thread for rooms, events, places

[hengest]

I'm not sure what to call this, but sometimes I have thoughts about modular things that don't quite fit into the existing threads here on Evening Bell.  A little more detail and more types of features, but still, not part of any grand plan.  I'll try to post some on this thread.

*********

As you approach the encampment on the plain, you notice an odd sensation and pause.  One of the tents appears to be moving and then disappears from view.  As you try to get your bearings, you see several others vanish in the same way.  You hear shouts and confusion, but the camp continues to disappear.  A few seconds later, you can see that the encampment is being swallowed by a rapidly-growing sinkhole.  As you stare in wonder, the edge of the hole approaches you, slows down, and stops just inches from where you stand.  The encampment is gone and there is silence as the dust rises in the evening air. 

You see that you are standing on soil that supports low-growing plants and grasses.  But as you reach down into the sinkhole, you touch only a fine, colorless sand.  

[hengest]

You stand in a musty room well below ground level. It would be pitch-black here without your lights. The walls and floor appear to be made up of large cobblestones set together without mortar. There is a stone table afffixed to the wall in one corner, with a stone bench. It appears to be for someone of less than human stature. A closer look at the table reveals that its surface is covered with runes. Some look untouched and some are quite worn. If you take a seat at the table and look very close, you can see that the "bottom," the deepest part of each rune-stroke, is touched with silver.

There is a rune in the upper left portion of the table. It alone among them is convex rather than concave, rising half an inch out of the stone of which it is part.

Touching the incised runes has no effect. Touching the unique rune causes a strange sound and a lurch followed by a feeling of effort as the cobblestones in the walls appear to spread themselves out, leaving nothing in between. You feel movement and your stomachs drop out. As you get oriented, you sense that the room is moving. Most unfamiliar sensations beset you as it seems you are inside a moving, living creature. You feel small and irrelevant. Finally, the sensation of movement fades.

You are in the same room, somewhat larger now, with nothing visible between the cobblestones and an uneven layer of earth surrounding them. In some places, the earth has fallen away and the light comes through, if it is daylight. You can poke out more of it without effort by reaching into the spaces between the stones and pushing it away with your hands or a pole. If you do this enough on the floor, and if it is daylight, you will be able to see some ways below the wound in the earth that this chamber left as it tore itself free and rose some sixty feet into the air, with you still in it.

There is a sense of expectancy, but no sound.

[hengest]

Standing outside the nicest inn in town, you cannot help but hear an apparent marital spat taking place in a room with a window near you. Listening in, you understand the words but not the sense. The couple are deep in an old argument that you cannot really follow. The voices sound sometimes defensive, sometimes angry, sometimes confused, and sometimes just hurt. One voice falters as it breaks into sobs. You hear a noise of exasperation and a strange sound. A cat leaps down from the window, turns, and glares up at you.

[hengest]

The Interrupted Ceremony

This should be a large chamber in a ruined cathedral or monastery.  

There are three simple wooden coffins a few feet apart on the dais at the end of the chamber.  Two candelabras still stand with the stubs of candles in several holders.  The tapestries on the wall behind the coffin have begun to rot, but the central image depicts something like an adult human stepping out of a chrysalis with large and white eyes.  

The rest of the chamber is littered with the bones of mostly complete skeletons.  You can count some twenty-five skulls.  The room does not appear to have been disturbed or looted, but there is no smell other than mustiness and the bones are clean.  

Opening any of the coffins reveals a black burlap sack inside.  Painted with incomprehensible symbols and characters, the sack clearly contains a human body.

You can untie the sacks at the head or cut them open without much difficulty.  Inside each sack is an impossibly wasted human body dressed in white cloth.  The bodies' eyes are closed, but have an odd and sunken appearance around the eyelids.  

Opening any sack will revive in short order the body stored therein.  The resultant undead-like may be called a Moth.  

A Moth has no eyes and can only wheeze rather than speak.  It will struggle out of its coffin and fall to the ground.  After a few minutes, it may be able to stand.  It is very alert to sound and warmth and will be drawn towards living creatures.  It does not attack but seems to be pleading for something.  A Moth will eat any nonliving organic material.  

If it gets no such material to eat, it will shudder and fall to pieces 2d4 minutes after activation. 

If it does get such material, it will eat all it can get for a time and begin to take on a slightly less wasted appearance.  

A Moth, once fed, will begin to gesture towards its eyes.  

