Saturday 16 March 2013

a sausage being forced through a damp doughnut

PERVOTHEMS

Sausages forced through wet doughnuts. Flesh ellipses with peanuts at the top. Round dual mounds with central nubs. Flanged cylindrical stalagmites. Round black puckered exits with enfolding globes. Every single thing in this cave looks like or reminds the viewer of sex. Keep this up until the players are disgusted and depressed. Then keep doing it.

LENS CAVE

Polished rock like an upturned bowl. Bulging smooth and jointless, glasslike and slippy. Footprints fade like fingermarks on black screens. The ceiling bulges mirrorwise. They bend to reaching distance at the core. Stand there and hand-link the orbs:- get charged with cosmic rays! harmless, but you buzz with purple kirbydots for a time and hippys think you're 'cool'. Somewhere miles below a watching Archean sees your blurry blocking shape occlude their view.


CARVED CAVE MEGA-TALE

The walls are carved with one continuous story wrapping the walls like the snake game from a cheap phone, waving and curling in impossible lines, mazing itself and repeating, swerving obliquely. Sometimes eroded or obscured but always there. The story of everything that ever has or ever will happen in that cave, from its geological birth to distant death.

STONE MONKEY CAVE

Stone Monkeys! This is a simple cave made from endless tessliated stone monkeys clinging onto each other. You tread on their motionless snarling faces and their marble eye-orbs grate horrifically en-masse as they follow you round the room. A magic word makes the monkeys re-incorporate themselves into a new cave with different exits. Poke your eyes In between the monkeys limbs, there's nothing there. A wizard did this for no reason.

XENOLITH BURG

This cave winds inside a green alien rock. Not a meteorite but an interiorite. Falling counter-orbital in the magmatic flow, crystallising from the liquid stone like a green ballistic pearl. Impacting on the undercrust and resting here. Green like leaves of climbing plants. Olivine and embedded thickly with Chromite crystals.


OBSIDIAN BRICKS

Bricks of black, glassy volcanic rock. Polished smooth then aged, buried and riddled with bright lichen. The bricks are held by spiderwebs of sparkling iron pyrites. Beneath the smooth facing the walls are dull tessile dice-shaped obsidian chunks. Perhaps a sunken dungeon foundation or scatterfrags of bomb impacted temple sites.

GLAZED CAVE

Smooth wedgewood-white china walls and swallowflight emblazments in Ming blue. A whole constructed thing. Gigantic cave-shaped anti-vase made to be traversed. Ways in and out wreathed in abyssal willowmarks. Faint blue dancing myconid lines filigree the paths, happy Trapper sunbursts at the top.

NEON CYSTS

Warty cancer lumps of pale discoloured glass. Volcanic-lymphatic strands rippling the rock and bulging. Swelled like slow balloons by noble gas. Flickering dimly, ruby-red, igniting in spasmodic lines in time with distant lightning strikes, aetheric and magmatic lightning too. Like a really creepy Berlin bar.

BLACK CURLS LIKE MELTED CROWS

Dead and black like executed Goth mopheads. Scattered patternless on walls, ceiling and floor. Each obeying a personal gravity, collapsing like crushed cans. If cracked, just more black curls and clawshards, onion-ringed round nothing.

A FIELD OF BLEEDING CADMIUM SUNS

This chemical pigment-poison leaks through the stone in irregular blotches. Fierce primary synthetic stains like burning matcheads in pre-school blue, fire-truck red, smiling-sun yellow and blob-tree green. Pigments bleeding down like unfixed paints. It's toxic, not poison, but bad for you.

MAGNESIUM VEIN TREES

Magnesium boxwork. The branching ore protrudes like knots on old mens hands. The ore holds hidden specks of elemental shine. Slick with black oil. The ore-trees branch and prick some ancient seam of crude. The oil drips down the tarnished silver trees. Protecting them from water and the air. Scrape it off and douse the vein and trees will incandesce in ultra-violet flame.


A THRONE OF GOLD

A pyratized throne. It's probably a metaphor for something. Gold, with fat lego-block pyrite crystals. A random accretion of semi-precious metallic stone in the chance shape of a chair. Revealed by the natural action of the cave. Fragile, almost impossible to move, will break if used.

FOSSILISED HIVE

Men, or natural forces, have smashed through empty stone hexagonal cells. An ancient hive of dog-sized wasps. Walls and roof and floor still show the steady grid of larval beds. Some closed caps conceal amberised grubs. The floor is crunchy-thick with stone mandible fragments, translucent limestone tracery wings and blunted stings.

WHISPER WALLS

The oddly curving wall holds secret talk. Press your ear to the stone and speak quietly and you can converse with anyone doing the same anywhere in the same cave. (Sometimes you will hear the illusory whispering of the dead and dammed. Plus predators will use it to trace and fool you.)

1 comment:

  1. I feel like I would be disgusted and depressed by sausage-doughnut cave long, long before my players. They have an endless appetite for the squicky, though, strangely (fortunately?), none at all for the perverse. They think my taste for tentacle monsters indicates a fetish.

    I like how all of these caves are filled with things to take. Cadmium pigment, Angel of Death soot, giant wasp fragment, flakes of gold throne. Lots of potential utility, lots of potential consequences.

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