So I've been sent home from work because I burnt my hand like a giant idiot and I thought to myself 'oh well, what better an opportunity to get down to some long-neglected blog writing, even though I'm typing with one good hand and what is essentially a claw wrapped in gauze.' The left side of my keyboard suddenly seems like an expansive desert which I can traverse only with a single digit, one character at a time. And don't even THINK about trying to hold shift and type at the same time. At least caps-lock exists.
ANYWAY, I'm working on a longer kind of post that I want to accompany with my own artwork and RPG templates. I might even compile it into a PDF and put it up here for people to run if it sounds interesting to anyone, a la Deep Carbon (which is absolutely gorgeous). I read that particular adventure whilst listening to some Cryo Chamber stuff on Youtube and since then I haven't been able to get the weird and wonderful feelings out of my head.
Now would be a good time to mention my utterly sycophantic fanboy-ing for From Software's Souls games, including Bloodborne, so any superficial similarities are by no means coincidental. I adore them. They are hugely inspiring as sources of the kind of bleak and existential aesthetic I simply cannot get enough of, and which seems to influence a lot of the things I write and invent almost without me even realising it. In many ways, I feel they are representative of gaming as an expression of literature and art just as much as they are games in and of themselves. Very good indeed.
The thing I am envisioning at the moment seems to be a kind of megadungeon, a format to which I am rather partial. I suppose smaller and more episodic installments in an overarching campaign would be good too, but the idea of a sprawling expanse of random and spontaneous adventure potential amidst unknown depths and uncertain climes is too tempting to pass up. With regards to the aesthetic, I am imagining it being very heavy on the neo-gothic, or gothic revival style of architecture common in the 19th century in European cities like London, Prague, Ulm, Budapest etcetera. It's a style characterised by a kind of soaring grandeur, hopefulness, and optimism yet it looks simultaneously so foreboding and dreadful. Without further ado, some exposition:
Imrastone
A pernicious thing, memory. What is forgotten is only buried. Wounds heal but beneath the skin is a knotted welt of scars and mangled bone. Pushed below the wash of consciousness into the murky depths, it is free to warp and twist in the primordial trenches of the mind.
A city in the grips of a nightmare, caught in the throes of a fitful sleep fuelled by its own memory. A city haunted, not by apparitions of people or monsters as such, but by the dreadful remembrance of its own history. A city haunted by a building. A city in mourning for its past, today naught but a ghost of its previous self.
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| In a flurry off noise and motion, the phantom disappears (this is the Santa Maria Della Salute in Venice and is more baroque than neo-gothic but you get the idea) |
A building that does not exist. Ghosts seen in reflections. Crumbling spires reflected in windows, in puddles of stagnant water that, when one looks up, are not there. A phantom of spires and arches that looms out of the fog, only to dissipate a moment later, nothing but a coalescence of smoke and vapour. Old signs point to a place long demolished or left to ruin. The building's physical locus is long gone, forgotten except in maps yellowed by age. But if one knows where to go, one can get inside this place, this brooding monument. One can see the remnants of its spirit and the collective experience of the people who walked its corridors, tarried in its halls.
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| It can be seem looming over with no discernable way to find (and yeah St. Paul's is baroque too but gimme a break man) |
It is a place that sits, foreboding, at the back of the city's mind. It is almost as if it is itself a manifestation of a city's collective hallucinations, part of their gestalt consciousness. But the place is real, at least in a historical sense. Years ago, it was built to be a place of hope, a place where things were fair and just. A civil court, a library, a hospital, a place of learning and knowledge and healing. But that was before the misdeeds of a generation past. Deemed irreconcilable and desecrated beyond repair, the building was condemned. The people set it ablaze and watched the place go up in flames, and come down naught but ash. This marked the night of the great fire, as great swathes of the city were forgotten in a sweeping amnesiac madness.
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| Sometimes one cannot be sure which architectural apparitions are real |
A mausoleum of dreams, a place where thoughts go to rest. It holds the memories of a painful past. The remembrances that make people weep, a history steeped in sorrow, in redness and madness. Things that should be forgotten, but languish with restless trembling in the pits of the shadowed mind.
In a flash of anamnesis, one sees the jutting windows, hears a flock of birds. One sees spectres pressed upon panes of glass, having been once forgotten and all of a sudden recalled, their accusatory eyes filled with grief.
