19 January 2020

The Shifting Sand Tower from Towers of Krshal

Towers of Krshal turned up - had it printed from Lulu and read it avidly.

To test run the tables I set out with the tower generator to see what I could create as a spare tower for Sholtipec

Following down through the tables give me an unexpected 17m tall single story tower with an accessible roof. Relatively ordinary round, stone walls, inhabited by ordinary townsfolk and with 2 levels of basement.

So what have we here?

First off accessible roof means that we can somehow traverse the whole tower - obviously it has a dangerous spiral stair running up the interior of the walls. Why one ludicrously tall single room - because there is something suspended from the ceiling in it. An orrery or difference engine, maybe a hive or other thing the inhabitants or tending. This place is not a temple, or cult, whatever the inhabitants are up to it is odd but secular.

I think we have a pendulum based seering engine here - with the apparatus hanging in webs and chains from the top of the tower; its progress across the floor of the room dictating the activities of the inhabitants.

The apparatus is a complex sand cascade, with many colours of sand being fed into the top of the apparatus and their paths through the structure modified by the tick of the pendulum and the shifting of its parts. The blends of the sand, the intensity of the colours and where it lands on the floors provide weather forecasts, crop timings, and other 'almanac' factors that guide the inhabitants throughout there lives.

The basement is filled with all of the reference books.

Some of the reference books have never been opened in the life time of the current inhabitants; some reservoirs of sand have never flowed in all that time. Some streams are beginning to turn up now; flecks of dark bone, greenish metal. None of the inhabitants know what this means and have found no references in the books of the first cellar. They have not yet ventured into the locked second cellar yet, noone has since the last invasion from beyond the ocean.

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