GACKLING

MOON
PATRICK STUART
TOM K KEMP
NAMES BY SCRAP PRINCESS
ORIGINAL MAP BY KYANA
ESSAY BY EMILE FRANKEL
CONTENTS:

vi. Map of the Moonlands

1. Phases of the Gackling Moon
5. Table: Weather in Moonlight
6. A Fine Gackling Moon
9. A Painted Moon
10. A Sorrowing Moon
13. A Ruinous Moon
14. A New Moon
16. A Wasp Moon
17. A Goblin Moon
20. A Forgotten Moon
23. Narcissolis
30. Table: Orders From Lord South-Barking-Dog
36. Table: Buildings Behind the Curtain
41. The Incoherent Isles
50. Table: Encounters and Adventures in the Isles
52. Narcissan Map of the Incoherent Isles
55. The Umber Woods
64. Table: Encounters in the Umber Woods
67. The Yellow Plain and the Large Goblin Collider
76. Table: Encounters and Adventures
80. List: Goblin Philosophers
81. List: Experimental Goblins
83. The Vermillion Sea
91. Table: Scenes at Sea
93. The Plain of Anaesthetic Fire
97. Table: Governments of the Goblin Islands
106. Table: Situations on the Plain of Aneasthetic Fire.
109. The AntiGoblin Empire
112. Table: Chaos at the Apple Factory
123. The Whetstone Ridge
127. List: Magical Apples
130. List: Madness’s of the Crazed Theigns
134. Table: Encounters on the Whetstone Ridge
137. The Painted Plane
141. Table: Amidst the Picts
148. Table: The Roles of Pict Government
149. Table: Utopian Ruin Generator
152. Table: Intrigues in Gate-Town
155. The Maw
161. Table: Mole Man Scandals!
165. Owl City, the Great Goblin Market and the Necropolis of Glass
172. Table: Factional Action; Street Fights in Owl City
176. Table: Deals to be Dealt
191. List: The Tombs of the Illusory Lords
187. Names (By Scrap Princess)
196. Appendix of Plates
199. Essay: Notes on Moonmaking
00. THE MOONLANDS AT THE TIME OF LAST COUNTING
 (SOURCE UNKNOWN).
ANNOTATIONS TO THE MAP OF THE MOONLANDS

THE MOONLANDS AT THE TIME OF LAST COUNTING.

A map seemingly strewn with artifacts of play, or symbols of
mystery, yet be not confused for every element, even those
dreamlike or impossible, is exactly as it is seen, and at least as
accurately recorded here as it can be in this land, trapped beneath
a whirling maddened moon, at the end of the understandable
world, bordering on incomprehensible seas and riven with tears
in causality itself.

I. THE PLAIN OF ANAESTHETIC FIRE

The great border, and main access to the lands of the Gackling
Moon. No accurate maps exist to show its size or reach, for all
who survive the crossing are mind-blasted and made strange by
their survival. Only here, as the waste of clinker approaches the
Moonlands themselves, can one truly guess at distance. (Most
Moonlands maps minimise the size of the Plain of Anaesthetic
Fire, I think they do not like to dwell on its encompassing
greatness. They turn away). On the borders of the Plain one begins
to encounter the Goblin Islands, patches of verdant green, oasies
in the desert. All are infested with the green rogues, show due
care in dealing with them and refuse their powders, unguents
and political theories.

II. THE GEOMANTIC ROADS

Here and there one sees the ruin of a raised road, or walks a
stretch of level path, unusually straight, or precisely curved,
which follows the old ways. For the most part, only the slow proces-
sions of Penumbeetles solemnly mark the path. What is shown
here is partly guesswork, but the regularity and predictability of
the Geomantic Roads suggest predictions based on pattern will
hold good. I think they are not roads though, at least, not as we
would know them. They are sacred ways, routes for stabilising
ritual, a web of sanity which holds together this cracked land.
Do they go also beneath the Lilac ocean of the Reach, or beneath
the Vermillion Sea, impossible as that might seem? Do tunnels
penetrate the mountains of the Whetstone Ridge?

III. THE WHETSTONE RIDGE

Vertiginous mountains, long-fortified and monster-haunted,
home to the patchwork holdings of the Crazed Theigns and their
Apple-obsessed subjects.
x
IV. ANTIGOBLIN EMPIRE
All this zone of the Inverse Forest and Lolipop Hills lies within the
AntiGoblin Empire, centred upon its Azure City, a place you wouldn’t
wish to visit. Though few in number the AntiGoblins play an outsized
role in the affairs of the Moonlands due to their insane fanaticism
and control of the AntiGravity Juice trade. How far north the Inverse
Forest spreads, and what lands it may border upon, is unknown to me,
and perhaps to the AntiGoblins themselves for they fear its depths.

V. YELLOW PLAINS
Other than being riddled with Goblins and the yellowness of its grass,
perhaps due to the Pigment River, the Yellow Plane is a relatively
safe and stable place, providing one stays away from the Collidor.

VI. THE LARGE GOBLIN COLLIDOR

The centre of Goblin Science, Culture and Power. Some Goblins claim
this to be the headquarters of a Multiversal Goblin Empire. It is a
silly place. Go there not. Do not join the queue.

VII. VERMILLION SEA

A fearful ocean said to be the boundary to a poisoned red world, like a
caul across the surface of a lethal nightmare. Only the InvsisiBeetles
may be trusted here. From the Vermillion Sea the Goblins came, and
thence come also the Chaos Wasps, loathed by all. Moonlanders speak
of it little. I have heard that a secret city lies somewhere between the
Sea and Umber Woods.

VIII. THE UMBER WOODS

Here reigns a Great Silence and within are the secrets of the
Penumbeetles. All who seek within have returned mad and addled,
if they return at all. How far southward go the Umber Woods, if they
keep the separation of the two strange seas to either side, form a
promontory or reach some other land, none can say, or if they can,
have not. The Beetles guard all.

IX. OWL CITY

The terror and energy of this city may not be ignored! Here any-thing
may be done or acquired! Yet also it is a crazed metropolis, defenceless
and ruined yet as inexorable as a stain. The Glass Necropolis at its
heart is not its own. Watch your corners! Eyes to the sky!
xi
X. NARCISSOLIS
Here those that think themselves the centre of all things live and
build. Many wonders are here seen and adventures incredible to
describe, yet the city bounded by a glass wall tires one. It drains
the visitor dry, consumes their history and spins it anew before
casting them aside. Narcissans feign interest in everything but
are absorbed largely in themselves, (and also with the Incoherent
Isles upon which they bound). Attention is its currency, trade
wisely in it.

XI. THE MAW

In any other land this city of invisible ruins, blasted by winds
which have whirled across the worlds before spewing from the
spire-toothed Maw, would be a centrepiece of mystery. Here it is
a backwater. Do not talk politics with the Moles.

XII. THE PAINTED PLANE

A half-real realm most beautiful and strange yet too-great in its
brightness and its people bigoted and divided against themselves.
Gate-Town, above the Drops of Ink, is a tolerant place but ware
yourself should you go deeper in. Sleep is hard here.How far
North-East the Plain proceeds, or whence the Pigment River rises,
if it is made strange at the source or by its travel through these
lands, I do not know.

XIII. PIGMENT RIVER

A river most bright and strange, seeming always to me something
torn from a painting, half-real, or more real than real can be.
On the Painted Plain it burns like a second sun but even in the
saner lands beneath it holds a picturesque ecology of curious, (and
dangerous) beasts.

xii
 PHASES OF THE
GACKLING MOON
THE MOONLANDS

At the ends of the understood earth, trapped between contending

seas, crazed with fractured realities and bathed in the glow of a
mad satellite, itself reflecting light from unreal suns hidden in
the shadow of the night, lie the lands of the Gackling Moon.
Guarded from the North by the Plains of Anaesthetic Fire, the
Whetstone Ridge and the unnerving para-reality of the Painted
Plane, from the West by the flower-strewn Vermillion Sea, which
borders on a murderous otherworld of mad red light, and from the
East by the surging seas of the Reach, an ocean whose opposing
waves tickle the beaches of the ever-mythical Dark Continent,
the Moonlands are not an easy place to reach.
Yet some do find their way there, for this realm of cracked
realities is the origin of rare resources and secret wisdom. From
the strange drugs of the Asbestos Bedouin to the magical apples
of the Whetstone Ridge, the fictional weapons of the Picts of the
Painted Plane, the secrets of the Great Goblin Market in the
Necropolis of Glass and Narcissolis, the ever-shifting city with a
wall of glass, the Moonlands hold treasures and secrets of such rare
and inexpressible strangeness that in any other place, possession
of the smallest of them may draw the eye, burnish reputations
and summon awe.
For all their deep differences and continual conflicts, those
who populate these lands are united by two things. Firstly; absolute
terror of the Apocalypse Wasps; nightmarish invaders from the
Red World beneath and beyond the Vermillion Sea, who despise all
life and wish to lay eggs in everyone. And secondly; their shared
experience of the light of the Gackling Moon, for the orb which
rolls over these lands in the night is of no ordinary kind, and such
is the enchantment in its beams that all beneath its grin must
keep care of their calendar, for to leave shelter on a cloudless
night, without noting the face of the moon, can summon doom.
Doom, or adventure.

2
 Phases of the Gackling Moon

01. NARCISSOLIAN PARALUNE. Depicts the supposed faces of various Illusory Lords
of note.

3
THE GACKLING MOON ITSELF

A smashed moon for a smashed land, crazed and cratered like

a pale cracked mirror in the sky. A blind, moaning moon with a
broken face.
Legends, myths and imagined origins abound, but the most
commonly accepted theory of its nature is that each cracked
fragment of the face of the Gackling Moon reflects down upon
the world, the light of a differing sun.
And each mosaick’d slice does glow with a different hue, so
that the Full Mad Face of the Gackling Moon is a tatterdemalion
chequerboard of gash-bright light from incomprehensible stars.
Each eldritch wavelength carries with it a little of the power
and strangeness of the reality from which it shines. The moon is
mirror to a range of cosmic lamps, and in their light, the physics,
logic and actuality so illuminated must match and balance that of
the emitting sun.
These lights have magical properties, each different, and all
comprehensively intermixed and blended in the full face of the
Gackling Moon.
As the shadow of the Real slowly slices out the moons mad
smile day by day and week by week, revealing and disguising more
or less each night, the balance and composition of the unreal light
shifts and alters, different colours matching, mixing, conflicting
and combining as the month drifts by.
Though the moon is crazed, the arrangement of its fragments
does not change and so the people of the Moonlands have at least
one clear moon-boon; the cycles of its witch-light are predictable
and known, and the effects of each face of the Gackling Moon are
understood and accounted for by all who live beneath its glow.

MOON RULES
Even in madness, there is law. The following rules always apply to
the light of the Gackling Moon unless specifically stated otherwise.
+ The magical effects of the moon count only in direct moonlight.
+ Moon Effects last only as long as moonlight shines directly upon
the effected being.
+ Moon Effects only work at night. They end at dawn. The moon
is sometimes visible in the sky by day, this moon has no magical
properties.
+ Depending on the weather, clouds may occlude the moon. This
can be decided by the DM but for a random decision try this
method:

4
 TABLE: WEATHER IN MOONLIGHT

Phases of the Gackling Moon

First Hour of Moonlight – Roll a D6

1-2 Full Cloud. A dark, blind night.

3-4 Clouds scud across the face of the moon.

5-6 The moon is fully visible.

Every subsequent hour the cloud cover has a one-third chance of changing.

The population of the lands of the Gackling Moon are familiar

with its many faces and know what its various powers can do.
The simplest response to potentially dangerous moonlight
is to stay indoors or hide beneath shade. Other, more complex
responses will be discussed either in the description for that
particular face of the moon, or in reference to individual cultures
and populations.

02. MOON
PHASE CHART.
Antigoblin
Empire.

5
1. A FINE GACKLING MOON

Perhaps not the worst moon, but certainly the most powerful and
most feared.
LIGHT
The full, mad face of the Fine Gackling Moon is entirely visible,
staring down at reality with its wild eyes and crooked smile, its
face a mosaic of reflected sunlight from alien realms.
The colour of its light is an indescribable nullfire which veils
all beneath it with the texture of a dream.

POWERS
One: Anyone looking directly into the face of the Fine Gackling
Moon will go quite mad and not know who they are for as long is
its light shines.
Two: Anyone in direct moonlight can change shape with nothing
more than a silent thought.
+ Women may change into Animals.
+ Men may change into Stones.
+ Murderers may change into Weapons.
+ Goblins may change into Animals, Humans, Objects or Plants.
+ Animals may change into Humans.
+ And Children may change into Goblins.

If the transformed individual forgets who or what they are, or is

not in daylight as the sun rises the transformation can last until
the next Fine Gackling Moon.
Three: The Fine Gackling Moon will grant each individual a single
wish, once in their life.

+ The effects of this wish are limited, usually it involves the

moon moving something under its purview around. Often after
changing its shape.
+ To wish you must look directly at the Fine Gackling Moon,
6 meaning you will lose your identity and go mad.
+ These wishes always go horribly wrong.
 Phases of the Gackling Moon
LUNACULTURE
Being a time of madness and transformation, almost all sane
cultures, and even Goblins, obsessively avoid this moon, even if
the sky is overcast. The danger of being caught in its light and of
seeing its face is simply too great.
Three simple rules are beaten into every sane brain in the land:
1. Never go out in a Gackling Moon.
2. Never look at a Gackling Moon.
3. And never, ever, wish on a Gackling Moon.

However, nothing is ever simple, and mistakes, emergencies,

desperation or malice can lead to moon-exposure and its results.
If a family or community member goes missing during a
Fine Gackling Moon, then any altered, extra or eldritch items are
sought out in the day and guarded so they might be restored.
Men and Murderers can be easily located, being stone and
weapons, each incapable of individual movement.
Women can be hard to find in animal form, and children
extremely hard to find in Goblin form.
And almost anything or anyone new to a community encoun-
tered after a Gackling Moon may be a transformed Goblin.

SITUATIONS
+ A family looking for help moving and guarding a strange stone
which they say is a relative, they want to place it somewhere
where it will see the sun coming up.
+ A family, village or Kin-group likewise worried about a common
animal they think is their wife, mother or grandmother.
+ The discovery of a ‘Moon Blade’. These transformed murderers
always have magical or remarkable powers and possessions and
use of them always leads to discord, horror and strife.
+ A culture-group taking radical action in forcing someone to
transform under a Gackling Moon to prove they are not a murderer.
+ Someone falling in love only to discover that the object of
their affection is a transformed Goblin or Animal, and perhaps
attempting to make sure this is undiscovered, and that their loved
one does not turn back.
+ A family having to control and take care of a Goblin who they
say (and hope) is their transformed child.
+ Moon-Ruin, the results of someone wishing on a Gackling Moon
leading to people and places being swept up into the air and
re-distributed, people and things being transformed in strange
ways, outbreaks of particular madness and delusion and all
manner of other strangeness. 7
+ Someone depressed, angry or alienated actually wants to forget
themselves and transform into something else, permanently. In
the case of a self-assured adult it can be hard to work out if this is
something you should try to stop or not.

Everyone sighs in relief when a Gackling Moon finally occludes

into the by-comparison, quite safe and sane, Painted Moon.

03. MAWNIAN STONE MOON CARVING. Spiralic stone depiction of a Gackling

Moon, found in dwellings of the Molemen of the Maw.
 Phases of the Gackling Moon
2. A PAINTED MOON

LIGHT
The Painted Moon is a mosaic of glimmering colours like the
fragments of a gem catching light.
Images seem to dance through the air like a procession of
bright people winding their way through the sky or like fireflies
travelling up, up, up to the surface of the Painted Moon.

POWERS
For those who sleep directly in the light of this moon, their dreams
will either migrate (5 in 6 chance) or, more rarely, become active
and tangible illusions around them (1 in 6 chance).
Migrated Dreams – those who experience this swap dreams with
someone else nearby having roughly the same dream.
Embodied Dreams – those who experience this have their dreams
become visible around them, like a projected image.
The only significant physical danger from such Embodied Dreams
is if very powerful or very scared people have nightmares, they
can effectively act as monsters.
If Magic-Users have spells memorised while they dream
beneath a Painted Moon, these will become active as fully-mobile
independent beings with forms and intentions shaped by their
natures. In any case, waking the individual, or any absence of
moonlight, ends the effect immediately.

LUNACULTURE
Almost all of the dangers of a Painted Moon can be avoided by simply
not sleeping under its light, and for those witnessing potentially
dangerous embodied dreams, any possible threat can be escaped
with nothing more than a moon-shade, or by waiting for day. The
main dangers of a Painted Moon are social and psychological. At
times, the inadvertent swapping or sharing of dreams between
community members can cause social ructions.
9
SITUATIONS
+ A pair of young lovers setting out to sleep under a Painted Moon
in the hopes that they will swap dreams.
+ An argument or fight between people due to information they
think they received while experiencing someone else’s dream (i.e.
someone does/does not love their spouse, is lying about something,
is subconsciously into some freaky stuff etc).
+ A monster or dangerous situation which has sprung up around
an unaware sleeper, and which may not be immediately obvious
as a dreamed illusion.
+ An encounter with a ‘living spell’ sprung from the mind of a
sleeping Magician, the spell has its own personality and knows it
will only ‘live’ for a short time, this can make them quite capri-
cious (though not necessarily evil). They may not reveal what they
are.
+ A group of edgy young men setting out to sleep under the light
of a Painted Moon because it’s very-slightly somewhat dangerous
and boundary breaking.

3. A SORROWING MOON

LIGHT
This sad moon casts all beneath it in a sombre pall. All colours fade,
the silver of the moonlight turns to grey. Black pools of shadow
hang from eves and branches like fuliginous cloaks.

POWERS
This moon presents no physical threats and at least one great
advantage. Nevertheless its extremely melancholic glow makes it
a significant danger for those suffering loss, or those of a naturally
gloomy temperament.
One – In the light of a Sorrowing Moon, all become deeply sad.
Grief can be dangerously intense
Two – It is impossible to joke or laugh beneath its light.
10 Three – Once you start crying it can be impossible to stop.
Even Goblins are made sombre by this moon. Unable to have fun

Phases of the Gackling Moon

they just trudge in endless circles in the night or break into
people’s homes to clean them, do their accounts and weed the
garden. Goblins hate this moon.
Four – This moon gifts animals in its light intelligence and speech.
However, only nocturnal animals are active. All of the animals are
saddened by the cruelty of nature and their own brief awareness
of it. They either sit weeping or just cry in their sleep.

LUNACULTURE
The chief dangers of the Sorrowing Moon are psychological.
Anyone suffering grief or depression is strongly urged not to go
out in a Sorrowing Moon, as they may be stricken with terminal
gloom.
Likewise, sensitive carnivores are advised not to go beneath
its light as witnessing the sadness of the animals may turn them
into vegetarians.
Children are kept out of this moon as hearing farm animals
cry in the night, and witnessing them form words and make state-
ments in dreams or sad nightmares can be disturbing for them.
This can be a good time to question animals if they are
thought to possess needed information. Though talking through
their tiredness and sadness can be frustrating.
Conversely, a Sorrowing Moon is a great time to escape,
confound, oppose or defy Goblins as any under its light will be
stricken with a mental heaviness and lose utterly their maniacal
genius and deranged courage.

SITUATIONS
+ Investigators tracing a crime systemically drag every animal in
a village into the moonlight and interrogate it, but are gradually
worn down by the consuming sorrows of the beasts.
+ Dumb kids decide to fuck with some Goblins by hurling school
homework at them in the night, adults who realise the Goblins
will take revenge under the coming Ruinous moon try to stop
them.
+ The weeping and wailing of farm animals disturbs as you pass
in the night.
+ A favourite pet or animal has quite a lot to say, and is extremely
depressed.
+ Those taking suicide watch by the home of a grieving widower
are themselves crying.
+ A weeping housewife watches glum Goblins skilfully but
gloomily tend to her pumpkins in the night.

11
04. OWL CITY REPRODUCTION OF ‘WEEPING GOBLIN CHILD’. Infamous
painting by Pict exile Mauve Le Sin. Drafted on a Sorrowing Moon, it is said
this image will reduce any goblin to maudlin despair.

12
 Phases of the Gackling Moon
4. A RUINOUS MOON

LIGHT
A classic silvery-white moonlight with a tinge of sapphire-blue.
Slightly brighter and more directional than ‘average’ moonlight.
Shadows are depthless pools.

POWERS
One – Under this moon the ghosts of those slain by mortal hands
seek out their killers.
Depending on the strength of the personality behind the
Ghost, it may simply follow its killer accusing them of the crime,
or it may pursue a more direct vengeance.
Two – Shadows cast by the light of this moon sometimes rebel
against their caster if offended.
They escape and run away into a great Parliament of Shadows.
If you can find this Parliament it can lift curses, deliver knowledge
or amend mistakes.

LUNACULTURE
A moon of revenge and the accounting of old wrongs, where
many lose their shadows and others are harrowed by ghosts. Still,
a Ruinous Moon is not particularly dangerous for most people,
providing they treat their shadows kindly, and are not killers.
Criminals, murderers, soldiers and executioners, will all try
to avoid this moon. As will anyone who has ever killed a Wizard or
Magic-User.
The possibility of exposing a murderer or discovering the
Parliament of Shadows provokes certain groups and people to
undertake unusual actions in the light of this moon.

SITUATIONS
+ A legal trial held out in the open, beneath moonlight. If the
accused is guilty, the ghost of their victim will arrive to accuse
them.
+ Knights or adventurers in combat with their own shadows 13
after offending them.
+ A potent warrior trapped beneath shade by fear of the numerous
ghosts who will seek them out should they step into the light of
the Ruinous Moon.
+ A battle between the ghost of a Magician and their killers, who
foolishly let themselves be caught under moonlight.
+ A pilgrim or group of adventurers who seek the Parliament of
Shadows, either to regain their own shadows, or to solve some
irresolvable mystery or danger.
+ The Parliament of Shadows itself.

5. A NEW MOON

Joy to the world the New Moon is here!

Here are the safest and most secure handful of nights in all the
lands of the Gackling Moon. With the moon’s face totally occluded,
there are no magical effects or strange lunar dangers at all.
Many settlements have night-festivals to mark this time of
the month in which all the citizens, who might otherwise have
some reason to avoid the moonlight, walk about beneath the light
of the stars without fear or restraint.
Night markets and late openings are common for these few
eves.
Yet all make ready and prepare for perhaps the worst moon of
all, which comes soon…

14
05. REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NEW MOON. Used as a signifier of good fortune
across the Moonlands. An anthropomorphised New Moon is typically depicted with its
eyes closed. It is generally considered poor taste to even mention the Wasp Moon, and
so it is often excluded from a counting of the moon’s phases.

15
6. A WASP MOON

LIGHT
The light of the Wasp Moon is a virulent, violent red that washes
over bodies like crimson ink and stains reality like a charnel
house.
The Red Wasp Moon breeds, and feeds on anger, resentment
and wrath. Under its light people become their red, wounded
selves, all of the harms of their life visible as hacked flesh and
raw trauma.

POWERS
One – Meat rots in the red light and births red flies which swarm
in the night.
Two – Hatred breathes out like a caustic gas which cuts like a
knife.
Three – Bad thoughts squirm like red eggs under the skin, then
burst like buboes, releasing the poisonous red wasps of wrath.
These wasps buzz with a high-pitched keening sound like blades
on glass, they are aggressive and their sting is painful to the point
of being disabling. The pain only dies with dawn.
Four – Those who swear an oath of vengeance to this moon grow
buzzing wasp wings which burst from wounds in their back and
carry them towards the object of their hate at incredible speed.

LUNACULTURE
More even than the Gackling Moon, this selene should be avoided
at all costs. All pray for clouds to cover this most poisonous orb.
Since this moon is of aid only by those who wish to do harm, and
since it shows all under it in the most terrible light, travel under
it is abjured, regardless of circumstance.Culturally, it’s considered
reasonable to miss any appointment or meeting, to avoid any duty
or to break any oath or promise, if to meet or fulfil them requires
that you walk under a Wasp Moon. Doors and windows are locked.
Children are terrorised by tales to be sure they do not leave
16 the house. Cursed are those who choose openly to walk
under the Wasp Moon. They are villains all.
SITUATIONS

Phases of the Gackling Moon

+ A wrath-filled wanderer squats like a rank encrusted hive of
hate, spitting out wasps.
+ Dark towns and empty villages with every door and window
battened tight and all valued animals under shade. Few doors will
open, regardless of the circumstance.
+ Evil men walking freely beneath the Red Moon like grinning
flensed corpses, followed by swarms of their own bad thoughts.
+ The terrible buzz of wings in the night air and a hated enemy
left behind long-ago swoops upon you in a moment.
+ The bodies of friends caught in the Wasp Moon by mistake, who’s
argument turned to horror, their thoughts bursting from them as
flies and their breath slicing each other like knives.
+ Bodies in the red light, impossible to tell if corpses or sleeping
men.

7. A GOBLIN MOON
LIGHT
The Goblin Moon is a crazy facepunching GREEEEEEN.
Moving bodies hop and skip. Faces look like carnival masks.
The green of leaves, grasses, and goblin faces, grows pale. Those
which match exactly the light of the moon look white.
Shadows are a dusky, dusty red.

POWERS
One – Lies are always believed.

Two – Locks don’t work.

Three – The strong cannot restrain those weaker than themselves

with bonds or chains.
Four – It’s easy to hide in the shadows cast from this moon if you
are hiding from someone specifically looking for you.
Five – If anyone laughs, it takes serious effort for them to stop.
Weak or distracted people can die laughing, so can Goblins. 17
LUNACULTURE
While the Goblin Moon is a troublesome one, people usually view
it with a degree of resignation. As bad as Goblins are, they are
mainly into theft, chaos and mischief, rather than murder and
death. At least it’s not the Wasp Moon.
This Moon massively encourages thieves and most settlements
have curfews, nearly as serious as those for the Wasp Moon, to
prevent anyone from walking abroad under it.
Unlike the Wasp Moon, this curfew is actually policed by
Moon‐Cops, out looking for Goblins and other ne’er-do-wells (and
usually not finding them, but at least it’s something).
Wealthy homeowners often have secondary doors on their
houses, built inside, beneath the eaves, out of the light of the Moon,
so they can actually be locked. Poorer families often team up and
sleep in each other’s houses to keep watch.
Particularly useful for this are children as, being weaker
than a Goblin, and most thieves, they cannot be restrained and
can therefore warn their family if they sense anything awry.
Many children are bribed to stay up all night over a Goblin
Moon, and many of the amphetamine addicts of this land can date
their preferences to heady, adventuresome nights beneath the
Goblin Moon.

SITUATIONS

+ Goblins creeping in the shadows.

+ MoonCops stalking, poking shadows with poking sticks, running
after Goblins both real and unreal.
+ Goblins stealing trash to build a giant ladder in a crazed desire
to reach the Goblin Moon.
+ Drugged children running about screaming dirty jokes at empty
corners (Goblins have a terrible sense of humour so making them
laugh, and keep laughing is a key way to force them to expose
themselves.)
+ Goblins flying about on the back of huge owls, causing trouble.
+ Goblins poking people with sticks for fun.
+ Goblins paired up on each other’s shoulders, wearing long coats,
pretending to be MoonCops as part of some insane scam.
+ Goblins building giant lunar capacitors to store the energy of
the Goblin Moon in special glass vials. (For later transport to the
Large Goblin Collider).

18
06. CIRCUIT DIAGRAM FOR GOBLIN LUNAR BATTERY CELL.
Tattooed on, presumably, pig skin.

19
8. A FORGOTTEN MOON

LIGHT
A glistering crystalline gleam highlights every edge. The air hums
with a kind of static energy. Jewels and the edges of blades sparkle.
Shadows are a lambent blue, like lantern-lit velvet. Moths fill
the air like stars and land like snowfields in its light. Huge moths
seem to orbit around the moon itself.
Storms and high winds blow them away like hurricanes of
tumbling leaves, but they always return.

POWERS
One – Any secret whispered under the light of a Forgotten Moon
will be overheard by a moth. The moth will then carry this secret
to another and whisper it into their ear.
Two – Those who sacrifice an Owl to the Forgotten moon may
summon one of the huge, Moon-Circling Moths from the upper
air. This Moth will carry them to any place beneath the moon’s
light where they have already been.
Three – Rumours say that, very occasionally, a large moth will
arrive from the deep past and whisper into an ear, requesting a
single drop of blood. If this is given, they will relate a secret from
ancient history.

LUNACULTURE
Obviously, a Forgotten Moon is a bad time to conspire, as any secret
could easily escape. Because of this, in many cultures, some rituals,
contracts and agreements can only take place under a Forgotten
Moon.
The ease of transport via giant moth means people are accus-
tomed to both receiving visitors from their past, and to visiting old
places known to them, during these nights. But sometimes dark
things live in the past as well, and the Moths of the Forgotten
Moon can both deliver, and bring people to, black forgotten fates.
Most actual conspirators are careful not to speak secrets
under the Forgotten Moon and the majority of secrets lost
20 and found are those of children. But, people being what
they are, you never know…
SITUATIONS
+ A Moon Marriage taking place beneath the Forgotten Moon.
+ A village full of people; distant family members are visiting each
other.
+ An empty village where almost everyone has gone off to visit
somewhere else.
+ The return of a long-thought-lost son or daughter has erupted
into social drama.
+ Someone claims to have received a secret from the ancient past
and is looking for help in exploiting it.
+ A dark secret heard by a child leaves a village in uproar as
everyone tries to work out who’s secret it is.

With the end of the Forgotten Moon, we return again to the Fine
Gackling Moon as the cycle of the month repeats.

21
NARCISSOLIS
1.NARCISSOLIS

South of Owl City, between the Umber Woods and the Incoherent
Isles, pressed against the great Reach itself, is Narcissolis, would-be
Capital of the Moonlands, the city with a wall of glass. Narcissolis
is like no other city. Bound within its wall and behind its glass
gates lies a riot of form and colour more alike to an ever-evolving
painting, or a collage of buildings, each torn from different
pictures at a different time.
Even the ‘ordinary’ people of Narcissolis are costumed and
made up in the most vibrant colours and starkest lines, so that they
seem more like people from an image, or images of people. This
makes them hard to distinguish from the Picts who walk the city’s
streets; painted people from the Painted Plane or traders from the
Pigment River. Amongst them walk Goblins from Goblin Town or
the Large Goblin Collider, Men; Ridgedwellers from the peaks
of the Crazed Theigns, with perhaps a few hidden Cryomaniacs
amongst them, Asbestos Bedouin riding Yellow Clinkerskippers
and Blurred tribesmen from the Incoherent Isles. Here also are
found Matte-Black Penumbeetles and translucent Invisibeetles,
AntiGoblins, labouring in Goblin-Proof encounter suits and
Opal-winged Bat-Men from the City of Visible Grief. The Bat-Men
may have Invisible assistants with them, it is hard to tell.
Pressed against the glass wall (the city needs to be seen), are
the eyeburning colours and incoherent shapes of the Clashing
Slums. Beyond these rise gradually-more-sane and beautiful
constructions in styles ranging from Goblin-Gothic to Alien-Mod-
ernist, Hive Style, NeoVictorian, Generican, Pseudo-Ottoman,
Sinochure, Cyclopean, Hypnagogic, Ethereal and Fae. Its people
claim Narcissolis has at least one example of every style of archi-
tecture which reality can hold.
Eventually come the Harmonious Rue, some of the most
beautiful built environments in any cosmos, and rising above
these, the peaks of the Great Imaginings.
At the centre of Narcissolis, visible from everywhere, is The
Lathe, a huge art-deco shard and Palace of the Illusory Lords,
flashing either fiery red beneath the rising sun, or pale white as
it sets.

24
 Narcissolis

07. ORNAMENTAL PIGEON. Mechanical in nature, employed in great

number to coat new architectures of Narcissolis in pearlescent droppings.

25
THE CITY IS A NARCISSIST

Narcissolis is an illusion. It spreads and survives based on the

belief placed in its existence.
If everyone who knew about Narcissolis were to instantly
forget it was there – poof. It would disappear in a fragment of
time.
The city spreads its own fame as a form of self-defence. The
reason visitors are so welcome, that everyone is so eager for you to
have a unique experience and that tales and stories of its wonder
appear all over The Moonlands is that these things are deliberately
organised and heavily invested in by the people of Narcissolis.
Though Narcissolis is inviolate, it requires continuity of
memory and imagination to survive. Its glass wall is unbreakable,
so long as the majority of its inhabitants believe it is. When
conquered, its conquerors desire Narcissolis so much that they
renew it in its own destruction. It can be annihilated only if
forgotten but warps physically in times of hysteria or changed
belief.
To attack, or alter it, is as much a grand performance as it is
anything else.
The chief enemies of Narcissolis are the Apocalypse Wasps (enemies
of all that lives), the Blurred Raiders from the Incoherent Isles,
Narcissolis’ very own rulers the Illusory Lords, and anyone not
paying attention to it.

A CITY OF INFORMATION
Since the city itself is a performance, new parts can only be
constructed by a kind of mass-persuasion.
Building sites are cubes of big black sheets over the ‘buildings’
being created or demolished. The builders are performers elabo-
rately staging the process of construction. Materials are brought
in in vast quantities (actually invisibly cycled out in the night and
brought in again). Shouts and gusts of smoke and dust spout forth
from under the sheet. Burly workmen file out on lunch breaks
and take up space in nearby cafes, making noise.
Major new buildings have staged controversies in which
Nimbys object to the architecture, aesthetic, placement or some
other element, causing protests and arguments. Sometimes these
cross over with real, actual protests. Financial and political scandals
can be performed, sending feigned shockwaves through the city
as embezzlement or corruption is exposed or denied.
Every building has some kind of human interest story behind
it: a lost dog; someone allegedly buried in the foundations by
mistake; a strange fetish of the architect; or some other factoid
which a local can inform you of as you pass.
All of these things act as a lock on the communal memory of
the place. It is easy to believe that something large is being
26 made.
There is nothing happening behind the sheet. But if
people believe in the building, whether they hate it or love it,

Narcissolis
when the sheet comes down, it will be there.
So does Narcissolis sustain, and expand, on the bases of shared
memory and belief.

THE PEOPLE OF NARCISSOLIS

Everyone is eager to talk, especially to talk about the city. Everybody
wants you to see their house.
The popular aesthetic turns splendiferous. It’s very bad in
Narcissolis to ‘blend into the crowd’. Everyone wears makeup to
increase the definition and specific nature of their face. They look
a little like cellshaded animation.
Everyone wears remarkable clothes which are specific to their
personality, history and aesthetic. Clothes are tuned to behaviour,
personality and role, with the intention that no-one should be
easy to forget. Small mirrors are often worn as decoration.
No-one wears a uniform, or to be more precise, no-one wears
the same uniform. It’s as if people are cosplaying as themselves.
Behaviour is fancy and performative. Social networks are
Byzantine and hysterical. Hierarchies are invisible.
People in Narcissolis are valued for individuality and their
ability to generate strong, specific memories. Or conversely, for
simply having a very good memory. Competition over experience
and originality makes Narcissolis a vortex for cultural products,
‘events’ and stories, drawing them in from all over the world.
Despite this, it feels strangely empty. What matters in Narcissolis
is that the thing be performed, not that it have substance.
Still, the Citizens are generous, egalitarian, tolerant and
welcoming of newcomers. Every pair of eyes and every witnessing
mind, and every story of the city spread far and wide, is another
small brick in the bulwark of its fragile existence. They want you
to have a memorable time here – an adventure. They are a little
overly insistent on it actually. They also have a huge respect for
imagination and the arts, which are also very ruthlessly controlled.
The city is itself a performance and the power to persuade
en-masse is, in Narcissolis, the power to create and destroy. Those
with this capacity are treated like Soviet Ambassadors: afforded
very high status, treated with respect, continually watched, always
followed and carefully controlled. Every news-sheet, performance,
announcement, article, book and even state-sanctioned rumour is
carefully censored by the cities Thought Controllers, who are also
effectively its architects.