The city of Imrastone these days is a barren and blasted place. Fields of scrub, rubble, and wasteland intersperse the tightly packed and crumbling streets. People live here, people stay, but they are strange. A look in their eyes and the way they speak, disjointed as though they only say aloud a fraction of what runs through their minds. They are without hope, equal parts recklessly indulgent and wild, jealous, and fearful. During the day some take to the streets and roam in gangs. The only law now is violence, the rule of the mob, and they revel in the power they have. Lynchings are commonplace when the crowd gets riled. Others huddle in the dark and secret safety of their homes, keeping silent, extinguishing the lights, they remain by clinging to the memories of their ancient houses. There are scavengers who comb the rubble and ash for riches, scant though they may be. Old churches dot the blasted landscape and the rituals are carried out still, although dry and lifeless, a parody of once great and sacred rites presided over by the forlorn and the desperate. Bells toll for the lost and the forsaken, throwing their voices out across the thin air, bereft of cheer or promise of sanctuary. There are markets and people, but their wares are insipid, pathetic. Food for general consumption is mostly along the lines of anemic meat and etiolated vegetable matter. Inhabitants often go hunting for food if they have the guts to do so.
A casual visitor might conclude that the city is not such a fearful place. Granted it is strange, barren, and sometimes dangerous unless one has their wits about them. Perhaps other oddities may become apparent, with strange vistas in the fog which clear within moments, or confusing encounters that cannot be explained. The locals are certainly mad, and drink a lot in any case. But it is not a place steeped in horror and tormented by relentless, accusative memories as the inhabitants might suggest.
Until the sun begins to set. Until the inhabitants become frantic to find safety. Until they see those who have gouged out their eyes so they cannot see the abominations of their own minds made real.
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| When shadows grow long, an elemental and ineffable fear makes a home in people's hearts |
Impending dusk casts a pall of dread over the place. The fervent, clasping terror that assails the city is not truly felt until the time of sleep, when the unconscious comes bubbling to the surface unbidden and unwelcome. Dark enfolds the senses and the mind makes its own demons come rushing from the unknown shadows. Deep-seated fears are reified, given concrete form and intent.
Most people stay inside at night. They huddle around pallid candle flames and listen with bated breath for noises in the streets, noises magnified by the silence. A yowling cat becomes a banshee, a low wind is a lost voice. A pinpoint of light seen from afar becomes the accusing glance of the revenant. A tolling bell fills the immense void with reverberating delusion. Chills run down their spines and lurid imaginings plague their thoughts.
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| The security of a windowless room awash with the glow of illumination is a sacred and precious thing |
Night is the time when the beating core of this nightmare, the great basilica and home of all that is wrong with Imrastone, is realised. Towering over every single instance of terror is the dome of the great Tribunal Cathedral of St. Lucidus. This was the place where the great fire was started, where the doors were barred and people screamed and clawed their hands to the bone trying to escape on that dreadful night. A place where the innocent were condemned to die along with the guilty because the people's hearts were carried to despair on a tide of rhetoric and scare-mongering.
Sometimes this soaring edifice appears somber and dark, brooding and reliving its past, other times it is incandescent with the flames of its consumption. It is almost as if the smouldering building remembers itself, recalls the injustice and seethes with rage, with a visceral need for justice in retrospect of the atrocities committed in its lifetime.
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| St. Paul's during the blitz is an apt illustration of the irrational kind of hatred I am picturing |
Ideas for Monsters
The gazing spectres which roam during the night are part of the collective guilt that the citizens feel, the combined grief of thousands made real. The gaze of these revenants, which accuses and invokes memory, is a terrible thing. It drives people mad, makes them do anything to forget, brings them low into a state of bestial rage in the face of such powerful emotion and pain. They are somewhat benign creatures, and tend not to cause direct harm to observers save emotional trauma but they are terrifying nonetheless.
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| Hold tight the light, small one For the flame brings warmth And cheer against the dark. The Candle King will come to thee When hope flickers like a torch. Let your spirit take courage, small one The Candle King will come. (A lullaby) |
Elsewhere in the city, there are stories of a being that has come into existence deep in the heart of Imrastone's twilight. One which is almost half-hopeful. Where every shadow is conjured there is an implicit light somewhere else. The Candle King of Imrastone is part vengeful spirit, part ambiguous saviour. Even so, what little hope there is at night for the people of the city is clung to fiercely. Votive tapers are lit in honour of the king, a call to invoke him, with the hope that he will arrive to cast away the dark. Some say the Candle King is a spirit garbed in spun gold drifting through the otherwise accursed streets, with light cascading from its body, bathing the city in the radiance of true being. A creature made of hope. Others say he is simply a courageous man who took it upon himself to crusade against the dark and the legend started there. Perhaps it is both. Perhaps one begat the other. Either way, stories proliferate and grow within the minds of the people. A powerful thing, to be sure.
