Mundos de los Cataclismos

They get called Sleepers, mostly. Sometimes postapocs or just apocs. Formally they're supposed to be referred to as failed colonies, but even the government calls them Cataclysm Worlds when they're feeling sensationalist.

There are lots of them. The empire is big and space is full of surprises. Plenty of worlds have a colony ship, or ten, launched at them before the probes turn up any real data. Usually it's the air. Too much nitrogen, not enough CO2, unexpected clouds of acid, something like that. Other times it's the topsoil, or oceans full of some horrible poison cooked up by a brief flare of single-cell xenos a million years ago.

But then there are more interesting ones. Sometimes it's not even the world that's the problem. There's an issue with cryosleep, a problem in the reactors, a captain that just sort of snaps. The worst, of course, is when the world is too hospitable to life. The ship settles down, folds out into a city and fucked-up alien biology starts pouring in through the windows, through the walls.

All of them are worth huge amounts of money. They're the collected remnants of entire asteroid belts, pre-manufactured into everything that's needed to support life on hostile worlds. Power cells, atmo machines, medical supplies, seed stores, gene banks. One salvaged AI core or gravity compensator can set an explorer up for life, especially if the rest of the expedition is too dead to split the profits. The governments offer rewards, though they're not quite enough, and you can always find buyers on the black market. Though what a crime syndicate wants with a tailored strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria is perhaps best left unexplored.

What's Wrong With This Cityship?

1. FOG
2. PLANTS
3. EVERYONE IS HATE
4. BUGS
5. ROBOTS
6. DINOSAURS
7. CRYSTALS THAT ARE BAD SOMEHOW
8. SHIP IS ALIVE
9. GHOSTS
10. PORTAL TO HELL
11. HIPPIE LOVE PLAGUE
12. COMPUTER WORSHIP
13. TIME IS BROKEN
14. PIRATES
15. BRAIN FUNGUS
16. SQUIDS
17. FISH MANS
18. ACCELERATED EVOLUTION
19. MUTANTS
20. FLOOD
21. PSYCHICS
22. ICE
23. MORLOCKS
24. PUNKS
25. ALL MEDIEVAL FOR SOME REASON
26. SHADOWS THAT ARE ALIVE AND KILL YOU
27. BIRDS I GUESS
28. FACE CRABS
29. APES
30. VIRUSES
31. MEMES
32. SHAMANS
33. ENERGY VAMPIRES
34. OOZE
35. THE SUN
36. JELLYFISH
37. CANNIBALS
38. SAND
39. CYBORGS
40. SHAPESHIFTERS
41. RADIATION
42. RATS
43. MAD SCIENTISTS
44. MOST DANGEROUS GAME
45. LEOPARDS
46. METAL HATES FLESH
47. MUTAGENIC PLAGUE
48. LUDDITES
49. GLADIATORIAL COMBAT
50. AMNESIA

If you have some way of choosing a famous historical personality at random this list also doubles as a Doctor Who episode generator.

we make thank for picture famous artist Kilian Eng

12 Things the Aurora Borealis is that Isn't Aliens

Because all it ever feels like it is is aliens. Or spirits of the dead or something. We can do better.

1. Ice madness. Can actually see the aurora in the eyes of afflicted people. They just see it when reasonably cold and looking up
2. Backwards time echoes of a magnetic doomsday device that will strike the area in the next hundred years
3. What the sky normally looks like - everywhere else is cloudy b/c of alien contrails/rivers of souls
4. How the sky celebrates Christmas
5. Shadow of a negaworld poorly superimposed over this one like that old blue-red 3D effect thing
6. Great sheets of luminescent sky algae feeding on overabundance of nitrogen
7. n-th dimensional demiurge has scrawled signature into latest project
8. Sign that the sky turtles have come to earth to breed and you will soon be finding sky turtle eggs about the place
9. Mountain-top monks weaving big green eternity blanket to forestall existential dread
10. What happens when the moon is close enough to reach out its tendrils and start grabbing at shit
11. World's diary. Major historical and geographic events recorded with significant bias
12. Elf poo

Bluestone Barrow: A Dunkey Dungeon Adventure

Used the Dunkey Dungeon Generator to make three dungeons for my new setting, The Salt. Changes I've made to the dungeons are in bold.

Below is the first dungeon, which us two Dunks just played through in about half an hour as a kind of mental midnight snack.

Bluestone Barrow

First dungeon is set in the far south; a land of dried-out swamp, mangroves thick with salt, flooding once a fiveyear. The dungeon is a treasure hoard cum barrow. A hibernating CLAY LEVIATHAN slumbers in the cracked earth out front. SPECTRAL PIXIES giggle from the thick NIGHT BLOSSOM covering the mound.

