Crypt-Cities: Rot Blossom Beds

(I hadn't given my Crypt-Cities mini-setting much thought for over a year now. But somewhere during the lurid dream-quest that has been my first Elden Ring playthrough, I came across these guys.

Trying not to spoil much, they are undead guardians brought back to life by the miniature trees sticking out of their backs. Some are bare or budding, others are blooming, still others are suffering a fungal infection.

How could I not go back and write something similar up for CCs?)

Rot Blossom Beds

Ahh, here we are. Look upon this mound of rot and despair, all ye wretched Awakened.

This is the fate that awaits anyone who doesn't take the time to check their scabrous hides for sprouts at the end of the day. All that struggle, all that toil, all that Need doesn't amount to anything if you become just another mindless seedbed.

Fortunately for our demonstrational purposes, this poor wretch was taken by a less virulent strain of Rot Blossom. They're still doomed, make no mistake, but it affords us an opportunity to study it closer without fear of any of you lot succumbing- probably.

See here how the biggest growth erupts from between the shoulders- rot blossoms especially favor the spinal column as a pathway through the body when taking root. If this specimen was given the time to, it's likely it would grow into a hideously beautiful tree that would then spread its seeds all across the wastes, catching more Awakened and perpetuating the cycle.

It's almost enough to make you want to burn it, isn't it?

Of course that will only make things worse- for you, for the host, and for countless other Awakened. Instead, your best course of action will be to cut it down to size and then bury everything in pieces somewhere even more inhospitable than the rest of the wastes- a salt flat is ideal. Yes, you're damning your fellow to an eternity as an immobile salt mummy, but you'll be saving everyone else. Easy decisions do not await you in this unlife, Awakened.

See how the roots weave their way all along the body, even worming their way in under its death mask.  This allows it locomotion even after a point where the host's independent motor functions have long since ceased. The body is just another organ now, granting the plant the ability to move and see. The union is rarely perfect, and it can sometimes take seconds for stimuli to travel from one half to the other- that is what gives the rot-bedded their characteristic shamble; the thing so many of the Living characterize all of you having by default. It may be that these poor wretches originated that stereotype, but don't bear them any ill will for it if you can help it.

We may as well get this next part over with and show you lot how to neutralize them.

See how the body twitches and slowly gathers itself up as another creature approaches it. See the clumsy yet deliberate swivel as it tries to locate and react to this new threat.

See how it... waves its hand and clears its throat?

And... politely introduces itself?

What?

Not Just Fertilizer

It is difficult to call you "one of the lucky ones". You are an Awakened, after all. But considering the worse fate you should have suffered given the situation, it's safe to say you skirted another abyss. And look at you now; you've got a friend.

A less parasitic kind of rot blossom has taken root in your body. In fact, its relationship to you verges on symbiotic. You grant it life through your unfathomable biology, and in return it offers up its grim bounty. Perhaps it is a long-lost strain, or a more recent mutation. It may resemble a small flowerbed, a half-dead shrub, a tangle of vines, or even a gnarled sapling. Coloration ranges from matte and bland to eye-wateringly bright and lurid; texture from glassy smoothness to shredding thorns.

You resemble a Holt-Dweller whose mask has gone horribly awry, and among the unlearned you may even pass as one. But any Awakened worth heir smoke knows what you are, and will probably scorn you as such.

The plant will cause irreparable damage to your body if you try to remove it in its entirety, but you can prune it or keep it trimmed. Virtually every blossom bed that manages to keep the company of other Awakened will obsessively dispose of any fruit, seed pods, spore clusters, etc. before they can mature. Of course then you are left with company that is afraid of neither infestation nor immolation- a mad bunch indeed.

As alluded to, you can also use the 'bounty' of this bleak passenger to your own advantage. Branches can be cut and shaped into tools. Leaves can be harvested for their chemical properties. A seed can be used to hold yourself and anyone else in range of you hostage in a high-stakes situation. Your options are limited only by your imagination and recklessness.

You also benefit from something else. Something... disquieting to think about. You don't feel the Need quite as strongly as your fellows. The agonizing geas to throw yourself into a cozy little coffin in a crypt-city somewhere certainly still exists, but it doesn't have quite the same edge that drives others mad. This allows you to willingly travel farther afield of your final destination, opening up more opportunities to find resources and dangers out on the wastes.

But why exactly is the Need weaker in you?

Is it the rot blossom? Does it shield you from it?

Or is it feeding you a conflicting urge so subtle that you can't even perceive it?

And if so, where would it lead you?

Crypt-Cities: The Greenherders.

Islands of Green in a Sea of Death

You wouldn't expect there to be much of a rapport between Nomads and Holt-Dwellers. Their borders were fluid yet haphazard and cause for tensions for centuries, and that was before the curse of the Awakened gripped the land, before your kind started shambling about and the soil started to die beneath their feet.

And for the most-part, no, they are not on very friendly terms.

But that didn't stop a handful of them from working together when the world began to die.

At first, it was just a couple of the Dwellers who were desperate to move to a healthier tract of forest. The old growth had been dying away, allowing the Nomads to expand their grazing territory. The green-wardens bought their way into a traveling band, who brought with them dozens of wagons laden with plant life. Pots, sacks, and entire troughs of rich, black earth housed hundreds of shoots, sprouts, saplings, and other young green lives desperately trying to grow. When the waste-wanderers dropped them off at their destination, they were given a few choice specimens in payment.

Over time, more nomads gave more holt-dwellers transportation and protection, particularly when an entire community was suddenly cut off from the rest of a forest by sudden natural or unnatural disaster. Some were small affairs, while others saw entire trees uprooted and safely replanted. Something of an understanding formed between the two peoples, and cultural exchange grew deeper.

It isn't entirely clear when the plants started walking themselves.

Maybe some of the old wood-shapers started to meddle in few fields of esoteric knowledge, or maybe they'd always had access to it.