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| The memory contained and controlled allows communion with the dead, or so it is thought |
Back in the years before the blaze, there was a sickness which wracked the city. A mysterious illness which was difficult if not impossible to cure. A plague of sorts, it left its victims spluttering and weak before they eventually died of asphyxiation. There was a curfew and quarantine introduced and any suspected of catching the illness were dragged to the wards of the Tribunal Cathedral, which was set up as a temporary hospital so great were the numbers of diseased citizens. Those who enforced the curfew had orders to take any in violation to the Cathedral to stand trial, or to be themselves quarantined. They wore masks to keep out the vapours of the disease, and kept dogs to track down any in violation of the curfew. Catchers, they were called. The people of Imrastone grew used to hearing frenzied chases in the streets some nights, accompanied by the baying of their hounds and the wailing of their quarry. These days, some say the hounds can still be heard on the wind, searching for any in violation of the curfew, the masked catchers stalking the streets and knocking on doors, hoping to fill the Tribunal Cathedral with poor and sorry souls. The Catchers that prowl the streets of Imrastone at night are emanations of the Cathedral itself, manifestations of its hunger made solid by the collective fears of its citizens. They are towering, hulking creatures that bear little resemblance to the catchers of the past save the masks they wear. And the dogs- slathering hell hounds that leap and bound, seeking to rip and tear, to collect and feed the memory's hunger.
As amorphous and shifting thoughts come oozing from the psyches of Imrastone's people, there is no telling what one might come across if they ventured into the city at night, save that it would be quite awful. Manifestations of the deepest and most perturbed regions of the unconscious mind warp the buildings and streets. It is impossible to navigate with a conventional map of Imrastone, with timelines and hallucinations overlapping so. The geometry of the buildings appears to subtly change with each observation, as in a dream.
Yet the entire city is not without some recourse, not without some method of recovery, however obtuse or self-destructive. Even though it is difficult to face any kind of recollection directly, there are a number of ways by which people seek to assuage the memories and lay them to rest. They are a mixture of curative and palliative measures. Some seek to destroy the madness at its heart, others perhaps lacking courage can only bring themselves to find a kind of temporary respite.
The Church of the Lethean is one such institution that has taken it upon itself to cure Imrastone of its affliction. A cult which has risen to prominence since the time of the fire, its task it to expunge the memory forever with rites and rituals of amnesia. They are partly an organisation of healing, and partly one on a self-righteous crusade against the dark. The Lethean is a hypothetical perfect being which has no memory and exists only in the present. It has no past and no future because it remains the same forever in ecstatic bliss, utterly at peace. The parishioners of the cult aspire to emulate the Lethean and do all they can to attain a similar perfection. As such, anything which is thought to carry overt connections to the past or to the pernicious memory in particular is to be put to rest forever, to be erased from the cosmos.
There are other methods that citizens use on an everyday basis to combat the memory. Alcoholism is rife in the populace and is frequently consumed until the imbiber lapses into a drunken stupor. Other substances like opium are widely taken to dull the senses and cloud the mind. But drugs of this kind cannot be found in such quantities as to medicate the entire population.
Ravens and crows are killed on sight- they are dark birds of memory that plague sites of death and decay. People find their cries to be like the pointing of a finger, the laughter of damnation. Tame birds of this kind are kept by the Church of the Lethean in the belief that they can search out places where the pernicious memory resides so it may be erased.
One surefire way to rid Imrastone of its past, of course, is to kill all those that remember it- to erase the collective memories by destroying the houses in which they reside. However, many say this method is controversial, rather like throwing the babe out with the bathwater so to speak.
And still, the search continues for the ultimate cure. For knowledge of the cause. Perhaps the pernicious memory can be purged, but the wound might still remain. No one is sure. The memory seems like a catalyst, a bridge of sorts between the world and some other place, but why this should happen, why Imrastone should be snagged on the metaphysical barb of its inhabitants' past misdeeds is still unknown. Scholars of the esoteric search blindly for the answer, plumbing depths of the universe without recourse, without recompense. If living memory of the atrocity were to be erased, were to be cured, there might still be an opening to Imrastone's past.
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| The first rays of morning are met with tears of joy and relief |
What's more, the dear reader will no doubt be pleased to learn, during the writing of this article I returned to the doctor's and they gave me a much smaller dressing and now I can type completely normally and fluently. Hurray. Although now I have little to no excuse for my blogging negligence.
There's still a lot of ideas to get down for this, so in the future I'll try posting some designs for adventures and monsters and more of the setting etc etc. It's a good place to keep track of ideas for now.
