On Diminutive Deserts, Red Planet Commerce & 1d12 Thin Desert Caravans

 

 

While scouring the internet for public domain pictures of Thin deserts I stumbled upon one of its sibling: The Petit désert, as imagined by dadaist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes in 1920. A ready-made drop table if ever there was one, but one using domino bricks in lieu of dice. A great idea and, I soon discovered, one explored a decade ago at Telecanter's Receding Rules. 

Since the desert's length mirrors the Canals, to actually map it in its entirety would be quite a time sink. Perhaps better to make random tables for generating a particular road, its characteristics, the points of interest surrounding it, and the hazards peculiar to it.

Still, there is something to be said for the other route suggested by the painting. And that is taking it literally. A stretch of desert with the occasional, giant domino brick. Eroded by time, and half covered in sand. And through those remnants of who-knows-what game: A stream of poetics bubbling with the impossible reveries & dunemares of the Sleeping City further upstream. 

Edrick from Vaults & Van Goghs suggested it might correspond to a certain stretch of the desert: The Eight-and-Score Barrows of the Domino Princelings. Or shrines of discarded deities who lost out in one grand metaphysical game of chance or other. Obvious, when you think about it. Speaking of that blog: The author just posted a useful and beautifully illustrated text on ancient martian air rifles, and has been employing the AI at Talk to Transformer for remixing some of the random tables from this blog. I learned several things I didn't know about Red Planet histories. Check it out!

 One probably should refrain from posts without any at least semi-useful content, so here's some relating to

Commerce, that two-faced sycophant of the Canal

The intimate connection between trade and waterways once seemed a bottomless source of bon mots for gifted (and not-so-gifted) aphorists. ”A rising tide lifts all boats” etc. This is reflected in the vernacular, where foam remains a stand-in for a handful of copper pieces. 

As the weathers wane and the Great Vacuum grow always-closer, the close-but-not-quite identity between canal and commerce that allowed esprit just enough room to maneuver has turned into a literal, pedestrian truth: Trade routes seldom stray far from the crumbling quays of the canals. There, ancient climes still provide breathable air, and travel by ship is significantly faster than the land routes. 

However: The overlapping weathers of the Twin Canals does provide some opportunity for semi-regular intra-canal communications, passing through the stretched-out wilderness of the Thin Desert. As one approaches the desert, estates and villages grow further and further apart. A striking contrast to the wild Thothic gardens and ancient Nepenthian wineries. Then lonely farmsteads, in a futile struggle against dust and sand. 

Caravans cross the Thin Desert, but only armed and only where the Imperial roads still trace a just perceptible line. If you follow the roads, it only takes a couple of days to cross the wilderness. However, this has shown itself to be quite enough time for caravans to get eaten, waylaid, driven mad or simply disappear. So: 

1d12 Caravans braving the Thin Desert

• 1 A train of porters, carrying amphoras of aged vinegar and baskets filled with thistles. The caravan is destined for the Flagellante Despondency of Athabasc
• 2 The Tithe of Persb. According to an ancient treaty, every 30 years the League of Hitae is required to hand over the flower of its youth to ensure the league's thralldom to the Temple of Persb. The balance of power has changed since then: Seldom has such a choice collection of half-witted, sickly speciments been collected. 25% that one is carrying a contagious disease.
• 3 A secretive band of cinnamon hunters. Bringing a great many oxen & armed with lead arrows. Will go off-road in their hunt for the fragrant nests of the voracious cinomolgus.
• 4 Opportunistic purveyors of statues. Half withered statues are very much in vogue along this stretch of the Canal. The caravan is one of many under equipped, over enthusiastic attempts to get rich quick before the fad ends. Will go off road at some point in search of statues. 50% chance that a competing caravan is being rushed together.
• 5 Pilgrims on their way to the pillar-sophists of the Spiralling Dialectic, where the sharpest minds of a generation show by example how fragile the balance of sanity, how fleeting the monuments of men and gods.
• 6 A cache of recently unearthed genealogical records, in a bid to upset power structures in crumbling Jamuna. Well armed, with a 25% risk of being waylaid every day.
• 7 Two competing porcelain merchants, forced to cooperate for safety. The mode du jour along the stretch of Canal they normally frequent is firmly in favour of organic dinnerware, making the prices on porcelain plummet. Hopefully fashions differ on the other side of the desert.
• 8 Frankincense traders. The leader of the caravan is covered in scars from his many encounters with the winged serpents that guard it. One of the ox-drivers have hidden a number of snake eggs, intent on creating his own frankincense grove.
• 9 Yeasts of many colors, collected for an exiled master cook trying to get into the good graces of the Emperor once more. A member of the court has vowed never to break bread made from the same yeast culture twice.
• 10 A quite ordinary caravan, the majority of trade goods being: 1. Almond milk. 2 Nutmeg. 3. Molluscs in oil. 4. Saffron. 5. Antiques from the lost glassworks of Nili Fossae. 6. Perfumed salts.
• 11 Covered carts, filled with rose bushes. The caravan is loaded with water, its members working in shifts to keep the roses well-watered and cared for. (Really a front for blue poppy smugglers. The flowers are illegal in most places along the Twin Canals, for fear of a second Sleeping City, but since they are a very potent stimulant for poets and mystics, there are always buyers.)
• 12 Peaches from the Dellavolpe estate. The stone of each peach is biomantically marked with the orchard’s seal of quality, and will not grow outside of the estate.