NIGHT BLOSSOM:  PLANT
CLAY LEVIATHAN: MONSTER
PIT ROACH:      VERMIN
SPECTRAL PIXIE: HUMANOID
OCHRE HOG:      CRITTER

MAP:

C--A--B

Room A.
SOUND: Muffled voices from next room. (Room B)
Treasure room. Magnetic gates prevent you removing any gold or steel, even if you brought it in with you. PIRATE'S SPEAR made of pure gold in hand of enormous porcelain golem. Talisman in room B deactivates gates, activates golem.
Entrance is to the south, a half-collapsed arch of rough stones. Eastern staircase leads down to cool cellar. Roof has partially collapsed to the west, separating rooms A and C.

Room B.
SUMPFIANA the HELPFUL PLAYWRIGHT and SUMPROGG the ABSENT-MINDED GARDENER (who are spectral pixies) fighting for possession of a SCABBARD OF THE ELEPHANT (Any weapon sheathed therein gains +2 when fighting from back of pachyderms/aurochs), each with an extremely good argument for why it is rightfully theirs. Actually they stole it from a nearby burial mound and have probably annoyed the shit out some ghosts.

Room is lit by light from Room A and a jar of fireflies. The room is newer and better reinforced than the others. Six bodies are buried in raised, open-air coffins full of salt. One corpse clutches the runekey for Room A. The pixies know this.

Room C.
Formerly a necromancer's lair. Now a breeding pair of OCHRE HOGs has made a nest of the spellbooks, which reveal interesting magical snippets if closely examined. Torn-up pages, gummed back together, may have produced odd new spells. (1d3 workable pages. Roll two results from the first three available death, destruction, earth and plant cleric spells* and mash them together in some way that mostly makes sense.)
A few holes in the ceiling let in dappled light. You could almost certainly bash your way out through ones of these if you really, really wanted to.

*Those spells are:
1. Cause Fear: One creature of 5 HD or less flees for 1d4 rounds.
2. Death Knell: Kill dying creature and gain 1d8 temporary hp, +2 to Str, and +1 caster level.
3. Animate Dead: Creates undead skeletons and zombies.
4. Inflict Light Wounds: Touch attack, 1d8 damage +1/level (max +5).
5. Shatter: Sonic vibration damages objects or crystalline creatures.
6. Contagion: Infects subject with chosen disease.
7. Magic Stone: Three stones become +1 projectiles, 1d6 +1 damage.
8. Soften Earth and Stone: Turns stone to clay or dirt to sand or mud.
9. Stone Shape: Sculpts stone into any shape.
10. Entangle: Plants entangle everyone in 40-ft.-radius.
11. Barkskin: Grants +2 (or higher) enhancement to natural armor.
12. Plant Growth: Grows vegetation, improves crops.

me and Matt on vacation
a juvenile CLAY LEVIATHAN

where Matt and I went on vacation
what the landscape looks like basically

~playthrough below~

The Salt

It's called The Salt. Or just Salt, depending on your grammatical preferences. There are other names in other languages but you don't speak those languages and you won't need those names.

Salt is not one desert, though foreigners sometimes can't tell the difference. The north is cold; sleet and ice and salt. The north kills you without you ever knowing. Here the salt is spiteful. The centre is hot; sun and sand and salt. You can feel your death days away. Here the salt is patient. The south is not a desert at all; scrub and hogs and salt. In the south it is the people that kill you. Here the salt is valuable.

In truth, all salt has its uses. Pink salt, wrapped in northern ice, burns with unrelenting flame, makes fireworks and lures evil spirits. Black salt, still warm from the desert sun, burns out poisons and gives glimpses of the future. White salt, scraped off the desert mangroves, tastes really, really good.

The salt trade is everything in Salt. The country is named for it, after all. The deserts won't grow food crops. Even the far south cannot support the grains and cattle other nations thrive off. Instead, great caravans turn the Three Wheels of Salt. The northern wheel runs clockwise, from glacier down to frozen sand. The aurochs are biggest here, the height of five horses. Loads are strung up on their backs and ribbons knotted through their manes. The middle wheel runs counterclockwise. From frozen sands through a hundred leagues of dunes down to the broken spine of stone that marks the parched delta. The aurochs here drag stone sleds. Bone and bark armour clatters on their scarred, fur-less shoulders. The southern wheel is small and flat and bent. It runs clockwise below northern cliffs, down dry riverbeds and up their banks, touching two dozen different kingdoms that cart salt yet further south. The aurochs here are of another lineage. Scarcely larger than cattle, they work in teams to pull wagons and pick fights with hogs and wildcats.

