Physical Appearance

Are these monsters even Goblins? No two are quite the same. Most have no heads. Instead, big gawping faces occupy the centre-mass; lumpy spheres ringed with limbs; long dandling legs and nearly indistinguishable arms spreading out like spiders limbs. Others so crooked-backed that they are grown into hoops, even rolling along on their knobbly spines, bouncing the ground with pugnacious faces on each turn. Others long and loopy, with fifty eight vertebrae and six to eight limbs, who scurry like centipedes along the ground.

The chaos goblins sunless skin stained black with crazed tattoos, full-body or half-body black paint, tattooed vantablack ‘gloves’ or ‘boots’ so that they seem to move along like ghosts, or one half blackened, the other kept pristine. Others graffitied with crazy notions and scurvy pictures. In off hours the Chaos Goblins tattoo each other and themselves with whatever they have to hand; blood, brain paint, ash, ichor, mondmilch. Don’t confuse it with a Culture.

The Chaos Gobs have monocoloured eyes. Either utterly black, like a sharks, or and infra-white sclera and iris that backscatter unlikely radiations into visible light, meaning the whites of their eyes, which are the whole of their eyes but for the pupil, glow or stand out clearly in the dark, especially when there is no other light at all. Such goblins often paint or tattoo themselves utterly black, leaving only their eyes. They find this hilarious.

Chaos Goblin eyes can also ‘bulge’ and ‘flex’. Rings of muscle around their cartilaginous orbits, and very robust jelly, mean the eyes themselves writhe and warp in shape, sometimes pushing and squeezing the ball into a peeping scope, or even ‘closing’ entirely, making the face a blank,

Somewhere equatorial to the eyes, swivelling radar ears turn like blinking chameleons. Beneath; their twitchy noses poke and point this way and that, leading the way, and under those the mouths are full of teeth of knives, while the Goblins carry knives of teeth, along with the most bizarre assortments imaginable; umbrellas, hats, man-skin gloves over tattooed black hands, geegaws and trinkets. Always jiggling and poking, snorting and chuckling are the Chaos Gobs.

Russ Nicholson

Culture (?)

Horror Goblins banished from the sun for deeds too-queer. Worshippers of primordial chaos, and the chaos Dukes they find in worms, in pies, in dung, in eyes… Even Goblin Lands won’t take them in. Thus came they, blindways, nightwayes, west of Midnight, north of Quiet, down down down to the Underground, where no sun shines and dreams and dark are one.

Even here nobody likes them! (Maybe the dErO, who use them as hunters and deniable ‘proxies’, (like a rabid frog on a candyfloss leash). Or at least they try to. The Chaos Goblins find the dErO hilarious, but they find everything hilarious.)

Anarchists of the Veins. Hell Gobs! Terrorists! Friends to slime and slug. Goblins who got a little too dark. Chaos! Or expressions of it.

They must engage in some kind of economic activity, if only for the fun of it. They seem to have…. stuff. As well, they must have some kind of irregular pipeline to other multiversal goblin cultures - they have some animated weapons and goblin guns. They have met David Bowie. (The actor, not his character in Labyrinth.)

Too twee? Too cringe? Too twenty-twelve blog post? They don’t care. In fact, that makes it better. In the whole of any Veins-World, the Chaos Gobs are the only creatures who may have met David Bowie, or will even know who that is, when even the Player Characters don’t.

I’ll say this; the Chaos Gobs have so much respect for Chaos they will usually respect a bet, and the more inane and chaotic the bet the greater respect it has. Cards & Dice? = FOR CUMPS. Lets bet on flies landing on shit-piles, or whose eye pops out first, or who can eat more of a live snake, each starting at a different end. Yes, the Chaos Goblins will respect a bet, for the five to thirty minutes that makes up their short-term memory. After that they stop caring at all.

But that doesn’t mean they will chase you down. They are chaotic after all. Might simply doodle on the walls, or sing a song, or eat each other. Best to run while you have the chance.

Pathfinder

Material Culture

Wherever they are the Chaos Goblins ‘Chaos Aura’ (see ‘Mutational Effect’ below), warps and alters the environment in various ways, but they also make raw physical changes that anyone could do.

