There’s here. That’s familiar. Towns and forests; roads and rivers. Death waits for the careless, but a simple sort of death. Knives. Teeth.

Then there’s the Elsewise. As changeable as the winds. Labyrinthine halls of antediluvian stone. A sea with stars below and eddying currents up above. Dream, Delusion, Delirium, Doom. A cluster of mirror worlds from whose grasp escape may prove impossible.

But also, there is the place where the two come together. Always a space betwixt. Beads of light and gleaming metal. Threads of copper running like golden veins through the fabric of reality. A nearly invisible ring of crystal where two slabs of stone fit too neatly together. Miss it and you might be hours along before you notice the difference. A burnt taste to the air. An unfamiliar color. A second sun dappling through the trees. By then it’s too late.

Be they reliquer, bountyman, outlaw or tramp--those that find themselves often at the corners of civilization learn to keep sharp for signs of Transience. To do otherwise would be suicidal.

THE KING’S ROADS

The mortal races know nothing of the nature of Transience, except the danger that it foretells. The Dwarves prize it highly, for it is always a lode of rare and useful resources, but consider it a natural formation with no more significance to its location than a coal mine. An Elf, if you asked it (and if it was of a particularly conciliatory mood [and also of a particularly scholarful nature]), would not call it Transience but instead “The Mechanicum”.

These little gateways of delicate machinery are extrusions of an “in-between” space built by the creators of the Elves. It was used for many things, most commonly as a shortcut...or an escape route. Each portal into the Elsewise is a split between worlds that was never closed. Out of negligence, perhaps? Who knows. Even the Elves do not recall.

MYTHRIL TUMBLEWEEDS

But there is more to the Mechanicum than these cracks that signpost the edges of our world. A whole macrocosm of twisted wires and cracked panels hides in the shadows of every atom, waiting to be called into being. Occasionally, a big chunk of amalgamated tech falls out of unbeing and into our perception. These shards of Transience float across our atmosphere unbidden by gravity, wind or the whims of man. Most float so high that they can barely be made out through the clouds, but occasionally they’ll skim the surface of the Earth, or else trail hoses and wiring strong enough to climb. The average traveler would give any such thing a wide berth. The clever might realize that they could harvest enough Transient Matter from one of these floating islands to live comfortably for an entire year. It takes the wisest of all to both recognize the fortune promised by such a place and to avoid it anyway.

A daring explorer may, pack overfilled with plundered tech, unwittingly tumble down a shaft that they’d easily cleared before. When it spat them out, they might expect to be a short walk away from where they’d stowed aboard the shard, watching it float off above them. Not so. An endless panorama of rusted steel and misfiring circuitry would greet them. A lifeless land lit intermittently by winking artificial suns. The lucky starve to death, teeth stained black by oily water. The less fortunate are still alive when the Transience starts to take them. Or else they’re found by a Techwight.

D10 TRANSIENT SHARDS, AND HOW THEY CONNECT TO THE MECHANICUM

A cluster of industrial pipes belching sickly smog and trailing moldy black tubes. Empties out into the Autonomic Manufacturing Bloc. Little stowaways will have to dance between the mindless operation of a thousand assembly engines. Like they were digested by a steel god.
Walls of screens bright enough to banish the night. The writing is illegible but the faces are smiling wider than should be possible. A heating duct runs to the Pharmaceutical Vats. Even the fumes are treacherous.
A distribution arm occasionally dropping precious drums of petroleum. There’s a small chamber that zaps you down into the Oil Farm. Don’t start a fire.
A floating furnace cutting springtime through the ice of winter wherever it passes. A coal chute leads up into The Sprawl. You could walk forever and never find a wall.
A cluster of thatchwork huts and jungle sat atop a mass of pyrite cubes. Walk through the master’s threshold and your suddenly in the Antispire, which towers down, down, down into darkness.
A stage, with velvet curtains and lights. Intricate set decoration hang from wires. Stadium seats stretch out over the lip of the mechanical island and peer down to the ground hundreds of feet below. The stage lift lowers down into a vast labyrinth of bookshelves (and then the engine dies).
A massive screen with a complex game playing out. Can be controlled by a series of panels nearby. Winners are instantly transported to the pleasure resort of Arcadia. Ten centuries of radial decay have made it somewhat less inviting.
A condensation farm, seeding clouds and harvesting ice. every surface coated in a thin sheet of rhyme. Hard to tell what’s really a floor. Fall through a thin sheet and you’ll be deep in the guts of the Coolant System. Hope you brought warm clothes.
What looks like a thousand ratty veils floating in the twilight. There’s structure under the fabric though. Hoses full of piping water, ducts belching lye. Dig deep enough and you might empty out into a house of courtesans deep within the ruined city of Hub.
A smooth pillar of gold. Skin contact yanks you across the galaxy to an electron twined column of black glass. The Overseer’s Estate. Grand, palatial and brimming with the feral offspring of the once docile wildlife kept here. Each and all incorporated into the mindless assembly.