How to make Gold from Salt

If you can get hold of an aurochs it's easy to find goods to trade, and there's always profit to be made turning the wheels. Most of this profit will not stay in your purse though. The Companions have steep protection fees, and setting out without a company's flag to fly is likely to cost your life.

It's possible, too, to turn against the wheel. Work is harder to find but few of the larger companies make trouble for a small caravan carrying messages and parcels on special request.

Travel without an aurochs is difficult, though not impossible in some regions. The western dunes have oases to rest at and to the east, on the slopes of the vast, dead plateaus, there are hardy groves of dates and figs, little herds of scrawny goats. Down south the there is far more food and water. The threats here are hogs and wildcats and bandits, if you've no circle of aurochs to shelter in.

Those roads that a woman may walk, that an aurochs cannot, hold some of the greatest treasures of Salt. The fine sands of the central deserts will swallow a lumber aurochs whole. Adventurers on sand shoes will have better luck pushing out to the ancient temples buried in the dunes. The cracked valleys in the east wind too tight for an aurochs to turn. Their bones can be found at the dead ends of these valleys, left to starve when their masters could not turn them back towards the desert. Here are the burial chambers of a thousand dead queens and princesses, sandstone guardians standing watch over funeral hordes. In the south there are battlefields from centuries past. Over bracken and broken trails that wagons cannot cross you may find the swords and axes of ancient warriors, caked with salt from each fiveyears' flood.

The north holds the richest treasures and the greatest perils. Deep in the ice are artefacts not of this realm. Devices of black stone and ancient magic. Ships that sail on the skies, leaving green wakes to light the snow below. Great snakes of ice, wolves the size of aurochs, ghasts and ghouls with bones of sleet and the ice madness, ever whispering. Here are the gates to Hyperborea.

Pirate Generator

In the tradition of such Dunkey classics as Witch Generator and Vampire Generator, we present to you: Pirate Generator. Generate all the things. In the future there is nothing that will not be generated.

click the fight, get a pirate, fight the pirate

Dungeon Generator

So you remember that nifty biome generator we made a while ago. Did that again but dungeons. Change the number in the url to change how many rooms your dungeon has. HAVE FUN.

It's got like 2,400 creature combinations, with 120 adjectives and 20 nouns for each thing in the biome. There are about 120 rooms, 20 for for each room type and 20 general ones. And the NPC generation just completely rocks. THIS IS NOT ENOUGH. For version 2 we'll probably crowdsource a million more rooms from y'all.

Version 1.2 will be first though! It'll let you generate biomes and NPCs and items and dungeon maps and all that separately. Start holding your breath yo.

Music as Currency. Music is Currency.

It's a dystopia. It's always a dystopia. They let you do the weirdest things with every day stuff (please start a debate about that in the comments) and that makes them accessible and interesting.

So in this dystopia, as in all dystopias, people are deeply fucking bored. Always. They still remember the internet, or stories of it. Endless information piped from across the globe. The freshest content renewed with every f5. But now it's just smoke and craters for forever, and subsistence farming doesn't make you feel enriched when all your food tastes like shit. But even though dvd players and working tvs are hard to find and electricity hard to produce, mp3 players are everywhere. Every phone, every ipod, every stereo, every car radio with a cable jack or a usb port, it all gets used to endlessly loop the culture of dead civilisations.

But you get bored of hearing the same song over and over and over, especially when that song sucks, so obviously you trade them. With limited access to computers you can rarely copy an mp3, but you can trade one ipod for a stack of cds. All it takes is figuring out about what each song is worth. It turns out that is very hard.

Pop songs are clearly worth the least; they're common and lack depth. But, then, everyone likes them. They're guaranteed currency wherever you go, so that makes them worth more again. Rarer stuff is worth more to a collector, but who has time to collect in dystopia? You might be able to trade Vivaldi and Sigur Ros and the Sesame St theme with one of the Aquifer Queens, but if you're living rough in the badlands, Taylor Swift is better than gold.

And then there are the people that remember the stock market, and banks and mints and all the ways economies should work. So you get the one set of turntables in a thousand mile radius and go into business. Or you start printing banknotes, backed by the basement collection you found: every song, album and ep produced by The Beatles, or anyone that was in The Beatles, on cd, vinyl and live dvd. Or you just start speculating, telling people how many Adam Levine's they can get for a Drop It Like It's Hot remix. I'm not even sure that radio stations have a real-world allegory at this point. They definitely start wars.

Presumably, at some point, someone does just decide that bottlecaps have intrinsic worth. But think of life before that. How much is entertainment worth in a dead world?