Battle Report 3: In which the Zehlin infantry is Tree-ted poorly.
The Alikai campaign through the
Blasted Craters continues to cut through their primitive enemies. The Akibara and the desert tribes together drive the enemy back, and cohesive resistance is crushed beneath waves of arrows and armored boots.
Rumors also begin to circulate of a limited Alikai cavalry elements- strange survivor stories of knights mounted on giant desert rabbits, bounding at impossible speeds across uneven terrain to literally smash the heads of their foes with massive hammers. However, the stories could be just that, as such warriors have never been seen operating around the primary Alikai warcamps.
The somewhat... troubled expansion through the
Mossteeth is finally put on the right track when sailors from the city of Taratan, uniformly mutated to bear strong resemblance to turtles, crew the caged turtle boats. While such vessels are still absolutely miserable for anyone who isn't also a turtle on a turtle boat, the turtle sailors are able to press the creatures to the limit and use them as fast and submersible vessels.
Advances continue in the
Devil’s Scab, with nothing additional aiding or hindering the campaign of the expeditionary forces Alikai sends forward.
The increasingly desperate natives of the
Ghoulwood make ever more grandiose sacrifices to their bestial gods in an effort to turn back the tides of the Zehlin advance- both living and dead. While some few of the horrific beasts are enticed, they're repulsed by new developments for the Zehlin infantry.
Importantly, limited archery units have been deployed by Zehlin, making use of a form of arrow seemingly derived from their sunlight spear. While slightly inaccurate at longer ranges, these arrows blaze with solar energy throughout their flight and have the uncanny tendency to burn through their targets- when they don't generate burning miad.
The bestial zombies deployed by Zehlin have also been improved, with a dedicated effort made to attach all the really dangerous bits as securely as possible so they don't fall off.
Most horribly, the forces from Zehlin appear to have gained another element: Possessed Trees. Cut down and given legs and arms, with a screaming mouth carven into their trunk, these creatures seem hideously victimized by decay- frequently seen in battle with one or more limbs gone, their trunks wormeaten, and dragging themselves into battle by flopping forwards and grasping with their 'hair' of brittle and decayed cypress branches. While strong when they still have limbs to strike, capable of producing prodigious screams that stun everyone (including the living Zehlin infantry) in their immediate area, and able to absorb most assaults of arrow or spear, the possessed creatures can be broken apart- and when they break apart they go out with a bang. When near to destruction, the possessed trees strike out viciously, spiking anyone around them regardless of loyalty.
Progress across the
Stillreach continues apace. The sea chariots remain effective at plowing through the sargasso, and while vessels are still lost from time to time, that's the price of progress.
Frostspire sees a few new directives put in place. One, Zehlin archers are NOT to be used to light campfires. No matter how goddamn cold it is. Two, under no circumstances should possessed trees be used for firewood.
In Summary Alikai Presented New Assets Of,- Turtle sailors who sail the Turtle Boats
- Elusive Cavalry Elements on Giant Rabbits
In Summary Zehlin Presented New Assets Of,- Sunlight Arrows
- Rotting Possessed Trees with Anger Issues
- Animal zombies with preserved natural weapons
AlikaiAlikai: 5/5
Zehlin: 0/5
ZehlinAlikai: 0/5
Zehlin: 5/5
Northwest Land RouteBlasted Craters-Terrain is rocky and hilly, with sudden extrusive ridges and deep craters.
-Unstable underground geology results in sudden sinkholes, poisonous gas seeps, magma fissures, and natural gas detonations.
Alikai: 3/4
Zehlin: 0/4
The Frostspire-Unnatural Cold permeates this region, emanating from the mountain and covering the area in permafrost. Terrain flattish, broken by sudden sheer faced eruptions of ice and stone.
-Mundane beasts become extraordinarily difficult to handle here, and there is no native animal life beyond swarms of endothermic ice-worms.
