This is the first of my dungeon23 entries about the Catacombs of the North Wind. For an introduction to the dungeon, see this post. I start with the journal where I am physically recording the dungeon, and then present a cleaned up, digitized version below. The lovely map was donated by Gus L, bless his heart. As usual, his illustration pushed me to imagine the area much more fully. His cartography has been a huge stimulus to my work in general. 

I began using this journal during the early days of the pandemic. Those were hard days. I had to launch all of my classes remotely with only 1 weeks notice, constantly record lecture videos, and both my children were out of school. My wife was even more jammed with work than I was, since she is a union organizer who works with health care workers. Although I was working around the clock and providing full time childcare, I found that I had to do something creative by myself for 30 minutes every day or I found myself spinning out of control. 

So I began this journal, where I recorded my thoughts, wrote down quotations from books I was reading, transcribed some blog posts and podcast snippets that caught my fancy. I had never done journalling before. I used collage, stapling or gluing wondrous things to the pages. 

When life got easier, and I felt I no longer needed the journal, I stopped journalling. The large double graph paper pages make a perfect home for Dungeon23. I also love the idea of returning to this journal now, and filling the remaining pages with my dungeon materials. Here's the space for the introduction to the dungeon, which I haven't written yet. I decorated it with a very relevant clipping from Huargo's glorious White Jungle poster. 

I have been working on it every night with my son, who is also pursuing a dungeon23 project (more on that another time). It tickles me that this is now a family activity. Here are pictures of the pages describing the first seven locations. I've been doing them in pencil for now (I may go over them with ink), so they're a little hard to read in the current photos. 

Here is a clean, digitized version for your reading pleasure. 

Below the Walls of Cusp

In the neighborhood of Cusp, the city begins to spill down a great incline to the north that eventually becomes too steep for homes. There is set the Wall of Cusp, a mad press of tall buildings, fused into a single retaining wall. Within this labyrinth, one finds the arcades of Cusp, the most famous of which is Kaleidoscope Alley, lit by colored pools of stained glass, channeled through lenses and mirrors. 

Areas 1-7

The stairs travel past a ruined tower with a shattered onion dome, its lower entrances now choked with rock and sand (7). At bottom, the scree levels off at a long and wide rocky ledge.

Wind crashes and hisses in the rocks. In the recesses amongst silver-barnacled stones, blue crabs scuttle past sable velvet sea stars, and tiny flying fish dart. Beyond the cliffs, the Endless Azure Sea, magisterial and dizzying, dotted by clouds like foam or soft woolen isles. A ways off the shore, out to sea a tiny archipelago floats.

Beneath the stairs, darkened recesses provide shelter from the winds of the beach. The remains of an old encampment are there: tattered blankets, a tarp the color of the rocky beach, and an old fire pit built from rock. In a rotting picnic basket, there are coils of rope, climbing spikes, and a rusted file and crowbar. A careful search reveals a phylactery hidden under a buckled tile: an antique silver lobster claw set in a leather circlet.* 

Stories & Speculations about the Creation of the Catacombs

The first word goes to Learned Paw, legendary jurist of the era pre-dating the Slow War between the cats and the Zyanese. It is drawn from his autobiography, A Cat at the Moonlight Court: Memoir of a Feline Barrister. 
See the next installment of The Catacombs of the North Wind, "Below the Wall of Cusp", detailing the entrance to the dungeon here.

 This post is about the MAPS of Through Ultan's Door. It's a glimpse into some of the wonderful cartography in this upcoming trio of zines. It also tells you a little something about how I collaborate when things are going well.

The zine uses detachable covers with maps printed on the interior of sturdy cardstock covers that can stand up like little screens. Gus L has done all the cartography for the zine from the very beginning. His maps grace the interior cover of Through Ultan's Door 1 & 2. For issue 3, I sent Gus a pointcrawl map of the sewer river that just had a series of circles with words in them connected by a single line, along a capsule summary of each point. It was like a child's scrawl. Check out  this psychedelic, three-dimensional map, Gus came back with, which will be reproduced on the interior of the cover of Through Ultan's Door 3 Part I. 

One thing Gus said when he sent the map is: "You're obviously going to need to write the harbor up as a bigger site." To which I replied, "Yes, I will."  Truth be told, in fact, it's in part by staring at this map and thinking how my text could live up to this cartography that we ended up having a double issue for Through Ultan's Door 3. I thought, "I have to do this map justice."