In the living expression of course, its hard to tell where madness ends and the extra-real beings. The Chaos Gobs certainly don’t know.

They shit everywhere, paint the walls with shit. They poop in many colours. They paint the walls with Brain-Paint, (see below), and who knows what that might do? And they paint the walls with paint, if they happen to have any. They carve passages into goblinish shapes, their halls are like cathedrals where only gargoyles and grotesques are allowed. Gieger would enjoy them, and yes! He was one of them! They bore random holes to nowhere, build castles made of moon-beams, imported from the seas of the Imprisoned Moon (How did they get them, since they are so poor in every other way?)

So, imagine this; a ridiculous cathedral with the windows being crazed paintings in luminescent shit, or actual para-reality doors…

Yes they might have some treasure. They might have the treasure. Of course they don’t know what it is, or care. Its in a bucket and the bucket is what they value. They will chase you TO THE ENDS OF THE FUCKING EARTH about that bucket!!!

On the move you might find them hiding Man-Camels in a hole that wasn’t there before, or collectively inside a box that shouldn’t be present at all. (Many Chaos Goblins can climb out of one thing.)

Storyforge art

Tools And WeaponsMan-Camels

Trepanned or brain-screwed naked human beings with elongated limbs. Used as beasts of burden.

Brain-Paint

Vital Chaos Goblin tech, and a major source of conflict with Soft-Heads who also needed those brains. Brain-Paint is made from the brains of wizards, or anything analogous to a wizard in Goblin eyes, mixed with.. whatever really. What a Chaos Goblin paints with Brain Paint becomes conditionally-real. A tunnel painted on a wall becomes a tunnel, a hole becomes a hole, a princess becomes a princess (a Chaos Goblin version of one anyway). This may be how Chaos Goblins gain irregular access to other Goblin Realms; by just painting them on the wall and walking in, then getting out fast before they forget they can’t really be there. The useful effects of Brain-Paint for non-chaos-goblins are highly irregular, and it doesn’t work at all if not painted by a Chaos Goblin. The negative effects usually work.

Living Weapons

Chameleon Whips actual chameleon tongues make their targets appear differently, Sting Stones are wasp-souled sling stones, Spider-Guns like silk-spewing bagpipes. They are rumoured to use tame (?) Ungulix as hunting hounds.

Madlights

Important in the Veins, Chaos Goblin lamps are always varicoloured and always move madly, either flung and whirled about the head, or actual living bugs and floating frog-balloons lit from within but still trying to hop. They are carried like child’s balloons or like toys, or streamers, bouncing and whirling about.

Other Items

Potion-Pots, Sticky Pokers, Fiddle-Diddles, Hidey Box, Boomerangs, Hooks, Grease, mall-bought shuriken, Madness Pipes.

Russ Nicholson

The Power of Chaos!

Existence for the Chaos Goblins is a dark, violent, anarchic comedy that never ever ever ends. A cruel, surreal, picaresque from which they cannot escape, from which they cannot wish to escape.

They are like a corruption, a Cancer on Reality. Causality bubbles and warps around them. Extremities of chance become common, rare events; regular, humours change. Their physical environment also warps, becoming emblematic, expressionist, arch and Caligarish, somehow performed.

Those who are captured by Chaos Goblins, inevitably monstered, stripped, tattooed, altered, are either made into man-camels, or slowly devolve into Chaos Goblins themselves, as they go utterly mad. These ‘Changed Ones’ are the Chaos Goblin shaman who perform their Grand Transformations.

Chaos Mechanics

Chaos Goblins don’t roll dice, they just flip coins. Heads is a crit, or the highest number possible from the equivalent die roll, tails is a fumble, or the lowest number possible. A die-equivalent can be managed by making all ‘odds’ crits and high and all ‘evens’ fails and fumbles.

All Chaos Goblin action oscillates between bizarre flukes of terrifying good luck, and the most laughable and deranged failure, with nothing in-between. Their 'magic' is the ability to act like cartoon characters.

Chaos Aura!

The Chaos Aura around a Chaos Goblin randomises the effect of any spell cast upon them. Usually this just randomises between any spell of the same level, but on a d20 roll of 20, it randomises between all possible spells of any level.