What is known is that a few hundred years ago, the transitional grass belt became populated by mixed bands who herded both animal and plant. Simple words, lassos, and crooks were enough for the beasts, but it took a special kind of magic to coax a shrub into uprooting itself and squirming forward under direction on roots like so many clumsy, twisting legs.

Over time their art was honed and perfected. Soon, trees could drag themselves along by their roots. Before long, entire groves would walk or stumble at the lead of these Greenherders. They were far slower than draft animals, but comparatively implacable so long as they had water to store and good soil to root in at the end of a journey.

It was a natural conclusion of the process to weave them together. Roots not needed for movement were made to knit themselves together into vast meshes which could hold and bear the weight of good soil. Specialized roots bored deep into the earth to tap increasingly hard-to-find groundwater reservoirs. Over time this practice was strengthened until earth, stone, other plants, and even pools of water could be carried by these increasingly large agglomerations of flora.

They could even be inhabited.

Rather than subjecting them to the harsh wastes, the herders loaded their animals up onto a bed of animated earth before every major migration. The dead, human or beast, began to be buried amid those groves so that their every element could benefit their nascent ecosystems. Villages were built on the backs of those groaning forests, entire generations living and dying within view of a wasteland which they were almost able to separate themselves from entirely.

But as the earth continued to wither and resources stretched thin, the greenherders split up. Their bands ranged far and wide, each adapting to the strange and unique hardships of the region which they ultimately found themselves in, following the old paths known only to the Nomads. Roots dug deeper to pursue the fleeing water reserves. Vines as fine as hairs with fingers like cilia cling fiercely to soil for fear of losing a grain. People once at the forefront of a sociable, trans-cultural exchange have become reclusive and wary.

Now, it is vanishingly rare to see more than one or two of these walking green islands in a lifetime.

But when you do, it can be such a sight.

walking island by CoconutMilkyWay

Rot Blossoms

In their quest to become as resource-efficient as possible, a few more unorthodox innovations were made by the greenherders. Simply feeding the dead to the land is rather tame, after all- even if the idea is horrifying to the Awakened.

Their botanists hazarded to guess that a whole body could be made to benefit nature just as much as all its parts. So, they cautiously adapted plant life which could root itself directly in dead flesh without waiting for fungi and other decomposers to break it down first. A few relatively minor mishaps occurred in which calipers and pruning sheers became surgery implements and personal grooming tools, but before long the greenherders enjoyed hauntingly beautiful success.

Cropped from an image by Lora Zombie

A myriad of different plants were raised to grow from decaying flesh, but over time the umbrella term of "Rot Blossom" caught on and stuck. Normally innocuous elements of greenherder islands, Rot Blossoms have taken on quite a different character among the pained, raspy whispers of the Awakened worldwide.

You know them well, don't you? Bet you hate to hear someone confirm that all of the rumors are true, huh? Quit your knee-knocking and pay attention before you break a joint.

Yes, Rot Blossoms can infest the Awakened.

Your flesh may be animated, but it is most certainly decayed. And the slower rate at which you decay actually makes your kind an ideal bed for some of them. They can take root and lazily drain the nutrients from you until there is nothing left of a husk, unable to move as it overtakes your entire body in its sweetly sick tendrils, left to wait for some unlucky scavengers to happen upon you and start the whole cycle over.

Of course these aren't the ones to be feared. You can simply avoid their little boring seeds, or rip a sprout out long before it could suck you dry, resulting in minimal damage to your carcass.

No, you need to fear the ones with minds of their own. The ones released into the wastes by accident, never intended to be used on the Awakened- and therefore the ones without any well-known guards against them. The ones with the same walking-roots as the titanic green islands, but on a minute scale. The ones whose seeds can fly in on the wind, land on your shoulder, and then worm their way into your ear canal. It's just a few finger-widths of wriggling from there before they hit your rotten brain.

That's when the fun starts.

It can take over what little is left of your motor functions from there- subtly at first, of course. You'll think it's you deciding to go this way instead of that, or to lie down in the sun with your head tilted just so, despite never having done so before. But over time its control will grow more overt and difficult to resist without inflicting massive, potentially debilitating trauma upon your own skull.

By the time the first buds erupt from behind your death mask to bloom in the parched air, you'll be powerless to do anything about it.

If you're lucky, you'll have fallen for its intoxicating presence by then, and won't really mind.

What's that? 

Of course you will still be conscious.

Not even burning to ashes can fully kill you, so why would a little decomposer-turned-parasite?

With no heed given to the ever more agonizing pangs of the Need to find a crypt-city, it will lead you far astray. But it won't force you to do it alone, oh no. It knows an ambulatory host is better than a still one, and it has no use or interest in healthy, living bodies. So it will make you bring it to other Awakened, in order to grant its seeds to them. And other Awakened will come in search of you in turn, either to destroy you if they have the sense to, or to join you, damn that alluring reek.

There are tales of truly pungent flower beds tucked away in the ruins of the world; rumors of fallen crypt-cities overgrown with this aberration of nature.

Rot Farm Skeleton by Maciej Kuciara

Crypt Cities: What the Dead Carry.

Really?

Grave robbery?

No, that term is too dignified for what you propose. Corpse pillaging is what this is.

Were you listening to anything? Are you aware of the things your fellow Awakened have had to suffer through? The sanctity of one's death mask? The difference between collapse and perseverance embodied by the smallest of trinkets and sentimentals on one's person?

You are, and you just don't care?

... Smart. You'll go farther than most.

When one of you has just about had it, and all seems lost, the embrace of true death nonetheless remains elusive. Instead, you crumple under the weight of the Need as well as your own personal anguish, and turn inward. Without a body strong enough to carry you to a sarcophagus, your mind turns inward and consumes itself, slowly. You can look forward to weeks, months, even years as a tormented Husk, trapped inside of that desiccated head of yours. And after that, when you start to fall apart at the molecular level, the real fun begins.

