Monday, August 6, 2018

Two Chromatic Neighborhoods in Infinigrad

The Lizard Man Diaries has posted a generator for creating fantasy city neighborhoods. Le Chaudron Chromatique has a new fantasy building generator. Let's combine that with Lizard Man Diaries' fantasy building generator, and create a couple fantasy neighborhoods, as well as a landmark building for each neighborhood. In one neighborhood, we'll use the "fantasypunk megacity" generator to provide extra information about the neighborhood itself, and in the other, we'll use it to provide more detail about the landmark.
 
 
Neighborhood 1 - The Fountain District
 
Okay, so our random table tells us that this neighborhood's prevalent architecture is something to do with water transport - canals, pipes, sewers. There's engraved script that winds along the streets, and that script communicates some kind of message. Finally, the neighborhood is somehow existentially committed to being ethereal, vaporous, twisting, flowing, or floating. We can work with that.
 
Now let's add in extra detail from the other generator. The neighborhood has feral, makeshift, or jury-rigged architecture, made from repurposed materials, and seemingly on the verge of collapse. Despite its appearance, it actually required great expense in its construction. Meanwhile, the residents of the neighborhood are stoic or silent, and they dislike visitors.
 
Finally, the landmark building. It's a productive building of some kind and/or has something to do with food - a barn, farm, store, granary, greenhouse, mill, workshop or factory. Its special feature is that the building is made out of or connected to a giant fruit, vegetable, mushroom or tree.
 
Infinigrad: prevalent architecture 24, what's going on 85, atmospheric mutation 14 
Fantasypunk megacity: raceoid base 6, physical quirk 2/3, mental quirk 4/4
Fantasy house: trait 1, type 3, special 8
 
"To everyone else in the city, the Fountain District is a joke, but despite the place's whimsical appearance, the locals in the Fountain are all grim and serious. The whole neighborhood is filled with pipes, the entire apparatus above-ground, looking like something from a Dr Seuss book or a Rube Goldberg diagram. Pipes as densely packed as bamboo in a jungle, rising 10 feet, 20 feet in the air, vaulting over the streets, passing through buildings at eye level though open windows. The layout is more or less permanent, but it looks like it was built yesterday and ought to collapse tomorrow. The pipes wind and meander, merge and split, diameters stepping up and down, water pressure rising and falling, joints and valves and gauges everywhere you look. At any given time, half the water in the neighborhood is in the air, which is how the Fountain District gets its name. Every spray looks like an accident, a leak, but there are thousands of them on every block, and every one of them gets caught by a funnel or basin or drain, perfectly placed despite looking for all the world like a haphazard mistake. The locals shuffle around all day, taking pressure gauge readings, carrying wrenches, tightening here, loosening there, grafting on new pipes that look just as accidental as the old."
 
"What the residents know, but won't tell outsiders, is that the pipes in the Fountain District perfectly match the blood vessels, organs, lymph nodes, and glands of an Astral Leviathan. Anyone who's studied marine astrobiology will notice the similarities immediately. The daily routines of the locals involve a great deal of turning on faucets, filling basins, drinking and washing and bathing - and somehow, they believe, their activities don't just copy the natural biological functions of the leviathan, they cause them. Every day for the locals is a 16-hour choreographed routine that sustains the life of their Whale God. If directed with the right orchestration, they could seize control of the great beast, summon it to the mortal plane. For now though, their goal is just to keep the Leviathan alive on the Astral Sea, and they treat this responsibility as a sacred trust."
 
"Unfortunately, with all that water, it was inevitable that something would start to grow. First it was rust-colored lichen growing along the pipes, then precise lines of moss forming living shadow of the whole apparatus on the ground. Then came the ultramarine snozzberries, growing on winding vines that gripped where the lichen and moss already took hold. The locals tried ripping it all up, but it just grew back, and vermicious wasps began attacking anyone who tried. Now a giant peach has grown up right in the south-central park, right where the Leviathan's womb should be. The wasps have chewed away the peach's interior, carving it like the cliffs of Petra. It seems to serve as a cafeteria of sorts for them, perhaps a boarding house as well."
 