My collaboration with artists works that way too. Once I have a working relationship and trust with an artist, I say, "Here's the text I'm hoping you'll illustrate. Here are some visual references. But actually what I'm most interested in is how YOU will imagine it. I'll rewrite the text to match what you draw." Zyan, in its published form, is an aesthetic collaboration. 

Next, take a look at Gus' delicious cartography for the wreck of the Verdant Purveyor, the base of operation for the Regulators of the Black Hand, dread sewer pirates led by Free Hand Hesock. It is reproduced on the interior of the cover of Gus' companion module Beneath the Moss Courts. He dreamed up the Verdant Purveyor and wrote the accompanying text, so this is all his vision. (Note: the area numbers haven't been added yet on this version of the map.)

This map has none of the slickness of contemporary digital maps. It is not a battle map. Rather, it's intended as an aid to be used at the table (physical or virtual) in describing the rooms for play in the theater of mind. Look at how lovely the exploded design is, with each deck and their inter-relations so clearly illustrated, and so much visual information about the contents right on the map. 

What is most striking though about Gus' maps is the way they bring alive and vividly evoke the sense of place. Note those decorative, weird, elegant sewer reeds reaching upwards, and the shattered, water-filled lower deck, or the weird repurposed rooms, like the one with a pentagram on the floor.  I have always thought that even without the keys, you could design great adventures just by staring at Gus' maps and letting your imagination roam guided by sense of place his maps conjure. 

You can learn more here about what, besides these maps, will appear in double-issue 3 and Beneath the Moss Courts. A pre-launch page for Through Ultan's Door 3 is now up on Kickstarter. If you are interested in following along with the Kickstarter and getting an announcement when it launches on Monday February 2nd, please click on this link: 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/through-ultans-door/through-ultans-door

In closing, here is the cover of Beneath the Moss Courts. This illustration of the wreck of the Verdant Purveyor is by Huargo. Obviously. 

Let me tell you about a game my father played with me as a child. It started when we were walking home from grade school in winter, through the Greenwich Village towards the East Village where I lived with my mother in a six floor walk-up opposite Saint Mark's Church. He would pull a hat over my eyes to blindfold me. He would take a couple of quick turns and walk me around until I was "lost" (disoriented), and then he would put me in front of something, and lift the hat, shielding with his hands the rest of my view, so that I could only see what was right before my eyes. 

Although we had never walked very far, and I had been over every street dozens of times, I had never seen (noticed) any of the things he showed me. A marble bust of a polish general. A colonial looking house with huge roman columns. Once he took me inside a store and when he lifted the hat there was an airplane in there. It was a rule that he would never tell me where we had been afterwards. Cut off entirely from the map of the streets as I knew them, these glimpses gave me the sense that i was seeing an entirely different city, a hidden city, like a palimpsest lying beneath the city I knew and peeking out here and there when the hat came up. What could I do build in my mind but spin out a whole alternate city built from these glimpses of things that were in truth hidden in plain sight? This alter-New York loomed large in my imagination.

Eventually the game had to stop when my direction sense got good enough that he couldn't get me "lost" even if he spun me like a top and took many quick turns. But when I got older I played the game by myself, getting myself lost in less familiar terrain to great profit. I found too that I could lift the hat, so to speak, on myself by just looking at what was right in front of my nose, and by searching out the weird tucked-away spots, the hidden worlds, the queer and inviting side-paths of urban life. And what I found was that that other city was never far, because cities are limitless storehouses of secrets, bursting with wonders if only one stops to look. 

The Model of Dungeon Crawl

I've been thinking for a long time about how to run and design cities in a retro-game sandbox way. I've been reading older rpg city material off and on for years. I've also been running occasional games of the City State of the Invincible Overlord for my kids and their cousins. And now, at long last, one of my two groups has finally made it up to Zyan Above for some proper adventuring. So I thought it was time to pull together something in the way of technique. 

As I talked about here, the City State of the Invincible Overlord provides one model for running a fantasy city. It takes what I would call a "street-based" approach. In CSIO, streets generally have their own name, and many have their own special encounters. You also move through the city streets like corridors in a dungeon with encounters on a turn-based system. And there's a gorgeous map. It has the same openness that location-based adventuring has, but much more, since the "dungeon" of the city is less deadly and much more open. Because it's so focused on streets, there aren't neighborhoods with write-ups, because the focus is more fine-grained. This is similar to the way that dungeons often only loosely have thematically different quadrants.  