Some of the damage can be reversed, if you were to be placed within an enchanted coffin of your own.

Of course most of the other travelers who come across your bleaching hide will be less interested in picking up and helping you, and more interested in helping themselves to the pickings of whatever you might have had on you when you went catatonic. If you're smart, you'll keep your eye-slots peeled too.



(Roll 1d40 whenever you come across a suitably lethargic-looking cadaver. Any rerolls ignore the same result twice in a row.)

1	Nothing But Dust	The Husk and any rags it has left fall to ashes at your touch, its mask crumbling into nothing. Have a moment of silence for this most grim of fates.
2	Tattered Clothes	Little more than a filthy, stained loincloth. Gain one rag. If you are feeling particularly brave, gain one bandage or article of clothing.
3	Encrusted Thing	This object is completely covered over in gunk, grime, or dirt. You have no idea what it is or does. Gain one crusty old... something.
4	Vile Trophies	This Husk must have been one sick puppy to collect all these. If you are not Hunted, become mildly unsettled. If you are Hunted, have a laugh.
5	Abused Rucksack	Spacious, but weakening in places. Gain a medium-sized container. If it is ever filled to capacity, it ruptures.
6	Ghostly Whispers	You find nothing, and the murmur of wind and ash fills you with a sudden, dreadful urgency. You suffer one additional day of Need.
7	Scavengers	Carrion-eaters and worse things have found the Husk before you did. If you fight or scare the competition away, reroll.
8	Noose Necklace	A piece of fashion commonly sported by alumni of gallows the world over. Gain one short length of rope.
9	Snipped Sinews	Several of the Husk's muscles are still good. Gain three uses of stitching, or one bowstring, cord, garrote, etc.
10	Old Child's Toy	A weathered wooden figurine or a threadbare doll, probably kept as a memento. Gain one bitter reminder of your own lost youth.
11	Rendered Human Fat	A jar full of fragrant adipose tissue. Gain five uses of fuel or oil, and attract predators at twice the usual rate.
12	Visceral Trail	Dried droplets of black ichor, the lingering reek of death-smoke, and the occasional severed limb point toward potential danger- and profit.
13	Shiny Rocks	Not even the dead are exempt from humanity's fixation on shiny things. Gain a bargaining chip.
14	Befouled Liquids	These vials or skins once contained valuable potions or life-giving water. Now they are spoiled and noxious. They make you nauseous to drink, but could be used as a stink bomb or olfactory concealment.
15	A Fistful of Coins	A few ancient coins of unclear mint and composition. Flipping them into a body of water and wishing might do something. Like poison the water.
16	Corpulent Swelling	Jostling the Husk causes its abdomen to burst and shower you in insides which quickly become outsides. You can be smelled from a much greater distance until you bathe.
17	Awful Poetry	In sanity, this Husk used poetry as a creative outlet and coping mechanism. In catatonia, it serves to make you groan. Gain one use of fuel.
18	Powdered Herbs	They might have been an apothecary's wares. Or an old pressed flower collection. Gain two uses of medicine. Or placebos. Or poison.
19	Rusting Fragments	Anything made of metal such as weapons or armor has long since broken, but the pieces remain. Gain one use of scrap.
20	Infestation	At some point this body became host to a den of vermin or a squirm of large parasites. Gain one ration of food.
21	Infested	At some point this body became host to a den of small vermin or a squirm of large parasites. Now, so have you.
22	Old Wagon Wheel	Some Nomad cart won't be going anywhere without this. Gain a shield that breaks after deflecting three blows.
23	Mimicry	That isn't a Husk. That isn't even humanoid. And whatever it is, it looks hungry.
24	Gnarled Branch	Someone tore the face off of a particularly old Holt-Dweller, but didn't get around to working it yet. Gain one piece of wood.
25	Weaponized Femur	Whoever this belonged to must have had legs like a workhorse. Treat as a club that breaks after five successful hits.
26	Old Bone Dice	Bones for throwing, and a bit of idle recreation. They're probably not cursed.
27	A Ghost of Warmth	For the briefest of moments you feel faint, pleasant sensation that you'd thought dead for ages. Nothing about the Husk or its possessions tells you why or how to replicate it, however.
28	Crypt-City Brochure	An old flier both advertising for one of the smaller, newer Crypt-Cities, and calling for the violent expulsion of all Awakened. If you become lost, you may reorient yourself toward your goal once.
29	A Spare Limb	Everything seems to be in working order for one of the Husk's extremities. Randomly gain a spare left or right arm or leg.
30	Dislodged Corpse Nail	This foot-long wrought iron spike is hammered into the limbs and torsos of the Awakened by Hunters to affix them to a Groaning Pillar. Treat as a dagger.
31	Moldering Pages	Scraps of some old tome or journal. They may offer some insight into local dangers or past travelers.
32	Rot Blossom Sprout	Run. Run as fast as you can.
33	Sandals!	A marvelously underused pair of sandals. Gain the ability to travel the Wasteland in almost-comfort for the next hundred miles.
34	Passage of Death-Priest Psalms	These grim old hymns allow you to reflect upon your struggle and the goal which lies at its end, bolstering your resolve. You may ignore one day of Need.
35	Looted Mask	This Husk was once another corpse-pillager like yourself. Gain one blank death mask to use as a backup, and don't dwell overlong on this glimpse into your own future.
36	Map Fragment	Manic scrawling making use of parchment and ink of questionable origins outlines the general area and points of interest.
37	Mystery Cult Trinkets	Ritual tools and artifacts of ambiguous design and purpose. Using them correctly might allow for the casting of a single spell. Or they might explode.
38	Black Marrow	The bones of every Awakened become imbued with a hint of death-smoke essence over time, and these are still juicy. Become well-rested, if you can tolerate the grizzly, selfsame feast. Just ignore the nightmares.
39	Smoke Pocket	A pocket of death-smoke hasn't yet left the Husk's body. Split open the bubo-like protrusion in its flesh and huff deeply to repair light damage or remove one minor debilitation.
40	Not A Husk!	The corpse you're scavenging isn't entirely catatonic yet! Take light but unavoidable damage as it suddenly bites and flails mindlessly at the rude awakening.