Knightmare Miniatures

Chaos-Tricks!

Thankfully, each Chaos Goblin can only use one Chaos Trick at a time, and usually only one Chaos Goblin can use each Chaos Trick in each encounter.

It takes actual concentration to do it. But more important than concentration is circumstance. In the words of Roger Rabbit, ‘it has to be funny’. Though ‘funny’ for a Chaos Goblin doesn’t mean funny for anyone else.

Still, in effect, if a Chaos Goblin uses a Chaos Trick during an encounter, that Goblin can only use that one power, and only that Goblin can use that ability. Otherwise it wouldn’t be ‘funny’.

Elongating Arms

Extend your arms like a huge accordion! Or like long loopy animated limbs! Or like big mad snakes!

Inflated Body

Huff and puff and a Chaos Goblin can inflate itself just like a balloon and float about in the same way, waving its limbs for some level of control. Pierce it and it goes ‘vvvveeeeeeeeee’ and flies about like a balloon, instead of collapsing like a body of equivalent mass.

Deranged Disguise

A Chaos Goblin can disguise itself by dressing very crudely as whatever it wants to be seen as. They can even disguise themselves from the Dungeon Master. For instance the Dungeon Master might say;

“In the middle of the battle, a hot princess appears and starts making lovey dovey eyes at you?”

“Where did she come from?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

Bear in mind; Chaos Goblins are mad, stupid and cringe, so while their disguise might be impenetrable in a metatextual sense, it will often stand out as being utterly retarded. (But look out for those occasions where it isn’t.)

Harmless Liquefaction

A Chaos Goblin can be liquified and poured into something, before being decanted and reassuming its form. This honestly has limited combat utility.

Hiding

A Chaos Goblin can hide behind something that has no space to hide behind, like a long thin rod, or under a rug.

Limb Fix

A Chaos Goblin can lose a limb and replace it with something else that is sort of like a limb, simply popping or screwing it on or in. This might be sword, a hook, a bone, another Chaos Goblin or anything really.

Impossible Shadow Puppets

A Chaos Goblin can make shadow puppet animals or beings on a cave wall and use them as actual creatures.

Grand Transformations

A Shaman is required for this, or someone the Chaos Goblins think is a Shaman. A Big Ritual takes place and one, or more, or all Chaos Gobins are transformed, either randomly, or all into Bat-Goblins, or Fish-Goblins with smiling goblin faces, or Mist-Goblins or are agoblimated into a single Mass Goblin Mega-Goblin.

This is a book you might have assumed I would have already read. I think its on the 'Appendix N' and is often given as one of the main inspirations for the Underdark and the Drow. It showed up on my prospective research for Veins of the Earth but I only got round to reading it in the last few days.



What a remarkable, strange and interesting book this is.

There are two parts, the part that everyone talks about and the strange prophetic tail dragging after it.

The first part is about the Underdark. We open in the San Francisco of the late 60's (think it was written in 69). There are rats in the walls and scratches from behind the bamboo screens. Our hero wakes up to find his girlfriend gone. They argued the previous night, so that makes sense, but her camera, which she adored, is still there, which does not.

The slow decay into strangeness is very neatly done. The hero does and says all the frightened things we would do or say, police, friends, local haunts. The sense of something being deeply and invisibly off slowly rises with his inner tension.

This matching of the overwhelming strangeness of the world with the psychological state of the protagonist, a classic horror technique, so that the victim/heroes mental state mirrors that of the reader and the incursions into the real are impossible to discern from fear and madness in the head, all of this is very well carried off.

This is also where magic makes its first appearance, in an elegant form and style which carries over to the whole of the first half of the book. Someone advises the hero to scry for his girlfriend. The social milieu of the book (which was probably close to the writers own) is such that this is an entirely reasonable suggestion from the kind of people he hangs out with. He makes the rationalist response and they reply that yes, it probably isn't magic, but the meditation and focus allows the mind to process information it might not otherwise be able to arrange.

He tries scrying in a whisky glass and something happens.

Like the blending of decaying mind state and growing alter-verse, the tension between magic as maybe-real and magic as alternative-paradigm also tracks for the first half. The potential reality of magic grows slowly, rarely breaking out into unquestionably open reality.

