Week 6: Islands and changes

The Islands

No rules changes this week, just going back to writing new islands after last week's revisits.

Sluice Island

Elevation

720 m

Area

5.7 km2

• 3: Path: Crescent beach of black sand running the full length of the island; a natural harbour fringed by hexagonal volcanic pillars.
• 5: Focus: A single jagged spear of rock rises in the middle of the vast bay. What others lie hidden under the surface?
• 6: Impression: A faint hum rising and falling with the wind, but ever-present.
• 8: Focus: A ship in a broken bottle, washed up on the beach. A container ship.
• 4: Path: Streams run down from the mountain, through the woods, twinkling in the sunlight; glossy water over black stones.
• Event: Birds burst from the trees to the air. Our seismometer picks up a rumble, and then we feel it in our feet. We barely have time to get back to the ship before the top of the mountain explodes.

Reasons to return: Review the damage. Plant proper seismometers.

Rembrandt Islands

Elevation

390 m

Area

4.8 km2

• 3: Focus: A brightly-coloured plastic toy boat caught up in a tide pool. On closer inspection, it's inhabited by a hapless hermit crab.
• 4: Focus: Flickering light atop the tallest mountain. Morse code—but it's gibberish.
• Event: The morse code cycles into languages we know, shorter and shorter messages and quickly into our own. Warning! Nuclear contamination! Retreat to safe distance immediately! We test with our radiometers and… it's right.

Reasons to return: Determine the cause of the contamination. Make contact—if there's anyone left. Explore the outer islands.

Cradle Island

Elevation

94 m

Area

1.2 km2

• 4: Impression: Exhaustion drips down the rocks, watering albino mosses and trees.
• 2: Path: Long roots droop from the higher ledges—surprisingly sturdy and smooth, like a living climbing net.
• 1: Focus: A tortoiseshell on the rocks, small and empty, shining like a polished gemstone. It's on its back.
• 5: Path: A winding, muddy cave running through the island from one side to the other, densely-carpeted with shaggy green moss.
• 11: Focus: An interesting pillar of loose rocks—certainly not a natural formation, but as we go in for a closer look we disturb it and the upper stack collapses over the cliff.
• 6: Impression: As high up as we are, we can see that all the ledges below are covered with one big, undulating carving—of what, we can't tell yet.
• 3: Event: A striding bird crosses the path some way ahead, sharp and beautiful. It pays us no mind. Probably.
• 8: Event: Tortoise shells clatter down the cliffs from above, three of them, shattering on the ground, jewel-like splinters flying outwards.
• 7: Focus: A human skeleton nestled in a cave entrance by wet ashes, cradling a tortoise' empty shell. The wildlife's left them dressed only in rags.
• Event: Thump… thump… then A massive bird's head, with 7 eyes, looms over the edge of the rocky bowl at the top of the island, just barely missing spotting us as we cluster in fear in a cave mouth. We quietly make our way back to the shore and our escape.

Reasons to return: Search for any more marooned remains. Find a live tortoise specimen. Map the caves, see how far they really go.

Service Island

Elevation

130 m

Area

0.71 km2

• 4: Impression: Fragility. Tautness. Suspended motion that could resume at any point.
• 7: Impression: The sound of rope stretching, fraying, being pulled over a sharp edge that's slowly cutting through.
• 3: Focus: Moss-swallowed bothy, wind whistling through the cracks and windows; the throat of the island.
• 5: Path: A little furrow winding up to the peak of the “wave”, formed more by routine than planning.
• 6: Focus: In the bothy, a sodden firepit. Gleaming eyes in the dark—rats. Peaty aroma. Fuzzy, mossy walls. Embrace of sphagnum.
• 9: Path: A cavern gullet in the corner of the bothy. Rot breath rises, condensing into a smear on the cold air.
• Event: A quake in the island and an unsteady feeling in our feet, like we could slip into the earth like it was churning water. We decide to evaluate the situation from afar.