One thing I like about this approach is that it takes a tried and true open-gaming model and tries to reimagine and repurpose it for citycrawling. It also works for discovery and exploration. Just like I explore the map of the dungeon, moving through corridors, opening room by room, so too I explore the map of the city. For example, like other Judge's Guild products, the CSIO came with both player and DM maps, so that the players could fill them in, jotting down notes on the temples, guilds, establishments, and so on they discover. 

Although untapped, by extension from the dungeon, this also suggests a possible model for uncovering hidden locations in cities, insofar as procedures exist for uncovering secret doors and hidden areas in dungeon exploration. Perhaps one could try something similar here extending the dungeon model further. 

But the problem with this approach, for what I want, is that there's no way I could build a city that feels sufficiently big to scratch my metropolis of the dreamlands itch if I insisted on treating it in this exhaustive way. The entire CSIO map, for example, would only be the size of part of a single neighborhood in the city I've been imagining. 

A second problem is that I don't yet have a city map, and I'm not up to drawing one myself. This technique depends almost entirely on having a beautiful and interesting map. 

A third problem is that a map-focused approach doesn't have rules for getting lost. The simplest most fun version of using this technique would probably involve giving the players their own map of the city so that we didn't get bogged down in narrating details of the map. But in that case, the players would always know where they were.

A fourth problem is that by taking the street as the level of analysis, it loses something of the texture of a city. I want an approach that emphasizes the different feel of  different neighborhoods. I want a city with neighborhoods that feel as different as the East Village feels from Washington Heights or Red Hook or Astoria, or, to take a different city, as a different as Friendship feels from Polish Hill or Mount Lebanon. (Of course, one could recapture this through a well-designed map, but one could also try a different approach that built in the neighborhood as a unit more directly.) 

The Model of Procedural Generation

From early on, a different model competed with the completist dungeon-crawl model of the CSIO. This model involved procedural generation, either on the fly or in preparation for the game. There probably are precursors to this, but there are two relatively early products I know of that apply procedural generation techniques familiar from dungeon construction to cities. If you know more in the comments, then please let me know. 

The first is Midkemia system, first presented (I think) in the second edition of Cities, which involves a rich technique for randomly "stocking" a street with various shops and residences by rolling dice, with some neat rules for businesses clustering on a given street. Here we could see them applying the sorts of methods the Dungeon Master's Guide gave us for randomly generating dungeon rooms and stocking them via rolling on tables. 

The second came in Lankhmar: City of Adventure, which borrowed the procedural generation of dungeons using geomorphs: cut out dungeon chunks cleverly designed so that one can assemble them in any number of combinations by laying down connecting tiles. Lankhmar used a city geomorph to map the mazy slum of alleyways that connect buildings in a sort of city-within-a-city way in Lankhmar. The thought was that there was no way or point in mapping them, and that their jerry-rigged structures shift often as well, so better to capture the mazy, infinite, and shifting feel of it it with procedural generation. In a delicious coup, the gorgeous Lankhmar map left blank spots to indicate where one entered geomorph space, so that you would generate a chase through the streets after a cutpurse (say) in this fashion, and players could know in advance when they stepping into an area with this sort of procedure. 

Again, what I like about this is that it takes tried and true techniques from open-world dungeon crawling and design, and repurposes them to work on the city environment. 

The early OSR fastened on techniques like these to deal with city crawling, focusing on procedural methods of generating city environments, although without much awareness of the early hobby precursors. Vornheim was intended to capture an infinite city, of which its author, the abuser Zak Smith, grudgingly drew a map of on the inside cover, while telling the reader not to use it. Instead, streets were to be procedurally generated using a (too) cute system that involved writing words, with a separate die drop system for generating buildings and streets. This was supplemented by copious random tables did the rest of the work, along with illustrative examples of buildings and the like. [New copies of this book are not for sale any more, so discussing it will not produce profits for its author.]

The reason why this procedural generation approach won't work for me, as flexible and wonderful as these techniques can be, is that if you procedurally generate locations on the fly, you systematically disable the pleasure of uncovering something hidden, since it's all made up as you go along. As a player (not a character), I can only find something if it's already there to be found. Furthermore, if the map is infinite and generated on the fly, then although it sure will feel big, there also will be no such thing as coming to know it. And my love of cities is all about coming to know them, and this is what I want to capture in my city crawling rules. 