Alikai: 0/4
Zehlin: 3/4
Central Water RouteThe Mossteeth-Shallow, warm-water sea. Prone to vicious currents and sudden storms, the tempestuous weather is very difficult for large craft.
-Frequent abutments of vegetation covered rock both give the region its name and rip apart the hulls of careless vessels.
Alikai: 3/4
Zehlin: 0/4
Shifting Isles-Floating Islands that seem grouped roughly in the middle of the sea, capable of moving, but also somewhat repulsed by one another so that no large landmass forms.
-Exceedingly difficult to navigate and home to a bewildering variety of climates.
Alikai: 0/4
Zehlin: 0/4
Stillreach-A deep and vast section of sargasso sea which is known for its incredibly poor winds and burning sun. Very easy to get stranded.
-The depth and stillness of these waters make it home to many vast beasts.
Alikai: 0/4
Zehlin: 3/4
Southeast Land RouteGhoulwood-Very flat terrain, densely wooded. This area is idyllic with natural beauty and hypernaturally alive.
-Terrible, intelligent predators lurk in the woods- rapacious appetites taking advantage of the abnormal fecundity of these lands.
Alikai: 0/4
Zehlin: 3/4
The Devil’s Scab-Mountains of Hexagonal Basalt Pillars with ridgelike shale extrusions, the Devil’s scab terrain is all but impassible, deceptively fragile, and sharp at all times.
-Home to hundreds of small oases of rain lakes and thousands of species of bird.
Alikai: 3/4
Zehlin: 0/4
Contest Winner: Alikai
Seeing the clan structure and the varying animalistic features of the inhabitants of the Alikai Kingdom, one might assume that these clans correspond to differing animal types — so that one clan, for example, is a clan of toad-people, while another is a clan of desert foxes. This, however, would be completely incorrect. The clans and tribes of the Alikai Kingdom are old, even older than that ancient empire of the Mad King long faded away, and predate the animalistic form of the contemporary Alikai.
The clans and tribes are thus quite geographic in basis. Some of the clans are fully absent from the urban scene but for their traders and mercenaries, like the various desert clans that have sold their services as the Alikai Kingdom’s premier light infantry. Some of the clans, like the Karaca Clan, famous builders and maintainers of the aqueducts, are entirely urban, making up most of the population of the cities clustered around the oases and lakes of the desert. Others, like the Anirite, are starting to increasingly centralize in villages that have sprung up around the rising aqueducts (although the Anirite are notably powerful enough and large enough to straddle all of these categories). The end result, however, is that each section of land, each village in Alikai is usually the territory of a singular clan, with most cities having just a couple of tribes that make up its population, occasionally conflicting even in the more unified times of the Alikai Kingdom.
There are two major exceptions to this rule. One is the coast of Taratan — connected to the Alikai by the lightning rise and fall of the ancient empire of the Mad King and its aftermath rather than by any identity as one of the clans, Taratan identifies primarily as a city and region that happens to contains a people, rather than a tribe that happens to control a certain section of a land.
The other exception is the city of Alika, from which the Alikai Kingdom draws its name. Built around the largest and most fertile cluster of oases in the desert area now known as Alikai, the city of Alika is actually shockingly new, as is what we know as Alikai civilization itself. The existence of towns is of course not new, nor is this the first time it has been important to control — the Mad King kept the area tightly and mercilessly controlled, being a large source of resources for his wide-spanning empire. But the Mad King was an Anirite, and did not seek to divert the center of power away from the desert lands of his clan.
Alika has instead sprung up as the capital of a massive kingdom only around sixty to seventy years ago, as a result of many of the major clans (like the Anirite and Karaca) finally creating a peace deal and a coalition, finally ceasing the fighting around the oasis-cluster region (which had seen nominal control change between hands many, many times over the centuries). Serving a new role as a political center of a kingdom which has been only the second to fully unite the desert and Taratan, and as the source of the aqueducts that rose from the new internal peace, the separate towns of the oases swelled and formed into a wide-ranging urban agglomeration that is now known as Alika.