MORE MACHINE THAN MAN

The Mechanicum is in disrepair. Automated systems can only do so much without external supervision, especially with all these holes opening up into dreamlands, and flaming seas, and all the fucked up parallel realities that lie beyond the veil of the mundane. The loss recovery protocols just can’t keep up. More material is needed, and since machinery is hard to come by, biotech will have to do. After 24 hours in this industrial wasteland, castaways will have to start fighting off an invasion of their anatomy. Once weakened or dead, Transience will bloom across their body integrating it into the system of the Mechanicum. Welcome to the Machine.

D10 HORRID TECHWIGHTS

A series of green-lit monitors peeking out from liquid flesh. Floats as if held up by marionettes strings. Grabs you and pulls you in. Makes you a part of itself.
A large glass case, set into a brass cart. The case is filled with amber smoke , but a shadowy figure can barely be made out within. As the cart approaches, thinking starts to hurt. God help you if it talks to you.
Nothing but arms. A horrible grasping mass. It needs more arms. Never enough arms.
A man; nicely dressed. In all ways normal except that his jaw is broken wide, wide open with a computer peeking out. He speaks through the screen. You have to talk back by typing on a spit-slick keyboard.
A skull incase in a cybernetic helmet and strung in a spider’s web of cables. Lower jaw removed and fused to a massive plasmal cannon. The pain stops for a while when it shoots something.
A swarm of Seelie servitors hooked up to a malfunctioning hivemind. Will serve you to death. Cake stuffed down your throat till your stomach bursts. Drowned in honeywine. Bound down into a divan until you waste away of bedsores. They tell you it is no great effort. They LOVE to serve.
A carpet of cubed fungi, they release glowing spores if disturbed. Inhaled, they accelerate the transient process. Soon you’ll be coughing up coolant and digging copper wire out of your hair follicles.
Something from another world, completely alien to your senses. Once, it was all eyes but now the eyes are gone—replaced with cold, unblinking light. What it sees, other know. They are coming.
The voice of God blasted through a scream of static so loud it shake your bones. You must flee. Nothing could be worse than this.
The arm was surely a man’s, but the shoulders have a dwarven build and…is that a crab claw?! Once you’re dead, it switches out its worst bits with the your best bits.

Still, despite all the dangers, there’s riches to be found among the Transience that can be salvaged nowhere else. Delicate lenses, intricately filigreed tablets that the Dwarves call “circuitry”, gossamer thin threads of copper, brass and gold. All will fetch a fine price from any tinkerer. If you're lucky, you might even harvest some “functional” Oldtech. There’s no guarantee it’ll work for long, but for now you own something that your enemies couldn’t possibly prepare for.

D10 ESOTERIC BAUBLES (IF REUSABLE ROLL D6 ON USE, BREAKS ON A 1)

A shield sized panel of plasteel. Light as a feather, hard as dragon scales.
An arm’s length of corrugated iron tubing. Sparks burst irregularly from one end. Spits Stormfire.
A foggy crystal ball with a hard plastic switch. Slows time in a 10 ft cube around itself. Holder unaffected.
A bottle of antigravity pills. Only a few left.
A scroll with a window into somewhere else. Who’s at the other end? Hard to tell through the fuzzy signal.
A single dose syringe full of hazy pink liquid. Charm pheromones. Fast acting & strong, but short duration. The hangover’s a killer, too.
A long glass lozenge filled with effervescent acid. Burns through anything once broken.
A clay disk with clockwork inside. When wound up, it creates a 20 ft. invisible field. Memories of what happens within the field only last until the clockwork winds down.
A projector that shellacs the user in a thin film of hard light. Physical damage halved for an hour.
A carbon mesh glove with a button on the Thumbpad. When pressed, creates a microscopic singularity wherever the thumb was pointed. everything within five feet pulps together.

You don’t know, couldn’t possibly know, how these things work, but they don’t seem to play well together. If you have more than one piece of tech, your use rolls fail on a 2 and 1s break all held tech.

This, like almost everything I write, is a lot of shit put together. It’s a way to tie together your Underdark and your Astral Sea and your Elemental Planes and your Hells and make them all feel thematically linked because you get to them by fucking around with Transience. It’s a secret that players can learn about your “precursors”. It’s a good way to put some techy body horror into a fantasy game. It’s also how I put all the bits I like best about Numenera into games that aren’t Numenera.

Next week is probably more Glimmer’s Rim NPCs but after that I’ll do a write up on one of the areas of the island.

ART:

Cold Open by Robert Allen Burns

Industrial Fallout by Robert Allen Burns

Transient Shard Sketches by Robert Allen Burns

Expressway by Robert Allen Burns

Techwight Sketches by Robert Allen Burns

The Better Part of Valor by Robert Allen Burns

WRITTEN TO THE TUNE OF:

Car Seat Headrest—Twin Fantasy

IDLES—Ultra Mono

Mother Falcon—You Knew

THE SPACE BETWIXT