A key moment comes where a friend tells him where his partner might be. She can't explain directly, but she can show him the way.

She takes him to the basement of his apartment. They wait, and feel with their faces for a cold breeze and a particular scent. Slowly he becomes aware of it. They follow it.

He finds a black gap just behind the buildings pipes, just large enough for someone to slide through side-on.

He slides through.

He enters another basement. Then finds the breeze again. Another strange gap. he keeps going.

And keeps going. Another basement, a forgotten crawl space, an old industrial space, a warehouse. He climbs. More. Another space. All different, never a clear path, only just accessible. He travels for a day.

He crosses the city, passing through junk yards, back lots, empty sheds. It is this long circuitous path that leads him to the Under-World.

He finds a sword. One of the more interesting swords in fiction. It’s simply been left hanging on a wall in an antechamber to the Underworld and it’s is safe because the people of that world hate Steel. They cannot touch it.

Ultimately, he crosses a water barrier and enters a realm adjacent to myth but always carrying the tantalising strands of possibility.

The logic for the Under-People is similar to that used in 'The Descent' - a pre ice-age hominid divide with one group going underground and staying there, effectively becoming a sub-species, one so sensitive, silent and secret that they border on the supernatural.

We discover stuff about the Under-People. They live on trash and this barley infected with this strange fungus. The fungus is a hallucinogen, so everyone underground is on a constant, eternal drugs loop where they are imagining themselves to be animals (usually), then coming down and feeling utter despair.

At one point the hero remarks that he understands now why the Under-people arch their eyebrows like they do, it’s because they are supporting the weight of imaginary horns.

Dream fades into reality into dream, he fights and kills and decides whilst imagining he is a thousand different animals.

I don't want to spoil the details. Suffice to say that he finds the girl, gets her out but ends up having to spend much longer underground than he expected.

And that is the part of the book you were probably expecting, the part that Gygax was probably drawing from and the part most people are interested in.

In the second part it gets really weird.





Ok, so its three years later and the guy gets back to San Francisco. Except the culture represented feels like a Dark Future Sci Fi story written in 2017.

In the three years he's been gone the culture has become so violent that people are forced to wear ID discs to walk the streets. Robot cops stop you to check your disc. One tries to do this to him (he looks like an insane homeless person and has walked through his shoes) and he wrecks it with the Sword.

Luckily (this is a world with only about five or six people in it and they just re-encounter each other), he runs into the woman who advised him about the underworld previously. She's working for the government bureaucracy and offers to help him with a fake identity. Breakdown;

- The fake I.D. has to have a certain level of rule breaking in it or it looks unnatural to the computers that now run everything.

- The hills of San Francisco are gone. Computer-controlled industrial machinery went wild because of a bug and levelled them in a few days. No-one could stop the machines. The people were paid off and the materials went to make new land in the bay. It's generally assumed that it was a land scam of some kind.

- The woman wants him to live with her. They don't get on and conditions are hard but women almost always want men to live with them 'because it’s safer'. Fears of home invasion and street attacks are now utterly common.

- The guy goes to work at his job and usually sees at least one knife attack and at least one fight. It’s just the new background.

- Food shortages are common. A point later in the book is where the main characters manage to come upon a rural market with no food controls and happily load up on fresh food.

- Hardly anyone goes to the University any more, but the University grounds are 'safe ground', if you can touch the gates whoever is chasing you will usually stop. He asks where this custom developed and is told it just grew on its own.

- The boring boyfriend of a character talks constantly of bombs and how he can make them, what he is willing to do. This is played as just some annoying thing he does. Political extremes are considered normal now.

- A couple go dancing, the music is described in a way that it feels almost like a conservative/ironic regurgitation of an old style that no-one really likes but they have to be careful now. Then someone throws a bomb into the crowd. This is normal now. No reason is ever given for the bomb.


So the rest of the book is him trying to get back the girl he originally saved from the Underdark. This involves some detective stuff, some espionage stuff, and at least one full-on shamanic dream session where he witnesses and channels the power of some extra-dimensional entity.

There are people who know about the Underdark and a guy who it seems is trying to set up some kind of global conspiracy to do with the Underdark powers.