Crypt Cities Encounters: Forsaken Flesh.

As fleeting and meaningless as it is in the face of an eternity of Need or waking oblivion, many of the Awakened try to resist the draw toward the Crypt Cities for as long as they possibly can. This is easiest for your kind to do when there is something to cling to, and to pour yourselves into entirely. For some it's a craft or art, or revenge, or faith. Vices are difficult to come by when the senses are so deadened, but you'd be surprised at what desperate souls have been able to find.

Surprised, and horrified.

Hedonism is a rare but particularly cruel poison to the Awakened. The absence of physical pleasure should mean that the pursuit of it is pointless, and this is mostly true. But that doesn't dull the ferocity of a few acolytes desperate to indulge in any feeling. Tucked away in the moldering warrens of cities, deep forest glades, and abandoned mountain crags, these secluded groups--hidden for no other reason than the lingering ghost of their own shame--attempt to sate their artificial fixations. To call it sadomasochism would be inaccurate, for that tame little novelty of the living is outstripped by what they do to one another and to themselves.

Still, at least those groups tend to disband within a few years, their members finding that nothing dulls the Need for long, or the unlucky becoming addled and lost.

At least they don't succeed.

Once upon a time, several centuries ago by now, there had been plans to develop a new Crypt City closer to the seas. This distant annex was probably fated to fail anyway, or at best reach overpopulation within a scant few years. But it never got that far along in its construction. The workers began to be attacked or driven off, and more than one masked priest was hacked to pieces and bled of all of their smoke before the site was abandoned. A massive structure still stood there from what work had been completed, lonesome and stark against the wasteland around it. All the interlopers had to do was move in.

Within the failed crypt, the halls were gutted of their sarcophagus alcoves, and the central chamber was enlarged massively. A deep pit was dug in the center, and an amphitheater was built which would house them and everyone drawn to their cause. In the embrace of withered arms, hundreds found love and searing agony. But instead of petering out into another forgotten old distraction, some terrible threshold was breached.

Maybe one among them had been a truly gifted user of the astral or arcane in life. Perhaps some thing beyond our ken had been watching and waiting for an opportunity. It isn't clear exactly how, and perhaps that is best.

What good could come from learning how their flesh separated from their bones in one final, debauched orgy of decay?

Ounce by ounce, their beings sloughed apart, leaving slick skeletons rattling through the corridors or around the edges of the pit, mindlessly repeating the last actions which their former owners had been performing when the Embrace happened. It started as a pool, and then grew hideously in size, piling up on itself, moving, breathing with the life of everyone who had gone into it. Like a shuddering, mewling tumor it grew to fill almost the entire amphitheater.

And there, centuries after it should have rotted away to nothing, that mound of Forsaken Flesh still churns upon itself. It calls out with hundreds of voices, begging for others to come and join their embrace, to feel their piteous love, and to add their human dregs to the mass.

Sometimes its calls are answered, either by those seeking to add their voice to it, or those who would silence it for good.

In either case, they tend not to be heard from again.

Domicile of the Forsaken Flesh

This unfurnished basalt edifice was once meant to be the core of a new Crypt City. From its domed center extend four wings, each one oriented toward the cardinal directions, but slightly skewed to one way or the other. It is entirely windowless in the traditional Crypt style, though the interior may occasionally be lit by a hole in the roof or walls caused by the slow dilapidation of the entire structure. Hallways extend in all directions within, mimicking spiderweb patterns meant to maximize the "living" space of the death priests who would have presided over the City and its occupants. All paths which remain intact lead toward the central chamber.

Forsakers

Stripped of all skin, muscle, and sinew, even hollowed of all their marrow, the bones of the old celebrants still walk the halls of the Domicile. It is unclear if they now serve the Flesh, or if they are still possessed of enough of their old selves to recognize the vile thing they contributed to, and wish not for it to be seen or added to. In either case, they will attack intruders without hesitation, breaking their otherwise mindless routines to attack with whatever is at hand- including the discarded bits of their fellows.

Free the Imprisoned: If a Forsaker succeeds in grabbing a hold of its target, it will proceed to tear at any flesh left on it, dealing unarmed damage. If its target is incapacitated--or more rarely, the target is a genuinely dead corpse--the Forsaker will strip it to the bone in an attempt to free the skeleton within. It is not clear if they are aware that this does not have the desired result of animating the skeleton most of the time. But rarely, a skeleton so flensed will stand back up, and appreciatively join its new kin in rattling vigil. It is seemingly random whether the Forsakers discard any resulting meat, carry it back out of the Domicile to rot at the doorway, or leave it at the edge of the Amphitheater to be absorbed.

Reassemble: The Forsakers do not stay down for very long. As soon as a day after its destruction, a shattered Forsaker will reassemble itself to be more-or-less as functional as it previously was, barring the loss of any bones which it cannot retrieve or replace. The oldest Forsakers are little more than swirling jumbles of fragments and bone meal.

The Amphitheater of Flesh

This massive, vaulted chamber holds up a weathered old dome which overlooks the central pit. Better sheltered from the elements here, trappings of the old coven can still be spotted amid the ruin. Stone carvings, fragments of pottery, and implements of unclear but probably unpleasant purpose abound. The flat stone floor is entirely bare around the edge of the pit, which is about one hundred feet in diameter and twenty feet deep. The floors and walls here are covered in a sheen of grease and flecks like what is leftover on a cutting board after preparing meat. Most of the pit is occupied by the Flesh.

