⭗ REDIRECTIONS XXVIII⭗

 

⭗ LONGWINTER IN UVG #1 ⭗

⭗ MEMORIES OF BREZIM ⭗

“While we are airing old wounds, I could speak of the winter I spent in Brezim,” Kvelak said.

Charred-Hand gestured and nodded for the old caravan leader to continue. When the Blue Oracle turned her eyes on Kvelak, he felt the touch of her mind immediately, felt it like a single cold finger stirring the memories in the depths of his heart. Suddenly it was as if he was back there all over again, living that winter he’d tried so hard to forget. 

Brezim. Yes, beautiful Brezim, as cold and terrible as it was tantalizing. A wild place of potential, so much potential, and so much lost to winter, like ripe fruit frozen upon the vine.

“Speak,” the Blue Oracle urged him, and seemingly without any control over himself, he did.

⭗ BACKGROUND ⭗

Brezim is the setting of Luka Rejec’s Longwinter books. While not explicitly set in the same world as Ultraviolet Grasslands (also by Rejec,) both settings have enough similarities in terminology and in encounters that they can mesh together relatively easily. Still, there is room for more flavor to integrate the two together when moving your UVG caravan through Brezim and experiencing the wrath of Winterwhite. Some of my ideas for encounters which mesh with both worlds are below:

⭗ BLOOD INTO WINE ⭗

A rugged, idealistic Redfolk entrepreneur has set up a vineyard in Brezim where she intends to spend the rest of her days growing the hoary fruits that will make for a fine vintage of vampire icewine. She wants to put Brezim on the map as a tourist destination for such wines (and wine tours) and has grand plans for the future. When the winter sets in more suddenly and more harshly than she expected, it interrupts her harvest, drives off her seasonal workers and puts her into a very precarious position, monetarily. Additionally, raids by starving oldsettlers and crated orders commandeered from couriers by baronial patrols has left her at the edge of bankruptcy with fruit literally rotting on the vine. She has work, but she can only pay in heat, food and wine. She has a well-stocked cellar that is actually an old architect bunker she dug out under the basement of her chateau. Most of the expansive tunnels of the bunker have been bricked over and left unexplored, but the storage area she has is vast and packed with plenty of coal to make enough heat to outlast the worst of Winterwhite’s ice.

⭗ APOCALYPTICAL ⭗

A caravan of traders and vechs is “just passing through” on their way back to the Violet City. Heavy with treasures obtained at criminally low prices from desperate people in Gomily, the caravaneers are low on food and fuel, but they believe that they have just enough to make the border of Brezim before they start to starve. Of course, all it would take would be one ill wind or one too many days stuck in a snow drift for that to change. Whether or not the people of the caravan would be willing to resort to banditry and/or cannibalism in order to make the border and save themselves (and their treasures, of course!) still remains to be seen.

⭗ TELLING GHOSTS ⭗

The musty shacks of a syrup farm crouch in the snow between a pair of sprawling groves of sugarpine trees. There is woodsmoke in the wind, but it’s clear that the syrup farm has been abandoned for quite some time. The auto-tapping, sap-harvester golems sag around the buildings of the farm, icicles hanging from their jadeite faces. There are no bones, no remains that might indicate why the site was abandoned, but there is singing in the air at night, along with the constant smell of a sizzling woodstove that can never be found. Did the rocks on the strange stone piles in the backyard just move? I’d suspect the wolffolk, but there are no tracks. The snow around the shacks is unmarked, pristine.

⭗ INDIGO CHILDREN ⭗

St. Wulfyvich’s Orphanage and Bakery is a lonely, sprawling compound of several stone houses, a church, a barn, and a sagging silo. A pair of sallow, emaciated nanny goats are tied out in the ankle-deep mud in the yard, hopefully soon to be butchered rather than simply milked into icy starvation. St. Wulfyvich’s seems unassuming at first, but there are many stories about what may really be going on there, and most of them revolve around the number of orphans who seem to disappear after they are taken in. The place is run by an order of witch-nuns led by the matronly Mother Superior Griswalda Lundgretta, and is renowned for its sweet mince-berry and goat pyrizhky pies, made by the orphans of St. Wulfyvich. Some say that the orphans that disappear from the place are runaways from the strict discipline, or that they run away because they have learned the terrible secrets that only the witch-nuns know. Whatever the truth is, it is well hidden. The witch-nuns happily provide the warmest, most welcoming hospitality whenever the price is right.

⭗ BEDLAMITE ⭗

A redfolk railway assessment team has come to Brezim to conduct a feasibility study on running an atomic railroad through (and out of) the barony. Most of the team was chosen by the expedient means of nepotism combined with the expectation that the whole team might be taken by wolffolk, never to be seen or heard from again. The team’s leader, one Kelsen Giovenniese, is the most incompetent of the bunch. Red-faced, prone to fits and as wide as he is tall, with a hat as fancy and disheveled as his mustache, Giovenniese often leads his team into dangerous “shortcuts” that get them stuck and in need of rescue. The data they have gathered, however, may be worth something back in the redlands, if anyone can get it out of Brezim while Winterwhite’s wrath is in full effect.

⭗ 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.