Lone Knight

Travelling in for January's RPG Blog Carnival --

( There's another place threading through (or maybe beneath, or maybe behind, or maybe all three, or) the myriad planes. )

A world of endless towers, this.

Towers of purest precious ice, delicate and ethereal, a colourless beauty to steal one’s breath.

A realm of shining latticework minarets, of smoothly bulbous spires and clockwork obelisks, of ever-shifting, ever-growing, ever-branching towers upon towers that build themselves upwards — ever upwards — and onwards, forever towards the glittering white-crystal dome of the heavens above which may be, in turn, yet more growing, splitting, duplicating, fusing, elaborating towers.

As they climb ever higher these fragile structures change, the ice of their structures now glassy, now frosted, now whirled and patched with dead-white milky zones; now a touch of silver, now deepest azure or most royal teal, forms precious and rare; now sharp as razors, now smooth and bulbous.

A new sub-tower branches free; a lacy bridge reaches delicate fringes to cross — to maybe cross — the frigid span of emptiness as countless spans have crisscrossed, above and below. Sometimes a plaza slowly spreads, a dizzying plate of ice, hanging over the endless heights below.

Sometimes there are great curving balconies and balustrades, thick with intricate ornamentation; sometimes the ice grows strange pistons and levers and gears delicate as snowflakes.

Sometimes there are delicate gardens, growing from grains of ice instead of soil, trailing luxuriant vines of a million shining leaves and tiny blossoms over slender rails and down curving tower walls.

And sometimes towers fall.

Oh yes, they fall.

They shatter — losing entire sections, whole spires — under their own weight, under a flawed growth-angle, under the onslaught of would-be conquerors not satisfied with the ephemeral beauty they already possess.

They fall, losing part of themselves, until the ice begins to flow and grow once more towards the glittering silver-white perfection far above.

* ice * fragility * pathways * rejuvenation * patterns * beauty * ephemerality *

That’s right, doing terrible things with other languages now to fit letters —

How about a few interesting folks to meet on your travels? Love and friendship not, alas, guaranteed; but it’s not impossible ~


01. Linet Woodwalker

Born and raised in Rowan’s Cross, a sprawling broch complex in the Shadow, Linet sports both the milky eye-tint common to the locals and their casual unconcern for death and what might come afterward. The latter serves her well when she’s bartering her services as a guide and portal tracker to lost and confused newcomers to her neck of the (metaphorical and literal) woods; maybe not so much when her brashness takes her through the Shadow and into a Corerealm. Linet honours all her contracts regardless. It’s the principle of the thing — and once she reaches one hundred contracts fulfilled, the salt-and-shell curse will be lifted from her sister.

: driven : delver : practical : punctual :


02. Silphil

Most fleshy throats cannot pronounce this scintillant mathemagician’s actual name, so “Silphil” it is. It doesn’t mind; no more than it minds the necessity of simulating fleshy words in eerie tones by vibrating scores of its rapidly rotating light-rings together. Silphil wants the calculations of the afterworlds, and it collects them constantly and eagerly, identifying those calculations by its own inscrutable standards — proofs and poetic stanzas, perfect solids trapped in realm-stuff and intangible integers tangled in thought, it absorbs them all into its chiming form. It’s happy to crack mundane esoteric maths if approached politely, seeing it as a gentle hobby.

: melodic : flighty : acquisitive : enchanter :


03. The Water-Lion

There’s not a trace of actual felinity in this senior Ringwalker’s bearing; but any questions about his name are met with nothing but a faint smile and a shake of his head that sets his mane of silver-shot sooty hair swinging. The Water-Lion’s taught more would-be explorers than he likes to think about, these days, and far too few of those have come back to Guildhouses intact, a fact that gnaws at his innards and dulls his silver-bright eyes — and keeps his prodigious notations private and his riversteel blade in its scabbard. But the right reason, the right cause, could well lure him out; and he knows both many strange magics and the secrets of delving hearts and minds.

: experienced : timeworn : honourable : haunted :


04. Malifleur

He was the heart of a world, once. That’s what Malifleur claims, anyway, to anyone who listens — or finds themselves trapped in his grip, or entranced by the grinding rumble of his broken voice. He’s a sight to behold, certainly, with his titanic stature and his brazen skin, tangled crop of blood-rust ringlets and eyes like blue-green suns. Pay no mind to the wounds of throat, palms, navel, brow, eternally weeping ichor; pay no mind to the ghosts of shattered aureoles that dog him like a faded mockery of peacock-eyed lost glory. Malifleur brings far greater things to be concerned over: the goldshadow echoes of his might; his drive to claim any knowledge, any power that may restore him; and the possibility that his claims may be true.

