Week 1: Islands and changes

The Islands

Note: in all the images, the top view is the Northern view and the bottom is the Eastern view. After the first couple days I added letters and arrows to show perpendicular compass directions to make this more obvious (and so I wouldn't have to waste text explaining the viewpoints on twitter and mastodon).

Plough Island

• 2: Impression: The Southwest wall of rock casts a deathly shadow over the Eastern bulk of the island, carving a wasteland where no vegetation can grow.
• 3: Focus: Ruins of a camp. Old white denim canvas tents in the shelter of the wall. Dry, rotted guns. An open crate of bullets, some missing. No bodies.
• 4: Path: A walk in a lazy circular arc round the shore, banded on one side by cold spray and on the other by leafless, salt-encrusted scrub.
• 6: Impression: There's no wind here. Not to say there's silence, but all the noise is generated right here, and nothing finds or leaves this place under the wind's power.
• 10: Focus: Something's caught limply hanging high on the rock: a ragged red flag, once the deep colour of blood and war and honour, now just a pallid scrap.

Reasons to leave: through a hole in the low stratus cloud layer, we spy an eye—gargantuan—directly over the island. Unblinking.

Reasons to return: to climb the wall and recover the flag (if it is a flag); check the camp for logbooks; and scour the island for marks, excavations, or other leftovers from whoever landed here.

Seamstress Island

• 1: Focus: In the gully, a rowboat dragged onto shore, stocked with tinned food with indecipherable labels. Meat and fruit, maybe, or coffee grounds—all with dates in an unknown calendar.
• 3: Path: Rough handholds and swaying ropes lead round the Northwest pinnacle with the blocky concrete tower. Stones along the way are inscribed with suns and eyes.
• 4: Path: Up the side of the tower lead stairs slick with red moss that's eating through the concrete.
• 5: Impression: An atmosphere of tenderness, wounded-ness, unresolved grief. A cloying feeling of self-pity.
• 6: Impression: Except for the squat tower, everything else here is intricate and sharp, leaf and stone alike.
• 10: Focus: Glass outside one of the tower's windows—it was shattered from inside. A blue, leather-bound book lies some way off, pages wrinkled and aged by sun, wind, and rain.

Reasons to leave: The blue book writhes as we approach and suddenly the whole tower shakes and practically bursts at the seams with books, a tide of flapping pages covered with long-forgotten words desperate to be read—hungry for human touch. We beat a retreat, cutting our hands on the rocks in our haste.

Reasons to return: To ease their pain. To translate them. To know what the people here once knew. Maybe it'll be useful.

Anastrophe Island

• 1: Focus: A broken spear in the rainforest, covered in moss. An ant grips the tip of the broken haft, fungus bursting from its brain.
• 2: Path: Barely-marked trails through jungle mud and over woven root bridges.
• 3: Focus: A clearing: char, ash, and bone swaps—a human ocular orbit.
• 4: Impression: I'm being watched, every step I take.
• 5: Focus: A towering, reddish, multi-spired ant metropolis.
• 6: Path: A surprisingly strenuous climb up the island's gentle slopes, winding round the rootworks of the trees.
• 8: Focus: Mushrooms drying over a recently-extinguished firepit. They smell pungent, but on closer inspection it's not the mushrooms, it's the firewood that's giving off the medicinal scent.
• 9: Path: Trails of black and red smoke rise from the canopy, drawing the eye to distant glowing embers between the trees.
• 10: Impression: Everywhere I look: fungus. Gloomy, funereal umbrellas and veils.

Reasons to leave: One very good reason: I finally come face to face with a man. A lanky man, densely-tattooed, face stony but eyes alight with fear, armed with a spear. Should I have even come this far?

Reasons to stay: To take biological samples. To set up a warning to ward off intruders with more violent intentions.

Preacher Island

• 1: Impression: Malaise. Dilapidation. A concrete airstrip build on sand, cracked and crumpled and useless.
• 3: Focus: A gyrocopter sits rusting in the sea breeze; the rotors groan and wail when we turn them by hand. Hastily-painted, smeary white letters spell out "God Given" along the craft's black belly.
• 6: Path: Half-buried wooden slats form a path around a set of three dozen broken crosses in the sand just off the tower's foundations. A folding camp chair at the end of the walkway waits for some lonely sentinel to return.
• 9: Path: Around the control tower, rusty stubs and discoloured concrete mark where stairs would have run. A mangled pile of collapsed scrap metal wrapping the tower's base attests to how long this place has been abandoned.

