⭗ REDIRECTIONS XXI⭗

 

⭗ TALES FROM THE UTTER WEST #1 ⭗

⭗ THE WINEDARK OCEAN ⭗

“The Black City?" Kvelak asked. Spitting into the sand, he shrugged. "A myth. Twelve years I have run a caravan. I have been to every city on the Circle Sea. Never once have I met anyone who has actually been there."”

"Charred-Hand has been there," the Blue Oracle said, smiling when the old traveler gave her an exasperated glance. "He has been beyond the shores of the Winedark Ocean to places that exist wholly in darkness, where the only light comes from what you bring with you."

"Poppycock!" Kvelak exclaimed. "There is nothing beyond those shores. It is the edge of the world."

"It is the edge of the world, yes, but it is not empty," Charred-Hand spoke up suddenly, sighing. "The Oracle speaks true. I have been beyond the Utter West. I have been a castaway upon the Winedark Ocean, and I have see things which eyes cannot and only someone with a certain understanding of the language of dreams can imagine."

"So tell us," Lleva said. "What did you see? What exists beyond the lands of visible light?"

You're a stranger ‘til she whispers you can stay

You're a stranger ‘til she whispers that your journey's over

Green Valley - Puscifer

⭗ DESCRIPTION ⭗

The tides of the Winedark Ocean at the edge of the Utter West are heavy and constant, lapping at the black sand shores of the Northern and Southern Dust like massive, gelatinous tongues. Surely only a madman would try to sail across such a sea, but there have been some, all wild-eyed adventurers and well-equipped colonial types eager to open up trade with new and unknown lands. None of them has ever returned. Everyone else who ends up in the Winedark either falls in by accident or is thrown in as an offering, usually by the Mothers of the Quietly Observed Cabal.

Death comes swift to those who end up in the ocean without a boat, as the Winedark actively seeks to drown all outsiders. Traveling by ship isn't much better, as the more of the ocean a boat displaces with its mass, the more aggressively the waves will strike it and attempt to capsize or drown it. Small boats and rafts are the least harried, and perhaps have the best chance of navigating the ocean. Aerolith travel over the Winedark is no safer, as the sky is littered with razor-thin lines of stuckforce that shift unpredictably, slicing even the scant few leathery and obsidian-skinned seabirds to ribbons.

After a few kilometers, all of this ends. The sky clears to an open void, starless and black, and the Winedark becomes eerily still, as if it has finally accepted you, as if it has other, darker things than a simple drowning death planned for you. Out here, there are dark, gliding shapes that break the stillness. Out here, there are places and treasures waiting to be grasped by the blind hands of a doomed traveler.

⭗ MISFORTUNE, WEATHER AND REST ⭗

Anyone traveling the Winedark is already unfortunate. When the waves stop trying to drown you, there is such a silence and such a stillness that it can drive a person mad. The weather is constant and humid, never changing. The sun (invisible, but you can feel it) never seems to set or rise, and storms never coalesce out of the darkness. What rest you can seize is free, but ill-advised. No one sane sleeps on the Winedark Ocean.

⭗ ENCOUNTERS ⭗

1. Leathery, obsidian skinned seabirds (L1, divebombing) hunt silvery sky jellies and steal food from tourists near the shore of the Winedark Ocean. Those few who venture further out are typically older and bolder and don’t last long.

2. Swarms of Fractal Jelly Midges (L5, psychic vampiric) washed in from some darker place swarm all over the tides in the shallows. They descend on anything that holds memories and drain them to feed the singing larvae they deposit deep in the Winedark.

3. A predatory rip in reality (L14, full of glass) sweeps over the Winedark, ripping through and devouring anything that gets caught in its path. Closing the rip in reality wounds it but doesn’t kill it. Yes, widening the rip could create a gate to another place and time. Yes, the rip will remember your face. Yes, it will hold a grudge against anyone who isn’t easy prey.

4. Blind Aerolith Pirates (L3, insane mutants) have learned how to navigate the treacherous lines of stuckforce in the sky in the most turbulent parts of the Winedark. Mostly, they wait high above the Ocean, ready to prey on anyone foolish enough to enter their domain.

5. A Castaway (L1, desperate) crouching or hogtied in the bottom of a rowboat, or clinging to a piece of an obliterated ship. Save them at your own peril.

6. Hot Onyx Spores (L4, cloudy) ejected from floating fungal mats in the Winedark seek moist, living sinuses to bloom in. When they reach maturity, they glow with electromagnificent radiation, lighting up the insides of their hosts and slowly cooking them from within.

⭗ DISCOVERIES ⭗

The Echo Sensorium: In some places, the violet fog closes in on the surface of the sea, and both the Winedark and the sky above it thicken into wrinkled labyrinths of slimy black mirrorglass. Here, the air becomes so thick that it blends with the ocean and tiny silvered millipede-fish move freely between abyss and sky. Here, you will need a mask or a lung prosthesis capable of filtering air out of jelly just to breathe. Here, there is no light, only heaviness and a rhythmic thrumming, as if everything around you is breathing. Perhaps it is. For those with eyes that can see beyond the ultraviolet spectrum, there are places here that unfold into other physical dimensions. Call them doorways if that makes it easier to comprehend them. They are places where reality unfolds, opening like origami to reveal something wider and more primal. Whether or not that wider, more primal unfolding is something you can comprehend or not is the true concern. Your mileage (physically and non-physically) through other planes of existence may vary.

Clusters of Gamma Spires jut from the Winedark here and there in the abyssal black. Radiant, they glow subtly, but only if you have the eyes to see them. Bathed in an aura of electromagnificent radiation, they can be used as a point of reference for navigation. Even if you can’t see them, you can feel them slowly boiling the blood in your veins even at a distance, or hear their alien howls strobing over any radio you might have on you. If you come up on them, they are like massive flowstone stalagmites rising from the still waters of the ocean, slippery and black and warm to the touch. Clusters of radianthum orchids (a rare alchemical ingredient worth €500/sack) cling to the spires where the tide laps against their sides.

The Wreck Of The Eclipse is probably the only merchant caravel that ever made it past the rough waters where the Winedark chews at the black shores of the Northern and Southern Dust. Shattered upon a rough reef of mirrorglass coral and infested by glowing gamma crabs (L3, radioactive), the Eclipse is still mostly packed with all of the supplies her intrepid (and now presumably all dead and devoured) crew thought they would need to make a year’s journey across the Winedark to “The Land of New Light” which the captain of the Eclipse, one Henry Marigold (L6, foolishly heroic) saw in a dream and believed he could reach if he just pushed hard enough into the Winedark. His journal details everything he thought he would find there, from ever-bearing milk trees to streets paved with gold. The land he sought to colonize and plunder probably doesn’t exist, but he certainly believed with all of his heart that it does.

⭗ 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.