: prideful : resentful : primordial : lessened :


05. Aatacana

Inquisitive and insightful, with a canny mind behind her lilting tongue, Aatacana has been traveling throughout the realms for a very long time indeed. She can be found throughout the Manifold Palaces — having less interest in the Foundations of the planes — and currently chases down whispers and gossip about the dreaming Mirror, willing to pay in starjewels and honey-dust and even mundane coin. Pay no mind to her great lemon-gold coils, or gleaming silver eyes, or to the simple fact that she is a massive serpent the thickness of a warrior’s thigh, festooned with hovering pouches and two “hands” of magical force.

: wanderer : secretive : dreamer : amused :


06. Master Thea

Oh she’s sharp, is Thea. You don’t wend your way to prominence as the captain of a merchantry that spans six realms without being sharp. Sharp as a blade, and just as likely to cut if crossed the wrong way — as many discover when they think they can pull the wool over the Master Of Fortunes. Thea’s tossed more than one such fool over the rail of an umbraship into the nothing between realms for that, and for less; her temper’s as sharp as her mind, these days, and none know what has her so worked up. Even when tallying up her earnings, her shimmering tail lashes like an angry cats’. Oh and never ask about that appendage, come to think — that will earn a bloodglass blade in the gut instead.

: cunning : vengeful : methodical : betrayed :

Sand. All around is sand, golden and drifting, broken up by white-gleaming ziggurats and their sprawling cities picked out in azure and jade, by fallen tawny ruins, by precious expanses of pale green growth ringed around pools of sweet water dark as the eternal night above with its rippling sky-vault and great electrum stars. The Sage Princes gather their hosts, raise festivals, bar doors and great white walls against the sable-coated hunting cats that prowl, singing, in the night.

Sea. All is sea, wine-dark, flecked with waves and foam, filled with coiling glass-clear arms of deeply things and the swirling bronze shoals of long-finned swimmers, dotted here and there with islands and island-citadels of pale sandstone spotted with precious orchards from which the fleets of the Reaver Commons sail their uncountable ships beneath the endless day, that golden dome spotted with turquoise moons.

Between, the thinnest wisps of cloud and mist, and the cloud serpents, and the flocks, the bridges of birds, a riotous rainbow of wings that have no care for where they began, the sand or the sea. The messengers who cross that Fulcrum with far more ease than the great speckled wicker-ships, the shimmering fishscale-ships, of the endless battles of day and night as they wing across to clash and contest against each other for glory and for memory.

So it has always been, so it shall always be.

* balance * duality * questing * opposition * heroism * opportunism *

You can pick up all sorts of oddments as you wind your way around, across and through the worlds, really ~

