First Post: The Cat's Cradle

So I made a blog. Sporadic posting on reddit is fun and all, but I think I needed the discipline of having something I actually need to feed and water, take care of. Who knows, this will probably end up being a convenient way for me to organize my own content, which honestly is sorely needed around this ol' cluttered brain. Regardless, here goes.

-------------------------------------------------------------

I want to tell you all about the Moon.

Back in the old days, before Harvard sold their campus to the rail barrons and emigrated to the pitted and silent surface of that cold celestial body, humanity fired great guns and shot bullets filled with science equipment and researchers into its face. Most of the intrepid voyagers died on the way, and as everyone knows, when you die in space your soul is tethered where it happens.

The Moon is filled with ghosts and sad spirits.

This is the first post about a custom setting I'm building, a very weird version of the 1890s, in which some aliens visited Earth and severely fucked up all of reality. The Moon provided an escape for the harried Earthlings, and so the brilliant minds of what was once Harvard University began trying to find a way up into its silent expanse of silicon forests and dried, ashen seas. After the first round of man-cannons and primitive rocket ships and fucked-up teleportation spells, they stumbled on a mix of alien alloy and electricity, manmade and grown in equal measure. Some say they performed a dread ritual of some sort, and indeed the result seems to have its own strange intelligence, as if it were alive; miles-long hollow tubes, like alveoli or muscle fiber, stretching up and pinioning the Moon in place, providing air and shelter from the emptiness of orbit.

The Cat's Cradle

is what this shifting mass of living metal is called. It looks like a column of twisted wires up close, and a shining filament from far away. At its base, where it burrows and clings into the bones of the earth, spreads a dark stain of railways and train berths and stations, spilling oil and fire into the sky. This is where the campus of Harvard University was, before the Formless Ones reassembled it exactly on the banks of the Mare Tranquillitatis. Cambridge now supplies the bodies needed to keep such a beast satiated and running. The railyards are operated by infinitesimal railway companies, blooming and dying like sped-up footage of slime-molds, like animals fighting and killing. Everyone gets mutated and goes insane here. After the brainiacs killed themselves trying to shoot the Moon, they decided to try the most modern and reliable form of transportation instead; the locomotive.

They built engines of shards and discarded Visitor tech, engines that ran on probability and chewed through miles like the seven-league boots of myth instead of puny mortal engines of coal and fire. The engine cars have tendrils of metal that act like feelers and will cut you to the bone before you notice they're even there. Don't stand too close to them. Thanks to these miraculous devices, you can get to the Moon in a matter of hours.

This is what a train looks like after its boiler explodes, or if its been thrashed by weird physics-defying aliens

(The engines don't work correctly in atmosphere, for some reason. Some combination of the alloy of the Cradle and the weird forces of orbit make them able to disregard traditional space.)

The tunnels (if that is the right word; the only thing they tunnel through is upward, through emptiness) meet the ground, and in the openings the train tracks lead in great circles and switches and engineered junctions. Gravity is strange in the tubes. It circles and twists without you knowing until you’re riding perpendicular to the Earth you’ve been confined to by the demon Inertia. The tracks are maintained by spacesuited-men riding handcarts.

Here are some of the train companies you might interact with, and the kinds of trains they are known for building:

1. The Wail Railway Company. Formerly owned by railway magnate Orion Wail. He was converted into sentient vibrations and has since retired to a castle made of noise suspended above the New York Island. His board of directors have continued in his stead, provided a reliable and fairly cheap means of transportation. Wail engines scream through the normally-silent halls of the Cradle, announcing their presence on both the physical and metaphysical planes to ward off danger and call to other conductors. Passengers are offered earplugs on departure. 300 shards per ticket, and 1d4 day to get to the Moon.

2. The Steinbeck & Lowe Corporation. Known for the use of golems instead of mechanical parts. Made of clay comprised mainly of lunar ash. Like big urns with wheels, pulling themselves along the tracks with arachnoid arms. They don't market as a travelling service (their primary export are their exquisitely lifelike golems, which can only be made on the Moon under very specific conditions) but will provide you with transport if sufficiently bribed. 100 shards, 2d4 days to get there, but no one wants to rob a golem-train. They're spooky when they fight back.

3. Ohm & Milosh Iron. The Messrs. Ohm and Milosh wish to provide the most comfortable and expedient journey to the most discerning of customers. For enough money you can ride to the Moon in complete style and comfort. The Reduvius engine makes use of a paired probability-drive and analytical device imprinted with the post-mortem consciousness of an Arilus cristatus gigantis, creating a systemic whole. The engines are bred from Messr. Ohm's personal stock of giant wheelbugs, threaded and trained before death to traverse the Cradle. These trains are subservient to each of the Milosh fragments that operates them, and are vaguely predatory. The wine is to die for. 2,500 shards for a 1d8 hour trip.

4. The Scrapyard Boys. Not a real company, more like a gang, but there's enough of them that it doesn't matter. Ran by a dead woman named Cutter. They steal the gutted hulks of old trains and cobble together shit from terrestrial technology. Everything is dirty and rusted and barely-held together, but it runs. All the trains have scavenged engines, so the journey is about twice as long as any other group, but they're the cheapest out there. Just don't be surprised if you get pressganged into being a pirate on the way. 20-50 shards (they haggle), and it takes 2d20 days to get there.