[mao]

Sept 8, 2020 22:07:02 GMT -5 hengest said:

Standing outside the nicest inn in town, you cannot help but hear an apparent marital spat taking place in a room with a window near you. Listening in, you understand the words but not the sense. The couple are deep in an old argument that you cannot really follow. The voices sound sometimes defensive, sometimes angry, sometimes confused, and sometimes just hurt. One voice falters as it breaks into sobs. You hear a noise of exasperation and a strange sound. A cat leaps down from the window, turns, and glares up at you.

Don't know how I misseed this, luv it

[True Black Raven]

hengest Those are fantastic game hooks!

[hengest]

Nov 30, 2020 1:30:41 GMT -5 True Black Raven said:

hengest Those are fantastic game hooks!

Thanks, now that I completely forgot them, I like them, too!  

I gotta sit down and catch up on everything here.  I got a new (online) job this fall that knocked me flat for the last couple months.  

[True Black Raven]

Dec 14, 2020 18:49:33 GMT -5 hengest said:

Nov 30, 2020 1:30:41 GMT -5 True Black Raven said:

hengest Those are fantastic game hooks!

Thanks, now that I completely forgot them, I like them, too!  

I gotta sit down and catch up on everything here.  I got a new (online) job this fall that knocked me flat for the last couple months.  

Hope you are doing well hengest, I would really like to see a lot more from you.

[Death Even XIII]

hengest Those are great ideas, I hope you come back, I want to see more stuff from you. This is a gold mine.

[hengest]

Old Pictures


The room's walls are well-worn river rocks set with a mortar that sparkles just a bit. You see only a kind of featureless balcony set some ten feet up on the far wall.  There is nothing else to recommend this chamber. 

After you enter, a clammy and nervous feeling hits you in the stomach and spreads up to your head.  As this sensation takes over, you begin to see other figures in the room.  The figures flicker a bit, and as you look closer, you see that each has the appearance of a different make: one looks to be woven like a tapestry, one like a painting, one like subtly stained glass.  One looks like metal made into a man.

Their garb and equipment are varied, but they all have a look of incomprehension or horror on their faces as they gaze at the balcony.

[hengest]

In a large room decorated lavishly with mirrors, paintings, and tastefully bejewelled candleholders, a slender woman paces back and forth. She wears a long thin robe with a hood. Her long hair was pinned up but is now falling out of place and showing messily on the sides of her hood. She has been at this for a little while.

As the woman paces, she gesticulates and mutters repetitively, going through a cycle with variations. The elements are her voice as it goes from a mocking elegant whisper to hoarse shriek, her wildly flailing hands, and her eyes that seem to be on a cycle of their own. She is drowning in thoughts.

All about the floor, unmolested by her feet and unnoticed by her mind, there run dozens of tiny manikins. They dart around chaotically, wearing bland costumes the color of dirt. One of their activities is pitching a tent, holding a brief event in it, and striking it before running off to do something else. They also juggle, sing, talk, and squeal.

[hengest]

After drinking from the pool, you straighten up, refreshed.  But a moment later, the pool, ruined walls, and stones all begin to look a bit strange to you.  Their colors fades and then even their textures seems to smooth themselves out. You turn around and see that the same has happened to everything in your visual field. Just as you are getting oriented, the process goes further and the sketchy images themselves begin to fade until each is replaced by an idea in your mind: water, stone, earth.  You lose track of reference points and feel you are floating. 

[hengest]

A well-worn track lies ahead of through the moist wood.  Your footsteps seem almost silent.  There is no sound but your breath.  

The world comes apart at the seams.  The path you walk peels away from the earth on either side and rapidly curls into a concave arc, taking you with it towards the sky.  You watch as the woods themselves shrink into the distance, becoming little more than a few green curls that soon vanish from your sight. Casting your vision further out, you see the distant landscape picking itself apart in the same way: rivers and creeks pulling away from the land and the land itself splitting into beaches, cliffs, fields, marshes.  

Your pack shifts on your back and, realizing you no longer know which way is down, you drop to the strip of earth below you and cling to it. It seems to be curling up more slowly now, or perhaps you cannot feel the speed for the lack of points of reference.

You creep to the edge and peer over to see a great aerial ruin filled with a cool yellow light. Forgetting the path whose edge you grip, you search for familiar sights. The light seems to have no source. In the distance to your right, as if under some part of the path, you see a hollow structure of stone turning slowly, surrounded by some kind of floating debris. 