d100
01	psychopomp’s lantern, a staff of black heartwood hung with lantern-cage and soul-pyxes
02	double handful of solaurum and lilyglass clockworks, eternally moving and softly chiming
03	shard of ivory-like substance shot through with silvery paeans to infinity in delicate script
04	six bluestone tablets inscribed with invokations to a comet-crowned exarch saint
05	slender sword of ruby-rust wood, sharp as the wind and hard as steel
06	mantle of soft cloud that shifts in subtle hues of grey
07	packet of waxed parchment tied with string, inscribed on the inner surface with a ring-pattern
08	three bangles of blue-silver, eternal ice, slender and gleaming
09	choker and pendant of red gold and sapphire in the most baroque of Cerulean Hell styling
10	a rune, viridian, luminescent and undecipherable, that floats idly around the flesh
11	fractal censer of a dozen metals, smoking with honey myrrh kneaded with souldust
12	the black iron Blade That Sunders Oaths, with two strikes remaining before shattering
13	a sprig of radiantly luminous eternal asphodel
14	a memory pearl large as one’s palm, translucent like a feather-engraved egg
15	hundred hell-jade coins, waxily golden and ruby, sealed in a sculpted, fang-jawed coffer
16	tattered fragments of an ancient cerulean scroll naming seven Cores and their imperial desires
17	ledger of translucent silk paper recording the exchange of souls between several afterlives
18	violet-and-rose torc shaped from fragments of Wilusan sky-shards
19	scaly saddlebag filled with thirst-quench-stones, smooth and inviting
20	brace of corpse shadows knotted together for transport
21	porcelain and bronze swanbolt caster with a dozen charges of cygnine
22	flower-embossed crystalline box containing nine cubes of delicate dream-marrow
23	diary of a long-lost ringwalker, bound in copperscale and sealed with Iron Judge’s solder
24	petrified reptilian skull, long of jaw and of a deep tyrian hue, and still quite chatty
25	a string of minuscule suns in the colours of the visible spectrum
26	a robe of stardust, glimmering softly
27	a skin-tight full-covering suit of bony chitin, with a spore-body filter in its snarling mask
28	delicate crystal globe filled with pale rainbow flames
29	a perfectly matched pair of void sapphires the size of a thumbnail
30	personal cutlery set carved in delicate lacework from a death’s black bones
31	three arrows formed of fire-omen shards
32	cake of crumbling ambrosia, soft, sweet and sticky, wrapped in godskin
33	nearly complete collection (7/10!) of pearl-bound volumes of Deific Battle-Lands Reclaimed
34	half-melted sheet of crumpled copper with the lion’s share of a “bounteous” ring-pattern scratched on it
35	two cobalt blue stoneware bottles, sealed, of finest crimson garden sweetwine
36	drinking bowl carved, with delicate fluting, from a hollowed out firepearl
37	delicate woolen blouse embroidered with shadow prayer in faithglass seed beads and gold thread
38	matched bronze daggers inlaid with calligraphy praising the largesse of the cerulean host
39	folding starshell writing tablet and stylus, its wax impressed with angel’s sigils
40	paired flutes, transparent and cool to the touch, carved from a songwraith’s core
41	five glass-smooth sparkling orbs, palm-sized, that orbit one slowly and randomly
42	a single massive, peach-like pit, head-sized and silvery, wrapped in heavy waxed cloth
43	a roughly bound folio, bloodily fingerprinted, supposedly copied from an Iron Court archive
44	a fluttering, singing nightingale of animate, rosy crystal
45	twelve skyjade death masks belonging to a lineage of sphinx-kings
46	a halo, a thin semi-tangible ring of brilliant ruby-gold light
47	full set of long voidstone nails, black and glittering, to cover or replace one’s own
48	a leather satchel containing a loaf of sweetbread, a horn of nectar, and four sable peaches
49	two bundles of porcelain and steel limbs shorn from Eternal Forge workers
50	a titan-brass blightcaster, slim and spiraled, needing only to be recharged in balefire
51	painstakingly dyed cloth scroll detailing half a dozen incursions into one single realm
52	a slender necklace forged of tiny herringbone links of bleak carbuncle
53	four thick, plush furs, deeply violet-bronze in colour and trimmed to be blankets
54	three bolts of gossamer woven from midnight whispers
55	Pakrathi’s Joy, a luminous blood emerald, pendaloque-cut and the size of one’s eye
56	an elaborately engraved adamantine flask containing a great lord’s soulstuff
57	paired finger rings of an impossibly hard, matte black substance, strangely cool
58	a gelatinous, faintly lavender voidmask for nose and mouth, good for twelve hours
59	six palm-sized tablets of pink glass whose cinnabar etchings describe the Caul-Render’s Seventh Cycle
60	a gnarled teardrop ingot of of orange-violet metal, tears forged from a wailing sun
61	rough crystal prism, a blunted shaft of greenish gold, imprinted with scenes of flame-winged glory
62	a net large enough to catch an ox knotted from coarse, green and white hair
63	a water-heart, fist-sized, teal and aqua and azure, translucent and cool and soothing
64	string of a dozen smoked angel-faced trout, tied up neatly for storage
65	bluelight sword blade, with finished frosting, ready for mounting
66	the tangled silvery maze drawn with difficulty from an elder monolith’s mind
67	a well-worn folio sporting battered brown leather covers, scores of unknown flowers pressed between its pages
68	a single deep indigo horn, recurved, etched with a trail of scarlet glyphs, hollowed for drinking
69	a chaplet of briar canes insubstantial as milky shadow
70	set of snakestone aegis jewels meant for implanting into the skin at the pulse points
71	a palm-sized aloes box containing a rosy-orange sliver of bone that murmurs prophecy
72	multi-stranded necklace of pressed-petal beads, green-black with age and still headily aromatic
73	creamy brow-stone, rippled with patterns of flame-and-waves, filled with lost dreams
74	a riding cat of smoky spun glass, harnessed with bright bronze lace
75	six bales of mistgrass basketry, wrapped up in speckled olivine oxhides
76	a collection of teeth of many and varied shapes, all of glittering ruby-red metal
77	arm-length ribbonsnake of blue-gold flame that coils slowly along the body to warm one
78	an apple green lens, palm-sized, that reveals ringwalkers and other such travellers
79	plans for a ten-crew umbraship, metallic bone-ink on battered starfilm
80	six silverglass amphorae of plasmic wine from a Corerealm afterlife
81	mummified arm sporting two forearms with taloned paws, studded with flesh-pearls
82	seven turquoise foam-leather scrolls, a portion of the Ooailaen Theurgy
83	a delicate finger ring woven of a dozen different hair-fine jewel filaments
84	fist-sized, shivering black jewel drawn from the brow of a nightmaster
85	a fragment of the abyss, quivering, suspended in a tiny solaurum cage
86	a changestone, lenticular and rippling chromatically, wrapped in rough wool
87	a warrior’s panoply fashioned by a master’s hand from black scaled leather and pale cherry-pink, milky metal
88	a cutting from a golden sugar plum tree, heavy with roughly glistening fruit and carefully trimmed
89	pair of heavy torc-like armbands of lunargent, finials filled with stars
90	four cloak-lengths of finest cloth-of-moonrise
91	twisted staff of gnarled wood, its ashy bark cracking to reveal black wood veined with still-wet blood
92	dice set carved of nightmare amber, warm and concerningly inviting to the touch
93	wanderer’s astrolabe of smoky adamantine, set with delicate needles ready to inscribe the patterns it finds
94	a spare shadow folded in a limewood box
95	an IOU on silver tissue for two units of soulstuff from a sage of the graven heavens
96	a frozen note, its ancient sound lost to the planes for now
97	diviner’s stones in a dragonsaint’s crop, sundrops and glassy shards and ovals of strange greenish metal
98	tucked in a worn linen pouch, ten silver coins, a wooden toy frog, and a folding knife of bloodiron
99	a glassy ampoule filled with the breath of the elder sun
100	a radiant lacquer case of hundreds of pigments, a dazzling array of impossible colours all tied up in squares of voidskin

