A Grim Oasis

 "One would scarcely call Leviathan Bay a town in any reasonable sense of the word, so much as a squalid huddle of filth and misery built in the lee of a reeking mountain of bones and blubber."

    -Excerpt from the journal of Eliphas Quinn, renowned traveler and historian

    A town built beside the corpse of a beast so large it had no business ever being alive, so immense that its body is an ecosystem unto itself. It is a town where butchery is the main profession, blood and flesh the currency.

Monster fish taxidermy is my new favourite Instagram page

 

I'm not going to try a photo-bash a landscape of the place because I think it would look rubbish and it's better in my imagination anyway- as I hope it will be in yours after you read this article

    For some context, I recently read In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. It's a retelling of the historical account of the whaling ship Essex and its trouble with a particularly aggressive whale in 1820. When they were out in the Pacific, an enormous whale rammed the ship and sank it, leaving the crew of about 20 men totally stranded in their life boats. They had to navigate the ocean without a map, and many of them starved. Those few who managed to return were never the same, broken physically and mentally. It was the story which originally inspired the tale of obsession and vengeance Moby Dick, and it goes into immense detail about the context of the Nantucket whaling industry, as well as the physical and emotional toil of the job and the horrors of being stranded at sea for weeks on end. If you've ever wanted to read about the effects of severe starvation and dehydration on the human body, this book is for you. Philbrick also does a great job of describing how disgusting and visceral the job of hunting, killing, and rendering whales for oil actually is, with one passage describing the twenty-foot geyser of blood which happens when you pierce the arteries of a ten-ton whale with a spear. It's gross.

Would heartily recommend if you like books about whales or if you are a bit morbid (but not if you're into animal welfare, tbh).

This book inspired me too. China Mieville's weird fantasy is a favourite of mine.

 

 

   Anyway, back to the fantasy...

    The monster washed ashore during a titanic storm, one that will be remembered for generations. When the storm was calmed, the shoreline was flattened, quaint coastal towns and ports were erased from the face of the earth. Atop all the devastation, the felled trees, mounds of debris and banks of fetid mud, was a great heaving mountain of flesh. A malformed titan breathing its last. The squall left it stranded in the open air. It was accustomed to living at unimaginable depth and pressure. A deep dark where caustic horrors creep along the sea floor, along trenches and chasms beneath the waves. Above the surface, its body became swollen and formless, its muscles unable to shift its massive bulk. Its great mouth was studded with teeth like a dense forest of ghostly, branchless trees, festooned with kelp and strands of unidentifiable tissue. Its eyes strained and wept, squinting in the light.Where the sun cracked its oily skin, small creatures from the surface world began to sip at the rank effluvium that flowed out. Flies and maggots began to seethe in the muck. Ticks which had lived alongside it in the deep dark dotted its bulging flanks, hideous arthropods as big as cows, with their jagged maws buried in the creature's thick epidermis. Pores as big as potholes and brimming with foul lymph pocked its hide. A mountain of waxy, grisly purpure. Raw for all to see.

The surrounding land was forever changed. The dead leviathan nourished the earth with its body. In a short time, a profusion of life sprang up in the midden heap around the decaying behemoth. Plant life bloomed in the marshes and rock pools. Vivid fungi and lichens fed on the oil-soaked sand. A rainbow sheen came to rest on the water's surface, on puddles, as if everything were coated in a thin slick of oil. Creatures too - crustaceans and reptiles - grew large off this grim oasis. Giant arachnoid crabs which creep along the sea floor, through the effluence and rotten flesh that makes its way there, feeding on it, began to come up into the shallower waters each spring to spawn- a time of plentiful food but also danger for the inhabitants of the town.

 

Strange, ornate crabs like this, but bigger.

 

Big enough to contend with the beasts which stalk the swamps surrounding the mountain

  

It would be a nice place for a holiday if it wasn't for the... everything else

 In the wake of the storm, the region was wiped clean of people. A tabula rasa, free from the weight of history or the stain of industry which had encroached upon civilised lands. Entire settlements were swept away, claimed by the sea. The shoreline was flattened, remodeled, unrecognisable. A new wild. In the intervening years between then and now, people came creeping back, looking to settle again. This new and empty frontier of flat wetland was difficult to traverse, having no roads except twisting, unmapped waterways. A perfect place to escape the sclerotic gaze of the Silent City.