These Elves that live underneath the world feeding on trash and their hallucinogenic barley are strangely powerful above ground. Not directly because they fear light, but like an ever-present low-level threat. You can never be safe. Any crawl space could lead right to the dark underneath the world.

They manage to take out the bad guy, kind of, and he frees his girl, kind of, but the knowledge/addiction of the Underworld is still with her, and with him a bit. Even though it’s the most terrible place imaginable it has this dark consuming power. People just don't leave it.

The 'good guys' kind of win but society is so utterly fucked that it doesn't really matter. They are caught in a riot, which might also be a government assassination attempt (no-one knows who is really working for the government or who really has power, there are assumed to be constant shifts between invisible factions) because they wouldn't give the government the secret to the Elves hallucinogenic fungi.

Fuck this book is strange. Like really no-faking original strange. Margaret St Claire was a unique woman.

Then eventually their old friend, who went back underground to be a Queen, due to the Underdark-addiction, sends them a powerful magic stone which protects them.

And that’s it.

No-one really seems to know what to make of this book. It's not like anything else. I think probably if Margaret St Clair was a man she would be a well know cult author, like maybe Phillip K Dick well known.

If it was just about the origins to the Underdark it would be important. It’s all there, in deep feel at least, the seed of it.

And then there is this whole other half to the book about this doomed future that looks a lot like our present.

And how those two interact and what the whole thing is, well your guess is as good as mine.

People have been asking me about how Cities might exist in the Veins of the Earth, and the answer is that really they couldn't, but we probably want them anyway so here are a few ideas about how to feed an urban population underground..

Roll some dice or add as you prefer. I'd say throw together about three of these and you'll have something interesting. Probably one from the quasi-natural list and two from the others.



NATURAL OR QUASI-NATURAL 

1-4. A river from the surface world carries both life and resources, possibly forming a swamp or archipelago of valuable nitrate-rich mud.

5-7. Natural, managed or artificial vulcanism creates both heat - feeding black fungus, and low light, aiding the same.

8. Stone-eating bacteria or Archea common here, farmed over cycles of millennia with herds of nomadic sonic pigs and cave crickets guided through the volume of the cities agriculture.

9. Black radiation-eating fungi like the mass inside the Chernobyl reactor, feeding off a natural source of radiation.

10. A huge and regular migration of flying beasts like Lamenters, Bats, Mega-Moths or some other creature that lives largely on the surface but passes this point at regular intervals.

11. Either undersea cities with aquaculture based around oceanic vents, or floating or coastal cities that trade with the same.

12. City maintains a 'Kite' nation somewhere on the surface. A polity which exists purely in order to service the cities agricultural needs by dropping down food directly, sending it by river or by more magical or abtruse methods. A common method is a culture hidden in high valleys or inaccessible mountaintops, almost impossible to reach from the outside world and live in either terror and/or worship of their underground rulers.




FALSE SUNS

Usually based around a large, open central area with agriculture of some kind taking place on every surface, floor, walls and roof. Golems or slave spider-castes farming the upside-down area above the city. The False Sun held in suspensions of mighty chain in the centre.

1-3. A 'Ghost Sun' made from the dead souls of deceased citizens. Pale light and you can see the individual souls trapped inside. All citizens must give their soul to the Ghost Sun on death.

4-5. Imprisoned being - chained light elemental, fire elemental, angel or devil. Held in spiderworks of eternal iron.

6. Mechanical Sun - rare, often using hyper-dimensional mechanics. Gnonmen Capital has a Futurist Clockwork Uranium Sun fed by rare heavy metals.




INTERDIMENSIONAL GATEWAYS

1. Stable portal to Hell - city sub-contracts from Hell, receives a portion of dammed souls as payment, on which it feasts.

2. Portal to positive 'Wild' dimension. Cities in the Veins are usually regarded as parasitical in these realities and usually some kind of Crusade or Jihad is launched to close the portal.

3. Gateway to Xor - same problem. Veins cities not popular there.

4. City has a stable and large portal to a dimension of fire or light and uses the permanent energy from this to farm wherever the light shines.





D&D MAGIC- INDUSTRIALISED

1. Un-dead rulers, golem workers, small living class.

2. Either by revolt, disappearance of original creators or by design, city is a golem-built and golem ruled near-automata with living people surviving in it almost by happenstance.