The Model of the Pointcrawl

Another model we could try in this context is the pointcrawl. The term "pointcrawl" was coined by Chris Kutalik for techniques that use points of interest connected to one another by abstract paths one moves along. The pointcrawl abstracts movement through a much larger space where not everything is of equal interest, and so where a micro-focus on the environment is not fun. It also mirrors the way one orients oneself in a wilderness space, navigating by landmarks, trails, paths of least resistance, and the like. 

This is promising since it would allow exploration while focusing prep energy as a DM on a set number of notable locations, with possibly multiple things there, e.g. a location could be a single notable bathhouse, or it could be a theater row, or a bustling square with numerous establishments. If we wanted to focus on different neighborhoods, we could make each it's own pointcrawl. A pointcrawl models in abstract ways the distance between things without presupposing that one has a gorgeous map sufficient to capture the fascination and interest of players. So that's a plus too.

There is an obstacle to this otherwise promising approach in the city context in that one can usually reach a location in a city without being forced to move through any given location by going a slightly roundabout way. Thus cities don't really have the chokepoint feature of pointcrawl maps. But one can handle this by simply giving players the option of not interacting with points they pass through. 

To make this work, we'll also need rules for getting lost on a pointcrawl, and a way to model off the beaten path or "hidden locations" in each neighborhood, which are often not literally hidden (although sometimes they are), but rather places that are easy to miss secret locations. Luckily, I have a system for this I developed for the sewer crawl in issue 3 of Through Ultan's Door, that uses a system of floating hidden nodes on the pointcrawl. I'll repurpose that here.

My Citycrawling System (V.1)

City Size

The number of neighborhoods, and locations in a given neighborhood, depends on the size of the city. There are the same number of hidden locations per neighborhood as regular locations, and the number must correspond to a die size (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, etc. unless you use funny DCC dice). The hidden locations are ordered in a numbered list in terms of how hard they are to find, the higher the number, the harder it is to stumble on them. 

• Small City: 3-5 neighborhoods; 4 nodes and hidden location per neighborhood 
• Middling City: 4-6 neighborhoods; 6 nodes and hidden location per neighborhood 
• Large City: 5-7 neighborhoods; 8 nodes and hidden locations per neighborhood
• Metropolis (the size of Zyan): 6-8 neighborhoods: 10 nodes and hidden locations per neighborhood
• Megalopolis: 7-10 neighborhoods: 12 nodes and hidden locations per neighborhood

At the bottom end you have a city with three neighborhoods, 12 notable and 12 hidden locations. At the top end you have a city with a staggering 10 neighborhoods with 120 notable and 120 hidden locations. Zyan is on the big side, with 6 neighborhoods, and so 60 notable locations and 60 hidden locations. While prepping a giant city like this is a lot of work, the idea is that it could sustain years of possible play, a whole campaign in a single city. (And should players just visit, I want them to be like: HOLY HELL that's a proper city of the dreamlands.) This number feels right to me.

Encounters

When entering a neighborhood roll an encounter check. Also roll an encounter check when moving from any node to another other node. Encounters in cities are somewhat less perilous (although they can be dangerous), less to give pressure to exploration, and more to provide color, introduce NPCs, and provide hooks for adventure. Encounter checks occur 2 in 6. 

Searching for Secret Locations

Getting Lost

When entering a neighborhood, or moving between locations in it, check to see if the party becomes lost. Roll a die corresponding to the number of locations in the neighborhood (4=1d4, 6=1d6, etc.). The chance of becoming lost is initially very high, n-1/n (so 3 in 4, 5 in 6, 7 in 8, etc.). Decrease that chance by 1 for each location the party has visited in the neighborhood. When the number is 0, the party knows their way around well enough that they can no longer become lost in that neighborhood. (This necessitates a minimal book-keeping for each neighborhood, with a score equal to the number of locations the party has visited in that neighborhood.) 

If the party is lost, that's not necessarily a bad thing. First give them a free roll to see if they stumble upon a secret location, since getting lost is the best way to find something off the beaten path. Next roll an encounter check. Finally, if they don't find a hidden location, dice randomly to see at what (non-hidden) location the party arrives, the spot where they can ask for directions and get their bearing. 

