Far Travels in Pharion
Been a while. I had work.
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| this isn't related it's just really funny |
Vlexiraptor's far traveler is something I want to use. I also want to use her whole GOOSEFLESH thing but one act of share-alike thievery at a time. The Far Traveler class is great because even if you don't play it, skimming it gives you an idea of what kind of crazy shit you might see out there in the world- and if you do play it, you have inroads to really get the most out of it.
Not so long ago, another brilliant blog I pore over recommended doing a set of Far Traveler's "Been There" locations for your own setting. Now, I'm pretty in need of locations and this seems like a fun reason to make some up out of necessity and deal with the far-reaching consequences later, so let's go. We need like, what, twelve of these?
1. Counterfeit's Pit: Every adventurer, it is said, ends up in Counterfeit's Pit at least once. The last relic of a time when everyone thought it made sense to dig down to the layer where all things become metal contrivances, and the only one still in operation. Down the long, long elevator, a layover midway through the shaft for a drink at the Last Tavern, and then a world of high ceilings, paneled metal and blinking lights. You pried apart the grates, wriggled through tunnels which whisper in tongues, and picked through mountains of refuse older than all the world above. From the lifers, whose tunnelside camps were your only refuge, you learned the songs that the ancient substrate's maintainers sing. Walking past ancient automata like next-door neighbors never ceased to be odd, far less reassuring. Nothing you found was worth keeping, but some of it sold- and you kept a memento.
Elder-metal automatons - both underground and those made above - will not attack you unless you act openly hostile. They tend to treat you as if you're supposed to be wherever you are, and security might even give you a pass. The memento you kept might play a little song, or project a strange image on a wall, or something equally benign but potentially distracting.
2. Minotaur Country: The loathsome minotaur can live just about anywhere, no matter how inhospitable. The land they call their own is minotaur country- the greyest, driest, most desolate waste Pharion's ever had. The sky above is choked with ash, and the land is dark as if the sun itself had no wish to shine on it. Life here is irascible, poisonous, and hungry for the meat of soft-bred things like you. You might have come here in exile, or to chase someone who had, hiding from minotaur hunting-parties in stagnant pools of viscera and feasting on the toxic flesh of skull-faced struthiforms and crabs with faces like men. At night, worm-tunnels large enough to stand in provided shelter, and one could eat of their shed skin and the remains of their meals until they passed through again. To survive here is is no mean feat.
Organic material which is not immediately poisonous counts as rations for you. You can live indefinitely off of treebark, shoeleather, old bones or hay, and can (with a successful CON save) eat poisoned or rotted food without issue. (taken from another much better blog than this)
3. The Magelands: A landscape of bubbling chaos, a sky in a thousand warring colors and earth that roils and twists like the sea in a storm. Cities bubble up before your eyes, celebrating their grand and storied histories even as they soften and sink back into the world. This is the place all roads lead when they cease to lead anywhere else, and you've passed through it. The Magelands leads anywhere you need, because it's already everywhere. You remember entering it, you remember emerging, but of the passage through precious few details remain. The laughing duke, many-faced and so very tall, walked with you some ways down a promenade of fingers. You spoke with a piece of the stolen wall- you were asking for directions, you think, but the conversation turned very philosophical. You were offered food and unwisely took it, centipedes poured from you for days thereafter.
Or, perhaps, none of that happened. It's a bit hard to tell. All you know for certain is that you got to where you were going, and you came away changed, as so many who pass through the Magelands do. Your skin shifts, a living passenger upon your meat, subtly rearranging your features. Each week, you become unrecognizable to everyone but your closest confederates- even if, to them, you look no different at all.
4. The Yodo Fields: Homeland of the dollfolk, or something close to it. Here, the world is sharp angles; pyramidal hills, slopes that square off at their tops and perfectly-flat roads. The grass grows an inch and a half above the ground, never higher or lower, and the birds sing the same song in intervals you could count to the millisecond. Turn away from the antelopes grazing in the field, then look back; it takes them a moment to move again. The dollfolk have villages here, thatched-roof houses all the same size and dimensions with the same furniture rearranged somewhat in each. The townsfolk will greet you pleasantly and, if you wait a few hours and come back around, greet you the same way again. Dotted throughout the landscape, tucked behind buildings and sitting innocuously atop hills, are the Yodo, inverted black pyramids the size of a human and cut into numberless floating segments. They hum pleasantly, turning about like puzzles attempting to solve themselves.
The dollfolk gave you a gift- a piece of themselves, to replace a piece of you. You can't seem to recall if you consented to this or not. Your heartbeat, so prone to irregularity, has been replaced with a rhythmic ticking that never falters or slows. You always know what time it is and, once per day, you can declare that an instance of poison, disease, sleep, charm or fear (and similar things, if you can talk the GM into it) does not affect you. If the effect would be otherwise impossible to resist, you usually should at least get a save.
5. Jeuno, City of Elves: The foreigner's quarters of Jeuno are as nice as the wealthy districts of most human cities, and much and more is said of the city's inner rings. You've been there- the notoriously germophobic elves made an exception for you, made you wear a bulky suit of sweet-smelling burlap and led you by a bemittened hand through their sanctum. Through your darkened visor you saw a world of carved ivory. Every cobblestone a bas relief, every railing a masterpiece in metalwork, every building its own monument. Everything, no matter how mundane its purpose, was meant to be seen and admired. You were passed between stenographers and secretaries and functionaries, all of whom treated you with barely-disguised disdain- you knew something Eina did not, and they wished only to extract it from you. You were not permitted to spend the night, but a free stay in the city's nicest foreigner's inn more than made up for it.
