Words &c.

Having returned to Ashland for the rest of the winter, I've broken out my print copy of How to Host a Dungeon (a Boxing Day gift from the inimitable Shadowminister) and made my trek to the Dollar Tree for multicolored pens and beads.

As it happens, the Dollar Tree is bafflingly lacking in small colorful bits of plastic. Thus I have settled for glass beads (white tokens) and incense cones (black tokens).


The setup
(All these photos are up at Flickr.)

The Primordial Age:
The forces of nature slowly stir the underbelly of the world for untold eons. While the surface world ripples as mountains sprout and continents split, a land of caverns opens up below.


That's a lot of plague.

The Age of Civilization
Long before the nations of Man, Elf or Dwarf arose, the denizens of the Netherworld waged ruthless and brutal war upon one another. Ten archfiends, rather than face the tortures traditionally inflicted upon the losing side in a devil's war, tore open a gate to our world. Emerging in the darkness of the caves below, they began to forge a new Hell Below Earth. Thus began for them the first year of the Daemonic Epoch.

1 DE (year 1): With great violence a pit opens in the bowels of the earth, splitting basalt asunder to accommodate the Hellmouth. The Pit would serve as the staging grounds for the vilest blasphemies against nature.
The Ten Demon Princes used the flesh and souls of lesser fiendlings to create the Tunnel Worm. Before the year was out, the flesh and soul of the tenth Demon Prince has been added to this automaton.
The Tunnel Worm burrows upwards, the Demon Princes seeking to ravage and corrupt the world of light above. An immense cave of gemstones is discovered, but they initially serve only as food for the Worm until Maganth sensed their well hidden mystic properties. He realized the underground river which this cave of gems connected to was one of the arteries of the world, and the gems held immense power. Thus did he build his Soul Mill there, content to feast upon the ancient spirits trapped within the gems and flowing within the river.
Sensing an immense undergrown lake above, the Demon Princes steer the Tunnel Worm around it, and at its edge find a cave within which a foul, sickening presence resides. This appeased Dammoroth, and he carved out the palatial Bile Pit, seeing no reason to leave such a paradise for him.

20 DE (year 2): A Demon Prince jealous of Dammoroth brought forth an army to take the Bile Pit for his own. He was thrown down, and his corpse is now a breeding grown for new pestilences of Dammoroth's devising.
Above the Bile Pit of Dammoroth, below the springs which the plague Dammoroth was so drawn to had poisoned for eons, the Demoness Naeir built her Soul Mill that she may continue the cycle of lust and hate that had kept she and Dammoroth together for centuries.
Sensing a rich source of meat and mortal souls, the Demon Princes continued to drive the Tunnel Worm on. They finally fell upon the Primordials - beast-like beings that had carved out a city in the caves just below the surface, making the first society. The gory bas reliefs of their conquests indicate the Primordials wielded magics, but not any that could match the Three Princes.
The Primordials they did not slay and remake into mindless servants they twisted into demonic mockeries with fel sorceries. Their very souls corrupted, the Primordials were set to work creation the war machines with which the Three Princes sought to raze the surface.

164 DE (year 3): With the mithril of the caves, the Three Princes created the Infernal Engine, a huge device of unknown properties. The mithril used to forge it is corrupted by hellish energies, and anything smithed from its remains will invariably twist its user's soul.
The Demon Prince Astaerus, seeking to be unquestioned King of the new world, sought to turn the Infernal Engine upon his kin. He was cast down, and his very essence torn from his body. Taking the greatest shaman of the Primordials - now a foul servitor of their will - they infused him with Astaerus's power. Thus the corrupt Primordial became the Seventh Prince.
The Demon Princes were now at the height of their power. Their foul instruments of suffering now pierced the skin of the world, drawing away its power to fuel its own destruction. In factories the corrupted Primordials toiled away to build the Infernal Engine which would scourge the world of all that was good.
The demon Gygys retired below, content to send his spirit to explore the darkest secrets of the Beyond while his Soul Mill powered the forges above and stained the arteries of the world with fouled blood from the Charnel Shrine. Another prince drew the ire of the Three, and they bound him within the Infernal Engine.
Now the Three Princes gathered their armies, and prepared to make a new Hellworld.



(Next post will be forthcoming this weekend, once I've made mathematics scream uncle.)