THE ILLUSORY LORDS

It is no small thing to be ruled by an unbeatable genius, though
they be mad, and imaginary.
The rulers of Narcissolis, and thence arguably of the
Moonlands, exist only as thought-forms. Occupying the top of
The Lathe in the centre of the city, they communicate with 27
their people, citizens and functionaries by leaving orders, policies,
memorandums and instructions written at the bottom of tankards,
crayoned onto the bases of plates, stuffed into shoes, stitched into
the lining of jackets, scrawled with chalk on the backs of broad-
shouldered men, pinned inside wigs to be found when lifted to
scratch, or tied to the leg of a bird which feeds from the hand.
All of the people of Narcissolis live in absolute terror of
whichever brilliant tyrant currently rules the city. (At the present
time, Lord South-Barking-Dog, whos’ nature is unknown.)
Though they are invariably completely mad, the Illusory Lords
can achieve feats of perception, deception, action and analysis that
would baffle ordinary actually-existing minds. They can respond
to any event anywhere in the city (albeit indirectly) and their
genius-level prognostications mean that, though tyrannical,
Narcissolis always retains the edge in its military and economic
relationships.
Being unkillable, and impossible to remove from government
by ordinary means (since they do not exist), an Illusory Lord can
only be deposed by another like themselves.
First the rule of the Illusory Lord must become intolerable
to the people of Narcissolis. The forces of the old regime begin to
spiral out of control. Denunciations, corruption, beheadings and
tabloid journalism proliferate.
Then, emerging from rumour and myth, the concept of a
revolutionary leader can take root.
This cannot be centralised or planned, it must spring from
the unpredictable chaos of daily life in the city, from the uncon-
sidered minds of the people.
At first, actions and qualities are assigned to the new hope
of Narcissolis: they are intelligent, reclusive, with radical new
ideas. They are fearless, neurasthenic, perhaps they like oranges.
They are a revolutionary, or a counter-revolutionary. They head a
minority faction. They act from the shadows. They have a plan.
They are placeless. The forces of the old regime seek them,
but they cannot be found. No-one has seen them directly but
there are distant reports. Then third-hand accounts – a friend of a
friend saw them in a public place. They were here yesterday. They
are in the next street, in the next building. You hear them moving
in the next room. The door drifts open.
But now, a now that is no now, it is already too late, the
revolution took place yesterday, or the day before. There was chaos
in the streets. There is a new regime now, (this now). They make
laws, their face is on coins, stamps and post-boxes. The old regime
must be deposed of, secured, kept safely away.
The bodies of the old Illusory Lord are transported in great
state out to Owl City and the Necropolis of Glass, where they are
interned in sacred Krystaphagi, hopefully forever.
So goes regime change in Narcissolis.

28
 Narcissolis

08. POWER DRILL. Designed to produce the sonic disruption of a busy

construction site while having close to zero physical impact.

29
TABLE: ORDERS FROM LORD SOUTH-BARING-DOG

METHOD ORDER FOR PLAYER CHARACTERS

1 Delivered verbally by Minah bird. Find the ‘Sorcerer of Eggs’ on Rue Zuh and
steal his face.
2 Skreech Owls vomit up parchments. Assassinate ‘Glass Jack’, Mirror King of the
Chromatic Slums (pg. 32).
3 Reverse-pickpocketed origami animals. Uncover the conspiracy on Iridescent Lane
before the next moon.
4 Hidden in, or made of, food and drink. Infiltrate the Pict-club on the Rue Supreme
and discover its secret.
5 Stapled to your bill for goods or services. Destroy the child-derived mind-hole (pg. 32)
hidden in the Rue Azul, quickly.
6 Etched microscopically into spectacle Steal the notes of ‘Zig-Zag’ the fugitive
lenses. Cryomaniac (pg. 124), without detection.
7 A network of shadows cast from moving Shadow the Goblin ‘Ratspike’ and invisibly
sources. disrupt their schemes.
8 Words scrawled on passers-by form Investigate and expose the Dark Memory
order in crowds. Formation (pg. 32) Ring at the Theatre Bile.
9 Code-knotted floss hidden in hair while Deliver this Bristly Pig (pg. 125) back to its
asleep. home village on the Whetstone Ridge.
10 Note stuck to bottom of shoe like toilet Frame yourselves for the murder of your ally,
paper. then expose the true threat.
11 Delivered verbally by Minah bird. Find the Apple Smugglers on the Rue Jardin
and bring them to justice, publicly.
12 Etched on falling leaf that drifts into An Apocalypse Wasp (pg. 88) has been frozen in
your hand. ice, you must transport it to Pitville for study.
13 Carved into cannonball rolling slowly A Despiser of Ash (pg. 101) has smuggled a
towards you. spark of the Anaesthetic Fire (pg. 94) into
Narcissolis, get that spark.
14 Found stitched into uncomfortable seam Investigate a schizophrenic Mind Hole (pg. 32)
in clothes. in the Street of Flesh and Bone, bring back
the spider inside.
15 Scrawled on your pillow in crayon, Protect ‘Argun Shoal’ visiting headsman of the
found when waking. SkienWeaver Tribe (pg. 41), from assassination,
but do it in disguise.
16 High-velocity pneumatic darts. Painful, Find the secret room in the Great Imagining
codes within.. of The Pearlescent Dream (pg. 34), record (but
do not touch) its contents.
17 Spoken separately by three, each knows The abstract sinister Pict Goya VanJoy
only one third. is visiting Narcissolis, make sure they
experience a remarkable event..
18 Brutally inserted into recent memory Explore one of the Utopian Ruins on the
with psychic might. Painted Plane, learn what you can and make a
show of it back in Narcissolis.
19 On the inside-wrapping of a chance- Invent, or discover a way to repair the great
encountered consumable. cracked Guardian Lenses which bracket the
Reach (pg. 195) outside the cities wall.
20 Found jammed in wall crack when Soon, invisible assassins from the City of
investigating weird sound. Visible Grief (pg. 158), will attack a simple
house on the Street of Gleams, defend it.

30
9. NARCISSOLIAN VAUDEVILLE-SAFETY GLOVE. Required by all day labourers
in the city.
31
CRIME MIMES, DARK MEMORY FORMATION AND THE
MIRROR MASTERS
Like every city, Narcissolis has a dark side. Unlike others, it has
some elements unique to its particular nature.
‘Crime Mimes’ perform specific acts in a convincing manner
in order to subtly or strongly alter Narcissolis so they might gain
access to private places, or perform stranger and more abstruse
alterations of reality.
Miming and acting are heavily controlled within the city
limits.
Looked down on by bourgeoise society but tacitly allowed, is a
parallel subculture of Dark Memory Formation. Nothing seals in
the memory of a place like death and trauma, and in Narcissolis,
attention and memory are the strongest currency there is.
Those transgressive but semi-public elements include grand
guignol, murder stories, ghost tours and fake snuff performance
provocations.
These semi-legal, but officially unpoliced, events are intended
to act as a safety-valve.The population can express its less pro-social
urges and the most effective dark performers can be siphoned
away from invisible networks of power.
Beneath this are rumours, currents of darkness and death.
There are dark suspicions that serial killers who commit the most
graphic, exceptional and memorable crimes are allowed to get
away with it, or at least, not chased quite as fervently as they
could be, to the extent that the police force sometimes is forced to
publish its accounts just to prove it is funding overtime to catch
particular killers.
Narcissolis, like every city, has its more traditional crimes.
Theft, extortion, bribery, corruption, drugs, fraud and every other
kind of vice are engaged in. The criminal networks of Narcissolis
spread all over the Moonlands and beyond.
The heads of these networks are called the Mirror Masters.
These are individuals who were caught in mirrors while illegally
invading the Necropolis of Glass. Though this is dangerous and
forbidden in Narcissolis (no-one wants a ‘deceased’ Illusory Lord
getting out), nevertheless, meeting a Mirror Master, or being
involved with a crime or conspiracy, is a deeply memorable event.
And the Masters themselves, being trapped in the mirrors, can do
nothing other than observe Narcissolis. Not only that, but they must
investigate and memorise and explore its darker and less-visited
corners, and absorb themselves deeply in its built geography and
processes, something of great use to the city.

MIND HOLES
Building belief is complex and involved, building communal belief
almost as difficult as designing a real thing.
You can’t just imagine whatever you like and make it
exist, you have to believe it, and the strength of your belief
32 has to strongly outweigh the beliefs of anyone else about
the same space.

Narcissolis
But some types of people have a great surfeit of belief: children,
fanatics, the unwise and the insane. If one of those people gains
access to an ignored, forgotten or un-shaped part of the Imaginary
City, things can go completely to shit.
Minds alone can collapse consensus reality and open recursive
burrow-holes in the world.
Sincere, but fervent beliefs, like those of schizophrenic
conspiracy theorists, the more pleasing but still-dangerous
imaginings of children, or the musty, unreal, or hyper-bright
memory-realms of the abandoned old, can open the way to
halls of paranoid imaginings – the vast conspiracies contained
in terrified minds boil into existence behind cupboard doors or
under manholes. This is very dangerous, and very rare.
‘Popping’ childish sub-realms is a common parenting skill in
the Imaginary City. Invading and shutting down schizophrenic or
dementia-bored mind-labyrinths and alter-realms a more serious
and often more dangerous business.

ARCHITECTURE AND THE ATTENTION ECONOMY

Buildings in Narcissolis can be constructed from almost any
conceivable material, in any conceivable style – so long as they are
remembered. So they compete with each other for the attention
and memory of the observer.
This leads to complex ecologies of attention and aesthetic.

THE CLASHING SLUMS

The slums of Narcissolis are as great and magnificent as the
monumental centres of other cities. They are slums because they
clash.
Buildings in the slums almost war with each other in their
need for attention and memory – competing in brightness,
loudness, discordancy, strangeness or unlikely nature.
This Hobbesian architectural perma-conflict means every-
thing has to be even more bright and even more ridiculous and
‘novel’ to outshine everything else. This results in a staggering
eye-burning parade of wild forms and deranged colours and
materials, and a rapid turnover of buildings as places, as distinctive
as they are individual, are simply lost and forgotten, not blend-
ing-in but ignored in the discordancy.

THE DUELLING STREETS

Here, the architectural competition between buildings has become
a kind of exchange of attention so that the styles and forms,
while still opposing one another, also re-enforce one another
in opposition. Still clashing but not quite such a discordant
miscellany. 33
 On the Duelling Streets it is easy to remember, for instance,
the palace of bone opposite the circus of sausages, the prism tower
facing the cumulo-nimbus arcology, the church of pink marble
opposite the marble rose.
Here is chaos, and extreme novelty, but also a form of
reciprocity of thought, and the development of a memory and
attention system that only grows more complex.

THE HARMONIOUS RUE

Rare, prized and dangerous to live in, these streets are extremely
high-status, though their instability means that many govern-
mental buildings are on discordant or duelling streets instead, or
crammed dangerously into the Lathe.
Radically, as in music, the individual parts of a harmony
are often not memorable or surprising on their own, but instead
support and sustain one another, flowing into each other to create
a continuous, pleasing, unexpected but correct and fitting surprise
of form and beauty, each element unique and each one part of the
whole.
These streets are the high art of Narcissolis and some of the
most beautiful places to exist anywhere.
Unfortunately, as with any harmony, the construction is
delicate. One small un-noticed flaw, and disharmony can creep
in, poisoning whole streets as-one, leading to disaster.

THE GREAT IMAGININGS AND THE LATHE

It’s hard, in Narcissolis, for buildings to be very tall and still
useable. Creators can imagine shapes and known materials but
it’s difficult to develop and precisely imagine the mechanisms
for elevators. A handful of tall buildings have them, drawn on
winches turned by remarkable things.
The Lathe, for instance, has a giant winch turned by painted
elephants and employs a team of engineers to imagine, observe
and remember its mechanisms.
Bylaws say that each new elevator must be powered by a
distinctly different, and memorable method, so as not to infringe
on those of others. (Though this is generally considered a deliberate
tool of suppression to maintain the status of the Great Imaginings).
The Lathe itself, Palace of the Illusory Lords, is a giant art-deco
spire in the centre of the city. Supporting opal buttresses spread
out over and into the city like spider limbs. The east side of the
Lathe is stained and etched pale red in patterns of flame so that in
dawn, it flashes like fire as the sun rises. The west side is similarly
etched with curling waves in blue, but the red light of sunset
reacts strangely with the colour to make it gleam pale white as
night falls. Inside, floors and departments become more fright-
ening, symbolic and unreal as you go up, transforming to
dark theatre or enacted nightmares. No one ever goes to
34 the top.
 Narcissolis

10. NARCISSOLIAN PLAYING CARDS. Depict various Illusory rulers. The

relative score value of these cards in any card game is based entirely on
current events in the city.

35
TABLE: BUILDINGS BEHIND THE CURTAIN

BUILDING STYLE CONFLICTING HOOK

ELEMENT
1 Orphanarium. High Necropolis Covered in offensive PCs interviews on street,
Ossuary Style. writing. their stance, or lack
of one, made public
and brought up in all
subsequent meetings in
the city.
2 Goblin Flop Post-collapse Lit up by goblin Extra numbers needed
House. Gothic Style. generated electricity for a protest, help out or
(pg. 74). crowd turns on you.
3 Gallery. Fictional Manse Also a huge advertising Extra numbers needed to
Style. hoarding. counter-protest a protest.
Help out or both sides
turn on you.
4 Shops. Broken Orrery Will massively contrast PCs hired to find and
Style. with rest of street. suppress builder-per-
formers from out of town
who have been publicly
talking about the absence
of a ‘real’ building.
5 Hotel/Tavern. Neutronium Is too tall and PCs hired to write
Collapsar Style. dominated the street. articles and create
performances to provoke
and extend drama about
the building.
6 Scholars Tilted Alchemical Largely underground, PCs enfolded in small riot
Residence. Style. lit by light-wells. and separated from each
other.
7 Goal. Extra-dimensional Incorporates two An avant-garde group
Structural Graffiti completely different doing an improv about
(Reformed) Style. social strata. how terrible the building
is, incorporate the passing
PCs and won’t let up.
8 Bakery & Obtuse Hydraulic Built for one class only, Lathe official visiting the
Windmill. Style. and no-one else! site needs replacement
body-guards NOW.
9 Bijou Apart- Inverse Theatre Ignores aesthetically PCs hired to simulate
ments. Style. constrictive safe wrecking the site and to
guidelines (pretty either get caught doing
typical for Narcissolis). so, or leave clear evidence
of the ‘wrecking’.
10 Nobel’s Home. Black Romantic Façade is home to PC’s hired to pretend to
Style. baboons intended to guard the site from
act as cleaning staff. people who are
pretending to wreck it.

11 Embassy. Aviform Pagoda Intended to incor‐ PC’s hired to create a

Style. porate own sewage famous scandal around
processing. the building, with no
specifics given.

36
 Narcissolis
BUILDING STYLE CONFLICTING HOOK
ELEMENT
12 Grand Tundral Khagan Shaped like female PC’s hired to invalidate
Bath-house. Style. sexual characteristic. the buildings style in the
public eye. No specifics
given.
13 Public Helical Driftwood Also an aviary. PC’s hired to validate and
Sculpture Style. acclaim buildings style in
public eye. No specifics
given.
14 Library. Incandescent Will block view of, Paid to have the
Shipwreck and by, higher-status showdown or culmination
Style. buildings. of their current
adventure around the
building.
15 Trading Waste Fissure Built to lean in an Paid to create and
House. Fortification agonising way. publicise an aggressively
Style. “outsider” take on the
building which
shocks the city.

16 Warehouse Dionysian Spiral Built in a state of Find or create a scandal

Style. pseudo-decay. around the buildings
architect.
17 Thaumaturgic Fresh Crime Style. Wind will moan Commit a murder, or
Resonator. through it in a dis‐ create the strong illusion
tressing manner. of one, around the site.
18 Slums. Old Clinker‐ Allegedly built without Simulate a foreign
skipper (pg. 98) foundations, for an potentate or outsider
Rustic Style. insurance scam. and create a cultural
appropriation scandal
around the building
19 Hospital. Goblinish Painted pure PC’s offered low sum for
Style. vantablack. incorporation of their
“I.P.” i.e., their character,
aesthetic & adventures,
into the building. This
will go ahead whether
they say yes or not.
20 School. Wasp House Planned dual-use, PC’s fingered as
Style. will be circus half ‘mysterious outsiders’
the year. in planning permission
bribery scandal. Court
case is tomorrow.

37
THE INCOHERENT ISLES
2. THE INCOHERENT ISLES
THE REACH
Beyond Narcissolis is The Reach, a lilac ocean shifting to deep
purple out where the high waves endlessly turn. Such is its nature
that no organised polity may successfully cross. Or if they do, they
do not come back. Only savages in oceanic canoes can reach the
mythical Dark Continent on the other side, and even that may be
a lie.
Bordering on the Reach, close to the city, are the Incoherent
Isles.
The Isles are blurred, as if by distance and will not resolve their
form. Nothing comes into focus, seeming always as if perceived
through an old man’s eyes. For those raised outside the Isles being
there is a little like being old, or being blind; frightening and
indistinct.
They are colder than surrounding lands. The ocean of the
Isles grows wider and deeper the further within one goes. It
can be circled in a few days, but to cross across its centre would
take Infinite Time. (It’s rumoured the Isles have an Antipole and
opposite on the worlds other side; the City of Infinite Ruin.)
Those few who have penetrated deep into the isles and
returned alive say that, in time, the sea becomes a flat plane
perfectly mirroring the cloudless un-blurred stars, refusing
even a ripple. The temperature sinks below freezing but the
ocean remains liquid; super-cooled. Those who fall in are dead in
a second, pulled out a moment later as solid as a lollipop while
the wake of their death spreads endlessly from the scene like an
infinite shadow of kinetic time, sinking into nothing.

THE ENVIRONMENT AND MUTABILITY OF THE ISLES

There are roughly a hundred small islands around the outer
circumference. This changes over time. The Isles blur together or
apart. They break and join over years like slow bacteria in a dish,
sometimes invisibly, sometimes very rapidly. When two Islands
merge, their identity, geography, population and history, merge
and become one. A new whole carrying traces of both. Likewise,
when they break apart, separating into two new islands, each
becomes a more pure or refined expression of some element of the
first.
About half of the rim-isles are permanently populated. The
Islands become larger deeper in, as more space becomes available,
but eventually become utterly uninhabitable due to their extra-
solar cold.
Always they are mountainous and thick with forest. Wise
salmon fill the streams, black bears haunt the woods, hawks wheel
opalescent in the air. Blurred Orca cut beneath the glassy sea
like scissors cutting aluminium foil. Preying upon them,
40 semi-mythical creatures of the deep incoherence, are Giant
Aquatic Wolves, never before seen by outside eyes, their size
inferred only through their hides and the occasional tooth found

The Incoherent Isles

struck through the flesh of a bull-Orcas hide. The isles throng
with unresolvable life.

THE PEOPLE OF THE ISLES - THE SINGING TRIBES

In the Isles, visual identity is up for question. No-one has a defined
face, just a bearing and a voice. The borders between selves are
indistinct.
Each person in the Tribes learns their song from birth.To begin
with, their parents and community sing it to them. It is the first
sound they learn, the first word, the first language. They learn to
sing it themselves. All children of the tribes are singing night and
day, in sleep they sing in their dreams. As they age, individuals
can learn, slowly, to become silent, but all this means is that they
are singing their song internally, within their minds. When safe
at home, not hunting or hiding, everyone sings or hums their song
all the time. This is their identity, their specificity. It is the story of
them. It is their face and name in-one.
In the Isles, indistinct people can literally fade away, lost in
the blur. The song of their self is their protection from this.
For the Singing Tribes, having a notable and distinct person-
ality is a matter of survival. (A strange parallel with the hyper-nar-
cissism of Narcissolis, which neither culture would be pleased
to admit to). Status amongst them is accorded to those with most
‘identity’, as perceived through their voice, bearing, behaviours
and song.

THE ABILITY TO ‘BLUR’

The nature of life in the Isles is so subtly strange that even in
the Lands of the Gackling Moon, with its shattered realities, it
borders on the incomprehensibly alien.
Any resident of the Isles can ‘blur’ themselves into their
immediate environment, merging with it, swapping and sharing
identity with local objects and phenomena.
Ability does not mean mastery. To Blur well is about twice as
difficult as learning to swim, and not all become truly proficient.
Many tribespeople can only blur in an immediate stationary way,
to hide, and perhaps creep slowly through the local environment.
For those who gain expertise, to master this craft, many abilities
become open to them.
A blurred individual can travel with unnerving swiftness
between visible objects, shifting from one to another, sharing
identity and shape with a tree or rock, or even animal, then
leaping to something else in visible range.
They can hide with terrifying effectiveness, simply disap-
pearing into the background.
Still rarer uses of blurring are religious or psychological. A
ritual blurist can share shape with aspects of their environment,
triggering personal and psychological transformations. 41
11. WOLF-TOOTH KNIFE. From the sign of the Ruinous Moon on the item, the knife is
considered Guilty by a Singing Tribe, the owner slain by their victim’s ghost.

42
THE CULTURE OF BLURRING

The Incoherent Isles

In many tribes, individuals share their identity matrix with their
immediate or most commonly inhabited environment. No-one is
assumed to be entirely separate. A person can be held responsible
for the actions of someone who shares their voice, or for the actions
or inactions of objects or processes that have become part of their
identity though interaction and common knowledge. They can be
rewarded or punished, in a deodand-like fashion, for the fall of a
tree, a tide, for a canoe sinking or doing well.
It’s a little like being responsible for the behaviour of your
dog, except here you are also responsible for your tree, your house,
your canoe, your tools, your wind, both in good and bad ways.
Tribespeople work hard to avoid ‘guilty’ objects, places or
phenomena and to stay close to ‘good’ objects, places or phenomena.
Many tribes will ‘keep’ a good chief or leader around after
their death or disappearance by having a suitable individual adopt
their behaviours. (If a visitor happens to have those behaviours
they may try to persuade them to stay, or even abduct them.)
United largely by their challenging environment, and by the
culture of blurring, tribes can differ in many other ways, being
Hierarchal or Anarchic, Patriarchal or Egalitarian, basing their
mentality on strange intense shamanistic religion or simple
brute materialism. They can live in families or meta-clans, have
strict division of labour our be generalists, cultural chauvinists or
liberal cosmopolitans, they can have aesthetics joyful or dark, can
be taboo-obsessed or thoughtlessly un-sacred. They can subsist by
unglamorous but practical gathering or by the hunting of charis-
matic megabeasts.
In practical terms, the tribes are skilled with rope work and
grass and branch weaving. Some weave villages all summer, live
in them through winter and burn them in the spring. Some have
huge tents stitched from wolfskins the size of houses, log palaces,
treehouses or homes in root caves, sea caves or pine riddles.
Since its very hard to do detailed visual work in the Isles,
most fine crafts are done by touch with the eyes closed. ‘Blind’
thinking is considered detailed thinking in the Isle and they do
not use visual metaphors to describe precise thought or action.
They hunt by smell and scheme, touch and blur. The tines
of their hunting tridents or spears are set at specific distances to
match the probability wavelengths of their expected prey.
The wars of the isles make no use of ranged weapons. Large
hardwood polearms, spears, Orca and wolf-tooth knives and
weighted nets are employed.

THE MERGING AND UN-MERGING OF ISLES

When Isles merge or sperate, their populations merge and separate
too, producing new identities, individuals and cultures.
Merged islands produce composites of the isles that
make them up. Separated islands produce extreme, refined or
abstracted versions of the qualities of their originating isle. 43
Dominant personalities, intentions and specific targets can shift
back and forth.
For an Islander, leaving home can be dangerous; they may
return to find it separated into extreme versions of its former self,
or merged with another isle into a gestalt land.
The tongue of the islanders has words for merge-grief and
the grief of abstraction.
Poems explore and console forms of identity dysphoria near
inexplicable to those outside the isles: the sensation of returning
home to find culture, friends and family changed, or the pain of
being separated and knowing that who and what you are now is
only part of what you once were.
Strange mergings can birth very ‘bright’ isles with positive
heroic imperialistic domineering cultures and ‘dark’ isles with
introverted gloomy, creepy and fey ways of life.

RESOURCES OF THE ISLES

The Isles are rich in natural treasures: blurred bearskins, whale
teeth, furs, honey, hardwoods, and the beautiful carvings of the
Singing Tribes. Many Tribes gain great wealth from harvesting
the Black Clams of the Reach, the only source of natural Asbestos
beneath the Gackling Moon, greatly prized by the Bedouin of the
Plain of Anaesthetic Fire.
But they are also home to stranger and more esoteric things.
In the forests are Pine Riddles – half real mazes of pine trees. At
their centres are houses made of pure amber. Within these are
amberised golden bugs and ancient insect saints. These can be
used as powerful magical re-agents and holy cures (though they
must be defeated first).
Across the violent waters of the Reach lies the semi-mythical
Dark Continent, a place civilised peoples have been unable to find,
but which the Singing Tribes raid in oceanic canoes. They steal
the Idols of the Dark Continent and keep them in black caves or
guarded sacred tents, and worship them to attain or be possessed
by, the numinous powers of whatever entities they contain or
represent.
No outsider has ever even seen an Idol. Since they are the only
known evidence of the existence of a ‘Dark Continent’ beyond the
Reach, they are much desired in Narcissolis, and beyond.
Wisdom, also, can be sought in the Incoherent Isles. Many of
its animals are intelligent and capable of speech. The oldest and
wisest of these, the Prince of Bears perhaps, or the Salmon Pope,
may offer answers and advice if trapped, or if some boon is done
for them.
Most specifically, certain animals can give access to the Three
Worlds. These Alter-realities can be entered from the Isles. Each
of the Three Worlds expresses some aspect of our own in purified
form and each contains strange treasures.

44
12. WHISTLE NECKLACE. A tonal reminder of members of a Singing Tribe. My theories
vary as to whether the necklace belonged to an islander leaving for the mainland who
wanted to remember their family, or if it details the quarry of a Narcissolian Lense
Hunter.
45
THE THREE WORLDS
THE SKY WORLD
Cold and wind-scoured, this land can be found across a Gulls
Wing. It is a world of endless white bridges, leading into further
bridges upon bridges lacing through cumulo nimbus towers.
The birds rule here as Nomad Kings and the longest-flying,
the Terns and Geese, are the most powerful, though all fear the
shining Falcon.
The treasures of the Sky are lightning bars, coins like
snowflakes and necklaces like storms.

THE EARTH WORLD

This can be found by curling up as small as a bug and falling
into a maze of roots. It is the belfries and arches of a wood-dark
cathedral whose nave and floor you cannot see. But you can feel
it somewhere down there in the dark. It is very warm, there is
constant movement. There is no ‘outside’ the cathedral.
Here live Worm Priests, armoured Pill Bugs and the Terrible
Centipede.
The treasures of the Earth are blades like leaves of stone,
gem animals that give sovereignty over different species and THE
SILVER ROOT.

THE RIVER WORLD

A stairway of stairways – some steep, narrow, and bright white,
some large, shallow, wide and brown. There is nothing beyond the
stair. It is easy to go down, hard to go back up and slippery – those
who fall will slide. But it is easier to see up than down. What is
above you is known, what is below you is uncertain.
There are many creatures on the stairs, friendly leeches,
caddis flies and the enormous dragon-pike.
The treasures of the River are silver scales, coins of bone and
white horses.

THE CITY AND THE ISLES

The people of Narcissolis, and others on the coast, and beyond,
have long feared and hated the Singing Tribes. That hatred has
often been returned.
Not all tribes are aggressive and not all tribes make expedition
into lands beyond the borders of the Rim. But there are many
tribes, and they are changing all the time.
Though direct attacks have been rare, those few that have
taken place left deep scars.
46 The terror of the Blurred Raiders, arriving silently
in morning or gloom, evading every defence, merging and
emerging from shadows, walls, trees or gusts of leaves, their faces

The Incoherent Isles

and bodies shifted out of focus, and singing, singing, singing all
the while, is great.
Currently Narcissolis maintains functional relations with
many of the rim-tribes, as much as is possible before they merge
or separate into something new. The majority of the Tribes are
not excessively violent, such groups usually come from deeper
within the Isles, and those that are almost always aim for the Dark
Continent, to steal and worship its numinous idols. Only when this
fails or circumstance thwarts them do they attack the Moonlands.
So Narcissolis tolerates the blurred oceanic canoes slipping
past it in the night, out into the reach, and the fleets of pods of
blurred Orca that make navigation of that span almost impos-
sible, because the alternative is worse. Attacking or supressing a
‘dangerous’ tribe means finding and identifying them first. Not an
easy task in the deep Isles.
(And because they probably couldn’t stop it anyway as the
tribes would blur through any fortification. The huge paired,
cracked, lenses on opposite sides of the river illustrate the last,
failed, attempt to shut down the strait.)
That said, the city will still license Lens Hunters to chase
down offending tribes. On their boat-prows and hanging around
their necks, these punitive expeditors carry huge focusing lenses
of glass, gemstone or rock crystal. They go into the Incoherent Isles
and peer at people, bringing them into focus, specifying them,
and, in the eyes of the natives at least, robbing them of their
un-identity.
The Lens Hunters have as dark a reputation inside the Isles
as the Singing Raiders do out of it. And so the two peoples are
locked together in passive and intermittent conflict.
Beyond these arguably-justified expeditors, Narcissolis is also
a base for various uncontrolled non-state actors with an ‘interest’
in the Isles.
Bands of Goblin Mercenaries, ‘Owl City ‘Adventurers’, ‘The
Exploring Companies’ of Narcissolis, or just simple thieves may
try to venture in, perhaps as privately-hired punitive expeditions
against particular raiders, or in vengeance for particular deaths,
or simply to raid the Singing Tribes for honey, amber or other
treasures. Or to steal an Idol of the Dark Continent (a feat never
before achieved).
Less acquisitive travellers might seek the wisdom of the
animals of the Isles, to gain access to the Three Worlds, or might
be academics with an interest in the Tribes themselves.
The city tries to license and regulate the movement of these
groups, but with Narcissolis being what it is, such control is partial
at best.
As the Moonlands must suffer the raiders, the islanders must
largely tolerate ‘adventurers’.

47
13. INSECT SAINT. Preserved in amber. All evidence points to it being
genuine, but it remains completely unresponsive to me.

48
14. HAPTIC RUG MAP. Sealskin. Used to guide infant Islanders into the Three
Worlds.

49
TABLE – ENCOUNTERS AND ADVENTURES IN
THE ISLES
ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY COMPLICATION/
ELEMENT OPPOSITION
1 Narcissan Lens- An object “guilty” A tribes’ shifting The freezing ghosts of
Hunter (pg. 52). of murder. identity structure. betrayed travellers.
2 An expert A “heroic” A hidden and A pod of disturbingly
blurrer (pg. 41). fortune-associated permanently-dark intelligent orca (pg. 40).
object. sacred tent.
3 Blurred Giant Wolfskins. Wisdom from an A Goblin Crime Clan in
raiders (pg. 41). Insect-Saint (pg. 48), in tin boats.
a Pine-Riddle.
4 The Salmon A Wolf-Tooth Knife A frozen-isle deep in The White Wolf – a
Pope (trans- of the Giant Aquatic the extra-solar cold. Moby-Dick style Aquatic
formed). Wolves (pg. 40). Megawolf.
5 Asbestos- The Silver Root, A war between Blurred Mercenaries of a
Trader (after prime treasure of recently separated Narcissolis Mirror Master
clams) (pg. 44). the Earth-World tribes. (pg. 32).
(pg. 46).
6 Crazed Hunter White Horses, a A map scarified onto a Pine-Witch whose skin
of the Giant treasure of the Tribesperson’s back. has been stolen – she
Aquatic Wolves River World (pg. steals others, uses them
(pg. 40). 46). up or goes skinless.
7 Apple-Knight- A cache of stolen An evil song-thief (pg. A dark Shaman who must
Errant (pg. 126). ‘Apples’ (pg. 126) (the 42) who can ‘steal’ the be defeated once in each
coin) from a Crazed identities of others. of the Three Worlds.
Theign (pg. 128).
8 Lonely Merge- Blurred Honey The ‘chain-letter’ curse Clam-Thieves (pg. 44)
Refugee (pg. (pg. 44). of an Insect Saint (pg. wired on Amphetamine
143). Only they 48). Cat Glands (pg. 12).
now remember
their culture.
9 Invisible Silver Scales, a The Cave-Palace of the A night-travelling
Ambassadors treasure of the King of Bears (pg. 44). cult whose canoes are
(pg. 160) from River World (pg. 46). empowered by blood
the Maw. sacrifice.
10 Surreal Pict (pg. Blurred Carvings Deep-tribes massing A lodge of Blurred
140) surviving (pg. 44) of great for a great attack on Assassins (pg. 41) who
on Pigment haptic beauty. the Moonlands. perform their work for
River water. honourable reasons.
11 Goblin Explorers Coins of Bone, a A mercurial A tribe resulting from a
in pig-powered treasure of the woodcarver who can Nightmare Merge. Real
re-fitted River World (pg. bring their carvings Cormac McCarthy stuff.
submersibles. 46). temporarily to life.
12 Decayed A Treasure trove A ‘living tomb’ canoe A militia from Narcissolis
Owl-City of Black-Clam which cannot sink on strange and surreal
Academic of Asbestos (pg. 44). but must never stop orders from the Illusory
the Singing moving. Lord (pg. 27) which they
Tribes (pg. 41). fear to disobey.
13 Escaped Amberised Golden A palace of Amber A gang made up of the
half-adapted Bugs (pg. 44). accessed by sleeping in embodied spells of an
Narcissan (pg. a cold and dangerous Owl City Magician who
27) captive place. they keep with them,
of the Deep drugged, sleeping and
Tribes. secret.

50
 The Incoherent Isles
ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY COMPLICATION/
ELEMENT OPPOSITION
14 A Shaman An Insect Saint The Mask of a Tribal A Crazed Theign (pg. 128)
of the Three (pg. 48). Shaman which can of the Whetstone ridge
Worlds. possess the wearer. and their retainers.
15 Penumbeetle An Idol of the A persistent dream of An enemy wind allied to
Pilgrims (pg. Dark Continent. a woman trapped and the King of Birds (pg. 44),
60) in a Beetle freezing in a cave of who only that king can
Boat. ice. appease.
16 “Deodand” Lightning bars, a Weather-slinging A ruthless tribe and
Singing treasure of the Sky shaman hurling storms Orca Pod (pg. 40) working
Tribesperson World (pg. 46). at one another. together in symbiosis.
(pg. 41) guilty
by association.
17 Narcissan (pg. Snowflake Coins, a A flock of cursed and Narcissolis militia on
27) Tabloid treasure of the Sky immortal sea-birds. ill-advised punitive
Journalist (pg. World (pg. 46). expedition, drunk, racist
161). & heavily armed.
18 Migrating Storm necklace, a Rogue Pict Surreal Maddened explorers of
Singing Tribe treasure of the Sky (pg. 144) carrying a the Deep Isles who have
(pg. 41). World (pg. 46). Conceptual Weapon “gone a bit Wendigo”.
(pg. 146).
19 Order of Stone-leaf Blades, A cave system in Extremely powerful and
the Peach a treasure of the two part-merged evil magical spider which
Chaos-Wasp Earth-World (pg. islands which must lives in a web between
Hunter (pg. 90) 46). be navigated in the horns of a giant elk,
(undercover). dual-space. leader of its herd.
20 Ruthless Gem Animals, a Unknown marine The Chaos Wasps! (pg. 88)
singing-Tribe treasure of the hyperpredator (an
Orca-Hunters. Earth-World (pg. ‘Alteration Tear’,
46). pg. 145).