All Alikai settlements are fairly colorful, holding people of wildly different forms and animal types. But Alika, holding members of just about every major individual clan in the land, spread to different levels of sparseness over areas old and new, and expanding at a breakneck pace as the Alikai Kingdom becomes more and more important, is by far the most colorful place in the Kingdom. And it is this color, manifested in a dazzling array of animal people and mutated animals, that the Sacred Lunacy of the Alikai peoples manifests.
In the centers of economy present between the locations of the old towns, where large bazaars have sprung up, supplies and goods are carried along the stone roads in a variety of ways — shockingly giant animals with riders of their species’ traits trotting along the street, more mundane beasts of burden, and rather bewildered people on foot maneuvering their way through traffic, like the lithe woman with fennec ears, fur, and tail sinuously moving around various pack animals here, or the stout and most certainly fat camel man simply bulling through, confident in his ability to win in any collisions.
In the oases and lakes themselves, a desert pupfish woman, possessed of scales and gills as one of the few aquatic animal-people outside of Taratan, watches her still-less-mutated children play around a giant turtle, gentle if perhaps still unused to its new size. At the edge of the lake, a (saltwater) turtle-man all the way from that far off shore city sits there with his face in his hands, trying with some difficulty to commune with the (freshwater) turtle in that lake, wondering who thought it was a good idea to transform one of the turtles here rather than the ones in Taratan, and why. Above them, a recently-adult gecko man hangs upside down from the aqueducts, carefully replacing or repairing damaged bricks.
In one of the old town centers of the massive city, a reptilian showdown brews between a young and brash rural clan snakeman and a member of the clan native to this particular old town, territorial because he feels that this area of the city is the rightful territory of his clan, which has been around for centuries longer than “Alika” existed, but also territorial because his spiny lizard instincts are screaming at him to start some shit. On the other side of the old-town area, a rabbit woman starts walking faster, trying not to look too hard at the Lunatic (both figurative and literal) trying his damnedest to make a toad violently explode.
In the desert outskirts of the city, one of the local garrisons —Anirite Akibara— conducts drills, practicing their movements and the forms of their strikes, wandering around the dunes unaware that they are about to enter a truly bizarre incident running across the poorly constructed burrow of a cranky teenaged meerkat girl, covered in sand and soil and none too happy to have her nap interrupted.
Of course, the funny thing about Sacred Lunacy and Alika is that the former is built on ties to concepts -- the bestial, the chaotic, and above all raw change. And it's for all three of these reasons that Alika is a place of magical power as well as the place where Alikai usage of Sacred Lunacy comes to the fore, turning the city into a place of intense suitability for rites of Lunacy, and a place where Lunatics in service to the Kingdom tend to congregate to work on their many strange projects.
Movements of beasts, vibrancy of life, and bestial states of mind of course abound in Alika, and probably abound there more than any other singular place int he world. Alika is, as described, a positive milieu of ways of life that run multiple gamuts -- from the urban dwellers of the old towns, to those recent arrivals still coming to terms with staying in one place, hard-honed instincts of hunters and scavengers coming to light in oft-inconvenient ways, and from hundreds of different animalistic bodies and mindsets. These all come together to create a distinct atmosphere -- the beastliness of the Alikai can be practically felt in the air. And that's before the full moon... when rules and laws have to be reshaped simply to work around the crescendo of bestial Lunacy that suffuses the city, madness and animalistic instincts combining into a half-magical half-mundane tempest of chaos, which the Alikai have still been struggling to learn to deal with.
