Beyond the Mountains

*Sunday Players Go Away*

Across the Northern border of the Nilfenbergian Empire lies the Petty Kingdoms - each run by a self-styled autocrat, all too aware of their insignificance. It is said the witches have saved them from being absorbed. The truth is the Empire is under threat from the Demon Sultanate. But this is of little interest. The Petty Kingdoms end abruptly with the Mountains. Some call them the Brokejaws. Others the Spinal Peaks. Yet others the Marginal Range. But to most, they are simply the Mountains.

Some small villages lurk in the shadows of these imposing peaks - folk scraping by in the crags and fearful of the creatures that crawl from chasms in the deeper ranges. They have little to trade but furs and warnings.

Beyond the Mountains is ash and ice. A desolate terrible plain, marred only by the broken teeth of buildings long-hidden by the ice and snow, appearing more like dunes after the many years of frostbitten burial.

People once lived in these buildings, but now they live above them, grim scavengers atop their dog-driven sledges, tearing across the dead country, either starving or committing to cannibalism. They know not of the secrets buried beneath them, but whisper to their rare children that things forgotten should stay that way. None will enter the ice-bound city beneath them, and they are right to.

A name forgotten a thousand times, no expedition ever returning to restore the torch of knowledge, the city evoked it's own end, as such things always go. A people enslaved by another, joint in a collective plea for revenge - and so it was when the Riven Wolf heard their plight. The plain was blasted for six hundred days with storms and snow, the wind tearing skin free and stealing children into the sky, their screams lost in the howling, their tears freezing in their eyes, tumbling blind through snow thicker than castles.

Seeking a weapon here is madness - all that could be learned is an end to both the Empire and the Sultanate. Yet the expedition left, and is now sealed in the glacier-riddled city with the creeping horrors.

*TREASURE HERE*

SURVIVOR PACK - 4d4 Humans w/ Spears, Dog-Leather Armour. They fight from the back of Dog Driven Sleds (treat as mounted). Each sled has a team of 6 dogs, and can have 3 men fighting and a fourth driving.

FROST MAD DEAD
The people of the city gathered together to conserve warthm - from each cluster emerged one frozen by the cursed flesh of their peers, forever seeking warmth.
HD 4
AC as CHAIN - HARD FROZEN FLESH
MOV as OLD MAN
ATTACK +4 - 2D8 ICY GRIP (8+ damage freezes random limb - cannot be used until thawed out).
M 7 / 12 IN PRESENCE OF FIRE. OH TO BE WARM AGAIN.
2d6 APPEARING

CHAINED OVERSEER
Before the slaves realised what they had invited, they rose up and bound the overseers in chain. The numbing effect of the chains protected them from the blasting to come.
HD 6
AC as PLATE - MANY CHAINS - MAGIC IS ROUTED INTO CHAINS, HAS NO EFFECT IN 30FT RADIUS
MOV as MAN BEARING GREAT WEIGHT
ATTACK +6 - 2D4 WHIP + SAVE VS ENTANGLE - TAKE NO ACTION UNTIL CHAIN BROKEN. EACH ENTANGLED PERSON REDUCES AC OF OVERSEER BY 1.
M 10 / 3 IN PRESENCE OF SLAVES (That is, anyone dressed in rags)
1D4 APPEARING

SLAVE SPIRIT CONGLOMERATION
So too did the slaves gather for warmth in their rags and chains. They pressed closer and closer until their very souls touched, fusing them together in anguish and fear and regret. The only thing that could drive the result away is the whip of their tormentors.
HD 1
AC as INSUBSTANTIAL - CANNOT BE HARMED WITH PHYSICAL WEAPONS. (Except Whip)
MOV as CRIPPLED HORSE
ATTACK +0 (IGNORES ARMOUR) - SAVE OR 1D8 CON DAMAGE FROM UNEARTHLY COLD.
M 2
1d4 APPEARING

The Dungeon-As-Wound

Negative space carved into the landscape, a hollowing, and a damaging of the wholeness of the material. A fissure in the ground itself. This essay considers the dungeon through the lens of an impossible necrosis of the physical material, a self-generating wound (negative space)^[1] alternatively worming and yawning wide beneath, the inhabitants either opportunistic or a consequence of this death-of-stone, spawned by the Wound itself.

Continuing this examination of the physical self-generating negative space (Wound), its very strangeness can be a wound on the expectations and experience of the observer, mirroring the wrongness of the physical artefact. It does not follow the rules of the world – by their nature, these wounds are aberrations, impossibilities in the natural order, a negative space in understanding – a wound in how we thought thinks worked, or how they should work.  This feeling is exacerbated by two common features observed within the wounds – their age, as ruins presuppose history and thereby age, and the impossible inhabitants which cannot, should not ecologically function nor survive.

Self-generating aged ruined structures are a paradox – their nature explicitly points to a history, which is rendered impossible by their very self-generating nature – how can something not here yesterday have the weight of history so deeply embedded into every rotten flagstone. One could view the ruins and devastation not as a mark of history, but resultant of the wound itself – but this rapid destruction would leave burning and sharp fresh-severed rock, not aged ruins stamped by the passage of years.

The inhabitants, those oft-hostile monsters, seemingly doing nothing but squatting in the ruins, waiting to kill those foolish enough to plumb the depths. When there is no natural ecological explanation for their existence or their actions, one must examine through the lens of the self-generating Wound, as well as the negative space/wound opened within knowledge. They could be considered a result of the physical Wound.

One view, that of the self-generating dungeon as a force possessed of a will for self-preservation, more akin to a living thing, would give these generated monsters the role of the antibody, destroying foreign bodies which enter the system of the wound. However, this reasoning, considering the dungeon-as-Wound, renders this strange. The wound is a disruption of an existing system, not a system of its own. We could instead take the view of the inhabitants as debris – the wreckage spawned by the act of wounding itself, the negative growth of the self-generating dungeon. Something akin to survivors, squatting in the ruins left behind, wounded themselves and driven to madness by it, full of violence and spite for those who come after, plumbing the depths of the damaged body the remains were once part of.

They could, alternatively, be viewed as an infection – the wound, left open, allows parasites and disease an easy entry into the ruptured body, infesting and spreading in the increasingly fetid wound, eventually, perhaps, a greater threat than the initial wound itself.

A final view is that of the inhabitants as secondary wounds, caused by the disruptive effects on the body by the original wound, like splintered bone tearing open further injuries within. Following this, the wounding of observers physically and in negative-space infliction within knowledge, are tertiary wounds, further damage by the original self-generating wound, now attacking along further vectors.

As an aside, the increased danger as the wound is probed further and deeper could be understood as a concentration of the wounding energy, as well as the wounding mechanisms being worse as the injury extended deeper into the body – something applicable to all views on the inhabitants. The remains are deeper gouged, the infection deeper and more sinister or the secondary wounding worse.

^[1]Whilst this essay is an examination of the self-generating dungeon-as-wound, the notion of the dungeon as a purposeful wound, a designated and conceived site of activity is still worth a mention. Conventional, mundane uses can be easily understood, blunting the edge of their wounding potential, simply assimilated into existing knowledge rather than being a negative space of understanding, mirroring the physical architecture of the constructed space itself. However, giving the constructed space utility does not have to cause this, if the use itself is wounding, something not understood and, potentially, not to be understood. The site of unknown/unknowable utility has the mirrored negative space wounding potential of the self-generating dungeon-as-wound, and, perhaps, intensifies the wounding of knowledge through the frustration of the unknowable use. An additional layer can be achieved when this utility is in-congruent with the physical negative space of the structure itself.