51
NARCISSAN MAP OF THE INCOHERENT ISLES

52
ANNOTATIONS & EXPLANATION TO THE
NARCISSAN MAP OF THE INCOHERENT ISLES

CAUTION TO YOU, READER, FOR WHILE ALL MAPS ARE

LIES, AND A MAP OF THE MOONLANDS DOUBLY SO, THIS
NARCISSAN ATTEMPT TO MAP THE INCOHERENT ISLES CAN
NEVER BE MORE THAN A SKETCH, OR IMPRESSION OF WHAT
MAY BE, REGARDLESS OF THE TROUBLE TAKEN, AND RISKS
SUFFERED, IN ITS CREATION.
AS YOU SHALL DISCOVER, THE SMALL SEA IN WHICH THE
INCOHERENT ISLES ARE HELD GROWS LARGER AND WIDER
THE DEEPER ONE GOES. IT IS LIKE A MAGIC PALACE IN WHICH
EACH DOOR OPENS ONTO TWO MORE DOORS, AND EACH
HALL ONTO TWO MORE HALLS, SO THAT THE SIZE WITHIN IS
MUCH GREATER THAN CAN BE SEEN WITHOUT.
NOT ONLY IS THE SPACE OF THE ISLANDS INFINITE, YET
THE ISLES THEMSELVES SHIFT AND MOVE, MERGING AND
SPLITTING, BLURRING TOGETHER TO SHAPE NEW REALITIES
AND SPLITTING APART LIKE UNBOUND FATES. THIS MAKES
THE ISLANDS ONCE AGAIN, UNCOUNTABLE, INCOMPRE-
HENSIBLE, AND INCOHERENT.
STILL, THE OUTER ISLES, WHILE THEY SOMETIMES SPLIT
AND CHANGE, CAN BE MEASURED SOMEWHAT, AND SOME
OBSERVATIONS CAN BE MADE OF THE INNER ISLES, AND
TALES DO REACH NARCISSOLIS (THAT GREAT DEVOURER OF
STORIES) OF WHAT PROCEEDS WITHIN.
IN THIS MAP THE EXPANDED VIEW INVERTS THE
ARRANGEMENT OF SPACE, WITH THE OUTER RING OF
ISLANDS BECOMING THE INNER RING OF THE MAP AND THE
LESS-KNOWN, DEEPER ISLES, EXPANDING OUTWARDS FROM
THE CENTRE. AS ONE TRAVELS FURTHER AND FURTHER
FROM THE POINT OF ENTRY, THE RANGE OF POSSIBLE
ISLANDS AND THEIR NATURE GROWS EXPONENTIALLY, AS
DOES THEIR STRANGENESS.
IT IS A CURIOSITY OF NARCISSOLIS THAT IT LIVES NOT ONLY
ON THE EDGE OF THE LILAC REACH, WHOSE BOUNDARIES
ARE UNKNOWN, BUT ALSO BORDERS CLOSE TO AN ABYSS
OF IMPOSSIBILITIES GREATER EVEN THAN THE PLAIN OF
ANAESTHETIC FIRE. BLESSED INDEED IS THE SOUL TOO
SELF-INVOLVED FOR MORTAL FEAR.

53
THE UMBER WOODS
3. THE UMBER WOODS

Between Narcissolis and the shore of the Vermillion Sea are the
Umber Woods. A void in the culture and memory of the Moonlands.
No-one remembers going there, but many people leave.
Travellers are encountered moving directly away from the
woods at high speed. If questioned, these frantic, disorientated,
but driven people recall nothing of the woods themselves. They
are embarked on adventures; chasing old memories and desires,
memories that will take them a long way from the Umber Woods.
They do not wish to be questioned. They will not stop. They fear
beetles, though they do not know why.
This back-scattered radiation of memory-damaged minds is
one of few clues as to the content of the woods themselves.

THE SILENCE
The woods are quiet. Tidal waves of silence surge from their
borders and flow across neighbouring lands before ebbing away.
The silence comes in stages.
First: a wariness or a hunting of the eyes, a perturbation; “we’ll
wait and see.”
Secondly: a grim inward turning; thoughts are ammonites curling
into themselves. An unwillingness to speak and an intolerance of
chat.
Third: suppression of sound, a scream becomes a shout, a shout
becomes speech, speech becomes a whisper and whispers die.
Finally: the mute weight of annihilating silence presses down like
a euthanizing pillow.
These silences are loathed by the Goblins of the Large Goblin
Collider who set up sound cataclysm machines and start garage
bands, pointing their dog-powered amplifiers at the distant trees
just to drive the silence back.
The border-spaces between the Umber Woods and the noise
patrols of the Large Goblin Collider are truly a no-mans-land of
damaged sound.

56
 The Umber Woods

16. PENUMBEETLE BEEKEEPING

HOOD.

57
THE ENVIRONMENT
Above the woodlands, silent flocks of birds spill into the sky like
the flint tips of invisible arrows before looping like vines and
falling back into the insect-haunted, orchid-spattered, fig-rich
trees.
Within, the earth smells rich, like dried compost. Roots curl
around gloom-pale bone. With rain, the ground splits and fumes
like a burst loaf.
Umber moths and glimmering silent bees flit between
branches where it seems Autumn is always about to arrive. Black
flying squirrels leap between oozing fig trees. Hidden under roots
and soft moss are the tunnels of the sleepy mega-sloths. Easy to
fall into; the sloths do not take well to this.
Strung between some trunks are nets of woven grass. The
shape and weave of the dense spiderwebs further dampens
decibels amidst the trees.
Streams run silently over utterly smooth stones. Beneath the
surface, impudent Tapirs lie in wait, ready to blast wanderers with
nasal jets before dashing back into the bush.
Arrow-straight moss-strewn paths follow radial geomantic
lines. Where they encounter streams, drystone bridges form a
span.
Hidden beneath the bridges are Whispering Trolls.
Monochrome, deep black with white teeth, nails and hair, they
murmur impossible questions:
“What am I thinking of?”
“Is the Blue I see the same as yours?”
“What did I do yesterday?”
Of course such queries are easily answered by those with the
power to read minds, and it is just such power that the rulers
of this forest, the PenumBeetles, possess, and which forms their
passport to this, their land.

58
 The Umber Woods

17. INFRASOUND AYE-AYE FLUTE. Extremely distressing when played

by an amateur.

59
THE PENUMBEETLES
Matte black in sunlight. Iridescent in shade. Milk white in darkness,
Green beneath a Gackling Moon. By night they seem like ghosts,
pale and threatening. By day they are looming silhouettes.
The Penumbeetles are large, over man-sized, intelligent insect
men; most mysterious of their kind. Considered ‘cousins’ of the
InvisiBeetles of the Vermillion Sea, they are sculptors, builders,
architects and gardeners. What little is known of them is here
described.
The Plains of Anaesthetic Fire were once their home, when
that land was verdant. Hidden beneath the ash and clinker are
ruins of PenumBeetle temples and the ghosts of the shapes of
their geomantic radial roads.

PENUMBEETLE CULTURE
Here in the Umber Woods they grow house-sized gourds, slowly
over decades.
The PenumBeetles assemble and dis-assemble greenhouses
around the gourds as they grow, expanding like shining chrysalids.
(Glass is one of the few things they will trade to obtain).
Once the gourd hits a maximum size, the PenumBeetles break
into bursts of melon madness, burrowing inside the vegetables,
eating them away from within then collapsing flat on their backs,
limbs spread out, rocking and sleeping.
It is a rare, and private, berserk moment for this conservative
and inward-turning people.
For protein, PenumBeetles farm Aye-Ayes. The meat of these
is poor but the creatures are quiet. The Aye Ayes eat the pale
fig-moths that flit about like snow. They are trained and guided
by the tunes of bone-carved flutes. This might be the only sound
within the woods at night; the unearthly airs of a Herder’s infra-
flute, guiding their slow flock through the dark and sticky trees
in pursuit of pearl-white moths drawn by the Aye-Aye Herder’s
lamp.
Some PenumBeetles raise hives of rare silent bees – their
iridescent wings shining in the beams of light. Others create
exquisite geometric scent gardens. The PenumBeetles are ruled
by the Big Beetle Thing – the Parliament of Thoughts. This place
is like a silent masque. Instead of shouts, wings vibrate inside the
case. During arguments psychic backdraft freaks stuff out for
miles around.
The factions and ideals of PenumBeetle Politics are based
around subtleties of silence, Interaction with the Outside, The
Morality of Mind alteration, The Necessity of murder, Hopefulness/
Nihilism about keeping the Moonlands from decaying to nothing
and the virtues of Writing vs Memory.
They learn these things in a mind-palace university
where they share knowledge across generations.
60 The primary architectural effort of the Penumbeetle
culture is the creation and maintenance of vast, labyrinthine

The Umber Woods

cyclopean ruins, which they build and allow to decay over eons.
At the centre of any grouping of the PenumBeetles radial
roads, is a temple, empty, ancient and unvisited. A place built to be
a ruin, slowly assembled with tireless strength and utter silence,
cyclopean blocks eased into place on layers of fig grease, then
abandoned.

PENUMBEETLE PSYCHIC POWERS

All PenumBeetles are dangerously powerful psychics. Those shells
crack open and they fly into minds.
To witnesses this looks as of the PenumBeetle is utterly still,
actually they move in the ethereal plane. They fractalize their
awareness and swoop into a brain hole, swarming thoughts,
climbing about invisibly and altering things.
Mind changers, or destroyers, when they want to be. Usually
its simpler for them if they only alter memories, first removing
any memory of the Umber Woods and any desire to seek them out
again.
Then they go through previous memories to provide some
strong motivation to do something, anything, other than to go to
the Umber Woods. Preferably something a long long way away.
They delete, amplify or emotionally mute recollections to provide
a nice clear path. This often leaves the subject with the sense that
there are insects inside their heads.
(Goblins found making noise in the woods do not have
their memories altered. Instead they are drowned and fed to a
Monochrome Troll.)
PenumBeetles are not meant to use these mental powers just
to fuck with people, but some do, and sometimes a PenumBettle
will go bad and need to be hunted down and taken out by ‘deniable
assets’.

PENUMBEETLE RUINS
The reason for the ruins, the radial paths and the purpose of
PenumBeetle culture, is to keep the Moonlands sane.
This land is fractured with multiple varieties of reality decay
and teeters daily on the brim of ontological collapse.
The terrors beneath the Vermillion sea, the wind from the
Maw, the abstracting corruption of the Painted Plane, the exper-
iments of the Large Goblin Collider or the strange light of the
Gackling Moon itself could tear the fragile remaining reality of
the Moonlands like wet paper.
And then what future for the world as a whole, with its fragile
membrane of coherence blasted wide?
The Reality-Intensifying temples of the PenumBeetles
draw their power from the thronging of inhabited parallel 61
worlds. They are empty in multiple dimensions and the inten-
sification and compression of silence emanates from them.
Great chambers of stillness, they harmonise the silent power
of monumental, amplified emptiness. This spreads across the
Moonlands, channelled by the radial roads, forming a fragile
counter-lock on its decaying reality, like a spiderweb over
shattered porcelain.

18. RUIN MAQUETTES. Carved into troll’s molars in a style reminiscent of Abacus, the
architect beetle.

62
19. PENUMBEETLE GROMA .Able to determine mathematically precise straight lines
and angles regardless of ground, weather or incline. Requires at least four hands to
operate.

63
TABLE – ENCOUNTERS IN THE UMBER WOODS
ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY COMPLICATION/
ELEMENT OPPOSITION
1 Mindwiped Backpack Dog- Damaged Sound from An Amphetamine-Based
Narcissan Powered Goblin- the Goblin Hinter- (pg. 12) Goblin Invasion
Tourists (pg. 27). Built Sound lands is infesting and force.
Amplifier, with crackling between the
Sonic Dog (pg. 27). trees.
2 Mindwiped A net of woven Wild memories batter A trio of pompous,
Goblins. grass which like moths against domineering AntiGoblins
utterly silences glass, trying to get in. (pg. 110) served by a team
what it covers or of Malakaj Kudroj (pg.
interrupts. 117)– the Joke Police.
3 Apple Knight Dice carved from An invisible maze of A ruthless Narcissolis
(pg. 126) the teeth of a Fears. Mirror-Master (pg. 32),
seeking the Monochrome their team of thieves and
apples of the Troll (pg. 58) – can murderers each carries
Umber Woods. divine the answer a mirror through which
to one question they may move.
per day, if the
answer is a number
between 2 and 12.
4 InvisiBeetle Iridescent A vast black ruin A Gackling-Moon
Knight (pg. 85) Dream Shield of Ultimate Silence transformed murder
on their way to – immaterial, containing condensed sword (pg. 6) that has
the Big Beetle merely the idea avatars of mute, persuaded others that you
Thing. of a shield but if suffocating eons which are the true villains.
the user pictures wish to escape and
themselves cover the earth with
wielding it they silence forever.
can defend
themselves from
mental attacks.
5 A Brother The bone-carved A half-surreal Pict (pg. Extremely edgy, secretive
of the Egg infra-flute of an 140) Aye-Aye painted at and dangerous Agents of
(pg. 101) with Aye-Aye herder. enormous scale which the P.O.G.R.A.P (pg. 74),
an artefact feeds on living souls. they know Parkour and
found beneath have surveillance Owls
the Plain of (pg. 173).
Anaesthetic
fire (pg. 94).
6 Ontomorphic A tame Tapir. A beast which cannot Glass smugglers (pg.
Manticore (pg. A friendly see or be seen, but 174) trying to shift some
133), moving as yet ridiculous which hunts by its own good-quality glass stolen
an irresolute creature. echoes. from the Necropolis of
tapping sound. Glass.
7 An Inter- Barrel of Ultra- A huge, walled, Bee-Thieves – they want
Object Tear (pg. slick fig grease visually unappealing the Silent Honey (pg. 56)
145). (pg. 60). scent garden and a living hive.
containing a riddle of
overwhelming smells.
8 Curious Tapir Load of Fine A secret Peach Pit of An evil and sadistic
Herd. Trading Glass (pg. the Apocalypse Peach PenumBeetle (pg. 60)
174). (pg. 88) has grown into deliberately goes too far
a gigatree. with intruders – a bad
cop on the force.

64
 The Umber Woods
ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY COMPLICATION/
ELEMENT OPPOSITION
9 Curious Honey of the Psychic storm waves Nihilistic PenumBeetle
or angry Silent Bees (pg. from the Big Beetle Radical (pg. 60) actively
Megasloth. 56) – causes Thing radiate, filling wants reality to decay
temporary people with factional further, just to see what
deafness & opinions on Writing vs happens.
muteness but the Memory.
eater makes no
sound of any kind.
10 A Monochrome Moonproof Cloak A silent, smokeless fire A Psychic War between
Troll (pg. 58). of Black Flying- burns in the forest and PenumBeetle authorities
Squirrel Fur. silently, it spreads. and PenumBeetle compound
survivalists (pg. 60).
11 Aggressively Sanity Pills (pg. 90). A rambunctious herd Dangerous maniacs
loud Goblin of Wild Pixilated searching for their stolen
Calamity Band. Hippos (pg. 85). memories.
12 PenumBeetle Badge of the Geomantic Distur- Someone who believes
(pg. 60) on the Order of the Peach bance causes directions they are you and that you
verge of Melon (pg. 90). to flip. are the fake them.
Madness.
13 PenumBeetle Surrealist Pict A cracked Geomantic Narcissolis cultists of the
Aye-Aye tool with one road must be rapidly Chaos Wasps, undercover
Herder (pg. hyper-specific repaired. as something else.
60) (sleeping if use, impossible to
day). define until it is
encountered.
14 PenumBeetle Low slow silence- Moth Storm – blinding Stealth Goblin Crime
Glass-Trader bells of Geomantic and choking. Crew fixated on Aye-Aye
desperate for Pilgrims. Theft.
glass.
15 PenumBeetle Broadsword-sized Cyclopean Ruin (pg. 61) A ruthless ‘Old Master’
Geomantic ceremonial gilded half-sunk in the black Pict Inquisitor (pg. 140) of
Pilgrims (pg. melon-knife. soil. the Dexter faction who
60). suspects you of being
hidden Picts.
16 PenumBeetle High-Denomi- Heavy rain and Blurred Raiders (pg. 41) of
Noise-Hunter nation Gold Coins, fuming, pungent the Singing Tribes from
and Forest each sewn into a soporific earth. the Deep Interior, armed
Guard (pg. 60). tiny soundproof with unlikely Goblin
bag. Guns (pg. 98).
17 PenumBeetles Goblin Moon-Idol. The Impossible Riddle A group of Anaesthetic
moving giant of a Monochrome Troll Thugees (pg. 102) planning
stone block (pg. (pg. 58). to spread the Anaesthetic
60). Fire (pg. 94).
18 PenumBeetle An Amber Wand A huge Melon-Green- An utterly evil black
Geomantic which restores house Labyrinth. psychic egg carried on
Road repair memories, but a palanquin by reali-
crew (pg. 60). which must be fed ty-decay antipilgrims.
memories of equal
weight.
19 A Riddle-Cult AntiGravity Cider Creepy thieving Apocalypse Wasps! (pg. 88)
of Monochrome (pg. 112). Aye-Ayes (pg. 59).
Trolls (pg. 58).
20 MINDWIPE – YOU FIND YOURSELF HEADING OUTWARDS FROM THE UMBER
WOODS ON A MISSION OF VITAL IMPORTANCE TO YOU AND NO MEMORY OF WHAT
LIES WITHIN

65
THE YELLOW PLAIN AND THE LARGE
GOBLIN COLLIDER
4. THE YELLOW PLAIN AND THE LARGE GOBLIN
COLLIDER

In the Yellow Plain between the Umber Woods and the Plain
of Anaesthetic Fire, on the path that links Narcissolis and the
Vermillion Sea, and within sight of palette-coloured banks of the
Pigment River, is the Ruling Cube of the Large Goblin Collider.
The Cube Rules, but the Collider itself is a huge subterranean
loop buried beneath the waving yellow grass.
To understand, investigate, and exploit the nature of their own
Goblin Genius, Goblins created the Large Goblin Collider where
they smash up Goblins at supersonic speed and transform them
into Pure Incandescent Goblin Galvanising Yield (or P.I.G.G.Y);
The Prime Goblin Power.
The Cube itself is a library, a laboratory, a dada-ist religious
site and a nerve centre for the League of United Goblins, the
para-reality Goblin Government and its High Executive Head, the
President of Goblins Representing All Parallels (or P.O.G.R.A.P),
Lord of Goblins anywhere, or anywhen.
The answer to any Goblin Problem can be found within, as
can an infinite number of further Goblin Problems.
Anyone wishing to attack, exploit or evade Goblins, and anyone
wishing to effect or alter the Grand Goblin Strategy, must come
here and all Goblins everywhere are expected to, at least once
in their existence make a pilgrimage to the Cube to experiment,
and/or be experimented upon.

THE YELLOW PLAIN

“Roving Dimensional Holes At All Times” warn the faded, falling,
signs.
Goblins tramp the Cube-Road, back and forth. The ground
thrums like a bee in a jar. Not from stamping Goblin feet but from
the distant vibrations of the supersonic rail buried deep down
under the soil, screams from rocket pods, cackling laughter from
High Velocity Goblins and the tuning-fork-bomb-blast pulsating
implosions of Goblins colliding at unimaginable speed.
One finds three things on the Cube Road: Moonlanders with
some other destination, who just want a way past and hurry along;
Goblins heading to or from the Collider; and the Multiversal
ejaculate of the Roving Dimensional Holes.
All forms of Goblin Pilgrim can be encountered on the Cube
Road. Most common are the Goblin Philosophers, who often carry
examples of Goblin Science, and Goblin Volunteers, who wish to be
experimented upon.
Coming from the cube are Goblins with strange powers and
mutations, the results of those experiments.
The Roving Dimensional Holes are a continual threat. Holes
roll or skate across the plain like wild gyroscopes, sucking
68 things up and disgorging multiversal chaff. They are chased
by Goblin scientists with Hole Hooks who bring them back
to experiment on, either by shoving Goblins inside them, or by

The Yellow Plain and the Large Goblin Collider

shoving them inside Goblins.
The Holes may be created by the Large Goblin Collider, by
experiments inside the Cube or just by extra-dimensional Goblins
trying to bend space to get here.
Research is ongoing.

GETTING INSIDE
The Cube is Huge. Tiled with cracked glass and ceramic in an
off-kilter modernist style, at night it crackles from within, the
mosaic of its windows lit up with bright flashes of Green-White
Goblin Galvanising Energy
The only legal way for any non-Goblin to enter the Large
Goblin Collider is to sneak in, goblin-style. However, if they do
succeed in sneaking inside then it will be assumed that they are
meant to be there. The sneakiness itself is sufficient passport, and
proof of Goblinish intent.
The area directly around the Cube is patrolled by Goblin
Guards, (new versions and types are spewed out by the Cube every
day), and huge near-feral watchtower golems.
Surrounding this is the security fence and beyond that are
lines to enter and the huge crowd of Goblin pilgrims.

THE QUEUE
The crowd breaks into two lines, one for Goblin Philosophers, the
other for Experimental Goblins.
Goblin Philosophers must be able to present a work of goblin
science or advanced goblin thinking that proves their right to
enter.
Experimental Goblins need only sign a waiver.
As soon as Goblins pass the main gate, the two lines merge
and mix as if they forgot that they were different.

THE FENCE
The long, irregular fence is always a random height and made from
random stuff. Some parts are like long slender fingers sticking up
as if there were giant gracile goblin hands just beneath the ground.
Some are made of crumbling concrete sprayed with Goblin graffiti.
Some parts are chain link collapsed like wet socks. Others are fine
green-hued Victorian fretwork with cast iron Goblin faces. Some
are dense and deadly Goblin hedge. Some are crackling electrical
wire. Some parts are marked with flayed Goblin faces that wink.
Some are hung with bells or tied up Autistic Goblins that go
REEEEEEE if disturbed.
Between the fence and the cube are the huge Predatory
Watchtowers and the varied guards. 69
THE WATCHTOWERS
Constructions of black splintery wood which lumber about on
timber spider legs.
At their tops are Goblin lookouts and spotlights whose bulbs
are screaming incandescent Goblins fully charged with P.I.G.G.Y
- PURE INCANDESCENT GOBLIN GALVANISING YIELD.
The Watchtowers occasionally get confused and attack each
other like big dogs in the night. The winner will cannibalise the
loser and get taller, hooting out its dominance.
Too tall – eventually the Alpha-Watchtower becomes unstable
and falls, spilling Goblin Watchmen and howling spotlights,
shattering into splinters and being consumed by the herd.

THE GUARDS
These vary enormously but can include:
+ Goblins riding baskets using lighter-than-air hydrocephalic
goblins as huge balloons. Their bulging eyes turn.
+ Goblin Mecha, large copper steam-bots that go AWOOGA and
often explode.
+ Necro-goblins meditating on huge floating skulls and firing
death-energy from their occipital lobes.
+ Thieving counter insurgency stealth goblins like Aye-Ayes with
long fingers and large eyes.
+ Goblins driving a bound Antigoblin as a suicide bomb.
+ Goblins hang-gliding on big crows and dropping from above.
+ Goblins in spitting biplanes powered by refined P.I.G.G.Y.
+ Attack-Goblin cavalry on Penny Farthings with scythes on the
wheel hubs - big hussar hats, fur capes and swinging sabres.

INSIDE THE CUBE

A maze of linked and jury-rigged monorails ridden by Goblins in
primary colour jumpsuits (crashes are common), and a network of
glass tubes.
There are Goblins moving in the goblin tubing. They hurry
and scurry in unending lines.
There are paper maps pinned to various places. All are
inaccurate, have been moved, are in faded crayon or are not
actually of the Goblin Cube. There are also timetables, signposts,
directional floor-lines and information desks for which the same
is true.
The rooms and layout of the Cube are Borgesian but retarded.
Rooms of random size, shape and contents, with random entries
and exits. Here Goblins are experimenting and experi-
mented upon:
70
 The Yellow Plain and the Large Goblin Collider

20. MECHANICAL CALCULATOR. Stolen from the Goblin Collidor. Useful in solving
complex mathematical problems, and breaking mechanical locks, but whatever
calculations are written down, X will always be returned as ‘goblin’.

71
SCENES IN THE GOBLIN CUBE
1. Glass-walled Hannibal Lecter cells full of normal reasonable
rational goblins undergoing Psychotherapy.
2. Captain America-style transformational radiation machines.
3. Goblins putting on a Harold Pinter play but they have disinte-
gration rays and disintegrate each other at random before freezing
into an expressionist tableau.
4. Goblins wearing human papier-mâché heads in an otherwise
normal laboratory.
5. Goblins miniaturised and injected into things, then further
miniaturised and set to ride beams of green light.
6. Goblins with a jet stream test tube apparatus strapping Goblins
in and testing Goblin aerodynamics.
7. Dangerous Goblin surgery taking place. Drugged ocelots being
implanted into grateful patient, thumbs up at the end.
8. Dogs playing an octopus at cards, one Goblin furiously paints the
scene, others measure the artist’s brainwave output with torrents
of paper, but the tongues of paper infiltrate the scene, causing the
artist to paint them and setting off a cascade response. The octopus
is becoming aggressive.
9. Goblins gathered round a barely controlled pocket universe
which rolls around like a big lead ball sucking Goblins into it. They
push it with carbon rods like curlers.
10. Goblin Cybernetic Snail jousts.
11. Goblins fed into a consuming extradimensional spiral like
charity coins.
12. One Goblin experimenting with paired mirrors to create infinite
Goblins but the Goblin reflections will not stay still and several
have staged a revolt. (There is also a Mirror Master amongst them).

THE WAR ROOM

It is here that the meta-strategy for all Goblin Conflicts across
all realities is decided. Anyone who can infiltrate this room could
conceivably acquire information invaluable to anyone engaged in
warfare against Goblins anywhere.
They could also possibly alter Goblin strategy, though the
effects of this are unpredictable.
A full Ham Scan is required before entry. Visitors must place
their buttocks against a glass plate and a green scanning line will
check their hams. If their hams are not cleared for entry then
special forces Awooga Goblins will emerge in small cars.
There is always fighting in the War Room. The place is divided
into different factions based on preferred meta-strategy, tie colour
and food sauce preference. Goblins in suits and bejazzled military
uniforms battle and besiege each other with sporks, hot coffee and
office furniture. The Big Green Screen shows the Universal
Goblin disposition and current danger level (at the moment,
72 set to Gob Con Four, the worst being Gob Con One).
THE TRICK MINT

The Yellow Plain and the Large Goblin Collider

The primary Goblin Coin, the Trick, is minted in the Cube in
greenish silver.
On the ‘Heads’ side is the portrait of a Hydrocephalic Goblin,
his skull so huge and face so small that he looks like a guitar pick.
This is the P.O.G.R.A.P, the President Of Goblins Representing All
Realities.
On the ‘Tails’ side is the P.O.G.R.A.P.S Ham Scan, emitting
abstracted heraldic P.I.G.G.Y, Pure Incandescent Goblin
Galvanising Yield.

GOBLIN CURRENCY CONVERSION CHART

1 Jab = 1 Poke (the currencies are pegged to each other).
88 Pokes = 1 Trick.
97 Tricks = 1 Crime.
56 Crimes = 1 Jab.
The recursive nature of the Goblin Economy means that every
Goblin is simultaneously extremely wealthy, and very poor. They
are also in a cycle of debt and inflation, leading to ever-increasing
volumes of Jabs, Pokes, Tricks and Crimes.
The mint is often the target of robbery or financial manipu-
lation, but is defended by a giant invisible hand, which sometimes
just smashes stuff randomly, and by bewigged Goblin Financial
Philosophers who gargle coffee and argue constantly about the
value of the Trick relative to the Mould Standard.
The relative value itself is set by a pig attached to a complex
series of levers. Its wanderings have a huge effect on the Goblin
Economy across the multiverse.
If the value of the Trick should fall then Goblins will have to
perform many more Tricks to avoid falling into the legal classes.
Should the value of the Trick rise, then a Trick Bubble may take
place, with Goblins massively over-investing in highly complex
and unstable tricks that never pay off.

MEGAWEAPON DEVELOPMENT
Goblin society as a whole fully supports the concept of Mutually,
or even Accidentally, Assured Destruction and all Goblins believe
that the only thing holding back the next Apocalypse is the possi-
bility of a worse Apocalypse. The Cube itself is directly in the path
of the Apocalypse Peaches which rise from the Vermillion Sea and
inevitably roll to attack Owl City and Narcissolis. Here, deadly
arms are created to use against the next Apocalypse Peach if/
when it comes, and also just for fun. These include:
+ Bionic Wasps; These go horribly wrong always.
+ The Supermurder Cannon; Deadly, but too large to move, also 73
now sentient and paranoid.
+ Postmodernism Bomb; Too terrible for even Goblins to contem-
plate.
+ Autism Ray; May have no effect on Chaos Wasps.
+ Mega-Monkey Super-Cyber-Suit; Potentially very potent but any
Goblin that puts it on instantly goes Mad With Power.
+ Engine of Infinite Blades; Theorised to simply be an un-closable
portal to the plane of Edge. Now used for dicing by cooking goblins.
Blade elementals sometimes escape.
+ Ultra-Maggot Cannon; Distressing to use. Should the Ultra-
Maggot survive it can hatch into a Mega-Fly.
+ Ultra Maggot-Cannon; Similar problem to above but smaller, and
on a much wider scale.
+ Self-Replicating Peachivorous High Speed Bioweapon; The
Goblins have simply reverse-engineered rabbits. They seem
unaware that Rabbits already exist and keep these ones under
exacting control and paranoid hyper-observance.
+ Fungal Destructor; Has also attained sentience, currently barely
confined. Is also party leader of Goblin Minority Cordyceps Faction.
+ Primordial Annihilator Device; Will definitely destroy the
next Apocalypse Peach. Will also release the Chaos Gods upon an
unwitting cosmos.

OFFICE OF THE P.O.G.R.A.P

Few have spoken directly with the President of Goblins Repre-
senting All Parallels. Their brain is so huge they must wheel their
own head about in a special device and the wheels of this device
squeak like mice.
The powers and authority of the P.O.G.R.A.P are known by
few outside the Goblin World but they carry and command the Big
Pig Key, which both controls access to the Collider itself, and puts
them in final charge of the Goblin Economy across all realities by
allowing them to “change pigs”, and the P.I.G.G.Y.W.I.G., the Pure
Incandescent Goblin Galvanising Yield Worldwide Inhibition
Gun, the only device capable of nullifying P.I.G.G.Y at the base
level.
Truly, the P.O.G.R.A.P., armed with the P.I.G.G.Y.W.I.G.,
stands guard over the sanity and stability of all that is Real, for if
the semi-sentient PURE INCANSECENT GOBLIN GALVINISING
YEILD were ever to escape uncontrolled, it would form balls of
greenish electro-stuff and arc across the cosmos. Wherever it
grounded, Goblin anima would be released, radiating dangerous
Cackle Waves, triggering cascading Mischiefission and animating
base matter with Goblinish sentience.
If it arcs into a living thing P.I.G.G.Y can auto-generate
goblinism up inside them, allowing them to ignore the rules of
the reality if they do bad things.
Of course they must then perform more Goblinsh
74 actions or the effects will swing back upon them, producing
a spiral of Goblin chaos.
 Beyond the P.O.G.R.A.P lies the Large Goblin Collider itself,

The Yellow Plain and the Large Goblin Collider

where the PURE INCANSECENT GOBLIN GALVINISING YEILD
is studied and released.
(Or perhaps the P.I.G.G.Y. itself is studying the Goblins).
Access is Denied.

21. WALKIE-TALKIE. Can be used to contact anyone anywhere across the

Moonlands, although the longer the conversation, the more the person on
the other end will sound like a Goblin doing a bad impression. Do not call
people you love. 75
TABLE – ENCOUNTERS AND ADVENTURES
ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY ELEMENT COMPLICATION/
OPPOSITION
1 Goblin Quick, green, Murmurating Predatory Goblin Watch-
Philosopher. sharp-featured and swarm of Hydrocephalic tower (pg. 69).
suspicious pig. Balloon Goblins.
2 A functioning t34 Giant Goblin Mecha out Goblins Hang-Gliding on
tank from a roving of control. (giant) Crows.
dimensional hole
(pg. 68).
3 Sombrero which Linked Network of Totenkopf Korps – Deaths
imbues its wearer Roving Dimensional Head PennyFarthing
with the ability to Holes. Goblin Cavalry.
fly – slightly slowly.
4 Infinitely-Extend‐ Snow-Globe the Evangelist for the Goblin
ing folding ladder. size of a Zeppelin minority Cordyceps faction.
hanger, inside which is a
snow-globe factory.
5 A Superintelligent Goblins running a A team of carefully
Mouse. war-room simulation selected mirrorverse
of goblins running a Goblin assassins whose
war-room simulation skills and roles are
of goblins running a intended to perfectly
warroom simulation counter the PCs except in
which is actually the each case one vital detail
first group of goblins. has been misinterpreted.
6 Narcissan A glass jar Goblin conference on A competent dog with
tourist (pg. 27). containing a Anti-colonialism – Paralysing Eyes dedicated
fundamentally heavily armed and to foiling the players. (Not
indeterminate preparing to invade the PC’s, the players.)
number of beans. other conferences to
(i.e. even a impose its Anti‐colonial
Creator-God could views by force.
not work out how
many beans are in
the jar).
7 PenumBeetle Real-Cheese, Pict-Goblin protest Sinister black-hatted
Pilgrimage curdled from the demanding removal Ghoul Goblins carrying
(pg. 60). milk of the Cosmic of their civil rights. calculating caged monkeys
Cow for whomever “What do we want?” which can predict the odds
eats and sleeps, “NO-RIGHTS!” of anything with their
their Dreams When do we want clacking bone abacuses.
become Real. them?”
“EVER!”
8 A Crazed A chest bulging One floor of a 20th An Avatar of whichever
Theign. with green goblin Century Office Moon it currently is in
Gold (Golden Block with human- female form.
Tricks) (pg. 22) masked Goblins
cursed to be fulfilling all the roles.
spent in a ridic-
ulous way.
9 Hunting Set of insanely ugly P.O.G.R.A.P. (pg. 74) An Experimental Goblin
party of the bejewelled engaged in Tweet storm assassin with the ability
Singing matryoshka dolls of – vomiting to change shape. They
Tribes. awful gawping small blue birds which have been mindwiped and
goblin maidens. The get everywhere and reprogrammed to kill and
dolls become more squawk inflammatory replace the PCs one-by-one.
valuable as they get statements. TOPICAL. However, the mindwiping
smaller. The last is means their shortterm
glowing emerald. memory only lasts 12 hours.
76
 The Yellow Plain and the Large Goblin Collider
ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY ELEMENT COMPLICATION/
OPPOSITION
10 Pict schemet- The Viridian Pig SWAT-Style Gobcops and A Goblin ‘Mission
rader Crown, which Cackling Criminals in Impossible’ troupe capable
hoarding the enables the wearer to an icy, edgy streetside of rapidly constructing a
Pigment River telepathically read showdown. All are armed room of any kind around
water they the minds of, and with pies. One criminal an individual or group, and
need to even command, pigs. has an Automatic Ham. simulating its inhabitants
survive. through theatrical art.
However, they cannot stop
humming the theme to
that show.
11 Owl-City “Jack Splendid”. An extremely long The Goblin ‘Men In
Goblin A remarkably switchback queue with Black’ – dedicated to
Bubonkiners handsome and complex and violent hiding any evidence of
(pg. 173). charismatic cow. internal politics. normality from Goblin
society.
12 A single, but A perpetual A riot between A clockwork goblin knight
deadly, hula-hoop! anarchistic Goblin riding a rocket-powered
Anaesthetic (Or the plans for one). mimes and Goblin cops pig. Extremely serious and
Bedouin. riding bluepainted pigs. terminatorunkillable.
13 Anorexic Goblin The World’s Most Goblin Documentary A Goblin Gang with a
Art Critic and Valuable Stew. team who are set on functioning Cadillac they
Fashionista interviewing and tailing got from a dimensional
riding a fat, the PCs. hole – they use this to run
blind pig people over, do crimes and
which smells pick up chicks.
controversy.
14 A Man. A The Goblin Grail. A Goblin Haut Couture Goblin Assassins with a
completely Fashion show oh god can Gun which fires dimen-
normal man I stop now. sionally linked holes.
(pg. v).
15 Outraged Mole- Winning ticket to the Frog storm. Emu-Riding Goblin
Men (pg. 161). Great Turnip Lottery. Cowboys.
16 Experimental Key to an interdimen‐ Absurdism conference Body replacing goblin head
Goblin sional hole packed – things are getting gang.
with an effectively serious.
See Page 81. inexhaustible (though
finite) number of
Gibbons.
17 Acme-style ‘passage Flamingo stampede. Goblin Giant-Mole Cavalry
paint’ works for you gone rogue they follow
but not your enemies. from below.
18 A bottle city. Goblin parade with giant The World’s Most Evil Dog.
inflatable balloons in
politically topical forms.
19 A joke-powered CGI fuckfest Battle- Dungeon Master is
super-murder gun. Royale between rapidly replaced by a Goblin for
Also a expiring experimental random and indeterminate
murder-powered joke supergoblins. values of time.
gun. The settings are
wobbly.
20 A frog so dangerously Goblins who believe they A Chaos Wasp wearing
stupid that looking are in some kind of IRL Goblin Skin!
into its eyes numbs Minecraft situation. In
and subdues even the fact they are just slaves
most powerful. on crack (pg. 146).