3. There is an offal-god or something like it that dumps food, of some kind, onto the city as a direct trade for worship. Some gods might literally dump shit onto a city - the nitrates are vast wealth underground & low-status surface gods can be of major importance.

4. Food-Malmukes. Caste of slave Clerics raised without eyes, sometimes without tongues or even fingers. Brought up in total ignorance of everything except the one thing they are meant to believe. Ignorant, lobotomised mass-produced holy fools. Cast Food and Water spells en-masse. Like parasites on the love of a merciful God.

5. Slave mages created like slave clerics, though more difficult to manage as some intellectual capacity is required - they cast 'Create Light' and Summon creatures regularly, to be eaten.

6. Magical miniaturisation means populace can raise mice and fleas then shrink selves to feast. Fleas the size of turkeys, Mice like Mastadons.

7. Elemental citizens basically create energy just by living there. Like a resort feeding off a high-status 'Tourist' class.

8. Mining a Gigacreature - giant being like an Arch-Angel, Titan, God or Kaiju. Population digs into them for food and resources. (Think of a hibernating Godzilla with people crawling into its brain to make a lobotomy-mine, keeping it alive and asleep while they eat it from within. Urban population as 'killer bacteria'.)

9. City feeding off an Elder God or equivalent - like suckling at Shub-Niggurath, eating Dagons eggs, licking Chthulu's teats.

10. City farms within pocket dimensions created by paintings. Pastoral artists abducted from surface world but cities population strips everything and leaves their paintings ravaged wastelands, plus they gradually lose their memories of the surface world and succumb to mad despair, losing the ability to paint anything fertile or real.





PREDATION

1. Ourouboros city engaged in 'Paradox' farming,  feed off their own past, sending forces back along their own loop to take resources and slaves. They must keep growing more powerful so they can defeat their own past but the cultural and physical destruction of their own history forms unstable paradoxes and cripples them in many ways. They live in fear as they never know when their own future will arrive to consume them.

2. 'Looper' city sends forces into their own distant future to do the same. They practice forced cultural decline, creating their own 'Dark Age' so their future selves are not strong enough to defeat their current-selves. Result is more stable and predictable as fewer paradoxes result, but the cities future raiding-point and its current-self are continually creeping closer and closer to each other until inevitable moment of mutual annihilation.

3. City translocates/projects/is disguised as another city above ground - but that city is an illusion or simulation, either psychic projection, literal physical construction or something else. All resources consumed by fake city are actually dropped down giant secret elevators to real city. Method favoured by Dero.

4. City 'fishes' for armies, knights, ships, pilgrimages or crusades on the surface - magic forests, 'missing' kingdoms, disappearing isles, crusades to nowhere, fake colony conspiracies.  Large numbers of people disappear and are fed to the city either by being dropped directly down or via magic. Another Dero favourite as their mind control machines allow them to create powerful giga-conspiracies on the surface.




HIPSTER D&D BULLSHIT

1. City feeds on literalised psychic emanations from above - depends on angst and trouble of surface cultures and works to ensure continuity of supply.

2. City feeds on literalised psychic emanations from below - likely eating the dreams of a mad god or chthulu-esque entity. Reliable supply but drives everyone even more insane than usual.

3. City feeds on own literalised psychic emanations. Own culture tuned for maximum sensation & experience to ensure continuity of supply but they must feel or starve and jadedness-famine is an inevitable consequence of high-intensity feeling.

4. City farms in dreams - or forces others to do so - usually children as they have the most fertile dreams and are easy to terrify and control. Generations of surface children secretly made slaves in their own unconscious until they fear to sleep.

5. City has found a way to feed off orgones - depends on beauty and extroversion of the population but things inevitably get dark if jadedness sinks in.

6. City simply steals food from peoples dreams. If you dream of having a feast, suddenly someone with negative-image black skin or some hideous dwarf/gnome things are there eating your food and won't let you have any.

7. City is inwardly ontologically shattered like a schizophrenics dream. Golems and child slaves sent into its fractured core to scavenge food appearing from 'nowhere' i.e. dropped or created by people who don't exist.

