Songlines of the Navigators (Lanthanide Horizon)

The sea of Machine Space is dotted with land-islands - humming devices and precarious factories attached to the wall of that great void. The Navigators who sail the black sea use songlines, memorized map-fables, as guides.

Some songlines are common, known by Navigators of all septs.

• The Island of Shrouds, a heatstroke jungle of clear plastic sheeting.
• The Island of the Rivals, where two groups of Firstborn are locked in an endless blood feud. 
• The Island of the Great House, where a few hundred grain farmers live around a tungsten tetrahedron miles wide. They have seen Navigators before, and the people of the Great House scrape up gifts to become passengers on sept-vessels and explore the world. 
• The Island of Clouds, where some mystery fills the air with red mist that corrodes spacesuits - though this does make it a surpassing source of propellant. 

The route to the Spire is also held in common. 

Kiyonori Kikutake's 1970 Expo Tower

Others are rarer, spread across the assemblies but are known mainly by geoglyph painters and historians.

• The Island of the Lotus-Eaters, a winding building whose people dance forever pinned by dangling wires. Their home has been ransacked by Navigators - the lotus-eaters dream only of returning to its embrace.
• The Island of the Captives, whose arcology broke open from the grinding weight of time. Now machines stalk the shores of their false ocean to keep them inside until repairs can be completed.  
• The Island of the Loom, covered by the strings of its vicious guardian's web.
• The Island of the Welder, largely inaccessible without passing through a lethal conduit.
• The Island of Shining Sand, where each grain is perfectly square, glows like a diamond, and is engraved with microscopic shapes.

The routes to the Vault, the Ghostfields, and the Hanging Gardens are also rare. 

Another three are held by the assemblies - one of the last acts of the Imperious before their retirement at the end of the year is to decide which septs are allowed to forage from these more lucrative sites, which provide either multiple trade goods at once or allow more efficient foraging.

Assembly Elegiast:

• The Island of All Colors, where Firstborn tend to iridescent microbes that refine organics into hundreds of specialist chemicals.  

Assembly Cloudspinner:

• The Island of the Monolith, which has been slowly building the same 30-story-high object for as long as the Navigators have known it. 

Assembly Sidereal:

• The Island Paired, where lightning strikes and great cuboid machine-worms crawl from one island-pillar to the other. 

Another eight are fabled - known to exist, somewhere, though the route is lost.

• The Island of the Photosynthetes, whose people cracked their spherical arcology open from within, and now stand proud as kings. It is said they make fine hosts to Navigators - though with little food, as they no longer eat.
• The Island of Secrets, which is invisible to the eye and hides when sept-vessels pass by. 
• The Island of Variegated Limbs, which shift like kelp in ocean currents.  
• The Island of the Fortress, protected by a ceramic shell of surpassing strength.
• The Island of the Broadcasts, which sings a song that metal hears.
• The Island of Itself, which slowly grows across the walls of Machine Space like mold.
• The Island of the Moon, a still-sealed arcology of transparent plastic tunnels under an orbiting white light.
• The Island of the Harbor - Machine Space is haunted by the angular Dreadnought. Antenna-studded splinterer of shields, breaker of axes, scarred by its thousand victories. Surely it comes from somewhere, and returns there for repair and ammunition.

The Sword in the Stone (Cath Celdaenn Hexcrawl)

The sword Durandal, ancient beyond days, held by a shining hero in the lost past of Cath Celdaenn, has been found in the depths of the City. Durandal has wandered through fable - they say it can cut through stone and steel, that its touch cures disease, that its shine scatters armies. 

It should be no surprise that so many are willing to kill for it.  

Random Encounters

1. Hanged Sumire, a Braid D who says she learned not from the Capitol Tree, but from the "Dead Willow", where she hung from her ankle for months. Laughs at Durandal - the real treasure is below it. 

2. One of the four heroclans of the White Teeth, out for glory.

3. 2d8 Victims re-measuring distances for their cannon.

4. Stephen, leading 12 of the Scalloped Knights on a scouting expedition.

5. A hydra, questing beast of the Scalloped Knights, doing cartwheels across the ground. Stats as carcass crawler with 8 HD. Why on earth is it on land. Who allowed this. Stop it.

6. Roll twice and combine.  

Hex Keys

A1: Staircase

Durandal has landed on a flat concrete-and-grass disc that cantilevers from the side of one of the City's great pillars. To reach it requires a slow climb up 20 stories of tight, one-person-wide spiral staircase. Don't expect to leave in a hurry.

A2: Camp of the White Teeth

A heroclan party of four clans:

• Conn, whose 68 members are Storm-Chosen B (Thor). They are haughty and over-proud - channeling their ancestor after he struck down the Wyrm of Olenoch with a bolt of lightning. 
• Geta, whose 59 members are Princesses C (with the ability to speak to birds, eusocial insects, and fish). They are fair and scrupulously honest - which makes it all the stranger that they claim that their ancestor killed both the Wyrm of Olenoch and its (apparently imaginary) twin.
• Togort, whose 32 members are Folk N-1. They are far from Togort's lands and the strain slowly kills them while they laugh. 
• Baki, whose 61 members are Ghouls D. They are truly heroic - Baki's long undeath gave her centuries to add to her renown.