The Covetous Singer, Forsaken Flesh

Massive, pungent, and possessed of both solid and liquid qualities, the Flesh is constantly moving. Sometimes its surface only churns or ripples, while at others it erupts into selfsame geysers which nearly reach the domed ceiling before raining back down upon the area and reuniting with the central mass. Vague suggestions of organs, vacant faces, or throbbing veins occasionally break the surface of its otherwise uniform melange of tissues. It sings with hundreds of different voices, each at an unsettling midpoint between bliss and agony. If attacked, it lashes out with countless ephemeral limbs, smashing and grabbing at anything within its considerable reach. It is not known for certain what could damage or kill it, but fire or exposure to the elements is as good a bet as any.

Seething & Slippery: The area around the Forsaken Flesh is difficult to navigate and maintain one's balance upon, being perpetually slick with all manner of bodily fluids. Yes, all manner.

Acquaint Thyself: A target which is touching the Flesh, or which is struck by one of its many pseudopods, must resist a sudden wave of dreadful nostalgia which comes over them. Failure causes the target to be lulled into inactivity, taking no actions and becoming incapable of moving or defending itself.

Come into the Fold: An acquainted target, if not removed from proximity to the Flesh, will be enveloped and held within its central mass for a full minute. If the target fails to shake off its addling nostalgia or is not removed with outside assistance before that time, it will be assimilated into the Forsaken Flesh. The target's voice joins the chorus, and a very scandalized-looking skeleton climbs up out of the pit and leaves after being unceremoniously spat out.

Crypt Cities: What's in a Mask?

Despite how long it's been, and how far some of us like to think we've come, the way we treat our Awakened varies considerably from place to place. As has been stated earlier, death isn't as great an equalizer as some poets make it out to be. But depending on what you were able to do with your previous life before its end, you might just be one of the lucky ones.

Well, "lucky".

Random Example Homelands & Masks (Roll 1d6)

1d6	Origin	Mask Appearance
1	The Plutocracy	A generic, clay worker's mask
2	The Thalassocracy	Theater mask with sea motifs
3	The Mystery Sects	Graven, deific imagery
4	The Holt-Dwellers	Sculpted parasitic plant matter
5	The Nomads	Bones of totemic animals
6	The Hunted	Whatever you scavenged up

The Plutocracy

"With death becoming so uncertain lately, we have only taxes left to take comfort in."
-Pilvic, Chair Secretary of Maldus & Kindred Incorporated, Collections Division.

Time, it has been said, is money. And when presented with the potential for infinite time, it didn't take long for some minds to turn toward the prospect of infinite money. So when the dead began to Wake among the interred members of certain guilds and business fraternities, their first and immediate thoughts were not ones dominated by the Need.

In a land where political power is explicitly and by design in the power of the most wealthy individuals, and things ranging from worker collective membership to voting rights must be bought and paid for, those without the keenest of business savvy and the richest of parents tend to accumulate a decent amount of debt over their lifespans. Regrettably, once upon a time these debts had to be transferred to slippery next-of-kin or altogether cancelled by their owners, leaving the food bowls of favorite pets un-festooned and the most purebred of ponies unbought for children's birthdays. But thanks to the advent of Waking, an honest loan-shark is able to collect indefinitely, at least every once in a beautiful blue moon.

You were one such debtor in life, or your relatives didn't want to front the bill for your funeral after you died, and you've become one since. A long stint as a manual laborer probably followed as you quarried stone, dug ditches, and tarred the rooftops of countryside villas.

But once you were, by some miracle, cleared of debt (or once the Need grew so great that they decided to discharge you despite trying to claw the face off of your foreman), you were freed from your dreary work camp and shipped inland toward your caravan.

You'll find many masks like yours out there- nearly featureless, light gray, made from a composite of clay and more resistant materials. But yours is still unique to you in some way, possessing an identifier scratched into its surface somewhere. It also happens to be a sort of canvas for your own personal expression. And though your time as a laborer was maddening toward the end, you worked alongside your Awakened kin--as well as those of living flesh and pumping blood--at close quarters for many a year. You escaped some of the worst indignities inflicted by the living, and the rest can be compartmentalized as "just part of business".

When the situation calls for diplomacy with the living, you are often the first pick by those who know you.

When the Need gnaws at your fellows, You may comfort them with the knowledge that worse pangs can be survived.

The Thalassocracy

"O endless sea. You are a curse, and an accomplice to human disquiet, but also the blood which runs in me. Take me and my batter'd ship, as you accept all that is and can be."
-Berucino, protagonist of the acclaimed melodrama A Death At Sea, and the first Awakened character known to enter the popular consciousness of "high culture".

 Ah, the sea. A bottomless womb of life and bounty which occasionally makes its power known via deadly, coast-obliterating reminders. Likened so often to a tempestuous lover, those who live beside it do so like they remain trapped in that abusive relationship. But every once in a while, a powerful navy, strong dykes, and careful meteorological predictions allow one clan of fish-eaters to claim they've mastered the oceans.

With their lives and deaths so intimately bound up in the whims of the waves, it isn't unusual to find romantics fixated upon them. For centuries, burials at sea were customary- a way of "giving back" to their provider. And this carried on just fine until the dead started to drag their waterlogged selves back up onto the beaches. Burning them and then carrying the ashes far out to sea on barges became routine for several fateful decades of the coast's history, but that practice ended when hundreds of crying whales started to beach themselves in unison and catches of fish started coming up with far too many heads, fins, and teeth.

Now the sheer cliffs and promontories of the coasts are given over to temporary burial chambers. But just because they are temporary, does not mean that they should be simple. Oh, no. You were probably swathed in more silk and gold in death than you had ever seen in your life. For a brief instant you were celebrated as a fellow actor in the same great play. The mask you now bear, similar to those worn in the theaters frequented by the members of elite houses, is a reminder of that. it's up to you to decide whether the motif of "comedy" or "tragedy" was a more appropriate choice for you, of course.