"The locals have two theories about their newest landmark. One faction thinks the God Whale has cancer and the peach is the earthly manifestation of its tumor. The other faction thinks the God Whale is pregnant and the peach represents is offspring. Obviously opinions differ about what should be done with the peach, but both sides agree the stakes are very high. Just recently a peacemaker seems to have convinced both factions that the only way to decide is to summon the Leviathan itself to the city, and perhaps to let it cure itself by destroying the worldly embodiment of its disease. The ceremony is currently being planned..."
 
 
Neighborhood 2 - Old Foundry
 
According to the neighborhood generator, this one's dominant architecture are ancient factories, oil wells, and fire pits. It's also a maze of teleportation portals, and might not even be physically connected to the rest of the city. The atmospheric mutation causes everything to be frozen, preserved, or caught. Okay, I think I'm getting a sense of what this place is like.
 
Next up, the landmark building. This one is a combination of two building types. It's somehow both a small house and a theater, arena, music hall, agora, or forum.
 
Let's see where it came from. The building was built by whisker men, so it's got low ceilings, tunnels instead of hallways, and the whole thing feels claustrophobically cramped to surface dwellers. The weather directly over the building is different from the weather in the rest of the neighborhood, and the building has been somehow partially destroyed by caustic liquid or boiling lava. Maybe something like the output of all those foundries?
 
Infinigrad: prevalent architecture 52, what's going on 19, atmospheric mutation 11
Fantasy house: trait 5, type 7/5, special 9
Fantasypunk megacity: raceoid base 3, physical quirk 1/8, mental quirk 2/9
 
"Old Foundry is a catastrophic industrial accident in slow motion, quite literally. In the hundred years since the final redundancy failed, perhaps 1½ seconds have passed. The cataclysm is still happening, still threatening to wipe out all life in every neighborhood that touches Old Foundry, and in every neighborhood that touches one of them. You can still hear the alarm bells ringing, a low bronze note that hums like thunder and never wavers."
 
"The old founders must have triggered one final failsafe to slow down the disaster so that someone could fix it before it was too late, and surely someone will, but not today, and probably not for another hundred years. For now, it's much cheaper, much more profitable to redevelop other boroughs, places where the sky isn't black and the air doesn't reek of sulfur and there aren't 10-story-tall crucibles midway though tumbling over, no tidal waves of molten iron hanging over the ground waiting to finish splashing down. The cleanup is going to be a logistical nightmare, and frankly, no organization exists within the city with enough employees and enough expertise to handle a problem on this scale. No one even comes close, no one is even in the right order of magnitude. So the problem waits for another day."
 
"The old founders sealed off the Foundry when they pushed the final button. All roads leading in or out of it are dead ends. From the outside, you might not notice that the buildings along one edge of your neighborhood form an impassible wall, but from the inside, it's obvious that Old Foundry is inside a sphere of black. Every factory and forge in the city has a secret entrance to the Foundry hidden in it somewhere, and if you aren't careful to go back exactly the way you came, you could end up halfway across town when you return. The whiskerers maintain their own network of entrances, as they do with most things, and it links up in innumerable ways to their larger network of underground tunnels."
 
"The whiskerers don't mind the dark, they like the warmth of the place, and time being near frozen doesn't seem to bother them much, they move so slowly anyhow. The only thing that would bother them is the dry, but recently they solved that too. The whiskerers have built a shanty town in Old Foundry right underneath one of the fire control stations. An entire water tower is slowly falling onto them, most days just enough lands to make a heavy mist, occasionally they get a light rain."
 
"The whole slum is centered around the Sensatorium, a kind of museum / performance art space. It's maintained by an onsite caretaker, who tends the tactile portraits and the haptic displays. The museum is filled with slow-time objects with unusual textures and properties. The centerpiece is a fireplace surrounded by dozens of sconces. The fireplace is the door to an industrial oven that was blown off in the disaster, with a blob of lava that landed right in its center just as time came to a halt. The sconces are dozes of pieces of ever-burning metal."
 
"The whiskerers collect dead bodies too, all the original workers, they carry them off somewhere. But unlike the Sensatorium - their pride - they share the location of the dead with no outsiders."

3 comments:

  1. Nice and evocative. I look forward to hearing more about Infinigrad.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Trey! Infinigrad is Michael's name for his city on his Lizard Man Diaries blog.

    It's different than anything I would make up without the input of the generators.

    Actually, it made me wish for the talent and patience to make architectural drawings like on Bearded Devil blog.

    ReplyDelete