Hiring Transportation or a Guide

Immortal Zyan is a mazy city, with hollow, hill, and cliff a plenty, and meandering streets opening onto covered arcades, networks of alleys, or stairways and tucked-away courtyards. It is convenient for those who can afford to spare their feet or are unsure of how to reach their destination to employ alternate means of transportation. 

By Boat

In some places canals cut through neighborhoods, as the weed-choked Blisterfish Canal winds through Turnabout, bleeding into swamps and fens until it reaches the Sink, a sordid sewer harbor. Here the clan of Piquant Bosuns ferry passengers in simple canoes or rotting barges along its messy course for a pittance. In Chimes, the Glistertwist flows in summer months from Finchleech, a beautiful reeded pond in the wooded western end of the neighborhood. Here the antique clan of Estimable Ferriers still operate their flat-bottomed gondolas wearing ancient masks, passed from one generation of rower to the next, beneath preposterous hats of the latest fashion. Such rides are free to members of neighborhood clans, who pay the Estimable Ferriers a fixed fee, but cost a pretty penny for visitors. They will, under no circumstances, transport riff-raff, puppet hooligans, or other ruffians. 

By Palanquin

Because the waterways are limited, other modes of transit are more popular. Most commonly used are the palanquin porters. Palanquins come in all shapes, sizes, and degrees of opulence, from simple wicker biers to compartments of gleaming dark wood veiled by perfumed silk curtains. Different clans use different designs and decorations. Competition between them is fierce, and sometimes leads to palanquins being upset in street brawls. Here are only a few of the dozens of clans of Palanquin Porters: 

• The iron masked clan of Forgotten Beasts carry plain wicker palanquins with little fanfare. Their symbol is a black stencil of a shaggy beast.  
• The yellow masked clan of Forward Anglers aggressively courts passengers whom they transport in simple open boxes. Their symbol is a colorful fish. 
• With masks of painted silk, the clan of Thrice Denied Courtiers carry black lacquered enclosed palanquins with silk curtains. Their symbol is a man spurned at a dance. 
• The pearl-veiled clan of Aria Runners carries passengers in opulent domed palanquins with glass windows. They are always accompanied by an opera singer. (These palanquin songs are a memorable feature of the soundscape of Zyan.)

By Carriage

Next in expense come the carriages. Many clans operate them, such as the Upright Ecru Coven and the clan of the Manifold Wheel. The least expensive carriages, often of plain black wood, are pulled by the tremble-legged Usquin, zebra-striped giraffes with ant-eater heads. Their legs snap, going lame with alarming frequency and delaying rides, but they reproduce even faster and feed on garbage, so a surfeit of replacements is always on hand. More expensive are those solid carriages, often metal with golden filagree pulled by striders, many legged white sinuous giant caterpillar beasts. 

For travel in dangerous neighborhoods, carriages sometimes employ security, provided not infrequently by recruits from the Sons and Daughters of the Vigilant Watchers, an ancient mercenary clan of Zyan specializing in the protection of transportation. While carriages cannot travel into the broken paving and soggy fens of Turnabout or up the precipitous steps of the higher reaches of Volish Hill, and are perilous propositions in tilted Cusp, they are more comfortable and secure than most other modes of transit.  

By Nimbus Barque

But the most remarkable means of conveyance are, without a doubt, the Nimbus Barques. The Endless Azure Sea that surrounds Zyan on all sides can be heard breaking upon the tumbled rocky shores beyond the wall of cusp, or crashing against the cliffs beside the Observatory of the Horoscops. In the Azure Sea, clouds float like islands, some partaking more and others less in solidity. In the halcyon days of the Incandescent Kings, sorcerers knew the art of binding of the clouds to service. Although this knowledge is lost now, a few such remarkable vessels remain in Zyan.

Blusterio  

White and grey, with roiling and flashing depths, Blusterio sometimes drizzles a fine rain on pedestrians beneath. Atop is a small deck, lined with sturdy seats with buckles to strap in riders, and many fine red sails atop small masts. It is captained by Hartoon of the clan of Notorious Oyster Climbers, who wears a white bearded mask and is gruff. The barque is blown by Hexifan, a spirit of the air, bound by antique contract. His billowing breath fills the sails, and send the cloud lurching at alarming speeds across the sky.  