You are, as a result of this treatment, a remarkably well-adjusted Awakened one. Either by hearkening back to your noble blood, or by faking it until you make it, you just might resemble a leader with some amount of dignity among your fellow caravaneers.

And better yet, stripping bits and pieces of excessive grandeur from your mask might allow you to bargain for supplies or advice, if you happen during your journey to come across those who still care for things like gold.

The Mystery Cults

"The secret is in the Black Breath, I know it! We need only collect a few more vials of it..."
-Burisane to his apprentice, over a mortisected petitioner at the altar of Argent Gedes.

 Magic and monolatry go hand-in-hand the world over. Unfettered by distinctions such as divine or arcane, uncounted organizations plumb the depths of mysticism in nearly every culture- the only variable is how public or clandestine they are, or how embarrassing their initiation rituals can get. You would know, wouldn't you?

You would also know how rigorous the training is. How after initiation, one learns before anything else the whims and needs of their assigned teacher. Next, one learns the abilities and weaknesses of one's fellows, just in case the likely day ever comes where competition grows even more stiff. Hours poring over annotated tomes day in and day out might addle the senses to the outside world and a healthy sleeping and eating schedule, but in place of all of that cut-out fat, one is gifted true knowledge. While turning a blind eye to many of their peculiarities, folk across the land often rely upon these scholars for people learned in letters, numbers, and sciences which they master by mere incident of coming to understand their chosen path toward the secrets of the universe.

Unfortunately what you don't know, despite your many years of devotion to your chosen cell, coven, house, church, or tower, is actual magic.

No, no. You were a decade away from even witnessing the rituals which were performed in the outermost sanctum, let alone partaking. Though, somewhat fortunately, that may be the only reason why you were permitted to leave when first you stood back up after dying. Were you a true vessel of your order's secrets, your former associates would never have let you leave seclusion. At best, such great minds have been reduced to talking heads used to educate students in between maddened ramblings. At worst, they could be locked away with only the highest members of their orders privy to their whereabouts or the experiments conducted upon them.

Be grateful for your mediocrity then, but also appreciate how your imperfect knowledge still sets you a cut above your new kin. You have an inkling of the deeper meaning of the world around you, and the likeness of a godhead or sorcerer-saint etched upon your mask affords you much greater respect among the Awakened than you enjoyed in life.  And if you put your learning to practical use, you might even work a cantrip before your long rest.

Or peel back another fraction of an inch of the veil surrounding the Waking.

The Holt-Dwellers

"We don't harvest the limbs of those trees. If you wake up their fertilizer, it won't quiet down for another month."
-Agudai the Planter, senior forester.

The creeping expanse of the crypt-cities over the eons has been almost as much of an ecological disaster as the results of its alternatives. Vast stretches of the continent's interior have been rendered almost uninhabitable to most of the living, and that grey blot on the map seems destined to grow and grow. Yet there are those who still seek to defend the bastions of nature not yet despoiled. Or, more particularly, they seek to defend their last bastions of nature from others who need them just as much as they do. The dwellers in the deepest holts aren't in it for nature's own sake, after all.

These forest and hill peoples have been forced by necessity to adapt themselves to shrinking old growth, becoming experts in forest farming as well as more than a little experience in more esoteric forms of crop husbandry and hybridization. You come from a land of furniture which bears fruit, and bioluminescent crickets the size of small dogs. Everything that can be used in an experiment toward the end of sustainability, is used.

Up to and including the dead.

In ages past, the dead were interred in shallow graves with the seeds or spores of their plants of choice strewn about their bodies, so that they might feed a fresh upshoot of life. But when the dead started waking back up before the seeds could even germinate, initial dismay at a shattered worldview soon gave way to strange new options. They say that the oldest of the Awakened from the deep forests never left, and that their voices can still be heard echoing in the trunks of ancient oak and elm.

You probably don't walk alone. Somewhere on you or in you, a plant or fungus grows with fierce determination. To say nothing of your mask, which is quite alive, and quite literally rooted to your face. And though these plants are a mild drain upon your already strained life force, they offer you a strange new perspective. You know the helpful and harmful plants of the most remote places. You know their names and uses. Your fellows might be put off by your woody visage and knothole eyes, but they heed your herb-lore.

And you remember well the horrible tales of the Knight of Blossoms.

The Nomads

"The tragic part isn't to see a child of the open steppes confined to a tomb forevermore. It is to know that they wish it."
-Olroxes, chieftain of the Tauirisos.

Someone from settled lands likely wouldn't think of the Awakened as a great business opportunity (unless they were a very particular sort of plutocrat). But that is not at all the impression one gets when you travel inward from the soft and verdant periphery. As the wasteland has expanded, so too has the borderland between it and the rest of the world. Here, on hard land packed by hooves and cartwheels, the nomads thrive, if such a word could be used in this day and age.

Long ago, each land and polity dealt with those who woke individually, and in a self-contained manner. This worked at first, but when your numbers erratically swelled once in a while and those systems of transportation broke down, beleaguered states turned toward the herdsmen at their borders for assistance.

Traveling light and requiring relatively little food for your cargo, your people move from place to place as your animals and the flow of death dictate. You are the ultimate middlemen, and the closest thing to a ferryman across the river of death which many Awakened with a belief in such things will ever see.

But the last migration ended badly for you, and now instead of riding beside the odorous metal cages, you sit in one of them. You aren't there against your will, of course. The doors are rarely locked, and the bars overhead protect you and your new kin from the near-constant attentions of carrion birds circling overhead in the grey sky. You used to hate and desire a delay to the approach to the interior checkpoint where human life grew harder and harder to sustain, and you eventually gave the Waking over to their own abilities and devices. But now you can't stand how slowly the procession moves. You know now the Need that you always felt you could see in the vacant eye-holes of your wards.

