A long time ago, kings were buried with the wealth of their lives, often including pets and servants, under the vain assumption that these material things would be carried on to the immaterial. To this day, many of these old royal treasury-tombs are haunted by the restless dead, rot-clouded eyes filled with fading visions of a promised afterlife. Šar Šarrāni Anaximandros knew exactly what awaited him. His client-line under King Surya , King of the Seventh Day , was in decline after a struggle for power and privileges with a rival dynasty. So, rather than let so many things fall through his fingers like sand, he sealed himself away in an obelisk with his most prized possessions to await his slow death. Perhaps, in the vastness of eternity, he would have his day again. For a few centuries, the obelisk has been a forbidden place. The water that pours from it is clear, the grass is green, the trees tall and strong. Those who stop there, stop briefly. Those that stay there do not retu...

In the choking vacuum of the Machine Space, there are islands: sealed pockets of material in the mechanism of  the Structure , waiting to be cracked open and stripped bare by anyone with the tools to do it. Most are more dangerous than what's outside of them, filled with crushing mechanisms and hostile machines- they were not made for you, you rat chewing on the wires. It should be no surprise what happens to you. Yet, rare though they are, there are habitable places to be found.  The only trouble is finding them first. The Basin  is inside of a hollow sphere, with gravity emanating outwards from the center at a level roughly equal to earth's. Two massive steel obelisks thrust up from the ground and meet in the center to hold up the "sun" with their points. The "sun" is an array of impossibly bright spotlights which illuminate the entire space, with "night" only coming from a thick cloud layer which covers half of the spotlight array at any given t...

Another Glåugust Glogtember  GLOGTOBER, post. From the famed  Archon's Court : a small regional hexcrawl. Ilya Zankovsky  Maybe you found a ring , and thought yourself a more legitimate ruler than the average freebooter. Maybe you're just ambitious and own a map. Regardless, up the river from Merara Wiha , the throne of Dahay lays empty. The old king Dawit  died three centuries ago, his firstborn Eskinder  got an arrow through the eye socket, and his second was busy making deals with the DEVIL  in exile, his name wiped from the record. Nobody came back to take up the scepter, the taxman got what he was due, and life went on. Captain Natsinet  came back from the war with a mind full of blood and sharp angles, if you define "war" as running an organized crime ring in his Imperial post on the isle of  Yonah , moving poison, slaves, and embezzled arms across the eastern channel. When the meteor hit, he took it as a sign to get out of foreign territo...

  It was one of those ideas that seems good when you've been living on black coffee and Yonah white. They obsessed over it.  A dozen Giant laborers taken out into the wilderness, blindfolded and sworn to secrecy, but clearly not sworn enough because Saskia  had heard one talking about the strangest job he ever had, some kind of dungeon or oubliette built around one spherical cell. Then there was that vault robbery, thousands of Moons of gold bullion taken from the Church like it was nothing. Everyone had heard about that, even ten years later, but only Jochem  knew that it had been an inside job and with that bullion there was a certain gold-banded box that must have held something terribly valuable. He didn't remember who he heard it from, but he was never shy about making bets. Neither him nor Saskia  knew how or where they had connected these two events. Maybe he whispered it into her ear, a sweet nothing to which she responded with how she'd kill anyone who ...

This is a post of two purposes: 1. For  Glåugust  challenge 6, fulfilling the prompt "a dungeon with a river in it". 2. A trade of prompts--a dungeon duel, if you will--between the aforelinked Nothic's Eye and yours truly. He emerged from the peat to suggest "great and ancient mechanisms", to which I raise my foot-long Colt Dragoon revolver and respond with "trench raid". Your move, eelboy. Ilya Zankovsky  Secret History A long time ago, this valley in the east was inhabited only by those exiled by the Sun Kings  and their descendants. When the spring rains came, the river came roaring over its banks to scour people, animals, and buildings from the earth. Then, in the summer, the sun burned it all away, leaving only cracked mud and fish bones. It was terrible, but not so bad that everyone left; tyrants and raiders passed the village over in times of war, nothing worth taking. So is it any surprise that someone made a deal with the devil? Saint DEVIL , ...