77
22. GOBLIN JABS, TRICKS AND CRIMES. I have yet to see two Goblin coins alike, and
each attempt at rendering this image of their money produces a different configu-
ration.

78
23. PORTABLE CALOTYPE MACHINE. My only successful attempt at using the machine
resulted in a strange effect - as the captured image developed, all physical forms contained
therein began to develop the uncanny aspect of looking back at the machine’s lense -
regardless what life, animisim or optical instruments they contained in reality.

79
LIST - GOBLIN PHILOSOPHERS
1. Bachelor in Fallaciloquency
2. Associate of Applied Stinks
3. Madam of Arggotecture
4. Super-Doctor of Prodding
5. Ascended Master of Gussetry
6. Greater Haired Lecturor in Practical Disagreeability
7. Associate in Applied Foppotee
8. Magister of General Whining
9. Cordial Associate of Despair
10. Abrupt Fellow
11. Muse-Nurse Attending Boreism
12. Hemidoctor of Abject Panic
13. Masters In Applied Venality
14. Casual Cagastric Anomaly
15. Brochity Companion
16. Over-Doctor of Mystery
17. Masters in Everything
18. Demiurge of Pottery
19. Sagious-fellow of Theoritical Snake-chasing
20. Unilateral Bachelor in Brephophagy
21. Associate in Cacatory
22. Graduate in Bumposophery
23. Lauded Siren of Buccellation
24. Sub-Bachelor of Harming
25. Obrumpent Regent
26. Fellow of Orgiophancy
27. Begrudged Companion of Panchymagogy
28. Duchess of Mindings
29. Disassociate in Unbelongings
30. Masters in Ingordigious Numbers

80
LIST – EXPERIMENTAL GOBLINS

The Yellow Plain and the Large Goblin Collider

1. Chiral Goblin: has top half doubled along the line of pelvis, like
a playing cards king or queen.
2. Matryoshka Goblin: splits in half to reveal a smaller goblin,
which contains an even smaller goblin.
3. Inverted Goblin: its outer skin is now inside and internal organs
now disgustedly external.
4. Goblin ray: a flattened goblin, undulating like a manta or sting
ray.
5. Uncoupled Goblin: moves like stop motion, effects of reality on it
are always delayed by a round.
6. Goblin Swarm: a mess of tiny goblins holding onto each other to
form a goblin shape.
7. Goblinataur: where its legs would be is a quadrupedal goblin.
8. Goblinataurataur: as above but it’s the quadrupedal goblin with
goblins for legs.
9.Toad Goblin: with digesting warts and poison containing sore-like
gland.
10. Spindly Goblin: a goblin stretched to have the proportions of a
harvestman/Opiliones.
11. Snoot Goblin: its head is one giant nose with enough suction
power to pull fruit off the tree.
12. Wheeler Goblin: has wheels for feet and hands.
13. Hedgegob: a Goblin with spines like a hedgehog.
14. Rubbery Goblin: bones are very flexible to the point it can’t
stand up, has to writhe on the ground to get around.
15. Rdula: has a large beer gut, but it’s actually where it stores its
massive slab like tongue. Tongue is abrasive and can grind flesh
from bone.
16. Infected Goblin: fragile, a pin prick or firm push will cause it
to pop releasing spores over wide area. Goblins will grow in any
untreated open wounds of people hit with the spores.
17. Another Goblin: will always be the another goblin. If you think
there’s 6 goblins, there’s actually Another goblin and there’s 7.
18. Goblin Elemental: can control an element, but the element is
goblin.
19. Skeleton Goblin: is currently wearing a goblin suit.
20. Superdense goblin: weighs as much as a 100 goblins.

81
THE VERMILLION SEA
5. THE VERMILLION SEA

Even before the Master Masons fall and the creation of the Painted
Plane, it was never clear what lay beneath the surface of this sea
or against what other shores it washed.
The sea is red for the world below it, and for its flowers, which
grow upside down, their translucent stems forming a liquid glass
Sargasso on its surface. Beneath the translucent roots, poking
down into the water, are the red heads of carmine lotus-poppies,
and beyond them is the crimson of the Red-Sun World.
The sea itself is not a sea, but an envelope, like transparent
plastic wrap over a bowl of toxic goo. Those who plunge beneath its
slow translucent waves usually drown, but survivors have gasped
out garbled tales of a world lit by a Red Sun in which the envelope
of our reality curls around the diver like a sheath, choking and
suffocating like oil as the drowner drifts upwards, weightless and
helpless, into a Red Sky above red petals on a blue sea, beneath
which lies our Golden Sun and Gackling Moon.
Under that blue sea, like pulsing blood beneath translucent
skin, is the heavy air and sombre light of our reality, now falling
away from the flailing diver as the ground casts back from a kite
lost to the storm.
At night the sea glows with the Red Light of the Red Sun of
the Red World which lies beyond, rosy fingers thrusting upwards
through its strange tides, the sea itself unnavigable, beating upon
unknown shores and unchartable fjords and masking silent access
to an unreachable world.
So it is, and has been, that the Vermillion Sea, like the Reach,
marks a border to the Moonlands beyond which few will pass, and
makes this truly the Edge of the World, and the beginning of its
end.

VERMILLION APPROACHES
NORTH
Across the Plains of Anaesthetic Fire, a fool might clamber down
cracked black fjords with the hopes of drinkable water, or at least,
safety from the invisible fires of the plain.
They will find only beaches of black sand filled with the
transparent wrack and decaying poppy heads which clump into
huge, wet, corroding piles in the time of a Sorrowing Moon.
A particular mixture of this liminal compost makes a perfume
of rare piquancy. A scent unknown elsewhere in our world, and
so gunfire crackles in the fjordlands as the Bedouin battle amidst
themselves for poppy-mining rights in the black-crevasse jags.

84
EAST

The Vermillion Sea

The Pigment River runs through the Yellow Plain and meets the
Vermillion Sea.
The waving Yellow grass fades into an orange beach stained
with unpredictable plants. Unknown flora bathe in the multiversal
light of many suns. Not only our terrestrial sun and the shifting
patterns of the Gackling Moon, but the red light of the Red Sun
beneath the Vermillion Sea.
Palette-lichen, Sorrow-Moon Ghostvines and wild blue sugar
cane thrive in the red nocturnal glow of the sun beneath the sea.
The Pixilated Hippos of the Pigment River feed here, dangerous
beasts for all their blocky brightness.
Further south, between the Vermillion Sea and the Umber
Woods, on the way to nowhere-at-all, is Pitville a top-secret
artificial micro-town.

SOUTH
Here the sea and the Pigment river mix and merge into a
marshland of poppy heads nosed about by Photographic Dolphins
from the Pigment River. Though even these cannot survive the
True Sea beyond the marsh.
Beyond are the inaccessible Far Southerlies, watched over by
the Penumbeetles and Invisibeetle Knights, if by anyone.
Perhaps it is here where the Reach and the Vermillion Sea
meet, mix and merge, though how it happens, or if it happens at
all, is a speculating thought to mortal minds.

THE INVISIBEETLES
One thinking species alone dares to make its living place on the
murderous surface of the Vermillion Sea. Glass knights in glass
castles. Beetles with a dignified sense.
The Invisibeetles, cousins to the Penumbeetles of the Umber
Woods and rumoured distant clan-line of the legendary Trilobite
Knights, are glistening translucent isopod-men. On the surface
of the sea, far out from shore, they build palaces of bubblewrack
on opalescent islands of coagulated poppy roots. Since they are as
transparent as their homes, the wrack does give them privacy of
a sort.
The Invisibeetles are known for their dignity, rectitude
and mannerly conduct. Of course the terrifying dangers of the
Vermillion Sea mean that privacy is barely required.
The chief prey, and predator of the Invisibeetles is a form
of demonic Pteranodon which flies in the inverse sky of the Red
Sun World and dives down into that Sea, bursting up from the
surface of ours, swimming in great bounding leaps, as if our air
were water, hunting for translucent knights.
85
24. DIPLOMATIC DIVING HELMET. Worn by members of the Order of the Peach, used
for their formal interactions with Invisibeetles and therefore designed in their aspect.

86
25. BRACE OF WASP EGGS. A smuggler’s dozen, wrapped in wrack. Germination would be
catastrophic.

87
GOBLIN ORIGINS
It is from the Red-Sun Sea the Goblins came.
Perhaps there were always Goblins in the Moonlands. They do
get everywhere, regardless of border or wall, and Histories of the
Moonlands are as fractured, recursive and liminal as the lands
themselves, but most cultures remember that at one point, there
were some Goblins, and then, there were MAXIMUM GOBLINS.
Most chroniclers locate the Great Goblin Migration to the
Master Masons fall and the creation of the Painted Plane. It was
in that time of chaos that the Goblin Moon glowed greatly green
indeed.
Then came submersible cans.
Ramshackle copper-green submarines full of loud noises and
sharp-featured and suspicious pigs, crammed with Goblins like
cans of bad sardines. Up they came, breaching the liquid surface
and bursting translucent strands of poppy root like glass tagli-
atelle. Up they came, coming to build their Cube of Genius, their
Large Goblin Collider, to infest Owl City, ride bicycles and deal in
terrible herbs under the light of the Gackling Moon.
Whether the Goblins came from the Red-World itself,
beneath the sea, or from some unbidden shore, they have neither
spoke nor told. All we know and all they will say is that they came
“goblinwise”. Whether this refers to the building of the Copper
Submarines, the employment of their anarchic Goblin genius in
some way or, as some have theorised, to a direction and dimension
that only Goblins can access or understand, none know.
Within a year the shores of the Vermillion Sea were crammed
with decaying copper submarines (some wrecks can still be seen)
and feral pigs. And after that, the first of the Apocalypse Peaches
rose up from the Red Sun World and brought with it the Chaos
Wasps.

WASPS OF THE APOCALYPSE

The Peach was vast, a hundred feet above the water-line. It lurched
up out of the Red Sun world and punched through the wrack like
a fist through glass. As it rose up, purple sails unfurled and the
peach surged towards land leaving a trail of sugary devastation
in its wake.
Within the peach were the Apocalypse Wasps, terrible insect
men from the Red-Sun World, violent, horrifying, utterly alien
with red wasp minds and bloody thoughts. They killed half of
everything they met, took the rest to lay eggs inside and advanced
upon the Moonlands. Is the Wasp Moon named for the Apocalypse
Wasps, as its character matches theirs so fully? Or did the presence
of the Wasps change the character of the Moon, bringing it
88 a glimmer of their Red Light? Did the Wasp moon summon
them?
Questions for historians...

The Vermillion Sea

If one thing unifies the Moonlands and sets common horror into
every heart, painted and unpainted, Goblin, AntiGoblin, Blurred
and Sharp, it is absolute loathing for, and hatred of, the Chaos Wasps.
On the arrival of the first Peach of the Apocalypse, absolutely
every element of the Moonlands; the Goblins, AntiGoblins (at a
distance), The Penumbeetles, the Invisibeetles (fighting a heroic
rearguard action and guerrilla war), the Illusory Lord of Narcissolis,
many of the Singing Tribes, the Asbestos Bedouin and the Crazed
Theigns of the Whetstone Ridge, Picts of every description and many
more, all joined forces and died heroically as the big peach rolled
over all attempts to prevent or besiege it. Crushing a path towards
Narcissolis, the centre of Resistance to the Peach.
Their flattened sugary corpses spread across the Yellow Plain.
And they were the lucky ones, the rest were taken deep inside the
Peach and impregnated with fresh Chaos Wasps.
Hell had come, and it was ripe. Ultimately the Moonlands were
saved. A rag-tag group of unlikely heroes drenched themselves with
poisonous Wasp-Musk and infiltrated the Peach, crawling through
its sticky warrens and fighting a traumatising tunnel war within its
Fruit-Labyrinth.
They somehow managed to sabotage the Peach, damaging its
structural integrity, and while battle raged outside between the
Moonlanders and the Chaos Wasps, a Goblin Superweapon, hyper-
charged with P.I.G.G.Y. from the light of an extra-green Goblin
moon, blasted the thing apart.
The Chaos Wasps were massacred and driven off. All that
remained was the Hideous Pit, later transported to Pitville for study
and safe keeping.
Of those unlikely heroes, naught remained. Hopefully their
end was quick, blasted into bits by Green Goblin Power. They live
now, only in our memories.
(Though legends and fairytails claim that those adventurers
were rocketed through time, or into some other dimension where
they wander still, destined to return to the Moonlands in the hour
of its greatest need).
Since that day the Apocalypse Wasps have come forth eleven
times.
Sometimes (fortunately) they are annihilated while still upon
the Vermillion Sea. On one occasion they rolled over half of Owl City
before the Peach was split with Goblin Technology. On another they
besieged Narcissolis itself.
Each time the wasps were broken, but only at great cost. The
terrible sucrose wrecks lay ruined on the shore and the Hideous Pits,
those that were recovered, taken to Pitville for study and control.
Small bands of Apocalypse Wasps still survive and roam the
poppy swamps and black fjords, a terror to all. Everyone hates them
because of the invasions and egg-injections and a bounty exists on
their wings.
Why the wasps come, if they were somehow summoned or
triggered by the Goblins use of the Vermillion Sea, the Goblins
will not tell. 89
PITVILLE
At the end of a track so inaccessible it looks like the graze on a
knee, hidden away between the Pigment River and tidal silence
of the Umber woods, is a star-fort with walls of smooth ceramic
and seven spiked rays. All points of egress are constantly watched.
No-one who goes in speaks out. No-one who speaks of it may return.
This is Pitville, a small, secret city built around the containment,
investigation and, conspiracists would claim – illegal worship, of
the seven Apocalypse Peach Pits recovered from the invasions of
the Chaos Wasps.
Though the gigantic peaches which bore them into our reality
were annihilated and the Chaos Wasps (for the most part) killed,
the Peach Pits could not be destroyed by any power the Moonlands
held.
They throb with Wasp Energy.
Like huge, house-sized scholars stones, they fascinate the eye and
enrapture the will. Those with no strong brain and muscular mind
shall stand enthralled before them, tracking the infinite folds
of the pit with weeping eyes. They are indestructible reactors of
Chaos Power. Only those with strong anti-Wasp personalities can
commune with them for extended periods, gaining visions of the
Red-Sun World.
Absolutely no-one is allowed near them when the Wasp Moon
rides. Of such a deed, catastrophe would be the only fruit.
Each Pit is locked separately within a specifically-built,
lead-shielded cubic (the most rational of shapes) Chaos Vault, each
within its own spiked ray.
Access is carefully controlled by the Order of the Peach, only
Penumbeetles, Invisibeetles, ‘Normalised’ Goblins (kept on a strict
diet of Sanity Pills) and the most carefully selected mortals may
go in. The risk is great for their purpose is to observe, secure, study
and perhaps, control, the Hideous Pits.
The Pits contain great power, though their Chaos Radiation is
intensely corruptive to the mind and soul
Attempts have been made to burrow or burn into the pits
with combinations of controlled Anaesthetic fire, Goblin Rays and
Cubist Drills.
One Pit only – Pit Six – has been partially cracked, and a
narrow gateway carved into its skin. In theory it could be explored
but of all who venture in, none have returned, and what things
have come from Pit Six have been utterly and horribly fucked. It is
sealed and closely guarded at all times.
Those few handfuls of Chaos Wasps who still hide in the
liminal lands seek to invade Pitville and free the Pits, but they are
not the only threat. The Pits represent such power that govern-
ments and rulers all over the Moonlands, and almost anyone of
consequence, may engage in intrigue to release a Pit, or at least
gain access to one. Chaos Energy is seductive, and the Order
90 of the Pit watch each other as much as the Nutty Horrors
in the Vaults.
There are rumours that in the depths of the poppy swamps one

The Vermillion Sea

Lost Pit has fruited and birthed a world-destroying tree and that
elements in Narcissolis secretly protect it – hoping to grow their
own apocalypse peach and re-invade the red sun world, or just eat
it.

TABLE – SCENES AT SEA

ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY ELEMENT COMPLICATION/

OPPOSITION
1 Poppy-Mining Carmine Lotus The Pteranodons from A dangerous Alteration
Bedouin (pg. 84). Poppies (pg. 84). the Red Sun World are Tear (pg. 145) surviving
highly active! hidden on the dregs of the
Pigment River
2 Normalised’ Carmine Lotus Heavy tides and waves A gang of utterly ruthless
Goblin on Sanity Wrack perfume in the Vermillion Sea! and amoral Asbestos
Pills (pg. 90). (pg. 84). Bedouin (pg. 97).

3 Member of Cache of Sanity The Wreckage-Field of A Pitville security detail

the Order of Pills (pg. 90). a huge number of of Sane Goblins, Penum-
the Peach (pg. Goblin Submersibles. beetles, Invisibeetles and
90), perhaps a Narcissans. They will
radical. do anything to hide and
protect its secrets and
location.
4 Bold Young Sorrow-Moon A Shooting War Scarred and racist Invisi‐
Invisibeetle Ghostvines (pg. between Bedouin over Beetle Knight who hunts
Knight-Errant 85). Poppy-Mining rights! the “inferior”.
(pg. 85).

5 Singing Stash or cargo Secret knowledge held Gang of Owl City

Tribespeople of wild blue only within Pitville, scumbags out “beach‐
seeking a ‘South sugar cane (pg. under super-dooper combing”. Whatever you
West Passage’. 85). high security. have, they think they have
a right to it.
6 Pretentious Ramshackle The Secret location of a Someone who got into
Narcissan (pg. 27) copper-green growing Pit of the the Gate in Pit Six and
hunting the submarine with Apocalypse Peach (pg. escaped from Pitville.
deadly Pixelated cargo of 88). A crime against all Now mad and mutating
Hippo (pg. 85). Cocaine (pg. 97) that is they wander, spreading
inside. good. their Chaos Gospel and
searching for the ‘Fruit‐
ing Tree’.
7 Aging Invisi‐ Egg(s) of the A maze of stable A self-Declared Prophet of
beetle Pteran‐ Chaos Wasps foot-ways amongst the the Wasp Moon (pg. 16) has
odon-Hunter (pg. 88). translucent wrack. One learnt to project its powers
on their last wrong step can see you even when not visible.
adventure. over

8 Psychic Pro‐ Poisonous The Translucent The Chaos Wasps! (pg. 88)
jection of a Wasp-Musk (pg. Wrack Palace of an
Punumbeetle. 88). Invisibeetle Lord (pg.
85).

91
THE PLAIN OF ANEASTHETIC FIRE
6. THE PLAIN OF ANAESTHETIC FIRE

A black boundary for a fractured land, the Plain of Anaesthetic

Fire runs north from the Vermillion Sea, its long ashen fingers
brush against the Yellow Plain and the foothills of the Whetstone
Ridge, then ride up around the borders of the AntiGoblin Empire
to the West.
How far does it flow? Who knows. The Plain is wide.
Intermittent rains reduce the ash to mud, Monkeyflowers, Iceplant,
Coreopsis and Sage burst forth from the black and hoary fertile
earth. These are fed on by paranoid animals; Pronghorn Gazelle
and Anaesthetic Hares. Only fast creatures can survive the Plains
and they must move continually or be reduced to clinker, ash and
shards of blackened bone.
On its border with the AntiGoblin Empire a few forested
islands remain in the waste, untouched for no reason other than
chance. All are perfect circles of Goblin-populated green and all
the Goblins are off their tits on drugs and complex political forms.
The waste of ash and clinker grows like a living thing, year
on year, spreading tendrils and tentacles, worming into nearby
lands, haunted by an invisible flame.
Keep to the Magnesium Paths; tenuous staked roadways
marked by tall, teetering and charred stakes from which flap flags
of flammable stuff.

THE FIRE ITSELF

The Anaesthetic Fire is a favoured metaphor for poets all over the
world, and much used in religious texts, but here in its home on
the Plain, all fear and flee whenever it is found.
The great terrors of the Anaesthetic Fire are first; that it
is almost invisible, appearing as little more than a heat-haze in
the air, second; that it has no smell other than that of your own
roasting flesh, third; that it moves and flows across the black waste
like a river of wind and last; that it cannot be felt.
The Anaesthetic Fire consumes the bodies of living things
without them ever feeling its touch. It could be burning you right
now, invisibly, as you read this.
It never entirely leaves and it never entirely goes out.
Sometimes it shrinks to a small vortex orbiting the centre of the
plains, then leaps and dances outwards on unknown vectors. It
can lie low like a grass fire and rage into huge invisible infernos.
The animals usually (but not always), sense its movements. It
rarely (but occasionally) moves at night. If the fire is high and a
fortunate rain descends, the space above the fire writhes with
curling clouds of boiling steam.
94
Praise the rain for in the rain is safety.

The Plain of Aneasthetic Fire

It has its logic. Its power and extent are not infinite. Sometimes it
tries the boundaries of the plain and burns into the surrounding
lands before quickly dying away. When it grows to a storm it must
invariably collapse back into a dull smoulder. It cannot sustain
forever.
It does not need objects physical to us, but it will burn them.
It may be burning some intangible element or be burning in a
neighbouring dimension. Those who survive the fire talk of souls
being burnt, or memories and characters and histories altered,
but it is hard to tell these stories apart from trauma. Some speak of
secret powers released by the fires touch, but this is Thugee talk.
Scars from Anaesthetic fire are swirling blue and silver.
Many empires have sent magicians and philosophers to try to seek,
control and comprehend the Anaesthetic Fire. Some send slaves
and engineers to make sure it never escapes. The relics of their
ramparts are said to circle distant parts of the Plain.

THE GOBLIN ISLANDS

No-one knows why the Anaesthetic Fire leaves perfectly circular
islands of un-burnt greenery in parts of the plains.
The Bedouin say that even the fire doesn’t want Goblins.
Sometimes islands are found burnt-over and sometimes new
circles are born in tufts of gradually expanding green. It could
simply be an accident of nature. The Goblins pay no attention to
any of it.
The islands range in size and become more common towards
the Anti-Goblin Empire in the east. The smallest are about the
size of roundabouts and the largest about half a mile in diameter.
They are always thick with dirty fast-growing trees and bushes
and utterly infested with hungry, crazy, drug-addicted Goblins
obsessed with unusual governmental forms.
The Goblins live in crappy lean-to’s and horrid burrows of
trash and old leaves. Some islands have fat heardable Isopods
and quick, green, sharp-featured pigs, the Goblins say they catch
hares and pronghorn with cunning tricks. They also trade with
the Bedouin for what they desire.
It’s not clear where the Goblins are getting all this stuff or
exactly what they are eating to support these numbers. Probably
it’s other Goblins.
Goblins need the Bedouin for trade goods, and the Bedouin,
and anyone crossing the plains, needs their islands for shelter.
Nevertheless, any period spent on a Goblin Island is a complex
and unpredictable trade-off between need, and exactly how
insane, predatory, deranged and political these particular Goblins
currently are.
95
26. CANNONPOWDER FLASK. Carved from ash antelope horn. A sign of status
amongst the Asbestos riders.

96
TABLE – GOVERNMENTS OF THE GOBLIN ISLANDS

The Plain of Aneasthetic Fire

CURRENT FORM OF WHAT ARE THEY ON? HUNGER LEVELS
GOVERNMENT
(roll secretly, Goblins will
always pretend that they
just ate)
1 Irony. Opium – dreamy and poetic. They actually really just ate.
2 Magnificence. Amphetamines (pg. 12) – Wouldn’t say no to an
manic and fast. After-Eight.
3 Poetics (Rhetocracy). Cocaine – Overconfident and
verbose.
4 A Theatre State. Heroin – strung out, Peckish.
hopefully sleeping and
fucking terrifying.
5 The Training of Small Birds. Khat – chatty, verbose,
chilled.
6 Moon Worship. Alcohol – drunk, singing, Pretty Hungry.
potentially violent.
7 Breakdancing. Weed – chill, but hungry.
8 Competitive Entrail Shrooms – trippin’.
Reading.
9 Smoke Ring Parliament. Ecstasy Equivalent – happy,
handsy, gurning, dancing,
erotic.
10 Chivalric Tournament Sniffing Glue. Ravenous.
(riding pigs or Isopods).
11 Democracy of giant piles of Ritalin equivalent – didactic,
battling goblins. obsessional and very hard
working.
12 Conspiracy (roll again for Crack (pg. 146) – get outta
the there.
surface appearance).

ASBESTOS BEDOUIN
The Bedouin wear thick robes of natural Asbestos harvested from
black clams in the cold waters of the Eastern Reach by the Singing
Tribes of the Incoherent isles.
This inflammable raiment is costly, handed down through
families and fought over in bequests. Most Bedouin will only own
one set over their entire life.
To be stripped of your Asbestos Robes is to be cast from the free
life of the Bedouin and from the Plain, out into the settled and,
(to the Bedouin), slavish hierarchies of the Moonlands. As a people,
they know neither safety nor rest, except for the madness of the
Goblin Isles but, at least politically, they are free, since no-one can
be bothered oppressing them and probably couldn’t anyway, even
if they wanted to. For only the Bedouin know the secrets of the
Anaesthetic Fire and how to safely cross the Plain. Though some
say that there is no secret and that, like most living things on
the plains, they survive primarily through luck and speed. 97
CLINKERSKIPPERS
Other than their defining robes, what the Bedouin value most
is their Xanthic Nictitating Clinkerskippers. They tame and ride
these big lizards which dash across the ash with sinuous speed,
and which can never be still. Even when they sleep one half of
their body and the whole of their tail, twitches and patters, fearful
of the Anaesthetic Fire.
A Bedouins chest wrap may carry children too young to ride,
or any un-hatched Clinkerskipper eggs, both having the same
essential value to them.

VIOLENCE
Though the Bedouin have a reputation for ruthlessness and rapid
recourse to arms, this is surely the product of prejudice. Life
on the Plains is hard, though free, and very resource-poor. The
Bedouin must by necessity stay twitchy from fear of the fire, and
many are seriously strung out on the glands of the Amphetamine
Cat, which keeps them quick, but are regrettably non-optimal for
mental health.
An Asbestos Bedouin is rarely unarmed. Most carry small
hunting bows, used for catching game and testing the boundaries
of the Anaesthetic Fire, and slender lances for hunting or duelling
in hand to hand combat.
Some wield the feared Goblin Guns, acquired via trade with
the Goblin Islands.

GOBLIN GUNS
An unreliable and sometimes ineffectual weapon, but one so
terrifying in its consequences that fear of it plays a major part in
ensuring the Asbestos Bedouin never get fucked with.
A kind of long musket with a green-tinged steel octagonal
barrel, and a stock of un-cured wood which continually leaks mild
sap, giving the Bedouin green fingertips. “Beware a green-fingered
man” the Plains-saying goes.
The gun goes off with a flash of blue fire and shoots a metal
projectile like a tiny sculpture of a goblin curled up.
The balls scream and cackle in the air as they fly. If they
embed in flesh, the Goblin-Round uncurls and capers about,
causing terrible harm

98
ON A HIT, ROLL A D4.
1. Goblin ricochet. Counts as a miss.
2. Goblin-ball expands too soon. d4 damage and all within 6 feet of
target save or take 1hp damage from shrapnel.
3. Entry/exit - d6 damage.
4. Embedded Impact. 1st round, take d6 damage. 2nd round Goblin
screams and cackles from inside body. 3rd round, Goblin bursts
out (take 2d6 damage) and climbs over body trying to pull out
target’s teeth.

27. ASBESTOS CLAMSHELL RIDING BOOT. Klinkerskipper motif.

99
IGNITION PILGRIMS
The strangest, and perhaps noblest of creatures encountered on
the plains. These wanderers dedicate themselves to tracing, and
trying to understand the Anaesthetic Fire, to track its movements
and know its heart.
They are also called ‘Magnesium Pilgrims’ for the huge rolls
of magnesium paper they often carry beneath their worn robes.

THE MAGNESIUM PATHS

The tradition of the Pilgrims is to, wherever they walk, leave
behind a marked way of visual and flammable signs. They drive
stakes into the earth, marked at the tip with magnesium strips.
When stakes run low, they make use of bone or tie their strips
to any outcropping or other projecting shard. When they run out
of magnesium paper they tie tiny fluff-balls of light kindling
together.
When the Fire invisibly arrives these signs will incandesce,
the carrying stave will burn and the glowing signal will fall like a
meteoric star. The small kindling balls will hopefully puff smoke
as the fire bites.
By such tenuous methodology are those travelling the plains
warned of the presence of the Anaesthetic Fire.
Strange terrors can result; long lines of magnesium brands
bursting forth one by one, silently, marking the invisible,
advancing heat, closing in on your position. Then you must guess
which way the fire will flow, and quickly.

THE PILGRIMS AND THE BEDOUIN

Their relationship is mixed!
The risk and the fear of the fire of the plain is the Bedouin’s
defence against the world, making them almost impossible to
govern and control, and making the Bedouin necessary to all who
wish to cross the Plain.
By making the Plain safer, the Ignition Pilgrims are abrading
this protection. But the fire is dangerous to all, even the Bedouin
and the pilgrim’s flares have saved tribes before, and some pilgrims
were Bedouin, cast out from their group, possessed by the mystery
of the fire, or simply turning to noble charity in their old age, so
the two groups persist in distant, uneasy respect.
If the Pilgrims numbers grew, and if their efforts were more
effective and comprehensive, then attitudes might change, but
they die a lot; eaten by Amphetamine Cats, Condors and Goblins,
or just scorched up, and there are never very many. Since they
walk alone, only chance, assistance and their knowledge of
100 the fire can keep them safe.
Some move continually, some keep hidden hermitages
which may be forgotten PenumBeetle ruins. Rumours say that

The Plain of Aneasthetic Fire

the only safe and habitable underground spaces in the plains are
controlled by small conclaves of pilgrims, each representing one
of the sub-cults.

CULTS OF THE IGNITION PILGRIMS

THE BROTHERS OF THE EGG

Nearly half the brothers are sisters, though all have resisted
changing the name. These are older Bedouin of a solid, honourable
disposition who have no place within their tribe or who simply
wish to separate themselves.
As the Clinkerskipper keeps its eggs within its mouth-pouch,
so do the Brothers keep the paths of the plains, tracking the fire
for the protection of all.
Though very poorly resourced they will almost always help
travellers and a few are very potent, though aged, individuals.

ADORERS OF THE FLAME

Somewhere far beyond the Moonlands a great order of sigilites
focuses their worship upon fire. Of these, a small, radical faction
particularly worship the Anaesthetic Fire.
Part of the fulfilment of this calling is a pilgrimage to the
Plains of Anaesthetic Fire where they must trace and worship
the fire itself until they experience spiritual ascension, either
through revelation, or annihilation.

DESPISERS OF ASH
That same faith has a radical faction that believes the Anaesthetic
Fire to be a direct representation of the Demiurge, the creator of
the physical universe and the being responsible for all evil.
They also send monks and seekers to the plains to study the
fire, in this case to test themselves against it, discover its nature
and perhaps even destroy it.
From the perspective of the ordinary traveller, they seem to
do pretty much exactly what the Adorers of the Flame do, yet
their intent is quite different.
There are regular sectarian conflicts between the two groups
on doctrinal matters that no-one else can understand. Sometimes
a Despiser of Ash will experience a Spiritual Crisis and become an
Adorer of Flame, or vice versa.

101
ENTROPIC PHILOSOPHERS
These ‘natural philosophers’ eschew all spiritual reasons for
running about on the plains.They are sometimes former, or current
thaumaturges, scientists, poets or explorers. All are obsessed with
tracking and understanding the Anaesthetic Fire for what they
call “rational reasons”.
They all carry extensive papers and when two meet they will
exhaustively compare notes and argue with each other.
All regard the religious fire-chasers with some condescension,
though their behaviour around the fire is exactly as hypnotically
adoring and potentially self-destructive. Most are certain they
will be done within a year. Few ever leave.

ANAESTHETIC THUGEES
A tribe, or a cult, or a conspiracy, or a family, or a secret gang, or
something of all of those.
The Thugees are murderers who pose as some more-gentle
Pilgrim group to deliberately lead travellers to their death.
Why they choose to do that here is not clear, as almost every
other place that exists is better suited to doing crimes in.
No-one is absolutely certain the Thugees are really real
though everyone is secretly afraid they are. Legend says they seek
a way to control, and even spread the fire. That they have been
spared by it, but changed by the experience, and now serve it, or
believe they do.

AMPHETAMINE CATS
A grey-black cat like a knobbly strung-out Cheetah.
The apex of the food chain on the Plains of Anaesthetic Fire, the
Amphetamine Cat processes unknown herbs which it eats secretly
into black amphetamine glands that cluster around its lips and
genitals.
They are not a pleasing sight.
The cats can activate the glands, driving themselves to insane
levels of rage and acceleration. This can have a number of negative
side effects, including running so fast they break their own limbs,
running into a rock, trying to attack and kill a rock, running right
into the Anaesthetic Fire, biting off their own legs by mistake or
just having a heart attack.
The glands of the Amphetamine Cat are valuable, and can
be harvested from a dead specimen, (so long as the glands are
plump). If eaten unprocessed by a human (or fed to a nictitating
Clinkerskipper) they provide a massive adrenaline boost,
102 and The also possibly kill the user.
dried glands are a valuable trade good and even a
kind of currency amongst the Bedouin.

