Caverns Without Number

This is a placeholder page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

Introduction

The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan joy, wealth, and knowledge, is Fantasia, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Fantasia so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, a citizen. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Fantasia has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of Fantasia leaving you behind is just too high.

You fucked up.

House Rules & Character Creation

Character Creation & Advancement

• Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
• For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
• When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
• Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
• Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
• Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
• Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
• Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
• You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
• For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
• Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
• We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
• You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

Setting

Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

History

Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known.

It is known to scholars that there are occupied cities on the moons.

Contemporary Culture

Industrial culture and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Ancient humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Astronomy & Weather

Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in the distant past.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

Calendar

There are 13 months, each of exactly 28 days. There is also an "extra" day, counted as the first day of each new year, which marks the beginning of spring. That adds up to 365.

Languages

The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

• Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
• Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
• Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
• Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
• Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
• Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
• Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
• Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
• Various other species have their own languages.
• The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

Random Notes

• "Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciate of in most cases.
• Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and infections are rare. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
• There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

Technology

• Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.
• The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.
• Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
• High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
• The advanced technology that does exist seems often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
• The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down," and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.