8. City preys on dying hierarchies of failing faiths, hunts asuras, angels, devas, devils and demons as if they were hot girls in a horror movie. Drags back the corpses and feasts. Sky-Father ends up alone in valhalla, boarding up the doors in fear.

EDIT: So it is live, click the image to go to the LotFP site to purchase.





For anyone unfamiliar with the idea of 'Veins of the Earth' or who thinks its either that computer game that comes up when you google the phrase, or just the original quote from The Tempest, here is what it is.

This is a book that has been in production a looooog time. Longer than any other work I have done. Investigating its origins takes us way back to near the dawn of this blog. To illustrate this, here's a brief rundown of my publishing history;

August 2011 - I get my first laptop and, within a few days, create False Machine.

16th October 2012 - In a comment below this post we see the first public mention of the idea in a conversation with David.




18th October 2012 - I accept Davids Challenge, he will create what ends up being Yoon-Suin and I will write Veins and we will RACE TO THE FINISH LINE.




December 2012 - January 2013 - many of the Veins monsters were created in this period. If you check out the tag 'Veins' in the sidebar, or just click through to the period in question you can still see them there.

9th February 2013 -




21st June 2013 - Zak first contacts me to propose the thing that eventually becomes Maze of the Blue Medusa.

3rd October 2013 - Zzarchov Kowalski first contacts me to propose the thing that eventually becomes Deep Carbon Observatory. Another guy with a 'Z' name, interesting.

26th October 2013 - The first Maze of the Blue Medusa draft is finished.

6th June 2014 - The first Veins of the Earth test print is created. I have never actually seen a copy of this print since, when I created it, I couldn't afford to buy myself a copy. I think everyone else in the production got one though.

24th June 2014 - Fire of the Velvet Horizon first proposed, as I remember as a 'simple' project to do after DCO. It turned out to be about five times as large.

8th July 2014 - Deep Carbon Observatory released.

5th March 2015 - Yoon-Suin released to universal acclaim. David CRUSHES ME LIKE THE ANT I AM. VICTORY IS HIS. He loses the $10 he bet on me to win.

8th March 2015 - Fire on the Velvet Horizon released. The world cries out; "Will there be a PDF?" and "I can't read this" to which we reply NO THERE FUCKING WON'T and I'M GENUINELY SORRY ABOUT THAT respectively

23rd September 2015 - Veins final edited  and multiply proof-read text is locked.

30th June 2016 - Maze of the Blue Medusa is released.

14th April 2017 - (the future) BOOM. Finally. You can now order Veins of the Earth. It's still going to take ten days to send as James forgot to order the packing materials.

So the times from conception to completion are;

• VotE - 4 years, 6 months.
• MotBM - 3 years.
• DCO - 1 year, 9 months.
• FotVH - 9 months!

So you can see, in a way, Veins is my first book, it's just the last one to come out.

.................................................................................................


BUT PATRICK, WHAT IS 'VEINS OF THE EARTH?

Belive it or not it actually started off as an attempt to 'Vornheim' the Underdark, to provide a way to simulate complex underground spaces during play, so that you could adventure in them, in the same way that Vornheim helped you to do that for cities.

What it ended up as was my attempt to 'Vornheim' the Underdark encrusted with loads and loads and loads of extra stuff. So if your response to reading this blog is;

"My God I wish he would shut up and get to the point", then this might not be for you. If your response was "I would like more of that, with someone having gone over the prose a few times then packed the lot of it up with some really excellent and savage illustrations with high production values, and I'd like enough of it that, if I smacked someone in the face with it, I could break their nose, and I don't mind paying for it"

Or;

"Wow I really liked DCO but I wanted to go down that big chain at the end and I also wanted a whole world waiting for me down there, and I don't mind paying for it".

Then CONGRATULATIONS! This might be the thing for you!

Half of it is monsters, the other half mechanics and lists.

All of the monsters are individually illustrated by Scrap Princess. They are designed to be as original as possible, for a lot of things I drew on the Science of cave exploration and advancements in genetics that have taken place since the 1970's. The Archeans in particular are a race based upon Archean bacteria. The Knotsmen are based on my feelings about working as a call centre operator in the debt industry for several years. The empire of the Endoliths is based on taking train journeys to work in winter mornings where the whole world is dark but a lamp or a house-light burning in the distance encompasses a fragile globe of existance that seems to drift like a bubble on a dark sea, and on actual endoltihs.