The Plain of Aneasthetic Fire

Male Cats have near human-level intelligence, they listen in
the night as people talk, though still with animal desires. This is
why the Asbestos Bedouin will rarely speak the truth in darkness.
There is no known upper limit to their growth. Some are as
large as Lions and the glands cluster around their mouths and
genitals like thick fields of berries. They live in dug-out caverns
strewn with bones and the imperishable wrappings of eaten
Bedouins and seek to dominate as much territory as possible.
The legends of Blind Regrets, said to be the oldest and largest
of the cats, talk of something almost the size of a shire horse,
capable of wiping out an entire Goblin Island in a night (though
that could just have been the Goblins themselves).
Although the males are much more feared due to their size
and aggressiveness, the female packs are probably more efficient
hunters, and a more dangerous threat.

MELANCHOLIC CONDORS
The Condors are too sad to fly. They lair in cracks and caverns
high up in the Whetstone Ridge and send their gloomy shadows
skidding out over the AntiGoblin Empire (who praise them, as the
Condors not only eat Goblins, but make them sad), and across the
Plain of Anaesthetic Fire.
The Condors and huge and their shadows likewise so. Looking
up from below it is impossible to tell if the Condor is present, or
its shadow only.
When they find a likely target; something solitary and
separated from its group, the shadow gusts down and settles over,
wreathing them in sadness and twilight.
These poor damned individuals then wander the Plain,
growing ever more morose and distraught, surrounded by gloom
and avoided by all, until they collapse to the cold earth weeping
dry tears.
The Condor, sensing this, will set out from its lair, gloomily
flapping its way across the AntiGoblin Empire (to the cheers of
any AntiGoblins who see it), zeroing in on the shadow-caul’d
individual, descending, circling, cloaking them a second time
with its enormous cinereous wings, and crouching down to tear
open the softer elements of its now-suicidal prey. Pausing to sigh
in long wheezing moans and, in some cases, temporarily collapsing
out of ennui before struggling back to its feet and continuing its
horrible work.
Fear of the Condors shadow, and its terrible taste, keep most
creatures from attacking it. Nothing wants to be the next victim of
its umbral shroud, all except for some of the larger Male Amphet-
amine Cats who will simply attack it out of rage, because it has
trespassed their territory, and Goblins, who will attack and eat
anything.

103
TO ESCAPE THE CONDORS CURSE
Kill the Condor – If the bird dies its shade will perish.
Night-Time Bait and Switch – In the worlds shadow, shadows lose
their shape and power.
Close to pitch dark it becomes possible for a clever thief to
‘steal’ the original victim from the Cinerous shroud and replace
them with something of equivalent size and mass.
Often this involves dressing a Pronghorn, young Clinker-
skipper or a pair of anaesthetised Goblins in the victim’s clothes.
When daylight comes, the shadow (hopefully) clings to the new
target.
Amphetamine Overload – Dangerous but it can drive the shadow
off.
Party Animals – The Condors loathe crowds, noise, music and jollity
and any sufficiently loud and long celebration around the victim
might drive off the Shroud.
It can be difficult to attain the resources, guests or jollity
on the Plains of Anaesthetic Fire, and the whole thing will be a
nightmare for the depressed victim.
Goblin Blood Transfusion – this always works but does usually
result in some Goblinification. And getting the blood and/or
Goblin can be an issue.

104
28. IGNITION PILGRIM IDOL. Animal Bone. Pilgrims will often collect blackened bones
after the Fire passes, paint them and give them to Beduoin tribes in exchange for favours.
These are later used to establish relations with other passing Pilgrims.

105
TABLE – SITUATIONS ON THE PLAIN OF
ANAESTHETIC FIRE
ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY ELEMENT COMPLICATION/
OPPOSITION
1 Asbestos Bedouin Goblin The bone-strewn A manipulative
(pg. 97). ‘Magnificence’ temple-lair of the and very wealthy
Governmental Anaesthetic Thugee Narcissan trader (pg.
This person or hat (pg. 120). (pg. 102). 27), along with their
group is; thugs and dupes.
2 Goblin Moon Idol. The Anaesthetic Fire! A lone beggar.
1-2. Weaker (pg. 94) Actually an extremely
than the PCs. powerful and evil
Cryomaniac (pg.
124). Perhaps strong
enough to defy the
Anaesthetic Fire (pg.
94) itself.
3 Cache or Cargo Gang of completely An Ontomorphic
3-4. As Powerful.
of deadly Goblin blitzed heatstruck Manticore (pg. 133)
Guns (pg. 98). Goblins who are has crossed the
convinced whatever AntiGoblin Empire
you are doing is their to hunt. Currently
business. a passing sense of
5-6. More
Ennui.
Powerful than
4 the PCs. Clinkerskipper A Penumbeetle Goblin Penny-Fathing
Eggs (pg. 98). Pilgramage (pg. 60) and Deaths Head cavalry
its psychic backwash brigade under orders
from the P.O.G.R.A.P.
but seems; (pg. 74).
5 1-2. Much Cache or cargo Heavy rains causing Crazed AntiGoblin
weaker than of Black Clam dangerous flash-floods (pg. 110) crusade
they are. Asbestos (pg. but, paradoxically, seeking hidden
44) from the highlighting the PosiGoblins (pg. 110).
3-4. As they are. Incoherent Isles position of the Anaes- Headed by Scythe-
(pg. 40). thetic Fire (pg. 94). Wileding AntiGoblin
5-6. More Esploradoj Inquisitor
powerful than (pg. 118) in a Safety-
they really are. Dome-Palanquin,
accompanied by elite
Malakaj Kudroj (pg.
117) and hired bandits.
6 Desperate Victim Magic whistle Escaped slaves from the The Seven Deadly
of the Melancholic which tames the AntiGoblin Empire in Bedouin (pg. 97), a
Condor (pg. 102). Clinker‐skipper need of help. mercenary group,
(pg. 98). each expert in one
of the following:
tracking, the gun, the
bow, the lance, the
sword, the Anaes-
thetic Fire (pg. 94) and
detecting lies.
7 Crazed Theign (pg. Bedouin Weapons, A Plains-War between Caravan of Wealthy
128) and retainers. lances, bows, and Bedouin Tribes! Narcissan Tourists (in
robes. fact a Mirror Master
(pg. 32) and their
servants in disguise).

106
 The Plain of Aneasthetic Fire
8 Extremely civil A huge stash of Wandering Invis‐ Alpha Male Amphet-
Goblins on Sanity Magnesium Flags ibeetle, a Lone amine Cat (pg. 12).
Pills. (pg. 110). Blade against the
Darkness.

ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY ELEMENT COMPLICATION/

OPPOSITION
9 Caravan from afar Carmine Lotus The secret to a Clowder of Female
searching for the Wrack (pg. 84) Hidden Hermitage of Amphetamine Cats
‘Great Goblin extract from the the Ignition Pilgrims (pg. 12).
Market’. Vermilion Sea. (pg. 100).
10 Ignition Pilgrim: Quick, green, An armed embassy of Shadow of a Melan-
sharp-featured the Invisible Ambas- cholic Condor (pg. 102).
and suspicious sadors (pg. 160), with
1-2 Egg Brother (pg. pig (pg. 88). Puppets and chariots.
101),
11 Jar of ripe Crazy-Ass Goblin party Actual Melancholic
Amphetamine meant to dispel the Condor (pg. 102).
3-4 Adorer of the Cat Glands power of the Melan-
Flame (pg. 101), (pg. 12). cholic Condor (pg. 102)
from a victim.
12 A fragment of the Goblin DrugDeal The Chaos Wasps!
5-6 Despiser of
Anaesthetic Fire gone horribly wrong, (pg. 88)
Ash (pg. 101),
bound within a No Country For Old
glass dome. Men-style.
7 Entropic
Philosopher,

8 Anaesthetic
Thugee (secret)
(pg. 102)

107
THE ANTIGOBLIN EMPIRE
7. THE ANTIGOBLIN EMPIRE

Bordered to the West by the Plains of Anaesthetic Fire, to the

South and East by the Whetstone Ridge and fading northwards
into the Inverse Forest, the Antigoblin Empire is a small, calm
polity, separate from much of the Moonlands.
This is fortunate, for if Goblin and AntiGoblin physically meet,
they instantly annihilate each other in a blue-tinged spherical
compression wave that destroys everything in a five-metre radius
and irradiates the area with high-intensity Cackle Waves.
The Anti-Goblins are at permanent, absolute and very distant,
war with the Goblins, who they call “PosiGoblins”.
They are desperately afraid of actually coming into direct
physical contact with a PosiGoblin and continually paranoid about
the possibility, or reality, of Goblin infiltration. PosiGoblins are
their greatest hate and greatest fear. They will do anything to
strike at them and anything to avoid them. They are also low-key
obsessed with gazing secretly on naked PosiGoblins, though this is
illegal in the Empire.

THE ANTIGOBLINS
The AntiGoblins are big, fat, red Ogre-Babies who perambulate
unsteadily on ripe little legs. They have round, stubby little party-
sausage fingers and plump palms, warm and wet with drops of
sweat. The face of an AntiGoblin is old, shrivelled and small like a
plastic bag found behind a shelf.
All AntiGoblins carry Long-Tongs, their primary culture-tool
and last line of defence against PosiGoblins. These are strong, long,
iron tongs the length of a man which they use to grab and grasp
things which trouble or interest them like giant chopsticks. These
are of great utility to the AntiGoblins because their sweaty, fat
hands are so poor at picking things up.
The AntiGoblins are hideously strong creatures. Their
Long-Tongs can crush a skull. They can snatch a grown man right
off the ground at full extension and carry him around indefinitely
at arm’s-length. They can squash a human till they crack and
burst. AntiGoblins wear cloaks and tall cylindrical hats.
Hat size is all in the AntiGoblin Empire; a hats length, radius
and magnificence shows each AntiGoblins relative logic-domi-
nance and progression towards ego-death.
Pedantic, intelligent, unimaginative materialistic reduc-
tionists, they believe that the ‘self’ does not exist. Their only other
clothes are big nappies and thick yellow wellingtons. They are
EXTREMELY SERIOUS BEINGS. Do not MOCK them. They will
kill you with tongs.

110
ADDRESSING ANTIGOBLINS

The Antigoblin Empire

AntiGoblins speak with low, fluid, monotone voices and anguished
expressions on their very-ancient faces.
Obviously it’s important to be aware of, and recognise, the
capacity of their hat.
It’s also important to remember that, since AntiGoblins do not
believe in the construct of “identity” including their own, they speak
about “themselves” in the third person, as a collection of labelled
heuristics temporarily sharing three-dimensional coherency,
which they regard as a more fundamentally-true form of address;
“The epiphenemon labelled as.. greets you” and
“The gestalt collected under the function of ... acknowledges
awareness of the other.”
See Index (pg. 187) for these ‘names’!

GEOGRAPHY OF THE EMPIRE

NORTH – THE INVERSE FOREST
This is a Security Zone – Beware!
Anyone approaching the Inverse Forest from the South will
encounter the apparatus of the AntiGoblin AgiBuisness Security
State. The forest itself is divided up into plantations (“flotations”)
each owned by different AntiGoblins, and patrolled by Slave-
catchers, Giant Shoebills and their minders and roving AntiGoblin
patrols.
The trees of the inverse forest are all upside down. Their
tops merely graze the earth and their roots tangle in interlocked
escher-patterns deep into the sky, far beyond easy sight.
In the heights (depths) of the tree roots, a parasitic vine grows
a mistletoe-white Antigravity Pear which, if eaten or processed into
cider, gives the power of floating, for a time. The pear also dries and
keeps reasonably well, making it an excellent trade good.
In fact the “Sky Apple”, and its juice, “Sky-Apple Cider” is
almost the only major thing the AntiGoblins produce that anyone
else wants, it is their Empires major source of wealth and power.
The AntiGoblins are too big and horrid to climb into the
escher-maze of the tree’s roots so they employ, or in some cases
enslave, depending on their reasoning about such matters, huge
numbers of workers to do so for them.
The AntiGoblin plantation owners patrol the ground level with
‘tame’ Giant Shoebills, the only animals the AntiGoblins seem to
like.
There is always work in the Flotations for extra floaters, slaves,
slave-catchers, security staff, Shoebill minders and all manner
of other things.
111
THE INVADERS
The AntiGoblins fear creatures they call the “Anti-Gravity
Invaders”; translucent sky-dwelling balloon people who wrap
themselves in chains and ‘sink’ down to the plantations to abduct
staff, steal pears, kill Shoebills and foil AntiGoblin plans. Possibly
in combination with, or under the influence of, PosiGoblins.
It is highly likely that the Invaders are not real in any way,
no-one has ever seen them, and if they were real, it’s not clear
how they would be any kind of tactical threat, being made of
translucent balloons. Nevertheless, they are spoken of often by
sky-planters and their complete absence from measurable reality
casts a strange pall in the midst of the AntiGoblins, causing them
to be feared in a mysterious way, as if the very concept of them
were disturbing.

THE APPLE FACTORIES

Between the Inverse Forest in the North and the Azure City are
the ‘Apple Factories’. Named for the ‘Sky Apples’ (actually Pears)
these house the refineries which squeeze the Sky-Apples and
package the Pears.
A difficult and dangerous deal! For the gasses and juice of
the process which once worked with gravity, work now against it,
exhibiting a range of explosive and adherent qualities.

TABLE – CHAOS AT THE APPLE FACTORY

Things are But then.. And there’s an Not to mention this

PRETTY SERIOUS CATASTROPHE!! ADDITIONAL SECRET ELEMENT!!
PROBLEM!
1 An inspection by a A herd of Cavalry A loose shipment A bound Cryomaniac
member of the Esploradoj Procoptodon (pg. 114) – of extremely angry (pg. 124) used to create
– the Scythe-Wielding TWO METRE HIGH monkeys for Place ice cubes for cider
AntiGoblin Inquisition! KANGEROOS, have Prime in the Azure tasting is now loose!
(pg. 118) Their hat is gotten into a shipment City. Why were
VERY TALL and they are of AMPHEATIME CAT they stored here!
EXTREMELY SERIOUS. GLANDS. How was this
allowed to happen!
2 A crack corps of the Slave Worker eruption!! A shipment of trees Apple Bandits (pg.
deadly Malakaj Kudroj Usually kept blitzed and trunks from 96) are on the loose!
(pg. 117) – the absurdist on cheap AntiGravity the woods of the Deniable State-Actor
Joke police of the Azure Cider and made to Inverse Forest (pg. professional thieves,
City, are searching for sleep weightless in vast 111) has gotten loose horribly misinformed
PosiGoblin Infiltraitors dormitories tied like and is bouncing by the name of the
(pg. 110)! There is nothing balloons (to save space), around inside the Factory!
funny about this! If you storage failures mean factory!
are laughing you are half-asleep drunken slaves
probably a PosiGoblin. workers are bouncing
about in great numbers!!

112
 The Antigoblin Empire
Things are But then.. And there’s an Not to mention
PRETTY SERIOUS CATASTROPHE!! ADDITIONAL this SECRET
PROBLEM! ELEMENT!!
3 Bandit attack! Shoebill Stampede!! Burst Reactor! – A Secret Pict
Bobbin Ten-Goblins The (formerly) cider-fumes leak out infiltrator!
(pg. 115) is here for tame(ish) Giant invisibly filling all Underneath their
the Pears! And he Shoebills of the slave around with strange makeup is paint!
has brought his elite worker control corps AntiGravity Dreams! They want the
Goblin-Armoured have got loose and are secrets of the Juice
Procoptodon-Riding stampeding through and have a supply
Cavalry Corps with the factory! They are of Pigment-River
him (pg. 114)! extremely violent water and a deadly
creatures!! Tear in a jar (pg.
144) bound to their
command!

4 The Factory foreman It’s the Anti-Gravity JUICERS have Several workers are
(an AntiGoblin Invaders! Translucent infiltrated the in fact human-
(pg. 110) with a Sky-Dwelling Factory! Deadly shaped automata
three-tiered hat) BALOON PEOPLE (pg. POSIGOBLINS (pg. piloted by pairs
is escorting the 112)! They are real and 110) disguised as of Goblins from
Factory Owner climbing down to get ANTIGOBLINS (pg. the Large Goblin
(Six-Tiered Hat, back their pears!! 110) via the imbibing Collider! The
ABSOLUTE Logic of a SECRET JUICE! perfect spies!
Dominance (pg. 120))
on a viewing. I hope
nothing goes wrong!

5 A Crazed Theign IMPLOSION – the Explosive (or One AntiGoblin

(pg. 128) is about to AntiGravity fumes implosive) rain of (pg. 110) is really a
make a Huge Order have ignited AntiGravity Cider Posigoblin addicted
for Cider, it will causing a dangerous (pg. 112) causes mass to Sanity Pills
be fine so long as compression wave and gravity-inversion! (pg. 90) and Juice,
the OBSESSIVELY roiling iceflame!! Grab something or convinced they
RATIONALISITIC the roof is now the are actually an
Antigoblins (pg. 110) floor! And it’s giving AntiGoblin! But
can pretend not way under the the juice and pills
to see the Theigns pressure!! are wearing off...
TOTAL INSANITY.

6 A team of slave CACKLE WAVES!! IT’S A CHAOS A team of cunning

hunters contract A massive emission WASP LICKING SMUGGLERS
enforcers are somewhere sweeps THE COAGULATED from the Lollipop
tracking escaped thru the factory UPWARDS- Hills (pg. 114) are
slaves unwise seeding St Gobs fire POINTING CIDER carrying out a
workers and think across the workings, ICICLES!!! scam to swap some
they are hiding in striking mania into AntiGravity Pears
the Factory! every heart and (pg. 111) with just
irradiating all with normal Pears!
Raw Trick Energy!! It’s
the Cacklocalypse!

113
29. ISOLATION PALANQUIN. Believed to have once been used by the great Antigoblin
cartographer, Concept Grasper, who traversed and mapped the Moonlands without
ever leaving his chair.

114
SOUTH – THE LOLLIPOP HILLS

The Antigoblin Empire

Other than their tongs, their perfect Azure City of Place-Prime
and their continual 3rd-hand war with all Goblins everywhere,
the only major expenditure of the AntiGoblins is their continual
urge and desire to plant and prune an entire section of their
nation so that every plant forms a perfect sphere.
This is AntiGoblin leisure time. They come often to the
Lollipop Hills, boinging along sombrely on enslaved Procoptodon
and carrying huge long clippers, to prune the trees and plants.
The area is large and the AntiGoblins few in number. They
will not allow anyone else to prune the trees.
When a plant is pruned into a perfect sphere the AntiGoblins
will clap their hands, say “Oh. Wonderful.” and almost smile.
No sooner is one part ‘perfect’ that another has fallen into
disarray.
Because of its size and unpopulated condition, the area of the
Lolipop hills is the primary hiding place of any radical or illegal
element in the Empire, though all such elements must move
continually in order to stay ahead of the pruning AntiGoblins.
Escaped slaves will hide here beneath the near-perfect spheres.

Smugglers will invariably congregate in the Lollipop Hills. Since

much of the trade that moves through the Empire is based,
ultimately, on contact with Goblins on either end, almost every
merchant is also technically a drug dealer and smuggler. This
results in massive taxation, paranoia and culture war regarding
the trade amongst the Anti-Goblins.
A radical cell of PosiGoblin Infiltrators have squeezed a
juice that can turn anyone, physically, into the simulation of an
AntiGoblin. These “juicers” wage a continual and covert terroristic
war to destroy the AntiGoblin Empire and the Grand Catalyst,
using themselves as bombs. Of course they are largely despised by
the smugglers, escaped slaves and bandits all of whom are more
concerned with the day-to-day survival of their shadow-economy
than “political issues”.
The Lollipop Hills are also full of Bandits and Robbers. Their
supposed ‘leader’, or at least the guy that nobody fucks with, is
‘Bobbin Ten-Goblins’, a huge man who continually wears armour
consisting of ten live goblins trapped all over his body, tied to him
even while he sleeps.
The AntiGoblins loathe this disorder but will not spoil their
hills with fortifications or settlements. Instead they consistently
hire mercenaries, thugs and security consultants to patrol and
“clean up the Lollipop Hills”. Often using forces hired from the
Lollipop Hills = LOGIC.
Purges are common. The slaves, smugglers, bandits and
politically radical PosiGoblins are always on the move to escape
the advancing forces, unless they have changed employment, in
which case they are now the advancing forces.
115
 30. ANTIGOBLIN PHRENOLOGICAL BUST. In the Empire it is believed that the
higher one’s head, the furthur one’s thoughts are from the Goblinous tendencies of the
hindbrain and visual cortex.
116
PLACE PRIME – THE AZURE CITY

The Antigoblin Empire

Centre of the Empire and the (regularly) beating heart of
AntiGoblin life and culture is the Azure City. Here, everything
that can be square, (doors, rooms, tiles, paving slabs, glasses, meals,
plates, etc), is square, and everything that can be a shade of blue,
(see previous list) is a shade of blue.
Here is Logic, Calm, Pure Reason and ABSOLUTELY NO
POSIGOBLINS EVER.

THE GATES
These are guarded by the Malakaj Kudroj – the Joke Police.
These expert human absurdists perform ridiculous antics
and strange performance art with deep intensity before everyone
seeking entry to Place Prime.
Truly, no hidden Goblin, or even anyone with Goblinish blood,
can stand easily beneath the ridiculous inquisition of the Malakaj
Kudroj. They are utterly ruthless in their absurdism.
Within the Azure City, at the square centre of its extreme-
ly-exactly-square central square, is the Fortress of the Grand
Catalyst. A Cubical Palace wherein dwells the unquestioned ruler
of all AntiGoblins.

FORTRESS OF THE GRAND CATALYST

The Grand Catalyst is the most extremely logical, and least
Goblinish being in any reality. Nowhere is there anyone less like
a Goblin, or a more-pure AntiGoblin.
Few are worthy even to approach the Grand Catalyst, though
even attempting to do so can be ennobling. The Cubical Castle is
separated into Levels with advancement in each level requiring
greater powers of LOGIC and REASON and increasingly LOW
levels of BACKGROUND GOBLINOSITY. (Most living things have
trace elements of Goblinosity).
To advance a level is to be PROVEN LOGICAL and to be
allowed to wear an even-larger hat. This alone is reason enough to
seek entry.

LEVEL ONE – THE HALLS OF THE ABSURD

A maze of rooms patrolled by the elite performance artists of the
Malakaj Kudroj and filled with surreal and absurdist art of the
most remarkable kinds. AntiGoblins looking to make a deal will
often come here to display their own lack of Goblinness and to
check for any Goblinish aspect in their potential partners.

117
LEVEL TWO – THE BEASTLY DISQUISITION
To progress further each individual entrant must step inside one
of a series of rooms, totally alone.
Within is an angry monkey. They must calm the monkey using
only Pure Reason. If the monkey dies, another will be added. Only
once the monkey has reached a reasonable level of calm will it
cough up the ceramic key needed to pass on to Level Three.

LEVEL THREE – THE SCYTHES OF ILLUSION

Both the name for this level and of the military faction of the
Esploradoj – the AntiGoblin Inquisition who control it.
Supplicants must meditate while the Esploradoj patrol around
them and shout random rationalist questions and swing their
scythes. Fear, flinching or an incorrect response means instant
decapitation. Those who answer wisely may pass to Level Four.

LEVEL FOUR – THE CONCLAVE OF EQUATIONS

This is the AntiGoblin Parliament. Anyone capable of passing
the challenges may attend, but the job of the Conclave is only to
interpret the law in the words passed down from the Thrones
of Ego Death in the higher levels. The walls of the Conclave are
all chalkboards for only laws that can be proven to be logical are
allowed to be enacted.
To leave the Conclave and move upwards, take the Stairs of
Ascension which, allegedly, the truly wise will be able to levitate
up while meditating.

LEVEL FIVE – THE INQUISITION OF PENITENTS

This is the lair and headquarters of the Esploradoj, the most fanat-
ically Anti-Goblin AntiGoblins in the Anti-Goblin Empire.
The Inquisitors keep actual Goblins imprisoned floating in
superthick test tubes and glass tesseracts, questioning them to
learn more of their nature. The Goblins usually die of boredom
before anything else kills them. None of them are actually
penitent.
Traditionally, the right to ascend to Level Six, the Thrones of
Ego Death, is only given to those who are able to force a captured
Goblin to Recant its Goblinness. Though the Esploradoj are able to
give Temporary Access should they deem it necessary.

118
LEVEL SIX – THE THRONES OF EGO DEATH

The Antigoblin Empire

Here are the endlessly-meditating Ascended Minds of the
AntiGoblin Empire.
They do indeed float while chilling in a Lotus position. They
listen carefully to the occasional gnomic statements of the Grand
Catalyst and translate his words in turn. Their statements are
recorded by the Esploradoj and taken down to the Conclave of
Equations, presumably unaltered.
As to what gives access to Level Seven, who can say? No
non-AntiGoblin has ever proceeded beyond this level.

LEVEL SEVEN – THE ARK OF THE GRAND CATALYST

Here, locked in eternal meditation is the first AntiGoblin to free
themselves from Goblinhood through PURE THOUGHT.
They sit veiled within their Ark.
The Grand Catalyst may seem unaware of what happens but,
being purely and perfectly logical, it is assumed they are capable
of predicting any element of the material world and will simply
speak when it is necessary they do so.
Here, haloed in unrelentingly regular hyper-glyphs
emanating from their trans-natural omnilogical meditations, their
eyes like weeping cigarette burns in an old rug, robed in matrices
of solved equations and tumbling with the infinite weariness of
the infinitely-right, is the Catalyst, prophet of the AntiGoblin
Empire, nemesis of the P.O.G.R.A.P and Most Logical Mortal Being
The catalyst still has the Posioblin they once were growing
out of them.
The PosiGoblins left leg grows directly into the Catalysts huge
right arm, as if the PoisGoblin were an insane glovepuppet.
This Goblin, should anyone approach to hear its insane
whisperings, claims that the Grand Catalyst is just a huge animate
radiation tumour that grew out of them and took over.
The Catalyst’s hat is really big.

119
31. ANTIGOBLIN ADJUSTABLE HATS. It is important to have as high a hat as possible
in Antigoblin society, but unseemly to have a larger hat than someone of higher status
- therefore there are constant processes of measuring and adjusting one’s hat height to
the appropriate social context.

120
THE WHETSTONE RIDGE
8.THE WHETSTONE RIDGE

VERTICAL ARCHIPELAGO – THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE

RIDGE
The ridge runs north from the Yellow Plain slicing up the
Moonlands like a big pizza piece. To its West lies the AntiGoblin
Empire and on its East, the Painted Plane.
Beyond its southerly foothills, like an old slice of salami dropped
on a sock, is Owl City, the ancient centre of the Moonlands, and
within it, like a crystal-bright wine-gum adhered mysteriously to
the centre of salami slice, is the Necropolis of Glass; final resting
place for the Illusory Lords of Narcissolis.
Northwards the ridge cuts the land into an ever-steepening
coagulation of hills.

THE ARROW VALLEYS

The Ridgelands are not an easy place to enter.
The Arrow Valleys; straight, slender ravines, run as neatly as an
arrow flies and are cut from the Ridge as a whole by the enormous
straightness of their stone and scree-sloped sides.
Narrow, steep rock-cut paths and vertical climbs with cut
hand-holds are all that link the valleys to the Ridge itself. Where
nature has provided no barrier, human craft has thrown up vast
drystone walls pierced by low black passages.

THE PEAK-TOP DAEMONS OF HYPERBLUE ICE

Upon each mountain peak an Ice Daemon meditates in Lotus
position.
The Demons have been meditating for a geological age, far
beyond the record of any sentient species, each encrusted in a
thick caul of Sociopathic Hyperblue Ice.
They are difficult to see clearly through the Ice and
occasionally crusaders, cultists and academics try to thaw one out,
or burrow in to get at it. They always get horribly frozen and the
Crazed Theigns work to stop any organised attempts.
The Demons exist on the ridge in the same relation as dormant
volcanoes to other cultures. One day, presumably, they will ‘go off’,
but since this will happen on a geological scale of time, the level
of risk for any individual day is very slight.

124
RIDGE VILLAGES AND THE SETTLED BAND

The Whetstone Ridge

Almost all of the population, agriculture and economy of the
Ridge is held in a band of heather and gorse above the Meta-Mon-
ster-Haunted, but unpopulated valleys, and below the line of
Sociopathic Hyperblue Ice.
The moors and scrublands of the Ridge support herders.
Rugged sheep, Goats and Bristle Pigs are moved across the maze
of ridgelines by the Intelligent Shepherds.
Yet, in a few places, isolated lakes, crossroads of mountain
paths, defensible sites, natural springs or simple chance mean
that villages and a handful of small towns exist.
These places are always built on a slope, (everything is on a
slope), with densely packed houses, roofs and walls piled upon
each other, surrounded by terraced and built-up fields growing
the careful crops.
Each Village has a library, a Keep for a Crazed Theign, a huge
Pig House and one or more fortified Orchards.
The main source of village pride and group identity is its
Mystery Play and the size of its largest Bristly Pig.

THE MYSTERY PLAYS

The Mystery Plays were originally ordered by the Crazed Theigns
but have transformed into a strong independent tradition. They
involve a redemptionist re-telling of the betrayal and casting-out
of the Lunar Aristocracy of Owl City (at that time ‘Moon City’),
and the destruction of the Moon Throne by the treacherous and
evil rationalistic mystery cults of the Masons.
Though the cults are now in ruins, along with Owl City, the
plays all end with the ‘fall’ of the feudal lords and their heroic
and noble suffering, and not with the present-day situation.
Due to the popularity of the plays (all villagers either take
part or watch in a day-long performance once a year, just after the
dangers of Thaw and the Cryomaniacal Dreams have ended), most
Whetstoners do have the vague but strong sense that the Crazed
Theigns are and should be the rightful rulers of Owl City, and all
of the Moonlands, and that the Masonic cults are evil and insidious
institutions. (Though the Masons themselves are long gone).

BRISTLY PIGS
The other main source of village selfhood is their Bristly Pig.
The pride taken in these creatures has led to an arms-race
breeding programme and resulted in some dangerously large,
nigh un-controllable Bristly Pigs which exist as a kind of porcine
nuke at the centre of each settlement. Everyone is quietly terrified
of what happens if the Pig gets out or accesses the fermenting
apples.
125
APPLES AND RITUALISED APPLE THEFT
While the pigs, though dangerous, are civic business, at the state
level the pride and power of each ‘Barony’ is shown in the quality,
number and defensibility of its apples.
Most crops can only be grown on the Ridge through terracing
and building-up flat areas of ground with drystone walling and
moving earth. Arable land of this kind is a rare and treasured
resource, built over generations. This is probably what initially
began the fortification of valuable crops. All that was required
was extending the supporting wall above the level of the plough.
Though the Crazed Theigns would prefer more noble, glorious,
violent and continual warfare between the Ridge-Dwellers, they
have been persuaded to forgo this (essentially the Intelligent
Shepherds refused to engage in organised intra-human violence
of any kind), for a culture of ritualised apple-theft.

126 32. CEREMONAL APPLE BASKET. Often used as convenient way of

carrying out ritualised apple theft between theigndoms
Though this began as a harmless alternative to war, the Ridge

The Whetstone Ridge

Dwellers may have been affected by the rule of the Theigns
more than they know. There has been a massive intensification of
apple cultivation, apple security, apple horticulture, guard dogs,
‘Apple Knights’, security-bees, guard geese, silver-tusked ‘stick
pigs’, apple mafias and the always-feared, sometimes state-actor
deniable Apple Bandits.
Magic apples are obsessed over and sought out. Treasure is
melted into golden apples. The currency of the Ridge is called
‘The Apple’ and cider and apple pie are high-status, even sacred,
foods.
Fears and threats over apple security are a major source of
inter-Barony conflict.
People on the Whetstone Ridge will not shut up about fucking
apples.

LIST – MAGICAL APPLES

1. An apple which can imprison the spirt and form of a defeated
monster, bound to the owner till the apple rots.
2. An apple which gives the eater the equivalent strength of who,
or whatever, they last kissed. (With tongues).
3. An apple which causes the eater to fall in love with the first
musical instrument they see. They will of course also become a
master of this instrument.
4. An apple that lets the eater charm Bristly Pigs with their
whistling.
5. An apple which gives the eater the power to walk through
dreams for one night.
6. An apple which restores transformed beings to their original
state.
7. An apple which when planted will eventually sprout into a tree
of silver swords. Each sword when ripe will cut the head from one
evil being with ease.
8. An apple which when eaten, allows the consumer to transform
into a particular weather effect, only once, but for as long as they
like.
9. An apple which gives the eater the power to transform into an
Apple Tree at will! With all the powers of a tree!
10. An apple which, when polished and lit by moonlight allows the
bearer to scry their enemies in its shine.
11. An apple which when eaten, will cure any madness, especially
the sad and destructive Apple-addiction which curses so many.
12. An apple which leads the way to other magic apples!

127
THE CRAZED THEIGNS
Known in other lands for their lun(e)atic embassies carrying
irrational gifts and making impossible demands, the Theigns are
largely tolerated by the people of the Whetstone Ridge since, in
their insanity, they have relatively little to do with them compared
to any other ruler, as well as for their usefulness in combatting
the Manticores.
Once these families of the lost Lunar Aristocracy served the
Moon Throne and ruled Owl City (then Moon City) with a mad
hand, keeping it in feudal ruin. Eventually, however, they were
driven off and displaced by the covert cults of the Mystery Masons,
who worshipped Reason.
After the revolution they retreated to the ridge, to gaze
impotently down on the developing lands, now freed from their
lunatic rule, and to plan mad plans about re-taking a nation that
did not want them back.
From the Whetstone Ridge they watched the Master Masons
fall, the creation of the Painted Plane, the Rise of the Goblins from
the Vermillion Sea and the advancing terror of the Chaos Wasps.
They watched the collapse of the Moonlands into a mess of
fractured realities as crazed as the surface of the Gackling Moon
itself and the mass-addiction to Goblin Weed, smoked in the
Goblin Pipes.
At night, there are a handful of places on the ridge where
a traveller can look down onto Owl City and the Yellow Plain
beneath the light of a broken moon, and where the blaze of Narcis-
solis through its wall of glass seems to merge with the guttering
lamps of Owl City, and where the Painted Plane and the Maw are
near-invisible in the dark, and the watcher can imagine what the
greatness of that past time might have been.
These mad lords now look down upon a rubbished land, almost
as disordered as their own minds. Yet none have made any move to
return to their, much obsessed-over, former country.
Though each of the Crazed Theigns is rarely more powerful
than a small Knight or Village Squire, they refer to their domains
as Baronies or Dukedoms and each has a store of ancient items,
relics, tales, death-masks, heraldic devices and general expatriate
sorrows. They affect a high mien and a tragic aspect which lends
them impressive gravitas.
Most of their clothes and heraldry involve apples, goats, Bristly
Pigs, Goblins (being crushed and killed), Manticores, Foxes, Gold
and Silver apples, strange furs, large conical hats, silver-bound
pseudo-books, harps, rich manticore hides, Bristle-Pig coats, apple
pies, cider jugs, ceremonial pig-goads, and apples.
Rather than a jester, most retain a dour psychotherapist as a
close adviser.

128
 The Whetstone Ridge

33. MOONSHADE THEIGHN CROWN. Once belonging to the Crazed Theign entitled
‘The Judge’. Considered unpredictable enough already by her costumier, the crown
incorporates a permanent moonshade to avoid any acceleration of her chaotic dictums.