Starlingheist 

Roseferry

Original art by Dirk Detweiler Leichty

The Inquisitors judge all men by the crooked law of Zyan. Like the assayer marking the invisible boundary of each plot, so the Inquisitors divide a life with their casuistry, saying, "this action was permitted, that forbidden". For each transgression, they weigh culpability with nuance, reckoning up the punishments. Justice is to be seen as well done, and when done right, justice is a splendid show. In reality, the sheer volume of cases elicits standardized responses with wry wrinkles around the edges. Most creativity is reserved for the class of acts deemed "iniquitous abhorrent". For it is only acts of this singular severity that are punishable by the puppet shows for which the Inquisitor's Guild is beloved.

Such shows are relished by all ranks of Zyan. Young and old, from clans high and low, they stream to the Theater of Justice in the tilted neighborhood of Cusp. They come bedizened with orchids in their hair, carrying picnic baskets, and bottles of the ochre wine of Chimes, or jugs of the spicy grog of Gutter. Filling the seats of the open-aired theater, for a time, they forget their cares. Laughter and breathless chatter ripples through the crowd, as they comment eagerly on the wretched occupants of the small gilded cages below, and wager on the puppets they are to face. With great morbid anticipation, their glance is drawn to the massive doors that stand opposite the cages. These are painted in gaudy colors, and decorated with images of sacred Afatis, the many headed queen of puppets. When the festival horn sounds it clarion call, the cages are opened by boys who run to the edge of the stage to be pulled up by ropes. To gay drum beats, the massive doors swing, and the punishment puppets step forward from the darkness into the light of the arena to deafening cheers from the crowd.

Dirk Detweiler Leichty

No two puppets are the same, although crowd favorites resurface from time to time.  Sublime products of antique art, they possess stunning elegance, cruel caprice, or comedic wit. Fiendishly clever machines, they are constructed of the finest materials: patterned silks and damask, draped atop polished wood with bronze and copper flourishes, and cables of twisting white metal. In a city where mask-making is the highest art, the masks born by the puppets are rare splendors. Some bear masks front and back, two opposed puppets in one that turn now this way, now that, fighting in contrasting styles. Some conceal masks within masks, peeling back to reveal new layers and inner transformations, others masks dangle as grapes from elegant chains, or peer from many places within the swirling silks that cover the puppets mechanical core. Some are gruesome weapons, slaying with flicking tongues, or sprays of pink acid, or pouring from their smoldering eyes killer wasps enraged by the heated metal that surrounds their hive.

The puppets' modes of locomotion vary. Some contain performers, skilled acrobats on stilts who fight with wild leaping abandon. Others are giant marionettes, operated by performers in the roof beams of the stage. Still others are arcane in nature, linked to the movements of a mime on a separate stage high above, or operated through the changing pitch of a string choir. The most perilous are those possessed by an ancient malevolence, moved by the cruel whims of a demon of Afatis, or guided by an intelligence from beyond the nighted gulfs of space. Such puppets are used with great caution, for they often run amok with bloody catastrophe.

Dirk Detweiler Leichty

The guildsmen fashion smaller puppets too, man-sized automata that guard shrines or assassinate guild foes. Some of these life-sized horrors are despatched to terrorize the Guildless, the exiled mutes who dwell in the sewers of Zyan Between. Like relentless clockwork nightmares, these automata whir and stutter through the blackened tunnels bringing red pain and desperate pursuit to these lost souls.

The siege puppets, fruit of another branch of the Inquisitor's baroque art, are suits of armor, encasing an acrobat pilot, usually on stilts. They often have the appearance of fearsome beasts, like the numinous jellyfish of the Endless Azure Sea, or the crystalline apes of the White Jungle. Armed with baleful weapons to break shield walls, they are guarded by sigil-covered lanterns that project ethereal fields of evanescent beauty. The art of the siege puppet is now fading, and the suits are passed down as a precious inheritance within prominent guild families. The noble scions of these clans are trained from youth to operate the twisting cables in leaping combat on stilts.





Flaccid Leviathan, "Squatting Man"
When the huge head of the Flaccid Leviathan, with its vacant staring black sockets, and expressionless stitched face, rears like a nightmare deity from behind the proscenium, throngs swoon, reason dissolving like a swirl of sugar in a tincture equal parts thrill and terror.

