B2-1 The Preservation

B2-1 The Preservation

A location hex from A Field Guide to Newtopia

The Preservation is one of 37 hexes described in A Field Guide to Newtopia, a forthcoming RPG source book. These views into the hex are not meant to be authoritative or exhaustive, or even final, so don’t fault me later for being inconsistent. 

 Much love, 

 Connor Sites-Bowen

  www.connorsb.com

1 Voidstone Islands

[Figure 1: voidstone island with buoyancy diagram]

In the 700th year of the dynasty, the voidstorm came to the Kingdom of Core-Khet. Ancient prophecy was left to fester. The void queens woke and called down a rain of annihilation spheres. No one survived.

Ages have passed, and the vacuum-voids left in the bedrock of the blasted kingdom have pulled the entire place upwards, forming a mesa of buoyant stone and shoals of  floating island boulders.

Weather and wildlife erode the stone, and as voids begin to fill with water or gas, the boulders sink, and eventually crash into the blue sandy brine of the valley floors.

2 Boulderfall

[Figure 2: Boulderfall]

Sky islands which hit the brine floors of the Preservation are quickly overwhelmed by mythane-adapted life. Any wildlife which cannot fly away eventually succumbs to the mythgas in the air, or steps into the brine below. Within days, a blue-white biofilm forms over the trees and ferns that remain. The plants go into deep sonescence, slipping from the rock and into the brine, held forever as they were when they crashed. Brine-tolerant plants soon take hold, growing tall and blue, transpiring the brine up and out, offgassing mythane and creating the story-filled fogs that characterize the Preservation. Fallen boulders take just a decade or two to be dissolved into a brine pool - the voidstone is broken down by biofilm into blue sand.

3 Mythane Brine Lake

[Figure 3: Mythane Brine Lake]

The blue sand floor of this mesa wash ripples as bubbles of mythane seep from below. This sump is flooded with mythane brine - toxic to everything but the maskprawn worms which live in its sand-and-water-and-gas depths. The immediate lake-shore is dense with blue mythane plants, which transpire mythane up from the lake and out, in an effort to extend their area of best growth. Weird birds peer from the treetops. Tallwalkers graze on islands floating above the brine. You can see long strands of green slime trail up from some areas of the lake - the threads are concentrated in patches. One patch of threads has caught a passing boulder, and you can see things moving up the strands and onto the boulder.

4 Tallwalkers

[Figure 4: Tallwalker]

Striding through brine pools are the mighty tallwalkers, pescatarian browsers of the brine swamps. Their hooves and legs are mythane-tolerant, while their tentacled mouths stay high above the brine, sampling the lighter oxygen air. They forage passing sky islands as readily as they munch on the blue flora at the edges of most brine pools.

5 Maskworms & Slime Aerials

[Figure 5: Maskworms]

These ten-legged soft crustaceans are often called worms, and their distinct face plates are a common trade currency in the area, with certain patterns and designs seen as more valuable or beautiful than others. They are omnivorous methane breathers, who use long tendrils of buoyant blue ooze to catch passing sky islands, tallwalkers, travelers, or anything else edible that passes through the brine swamps.

6 Mythane Brine Mole

[Figure 6: Brine Mole]

There must be a colony nearby. Moving disruptively through the thick sands of the brine lake, you see a bow of moving blue sands which can only be the thick, fast body of a Brine Mole. These enormous blue-white monsters are all teeth and thick, naked skin. Where their skin touches true air, it begins to turn white and chalky, calcifying as the flesh-to-stone spell. Mythane gasses directly reverse this, and so the Brine Moles operate exclusively in these swamps. Beware - they are unforgiving apex predators, always looking to bring meat to the queen.

What’s Preserved?

Looking into the brine, you can see perfectly preserved cranes, frogs, and people mixed in with the blue sands - an eternal tomb, at least until the blue plants at the brine’s edge begin breaking down the bodies for nutrients. There are remnant items, too, from travelers, old kingdoms, and elsewhere.

• 1 Baskets of fruits and grains, on their way to market.
• 2 The wooden and grass armor and weaponry of a terrible, small battle
• 3 Humanoids which you’ve never seen before
• 4 Hundreds of birds, as if still in flight
• 5 Decorative tiles from an old mosaic
• 6 Whole trees, mixed in with the blue sand.

The Preservation is one of 37 hexes described in A Field Guide to Newtopia, a forthcoming RPG source book. 

 Connor Sites-Bowen

  www.connorsb.com

A  Pocket Places Jam 2021 submission. November 2021