129
LIST - MADNESS’S OF THE CRAZED THEIGNS
1. Paranoid about specific natural phenomena.
2. Thinks surrounded by replacements.
3. Thinks you are they and they are you.
4. Hides in corners.
5. Melancholia.
6. Hysteria.
7. Fulminates.
8. Cryomania.
9. Quadromania (Everything in fours, can develop into Octomania).
10. Deceives in speech but communicates truth through hand-signs.
11. Only calm while music plays.
12. Believes self to be gigantic, acts huge, ponderous and careful.
13. Compulsively and continually swaps clothes with all near.
14. Believes is seven to fifteen seconds in the future, they respond
first and you have to fill in.
15. Trusts no-one who speaks their language, only happy around
those they cannot understand.
16. Obsessively plays board games with small dozing animals as
pieces. i.e. chess with sleeping black and white mice, backgammon
with drugged snails.
17. Disguises self as member of own staff. takes messages to ‘her
Ladyship’. Rapidly changes disguise if found out.
18. Can’t eat unless food represented in art. Sketches snacks, paints
meals.
19. Lives as a ‘prisoner of self’. Plays stern tyrant who will not
release self and also rots in dungeon below (accessible through
secret passage), checks with staff continually about security of
‘prisoner’, suspects escape attempts.
20. Communicates exclusively through life-sized puppets of self.

130
 The Whetstone Ridge

34. MYSTERY PLAY PANTOMIME MASK. In the third act of all Mystery Plays, a minor
character is revealed to be the Metafox in disguise and will don this mask, recieving
hisses from the audience. Typically the stupidest character in the play will be a Mason,
who is fed to the Fox.Mason, who is fed to the Fox.
131
MONSTERS OF THE RIDGE

BRISTLE PIGS (‘BRISTLY PIGS’)

Bristle Pigs are big fat boarlike pigs with huge porcupine spines.
The spines only partially lie flat, making the Pigs look almost
spherical.
They are a natural herd species of the Ridge and largely
domesticated but some wild examples do remain and can be
extremely violent if they think their young are threatened.
They do not predate on man, except in children’s tales, but
can cause enormous problems if they invade a village or decide to
dick about with a fortified orchard.
CRYOMANIACS
Every year a small handful of Ridgedwellers turn Cryomaniacal
from the thawing Hyperblue Ice and, after doing cold murders,
run off to the valleys, or even further.
Their powers rarely persist and they are usually hunted down
and killed by Manticores, Foxes, Goblins, hunger or expeditions
from nearby Baronies.

MELANCHOLIC CONDORS.
The Condors prey on the Plains of Anaesthetic Fire to the East and
rarely bother locals so their nests are usually undisturbed.
The Condors themselves are bedraggled, downhearted but
vicious creatures, rarely responding to anything other than the
most extreme provocation, but insanely and suicidally violent
once fully enraged.

THE META-FOX
A very large fox with the proportions of a long wolf and with hairy
apelike hands instead of paws, the Meta-Fox is a cunning creature
that prefers to eat idiots. (Though, unlike the Manticore, it has no
supernatural restrictions and can subsist on intelligent prey).
The Fox can crawl inside the skin of anything it has eaten and
impersonate its behaviour, voice and form. It will use this ability,
in either animal or human shape, to test the intelligence of those
it targets, hoping to find someone or something stupid (relative to
its species as a whole) to eat.
For this reason, it is common practice on the Ridge to appear as
intelligent as possible before strangers, especially lone strangers
in the wilderness.
The Intelligent Shepherds (and Pig-herds and Goat-herds,
but the name is commonly applied to all) of the Ridge, as well as
lone travellers, carry with them books of Philosophy and
132 Mathematics and when two meet they will often begin
their conversation by talking about the ideas in the book
they are currently reading.

The Whetstone Ridge

It is also a common, but low practice, for fearful people
travelling alone to try to find someone obviously stupider than
them as a travelling companion, resulting in rather complex social
situations.

ONTOMORPHIC MANTICORES
The intelligent and extremely evil Manticores of the Whetstone
Ridge lair in the walls of the Arrow Valleys but creep anywhere
they can in search of food or the means to do harm.
Though they are few, each is formidable, with the body of
a gigantic lion, the head of an ancient, evil and intelligent man,
steel teeth, bat wings which provide (presumably magical) flight
and the tail of a huge scorpion.
The Manticores are cursed so that they can only eat those who
give incorrect answers to their questions, though they can simply
kill those who give correct answers (they just can’t swallow them)
and can sting to death or drop from heights those who give no
answers. But, in every case, a question must be asked.
They can also Ontomorph themselves into shadows, subtle
sounds, snatches of song or strange moods, and thereby pass
near-invisibly amongst mankind before emerging into their true
form to feed. All of these aspects will leave a particular kind of
sting in the tail of their expression and wise Ridge-dwellers have
learnt well the particular tenor of experience that shows a Manti-
coral phenomena is passing through.
The necessity of giving an incoherent answer to a Manticore,
one neither true nor false, is one of the reasons that the rule of the
Crazed Theigns is still permitted on the Ridge. The Theigns are
expected to don armour and face any Manticores that threaten
their Dukedoms, baffling them with insanity so that they can be
killed.
In most cases the Theigns are happy to fulfil their ancestral
duty and in some instances they actually succeed and carry back
the severed heads of giant, evil, glaring old men to deck their
Pig-Halls.

133
TABLE – ENCOUNTERS ON THE WHETSTONE RIDGE

ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY COMPLICATION /

ELEMENT OPPOSITION
1 A wan, poetic and A rare and Cultists who serve Noble Goblin
penurious Herald exquisite Apple Pie a Demon of the hunting party
of the Crazed (pg. 127). Truly one Hyperblue Ice (pg. out Bubonkining
Theigns. Expert of a kind! 124), or think they do. (Hawking with
in their family Owls) (pg. 173), riding
trees, histories on sharp-featured
and heraldry and and suspicious pigs
useless in every (pg. 88) with Goblin
other way. Dogs by their sides
(pg. 173). (The dogs
are likely more
intelligent.)
2 A foolish Academic AN ESCAPED A group suffers an Stephen Freeze,
of Narcissolis who BRISTLY PIG (pg. “unusual mood” and a dangerous
seeks to study 125). fears greatly that and powerful
the Demons of an Ontomorphic Cryomaniac (pg. 124).
Hyperblue Ice (pg. Manticore (pg. 133) is
124). stalking them.
3 An extremely Intel- A treasure trove of Depressed Asbestos The Mercenary
ligent Shepherd ‘Apples' (the coins). Bedouin (pg. 97) wired Mistress of a flock of
(pg. 132). Very poor on Amphetamine Cat Insanely aggressive
but expert in many glands (pg. 12), dragged and intelligent
languages, sciences onwards by friends Security Geese (pg.
and arts. seeking the Melan- 126), more dangerous
cholic Condor (pg. 102) than any dog, and
which has laid its caul most men.
across them.
4 Some ‘rude Barrels of Accusations of An evil Exiled
mechanical’ Gold-Standard Mystery Play (pg. 131) Singing Tribesman
Mystery Players Scrumpy. Strong Plagiarism between (pg. 41) who can ‘blur’
trying to rehearse stuff! two villages have through objects. Now
the ‘Fall of the broken out into working as a deadly
Lunar Throne and costumed warfare assassin and thief.
Rise of the Gackling and severe acts of
Moon’ (pg. 128). Criticism.
5 An expert Apple The armour, shield A Penumbeetle A very crazed and
Horticulturalist and heraldry of a Pilgrimage (pg. 60) violent Crazed
who lives life on the Crazed Theign (pg. moving very very very Theign (pg. 128) who
edge and plays the 128) who was eaten slowly in an exceed- makes impossible
game by their own by a Manticore (pg. ingly straight line, demands and kills
rules. Just living 133) after giving a regardless of incline. those who fail.
that apple-lifeÖ straight answer. With much ringing
of sombre bells and
psychic feedback.
6 A brave but poor The missing page The nest of a Agents of the Apple
Apple Knight (pg. from a truly dangerous Melan- Mafia (pg. 126). Oh
126) who has yet to ancient Mystery cholic Condor (pg. 102). they can get you
recover their first Play (pg. 131) which whatever apple you
Magic Apple. reveals the true want. But there’s
origins of two always a price and
warring Houses once you are in,
and which might there is no way out.
bring peace between
them if found.

134
 The Whetstone Ridge
ENCOUNTER TREASURE SECONDARY COMPLICATION /
ELEMENT OPPOSITION
7 A sadly-sane Crazed Melancholic Tunnels foolishly The Ontomoprhic
Theign (pg. 128) Condor (pg. 102) melted into the Manticore (pg.
looking for some Eggs. Hyperblue Ice (pg. 124). 133) hunting as a
way to restore their mysterious fugue.
madness so they may
re-take their throne.
8 A dour Psychother- A baroque A HIGHLY fortified A dangerous and
apist advisor of a a glorious Orchard (pg. 126). predatory Tear (pg.
Crazed Theign (pg. ceremonial Pig 144) escaped from
128) looking for some Goad (pg. 125), the Painted Plane.
way to moderate priceless for its
their madness. historical value.
9 The Meta-Fox (pg. A Silver Harp – A Scree-Sided Arrow An invisible killer,
132) in disguise as ancient relic of Valley (pg. 124) with a rare citizen of the
a useful idiot but the Moon Throne its drystone gates City of Visible Grief
looking for a greater (pg. 164) and near intermittently (pg. 158) turned to
idiot to eat. worshipped as a guarded. evil.
living memory of a
more-pure past. Its
music incredibly sad.
10 Someone looking An imperishable Squad of the The Deniable black-ops
for a travelling fragment of the Esploradoj – the Apple bandits (pg.
companion more HyperBlue Ice AntiGoblin Inquisition 126). They leave no
stupid than they, (pg. 124). (Possibly (pg. 118), seeking witnesses.
but hustling by insanely evil, but illegal smugglers of
pretending that they also useful for its Goblin Hentai into the
are the stupid one. Utter Cold). Empire.
11 A Chariot of Invisible Small chest full An irregular rain The Men-at-Arms
Ambassadors (pg. of seeds for “Satin of corpses dropped of a Dark Theign
160) from the City of Derangement” by an Ontomorphic armoured in thick
Visible Grief (pg. 158) the ultra-rare Manticore (pg. 133) Bristly-Pig (pg. 125)
within the Maw. and hard to grow screaming “WRONG!” coats and armed
Black Apple with dangerous
Tree favoured goads.
by Emperors and
Kings!
12 A Crazed Theign (pg. It’s a Magic Apple A dangerous but THE CHAOS
128) on a Manticore (see list). unavoidable crossroads WASPS!! (pg. 88)
Hunt! (It’s a classic where thermic vents
for a reason). They evaporate meltwater,
are also seeking producing dangerous
non-answers for the Cryomaniacal visions
Manticore showdown. (pg. 124).

135
THE PAINTED PLANE
9. THE PAINTED PLANE
Between the eastern border of the Whetstone Ridge and the
Wasteland of the Gothic Forest a wedge of land expands like
a pie-slice from the Drops of Ink and stretches north-east to
who-knows where.
In its centre is a hyperbright river shining like a painted sun.
Around the river; crop fields like a fractured mosaic of amber
and gold, forests like scattered beads of jade, river tributaries like
the tails of fireworks and neat, manageably-sized mountains, all
of them mere hills, but with the crags and geological drama of a
romantic epic.
Reality on the Plane is broken, or improved, depending on
your taste.
At some point in the ever-fluctuating history of the Moonlands,
after the expulsion of the Lunar Aristocracy from Moon City, the
Master Mason of the Mystery Cults went upriver, to the plains.
Reality was saner then and the Plains beyond the waterfalls
had often been the toybox of the rulers of Moon City, a place for
them to build monuments, follies and utopian communities.
It was here that the Master-Mason plunged their hands into
the Real, and began to change “what-is” into a more-perfect form.
Thankfully, (or disastrously), they were stopped. Or maybe
just blew up. Or possibly they succeeded and this is what they
wanted? Or maybe they just transcended somewhere else and
don’t give a fig about what they left behind.
They are gone now, the Cults are fallen, Goblins run Moon
City (now Owl City) and the Painted Plane, and Pigment River,
are what remains.

THE TEXTURE OF REALITY ON THE PLANE

Everything is painted. The style is relative and shifts according to
the place, the view and the time.
Beauty is everpresent. Every scene and sight is perfectly
composed. There is nowhere ugly to look. No-one may turn away
from beauty on the Painted Plane.
There is a kind of horror to this. Without contrast or absence
to give it context, what can beauty mean? Living on the Plane can
lead to a numbness or absence, or in some cases a driving obsessive
refinement to ever-greater perfection.
It’s bright all the time. This can drive you mad.
The brightness is an illusion. Light does not exist on the Plane,
only colour. There is no focus and no depth. Telescopes and lenses
have no effect. Mirrors give a painted reflection. You need never
squint against sunlight for the sun is but a yellow smear. Night
means a shift to nocturnes, rather than actual dark – it is rarely
truly black. Lanterns barely work.
The way the Plain represents itself ignores the optic nerve.
Shapes and colours appear directly in the mind. Colour-
138 blind people are not colour-blind here, and the Blind can,
and must, see.
 Sound sounds ‘wrong’. As if everything was coming from

The Painted Plane

behind a curtain. There is not enough incidental noise; wind,
movement, animals, insects, water moving, your own breathing.
It’s there if you listen for it, just a tenth of a second too late. You
might notice it missing, as if the sound of your own breath had
disappeared. Then you attend, and in a moment it springs back.
Just a little out of sync.
Sleep is scary. Dreamers sense that while they are unconscious
there is no sound, like a terrifying absence around the borders of
reality. It’s impossible to prove of course, but many visitors wake
screaming for the first few nights, and go about their day doubting
that they slept at all.

THE ECONOMY OF THE PAINTED PLANE

The Plain is the breadbasket of the Moonlands, supplying the large
populations of Owl City and Narcissolis.
Both agriculture and hunting are much easier on the Plane
than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Only the most attractive
plants or crops grow, and these are rarely without fruit. Harvest
occurs when it would be aesthetically pleasing to do so and most
winters are banished to the Gothic Forest.
Its poetically beautiful forests are overstuffed with remarkable
and charismatic beasts and of course, all the animals kept by its
farmers are extremely attractive as well.
The Plain exports food of every kind down the Pigment
River to the cities below, as well as to the eastern borders of the
Whetstone Ridge and to the City of Visible Grief and the Maw.
That this food slowly becomes less real and less fulfilling the
longer it is gone from the Plain, (and the less realistically it is
painted), is more than made up by the superabundance of goods. It
also means the cities are unable to stockpile food; they are always
in need of fresh supply, much to the advantage of the Picts.
In Nacrissolis the rulers dine on photographically-exact fresh
beef steak while in the slums of Owl city the population ekes out
an existence on rapidly expiring abstract bread and cubist foods.

THE PICTS
Those born on the Plain are born Painted. These are the Picts.
There is no prejudice amongst Picts between gender, race or
social position. Instead they discriminate based on style and school.
Those from more representational, classical schools regard
themselves as being above those from modernist, abstract, futurist
or surreal schools.
Deep Surreals or those whose form cannot be understood are
seen as little better than monsters.
Picts usually group themselves into clans, tribes, villages and
organisations made up of a range of schools or styles. Larger
polities, like Pict Villages, almost always have some complex
factions within them. 139
PICT FACTIONS – DEXTERS AND SINISTERS
The Picts have one other form of prejudice and identity, one
which they often hold to with mad fanaticism, but which is largely
incomprehensible to anyone for beyond the Painted Plane; Right-
Handers and Left-Handers.
The origins of this divide are complex. They seem to have
something to do with the Hands of the Master Mason and their
relative dominance or combination in the creation of the Plane.
As well as this, there is a pair of Giant Stone Hands on the
Plane, which make up the centre of Pict government. The Right-
handers live in the huge Right Hand, and Left-Handers in the big
Left Hand.
No-one knows whether the “Master Masons Hands” have
always existed, and are therefore at the root of the divide (as the
Dexters claim), or whether the Picts themselves built them to
symbolise the divide (as claimed by the Sinisters).
Right-Handers, or Dexters, tend to be Classical and represen-
tative; oil paintings and watercolours. Left-Handers, or Sinisters,
are more commonly abstract, expressionist or surreal and are
often acrylics or other synthetics.
But there is no absolute stability between, or within, the
factions. Groups change sides often and complex political, racial
and aesthetic arguments and conflicts rage continually, sending
schools and individuals from one side to the other.
Though the Picts are in a continual state of low-level civil
conflict, only about one in four is deeply loyal to their Hand, the
rest being various shades of ambivalent and tired of the whole
thing. Belligerent Picts continually berate the less active Handers,
pointing out that if they would only pull themselves together, they
would have fucking won by now.
So it is that, on encountering any particular group or settlement
of Picts, you can never be sure of exactly who or what they are
loyal to, what their political situation is (it will be complex) or
how they will respond to you. Things can change in an instant if
the only truly belligerent member of a group hares off to the Big
Hands for Important Reasons, or if an Inquisitor arrives.

PICT BIOLOGY
Many people born on the Painted Plane will never leave.
On removal they may change slowly to their non-painted
selves, this happens more or less quickly depending on the
complexity and coherence of the being in question with the
simplest lasting longest and suffering least.
Complex intelligent beings, even if they are painted skilfully
enough to survive the translation, can undergo massive identity
reorganisation as they pale to their ‘real’ selves. Some part of them
always remains painted, even after transformation, perhaps a
single painted eye, a painted foot or brush-marks on one
limb. Because of this, few willingly leave.
140
 Surreals and Impossibles can simply ‘die’ away from the

The Painted Plane

Plains unreality. They decay into objects, forms, horrible mutants
or gloop. Forcibly removing a Surreal from the Plane can be
murder and even those formally exiled from Pict culture are not
actually driven all the way from the Plains, but only to Gate Town,
outside the Plains political influence but just within its reality – a
precarious existence.
Simple organisms in a naturalistic style, with a high level of
skill, often survive their transformation. Some birds of the Painted
Plane can travel a long way before returning. The creatures of
the Pigment River, Pixilated Hippos and Photographic Dolphins,
thrive in its ink-bright waters and illusory microenvironment.
Picts themselves can survive unchanged for some time if they
remain near, or regularly drink, its waters. More ‘Naturalistic’
Picts travel often to the Great Goblin Market in Owl City, but
they come back quickly.
A handful of rare Picts find themselves highly resistant to
Cold Reality beyond the Painted Plane, even without a store from
the Pigment River, and go out to make their way in the world.

TABLE – AMIDST THE PICTS

THIS GROUP IS AND SINISTER ON THE ISSUE OF

SPLIT BETWEEN
DEXTER
1 Pop-Art Picts. Cubist Picts. Mole-Men (pg. 161). Are they beneath us
EVEN NOW?
2 Romantic Picts. Gothic Picts. Monstrousness; WHO DEFINES IT
REALLY?
3 Art Deco Picts. Surrealist Picts (pg. 140). Stains (pg. 144); Sympathy? Or stop
whining and get the hell out!
4 Medieval Ikon Picts. Futurist Picts. Has the Culture War gone Too Far?/IT
HAS NOT GONE FAR ENOUGH!!
5 Pre Raphaelite Picts. Ukiyo-e (Edo Print) Pict Gobbos, are they more Goblin or Pict?
Picts. (And does it even matter?)
6 Impressionist Picts. Medieval Marginalia Are we even real? I'M JUST ASKING THE
Picts. QUESTION, OR ARE WE NOT ALLOWED
EVEN THAT?!!!
7 Soviet Realist Picts. Graffiti Picts. I want to discuss Dreams freely/NO ITS
A LAYER OF REALITY TOO FAR NARCIS-
SOLIS ISN'T EVEN REAL!!
8 Italian Renaissance Northern Renais- Pigment River/Owl City Imperialism.
Picts. sance Picts. We need more/less control of the River/
Owl City, as it’s Our Territory/Foreign
Entanglements.

141
 35. PICTISH TRAPPER CLOAK. Made from furs collected across the Painted Plain,
displaying the skill and versitility of their trapper.

142
36. PICTISH ARROWS. As the weight, behaviour and path of flight of arrows in the
Painted Plane vary wildly depending on their visual style, Pictish marksmen require
a mathematical imagination of such virtuocity that they are in high demand as
engineers in the rest of the Moonlands.engineers in the rest of the moonlands.

143
MONSTERS AND TEARS
Though there are few monsters on the Plane in total, the variety
of strange, inhuman, dangerous and Monster-like beings which
may be encountered is staggering.
Absolute codification is impossible but a few general types are
below.

‘NATURALS’
A painting of a perfectly normal monster, like a picture of a
Manticore for instance. This will generally act like something
close to its outer-plane version and is one of the simplest and most
predictable dangers of the Plane

VIOLENT SURREALS
Some surreal Picts can become predatory and dangerous. Perhaps
because it is simply their painted nature, or because of the alien-
ation and prejudice of Pict society.
Some of the most horrific-seeming surreals are simply bandits
with strange forms.

STAINS
A stain is a Pict creature the form of which is blurred and smudged.
A Stain is often assumed to be some kind of Tear (see below),
which, if intelligent, they will always deny.
Stains will often claim to be a modernist or post-modern
interpretation of a known form and not a stain at all. Though this
may be true they are rarely believed and form a sad underclass
of Pict Society.

UNKNOWABLES
A category used when no-one has any goddamn idea what
something or someone is. They could be really radical art, a freaky
imported ‘natural’ monster, a para-reality interruption, a Goblin
in a Suit, an hallucination or some strange kind of Tear.
If you have no idea what it is, then it is an “unknowable”.
TEARS
Tears are creatures born from the Plane and are the most feared
of all its dangers, especially by Picts.
A Tear is an area or volume of inexpressible anti-reality. In
a world heavy like ink-wet paper, reality can sometimes
144 ‘give’ and reveal an awful absence which seems to act with
a terrifying anti-sentience.
 The Painted Plane
Tears attack the Plane in a variety of ways:
By Savaging – blurring and permanently shifting lines.
By Removal – deleting or removing from existence entire limbs,
bodies, beings or objects.
By Tearing – like leprosy or cancer which can sometimes create
new Tears or ‘infect’ with a slow-burning inner Tear.
And by Annihilation – complete removal from reality, and
communal memory.
It’s always possible that someone you know has been Annihilated,
it’s always possible that everyone you know has been Annihilated.
Sadly, a handful of Tears, perhaps due to their very strangeness,
are able to leave the Painted Plane and survive in the more-real
world beyond and are sometimes encountered as inexplicable,
even inconceivable, monsters.
There are various types:

KINDS OF TEAR

INTER-OBJECT TEARS
Made from the reality between objects and things – often sessile,
angular, infiltrating, growing but thankfully usually slow or
environmentally related.

INTENSITY TEARS
One thing being ‘over painted’ often in the shape of the thing that
was represented. Sometimes animal or person shaped. Ragged,
‘pulled apart’ rather than angular.

ALTERATION TEARS
From a thing altered or re-drawn too much. Too many corrections.
Most like a Chimerae in ‘form’. May act something like a Monster.

SELF-TORN TEARS
Mythical, nightmarish, demonic, unspoken, greatly feared and
often denied to exist.
145
FIGHTING TEARS
A few methods work but making use of many of them, either
culturally (to cross a Pict ‘race’ line) or practically, requires the
intervention of outsiders. Battling Tears is one reason that Adven-
turers are often welcomed on the Plane despite its prejudiced
culture and fractious politics.
MAGIC.
This can work against Tears sometimes.
PIGMENT.
Taken directly from the Pigment River. If enough can be trans-
ported and thrown on the Tear it can be ‘coloured in’.
NON-PICT BODIES OR TOOLS.
Non-pict, or Visitor flesh and materials can damage Tears more
than the local Pseudo-matter. Either in battle, or simply from the
Tear choking on their still-real intestines.
MODERNIST, SURREALIST OR ABSTRACT TOOLS & WEAPONS.
The fact that these typically Sinister and low-status cultures can
create useful and lifesaving elements has in no way altered the
prejudice against them
CONCEPTUAL WEAPONS FROM THE UTOPIAN RUINS.
These are very powerful, but can create new tears, are generally
feared and are looped in time so they appear back in their own
path after a while, appearing in the ruins from where they were
retrieved, having been there undisturbed for centuries.

LOCATIONS ON THE PLANE

THE PIGMENT RIVER

The greatest waterway of the Moonlands. The river runs through
the Plane, crashes over the Drops of Ink into Lake Palette, then cuts
between Owl City and Narcissolis. From there it flows between
the Umber Woods and the Large Goblin Collidor, before emptying
its hyperbright waters into the unreal Vermillion Sea.
Condensed from water falling all over the Painted Plane and
trickling through its unreal soil, the water of the Pigment River is
a liquid concentration of the land.
The River is the Planes True Sun. A pulsing vortex of
146 blinding hyperreality burning like the bleeding artery of
God.
 The Sun itself is mere paint, always out of reach but not that

The Painted Plane

far away, and there is no real light anyway. But the river is always
bright with pigment – like bright dyed thread or an iridescent
snake in natural grass.
It has moods, sometimes seeming animated, sometimes like
glowing ink, sometimes like CGI water. A mutable representation
of itself.
For those non-Picts who fall into the Pigment River, reality
blurs, trickles, softens and erupts into colour. Movement leaves
colour-traces, they feel themselves softening, becoming brighter.
It seems like there is something wonderful in there – shapes
moving, adventurous and heroic.
Those who go too deep do not come out. Perhaps they have
translated into transcendent whateverdom. If so no-one has
confirmed it.
Beyond the Drops of Ink and Lake Palette, the Pigment
River dulls somewhat, but remains intensely bright and strange
compared to the more-real lands through which it winds. It carries
its own linear representational pseudo-ecology with it. The Pixel-
Hippos and Photographic Dolphins, CGI reeds, ink-wash willows
and etched wetlands. Bridges across the river must be drawn as
well as built.

THE DROPS OF INK

Where the Pigment River falls into Lake Palette, the cliffs are a
multicoloured riot.
Below the falls the pseudo-environment around the lake
looks like an optical illusion or 90’s CGI. Flora and Fauna seem
glitched, digitised or like a photographic collage, slowly fading
into “nature” further from the shore.
The microenvironment is near-tropical. The Glitchy Croco-
diles and Pixelated Hippos do not move above the Drops of Ink
and the most dangerous Tears and frightening Surreals are rarely
seen below the falls. Around the Lake the last drops of alter-reality
fade into Nature. This is one of the last places a highly-non-repre-
sentational life-form can survive.
The Pigment River is no longer so terrifyingly, unnaturally
bright, but the Lake still shines like a moon trapped in the
substance of the world, neither reflecting nor replying to the
Gackling Moon above.

THE MASTER MASONS HANDS

The Dexter-Picts believe that these huge stone hands reaching
out of the earth are the actual hands of the Master Mason, left
here as a monument at the moment of the Planes creation. The
hands of the artist embedded in the art.
The Sinisters believe they are merely a Pict creation aping
that same concept; a difference over the essential nature of
things which drives Dexter-Picts absolutely batty. 147
 This has not prevented both sets of Picts from from tunnelling
into the hands like fleshboring bugs, transforming them into two
huge Cappadocian stone labyrinths.
Almost all politics and conflict on the Plane washes around, or
emerges from, the Big Hands.
The commanders of each faction occupy a hand each. Each is
led by a council of five, with each member occupying one of the
big fingers and with their title being named after their finger –
Pollex, Manus, Medius, Annularis and Minimus Manus.
So the master of the Left Hand Thumb would be the ‘Pollex
Sinister’, the mistress of the Right Hand Little Finger would be
‘Minimum Manus Dextrix’.

TABLE- THE ROLES OF PICT GOVERNMENT

DEXTER/DEXTRIX SINISTER/SINITRIX
Pollex Minister for Security. Ultimate War Tool.
Manus Executive. Thinkmaster General.
Medius Chancellor. Cashgrabber Prime.
Annularis Foreign Secretary. Blazing Effulgence.
Minimus Manus Minority Affairs. Schemedreamer.

Of course there are continual intrigues between the fingers of

each hand, to add to the inter-hand conflict.

THE UTOPIAN RUINS

Villages and ruined towns based around big white modernist
blocks. Islands of darkness, reality and entropy. The only places in
the Plane untouched by the paintocalypse, the ruins are products
of the pre-paint Mason culture.
Deep within and beneath are dark dungeons walled in white
stone, ruined by the civilizational collapse and time-locked so that
they cannot be permanently repaired.
Here there is actual, real dark, one of the only places on the
plane where a Lantern might actually be useful.
Colour leaks in and stains the walls but always dries to umber
cake and flakes to nothing. Picts visiting the ruins can flake and
brown away. Outsiders are needed to explore and penetrate the
depths in search of secrets, Conceptual Weapons and time-looped
archeotech capable of killing Alpha-Tears.
The Ruins are occupied by Bandits, Blurs, Tears, Surreals and
(temporary) Civil-war losers.

148
TABLE- UTOPIAN RUIN GENERATOR

ITS FORM GREATEST ONE ANOTHER POSSIBLE TRAPS TREASURE WITHIN

ALIKE MONSTER FACTION FACTION
UNTO..
1 Linked Horrific Unhappy Rebellious Tangles of Ceramic sun-powered
fullerene Violent Stains Shadows (pg. cybernetic wire ray pistol (pg. 148).
environ- Surreal (pg. 144). 13). like spider’s web,
mental (pg. 144). which contract
domes. when brushed
against.
2 A shopping Intensity Tear Arty Narcissan Distress causes Psychic Resonator –
centre or (pg. 145). Goblins. Mirror glitched Gives wearer powers of a
airport. Masters Gang soma-injecting PenumBeetle.
(pg. 32). drones to tumble
forth.
3 A water A Goya. Humanoid Narcissan Fungal simulator Lunar Coagulator –
park. Surreals. "Adventure infects if Collects stores and
Tourists" (pg. interrupted. projects Lunar Energy
27). (pg. 19).
4 A capsized Alteration Fascist Owl City Keypads The Golden Form – a
cruise ship. Tear (pg. 145). Futurists. "Pre Emptive activate sonic one-time mind transfer
Archaeolo- pain engines at into new golden body (it
gists" (Player incorrect codes. copy—pastes the mind
Characters). but doesn't say that on
the front).
5 A car-park Klimt Dragon. Evil Red-Tinged Failing a Programmable Phage –
without the Invisible Dexter holographic Semiconscious genocide
cars. People. Cultists of the diagnostic leads plague. Targets can be
Wasp Moon to anesthetising assigned but the more it
(pg. 16). gas. infects the smarter it is.
6 A cylin- Self-Torn Tear Owl City Radicalised Tripwires and A lattice of Gold in a
drical pit (pg. 145). Trash. Renaissance antipersonnel Diamond form. Answers
with rooms Etchings. mines. complex questions in
around the dreams if worn. Slowly
edge. infiltrates and changes
the wearer.
7 A buried Northern Exiled Dangerous Gravity Aleph-Engine - calls
collapsed Renaissance Blurred Children’s Distortion ghost forms from
modernist Apocalypse Cannibals. Drawings. Engines turn parallel realities. They
office Beast. corridors into become more or less real
building. pit-traps. the more individuals
believe in them.

8 A pleasure A vast Anaesthetic The Chaos Auto-Cleaning Ancient Masonic text

park, like Unknowable. Thugees Wasps! (pg. 88) Service Engine (pg. 147) containing
Disneyland. (pg. 102). Steam-Blasts copies from an earlier
How did everything. manuscript of the Lunar
they get Aristocracy showing a
here? recording of a rubbing
of an engraving in stone
(part crumbled) saying
in a near-forgotten
tongue; DANGER
ONTOLOGICAL
MANIPULATOR
DANGER. DO NOT USE.
With a location indicated
somewhere on this
world.

149
 37. MOON TEAR. Painted Depictions of the Gackling Moon inevitably corrupt,
becoming destructive and wildly unpredictable Tears. Only removal from the Painted
Plane renders them relatively stable.

150
38. PICTISH TORCH, Casts a linear representation of light on nearby surfaces.
Unquenchable, but also indelible.

151
GATE-TOWN
Another bizarre relic of the Masons at the height of their pre-di-
saster powers, the Gate is insanely high, taller than most built
things should ever rationally be.
The Gate is accepted by all Picts as the political boundary of
the Painted Plane, though the effect of the Painted Unreality goes
on much further.
It is here that escapees, exiles (who swap over at each regime
change), visitors, low-status Picts, petitioners, ambassadors from
the Antigoblin Empire, Narcissolis, Owl City, the Whetstone Ridge,
and wherever else all come, forming ‘Gate-Town’, a hive of crime,
radicalism and equality.
There are less explicit racial divisions here, more cross-school
relationships (the classic Masterwork/Cartoon romance), along
with Visitors, outsiders, and the usual freaks who can’t get along
in the system but who won’t go live in the woods.

TABLE – INTRIGUES IN GATE-TOWN

FIRST AGENT SECOND AGENT THE MAGUFFIN THE SCENE

1 The PenumBeetle A bold Cartoon! An unlikely and An off-the-books Owl
Envoy (pg. 60). illicit love affair! aviary hidden in the
slums.
2 The head of a A Brother of the The location of A grand masquerade at
Singing Tribe (pg. 41). Egg (pg. 101) on a the Parliament of the peak of the Gate.
Mysterious Errand. Shadows (pg. 13).
3 An envoy from the An extreme The secret heir to a A lunar ceremony of
P.O.G.R.A.P (pg. 74). Surreal (pg. 144) major Barony of the whichever moon it
who just wants a Whetstone Ridge currently is.
normal life. (pg. 124).
4 A hidden Narcissolis A Mole Man from A map to one of the A chess grand slam
Mirror Master (pg. the Maw (pg. 161). Krystaphagi (pg. 181) taking place in the
32). A total rube in of the Necropolis of Esher-Palace.
over their head. Glass.
5 The AntiGoblin A hot cigar- A valuable An extremely exclusive
Ambassador (pg. smoking young shipment of party where they dine
110) 'Mind-Nev- Opal-Winged Vermillion-Sea only on Eyes.
er-Dreams'. Bat-Girl (pg. 160) Poppy-Wrack
from the maw. perfume (pg. 84).
6 A cubist agent of A bitter low-status Intelligence A Gate-Solstice Jubilee
Pollex Sinister, the stain claiming to indicating the 13th in which the Sun or
Ultimate War Tool be an overlooked Apocalypse Peach Moon shines directly
(pg. 148). modernist work. (pg. 84) is on its way. through the Gate.
8 The pover- A dizzy impres- A goblin super- The pigment-river
ty-stricken Scion sionist work, as weapon in the Fauna free menagerie.
of a much-decayed daft as they seem form of an amusing (A notoriously dangerous
House of Owl City. but with Gothic goose. (May just be place; the Hippos!).
pretensions. an actual Goose).

152
 The Painted Plane
FIRST AGENT SECOND AGENT THE MAGUFFIN THE SCENE
9 Embassy from the A near photo-re- A possible alliance A pict bordello visited by
City of Visible Grief, alistic pict between a Singing Narcissans and those of
invisible people with obsessed with the Tribe and the Owl city, (the only place
Puppets. possibility of life barbarians of the Hentai Picts can work
beyond the Plain. Gothic Forest. safely.)
10 An embassy from a A dignified 'Old A ceramic key to A Pigment-River
Crazed Theign, they Master' with a access the Beastly Gambling boat (the
can speak only in mysterious smile Disquisition in steering breaks half-way
impossibilities. (actually quite the Fortress of the through, and its heading
young and gauche). Grand Catalyst. for the Drops of Ink!).
11 An Owl-City Goblin An extremely A moth-whispered A shared memory palace
inferring they are didactic Propa- secret from the inside the mind of an
"an agent" though ganda Poster Pict Forgotten moon, exiled Penumbeetle,
for whom, none with no actually hidden in a mind populated with the
know. strong political not its own by memories of its visitors.
views. They just Penumbeetle
want to go home. scheming.
Everyone assumes
this is a front.
12 The Ambassador An engraving of A potential new Backstage at a radical
from the Illusory an archway held trade route from theatre during the
Lord South-Barking up by Caryatid the Incoherent performance of a Goblin
Dog, (who's nature is sisters, they isles through Noise band; no-one will
unknown). demand their the Whetstone overhear (or possibly
rights as true Picts ridge, avoiding hear in the first place).
but are considered Narcissolis.
mere architecture
by many.