Warmth, banked against future need in the face of the cold, inside or out.

Quiet contemplation, waiting to be stoked to white-hot readiness at a moment’s notice.

Flame, contained, in the flow of syrupy rivers, rumbling orange and sizzling gold; in the banks of steady-glowing embers breaking through black-ashen hill-crests; in the deeply ruby carbuncle glow of the great forests before they erupt into great harvests of flamepods and drifts of fluttering sparks.

Contained, as well, in the vast basalt kilns and glassworks that creep across the rugged crumbling land, turning dust, ash and obsidian into objects of craft, tools of production, works of beauty; and in the proud and bright-riveted forgeworks that temper and test metal and mettle both. And, not least, contained within the communes and creches, of glass and brick, pumice and ember, where ravages of the body and woundings of the heart alike are tended with slow-burning, warming intensity.

The realm makes, and re-makes. The plane prepares, stores away its great workings: for the needful, for the mindful, for the traveler, for those in travail. All things, all existences, have a purpose, needing only to have their embers stoked to burning brilliance at the right time, and the proper place.

If ashpards prowl and sword-wights tear loose from their circles, if conflicts erupt in molten glass and forge-hot metal, no matter; the fires will bank themselves in time, all shall be righted, all shall be soothed, mended, put to rest. Should even the crimson fireblossoms of the skies above be stained black by stormsoot or malediction, invasion or revolt, Rahaure continues.

A single ember is all that is ever needed.

*fire * generation * temperance * preparation * craft * restoration *

You’re spinning up a new idea (or trying to), and you’re stuck.
Your players just found a way to yeet themselves into a random plane.
You are a player and you want some way out there place to call home.

You can’t think of a new idea for a plane D: Curse that brain block! DX

For all the folks who’d just like a bit of inspiration once in a while — or need a few planar hooks fast — these tables are for you. A little bit of quick theming to hopefully get the ol’ creative juices flowing again.

d20	Theme: Composition	Theme: Nature	Theme: Modifier
01.	fire	utopian	divided
02.	cosmic	illusory	serene
03.	cellular	punishing	jaded
04.	air	labyrinthine	pleasure-seeking
05.	earth	still	mercenary
06.	shadow	entropic	dying
07.	aether	generative	riotous
08.	water	deathly	bureaucratic
09.	light	cyclical	repressive
10.	celestial	bountiful	artistic
11.	cththonic	dystopic	dreaming
12.	pastoral	wandering	legalistic
13.	hellish	isolated	courtly
14.	wilderness	reptilian	baroque
15.	barren	fungal	violent
16.	void	avian	industrial
17.	urbanized	mammalian	sleeping
18.	icy	spiritual	anarchic
19.	metallic	seasonal	fragmented
20.	verdant	mechanical	contemplative

Everything is the maw slashed into existence.