An entire day's worth of elf-talk was enough for it to rub off on you. Elves are masters of circumlocution and innuendo, but not always to the end of disguising their meaning; sometimes it's nice to hear the sound of your own voice. You can slip coded messages into normal conversation which will be immediately understood by those you intend to understand. (ditto)
When drinking, you're never more intoxicated than you want to be, and can appear as intoxicated as you like. You can pick the effects (or degree of effect) for any drug you've willingly taken, and get advantage to save against the effects of those you take against your will. The latter effect also applies to poison.
7. Bahardu Deepmarsh: Endless marsh ringed by thick jungle. Buzzing insects, from the size of your pupil to bigger than your fist, all hungry for your blood. Marsh-beggars with their endless hands, peering over the side of your riverboat and begging in their gurgly voices to feel the touch of your palm. A battery of questions from the village headman, for the humans like their spies and you're not from around these parts. You sang with the village at an orcish funeral pyre, ate their thick stews and wrestled with the younger folk- the adults laughed at the idea you'd be of any match for them. You dug water-ditches and planted stakes to earn your keep, and they might've even let you go out on a hunt if you were pleasant.
In Bahardu, there is no difference between the unprepared and the dead. Whenever someone in the party really should've brought a particular mundane item and didn't, you have it. This ability refreshes whenever you're able to spend at least a day and a night in civilization, or somewhere else with an abundance of adventuring supplies.
8. Oorun: Oorun is the human name for it, and not one you'd utter aloud in the presence of the locals. Here, craggy cliffs give way to deep canyons, where square openings lead to the domain of the giants. Nothing grows in these impeccably-carved tunnels, and nothing lives but that which the giants permit. Even relying on their charity to pass through, you had only the food you brought with you; the giants are metal and stone, and have little need for food and even less for nosy outsiders. In one of their sprawling cities far below the earth, a great craggy mouth lined with the squarish teeth of giant's dwellings, you were not permitted to wander and kept on heavy watch. A carefully-moderated tour took you to an opera, where the marble performer was smashed to bits at the end, the exterior walls of the emperor's palace (one of several), and a brief glimpse at the sacred chambers of the carver-priests, who sanctify each new giant.
You suffer no penalties from rough terrain, cramped spaces or dim light. Coming out of Oorun alive, having not tried the patience of the giants, is an indicator more so of your ability to keep up with them in stride than in conversation.
9. Elenai: The most prosperous of the human city-states. Or, well, it was. It's still the biggest, and one of the oldest, and by all rights the strangest. You've explored forgotten sidestreets, cratered thoroughfares, secluded shrines to unfamiliar gods and refuges for folks who've long since left. In the years after the war, the people have grown only more indulgent. From the lowest menial to the noblefolk at the helm, everyone is desperate to prove that Elenai is still the fairest city built by human hands. For your purposes, it made entertainment easy enough to find, and the sale of far-flung oddities from your travels easier still. Not a place worth hanging around, though- the war with the dolls has left a bleeding wound in Elenai's side, and if the city doesn't bleed to death it's sure to contract the worst kind of rot.
Getting around Elenai is more about navigating abandoned buildings than busy crowds, these days. You can automatically climb up vertical surfaces (providing anyone could theoretically climb them) as fast as you can walk.
10. Underland: A city, a forest, and a shore, overlapping in dreamlike haze. Here is where everyone's shadow lives, featureless atrament-figures clumsily living out the lives of those above. Shin-deep in water, they pantomime a conversation in a shop half consumed by glittering ferns. Phantom ships row overhead, ruined buildings rear up from their own rubble, and half-seen figures with glittering eyes join arms in dance. Everything here is slow and dolorous, dreamlike and heavy, so much unlike the feared Magelands. No one's going to believe you, but you woke up here and found your way out. There was a river- you're sure of that, you vaguely recall swimming along it until it became a canal in Elenai.
Your shadow moves on its own, sometimes, in anticipation of you. You catch yourself following its movements- to everyone else, it looks like you've got an uncanny knack. You can reroll any failed check and, if this causes the roll to succeed, you cannot use this ability again until your next full rest.
11. Thaumarch: The tan-grey land where dead things live again. Hollow trees are thick with fungal blooms, the grass twitches and spasms like a thousand bony fingers, and travelers you pass on the roadside are dolorous and pale. Here, there are no peasants, only the mindless menials who haul goods and work the land and the lesser necromancers who manage them. You dined at a corpse-baron's table and rode bespoke steeds of stitched-together dead, hunting wild wights with the baron's entourage. At night, you had to ignore the long-limbed howling things that congregated outside the manor, but one came to your window and muttered secrets into the chill air of your room.
Mindless undead, as well as creatures similarly made obedient (or dimwitted), will follow one simple order you shout at them. Pointing and ordering them to "go that way" will work, as will "hit that guy" but "tell me the code" or "inform your master I've arrived" won't.
12. The Adyan Sea: The Adyan Sea is a few inches deep. The bottom is rocky and makes all sorts of noise when you tromp through it. The fog here is heavy, and the people you meet are all a little too excited to see you- to say nothing of the fact that their faces sag like poorly-made masks and their eyes are little mouths that speak in chorus. Every aimless wanderer tries cutting across the Adyan Sea at least once in their lives, and you're one of the lucky few who came out again. Following the seawalkers, picking up irascible little crayfish to snack on and ignoring the eager entreaties of the fogfolk, you traversed the mists and came out close to where you'd come in. A complete waste of time, but a valuable waste.
You can breathe in water, and armor does not encumber you when you swim. You have a distinct, acrid sea-scent at all times.
This gave me ideas. I dunno about you.
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