⭗ REDIRECTIONS XX⭗

 

⭗ POMPIDOU PASS ⭗

“Did you say something?”

Lleva turned suddenly, her eyes searching the faces of Kvelak and Charred-Hand. Both blinked in return, uncertain how to respond. The pass was silent, unnaturally so.

“It’s ghosts,” Coda-1 said, his other male body nodding. “The veil is so thin and soft here that everything we say and do gets impressed into it. There’s no static to stir up the echoes. Those who die up here get stuck. It’s their whispers you’re hearing.”

“Dreams,” the Blue Oracle said predictably. “The songs of the dreaming dead catch the wind here and fly through the sky like kites. I see them all, and they see us.”

⭗ DESCRIPTION ⭗

When the lonely caravan road called the Myrtille Way crosses the border between the Greenlands and the Bluelands, it does so at a high, treacherous break in the Niebieski Mountains called Pompidou Pass. The ascent to the pass is mostly scrubby, lavender-colored scree spotted here and there with meadows of lupine flowers and thistle-cedars, but at its height, there are grand swaths of land where nothing grows, where there are no ruins of past civilizations and where the snow never melts. These places are lonely and silent, populated only by ghosts and the whispers of ill fated caravans that never made it to the other side. It’s not the most ideal way to cross the border between the two lands, but it is the quickest, especially for those running the route between Emerald City and Cornflower.

⭗ WEATHER AND REST ⭗

Weather in the pass is cold but manageable for most of the year. Occasionally, a freak storm will whip through (even in the summer) and completely bury the pass in snow, but generally even the areas cloaked in permafrost are clear enough to travel through until late autumn. At that point, (and all the way through to the end of spring,) regular heavy storms blow in and buffet the pass, making the crossing difficult, if not impossible, with 170 meters of snow often falling on the pass through the course of the snow season. 

During the warmer months, those who traverse the path can often find free and easy shelter in the remains of abandoned dryland coral ringforts that are scattered along the route. In the winter, these fill up with snow. They’re probably still usable then, but they have to be excavated, and that takes both calories and time.

⭗ MISFORTUNE ON THE PASS ⭗

1. An otherworldly wail pierces the silence and a ghostly frost-bite serpent leaps from the snow. It bites a traveler, filling their veins with radioactive hoarfrost. Lose 1 Endurance per day until a cure is found or fall into a sleeping death.

2-4: A bone-chilling blizzard sweeps in suddenly and engulfs the pass, slowing the living and stirring up the already restless spirits. Lose 2d6 days stuck in a snowdrift listening to the maddening whispers until the storm passes.

5-7: A beautiful mirage appears in the icy haze, luring travelers to their doom at the bottom of a craggy cliff. Lose one henchman or lose 2d6 life.

8-9: Frosty, animated thought bubbles periodically and unpredictably emerge from the minds of the travelers, manifesting as glowing speech balloons. The party's thoughts and feelings are made visible, leading to both bizarre misunderstandings and strangely insightful moments.

10-11: Strange dreams come in the deep night, vivid and surreal. Travelers find themselves reliving their own actions or even meeting alternate versions of themselves from parallel dimensions, challenging their grasp on reality when they wake. Moderate Aura test or lose 1d4 Aura.

12-19. The scree-littered path up and across the pass carries you onward in your journey toward the Emerald City. Haunting echoes of past travelers' stories seem to come in like whispers on the chill winds, but the skies stay clear, and the whispering ghosts (mostly) keep to themselves.

20+ A spectral circus arrives on the midnight winds, bringing laughter and ghostly jesters who perform incredible feats of skill. The ringleader entreats the travelers to participate in a contest that seems to defy all known laws of physics, but offers supernatural rewards for those who succeed. (+400xp)

⭗ ENCOUNTERS ⭗

1. A Ghostfire Merchant (L3, ethereal) clad in luminous robes arrives offering to sell vials of ghostly blue fire in exchange for memories and bits of soul. He insists that the strange flames can protect travelers from the storms and spirits that often plague the pass, but something in his smile seems to indicate that there’s more to it than that.

2. Spectral Bluelander Pilgrims (L1, silent) now bound to the pass they died trying to cross, continue their pilgrimage. Their mummified remains can be blessed or burned to release them. Many died while still desperately clutching cultic relics.

3. Frostbound Wraith Wolves (L4, full of stars) prowl the pass at night, descending from the heavens to freeze their prey with icy breath and blood-chilling howls. 

4. Marmotfolk Scouts (L2, gregarious) cataloging the wonders of the world in places far from home. They are underequipped and undersupplied, but hardy, confident and willing to work together or trade.

5. A Pointy-Helmeted Hero (L9, armored, spiky) who claims to have traveled all the way to the Black City on the shore of the Winedark Ocean. Good source of stories, especially when plied with the wares of a tokesmith or with vampire wines.

6. A Memory of a Monk (L2, spectral) tends to an ancient shrine dedicated to a god that no one remembers. The monk does not speak, but can communicate through gestures. The monk will grant minor blessings or show travelers to things they need (like specific herbs, paths out of the thick snow, etc.) if they are kind.

7. A majestic stag with burning ember eyes (L4, laser beams) is bound to a circle of ogham-covered stones deep within a thistle-cedar grove. He has a taste for metal music, and can provide great insight (and spells) to wizards who impress him with their riffs.