The back end has rules for the creation of large scale underground maps, large cave complexes and smaller cave systems. There is a relatively novel and simple (one you do it a few times) method for creating small networks of caves as you play, for when players go off the map or just if you want to improv something.

There are rules for cannibalising your friends and a neat mechanic that unifies currency and light, giving you a sound reason to keep running around underground. 

And of course there are extensive rules for going insane. Also for getting mutated or 'altered' by your time beneath the earth. Oh and insanity itself is an actual psychic monster that hunts you through the dark, that's on top of all the other kinds of insanity.
I'll just show the contents page again.

It's about 100,000 words over more than 350 pages of A5. Scrap has art on nearly every double-page spread so it's an art book as well, some of it in black and white, some of it in colour. A few of her 'Cave Scenes' are amongst some of my favourite works that she has ever done.

Taken as a whole it's a pretty concentrated and intense wedge of culture. If it works it should be like a Stanley knife held to your eye.


.......................................................................................................................


AN APPENDIX N FOR VEINS OF THE EARTH

Here's some of the books I have on record and that I can remember reading. The Richard Fortey books in particluar were a big influence on both this and on DCO.

• De Animantibus Subterraneis by Georgius Agricola (first translated by Herbert Hoover, the U.S. President).
• The Town Below Ground by Jan-Andrew Henderson.
• London Under by Peter Ackroyd.
• Tales From The Underground by David W. Wolfe.
• Climbing Fit by Martyn Hurn & Pat Ingle.
• Sand, A Journey Through Science and the Imagination by Michael Welland.
• Subnature, Architectures Other Environments by David Gissen.
• Cave Passages, Roaming the Underground Wilderness by Michael Ray Taylor.
• Rabid, A Cultural History of the Worlds Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy.
• Bound for Canaan, The Underground Railroad by Fergus M. Bordewich.
• The Smoky God Willis Georger Emerson.
• Underground Warfare 1914-1918 by Simon Jones.
• The Underground Atlas by John Middleton & Tony Walthan.
• The Descent by Jeff Long (an Airport novel gone bonkers).
• The Dungeoneer's Survival Guide by Douglas Niles (my copy of this was chewed by rabbits).
• Beneath Flanders Field by Peter Barton, Peter Doyle & Johan Vanderville.
• Subterranean Worlds Inside Earth by Timothy Green Beckley (a great book THE dErO ARE REAL!!!!).
• The Climbers Handbook by Garth Hattingh.
• Periodic Tales, The Curious Lives of the Elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams.
• La Place de La Concorde Suisse by John McPhee.
• Underground Worlds by Donald Dale Jackson (this is a lovely book if you can get your hands on it).
• Blind Descent by James M. Tabor (factual but in prose style, utter glorious bullshit).
• Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey.
• The Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey.

Here is an experimental 5e Underdark background that might actually be useful to someone.

You are FROM BELOW

SKILLS

You are proficient in Athletics when the test is for a climb. If you are already proficient in Athletics, you are doubly proficient (count your bonus twice) but only when the test is for a climb.

You are proficient in Survival and doublly proficient when deep underground.

You can never become skilled in above ground Nature, it will always be alien to you.

You know the Silent Speech and can communicate with another who knows through subtle gestures that are not obvious to others.

You have Darkvision but are always at disadvantage in sunlight unless wearing special goggles or some kind of occluding device.



EQUIPMENT:

A small tool or object of your choice, made from human bone.

A small but powerful lamp, made of strange metals.

Strips of a dried but unidentfiable meat.

A secret tattoo showing a specific underground route known only to you.

A fine, strong silk rope.

Any of the weapons acquired through character generation that possess parts of wood, instead have parts of metal or bone. The hilt of your sword is bone, your arrows are thin steel etc.

You have one clothing item of deep blue-black silk. This is regarded as high quality above ground, though you think of it as normal. If anything you are wearing is leather, it is the cured skin of a particular sentient race, you think of this as normal.

Click or look under the break and roll.