Reasons to leave: There's a storm coming—a wrathful one. We barely have time to leave ourselves.

Reasons to stay: To scale the tower and see the view. To try and determine whether anyone left this place alive.

Verbal Island

• 1: Focus: A glint at the top of the middle spire, something flickering red, then green in the sun.
• 3: Impression: The birdshit. It's everywhere.
• 4: Path: Volcanic pillars provide slippery, but even natural steps up the lower parts of the rock spires.
• 5: Focus: An avian boneyard nestled in the crags of the shortest spire. We count at least 3 species: a squat bird with a hefty beak; a cruciform bird with elongated wings, neck, and tail; and a single giant perfect specimen of a skeleton with seven eye orbits—and teeth lining its beak.
• 8: Path: Networks of twisting, hexagonal volcanic-black pillars arch around and wrap the island.

Reasons to leave: The birds come for us. They descend, a Stymphalian storm of wingbeats and lightning-fast claws. We retreat in a haze of screams and tumbles.

Reasons to stay: To find what was atop the spire. To determine whether the giant, abnormal species is still extant.

Redemption Island

• 2: Focus: A radio mast at the top of the island—little red lights blink up its spine, warding away malevolent spirits.
• 3: Impression: Disappointment hangs limp from the scrub growth like cobwebs.
• 4: Path: A crooked jetty off the low sands to the West, all dry ivory wood, weirdly tough as stone, like a giant bone broken and mended wrong.
• 5: Impression: I find myself always, always, always looking up. Up the island, up at the looming rock, up at the sky. Anticipation? I don't know.
• 6: Impression: A faint air pressure, a rumbling on the skin. It feels like raindrops drumming on a distant roof sounds

Reasons to leave: Our radio tells us, in no uncertain terms, to leave or die. We're sure there's nobody here, but then they speak to the whole landing party by name. No thank you.

Reasons to stay: To make a proper contact. To determine how the whole system receives its power.

Fort Sundog

• 1: Impression: Hidden danger—the sharp, bleached-bone reefs in the waters around the fort, the quiet guns barely visible inside.
• 2: Focus: An odd pattern of waves at the base of the fort, as if something protrudes for a long distance just barely underwater.
• 3: Impression: Sound here doesn't echo.
• 4: Path: A thickly-painted ladder, fortunately free of rust, lets us scale the outer wall to a short walkway that offers an unparalleled view of... empty ocean.
• 5: Impression: A very particular sturdiness and security. All the doors and vents sealed, but the gun-ports left open to the elements?
• 6: Focus: A door on the outside of the fort, welded shut. Warning signs in a dozen languages explain that unaccounted access is punishable by death. Several symbols denote explosives. One sign sticks out: mouldy cardboard hung with string around the handle, reading "BEWARE OF DOG".
• 7: Path: A chained-off ladder leads to a higher walkway a few metres under the lip of the fort's main bulk.
• 9: Impression: We can't see or hear any birds here.

Reasons to leave: Someone spots a gigantic feathered form gliding low over the ocean on the horizon. With the spyglass, we see seven dark eyes. We don't need a microphone to catch its cry. I've heard no earthly thing make that sound.

Reasons to stay: Get in through one of the gun ports. Uncover what was hidden here. Be wary of the dog.

Thoughts and Changes

Thoughts so far are basically what's written in Update 0.

Here are the changes I'm gonna make for next week:

• either only do one perspective when drawing the island, or draw the basic terrain at the start and then add to it? either way, shake up the drawing a little
• add some random-rolled stats for each island, e.g. the peak elevation (d1000 metres?), area (1d100 km2?), latitude and longitude (maybe 1d8 1d10 degrees?), maybe years ago it was discovered/"discovered", just as little details to start with—or stuff like notes on the weather, climate, condition of the ship, etc. Just a few random elements to inspire the island without being too constraining

Probably next week I'll think about the 12-item list part of the mechanics and figuring out a better way to do what I wanna do with that.