Starting off, you are the wisest of all Awakened when it comes to the outer reaches of the wastes. Your knowledge might quickly dissipate the deeper your group penetrates inland, but your knowledge of land and beast might save precious time or limbs.

Your tribe has also furnished you for the journey as almost anyone would. Of particularly macabre beauty is the bone mask given to you and others, fashioned into the likeness of one of the animals hardy enough to survive in and around the wastes. You might not ever have believed the shamans who claimed that each mask granted a measure of affinity with its respective, often savage, totem.

Hopefully there's something to it.

The Hunted

"We'll give our due to the dead, alright... a five minute head start!"
 - More than one leader of a "good old-fashioned Hunt".

Oh.

You really are unlucky, aren't you?

Well, at least you're still standing on two feet that probably belong to you. You haven't been ashed, and if you aren't currently venting smoke like a lousy baker's chimney, you've found a mask or something almost as good.

You are one of the Hunted, and no matter the goodwill you fostered in life, you are now reviled by everyone and everything that once knew you. Most likely, you once hailed from the regions that skeptics today label "theocracies" despite them having a diversity of shapes and sizes. But what unites those disparate tribes, villages, or city-states is their outright rejection of social norms and customs pertaining to the Awakened as they exist in the wider world. You are monsters to them, to be killed in as just and thorough a manner possible. Worst of all is when your culture has legends of vengeful dead predating the first Awakened. Some people have always burned their dead, while others took to it specifically to combat the possibility of Waking. In either case, they often find that they have ecological crises of their own when so much ash stored in one place starts to make people's noses bleed and the laws of physics scream.

But they might not have chased you with fire. Maybe they came with chains, seeking to detain you in some small, mundane crypt until the Need renders you docile and still. Or they came bearing hooks and spikes, intent on nailing you to one of the aptly named "Groaning Pillars" which dot the prairies. Whatever the form of their cruelty, and whether it was motivated out of sadism or a genuine belief that this is what's right for you and your soul, you escaped them. Avoiding roads and clinging to the edges of badlands, scavenging on the refuse of living lands, you found your way. Working together with one of your rare fellows haunting those lands, you came to understand your new form through practice rather than tutelage. Or perhaps you competed with your kin, fought for resources, and stole the mask off of some crippled unfortunate while filling your decaying lungs with their smoky breath.

Now that you've found yourself a caravan, the foreboding wastes before you might seem almost like a leisurely walk for one so accustomed to a ruthless world.

You'll be proven wrong before the end, but for now you do what needs doing, and your grizzled determination inspires hope (and fear) in your companions.

Crypt-Cities: Waking Up Dead.

So, you woke up.

It might have been a few hours after you died, or as much as a week. Most civilized places have regulations in place these days to prevent the processing of someone who might Wake, so hopefully you didn't have to claw your way out of a coffin six feet under.

Your eyes have probably sunken back or rolled out, but your vacant hollows are still able to see in ugly shades that are either faded or lurid. You've lost your sense of smell for baked bread, wind through the flower fields, and running water, but when it comes to rancid meat, waste, or your own unique brand of desiccation, you've got the nose of a bloodhound. Taste isn't much better. Hearing is probably the least impaired, though your range seems to have widened beyond the human norm in order to accommodate some unique and very painful decibels. Fortunately, you aren't likely to encounter many dog whistles out on the wastes. You can feel still, but unlike the diversity of sensations that the living can experience, you feel something in the spectrum of pain, or nothing at all.

You're going to want to cleave as close to that last one as possible, if you want to keep your wits about you.

And even if you can't enjoy food, drink, or rest anymore, you're going to want to mimic your living fellows for the foreseeable future anyway. Otherwise the pain will grow day by day until you're a withered little bundle of mindless pain. You've probably heard stories about the Awakened degenerating into savage, feral beasts that attack anything within arm's reach and thirst for blood and/or brains. And while that can happen, that isn't even the worst state you can find yourself in.

Don't fret, though. You're not alone. If misery loves company, you've got a whole battalion. Scores of you have probably popped up in the last month, and will continue to appear for a few more weeks, all across the land- you seem to appear in batches, though all the calculations and theories in the world haven't been able to determine if it's random, responsive, or cyclical. And countless thousands of you have already walked this way for centuries, stretching back into the ashen depths of history.

Take a moment to think about that. Whatever you were in life, no matter how wretched or ostracized you were, you now have a people with whom you share an unbreakable connection. You understand what they're going through, and they you. That's pretty damn impressive, and it's a level of feeling and empathy that most humans never really understand in life. You're all a family, as sickeningly sweet as that may sound. You're all suffering together, like it or not.

So try get out there and suffer well.

That isn't to say that you aren't still going to be ostracized and outcast, of course. Your former people, right down to your old kinfolk, have probably already either turned their backs to you as if you are just a shade of their dead-and-gone loved one, or actively tried to drive you away or destroy you. Remember: just because it's illegal in most places to try and deal lasting damage to your kind, doesn't mean the living don't still try.

At least they probably won't try to burn you.

Unless you're from the moorland east of the four lakes. If that's the case, you want to get really good at outrunning torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mobs really quick, or else you'll find yourself on an express trip toward that "bundle of mindless pain" destination mentioned earlier. Except you won't be much of a bundle. If they spread your ashes around, then every single infinitesimal mote and grain of you is going to be spending the rest of eternity experiencing every nuance of being disintegrated and exposed to the elements, with nothing to do about it except scream with every fiber of your unbeing until the wind itself gives you voice. Granted, that's only a theory. But it does sound convincing, if you've ever heard that keening on the wind, or if you've seen one of your new kin squirming around, even when they've been chopped to bits and pieces. And surely you heard the stories about the City of Ashes. No one, living or dead, has gone there since the fire, and that was a thousand years ago now.