Chaos and variance are also strong aspects of Alika. Alika is a patchwork quilt of a city thanks to its history -- spreading over a much larger area of land than even most urban clansfolk from outside Alika at first comprehend, the city is composed of many different kinds of places, from shocking undeveloped desert to little aquatic communities to economic centers to the hubs of engineering that are the aqueducts to shanties springing up around the edges of the city to military districts to old communities to lively expansions a couple of decades old. Where all of these things meet, there are clashes of the aforementioned lifestyles and of histories and attitudes, combining to make sure that many areas of Alika are quite unpredictable, back-and-forth cultural tugs of war that leave visitors confused as to what to do and what not to do at any given moments. Many Lunatics are known to quite happily dwell in these areas, letting the more chaotic areas of the city flow around them. Sometimes, Sacred Lunacy works well when you don't try to order your world, but instead to work among the unpredictability.
And change, oh, change... Alika and its history represent another one of the truly staggering lightning evolutions of the people of the desert. This change is more peaceful, of course, than the conquest of the Mad King (at least if you're Alikai), and its effects are somewhat less instant than his rites... but it is a truly worldshaking change nonetheless. Alika is at the very center of the monumental rise of the Alikai Kingdom -- it is the symbol of the rapid change from competition to cooperation. It is the starting place of the aqueducts now rising high in the desert and drawing an unavoidable stone web across Alikai. It is the birthplace of empire once again, the world's provincial status quo ripped away into war on unimaginable scale, conflict between titans. It is a collection of sleepy towns, turned into a metropolis that even the Mad King could scarcely have imagined.
The auspicious hours of the night in Alika are quite possibly the most auspicious there are, the moon shining over the chaotically beating heart of a new empire, inhabited by a stunningly diverse mixture of peoples whose connection to the moon and to the wild is core and powerful, built into transformations of body and mind. No ancient secret temple lies under Alika's sands. No ancient mage picked Alika as the site of a ritual -- the Mad King performed his rites in deserts, far away. It is the city of Alika itself --how it was created, who live in it, and what it represents-- that give Lunacy such curious power.The Tower of Agazast
The 'tower' of one of the more famous Zehlian kings is a pit spiraling ever deeper into the ground. He believed that by burrowing deep into the earth, one could burrow deep into the mind, and so reach the origin of all thought. This plan succeeded, but in messy and corrupt fashion- terrible things began seeping into the walls, feasting upon the workers and driving men mad. Construction was forced through for a time until the mad king himself vanished within its depths- some say devoured by the horrors he allowed to seep into the world, others say ascending to join them in depraved existence. Whatever the truth, the tower itself has been an important pilgrimage and ritual site for those seeking to understand or harness the Deep ever since, with travelers variously hearing their own thoughts echoing in the dark, conversing with things they cannot see, or vanishing entirely.
Alikai went for a LOT of beating about the bush. So much so that I feel I need to put a disclaimer for future contests: Keep it Short and Sweet. I like expanding the lore, I really do, but I also don't want people to feel that they have to produce twelve paragraphs for a contest entry. It can be demoralizing
That aside....
Zehlin went for one discrete place, and I really like that. I can't tell you how much I like that. TBH, I went back and forth over this result a couple times just because I prefer its focus- that and the Tower reminds me of the Polyhedron from pathologic. However, what holds it back is that it feels more like 'This is a dark and terrible place that eats people alive', and I'm left wondering exactly
how this dark and terrible place exemplifies
you.
Alikai despite being verbose as fuck, does an excellent job of showing their individuality- even though I feel that doing 'Our Capital is our most magical place!' is a bit of a cop-out. The entry does a good job of engaging with their magic and building something organic from it, even though I wish there'd been a bit more on some of the more interesting facets. How is the city interesting by moonlight? How is the chaos controlled and transmuted into civilization?
Alikai, Choose one:A. Remove one bug from an existing design. No strings attached.
B. Take a credit for a -2 on a future design's roll.
Next Contest, Due Turn 5: Show the FlagThe prototypical AR contest. Produce your nation's flag, along with a
brief description of the elements included.
Author
Topic: FR20 - A Fantasy Arms Race With Odd Rules [Prologue 3 Out] (Read 5254 times)