    The mountain formed by the creature's body was the region's only landmark, and people flocked to it as the stories spread. They came not only from the land but from the sea as well. Travellers and voyagers, escapees, merchants, and the morbidly curious came together by the shallow bay which formed on the leeward side of the leviathan's carcass. The place became a haven of sorts. An anchorage. People found that as the corpse nourished the life which surrounded the mountain, that life was a source of nourishment for them in turn. Not only for food, but for oil as well. Crews of whalers weary of the sea took to climbing the mountain in search of blubber. Other whalers in the region began to take their cargo to the town for processing and for sale. They would set up their catch on the shore of the bay, in the shadow of the mountain, and go about their bloody butchering, rendering whale blubber into precious oil.

Leviathan Bay

   If one were to actually travel to this place, despite having probably received a multitude of warnings not to, what might they find?

    Today, the first thing a traveller to the town of Leviathan Bay would notice is the smell. The musty, suffocating reek of putrid fish, burning oil, and the shit of ten-thousand seabirds is borne upon the wind and up the noses of any unfortunate enough to be within three miles of the place. From inland, the town is obscured by a ridge of hills which any visitor would notice to be somewhat incongruent with the flat, marshy plains to either side. These hills are flush with intensely coloured jungle and crowned with pale, angular protrusions. That this is the carcass of a vast sea creature might only become apparent once they come closer, once they see its skull.

    On the road to Leviathan Bay, one passes Skull Mount- the ragged, empty head of the beast which gives the town its name: millions of tons of bleached bone and sagging, ragged flesh baked hard by the tropical sun all towering over lush, lurid vegetation. Sea birds flock and swarm in the gaping hollows of its eyes, the ruined labyrinths of its nasal passages. A chalky crust of guano is accumulated at its top, like cliffs. It runs down the thing in streaks. Closer up, the sound is deafening. The birds' cries, shrill and raucous, fill the air.

Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, near Edinburgh. Imagine this but with added skull and jungle.

I think this is a Right Whale, it looks suitably monolithic and mountain-like doesn't it?

 

    What can one say about the town itself? A town in such strange and exotic circumstances, this malignant paradise, ought be an equally bizarre and dangerous place. But for all the outlandish allure of its location, the town looks make-shift. Almost temporary, as if whoever set up didn't expect to be here for long. Little more than a tawdry pile of timbers nailed together. Old vessels have been upturned and made into dwellings, Ramshackle cabins are precariously perched on stilts. Lean-to huts balance upon larger buildings. Thick plumes of oily smoke drift skywards, a sign of the town's gruesome industry.

    For all the stink of the ocean, there is a human stink here too. A noisy, bustling place, Leviathan Bay is stuffed with people, with drinking dens, wet markets, bawdy houses, and dark alleys. Effluence and garbage make the boardwalks slippery, and oil lamps cast a dim, flickering light on proceedings.

 

 Butchers and Hunters

    The mountain, the body: that colossal heap of mottled, putrid blubber and bones serves the town's people as its primary source of income and fuel. Thus, butchery is the town's most lauded occupation. Crews of whalers grown weary of the sea and its cruelties stick to the shore. Known as flesh gangs, they vie fiercely with each other while wading knee-deep through gore for access to the most prime sections of blubber.

Their profession comes with no small amount of renown amongst the townspeople. They are armed with razor-sharp blades. Not mere fleshing knives, but huge implements- serrated greatswords, saws, cleavers, huge tongs, wicked machetes. They carry these openly, almost proudly even within the town. They look imposing and brutal, obviously used to labouring with great weight in the harsh sun.

The flesh gangs' tools would all be appropriately up-scaled, naturally.

The Golem Shop

The sign above the Golem Shop door

    According to the law of the dead, it is a heinous crime to interfere with a corpse. Desecration of the dead is akin to killing one's gods. An apostate mage, a renegade who seeks anonymity, has set up a shop here. Using the flesh and bone gleaned from the leviathan's carcass, the proprietor is able to create bespoke constructs animated by magic. They can ply their ghastly trade without the impending fear of the agents of the corpse lords coming to their door.