As you peer into the distance, something peeps into your field of vision. You draw back but keep your grip. About two feet away from you, peering crookedly into your face, there sits a creature. Its beak is of a piece with the rest of its face, and its pupilless eyes alternate between focusing on you and flicking about independent of each other, as if confirming something. Its skin looks like supple tanned leather. You stare at it, trying to understand just what is looking at you. It has four limbs that split into three clawed digits and two small wings on its back. It makes the first sound you have heard in some time as its claws let go of and scratch against the underside of the path. It rises into the air, its face remaining almost in the same place, as it continues to regard you with an unreadable expression. As it rises, multicolored scales flow out from its wings, becoming long and grassy feathers. The creature then tucks its head into its chest and folds its ungainly body so as to cover it completely with its feathers, which continue to grow, until it floats before you as a perfect and iridescent egg.

A few seconds later, it pops back out of its egg-form, showing its unlovely skin and claws. It turns its head, looking hard at you with one eye, then pushes off the path with the extended feathers of one wing and moves towards the stone structure. It seems to beckon you to follow.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Wow, this is a wild thread, great ideas here!

[mao]

A lot of your stuff is going to end up in my megadungeon, a lot of this thread will be in it.

[hengest]

The Unusual Campfire

Some of the kindling was a little green and had an odd and unfamiliar smell, but you had no real trouble getting the fire going.  Having cooked your game over the fire and eaten a light meal with the herbs you gathered while you were still nearer home, you sit and watch the embers.

As you start to nod and realize you should set watches, the fire begins to burn more brightly again.  Surprised, you look closer to see if another log has caught.  But no: it is the same wood, far past the point of burning with such a bright flame, burning ever more brightly as you stare in wonder.  You continue to stare as the fire grows higher and a touch wider as it seems the very earth around it catches.  

None of you has seen a fire burn so high and so long on so little fuel. It burns til dawn at the same height and then quickly dies down to little more than a flicker. The remains of the fire seem to absorb the remaining darkness into themselves as the light grows.  They crumble and hiss a bit, finally falling into the earth. The ground surrounding them follows them, rapidly forming a large hole whose bottom you cannot see. As the sun finally peeps over the hills, you hear a kind of sigh and feel that the process has ended.  You are standing by an inky-black pit into which the night has fled from the face of the sun.  Whether you pursue it is up to you.  

[hengest]

(I can't even believe I wrote the post above.)

The Pit

The pit can appear almost anywhere, in a crypt, dungeon, jungle, wood, or desert.  

The pit is encountered on entering an area, whether it is a room or just the next visible portion of one's surroundings.  That is, it will appear when you are in motion.

Its appearance is simple: a pit in the ground. Peering over to look in right away gives the impression that you can see the bottom.  A moment later, the pit begins filling itself in.  A few moments later still, it is gone and is rapidly covered over by whatever stone, material, or groundcover surrounded it, as if it was never there. 

[hengest]

The Harrow Ball

In the land that belongs to both kings and to neither, those who work for their living like to show their independence, especially during the harvest. They gather in a fallow field and perform a deliberately bizarre set of actions that can only be taken as mockery of the revelries of the royal folk who live far off to the east and west. They dance wildly with pitchforks for partners, gift useless and ugly items to each other, and kiss the hands of tradesfolk as if they were great lords. 

This is the Harrow Ball.

When the first colors touch the sky at dawn and they spread out in ripples across the grey-blue dome, dripping down in long multicolored drops that sink into the earth, those at the Harrow Ball do what no one in the known world dares to do: they catch the colors in buckets and take them home for a purpose unimaginable to the petty kings who bicker over this land.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Dec 6, 2021 22:07:12 GMT -5 hengest said:

The Harrow Ball

In the land that belongs to both kings and to neither, those who work for their living like to show their independence, especially during the harvest. They gather in a fallow field and perform a deliberately bizarre set of actions that can only be taken as mockery of the revelries of the royal folk who live far off to the east and west. They dance wildly with pitchforks for partners, gift useless and ugly items to each other, and kiss the hands of tradesfolk as if they were great lords. 

This is the Harrow Ball.

When the first colors touch the sky at dawn and they spread out in ripples across the grey-blue dome, dripping down in long multicolored drops that sink into the earth, those at the Harrow Ball do what no one in the known world dares to do: they catch the colors in buckets and take them home for a purpose unimaginable to the petty kings who bicker over this land.

Wow, I mean Wow! I wanna know what they do with those buckets of colors!

[hengest]

The Perilous Dreamer Me too! Who knows what they get up to?