Some other on-the-fly worldbuilding I did in this session:

Some other on-the-fly worldbuilding I did in this session:

Some other on-the-fly worldbuilding I did in this session:

If you want to drink yourself into oblivion, there is a pricey alcohol that is tainted with leviathan blood. It takes your dreams deep in the crushing black.

The lead harpoonist on a whaler had her arm taken by a leviathan. She got another one carved out of bone, covered in glyphs, and she activated it by thrusting it into the eye of a still-living leviathan. Now it works like a normal arm. Also, she rarely shows her teeth, but when she does smile, you can see she’s got scrimshaw on her teeth. It is best not to ask why. Her aura and shadow is writhing and deep with the massive lives she’s taken.

When the leviathan hunting ships are in port, whispers wearing bone masks with only one eye hole roam the killing floor and the rest of the ship with their long wands, spooling up death energies and the raging spirits of slain demon whales. This cleansing has to happen each port of call. If you skip it, the death energy builds and horrible, horrible things happen aboard the ship.

The killing floor on the top deck of the ship has a gummy layer of leviathan blood on it. Bits of bone and higher bits of metal are not covered, so walking across the weirdly soundless gummy mat is like treading on a starfield.

Corpses lost in the canals have their energy woven through the waters. These traces of energy and awareness and despairing rage clutch at anything that falls under the surface. If enough death builds in a canal, something slimy carries it out.

Snow flares and dies as it blows through the electroplasm fences around the city. You can see a light show in the shape of the wind, and even the snow, which is the death of clouds, is swept into nothingness by their energy.

There is a forbidden magical practice called Second Death Hogs. Before electroplasm was harnessed, and spirit energies destroyed, whispers would banish spirits into hogs. Then they would kill the possessed hog, and the second death would take. These Second Death hogs are now illegal to make, but their almost-human and haunted flesh can provide powerful magical materials.

Isn’t that fun?

16 thoughts on “Some other on-the-fly worldbuilding I did in this session:”

  3. Nathan Roberts They also heard these horrible screams, and as they went down into the killing floor under the ship they saw that the screams were just the whalers testing out the saws, doing maintenance on them.

    When they got to the point where they could see down the long open sluice corridor in the center of the ship’s killing floor, they saw the black glitter of water under the ship, and there were gray glyphs along the metal sides of the sluice that prevented water (or anything else) from coming UP the sluice.

    I did jokingly tell my players when the leviathan hunter expansion came out all this would go away. =)

  4. Man, I love making stuff up, but I have trouble remembering it. Another detail just came back to me. The sluice trench also had water cannons that drew water from the ocean below, and could be pointed up into the carcass or used to hose down the sides of the sluice.

    Also, when the leader of the Red Sashes moved, she had her bodyguards all wear the same coat as her, and everyone wore low-riding tricorn hats.

    When the Slide was preparing to imitate her bodyguard, he wore a reversible costume so he could just twirl his coat off and around and back on and look like a Red Sash. 

  7. Seems like a lot of the ghosts running around Duskwall must come from bodies that go into the canals, either after being killed or via murder drowning. Harder for the spirit wardens to find the bodies. Unless the wardens have some kind of elite whisper-diver crew.  Hmmm…

     

    That or from people who die from collapsing tenement slums where it takes more than three days to dig the bodies out.  Or arson victims that get trapped in basements. (shudder)

     

    Last night the crew killed a couple of the four bravos on barge security detail & set their bodies on fire and/or pushed them in the drink. Didn’t have time for ectoplasmic clean-up because patrol boats were coming and the whisper had a stab wound. That energy is probably getting woven into the canals somehow.

     

    The big piece of world-building that’s been brewing in my head involves a new Iruvian science – a thing I call bathyscaphe astrology.

  8. I haven’t worked it out in play yet, but when one of my crews is in need of some truly nasty bad guys, I figure I’ll have a crazy whisper who runs a gang. Others use him to threaten their own people; cross a certain line, and they’ll be sold to him. He tortures people to death slowly, then extracts their essence, then tortures THAT.

    When he’s done, he uses the most spirited of the insane ghosts, and stages pit fights between them. They are called “tangles” because of how it looks when the spirits battle. It’s a betting event for the truly depraved, where one spirit eats the other.

    What could we do with that?

    * There’s a fire and his stock is released into the city.

    * A buddy ends up there, and you need to rescue him.

    * A patron faction wants you to do this guy a favor so he’ll help your patron out.

    * What? He might be colluding with the Spirit Wardens? Get proof and you can blackmail them!

    * The only time a target is exposed is when he goes to bet on the spirit tangles. Security is high, and you DO NOT want to get caught. Plus, if the target knows you killed him, he’s likely to get summoned up to tattle.

    etc. etc. etc.

  10. So cool. Tangle Fight Club

    One the PCs in my tabletop game has a weird vice. They get rid of stress by going to this illicit occult den where they are bound and then voluntarily possessed by violent ghosts for a while before either exorcising themselves or undergoing exorcism.

  11. I Love, Love LOVE it Andrew! And what stops the ghosts from turning on the assembled punters and possessing one? Does the bookie crew have some whisper thugs that ensure this?

    To me its more ‘Snatch’ than “Fight Club’. 

    Ooooh, Pikeys! I have ideas about them! They move through the slums of Duskwall, making camp wherever they can find some ground. They make scores, course the ‘dags’, and make folks disappear (for a price). They also engage in tangle fights.

    ‘Bricktop’ has to become a nasty bad guy NPC in the game for sure!

  15. Nathan Roberts Re: Sherlock Holmes: “Can I use my Insight for effect in combat?” “Why yes. Yes you can.”

    Re: the canal: the surface of the water is a barrier they cannot breach, they lack strength and will. Until they gather enough strength and will, that is, then they send something out.

    Re: why don’t spirits escape? Big fancy arena-sized spirit bottle.

    Re: marginalized populations crapped on by all levels of society and therefore distrustful and mobile: I suspect this is why the game’s design deliberately includes cultural groups and refugees.

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