All four clans despise each other - their histories are a long tangle of territory disputes and blood feuds,  put momentarily on hold to quest for Durandal. For now they drink and celebrate, putting up an ostentatious facade while the peace still holds out.

B1: The Victims' Cult

A swarm of 138 skeletons, killed by Durandal in time immemorial and seeking it ever since. They've pointed a cannon at Durandal's hill - if they can't get their hands on the sword, nobody else will either.

B2: Durandal

The sword Durandal glows like the sun at all hours. If it were moved even slightly everyone would see it and the Knights, the heroclans, and the dead would immediately swarm over to start swinging.

All the myths were true - Durandal ignores armor and strikes unerringly, cures disease and heals its wearer 1 HP per round, and permits its bearer to attack as an army in mass combat. 

If one were to dig under the mound, however, they would find Sumire's "real treasure" - a ruby seed. Planted and tended, this would grow a tree that could feed ten thousand (and, given Celdic society, start a religious schism).

B3: The Great Earthworm

The commotion of clashing armies has awoken the great earthworm to gnaw once more at the roots of the city. 15 HD, blind, food-seeking and dryness-repelled, 100 feet long. It is obvious from the surface - you can see hills rise and trenches form as it passes. 

C1: Viewpoint Tower

An abandoned Ilmari tower ending in an onion dome - from here you can see all other hexes. 

C2: Fief of the Scalloped Knights  

A bizarre example of parallel evolution with Celdish knight-penitents, the Scalloped Knights are 125 members of a deep-sea clade of ambulatory shellfish, punished for past crimes by being sent to crusade in the City above. (2 HD, 16 AC, attack +2 1d10+2).

They have cut out a small kingdom here, where they reign under the King of the Four Corners of the World, who Holds The City in an Iron Fist (who spent his time before exile robbing undersea convenience stores).

The King's son, Stephen, is appalled. The world of air is hideous, full of dust and weird people who insist on having "skin" and performing all kinds of depraved saint-worship. Durandal won't end their exile - they should return to the sea to fight against hydras and hippocampi and bathe in the adoration of their fellows. The King, for his part, is increasingly frustrated and would be overjoyed if Stephen were, let's say, forcefully remanded to a monastery where he can be "pious" and "moral" somewhere the King doesn't have to see it.

Their fief holds 523 bonded serfs, split evenly between people of the City (who lived here before the invasion and are now taxed heavily to punish them for their heathen ways) and civilian molluscs. 

This post is for  G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 6 challenge 1.4, "sequel to a blogpost from last year".

Clockwork Neuroblock

Back in 2022, the wonderful Phlox opened up a multi-GM shared-PCs dungeoncrawling game. My dungeon in that set was the Clockwork Neuroblock, a machine intended to create the perfect form of life. Mindless optimization brought them to the "proteans", indestructible and immortal balls of algae(?), which promptly washed down the river and became everyone else's problem.

The first 3 floors (57 rooms) of the Neuroblock were finished and the first two (I... think?) were run before the end of the game. I've had the handmade maps laying around ever since and always meant to replace them with digital ones. 

Other than the maps, this is unedited GM notes - you can read the dungeon here.

Looking back at it I think there're some neat bits:

• Proteans are, to be fair, just skeleton jellies, but I like my cute little Valonia ventricosa lookin' guys.
• The first floor being split in half by the river is neat - with a bigger single floor I could've done some more with that (like Wizzargh's Chasm Vaults). 
• On the other hand, the map seems overly circular? All three floors are just big loops, with 2 and 3 adding a central round room. There's not a lot of variety. 
• And, inversely, vertically the dungeon's real linear - one way from 1 -> 2 and 2 -> 3, with an extra Surface -> 3 route to unlock. To be fair, it is only 60 rooms or so. 
• The Forsaken being a faction players have to release into the dungeon is a good bit... though it's also not what's happening, they're already all over the place. Still, it's something to remember for later.
• I have been putting NOT TODAY TOMORROW in things for years and it's never actually seen play (back when I ran Neuroblock the PCs picked it up but never identified or used it) - it's varied between "damage to people you know" and "damage at line of sight" with no rhyme or reason.
• The fourth floor was, from what I remember, a key hunt - two wings that had to be cleared in order to reach the Neuroblock itself and climb inside. This was meant to be pretty short (for a dungeon the campaign is in, at least) - I expected the open table to go on for a while and thought it'd be neat to make a dungeon that could be swept through to prepare characters for the ominous floating pillars and so forth the other GMs were planning.  

Overall... dang, I should really make a dungeon. Not My Destination was supposed to be my next shot at a big ol' campaign tentpole, but around the time I finished the overland map I evaporated into a fine mist.