Thin Desert Travellers (2d8)

The unhappy fate of a lone pilgrim

Only the very foolish or very competent try to cross the Thin Desert alone. There are many things that would prey on the lone pilgrim, courier, graverobber. Better to wait for a caravan to join. Below a random table of travellers looking for travel companions. Some could be of use as hired help or as new pcs Some might rob you in your sleep. A majority might at the very least be slower than you when fleeing the spellridden pack of jackals pursuing your caravan.

 

 2d8 travellers

From Geschichte des Kostüms (1905).

2 Ancient urchin. Ever-Younger, disgraced viceroy of Lim. Spends his second youth as pickpocket and rumourmonger.
3 One-armed terracotta deserter, looking for blue clay to repair its cracked body.
4 Hopeful suitor with entourage, coffers filled with silk spiders busily weaving complicated apparel
5 Theatre troupe touring with new play. Beautiful animal masks, inane script. The actors know this, and wants a new play.
6 Fugitive from the Sleeping City. Has slept for centuries, now insomniac afraid of dreaming forth new horrors.
7 Jurist specializing in natural law. On the run after accidentally ruining a simple contract of dormancy with minor volcano.
8 Would-be settlers leaving dustbowled homestead
9 Landscape painter, with letters of recommendation to several prominent elementals
10 Sturgeonites, with carefully covered gills and webbed hands, moving a caviar nursery hidden among barrels of cider.
11 Pythagorean tutor. Belongs to sect practicing forbidden arithmetics. With complicated abacus, sack of chickpeas, two yawning pupils.
12 Imperial courier. The report she is carrying would bruise the fragile ego of the emperor, and spell her death. Splendid but impractical clothes. Sylph-in-a-bottle for one-way trip to Phobos.
13 Writer of travelogues, looking for exotic vistas and customs. Sack full of manuscripts, and a readership waiting for new book.
14 Connoisseur of drugs from the Microlevant-by-the-Thoth. Oscillates between obtrusive mania and oneiric reveries. Carries a traveller’s pharmacy with an impressive variety of stimulantia.
15 Astrologist, brooding over the movement of heavenly bodies, giving unasked-for interpretations of dreams and omens.
16 Retired mercenary, on her way to the Cutting Gardens to plant her scimitars for good. Too old, she says, for this shit.

 

On the Interpellation of Nature; or, The Sorcerer's Apprentice

 

Interpellation erodes natural law; not over night but over generations; meaning infiltrates dumb matter, whether stream, hill or bone, redrawing the borders that separate what has a voice and what lacks one. Elementalism & diablerie, poetry & necromancy are fruits growing on the same reality-twisting tree. On Earth, the over-saturation with meaning is just starting. On the Red Planet, it has reached its terminal stage: a dying world chorus of improbable voices slowly fading away.

Interpellation and its discontents

The great naturalists that ushered in the Age of Excess proceeded from a simple fact: Not every stone is a gnome. From this, they drew out the differentia specifica that distinguished dead object from personality, and elaborated it into an elementary theory of interpellation.

The proposition was the following: Where nature was treated like matter, worked on in silence – there nature remained dumb. But where mortals turned to it with prayers, curses, exhortations & admonitions – it became a moment in the moral economy and, in time, spoke back.

Taking advantage of the stream, the cliff, the wind became a matter of cultivating meaning. The sciences of Rhetoric and Law found new practical applications. A golden age, in many ways. Like Phobos above the Red Planet, Man's sovereignty over the elements seemed a foregone conclusion. But the continuous sophistication of nature soon meant that Fire refused to stay at its hearth, that the Wind refused its yoke. And thus started an era of strife between mortals and the forces of nature, and a struggle sometimes waged in the open, as civil war, and sometimes through intrigue and bargains.