THE GOTHIC FOREST

Bordering the Plane to the East, and stretching, who-knows-
how-far? Perhaps all the way to the lilac ocean of the Reach, Is
the wintery, monochromatic Gothic Forest, a wilderness where
Pigmented People are neither welcome, nor desired.
The colours are cool and the living is hard. Winter happens
here (most of the plain will only suffer a picturesque autumn) and
snow may sometimes fall, white flakes against the white ground.
The trees range across the Northern Renaissance; engraved,
ink-drawn camouflage for pencil-sketch tribes. Parts of the forest
are pure Mondrian.
“Monsters”, poor-looking grotesques, cartoons, abstracts and
some surreals come here, driven out of the Plains by its colourful
population and the insane factionalism of Dexter and Sinister.
Since almost everyone in the forest is relatively low-status the
Pict hierarchy doesn’t sting quite as much. These are a somewhat
free, though poor, people.
Though peaceful in political terms, this is a wilderness
without either resources or law, a strange kind of mirror to the
Plains of Anaesthetic Fire across the Moonlands, though much less
well-known, for the forest leads nowhere, and guards nothing. (So
far as we know.)
Most Picts believe the forest is haunted by Tears, Violent
Surreals and John Martin events. Political obsessives of both
kinds dislike it and blame its disorder for hiding impossible 153
occurrences.
THE MAW
10.THE MAW
Caught in a corner of land, cut from the Reach by great peaks
and from Pigment River by screes and boulder-strewn collapsing
cliffs, in a fragment of the Moonlands between the Painted Plane
and the Incoherent Isles, is the Maw, and the invisible City of
Visible Grief.
No city now but a Ruin which was old when The Lunar Throne
was young, blasted into transparency before the Gackling Moon
rose. The oldest and perhaps the first of the great reality-warping
events which ultimately came to define the Moonlands.
Before Narcissolis and Owl City, before the Gackling Moon and
Anaesthetic Fire, before the Vermillion Sea and the Pilgrimages of
the Penumbeetles, there was the Reach, and the Maw.

THE MAW ITSELF

A black hole in the world. A vast circular cavern, like the tunnel
of a mole. Glass towers ring its rim, spires like the broken crystal
teeth of a circular worm. From it surge pulsing roars of unreality;
swarming, boiling blackness from below and mad jags of writhing
light.

THE WIND
The storms of black and neon pulsing wind that blast out from the
Maw turn the visible invisible.
A neon, angular wind lashing through the invisible streets
like geometric lightning, spotted with rain in streaks of burning
gold like a god’s tears.
A wind that makes the plates of the Pangolins glow and the
Night-Geese cry out. A wind that feels as if it comes from a 5th
direction, yet you can sense it, feel its pressing fingertips upon you
from a place your nerves can’t define. Like a magnetic wave that
burns the backs of your teeth with acid reflux.
Some do come here specifically to stand in the wind. Stay here
long enough, lashed by the rain and the electric-bright spasms,
and be transformed as it hammers away your corporeal form and
projects you into another world.

156
 The Maw

39. MAW WEATHERVANE, Working to an inverse logic, the vane’s arrow points in the
only direction where the wind of the Maw is not currently blowing, allowing the user
a brief respite.

157
THE CITY OF VISIBLE GRIEF
The City of Visible Grief has been blasted into almost-total invisi-
bility by the wind rushing through it for eons. As if it were made
of glass. It hurts the eye to be there.
Around the Maw, the city would seem a great gouge in the
earth, plated and covered over with translucent glass.
The scouring of dust-storms, the chips and abrasions of daily
use and graffiti made by generations have all left their mark. The
city is highlighted like a wireframe model, marked by textures,
covered by tags. In most cases there is enough to make out general
stuff.
The circular iron doors of the city do not fade but lodge in
invisible walls like carved dead eyes.
At night, lamps burn visibly within invisible rooms. Columns
of scratched signs highlight monuments.
In the centre of the city; a black iron harp, imperishable, too
large for any mortal hand. The wind keens sharply though its iron
strands. The Gift of Night, to one beloved by the Dawn.
The Maw slowly draws the City of Visible Grief into itself,
fragment by fragment, inch by inch the invisible buildings slip
between the great glass teeth and tumble into its darkness. It
has been eating for a thousand years and will be eating for ten
thousand more before the end.

THE LIGHT OF THE GACKLING MOON IN THE CITY OF

VISIBLE GRIEF
The Moons magical rule counts only in direct moonlight, and it
seems that the invisible stones of the City of Visible Grief are
enough to prevent its unearthly effects.
Still, the sight of the moon, especially in its more troublesome
phases; Gackling or Wasp, can be distressing to the people of the
Maw. The Bat-Men may hide within their glass spires and the
Mole-Men burrow ever deeper underground, but other mortals
troubled by its light seek means of occlusion.
A steady trickle of screens, parasols and wide brimmed
hats is imported into the city for sale. All for use indoors, and all
eventually paling into invisibility as trickles of the cities wind
creep in through open portals and slink between door-jambs and
protective knitted snakes.

PREDATORS
VANTABLACK GEESE
Nothing could be blacker, they hunt in huge and silent pairs. Yes,
the Geese will encircle you in sleep, waddling ever closer before
cloaking you in black wings and beginning their black work.
158 The Geese guard the grim tarns that lie slackly hereabouts.
PREDATORY TARNS

The Maw
Sadly symbiotic, these pools live and move, but only at plant-speed.
Their black water oozes through cracks in the earth and looks for
things to strangle and drown. Most escape it, but the combination
of black, intelligent water, and hunting Vantablack Geese floating
blackly on it, can be deadly.
The Tarns digest all flesh but that of the Geese and leave
treasure glittering in their black translucent guts as a lure to the
foolish or poor.

40. AMBASSADOR PUPPET. Represents Invisible Judd, an influential

commotidies smuggler from the Painted Plane to the Maw. An old, late friend. 159
PEOPLE

THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE

Few come to stay. Poets and crime gangs. The city has a nominal
population.
The Invisible People live within the ruins, reading invisible
books, scrolls of pearl uncurling like a dryads tongue, playing
music composed for keys of bone, singing hymns to the wind and
stars and dark spilling curls of blue-black hair.
They have Invisible Ambassadors – teams of puppeteers
manipulate a life-sized puppet for you to address. The Ambassadors
ride in chariots pulled by black rotating pangolins rolling like
wheels, and are guarded by invisible dogs in sheaths of armoured
spines which run alongside, spines clattering.

BAT-PEOPLE
The Bat-People all have Opal wings which, when folded, protect
them from the invisible wind. The City of Visible Grief is easy for
them to navigate, they curl around its tumbled and translucent
spires by echolocation while others bump, crawl and doodle maps
on disappearing paper with glass pens. This is why they came, they
say, the environment is to their advantage.
The Bat-Men can be chill, but paranoid; they say that people
hunt them for their opal wings. They live within the glass teeth
of the Maw. At night they come out and smoke cigars in invisible
saloons with molemen and poets. You can see the burning tips of
their cigars in the irregular cuboids of moon-lit smoke, and hear
their coughing; smoke is bad for bat-lungs but these creatures are
nicotine fiends.
They hunt the dull, droning Stag-Beetles which crawl in the
fissures of the invisible city in big invisible bass-note swarms.
The Bat-People claim to have come from the Maw, they say
it leads to the Dreamlands, some of the time, and at others to the
Parliament of Orphan Moons, which are moons without worlds,
orbiting only each other, these are their homes, so they claim, to
which they may not return for reasons not-given, yet they mutter
darkly of “imperialism” between coughs.
They speak little of the Dark Continent, to which the Maw is
also said to lead, only that it has Other stars and no sun, but how
would they know?

160
MOLE-MEN

The Maw
The final and most reasonable inhabitants of the City of Visible
Grief, the Mole-Men tunnelled up from somewhere, up through
the invisible earth (its visibility making little difference to them).
They make up the maws labouring classes (such as they are) and
read braille tabloids, hot off the Goblin Presses of Owl City, which
outrage them every day.

TABLE- MOLE MAN SCANDALS!

THIS PERSON HAS BECOME OVER AND HAS COME

MIXED UP WITH OUT LOOKING
1 The P.O.G.R.A.P (pg. The Annularis An illicit sexual A Villain –
74). Dexter (pg. 148). situation DISGUSTING
– SHOCKING. WHAT THEY GET
UP TO!
2 Groundbreaking A Bristly Pig (pg. A sporting catastrophe
Narcissan Influencer 125), somehow. – THEY SHOULD
(pg. 27). HAVE USED MY
STRATEGY.
3 An apple-rich Amazingly, an Some complex A Hero – AT LEAST
Crazed Theign (pg. AntiGoblin (pg. 110). financial boondoggle SOMEONE IS ON
128). – TYPICAL OF THESE TOP OF THINGS.
TIMES.
4 Owl City Goblin A Mind-Wrangling A ridiculous gaffe –
Sweatshop Magnate PenumBeetle (pg. THEY DON’T KNOW
(pg. 170). 60). WHERE THEY ARE
HALF THE TIME.
5 A Singing Tribes (pg. A deadly but silent A case of replacement A Fool – I’LL SAY
41) celebrity flute InvisiBeetle (pg. or dopplegangerism – THIS;
player - I KNOW 85). THEY ARE ALL AT IT THEY ARE A FEW
WHAT I LIKE AND MARK MY WORDS. EGGS
THAT IS NOT IT. SHORT OF A SALAD
AS MY DAD WOULD
6 Lord South Barking An expert An omnishambles SAY.
Dog - WHAT IS HE trainer in the walkback on previous
UP TO?. underground policy or boldly stated
badger brawls (pg. opinion – HERE WE
163) with links to GO THEN UP IS
organised crime. DOWN BLACK IS
WHITE.
7 A mysterious An extremely edgy Conspiracy with/ A Victim – IT
veiled beauty of Invisible Poet (pg. invasion by, those of WRINGS A
the Asbestos Bedouin 160) of the City of the Dark Continent – TEAR FROM THE
(pg. 97) - ILL TAKE Visible Grief (pg. ITS ALL OVER I SAID EYE IT
YOUR WORD FOR 158) – POETRY. IT WOULD COME TO DOES WHAT HAVE
IT. BAH! THIS! THINGS COME TO?
8 A hot goblin A charismatic Something arguably
model. (Centre-fold abstract Pict with a or definitely racist
in ‘Hot Gobs’ transgressive eye against someone
Magazine – NOT for Photo-Realistic – THEY ARE NOT
THAT I READ IT lovers. AFRAID TO SPEAK
MYSELF) THEIR MIND I WILL
GIVE THEM THAT.

161
 OWL CITY,
THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET &
THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
11. OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET AND
THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS

The tumorous and dying heart of a moon-maddened land.

A city like a turned-over log where the people scatter like pigeons
and the pigeons stalk like wolves. At its cold, dead heart are silent
tombs and crystal pyramids, clean boulevards of pure white sand
and smooth glass grains. Dawn rises daily on a city centre swept
precisely neat.

THE HISTORY OF OWL CITY

Long ago the city had a different name and at its centre lay the
Moon Throne from which the Moon Queen ruled. Around it the
Lunar Aristocracy built their castles, mansions and Grand Hotels.
Then, after many an age, the Moon Throne fell to the forces
of Glorious Reason.
After the revolution and the flight of the Lunar Aristocracy to
the Whetstone Ridge, the Masons raised vast monuments to civil
law and reasonable thought. Clear sweeps of pale stone washed
around hand-carved columns and windows of glorious glass.
Statues to Eternal Reason dotted gardens of imported trees.
Then, in the Catastrophe of the Painted Plane, the Master
Mason fell and reality shook once more
With the loss of its hinterland to total reality breakdown,
Goblins and invading Chaos Wasps, the rise of Narcissolis and the
hollowing out of its centre by the Necropolis of Glass, Owl City
has decayed into economic, cultural, spiritual and psychological
ruin. (Unless you are Goblin. For Goblins it’s pretty great.)
The concentric highways of the city have become a spiralling
maze leading to a core of cold glass. The Moon Throne itself has
disappeared, perhaps ruined, or stolen, or fallen, like a wrecked
ship sinking into liquid earth, passed beyond time, never to return.
Proud buildings covered with faded pentangles (point-up-
wards) and hexagrams, lists of revolutionary heroes and idealised
figures of Reason have metastasised into Goblin warrens.
The demi-castles of the Lunar Aristocracy, still spattered with
musket and cannon scars, were ruined twice.
The Mansions are full of descendants living in penury;
cooking magpies, setting squirrel traps, eating small Goblins or
trying to boil a Meta-Fox. A handful still keep hereditary MegaB-
adgers as guards, but every day poverty draws more of them into
the shadowy world of underground Badger Brawls.
Behind black windows stacked with rotting paperback books,
things move. Overgrown ornamental trees loom on the lanes and
lean over into the street, full of murderous birds.
All the birds are angry here. And criminal. Crow Zones
are inaccessible hells, Gull Gangs harass those too long
164 in the open. All the pigeons are informers and they are
everywhere. The only safety is to carry an Owl; violent and
hypersensitive creatures, asleep much of the time.

OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET & THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
The city is accessed via hidden paths; routes through fences
and walls. Paint splattered ladders leaning against crumbling
brick walls form part of the unspoken thoroughfare. Doors to
ordinary homes are left half-open and those who know can walk
in and climb a chair to a kitchen window. Trash alleys are guarded
toll-roads. Hidden trails sneak through sculpture dumping
grounds from varying ages of censorship and monumental pride.
These streets are serious. There are things on fire in the night
and shadows move against the flames. There are Goblin ghosts in
bottles and bins. Everyone is an addict.
At the centre is the terrible Necropolis of Glass.

BAD BIRDS
Perhaps there was always something deeply wrong with the birds
of Owl City. Since its collapse their mendacious evil has only
spread and intensified. It’s not for nothing that a savvy citizen
carries an Owl strapped to their wrist like a Navy Colt.

CROW ZONES
The crows of Owl City are as intelligent as Tax Inspectors and can
change their size at-will, becoming as large as a man or as small
as a mouse.
Murderous and thieving creatures whose nests are full of
golden teeth and stolen I.O.U’s, the Crows have no sense of right or
wrong and effectively control large areas of the city, the so-called
‘Crow Zones’.
Anyone entering a Crow-Zone does so at their own risk. To lure
in innocents the cunning crows sometimes put up signs reading
‘No-Crow Zone’, scrawled by stolen crayon held in cackling beaks.

GULL GANGS
The Gulls of Owl City fly over from the Reach to roost. (Avoiding
Narcissolis, where they are relentlessly hunted for being ugly,
nasty and dull.)
Thankfully they are intensely stupid creatures and cannot
change size. They will compulsively harass and attack anyone
who seems weak enough, following them until they escape or are
pecked to death.
Children and the Old should carry weapons or defensive
shields. The war between the children of Owl City and its Gulls
is attritional and permanent, lives are lost each day on either side.

165
STOOL PIGEONS
Just as some rare birds have learned to lead hunters to honey,
forming a kind of symbiosis in which human craft will crack open
a hive and expose its golden crypt to robbing flocks, so the Pigeons
of Owl City have adapted to lead predators to prey of every kind.
The Stool Pigeons have evolved a complex awareness of the
relative strength and vulnerability of moving urban entities and
have learned to guess which groups or individuals might wish to
predate on others.
Once a likely victim is spotted, they will separate off and look
for potential muggers, garden-gangs, Murders of Crows or political
enemies. Then they will lead these predatory agents to the ‘prey’.
Once the situation has resolved itself, they swoop in to feed
off what remains.
So it is that survival in Owl City means not only avoiding your
enemies, but dodging the Pigeons as well.

41. EGG PIPE. Used to smoke crack eggs. Normally a trivially common item amongst
Owl City and beyond, this specimen is unusually adorned.

166
 OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET & THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS

42. BIRD REARING PUPPETS. Once belonging to the notorious outlaw ornithologist
Wendy Bastard. Attempting to breed any birds (other than owls) is highly dangerous
and illegal and will have you ostracised.

167
43. BIRD REARING PUPPETS.

168
44. BIRD REARING PUPPETS.

169
OWL CITY CULTURE
CRACK SHOPS
Sweatshops powered by cracked-up Goblins and anyone else they
can squeeze in.
Owl City is full of these cramped, boiling, pop-up microfac-
tories spewing out steam and high volumes of terrible goods.
Outside the Great Goblin Market, Crack Shops are the chief,
and really the only, remaining economic engine of Owl City. They
make good things badly and bad things well.
Tools, cakes, pipes, pies, books, handy items and household
objects all are made at incredible speed, sold cheap and break
within months, or minutes.
Crack pipes, lockpicks, shanking daggers, voodoo dolls, lava
lamps, face masks, syringes, cheese graters, strappy sandals,
fedora hats, granny glasses, graphic Tees, acid, slime, poisons,
political pamphlets, commemorative coins, novelty aprons, pointed
shoes, cravats, pleather trousers and certain cheeses, are all made
surprisingly well by specific drugged-out artisans.
Any bad object can be found in the Great Goblin Market for a
reasonable price. It is one of the few good reasons to come.

SHOUTING MATCHES
A street that isn’t empty, patrolled by birds or unseen gangs or
cleared for a Penny Farthing race will contain a shouting match.
These are either Window-to-Street arguments, Intra-Street or
Window-to-Window arguments.
Intra-Street screamathons are usually the heralds to violence.
Window to Street arguments are less likely to break into violence
but will go on much longer. Window-to-Window shouting matches
can be quite familiar and ritualistic, but sometimes blossom into
foul slaughters when a tipping point is crossed.
Beyond that arguments can be either Group on Individual,
in which case the Individual will probably end up running for
it. Group on Group, in which case a gang fight may be about to
break out. Or Individual to Individual, which has a wide range of
possible results.
Most arguments are about drugs, money or varied opinions
and dissenting views on a complex network of interpersonal
relationships.
It has been said that if you cannot hear an argument in the next
street then you are not in Owl City.

170
GARDEN GANGS

OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET & THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
In the rule of the Lunar Aristocracy, when Owl City was Moon
City, the Gardening Gangs were simply aggressive guilds fighting
for contracts with the aristocrats who loved to splash cash on
display-lawns and pointless bushes.
As the Aristocracy fell into madness and the economy began
to tank, highly aggressive gardening was one of the few routes to
wealth for the working classes.
The Guilds became more violent and controlling, launching
raids on each other’s gardens and sometimes even composting
each other.
After the Revolution the Masonic Regime attempted to force
the cities competitive gardening culture underground. They were
never entirely successful. The association of gardening with crime
and violence had already been made and the Guilds were hard
to break. And the Masons wanted gardens too, albeit made in
depressingly regular geometric mandalas.
After the Masons fall, slow Goblin infiltration consumed
many of the Guilds and the rest were forced to match them in
cruelty and tricksyness in order to survive.
Any area of carefully maintained greenery is the territory of
a violent herbaceous gang and the precision and extravagance of
the Garden is an indicator of the power of that gang.
Sculpted Topiary, a well-maintained lawn, floral clocks and
water-features are all indicators that you have crossed a line. Even
entering the area may be considered an offence, especially if you
are already associated with another gang. Damaging greenery
will be considered an attack. Do not step on the grass.

PENNY FARTHING GANGS

Goblins have learnt to attach very basic petrol engines to
penny-farthing bicycles. The engines don’t do much other than
produce smoke and extra noise, and to sometimes explode the bike,
Goblin technology is not that good. The bikes do not have breaks.
Goblins ‘supercharge’ their penny-farthings with rare
chemicals and have extensive competitions and arguments about
the best engine and the best adaptations.
Bikers lounge around with their sleeves rolled up smoking
slender clay pipes. It’s not clear if they know or care that the
engines don’t work, or even if the engines are meant to be working
to power the bike.
The interpretation that the engine should be powering the
bike may be a purely human construct. It may simply be enough
for the Goblins that the Engine be Engine.
Bikers make a living dealing and delivering drugs and
through various other crimes. They feud for street control and
run regular midnight races in which Penny Farthings dash down
narrow roads a quarter mile at a time. They often die through
being hit in the face by a Great Horned Owl at high speed in
the dark. 171
TABLE – FACTIONAL ACTION; STREET FIGHTS IN OWL CITY
They are at it again!
THE BELLIGERENTS THE AGGRESSORS POINT OF CONTENTION (IF
REQUIRED)
1 A clade of cunning crows A dangerous Garden Gang (pg. The Stool Pidgeon’s (pg. 166) set
capable of changing 170), part man, part Goblin – up this battle, leading one side
size (pg. 165). They want ruthless organised criminals to another, and watch carefully
golden teeth and I.O.U.s and precise gardeners. Equipped to feed from what results.
and battle with trickery with ritualised gardening tools
and traps before pecking adapted to mortal damage. Caps
people to death. and Barbour jackets mark them
out.
2 Dumb Gulls the size Orphaned, lost or simply Inter-street Screamathon got out
of albatrosses (pg. 165) ignored children of Owl City. of control. One of the regular
bang down out of the Pict, mortal, Goblin or other. Owl City shouting matches
sky snapping and The undesired, unprotected accelerated, drawing all
screeching, rank with detritus of a fallen land. Armed around into its microdrama.
the rime of the Reach with knives, slings and bricks
(pg. 195) they WON’T they scamper climb and crawl
STOP SCREAMING. They through places inaccessible to
could easily kill a child. others.
3 Crack-Shop (pg. 170) Goblin Bubonkoners (pg. 173). The unending Drugs Trade
workers on their lunch- These surprisingly sombre of every kind which both
break amphetamine Goblins, careful trainers of the oppresses, and makes possible,
bender (who knows how Owl, think themselves an urban the urban flail-mare of Owl
long it has gone on?). aristocracy. Creeping, quiet City is regularly battled over.
Gobs and human all the and heavily laden with deadly
poorest and the ruined, owls an argument with them is
fingers like bitten almost always over NOISE.
pencils from the trash
mills.
4 Goblin Dogs! (pg. 173) (Or Drug-Dealing Plains-Goblins Territorial Conflict. Someone
are they just deformed (pg. 97). Wizened by the sun, ignored the gang signs in
naked Goblins sneaking scarred by the Anaesthetic Fire graffiti, dangling shoes or
around in the grass?) (pg. 94) and exiled for political bin-glyphs. Whether in error
Far more dangerous, reasons these “Foreign Gobbos” or provocation makes no
intelligent and sadistic couldn’t make it on the Plain of difference. A war is on!
than any normal Goblin. Fire and now form a resentful
Fear them! community of odd-accented
drug connections.
5 Underground Badger "Fancy" Technophile LGC Goblins. Ancient Feud. Who knows how
Brawlers (pg. 163). Clad Goblins with big ideas and a or when it started but the
in bejazzled sports kit belief in technology, but are insults and rages have built up
and gold (plated) chains, they really ready for Owl City? over the years and all anyone
each Brawler thinks Rayguns and semimechanoid has now is a history of Wrath
themselves a star though war suits won’t stop a shank in with the other.
they fight with their the guts or an owl in the eye.
Gym. The MegaBadgers Fuck off back to yer cube iron
are their weapon and man.
their trade.
6 Pict-Goblin Gang. Not “Focused” Exiles. The handful of New Kids on the Block. One or
even “real” Goblins the Singing Tribes (pg. 41) born both are new to this Quarter
but Pictures of Goblins. ‘in focus’, clearly visible and and they need to prove they
Trash on the Painted unable to Blur inevitably end up deserve RESPECT.
Plane for being Gobbos. alienated from their own people.
Trash in Goblin culture They form a sad and visible
for not being real. community here acting out a
Surviving on River pseudo-culture of feigned Isles
Water and fighting tools and technology. Dog-Skin
cause they gotta. cloaks and iron harpoons.

172
 OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET & THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
THE BELLIGERENTS THE AGGRESSORS POINT OF CONTENTION (IF
REQUIRED)
7 Ruined Humans. Those ‘Dulls’. Narcissolis is a hard Food Riot. Forced to feast
people left behind by place for those who are on Cubist bread and rapid-
every change in world fundamentally uninteresting. ly-decaying surreal meats,
or regime. To poor or Those unattractive, with no wit the population is raging and
conservative to go or imagination often leave and hungry! They want food!
elsewhere. Often with end up sucked into the vortex of
a decayed Gerontocracy failure that is Owl City. There
family structure & is not much to say about them.
wielding rusty ancestral They are just.. there.
weapons.
8 Penny-Farthing Biker Penny-Farthing Biker Gang. This Boredom. There was nothing
Gang. Maybe the ‘Dandy time the ‘Quick Nicks’, rolling else to do. Its Owl City.
Jacks’ pimped out in with leather jackets, pompa-
tweed with pipes and dours and flick knives. Wielding
weaponised clay-Pidgeon iron chains, they wouldn’t
launchers. They rev be seen dead with a pipe.
their engines on street Cigarettes only baby. If both are
corners both looking, rolled, this is a Drag Race.
and waiting, for trouble.

GOBLIN BUBONKONERS
While most potent individuals in Owl City will habitually carry an
Owl, especially while out and about, the largest and most dominant
Owls, held in greatest profusion, are commanded by the Goblin
Bubonkoners.
Most birds of prey will not tolerate a Goblin, only the Great
Horned Owl will stand their presence. This is because both share an
unreasonable attitude to life and have very long claws whose points
are so sharp they cannot be easily seen, being mere blurs against the
air. Nevertheless most Goblin Bubonkoners are very badly scarred
around the head and brain, even by Goblin standards, and have
fingers and face fragments missing.
The Bubonkoners come forth in the evening and compete for
space with the Drug Dealers, Bikers and Badger Addicts. The noise
of these activities always bothers the Owls so the Bubonkoners are
obsessive about preventing excess sound. Unlike most Goblins they
go quietly on rag-padded feet and slide slim knives invisibly into
lungs to let out the sounds before they form.
The Bubonkoners are tolerated because the Owls kill Crows,
Gulls and Pigeons and so reduce the numbers of Terrible and
Harassing Birds in Owl City, something desired by all.
GOBLIN DOGS
Green, long-jawed snaggley-toothed creatures that could easily be
deformed hairy Goblins going on all fours. They may be the final
evolution of the Goblin form, a strange mutation or a freaky exper-
iment from the Goblin Cube. The dogs are sneaky carnivores. Though
they cannot speak or use tools, their intelligence is roughly double
that of a Goblin.
They like to hide in long grass. 173
THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET AND THE
NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
At the centre of Owl City is a single crime-free zone.The Necropolis
of Glass.
It is here (in daylight only) that the people of the Moonlands
come to exchange Goods and Services in the Great Goblin Market.
During the Rise of Narcissolis, in those periods when regime
change became necessary, that city faced the challenge of disposing
of its Imaginary, and therefore, unkillable, Illusory Lords.
Like old ideas, they could not quite be forgotten, neither could
they be allowed to return to mind.
A solution was found in the absent and decaying heart of the
Old Regime, that goblin-haunted economic wasteland now called
‘Owl City’. Here would be built a Necropolis to house the spirits of
these undead tyrants.
Hidden in the crystal hills are mirrored labyrinths, antiseptic
mazes full of reflected shadows wrapped around the hidden
Krystaphagi of the Illusory Lords whose tombs these are.
The enormous, perhaps incalculable, danger of the imprisoned
Illusory Lords makes the Necropolis a near crime-free and neutral
trading place.
The horror and certainly terminal death of leaving as much
as a handprint or stain on the surface of a Pyramid, equalises all.
Even tricksy Goblins are forced to behave themselves (somewhat)
in the clean rows.
The stalls of the Great Goblin Market are set well back from
the glass walls, narrowing the walkable space between. No-one
litters, out of fear. Trading opens at noon (on bright days) and
as the evening begins to fall, stalls shutter, traders flee and the
Necropolis empties once more.
By night the place is dead.

THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET

From the invisible ruins of the City of Visible Grief might come
the occasional Mole Man (outraged), the rare bat-people trading
stag-beetle shells for fine cigars, hiding their valuable Opalescent
wings beneath long coats, and even a few Invisible People (perhaps)
selling invisible books.
From the Painted Plane come naturalistic Picts selling
painted tools and weapons, foldable houses and small scenes, a
handful of questionable Impressionists and mild Surreals trading
moon-bright pigment from the Pigment river, and anxious to
return, a Sinister Inquisitor seeking political foes and Goblin
Hunters offering Captured Digital Effects.
From the Ridge come Pig Merchants struggling with small
bristly pigs, Uncomfortable Pig Knights, Apple-thieves, Secretive
Apple dealers, Proud Waxers, Spies for Crazed Theigns
174
on cryptic missions which can be neither explained or fulfilled,

OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET & THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
Hidden Cryomaniacal killers offering Cold Fusion trades,
Manticore Bards claiming to have trapped a Manticore in song
and the Meta Fox.
From the AntiGoblin Empire; the rare and terrified pompous
AntiGoblin kept safe within a Popemobile bathysphere, guarded
by the elite performance artists of the Malakaj Kudroj, hawking
anti-gravity cider, strange equations or topiary art.
From the Plains of Anaesthetic Fire; Goblin-Gun-armed
Asbestos Bedouin leading egg-laden Xanthic Clinkerskippers,
seeking an asbestos trade connection, magnesium merchants and
dealer in Amphetamine Cat glands, sketchy Goblins claiming to
have boxed Anaesthetic fire – they say it’s too dangerous to open
and check. Or an Ignition Pilgrim on a strange quest of their own.
From the shores of the Vermillion Sea; Goblins trading copper
scrap from old submarines, red-sun opium from Vermillion Sea
poppies, wild blue sugar cane, the meat of Photographic Dolphins
or a whole baby pixilated Hippo. A disgraced but still proud Invisi-
beetle offering services as a duellist or bodyguard. A scholar of the
Apocalypse Wasps from secret Pitville, hiding their identity and
tracing a lead on a Wasp-Culture Cult. Illegal Peach Merchants or
Wasp Egg sellers – highly perverse.
From the Large Goblin Collider, a Goblin Scientist, or the
result of their experiments (often the same thing) selling amber
batteries full of Cackle Waves or Green Energy, or an agent of
the P.O.G.R.A.P wielding a P.I.G.G.Y.-powered raygun, on a secret
mission for the President.
From the Umber Woods, a Psychic Penumbeetle on a sombre
reality-sustaining pilgrimage, or perhaps a Glass-Hunter, maybe
trading Aye-Ayes, fig moths, figs grease, fig jam, raw figs, tinned figs,
honey and iridescent silent bees. Or a sad Gourd-Addict, trapped
in unending Melon-Madness, trailing their half-open carapace
down a glass-sand road offering psychic services for fruit.
From the Reach; a blurred member of the Singing Tribes,
shifting from shadow to shadow, perhaps bearing trade-asbestos,
carrying lightning bars or snowflake coins to exchange for an
unknown boon.
From Narcissolis; a bright and pigmented servant of the Lathe,
the agent of a Crime Mime or a fanatical Lens Hunter.
And of course, more Goblins. Goblins everywhere. Owl-armed
Goblins trading sticks, tricks and lockpicks. Goblins riding Penny
Farthings and offering to Swap Crimes (with a Goblin Handshake).
Goblin Garden Gangers working for the Goblin Lie Exchange.
Badger Brawlers selling rusty knives & broken daggers, (they
claim all are, or will-be, murder weapons). Goblins selling Goblin
Weed and Green Poisons and Goblin Dogs slinking between the
stalls. GOBLINS!

175
TABLE – DEALS TO BE DEALT AT THE GREAT GOBLIN
MARKET
(For more complex situations just roll again and loop back).

THIS PERSON WANTS.. THIS PERSON AND IN BUT..

HAS IT RETURN THEY
WANT..
1 Asbestos Egg of the Pompous Badger- Poisonous Need a permit
Bedouin (pg. Chaos Wasps Master (pg. 163). Wasp-Musk (pg. for that.
97) fleeing an (pg. 88). 88).
undesired
match.
2 Secret Wasp Bill for the Goblin AntiGoblin Time is
Cultist (pg. 88). AntiGoblin Bubonkiner Sphere Bonsai running out.
Parliament. (pg. 173). (pg. 115).
3 Whetstone Coins of Bone Member of the Snowflake Coins Political
Churl. (pg. 46). Order of the differences.
Peach (pg. 90).
4 Entropic Amberised Rebellious AntiGravity Romantic
Philosopher Golden Bugs Shadow. Pear ('Sky Apple') entanglements.
(pg. 102). (pg. 44). (pg. 111).
5 Goblin Pilgrim Idol of the Dark Amphetamine Tools of the Neither will
to the LGC. Continent. Cat Addict (pg. Malakaj Kudroj acknowledge
12). (pg. 117). the other.
6 Whetstoner Man Melancholic Amphetamine One is a
expertly faking polymorphed to Condor (pg. Cat Glands (pg. terrorist.
stupidity. stone (pg. 6). 102) Shaman (or 12).
claims to be).
7 The Salmon Blurred Ghost! Outrageous Can't agree on
Pope in human Wolf-Tooth Braille Tabloid price.
form. Knife (pg. 44). (pg. 161) (a stack
of them).
8 Deadly Lens Carmine Lotus Pixellated Hippo A will or Literary
Hunter. Poppies (pg. 84). Dealer (pg. 85). bequest. disagreement.
9 Cockatoo Insect Saint (pg. Professional Blade of a Something
claiming to be 48). Condor Assassin. Guillotine Guy mysterious
polymorphed (pg. 182). interferes.
woman (pg. 6).
10 Tabloid Magical Apple. An "Anti-Gravity Crazed Theign Spies are
Journalist Invader!" (pg. 112). (pg. 128) Death watching.
(pg. 161). Mask.
11 Speaking, White Horses Intelligent Bat persons It’s an illegal
weeping snake. (pg. 46). Shepherd Opal Wings trade.
(pg. 132). (pg. 160).
12 Bedouin Magnesium Dour Psychother- Fragment of They won't
hunter of the Flags (pg. 100). apist advisor of glass from the come out of
Pronghorn a Crazed Theign teeth of the hiding.
Gazelle (pg. 94). (pg. 128). Maw.
13 Slavecatcher Gem Animals. Levitating Necro Political BEES!
for the Anti- Goblin. pamphlets.
Goblins (pg. 110).
14 Thought-Con- “Good” Object Goblin Philos- PIGMENT - of There’s one
troller of or Process. opher. the Pigment small problem
Narcissolis. River. with the goods...