    The shop is known amongst certain circles for producing golems of a curious nature. Strange and misshapen, an attempt at the human form, but only an attempt. And one without a great deal of success, it must be said. The constructions are solid but they lack finesse, clumsy in their execution, almost childish. They are as if the maker is merely approximating human anatomy without knowing its inner workings.

    The thick, rubbery skin of the leviathan makes these golems more durable than the average flesh construct. Although, because the parts used to make them are essentially reconstituted, their overall integrity is probably lower than a golem made from parts which have grown together via more natural methods. They have small, sunken eyes. More like pinholes than functional organs. Their mouths are little more than an asymmetrical horizontal slit in their otherwise featureless nub of a head. Long, misshapen limbs teminate in a clumsy mass of digits. Yet there is brute strength in them. The flesh gangs sometimes requisition the help of one of these mute, brawny pinheads. A useful addition to any team which seeks to harvest yet more flesh from the mountain.

 

 

So Who's In Charge Here?

Who would the players go to in search of jobs? Is there a Mayor? You could put one in but I highly doubt it. Leviathan Bay is a free-for-all where no one tolerates being ruled. This is what the townsfolk came here to escape. Perhaps there is a charter of sorts which suggests how people shold go about their business, a buy-in which seeks to make the town a place where anyone can come and go as they please.

Other NPCs

Who else might be coming through Leviathan Bay with the players? Who calls this place home?

• Sailors- The obvious choice. Sailors and seafarers come and go every day and night. They bring wares, cargo from all over the continent, the world, even. They smuggle, they drink, they fight. They wear odd clothes and sport strange tattoos and haircuts, tokens of their travels. Their skin comes in all colours. People from all walks of life, all clans, creeds, and cultures feel the call of the sea.
  
•  Traders- A merchant can stand to make a good living off the oil rendered from the carcass of the leviathan, as well ass other whales which are hauled into the bay. These merchants broker deals and give a cut to the sorry, blood-soaked butchers who do the more gruesome work

• 

  Savage, gibbering, and insane
  

  Hunters- The townspeople also rely on other creatures on the mountain. They eat the birds which mass on the its sheer slopes. They hunt them for sustenance and eat their eggs, collect their guano which accumulates in lithic formations below their nests. Armed with nets and spears, the town's hunters also seek crabs, alligators, and other meats for selling at Leviathan Bay's wet markets and roadside meat traders.
• Hirelings- It would come as no surprise that there are some people in Leviathan Bay who have no wish to stay there a moment longer. A person desperate enough might seek to sell their services for passage aboard a ship, or a caravan through the swamps in hopes they might find a better life elsewhere. However unlikely this better life may be, perhaps they are simply yearning to go somewhere which smells a little less foul.
• Eaters of the Dead- Those poor, desperate souls who succumb to the disease of the ghoul exist on the fringes of every society. They scrabble and claw at the periphery of society, looking for scraps, their feral eyes watching from the dark. Wracked with an insatiable hunger, they lose the ability to think rationally and are driven by this primal urge.
  

• 

  Probably nothing so obvious.
  

  Agents of the Unquiet- The dead do not rest in this world. They dream and they hunger. Their spies are everywhere, those amongst the living who have pledged their life so that they may rest decadently in death. The Corpse Lords despise those who do not fall under their dominion. Those who are living and free are anathema to the law of the dead. What's more, people come to these lands to escape persecution. No dark abbey rests atop a hill. No watching gibbet or tower looms over the town. Not yet, anyway.
• The cult of the Fire- Adherents to an ancient faith, this cult strives to overthrow the Kyriarchy of the Corpse Lords. The believe in the cleansing, changing power of fire, and they seek to bring that might to bear against their calcified overlords. Rumour has it that a number of ships carrying barrels of gunpowder and weapons have been seen coming and going in the town of late. They are using the town as a base to smuggle supplies into the country for their ongoing efforts.
  

This thing. Isn't it gross?

But also incredible?

That's about it for now. I hope to write some more on this world later. As you might have gathered from some of the descriptions and allusions to the Silent City, the Unquiet, the Corpse Lords and such, there is a bunch more to this setting I have yet to commit to type. It's all in various notebooks I have strewn around the place. I'll be making an effort to collate it all here when I have the time.

I've been taking inspiration from the writings of James C. Scott when developing this world. Namely Weapons of the Weak and The art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.

Peace,

O