 Nature was bound through a thousand treaties, formulated with all the sophistication that History's greatest lawyers could muster. Over time, this patchwork of servitutes and pacts grew into a bureaucratic jungle. Dying nobles gave freedom to a favourite among its djinni, juridical archives were lost in fires. A class of free elementals were slowly formed. Shaped in the image of Man they formed their own clubs and courts, salons and guilds. And what nature had once given freely and in abundance, it now refused to give at all or gave only in exchange for treasures fit for queens. Through personal adress, all the major forces of nature have gotten other interests than acting as ground water for their former masters. Why waste your life raining, heating, cooling, eroding, blowing when you could dance, travel the Ether, feud with your neighbors?

 

At the end of history

To the degree that the elements still perform those functions necessary for the preservation of life, they do so because they are bound by ancient, shrewdly formulated contracts – or because they gain something otherwise beyond their grasp. Some play at being local deities, content by the adoration and sacrifices of their flock. Quid pro quo is the only natural legislation.

The remnants of human civilization that huddle around the Canals thus owe their continuing existence to brittle documents, whose opaque formulations few understand the true meaning of. The great legal schools of the past have degenerated into scholastic, pseudo-religious doctrines. Documents and catalogues of archaic turns-of-phrase are traded or stolen, memorized but seldom understood. One can imagine the bitterness of those waves and winds who remain in thrall to the mere shadows of former tyrants.

 

 

On Natural Law & Those Who Wield It

I like the idea of a class of itinerant natural lawyers, brokering deals with ancient volcanoes, finding loopholes when the 10,000 year long lease on breathable air is running out for a Canal principality, and the Weather in question is dead set on leaving the quite frankly depressing surface of the Red Planet. I'm not sure how to implement such a class (or if it should be one?), but I guess reading Elric! or the different iterations of the warlock class might give me some ideas. Or the auction mechanic in Whitehack. Or a version of the 2d6 reaction table, with the rolls modified by the strength of the elemental, the terms of the contract, etc. Perhaps something like this:

Getting the elemental to the bargaining table might be tricky. Perhaps you have to defeat it, perhaps you can trick or flatter it. Perhaps you present a suitably lavish gift (rare firewoods for the salamander, a custom made map for the road elemental).

Finalizing the Contract (2d6)

• 1-2: Provoked to attack or leave (if defeated: dissipates into dumb nature)
• 3-4: Won't sign anything (if defeated: dissipates into dumb nature)
• 5-7: Temporary bound (1d4 uses), but missed something in the fine print
• 8-9: Temporary bound (1d4 uses), with significant price
• 10-11: Bound, with moderate price
• 12+: Bound, with trivial price

Modifications might be things such as:

• Anyone lacking legal training: -3 [Anyone can of course attempt to strike up a conversation with elementals, but perhaps the natural lawyer class gains bonuses through unearthed fragments of ancient natural law?)
  
• Cha 13+: +1
  
• The power has been defeated: +2
• The power has received a lavish gift: +1
• You have compromising gossip about the power: +1-6
  
• A determined number of uses <4: -1
• HD of the power is 1-4: -1
• 5-8: -2
  
• 9-11: -3
  
• 12+: -4

Without sample pacts this is all very abstract. But lets say we have a

 

ROAD ELEMENTAL (HD 6)

Prerequisite: Being on a paved road

Pact 1: The Scenic Route. Decrease the travel speed of a pursuer with HD miles per use.

Pact 2: Downhill All the Way: Increase the travel speed of the party with HD miles per use.

Pact 3:  Charm Caravan: The road elemental lures a caravan in this direction. Arrives in 1d6 hours, willing to sell basic supplies.

Prices: Trivial: A new milestone per use. Clean a significant portion of weeds. Moderate: Write a detailed travelogue/biography of the road. A formal apology from rival route.  Significant: The road wants to stretch onward, to the city of Palimpspolis.

...the range of prices would have to differ significantly between a HD1 breeze and the HD12 Weather of Jokk, of course.

Three considerations: 

Most importantly: 99 times out of a hundred, a pebble is just a pebble. Spontaneous interpellation works like erosion: It takes a very long time, and the final form is generally not very useful. A whisper in the wind, a pattern in granite. I don't want the Red Planet to turn into  a swords & sorcery reskin of Pokemon.

Also: It is not magic, per se. Not any more than rhetoric or gravitational theory is magic: More like engineering on a world were natural forces might engage you in conversation.

Finally: This is probably all too convoluted, and should be a whole lot more streamlined. 1, 2, 3, a thousand pacts, sure. But not as many fiddly mechanical bits.