5. The Deathly Choir. A company of the clergy, split from the New Catholic Church in the days since the First Visitation. They monetized worship across the land, turning faith into dollars to God Mammon. They saw the potential shards to be made in helping sinners prevent eternal damnation: as I said before, if you die in space you stay there. They drive tomb-trains full of dying sinners, both real and those who worried they wouldn't make the cut to get to Heaven. They only take you if you go to Confession and can provide proof that you're dying. They don't technically charge anything, they just seriously recommend donating for the railtithe. The Deacon stationed in Cambridge is a sallow man called Johns who seems to be splitting into several possible Deacons. The journey is fairly long (2d8 days (you're supposed to die on the way, after all)), and the appointments are as cramped and bare as coffins, which they are.

In addition to passenger trains, the halls of the Cat's Cradle are crawling with merchant trains carrying compressed oxygen, food, water, plants, books, and cigarillos to the Moon while others haul the spent containers and magical exports and research papers and college kids on sabbatical back to Earth. You can breathe and walk in the Cradle, but that’s inadvisable. Getting lost is incredibly easy; it takes teams of dedicated cartographers to map the ever-changing routes of the Cradle. One tiny slice in the wall and the cold rushes in and the air rushes out, boiling with radiation and suffocating you. Strange ecologies form in the tunnels, fed by the runoff of the madness rain on the Moon like silver blood, flowing along the ties of the tracks. Lattices of souls, living trains, tardigrades grown swollen from food and insanity. You can hear the mercury-rain pattering against the walls as it falls in aurora-sheets off the surface of the satellite. And many take to piracy, both en route and actually on the Moon, to subsist. They drive stolen and modified trains daubed in blood-red and jaundice-yellow paint in the forgotten or fractal spaces of the Cradle. They kill and pillage, and the rail companies regularly send militias and armored engines into the recesses. Your players might negotiate their way to the Moon in exchange for killing some pirates and rendering a portion of the Cradle safe for travel once more.

Many companies in Cambridge sell lunar supplies, like spacesuits and arc lamps and bottled oxygen. It is a dead adventurer who doesn't come prepared to the Moon. There are also oxygen banks, which will exchange your shards for minutes of oxygen. Shards and dollars are useless on the Moon; minutes of air is your currency.

Legion Trains

Sometimes, things go wrong. Air leaks from the tube, and the train is suspended in vacuum. The seals fail, and everyone on board dies. Usually, the train stops. Or, the engine churns its way through the seething metaphysical mass of souls deposited in from of it with no problem (which is one of the only ways to actually be put to rest in space-to have your soul entirely consumed). But sometimes, the engine can’t chew all the souls at once. They bunch together, blending, turning, like hair in a drain, and the train can’t fight its way through it. Something changes in the gears and flywheels. The train suddenly is. It thinks. It has a head full of fragmented memories and personalities, and it knows that it is alive. And it wants to stay that way.

These rogue locomotives are called legion-trains.

Usually the rail company hunts them down (involving a great chase and lots of harpoons. It’s a lot like hunting a whale.) and melts them into slag, but very occasionally they’ll escape and flee into the deepest recesses of the Cradle. They talk amongst themselves in a language of wheel grinds and cinders. They hunt, consuming more minds to add to their knowledge. They try to reach the Moon’s surface, where they can be free. Be wary of lines of swiftly-moving dust clouds while on the cold, ashen ground.

Legion-Train

Chaotic neutral

HD: 12d12

AC: 18. It’s a fucking train.

Movement: 60’, but only on tracks. 10’ otherwise.

Morale: 6

After consuming 5 more people, its Intelligence score improves by 1. It starts at 10.

Uncanny knowledge. It can take the Dash and Disengage actions to disappear into the tunnels of the Cradle if the fight is going poorly, and attempts to track it afterward have disadvantage.

Attacks:

It’ll try to run you over. Dex save 17 to avoid if both of you are on the track, Dex save 12 if you both are off-rail. 10d10 damage as you’re sucked under the wheels and churned to death.

Probability-eating tendrils get +4 to hit and deal 3d6 slashing damage. Multiply that number by ten. They also take away that much XP from your character.

Remember: legion-trains want to live more than anything else. If you can find a way to communicate with it, it might negotiate with you to secure its personal freedom. If that fails, it will fight until it looks like it’s going to lose, then it will escape.

The Umbilical Theory

No one is quite sure what the Moon is. Some think it is a captured planetoid that was drawn in by Earth’s gravity, some think it is the egg of a strange god and that it must be nurtured to hatching, some think that it is a failed version of Earth that shriveled up in death. But some believe that it was once a part of the Earth itself, excised like a malignant tumor. The dead surface of the Moon belies the life under the crust: vast networks of fungus and bacteria, burrowing insects comprised of silicon and glass, metaphysical beings grafted to ancient ruins. The connecting of the Earth to the Moon has brought about a renaissance for the flora and fauna of the Moon. Things are stirring that have never seen the etiolated light of the sun before. A division of the Lunar College of Harvard have devoted their time to studying this effect via the Cat’s Cradle, the ripples of change that are sweeping the dark rock. A few extremists think the Cradle should be destroyed, but business is far too important to lose to a few nutjobs.

Anyway, I'll be posting more about this setting as I write it up. Next up will be the Moon proper, some stats for lunar monsters, maybe a collection of equipment, writeups for the Harvard Lunarium and the Regents and the Formless Ones. Also have some plans for a hexcrawl with swamps, snakes, and gold, and maybe a fetal dungeon made of flesh. Weird winds are blowing.