8. A Vomish Frosty Frogwyrm (L6, flying) originally built for a thrilling amusement park in the Long Ago keeps a den among the highest points of the frozen peaks of the pass. Occasionally she gets hungry, especially if she is tending to eggs or hunting for her newly hatched young.

⭗ DISCOVERIES ⭗

The Moonstone Keep: Once every few hundred years, a summer is warm enough to melt the snow around the Moonstone Keep enough to reveal it. The Keep itself appears simple on the outside, stretching toward the sky as a lonely, smooth-sided pillar of luminous moonstone, but wizards, psychics and even particularly sensitive people will all detect something strange about the keep. It was once a part of a sprawling castle complex that was almost completely vaporized long ago by a powerful ritual gone wrong. Now, only the single tower remains, mostly hollowed out and forgotten, at the top of a lifeless hill. Pilgrims to the area have mostly picked the place clean of valuable relics, but others have left more mundane things scattered here and there, so ordinary objects like candles, lighters and dried herb flowers are easy to come by. At the highest level of the keep, beyond crumbling steps and traps set by various wizards over the last few centuries, is a silver album case with 1d6 engraved crystal record albums in it. Each record album contains 2d6 Power worth of spells in the form of songs that can be played directly off the record by any competent magic user (but still behave like normal spells.) Whether or not the spell that leveled the castle complex is on one of those records or not, no one alive can say.

Skarn, the Metal Oracle (L12, Magitech) is a sentient, floating metallic sphere covered in glowing runes carved to give it life and unthinkable powers at some point in the long, long ago. Using something like morse code that comes as a loud, grinding knock from inside of the sphere, Skarn can answer simple questions about the world as it was, but it always charges a price. It collects ancient metal artifacts which it melts with powerful heat rays, then levitates them so that they can become part of its body, making the sphere larger with each one consumed. Those few academics who have met and interacted with Skarn posit that the runes on its skin hold a message, and that the message may indicate that Skarn was built in a collaborative effort between ancient wizards and some celestial force, perhaps even a god, or a pantheon of gods.

The Glitchforge is the name given to a strange anvil-shaped chunk of translucent, yet incredibly strong alloy that sits alone in a thistle-cedar grove in the shadow of a frosty basalt spire on the Pompidou Pass. In the past, some powerful wizards have managed to use the Glitchforge to hammer bends and folds into reality ( glitches) which they can use as tools or spells, but this is not the Glitchforge's original, intended purpose. Instead, it is the lock to an ancient underground facility accessible only by a collapsible stone staircase that descends (when unlocked) down a thirty-meter deep silo into an artificial cavern. A massive blast door made of the same material as the Glitchforge blocks access further in, where there is a sprawling seed vault tended by radiation ghosts and the recordings of researchers preparing for an apocalypse that must have happened, but that no one remembers. Getting past the blast door requires a spoken code, but a band of post-mortals camped against the door at some point in the long ago and left a recording device full of song-rituals in the remains of their camp. At least one of the song-rituals contains the ka and ba of an insane dictator who wants to bring about the end of the world, even if that dictator has to possess someone else's body to do it. Whether the password is also there is anybody’s guess.

⭗ OUR PARTY (SO FAR) ⭗

Lleva Vyeldisana, Greenfolk Naturalist and Zoa Conservationist

"Charred-Hand" a perfectly ordinary and unassuming wastelander

The Blue Oracle, Dreamer of Dreams

 

Coda-1, Coda-2 and Coda-3, a bluelander polybody pilgrim, allegedly.

⭗ WHAT ARE REDIRECTIONS? ⭗

My goal with REDIRECTIONS is to add my own contribution to the Psychedelic / Heavy Metal / Ligne Claire art RPG space.  Much in the way that people inspired by Tolkien’s style helped give birth to the modern genre of High Fantasy, the style of Jean “Moebius” Giraud (and others like him) seems to be spawning a sort of genre of its own right now, and I want to expose more people to the wonders of it. I want to share it. I want to be a part of it. Most of all, I want it to grow.

    REDIRECTIONS is a collection of wondrous places and resources presented in story format (as a game in play, specifically traversing the universe of UVG (Ultraviolet Grasslands) but it is also kept more general for your own RPG characters to visit and explore regardless of the system you use. Each place is unique and wholly original, with a bevy of interesting stories, plot hooks and characters to color your experience. The format and many of the specific terms are from UVG. I'm just playing in Luca Rejec's universe. If you like these posts and find them useful, let me know! As of this point, all art in these posts is created as a collaboration with AI. Basically I trained an AI art model on my own sharpie marker drawings, then generated a bunch of pictures and trained a series of other models on them. I generate images with these secondary models, sometimes using the output as it is, and sometimes modifying the images with inpainting and/ or using the secondary models to refine output from DALLE-3. There is, literally, in every image, a little bit of me. Consider these images to be homages to the genre and pretty pictures, but nothing more. I greatly respect the skill of people who work with pen and pencil and have the skill of hand to make things from scratch. This is a series, and each entry is numbered. If you like things like this, please support the true artists whose works are part of the genre, such as the works of Moebius, Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands, Luke Gearing's Acid Death Fantasy and Raw Fury's game SABLE.