176
 OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET & THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
THIS PERSON WANTS.. THIS PERSON AND IN BUT..
HAS IT RETURN THEY
WANT..
15 Penny-Far- Cackle Wave Apple Horticul- Valuable Apple Price
thing riding Meter. turalist. Pie (pg. 127). fluctuating
Goblin. constantly.
16 Dangerous PosiGoblin One badly Ooze from A better offer
Blurred Raider infiltration scarred by the a black & from someone.
(pg. 41). juice (pg. 110). Anaesthetic Fire predatory tarn
(pg. 94). (pg. 159).
17 Former/ Bedouin Tracker of Regalia of an They had a
Current Asbestos Robes. Cryomaniacal Illusory Lord in strange dream
Armour Goblin serial killer (pg. life (pg. 180). about this very
of Bobbin 124). thing..
Ten-Goblins
(pg. 115).
18 P.O.G.R.A.P Blurred Furs Evangelist for Large Field Owl. It used to
Secret Service (pg. 44). the Goblin belong to my
Agent (pg. 74). Minority old granny!
Cordyceps
Faction.
19 Victim of the Opium. Penumbeelte Certain cheeses. RACISM.
Melancholic Aye-Aye herder.
Condor (pg.
102).
20 Bobbin Natural Goblin working Rich manticore Obsessed with
Ten-Goblins Asbestos. for a giant Crow. hides. noise of a
(pg. 115) (in bothering wasp.
disguise,
somehow).
21 Mysterious Blurred Honey An Old (or new) Bristle-Pig coats Severe drug
Glass Trader (pg. 44). Enemy with (pg. 125). addict.
(pg. 174). (hidden) Wasp
Wings (pg. 16).
22 Crime Mime Lightning bars A surprisingly Melancholic Wants sexual
(pg. 32). (pg. 46). easy-going Anti- Condor (pg. 102) favours.
Goblin (pg. 110). Eggs.
23 Boring Unique, bright AntiGoblin (pg. Mystery Play Lovelorn
Narcissan (pg. clothes. 110), an Expert (pg. 131) script/ and needs
27). Monkey-Frus- Paraphernalia. assistance.
trater (pg. v).
24 Egg Brother Shrooms. Manticore Bard Ink-Wash Actually two
(pg. 101). (pg. 146). Willow Branch. identical twins
pretending to
be the same
person, but
they don't
update each
other properly.
25 Academic Storm necklace Penumbeetle Chunk of Won't make a
(Cultist) of the Pilgrims (pg. 60). Sociopathic deal without
Hyperblue Ice Hyperblue Ice getting blind
(pg. 124). (pg. 124). drunk first.
26 Poppy-Mining Glass for Trade Though-Con- Golden Apples Extremely,
Bedouin (pg. (pg. 174). troller of (pg. 126). very, very,
84). Narcissolis. painfully
boring yet
innocent.

177
 THIS PERSON WANTS.. THIS PERSON AND IN BUT..
HAS IT RETURN THEY
WANT..
27 Manticore Goblin Goblin mecha- Invisible Dog Very passive
Hunting 'Magnificence' master. in sheath of aggressive.
Theign. Governmental clattering spines
hat (pg. 120). (pg. 160).
28 Invisibeetle Polymorphed Fellow in a Silver-Tusked Fearful to the
Knight (pg. 85). Murderer-to- strange mood 'Stick Pigs'. extreme.
Moon-Blade with a strange
(pg. 6). song (Manticore
Carrier).
29 Esploradoj – the Xanthic Expert Blurrer Small Backup Experienceing
Scythe-Armed nictitating (pg. 41) of the Pocket Owl (pg. a crisis of faith,
AntiGoblin Clinkerskipper Isles. 173). won't deal till
Inquisition (pg. (pg. 98). resolved.
118).
30 Anaesthetic Sanity Pills (pg. Extremly Weak Occult lens. Fears they may
Thugee (secret) 90). MoonCops. be a living
(pg. 102). illusion.
31 Cryomaniac Goblin Gun. Apple Knight (pg. Supercharged Is in massive
(pg. 124) 126). Penny-Farthing. debt to a
(hidden). Mirror Master
(pg. 32).
32 Dark Memory AntiGoblin Slaves of the Conceptual It’s all actually
Former (pg. 32). (pg. 110) long 'Flotations'. Weapon! (pg. 146) a trap to draw
pruning you in.
Clippers.
33 Giant Shoebill Quick, green, Polymorphed Eatable Pixels Keeps trying
herder (with sharp-featured Animal-to- from the Pixel to set up a
Shoebills). and suspicious Human (pg. 6). Hippos (pg. 85). threesome.
pig (pg. 88).
34 Wise and Cocaine (pg. 97). Butcher of the Vantablack STENCH.
ancient Singing Animal-Picts. Goosefeathers
Tribesperson (pg. 158).
(pg. 41).
35 The Prince Ceramic Key Hot Slutty Big old head of Extremely
of Bears (in to the Scythes Goblin. an Ontomorphic proud and vain.
disguise) (pg. of Illusion Manticore (pg.
44). (illegal!) (pg. 118). 133).
36 Mirror Master Vine of the Despiser of Ash Apples' (the Keeps
(or an agent of antigravity (pg. 101). coins). changing the
such) (pg. 32). Pear (pg. 111). price.
37 Hydrocephalic Work of Goblin Crazed Theign Umber Cake Forgetful and
balloon goblin. Science. (pg. 128), currently from decayed pissed off about
deeply depressed. Picts (pg. 148). it.
38 Memory-Wiped Giant Blocks of Anaesthetic A Time-Trav- Dislikes
Traveller. Stone Hare trader. elling Pig! 'educated
types'.
39 Professional Carmine Lotus Whetstone Water melted Actually
Procoptodon Wrack perfume Mystery Player. from Pure a masked
(pg. 114) (pg. 84). Sociopathic vigilante in
breaker (a Hyperblue Ice disguise, this is
"Bouncer"). (pg. 124). just a cover.
40 Sky Apple Silver Scales Innocent Singing scroll of pearl. Stole all this
Smuggler. (pg. 46). Tribesperson (pg. recently and is
41) on a quest. being hunted.

178
 OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET & THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
THIS PERSON WANTS.. THIS PERSON AND IN BUT..
HAS IT RETURN THEY
WANT..
41 Embodied Goblin moon Normalised' Fancy Cigar(s). Obsessively
Dream. Worship Thing. Goblin on Sanity tests the goods.
Pills (pg. 90). ALL of it.
42 Lollipop Surreal art Polymorphed Stag-Beetle Being used as
Hills (pg. 114) from the Halls Child-to-Goblin Shells. unwitting mule
Topiary-ob- of the Absurd. (pg. 6). by smugglers,
sessed Goblin. "stuff" hidden
in the goods.

43 PenumBeetle Stone-leaf The Meta-Fox Silver-bound May be

(pg. 60). Blades. (pg. 132) in pseudo-books. plagueridden.
disguise as
someone else.
44 Juicer, a Scythe of the Experimental Black Pangolin Has a catch-
PosiGoblin Esploradoj. Goblin with (will roll up). prhase "Jingle
infiltraitor (pg. Spider Arms. Jangle that’s
110). my angle!" uses
till you want to
kill them.
45 Roving Blurred Malakaj Kudroj ESCAPED Griefstruck
Dimensional Carvings (pg. (pg. 117) -the Joke BRISTLY PIG but still trying
Hole (pg. 68) 44). Police. (pg. 125). to work.
(letters fly out).
46 AntiGoblin Guilty Object Monochrome Magical mirror. They are
(pg. 110) or process. Whispering Troll an abused
Slavecatcher. (pg. 158) with employee and
portable bridge. takes it out on
you.
47 Goblin AntiGoblin (pg. Aye-Aye Stealth Shepherds or Really really
Polymorphed 110) Logic-Dom- Goblin. Travellers book dumb to the
to Puppet of a inance Hat (pg. of Philosophy or point you
Goblin. 120). maths. can't even
functionally
fool them.
48 Adorer of the Goblin Poetics. Deniable Apple Time-Looped FLIPS THE
Flame (pg. 101). bandit (pg. 126). Archeotech (pg. FUCK OUT!
148).
49 Wrath-Filled Honey from PenumBeetle Legal Quietly huffing
Wasp-Struck Silent Bees (pg. Mutist (pg. 60) documents. glue.
Wanderer (pg. 56). and occasional
16). Manticore-
battler.
50 Apple Mafia Porn of Goblins Bedouin scout for Bottled Goblin Agent of the
'made man (pg. (illegal). a Plains-crossing Ghost. CHAOS WASPS!
126)'. caravan. (pg. 88)

179
THE NECROPOLIS
The Krystaphagi are giant glass pyramids packed with mirror
mazes and light, shining cubist reflections wreathed in diamonds,
chained in diadems of diadems.
All simply to keep the Lords slumberous and silent through
the days in which they don’t exist.
The Great Goblin Market only happens when it’s bright.
When it’s dark and shadowy, or very overcast, the Lords become
wakeful and wander around. A sight you wouldn’t wish to witness.

45. CATOTYPE OF THE NECROPOLIS. Made using Goblin technology. Taken by the
author.
LIST – THE TOMBS OF THE ILLUSORY LORDS

OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET & THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
There have been seventeen (recorded) previous Illusory Lords
whose Krystaphagi now lie within the Necropolis:
+ Dame Pain
(Paranoid, accusative)
+ Lord Unlikely
(Sought invisible creatures)
+ Prince Remover
(Bilious, friendly, corrupt)
+ Queen Sigma Pi
(Set the weak against strong)
+ Lord ‘Reasons Tribune’
(Made lengthy bullet-pointed demands. His influence lives on)
+ Lord Thin-Skin-Hidden
(Very sectarian, worried about the ‘other’)
+ “The Emergent One”
(An insinuating, complimentary, systemic poisoner)
+ Lady First Cuttlefish
(Demanded endless tiring carnivals)
+ ‘The Optimising Eye’
(A Meta-Bureaucrat with infinite fillable forms)
+ Grand Madame Scalp
(Bumbling, vague, happily murderous)
+ Lord Dark Arcturus Dark
(Obsessed with Theft)
+ The Prince of Knives
(“Closer of Holes”)
+ Lord Scalpel of the Horde
(Lead a precise gerontocracy, by exact hour)
+ The Unspeaking Crown
(Relentless failed invasions of the Incoherent Isles)
+ Judge Fragmentation Round
(Suspected Photo-Realistic Pict)
+ The Great Unreasoning Thief
(“Bread, Circuses and Hand to Hand combat”)
+ The Prior of the Choir of the General Will
(May have been two Goblins in a suit)

We live now in the age of the current lord, the eighteenth; Lord
South-Barking Dog, whose nature is Unknown.

181
WHY GO IN?
Diamonds usually, legends say the floors are carpeted with them.
Rare resins, sunstones, fragments of eternal and un-meltable Ice.
Glass fountains spewing bubbling pools of clear magical goo. Rare
jellyfish, cellophane, calcite crystals, occult lenses, magical mirrors
in bountiful hordes and the regalia of the Illusory Lord in life.
There are also legal documents, seals and manifestos. Thieves
(pre-emptive archaeologists) might be asked to risk the tomb
simply to confirm a will or bequest, end a long-running court case,
clear an inheritance or even free someone from prison.
Many of these quest-givers are themselves Mirror Masters of
Narcissolis, career criminals who became trapped in glass by the
tricks of the Necropolis, and who now send others in their place,
hoping some key or release will be discovered. Or perhaps covertly
desiring that others share their two-dimensional fate. Things
may be survivable in the mirror world, but become increasingly
distressing the deeper in you go.
The Mirror-Masters are not behind every attempt to penetrate
a Pyramid, but if one is organised, they will soon infiltrate it

DANGERS OF THE NECROPOLIS

DROWNING ROOMS
Tall rooms with invisible ceilings, or false ones, filled with utterly
clear, utterly still water. The walls and door are glass.
If the door is opened, the clear water flows out into the clear
glass corridor and drowns anyone there. Trying to work out if an
unopened room is actually huge and full of clear, still water, is a
serious challenge in the Pyramids.
The Sprtizenmenn love these rooms.

GUILLOTINE GUYS
Men made of eternally falling heavy glass blades. Like doorways
torn into a dimension of transparent cleavers.
Whether they mean to harm is not known. Touching one is
disaster, to be embraced is certain death.

SALINE GOLEMS
Huge, smooth, slow, salty and non-infectious, the Saline Golems
may be what carefully clean the streets of the Necropolis in the
night. Their shape is tubular, humanoid and whacky, but difficult
to spot, except for their fingers; blunt trapezoid blocks which flash
like prisms. Moderate contact with a Saline Golem can help
182 cleanse wounds but their only intention is to fill the bodies
ventricles and blow them open like bad pneumatics.
SHATTERTRAPS

OWL CITY, THE GREAT GOBLIN MARKET & THE NECROPOLIS OF GLASS
The commonest trap in the Pyramids. These stick you in a mirror
which then tips over and breaks apart. Many individuals are
caught by the trap, but the mirror saved from breaking by their
friends. Whether this is a mercy on their part can be debated. So
are many Mirror-Masters born.

SILHOUETTE MACHINES
These half-intelligent grim sliding automata can tear an individual
apart or make their existence dependant on a strong light and flat
nearby surfaces.

SNAKES IN THE GLASS

Simply large glass snakes, that live in glass as if it were grass.
Some of these may not even be aggressive but since they are
almost impossible to see, one can step upon their hiding place and
disturb them without realising. Then a huge anaconda like a mad
chandelier bursts out of the smooth wall as if it were water and
takes you down.

THE SPRITZENMENN
Perhaps the most awful and frightening guardians of the
Necropolis. Silver needle automata, whose limbs and bodies are
as fine as a hair. They stride, plinking along and jab frantically at
anyone who breaks the rules.
Fighting them is terrifying; they are barely visible and deep,
microscopically narrow puncture wounds appear on the body with
startling rapidity.
The Spritzenmann themselves are an indefinable blur of lines
in the air. Grabbing one is like grabbing a long steel needle that
hates you and lives. Their mass is so slight that blows only knock
them away. If bent they scream and freak out.
Spritzenmenn both hate, and fear living things and the
staccato, spastic flailing of their raging and frightened needle
limbs only adds to the terror.

183
 46. NECROPOLIS FINGERTRAP. Such relics occasionally turn at the goblin
market, purporting to be the remains of some great theif or other, recovered
from the Necropolis. Said to rattle in the presence of glass traps, they are sold as
a survival aid to those wishing to enter the tombs, although in my experience,
they are near useless.

184
47. UNKNOWN. It is hypothesised that if a cunning, patient and brave Mirror Master
were able to manipulate events in such a way that their entrapping mirror was grafted
to the body of a Glass Snake by a Necropolis raiding party under the transformative light
of a Fine Gackling Moon, they might gain some form of mitigated motility and escape
the Necropolis, slipping easily through its glass. They might then, as a thief with no
perishable form, and an ability to traverse both mirror and glass, spend their undending
life travelling the Moonlands completely unobserved, collecting and cataloguing items
of interest. This is, of course, entirely speculative, as no Mirror Master of such
courage, stoicism and guile could possibly exist.
185
 NAMES
BY SCRAP PRINCESS
NARCISSANS 15. Old Mate
16. Chattering Imbecile
1. Robert Robert Robert
17. Tempestuous Harridan
2. The Incadescent Lily
18. Disquieted Maid
3. Towers Majesty
19. Surly Man
4. Sapphire
20. Whimsical Fellow
5. Pure Gold
6. Narcissisus
7. Eagle Heroic
PENUMBEETLES
8. Hearts Trumph
9. Heavens Fall 1. Oikos
10. Eva Forever 2. Agora
11. Pandora 3. Crepidoma
12. Maximillian 4. Stylobate
13. Nova Dawn 5. Stoa
14. Savant Steel 6. Gutta
15. Destinys Child 7. Sima
16. Helios Magus 8. Abacus
17. Eternity 9. Ovolo
18. Comet Palace 10. Frieze
19. The Solution 11. Tympanum
20. Halcyon Blaze 12. Lintel
13. Archivolt
14. Taenia
SINGING TRIBES 15. Oculus
16. Volute
‘Given’ Names used for outsiders,
17. Tholos
strangers and spirits, their True
names are melodies and songs. 18. Cella
19. Plinth
1. Snide Gentleman 20. Krepis
2. Maudlin Women
3. Large Child
4. Callous Beauty GOBLINS
5. Sinister Matron
1. Snuffajapes
6. Stuttering Youth
2. Mingentio
7. Charming Lady
3. Dunk
8. Jovial Grandma
4. Shuttergunt
9. Shrewd Madam
5. Zeepeep
10. Tenacious Girl
6. Blogart
11. Bogus Giant
7. Mansboy
12. Audacious Boy
8. Glue
13. Indignant Chap
9. Feague
188 14. Solemn Stranger 10. Wamblecropt
11. Waning Jobler 5. Ends-Badly

Names
12. Pickles 6. Harsh-But-Certain
13. Huffy 7. No-Time-For-Pity
14. Mochlic 8. Hold-A-Little-Joy
15. Sevous 9. A-Calm-To-Winds
16. Lardgarden 10. Ruminate-Not
17. Barking 11. Moments-From-Dust
18. Speustic 12. Take-More-Care
19. Spatchcock 13. Behold-A-Stranger
20. Urette 14. Udulate-Under-Uncaring-Skies
15. Lucks-spat
16. Entropic-Grace
INVISIBEETLES 17. Peace-With-Ruin
18. Friends-Few-Friends-True
1. Burrhallow
19. Patience-Long-Temper-Vast
2. Fuzzplane
20. Passing-Cloud
3. Stuccoridge
4. Two-notch
3. Seldom-silk
IGNITION PILGRIMS
4. Worn-down
5. Pitted 1. Ashen
6. Flanging 2. Perce
7. Coarsecomb 3. Heathe
8. Too-Grease 4. James
9. Curling-Spine 5. Kauna
10. Slicken 6. No-man
11. Gouge-little 7. Sulia
12. Dustcoat 8. Lester
13. Jitter 9. Kimon
14. Shagpoint 10. Kafhine
15. Brittle-edge 11. Tenree
16. Too-Rough 12. Heffew
17. Five-pits 13. Mikal
18. Oils-stay 14. Juke
19. Short-spike 15. Kaul
20. Long-Scratch 16. Hannee
17. Hos-He
18. Polo
ASBESTOS BEDOUIN 19. Fete

1. Torment-Might-Cease
2. Pale-Respite
3. Flicker-of-Pleasantry
4. Grim-Forbodence
189
ANTIGOBLINS 14. Sturmer
15. Peasgood
“Epiphenemon labels”, since the
16. Freyberg
self is an illusion the AntiGoblins
do not have True Names. 17. Oratia
18. Baujada
1. Gradations Of-Blue 19. Priscilla
2. Subtle-thought Fabrication 20. Baujade
3. Piston Bo-Reason
4. Observable Acts
5. Known-to-be-seen Seen-to-be- CRAZED THEIGNS
known
1. The Storm at The End of The World
6. Calculable Contraption
2. A Broken Man
7. Identity Concept
3. The Queen
8. Imaginary Concept
4. Iron Fellow
9. No-Joke Concept
5. August Represences
10. Concept Grasper
6. Agnes the 18th
11. Preserve-Truth No-Goblins
7. Domingo The Former
12. Definitely Notagoblin
8. Maria of Mercy
13. Objectively Notagoblin
9. Father Bear
14. Burnagoblin Truth-Irreducable
10. The World King
15. Oneplusone Isto
11. Empress Sin
16. Zero Goblins
12. Winter’s Throne
17. Intense Calm
13. The Judge
18. Mind Zoomfaster
14. Tom
19. Thinkbee Notagoblin
15. Graves
20. Zero Incoherence
16. Grail Lord
17. Saint Octovo
18. Kaiser
RIDGELANDERS
19. Plutotach
1. Braeburn 20. Jupiter
2. Gala
3. Cortland
4. McIntosh PICTS
5. Ballyfatten
1. Umbra
6. Cameo
2. Cinabrese
7. Jonagold
3. Frescott
8. Pippin
4. Liquin
9. Bramley
5. Tung
10. Belle
6. Temperane
11. Boskoop
7. Fulvous
12. Laxton
8. Falu
190 13. Egremont 9. Gamboge
10. Mauve 4. Tutmarc

Names
11. Drab 5. Smits
12. Isabelline 6. Dopyera
13. Jonquil 7. Humon
14. Madder 8. Waisvisz
15. Luster 9. Yepes
16. Majorelle 10. Nernst
17. Nyanza 11. Moog
18. Phthalo 12. Yinn
19. Rufous 13. Jupolli
20. Sinopia 14. Bode
15. Wintergatan
PICT NAMING CONVENTIONS 16. Uhlig
17. Theremin
Picts sometimes add one of the
18. Stocco
following to their names in formal
occasions, as would be suitable for 19. Zenti
the name. A particularly zealous Pict 20. Russolo
might use this form of their name all
the time however.
BAT PEOPLE
SINISTERS

The suffix “ister”. Either added 1. Velva

directly on the end, or replacing some 2. Alto
of the ending. So Madderister could be 3. Shashun
one form, but also Maddister. 4. DoLitt
5. Grup
“le Sin” following the name. So Nyanza 6. Bullow
le Sin.
7. Moot
8. Flunpl
DEXTERS
9. Ussh
The suffix “rous” 10. Plull
11. Vuun
Again either at the end or replacing 12. OtOt
some of the end. e.g Drabrous, 13. Vamo
Mauvrous. 14. Dobul
15. MoLit
“van Dex” following the name 16. VaDo
e.g Falu van Dex 17. Gruva
18. Moolow
INVISIBLE PEOPLE 19. ShaOt
20. UsMoo
1. Buchla
2. Cahill
191
3. Judd
MOLE PEOPLE OWL CITY HUMAN
INHABITANTS:
1. Baz
2. Laz 1. Brian Assets
3. Gaz 2. Jill Cursesky
4. Staz 3. Malissa Rrote
5. Barry 4. Colin Shanders
6. Larry 5. Lee Gooses
7. Garry 6. Palant Cinder
8. Sarry 7. Mel Gant
9. Bazza 8. Alice “Full Bottle” Jook
10. Lazza 9. Lee Harmsway
11. Gazza 10. Kes “Under Drunk” Road
12. Sazza 11. Wendy Bastard
13. Barro 12. Juniper Grime
14. Larro 13. Sean Nuttle
15. Garro 14. Ivan Noroom
16. Sarro 15. Perks Maul
17. Baba 16. Zigfree Woadgrove
18. Gaga 17. August Rains
19. Lala 18. Winston “Smoke” Rivert
20. Sasa 19. Jose Kollaps
20. Raymond Anglesick

192
48. VERMILLIONIAN WRACK-DOLLIES. Depicts a
collection of stock folk characters – ‘heroes of the peach’.
49. BAT MAN PUPPET. Believed to depict a long disappeared theif. Found at the edges of
the Maw
50. GOBLIN CATOTYPE. Taken from 18th floor of the Lathe on a Painted Moon, looking
towards the Reach. The first, smallest and most stable of the Incoherent Isles is visible to
the right. To the left, the foothills of the Gothic Forest and the Maw.
APPENDIX OF PLATES

00. Map of the Moonlands (viii-ix)

01. Nacissolian Paralune (3)
02. Moon Phase Chart (5)
03. Mawnian Stone Moon Carving (8)
04. Owl City Reproduction of ‘Weeping Goblin Child’ (12)
05. Representations of the New Moon (15)
06. Circuit Diagram for Goblin Lunar Battery Cell (19)
07. Ornamental Pigeon (25)
08. Power Drill (29)
9. Narcissolian Vaudeville-Safety Glove (33)
10. Narcissolian Playing Cards (35)
11. Wolf-Tooth Knife (42)
12. Whistle Necklace (45)
13. Insect Saint (48)
14. Haptic Rug Map (49)
15. Narcissian Map of the Incoherent Isles (54)
16. Penumbeetle Beekeeping Hood (57)
17. Infrasound Aye-Aye Fluit (59)
18. Ruin Maquettes (62)
19. Penumbeetle Groma (63)
20. Mechanical Calculator (71)
21. Walkie-Talkie (75)
22. Goblin Jabs, Tricks and Crimes (78)
23. Portable Calotype Machine (79)
24. Diplomatic Diving Helmet (86)
25. Brace of Wasp Eggs (87)
26. Cannon Powder Flask (96)
27. Asbestos Clamshell Riding Boot (99)
28. Ignition Pilgrim Idol (105)
29. Isolation Palanquin (114)
30. Antigoblin Phrenological Bust (116)
31. Antigoblin Adjustable Hats (120)
32. Ceremonal Apple Basket (126)
33. Moonshade Theighn Crown (129)
34. Mystery Play Pantomime Mask (133)
35. Pictish Trapper Cloak (142)
36. Pictish Arrows (143)
37. Moon Tear (150)

196
38. Pictish Torch (151)
39. Maw Weathervane (157)
40. Ambassador Puppet (159)
41. Egg Pipe (166)
42-44. Bird Rearing Puppets (167-169)
45. Catotype of the Necropolis (180)
46. Necropolis Fingertrap (184)
47. Unknown (185)
48. Vermillionian Wrack Dollies (193)
49. Bat Man Puppet (194)
50. Goblin Catotype (195)

197
NOTES ON MOONMAKING
BY EMILE FRANKEL
NOTES ON MOONMAKING

Looking up at the sky from The Desert John C Van Dyke asks:
‘have we not proof in our own moon that worlds die?’ Van Dyke’s
query is unnervingly modern. The question of a world’s disap-
pearance, that a planet could petrify to become pale dust, is a
distinctly recent proposition. In the far past, anagogical tales of
maceration or desiccation treated the Earth as a surface which
would nonetheless still rejuvenate itself beyond the temporary
destruction of humanity. When in the 1600’s Saint Augustine
decreed that civilisation stop procreating, his argument was
inspired by a fixed belief in a vision of humanity after the Earth,
of eternal life beyond the Last Judgment.1 But what of a planet
with no life upon it? Or a planet of temporary life? Or a planet
of no player characters? In the discovery of fossils, and contem-
plations by Xenophanes to Strabo, Ibn Sina to Shen Kuo, and on to
George Curvier and the Enlightenment development of palaeon-
tology, fossils, as evidence of lost animals, as evidence of extinction
and change, brought with their finding the contemplation of an
unrecognisable world and climate. The development of Science-
Fiction, Fantasy, and the English Novel, emerging in tandem with
advancements in geology, brought so too a privileging of this very
meditation upon the unfamiliarity of past and future worlds.
This point of examination to the finished book, Gackling Moon
by Patrick Stuart and Tom K. Kemp, isn’t intended to exaggerate its
significance, instead the hope is to investigate the act of role playing
in an unrecognisable and continually disappearing world (a world
which could crumble into a substance of complete opacity at any
moment). The player-reader is given a place to inhabit which is
scarred by a continual structuring of the anatomical (and psychic)
through the geological. In this case, the selenodesy of the occlusion
caused by two cosmic principles, and a cracked moon-visage which
represents this structure—smile, frown, grin-scowl again—cause
changes to the inner and outer life of living things. By stepping
out of cloud cover and into moonlight, the player-reader and the
non-player-characters of the world open themselves to a restruc-
turing. Repetition not of an unconscious kind is outsourced to
the cycle of the moon, and in its sequence a culture emerges in
these Moonlands dictated by a complex series of often ambivalent
magics. To gain the ability to speak to animals, or become one; to
find yourself born a child but now a goblin, or born a goblin and
now an object or a weapon; to have dreams migrate to a physical
state beyond sleep; to feel sorrow or anger or revenge because
of the sky; to speak secrets to a moth—all effects as implications
of the cycle of the moon produce their own emancipatory chaos,
and I say emancipatory because stark change here comes not just
through chance, but instead through unerring regularity. Each
cycle repeats. The moon’s consequences can be taught, and utilised.
And as player’s new to this world, the opportunity for roleplaying

200 1. See Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction
(Urbanomic, 2020).
within the sutures of this ambivalent magic, is brilliant.

Notes on Moonmaking
Through Stuart’s rulemaking, evidence of stark transformation
become unlikely keystones to stable cultural properties. That there
was a time before, where things weren’t quite as they are today,
is one foundational quality of this text. Gackling Moon as it is so
divided becomes a map of such temporal relinquishment. Abandon
the world as it is at present and muse about it as it once was. This
‘was’ could be a time lost to rationalizable memory, where physical
ruins and fragments of past culture become unrecognisable icons.
This ‘was’ could be two days ago, when the moon reordered the
hierarchies of a village or city, or when the moon reordered the
balance of life and power within a family (or within the player’s
group itself). And this disappearing ‘was’ which structures fantasy
could be something far more insidious, like the moment when the
role-playing campaign became unhinged from its own origins. To
be the dungeon master, if the book implies this necessary position,
is not at all straightforward. The interpreter of the text is given a
rulebook to undermine their own interpretation.
There are five didactic texts which mingle here: (1) Stuart’s
prose which is tool-like in its evocation, structuring and contex-
tualising the limits and possibilities of place. (2) Tom K. Kemp’s
invented ethnographer who documents and collects artefacts
from this world. (3) Scrap Princess’s ‘Names’, rollable and gener-
ative. (4) The map itself, made originally by Kyana, and its place
names which spawned the entirety of this work.2 And (5) my
contribution, page numbers, headings, the formatting of the book
itself; this concluding essay. I would like to speak briefly about
the role-playing possibilities of each these register changes. For
the uninitiated—a world in a book, a book as a tool to understand
the world, an open-ended world as a narrative, a setting in text
and image which functions as a foundation to build one’s own
stories upon and within, a tool as a tale, a book as a mechanism, a
guide as a plot—are all key components of the RPG genre, tabletop
gaming campaigns, and Gackling Moon. As such, this work invites
multiple readings and reading styles. Open to any chapter and
find solace in a functional and rule generating place presented in
text and image. Read from start to finish. Roll dice and let a table
generate a scenario, quest or politic. Or turn to the language itself
and read closely. These are just a few options, however there is an
author’s preference: sit down with friends or strangers and play
the book. This is not the twisting and untwisting of the same rope,
to play a book invites a new rope every time.
Playing a book, without necessity, enables the mingling of
the registers of language within Gackling Moon. Atop Stuart’s
descriptive prose come further interpretations of this base imagi-
native structure. Kemp’s ethnographer who writes short annota-
tions to their findings, is a meta-player themselves—discovering
and making claims about the world in turn as we also must do. We
wonder who this thief or collector is. Do we also thieve or make the
world when we play it? In the gaps between Stuart and Kemp’s

2. See the origins for Gackling Moon on Patrick Stuart’s blog: https://falsemachine. 201
blogspot.com/
description—moments where only a sentence might hint at the
role of a beast, or the vying of a society’s hegemonies—the player-
reader steps-in to imaginatively possess these holes and fill them.
And yet this process of unpacking and gapfilling a world’s solidity
through play also incurs a fundamental challenging: dice; chance.
The tables which litter this book dictate scenario through number.
Interestingly, it is here, as chance event, where Stuart expresses
his most farcical and humorous writing. These tables expose joyful,
terrifying, ridiculous, bathetic scenarios. Layered into the history of
worldbuilding on tabletops is a parallel philosophy of worldmaking
with dice and number. Much has been written of the play of dice.
For me, I am reminded of Freud’s peculiar comment on numbers
in ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’. Famously here, there is
the accusation of no ‘chance’ in the unconscious. Freud attempts
to read ‘random’ numbers as ‘symptomatic acts’, as if each digit
possessed a past and determinate meaning for its subject.3 Philoso-
phies of the future have incurred similar sicknesses, this causality
of number. The world will be made like a snowball, they say, each
idea gathering pace and manifesting its future. Roleplaying with
dice complicates the touching of snowballs, and the causality of
a player’s unconscious improvisation. Two layers then mingle:
the ‘no chance’ decision to play a certain character and speak as
them; and atop this, a layer of ‘random’ situational generation. The
import of this structure is a forced alienation upon the players
of tabletop worlds. The ‘no chance’ of a joke or slip of the tongue
is inflected by stochastic ordering. The becoming ‘other’ through
rolling dice: vital; special.
Lacan asks in a strange and lingering question: ‘why don’t
the planets speak?’ ‘We aren’t all like planets…we always have a
tendency to reason about men as if they were moons, calculating
their masses, their gravitation.’4 The modern condition of games
and the gamification of contemporary life, treats a player’s words
like gravity, as if a chain of response could be calculable around
every utterance. Look at any virtual RPG, the code limits a player’s
reply to a set and repeating mass. Tabletop gaming, within the
region of analogue inter-subjective imagination, allows for an
interspersing of calculation: the table offers its players a set event,
but this rolled solution is only a starting point for response. To
answer the question ‘why don’t the planets speak?’ the obvious
response is ‘because they don’t have mouths.’ Those stripped of
their agency to freely speak without the necessity of gamification,
have a very close relationship with the lunar world. Moons don’t
normally have mouths, and importantly, unlike stars, they don’t
normally ‘die’. Their immortality is predicated, like the immovable
mover of Aristotelian divinity, on precisely not speaking. In our
sky, moons and stars ‘are purely and simply what they are. The
fact that we always find them in the same place is one of the

3. Freud writes: ‘I have known for some time that one cannot make a number occur to
one at one’s own free choice any more than a name.’ The Psychopathology of
202 Everyday Life, SE VI, 240.
4. Jacques Lacan, Seminar II, 235.
reasons why they don’t speak.’5 But importantly, in Gackling Moon

Notes on Moonmaking
the unspeaking sidereal has a mouth. The mouth smiles or scowls
or occasionally does both at the same time. This moon, by very
consequence of its mouth, can end it all. Every time that face is
glanced upon it isn’t just that the moon isn’t the same—the player
who glances is irrevocably changed in their gazing. In this way, I
find an equivalent analogy to gamification in the act of roleplay.
We aren’t dealing with people made planets with no mouths, but
we aren’t exactly speaking freely. Instead, in the middle, speech
becomes implicated in its silent lunary symbol of operation—the
potential to speak without opening one’s own born-to mouth, the
potential to speak through the mouth of an invented other in
roleplay.
Tom K. Kemp’s ‘plates’ are inspired by mid-century museum
catalogues from the UK and the Netherlands. These archives of
stolen objects are placed in the hand, by book, in a particularly
haunting manner which cannot escape its history through repro-
duction. Turning pages, physically touching their picture, tactile,
but made phantom-like—is a figurative process which Kemp’s
technique comments upon. Kemp starts by making charcoal
drawings. He then models these perforated sketches in 3D. He then
renders his own digital interpretations and prints these images
back onto paper which can be touched and drawn atop of once
more. The charcoal which started this process is then redrawn.
The confusion between hand-drawn and digital, smudged and
hyper-realistic, is the ambiguous method of image-production
which ties itself to, and mirrors, the structural qualities of RPG
campaign books. Xenakis, who recorded burning charcoal in
‘Concret PH’, did so in an attempt to comment on the stochastic,
chance-like sound which emerged from this material as if it were
already a highly designed Bayesian distribution or algorithmic
process.6 Charcoal is a modernist preoccupation. These remnants
of the famous progenitor of climatic change leave haunted,
ambiguous marks on paper when drawn with. A fitting aesthetic
for Gackling Moon, a world on the verge of dice-driven opacity.
I’ve often thought about Tristram Shandy and Sterne’s procla-
mation to future books:
Tell me, ye learned, shall we for ever be adding so much to
the bulk—so little to the stock?
Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make
new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into
another? Are we for ever to be twisting, and untwisting
the same rope? for ever in the same track—for ever at the
same pace? Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on
holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks
of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints—without
working one—one single miracle with them?7
Beyond the novel’s miracle-less demise, role-playing as alchemy

5. Lacan, Seminar II, 238.

6. Iannis Xenakis, Concret PH, 1958.
7. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Word- 203
sworth Editions, 1996), Chapter 3.1.
not apothecary, as mixing the register of a physical speaking
body with the register of a text—bodies which talk and discuss,
bodies of improvisation—rebuke Sterne’s narrow death-sentence.
This opening proposition of looking up at the sky and seeing a
similarity in the moon, something which reflects and represents
the landscape of the Earth, is itself lost stock. Here, looking up
presents not just a reflection but an enactment of the emotional
and geological change which might befall its characters. Stuart’s
moon with its ‘cracked face’ half-smile half-scowl, entreats the
ambivalence of reading with a solution: I don’t recognise myself in
this surface, but the book has made space for the placement of my
own or invented self within its pages. Without clear narrator or
character, recognition with the textual Other is sidestepped, and
the RPG campaign maintains its fruitful (yet not critique-less)
burden: play, through invention.

Text and ideas by Patrick Stuart

Illustrations by Tom K. Kemp
‘Notes on Moonmaking’ by Emile Frankel

© 2024

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Typesetting: Emile Frankel

Font: Luxurious Roman

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ISBN: 978-1-9993403-7-7