This great being was brought from Phantamoria, the dreamlands of the dreamlands, when Zyan was young and the ways were still open through subtle sorceries. The substance of the Leviathan is strange: skin papery like wasps nests, organs like luminous jellied plastic. It emits a smell, sweet and acrid, like caustic anise, and occasional sounds that fill the mind, like the call of whales drowning in an oxygen starved sea. Whether the Flaccid Leviathan is one of a whole race of that alien realm, or a singular entity, whether something created, or something slain and preserved through necromantic abominations, is not known even to its handlers. It is brought out but rarely, only once or twice in a generation, for grand occasions with huge numbers of the guilty. For its preparation and repair is the work of many years.

The Flaccid Leviathan is operated by threads that run between a harness of moonstone set directly into the beast's cerebellum, and a small puppet above that wears a red wig. Elsewhere, a carefully selected child, cruel and imperious, is fitted with the wig's sympathetically attuned twin. This callous youth is presented with a toy simulacrum of the Theater of Justice, complete with little clay figures that replicate the desperate movements of the guilty, who run screaming or hide uselessly in quaking terror at the child's questing fingers. The delighted child plays with these toys, producing in the limbs of the Leviathan the like movements: placing the guilty where it will, posing and undressing them, making them fight, enacting strange shows and scenes. And always in the end, when the novelty of the game wears thin, pulling with great satisfaction the limbs from their bodies squishing their little heads, or mashing their bodies together. (This child is always quietly sacrificed afterwards in the Grand Abbattoir of the Fleischguild.)

The Flaccid Leviathan
Frequency: Unique
No. Appearing: 1
Armor Class: 3
Move: 24" Squatting Walk
Hit Dice: 30 (200 total HP, 40 HP per arm)
No. Attacks: 1
Damage Attacks: 10-60 squash 15" area
Special Defenses: Immune to paralysis and mind-affecting spells; DR/5
Magic Resistance: 50%
Intelligence: As the child (Low Intelligence)
Size: 30' tall when squatting, 50' erect

Original art by Dirk Detweiler Leichty

The Sword Crone, "Old Lady Snip"

Her large form comes onto the stage, stumbling, abject and praying, a parody of religious devotion. She wears a corset of metal, bulging as though with sagging flesh. Her wooden mask, with gray hair over a severe and matronly face, is lifelike and subtle. It is fixed in an expression of intense obedience, as she constantly glances over her shoulder, as though seeking direction from what follows. For the object of her supplication, the strange deity of her singular faith, is never far behind.

This alien god is a tangled mass of tentacles that moves octopus-like, its slender coils caressing the Sword Crone and pushing her forward. Gripped in its many divine pseudo-pods are the instruments of its brutal ministrations: long razors, probing swords, and enormous shears.

The Sword Crone always presents the god of her fawning obeisance to its victims, entreating them by gesture and example to prostrate themselves before their savior and accept its surgical attentions. Should they stubbornly refuse, she becomes enraged, using her coarse hands and inhuman strength to pull them towards their bloody salvation. In reality, the puppeteers sit within the deity, moving the Sword Crone by controlling the tentacles that caress her at many points.

The Sword Crone
Frequency: Unique
No. Appearing: 1
Armor Class: 2
Move: 15"
Hit Dice: 8+8 (56)
No. Attacks: 1
Damage Attacks: 3-12 Pummel or Grapple
Special Attack: None
Special Defenses: None
Magic Resistance: Normal
Intelligence: As the puppeteer (Very Intelligent)
Size: 10' tall

The Deity
Frequency: Unique
No. Appearing: 1
Armor Class: 5
Move: 15"
Hit Dice: 10 (60)
No. Attacks: 5 x slice
Damage Attacks: 1-8/1-8/1-8/1-8/1-8
Special Defenses: None
Magic Resistance: Normal
Intelligence: As the puppeteer (Very Intelligent)
Size: 12' tangled ball

Dirk Detweiler Leichty

Disgorger, "Worm Gullet"

The disgorgers move with relentless purpose through the abandoned tunnels, catacombs, and sewers of Zyan Between, stalking the lost souls that haunt these liminal spaces. The guildless, who have been rendered speechless with the acid "wash" and exiled to the darkness below, call them "Worm Gullets" or "Terrible Ones" in their queer sign language. When they find themselves driven back against rusting bars, or caught in a sudden ambuscade as the disgorgers rise from the black sewer water, they scream silent screams their ruined vocal chords can longer clothe in sound. But the disgorger understands. For it was built to speak the silent language of their fear, and it faithfully provides the response their cries anticipate.

