Week 10: journeys and changes

Last week I decided to change the rules in some major ways, getting rid of the inventory stuff and shifting the focus from Passages to Landmarks. One thing I didn't make explicit was that a successful roll on a Passage you'd describe the Landmark for that Passage, and on failures you'd describe the Passage itself.

The Journeys

Crooked Mirror salt flats

1. To the Celebrant

   1. 10 vs 3: A dead-but-decorated tree, arms raised in joy, strung with empty multi-coloured lanterns.

2. To the Seamstress

   1. 2 vs 5: From ankle-deep dunes of iridescent sand—or ground-up pearls…?—to a more level desert spotted with dusty pebbles, but still no good landmark in sight, just flat emptiness in all directions.
   2. 10+1 vs 5: A massive fossil whose only organ visible from the surface is a needle-like horn rising from the brow of its submerged skull; another needle lies shattered nearby.

3. Past the eyes

   1. 3 vs 9: Back to the iridescent dunes, which grow higher now, and glow in the light of the sun, threatening to lead to something akin to snow-blindness; it takes a day of rest under a simple canvas tent to recover.
   2. 10+1 vs 9: A skull looming from the shimmering sands, thoroughly coated with the same pseudo-mirror dust, eight eyeholes blank and silent, offering no advice or admonition to the weary traveller.

The harvestlands

1. Footprints

   1. 9 vs 2: It's easy to leave these fruitful fields—there's a trail of footprints between two rows of crops, relatively fresh in the earth.

Cymbal River

1. The broomline

   1. 5 vs 2: Trapped on an estuary island, surrounded by dangerous currents, but as twilight's low tide approaches the sun glints off bundles of ash sticks mounted on rods now poking above the surface of the water. They mark the shallowest point. I do my best to ignore the bodies—my bodies—sinking into the silt off the beaten path and make my escape.

The Whale Scar

1. Ancient mining probe

   1. 2 vs 2: Past the ancient, silent machine, turn South. This avoids the worst of the unsteady, meteor-marked lunar landscape, where crevasses are so often hidden by thin sheets of ice; while the natural caverns below are beautiful and easily survivable, I can't afford to waste time getting this delivery out to the way-station after the last one was delayed.

Red River Canyon

1. The birds

   1. 8 vs 7: Down the steep canyon, along the riverbed, over ancient ruins of flooded villages and temple-domes, to the junction—the former tributary running from the North is now the main channel leading East, but still only a shadow of what the old river must've been like. My contact told me to wait until the sun-birds roost and then I'd know which way to go…at sunup they come down from the sky to shelter among the reeds going upriver. Why couldn't my contact just've told me to go North?

Vessers Dun

1. The Crowns

   1. 8 vs 9: These aren't rolling hills, but rumples in the earth, as if it was raised and shaken out like a great carpet and then tossed over the body of the world in disarray. This place is so confusing
   2. 9 vs 8: I finally crest one crease in the world and spy the crowns—two giant rings of jagged crystal that tear through the earth. My route should pass between them.

2. a hermit tower

   1. 6 vs 8: Birds wheel above and laugh, but not at me. They're just laughing in aimless joy. I don't know the way through here, and neither do they, but at least they're not trying to pass on.
   2. 7 vs 7: A tower built on a discarded hermitage. First you spot it over the wrinkled earth, then you loop around the not-hills and see the giant shell it's built on, nacre turned the colour of rust, a hermit standing at the foot of the tower and wielding a giant whip, lashing deliriously at the empty space where their giant crab-steed must once have been before it abandoned them. Then make a sharp turn and pass through another vale to leave the Dun.

Graves of Incomplete Gods

1. The offering

   1. 6 vs 10: The gravetender's advice leads me the wrong way, through thickets and across weed-studded wastes between the graves.
   2. 4 vs 9: Eventually I find my way to the grave of an incomplete god of the sea, but it's not the one I'm after—the god of the voices of fossils. The grave stands tall and the baby-like mouth engraved on it wails silently. I move on.
   3. 10 vs 8: At last I find the grave of the god of ocean primordium, where I leave my offering of semi-moulded benthic clay before going on my way.

Thoughts

There's still a bunch of sticking points for me that I think contributed to these being kinda bland and uninspired, one of the biggest being that the order of events is kinda jumbled. In Stone Words Walk you start out drawing the thing (in archipelago23, the island) as you approach it, and naming it; then you go on to explore it. There isn't a clear, natural order in this game so far. Another major issue is the maps themselves—I don't think they actually work well in this game.

Based on that I think I'm gonna make three major changes:

1. there won't be a map per-se
2. I'll roll 1d6 for a number of Landmarks and name them before moving on to the journey part
3. the game will be played by rolling to see whether or not I've reached the next Landmark, just like rolling against Passages right now; the number to roll against will represent the distance of the Landmark and maybe the difficulty of spotting it

Another minor change: instead of each route having the name of the land you travel through, the name'll be the route between two places (e.g. "from the White Needle to Severn Spaceport").