Existence is nothing except the maw, this endless chasm with no terminus; endlessly extending, splintering; endlessly long, endlessly plunging into the darkest depths, reaching endlessly upward with its bleakly striated walls towards the thin wan slit of pale-ghost light scavengers and exiles, bone-wings and darkcrawlers, hermits and exultants call the sky.

Try not to fall.

The darkness below croons a melody in the heart; ripples now and then with motion, dark on dark.

Try not to fall.

Winding up and down the chasm’s fissured faces, like the tiniest ants, look there: thin tracks carved into the cliff-face, splitting and meeting, hugging the wall, at times hemmed in with flimsy fencing, most times open to the air and the maw below, leading to tiny pockets of ruby-green, coiling weedery; or to larger, spiral-carved ledges and rough-hewn uneven cells stacked upon each other, like clinging growths emerging from the dusty sooty stone before burrowing deeper within its face. And within those cells, light flickers and furtive figures flit.

Penitents find their way here, and exiles, and those who know no other way, seeking release. None trust the strangers who seek to mine the maw’s splintered faces, nor the fools seeking the melodious dark.

And here, and there, strange luminous spars — like green-white glass, like smoky ghost-amber — reach fitfully across the maddening gulf. Creeping, inching, a hair at a time, tiny ripples of new growth stretching across the darkness. Sometimes they even meet. More often they shatter, and the denizens of the cells scavenge what they may.

Do not answer the melody.

Try not to fall further.

* isolation * unbalance * loss * bleakness * privation * penitence * abyss *

Welcome to the void, traveller — a void lit by a softly pastel, softly golden, softly bloody numen that never relieves the velvet lack-of-colour of the plane’s black emptiness.

But you are not alone, not at all, here within. You stand — as all things must — on bone dense as ivory, pale and tawny, indigo and maroon, golden and splintered, waxy and sporting strange patterns and ripples beneath it ancient cracked skin, like ripples in sand, like the dapples of a rice pudding, like a spiderweb of maddeningly intricate lace.

The soft faint light registers from that bone. The bony remains of some great unknowable — sage-beast, demon-saint, fell-angel, dead-god — immense, incalculable, spanning from horizon to horizon, as far as senses grant you. Twisted limbs, arms, wings, stranger things yet, arc upwards, downwards, skew-wards, framing the velvet of the void. Shattered fragments drift and return, swaying in place gently. So many limbs. So many ribs, curves of vertebrae, beyond comprehension. So many blank bony visages, looming, crowned with shattered osseus glory.

From these remains spring life-giving rivers, nurtured crops beyond imagining. And carved from the fallen — in wide shallow pits like open sores, in twisting tunnels — are bone-brick complexes, towered and domed, of lacy wonder; cysts of that numinous power, soft osseus jewels pastel and sanguine, murmuring spars of bone-amber thick with ancient faith and archaic enlightenment.

All worthy of the the great bone-ships that fly to war to spill ichor and blood across the remains of deific death. All worthy of the mighty powers that come to prowl and glide and slowly trail along the great bones, from across the realms entire, to seek greater power yet — or to humble themselves, to be humbled, by what they find.

All desire the light of divinity lost.

Aqua above and aqua below, here in the endless slow flow fluid existence that is Joui; if “above” and “below” are words that mean a thing where the difference between water to drift and water to breathe is its density.

Perhaps true below lies under the drifts of translucently jade greenery — like verdant fluid barely contained within gelatinous skin — and the dense pearly foam that forms rafts, in places, enough to build upon. Above would be where water has become the mists, above the clinging weeds and banks of foam — drifting, eddying, thick enough to part like phantom curtains, a milk-pearl haze lit softly by an unseen light tinged with the aqua ripple of another endless ocean — threaded with the trailing, slowly twisting roots of wandering lilies lighter even than the mists.

Reach above and learn to float upon the mists. Reach below and learn to slip through the gently lapping depths.

Return.

Go back.

Return again.

Change to suit yourself, inside and outside.

In the aqua below, in the depths of the deepest of colour, sinuous shapes twist and dance. A flash of silver and a foam-ship disappears.

In the aqua above, the mists fill with winged, whirring barbs and shell-coiled trumpets. The above calls to the below to change, change again, join them, an endless shifting of shape and drifting of purpose.

Yet the Graven Wave and the Last Mist Weaver and a thousand thousand colourless wavekin and more muster with salt and nets and lances of frozen creation — so it is whispered, softly, in bafflement and doubt — to lock all forms forever.