But it's best not to dwell on such horrors. You've got enough on your mind right now.

On the bright side, your new, wretched form has made you tougher. Your nerves and sinews simply shouldn't work, and it's that broken fact of reality that allows them to work even better. You might be surprised to find how easily you can tear a door off its hinges now. That might be part of why the living don't like having you around. Your wounds might not stop aching, but the edge you have over your old, living self is that back then, you couldn't sew an arm back on and have it work almost as good as new. Now, as long as you afford the time to rest and shovel nutrients down your vile rot-chute, you can. You could even get your block knocked clean off your shoulders and walk away from it, if you're lucky. Which you obviously aren't, considering you're in this mess to begin with, but still.

Just don't try to take your mask off. You probably aren't very attached to it, but it's certainly attached to you, and it keeps most of the smoke from leaking out of your face-holes. It's also your ticket to a new identity. Contemplate its motifs and meaning. Embrace its qualities. Or don't, and take a hammer and chisel to it at your next convenience. Just really don't try to pry one of your fellows' masks off. No matter how pretty, gilded, and more ornate it might be than yours, your people tend to frown on such behavior. Yes, the rich Wake too. And yes, their masks and burial goods are every bit as fine as you would envy. No, you're not all equal in death.

What's so special about your mask in particular, you might ask? Well, that comes down to a variety of factors, not least of which is your homeland, the story of your life, and the circumstances of your death. It also probably has your name scratched into its surface, somewhere.

You do remember your name, don't you?

Crypt-Cities: And Now For Something Completely Different

It was a long, long time ago when first the dead failed to stay that way.

When the first cold, grey body rose back up on blue-black feet and groped uncomprehending at its own sunken, featureless face. When the first wisps of musty smoke could be seen and smelled on the wind. They did not come all at once, of course. Hard though it may be to believe today, only one in tens of thousands is unfortunate enough to Wake. In twos and fews, always at random, and with vast gulfs of time and space between each, they appeared. But in intervening centuries, they began to pile up.

Striking them down a second time served no purpose- nor did doing so three or four times. You could lop off every limb, break every bone, bury them under forty feet of earth, but never be rid of them or their moans of pain.

Burning them was the biggest mistake of all.

There were no plagues. No prophesies, or portents of doom. No world-ending cataclysms or all-consuming wars. No wrath from the gods- though many were accused of heresy all the same. Firebrands, kings, and snake oil salesmen all rose up with their own answers and solutions to this aberration of fate, and all of them were left wanting.

No, there was no explaining them, and no solving the problem of them until they were, ironically enough, accepted.

The funerary masks given to the first corralled group of the Awake were austere things, meant to symbolize peace and formal recognition, as well as to hide the tortured mouth and nose, and those damned eyes from the sight of the living. They were led away and sequestered of their own free will, and in absolute darkness and silence they found some semblance of peace. Hunger, thirst, and fatigue plagued them even in unlife, and those urges and feelings could never truly be sated. But in the crypts and chambers built for them by that grim, grey priesthood, they were able to have a taste of wonderful nothingness.

Soon word spread among the living and the Awake alike, of a city in the center of the world where all tortured senses could be abated. Some said it would be until the very end of days. The crypts grew cramped and crowded soon after, new chambers able to be built far too slowly to accommodate the moldering masses of petitioners who now donned masks of their own and wailed prayers before their temple.

The smoke which wept from their wounds and fell from their lips thickened and churned into a miasma that drove the living away. Not even the priesthood could withstand it, and those who did not flee succumbed to the presence of their patients. The dead were left to tend to their own, and don masks of new and varied sorts. They pried the secrets of how to build the merciful sarcophagi from the scrolls and murals of the temple, as well as a lone priest or two who was (un)lucky enough to Wake. And so they built up high and delved down deep, repurposing all of the abandoned structures in the city toward housing their brethren. The city of the dead grew and grew as the surrounding countryside was stripped down to the bare earth, and then that earth was quarried even deeper. A jagged and disorderly spire rose up toward the perpetually overcast sky and then pierced it straight through. Stargazers and the kite-riders claim to touch the heavens, but only the dead can truly be said to dwell there.

Other houses for the dead appeared over time, by design or through incident, but they all lack the size and miserable grandeur of the first crypt-city. Filling up beyond capacity, they came to serve as nothing more than stopping points and way stations for the newly Awakened on their own trudging journey.

Word of mouth has been replaced by something far stronger now. No longer must they be corralled and guided. All know all too well exactly where they belong, and how painfully far away from that destination they truly are. It is the Need that guides them, drives them, and tortures them far worse than any hunger or grief could. It is an echo of the memory of that blissful nonexistence sandwiched in between their previous lives and their current state, and they seek a return to whence they came with a coffin of their very own. Reviled by everything and everyone save for each other, the wearers of masks must band together or face an eternity of madness and pain.



((Thanks for reading! If this post reeked of a combination of Dark Souls undead asylums and those zombie cards from the Theros block of Magic: The Gathering, your nose is absolutely correct.

This as-of-yet nameless world was originally going to be the basis for a travel and survival focused Pathfinder RPG campaign, if I were ever to DM anything. Of course I did not and still will not, but after several months of letting the pieces hang around in the dust, they've risen back up to the forefront of my mind much like one of the Awakened.

This setting is, unsurprisingly, intended to be much more adventure-friendly and "gamy" than the scholastic romp through world-building that is the ITUniverse, but in the interest of widening appeal and preserving what sanity I feign to have, I will try to keep anything I write system-agnostic. (Now there's a buzzword for ya!) With your interest and support, I'll see if I can't set up a coherent campaign setting before long.

In short, expect the occasional glimpse into a desolate, danger-filled greyscape every few weeks from now on, in which the best that your heroes can hope for at the end of their journey is total numbness.

I swear I'm doing okay, dear Burrowers.))