The attack of the disgorger is most terrible. In place of the intestines and lungs, their hollowed torso contains a coil of wire tendrils. With a raspy heaving and metallic panting, they disgorge the tendrils that surge towards the head of the prey, strangling, choking, bleeding, and decapitating. Retracting the severed head, drawn back like a flopping white bellied fish caught in a net, into its jaws, unhinged, impossibly large, and down it goes to its distended belly. Here it rests in an alchemical bath, shrinking and hardening in a days span, acquiring a shiny surface like black lacquer on iron. Thus it takes its place among the coils as a memento. Those disgorgers who have hunted long in the tunnels have many such blackened doll's heads among their coils.

In combat the disgorger strikes with two weapons, often scavenged from its hunts. Provided it has not yet ingested a head, it may instead choose to disgorge its coils. If the attack hits, the target takes 3-12 damage and must save vs. death or be instantly decapitated. It the target saves, he will take 2-8 damage automatically every round, until the disgorger is slain or the target manages to extricate himself. Whatever the result of the attack, once it ends, the disgorger must spend the following round retracting its tendrils.

Disgorger
Frequency: Rare
No. Appearing: 1d3
Armor Class: 3
Move: 12"
Hit Dice: 5 (30)
No. Attacks: 2
Damage Attacks: By weapon +1 to damage
Special Attack: Disgorge Tendrils
Special Defenses: None
Magic Resistance: Normal
Intelligence: Average
Size: 6' tall

Sha Sha Higby

Child of the Sun

This sublime suit of armor was fashioned long ago by Helicanto at the decadent zenith of this strange art. It was one of a series of celestial siege puppets--gorgeous objects of a baroque genius--each representing an alchemical figure associated with one of the astrological houses. The Child of the Sun was constructed for Delandes, third son of the head patriarch of the Clan of Bilateral Hermeneuts, whose trade is and ever was the interpreting of contracts.

The Child of the Sun is lustrous, glinting with hues of burnished brass, red copper, and glistering gold. The helm is a serene face of the sun, around which has been affixed a corona of effulgent rays. The massive limbs trail streaks of metal that spark when struck against stone. Alchemical symbols are loving painted across its now tarnished surface, where many ersatz repairs have left a patchwork appearance.

In one of its hands holds the Searing Star, whose massive ball of polished yellow quartz is spiked with metal flames. It is a terrible weapon made for scattering foes and smashing defenses. It's other arm wields the Solar Lash, a cord of flexible metal that glows with an internal heat, made to ensnare and sear foot soldiers. When the Solar Lash hits a target, the target must test 4d6 under dexterity or become entangled, taking automatic damage for each round after until extricated. When the Child of the Sun is attacked by magic, its projectors produce ethereal shields, that glow like many-hued clouds of cosmic gas as they absorb and nullify the magics.

Child of the Sun
Frequency: Unique
No. Appearing: 1
Armor Class: 0
Move: 12"
Hit Dice: 6+2 (50)
No. Attacks: 3/2
Damage Attacks: Searing Star 5-20 + Solar Lash 2-12
Special Attacks: Entangle
Special Defenses: Spell Absorption
Magic Resistance: Arcane chassis absorbs up to 10 spell levels
Intelligence: The Puppeteer (Normal)
Size: 10' tall

Siege Puppet Pilot
Frequency: Unique
No. Appearing: 1
Armor Class: 6 (padded + dexterity)
Move: 12"
Hit Dice: Assassin 3
No. Attacks: 1
Damage Attacks: Khopesh 1d8 + poison
Special Defenses: None
Magic Resistance: Normal
Intelligence: Very Intelligent
Size: 6' Tall

At the bottom of the undercity, the offal sinks and great sewer river spill into Zyan Below. Here a fecund and ever blooming white jungle grows like a pallid reflection of the gilded towers above glimpsed in the fetid waters of a still pond. It springs from the base of the floating island downwards, a dense riot of immense fungal blooms, and thick snaking vines covered in flowers that look like the jeweled wings of insects. The place is the surreal nightmare of a jungle. The breast of a bird will open to reveal pale, trembling petals, on which its blind young feed with snaking tongues. The line between insect, animal, and plant is not respected.  Often, it is hard to tell where one living thing stops and another begins.

Zyan Below can be divided into four levels. Each level is represented by a hex map, composed of hexes one half mile wide and high. These maps are stacked one on top of another. While I cannot reveal the maps (alas!) since they are all in play, I can tell you a little bit about the levels, which are these.