Reasons to return: Scour the island for (abandoned?) livestock. Investigate the cavern and look for the bothy's former inhabitants. Explore the far side of the “wave”.

Termagant Island

Elevation

16 m

Area

0.27 km2

• 4: Path: Buoys draped in red and green flank a path in to the little jetty.
• 6: Focus: A depressed little shack near the shore, tarred wood and sagging lead.
• 2: Path: Rails for a little cart, the gaps now running with some kind of yellow-ish liquid. They lead up to the lighthouse.
• 5: Focus: The slats of the lighthouse door hang loose and are festooned with leafy tendrils. Is the wood growing?
• Event: Immediately upon pushing on the door, the tower grumbles, rumbles, and begins to sink and collapse, floor by floor, hurling up a cloud of dust and sparks that can be seen for miles around.

Reasons to return: Sift the rubble. Explore the shack. Recover the buoys (if there's no good reason for them being here) and put them to use elsewhere.

The Nest

Elevation

33 m

Area

0.0041 km2

• 2: Path: Three towers in an arc—fingers emerging above the waterline? Bars of a cage? Rock pillars are visible continuing the path under the surface.
• 5: Impression: Debris. Flotsam? Jetsam? Either way, ropes and flinders decorate the towers.
• 1: Focus: Amid the wreckage, a ratty bomber jacket hanging from an improvised clothesline. Nobody to collect it.
• 4: Focus: A nautical mine hangs by chain from one of the rock-“beaks”, embarrassed to be out of the water, ready to blow.
• 6: Path: Jagged handholds crusty with blood and crushed iridescent shells lead up the biggest tower.
• 3: Event: The water bubbles below, and up lunges a fourth tower—with a hole in the top that we see before it rises above even the tallest of the original three.
• 9: Impression: Echoing and whistling… the towers are riven with tiny holes, it seems, and hollow inside. Silos, breathing tubes, not pillars. We thing we hear screams.
• 8: Event: In our attempts to insert a microphone into the core we break a surprisingly-brittle network of the little tunnels.
• 12: Focus: A crab hiding in the fragments where we broke through. Fiddler, green shell, antennae? It pinches me when I go in for a closer look.
• Event: More of the towers rise from the waves, cutting off our boat step by step—our only option is to jump into the waves and swim for it, sacrificing all our equipment.

Reasons to return: Recover our equipment. See how deep the towers go. Sound out the sea floor. Investigate for survivors?

Fort Pompeii

Elevation

74 m

Area

2.4 km2

• 4: Impression: Everything half-finished, silent construction gear holding its breath, awaiting transfiguration.
• 6: Impression: Jagged metal and concrete; exposed rebar; shimmering oil spills; all in all, a death-trap.
• 5: Focus: A ramshackle temporary office draped in a flag we don't know. Fluorescent lights blink inside.
• 3: Path: Tracery of steel marking where a staircase should go, slowly overtaken by slimy vines.
• 11: Path: An open boulevard stairway strewn with trash and broken bricks—delusions of grandeur, dim feelings of hate.
• 9: Focus: Spent shell casings. Pockmarked walls. One desperate little corner…
• Event: A shrill whistle beckons ghosts dragging corpses from the empty windows and doors. The sun turns cold and we run.

Reasons to return: Identify the flag. Map the place. Recover the bodies of the victims of any atrocities. Discern the truth. Perform an exorcism?

Thoughts and Changes

At this point I think all that's left is maybe trying a card oracle (one result per rank-suit combo). The ones I wrote for post-apocalyptic monuments won't really work well for potentially-uninhabited islands, though. The other issue's deciding how often to draw—maybe once per island, before (or after) drawing it? Used like that, the oracle entries could be short seeds. Alternatively, they could be the rough details of the island (name, area, elevation, and a short general description or a list of seed ideas) and play could be drawing the island and actually exploring/detailing it.

For now I'm gonna try the former approach: next week I'll use an oracle of short prompts.