This is a wizards tower in a giant, animated hermit-crab-like nautilus shell. Stands on what looks like too-few legs above a miasma of crackling haze, more legs go in than it stands upon below. The surroundings are lit by irregular flares of burning discharge running down the shell. A dreadful smell of grease and offal surrounds it. Within a cabal of mid-tier wizards boot-strapping their artificer expertise and elbow grease to take down their old master.
All rooms are stages of a process and extraction chain for god-flesh wrenched from an colossal extradimensional being captured in some of the towers claws that protrude beyond sight. Everything shakes and shudders in its death-throes.
Everything here is hazardous, the crew/workers will freak out at people acting dangerously but are mostly too occupied with not dying themselves to actually care if people are moving through, as long as they are authorised. Authorisation checks can be as limited as a glance to confirm appropriate protective oil-skins and a purposeful walk.
Locations
1. Drilling - a series of derricks with plunging augurs, gantries spanning the space on multiple levels, deafening hissing and grinding noises, shouting workers, periodic bursts of high activity when everyone is focussed on un-hitching a god-flesh laden augur and screwing a new one in place on the drivers - then shifts to chores and lolly-gagging while it is run in again. Room is festooned with chains which are a trip hazard during quiet periods but snap suddenly taut during extraction, scything across the room unpredictably as augur sections are hauled up, un-hooked and hung onto gantries and hauled to the scrapers. Each augur section is 30' long and either razor sharp (clean) or massive with god-flesh and running with caustic ichors
2. Scrapers - a clanking, clattering room where flesh-laden augurs are cleared onto conveyors and the blades resharpened; bones and detritus are sorted away
3. Extraction arrival / safety baffles - here the fresh god-flesh is fed into wringers to capture the ichors and oils - mostly a deafening racket of grinding machines, occassionally squirt of flammable fluids as some gland is crushed and if you are very unlucky a simultaneous spark from some flinty nodule to produce a gout of flame to set the room burning.
4. Separation - ichors and oils are seperated by settling, the ichor being cleared off for secondary processes - here from long operations the tanks have built up sludge and debris at the bottom and continued use at the normal pace means all the walkways and gantries are now submerged in dark oil atop deep tanks of ichor. The workers know the way, including which of the gantries are too dangerous to trust with your weight any more.
5. Discharge reprocessing/recovery - ichor and flesh are recombined in macerators for rendering. Whirring blades scream as they hack at tougher parts of the god-flesh, the room is filled with the smell of smoldering lubricants and metal dust as the macerators struggle. New drums of blades frequently lower into place and hammering rings out as the old blades are knocked loose for sharpening and repair.
6. Primary production cleansing - gurgling oils are filtered through layers of finer and finer mesh where workers with sweeps scrape off the contaminants left behind. Trolleys of recovered bits slam down channels in the floor as they are shoved back towards reprocessing/recovery
7. Rendering - macerated flesh is heated to render out fats. Vats boil at hundreds of degrees, before high pressure rams squeeze yet more ichors and humours out. Searing steam and acidic bilious vapours regularly vent into the room. Leaning against one of the hot vessels would be a terrible idea.
8. Distillation - fats and oils brought to the distillation columns for careful heating and collection of the different qualities. A quieter room with huge columns, watched over by the most senior workers as the finest of distillates are recovered. Intruders unwelcome here on superstition their bad thoughts will disrupt the smoothness of the process.
9. Reservoirs/storage - many great cannisters with complex piping and valves above and below to receive and then transfer the many grades of ichors, oils and humours. Workers steal a quiet rest here where they can find a nook, very cranky at being disturbed. Periodically cursing overseers trawl for missing workers, likely to press-gang anyone they find to whatever work-crew they find short.
10. Cannister charging with product - busy with workers, piles of cannisters empty cannisters, workers sorting and selecting cannisters, filling them from many nozzles along the walls, maintenance crews, shouting overseers and rattling trolleys of filled cannisters
11. Distillation run-off cracking for recycling - complex apparatus operating in blistering heat, workers with long handled tools carefully operating valves as others shout gauge readings from high gantries. Constant motion, noise like an open-call trading floor.
12. Sludge incineration - cellar of the facility, great rumbling furnace, eerie shrieking noises, workers sweating in protective clothing tipping waste products into this incinerator to power the rest of the facility
13. Outbound export - a fragment of a shattered tower clamped in the middle of a room with a gantry leading to the corruscating portal in the middle of it. Expedition groups forming up with cannisters and breaching gear, storming out through the portal and returning frequently with empty cannisters and wounded
14. Byproduct sorting - the many offcuts, byproducts and other non-useable things get decanted, boxed, extruded and otherwise prepared - some go to the refectory, others to the incinerator, the workshops, or the markets.
15. Market facility - dimensional flux exhausts create semi-stable pathways to planar-thin nexi - merchants from those come for the byproducts on sale. Resident traders argue prices, typically how much low value things they will haul away for how many precious bits.
16. Worker residences - packed, greasy, stinking - busy at shift changes, quiet between them. Racks of bunks partitioned by leathery curtains. Any noise louder than a quiet conversation outside of shift change will be met with cries to shut the hell up. Though unseen, anyone entering is immediately aware that there are many, many people in close proximity
17. Workshop / gear cleaning and storage / suit up room - racks of equipment, tubs of useful reagents and materials and busy crafts-workers sharpening blade, hammering tools back into shape and maintaining all the protective gear that the crew goes through. Continuous traffic of workers at end of shift dropping off filthy or damaged gear and picking up fresh replacements for start of next shift. Smells strongly of lubricants and burnt leather.
18. Refectory - a generous canteen with a benches that are never empty and often rammed at meal times. Always something hot available to eat here, non-godflesh goes quickly. Strangers will be watched closely that they do not take the best bits. What is 'best' is subject to a wide range of opinion.
19. Control room - Boards pinned with schematics and lots of charts crewed by careful draftsfolk. Frequent, hurried traffic of messengers bearing whispered updates for the charts and getting orders in response. Always a mage on duty here. Tense atmosphere of a bunch of knowledgable people operating explosive machinery well past its design life and safety margins.
20. Maneuvering room - complex necro-arcane apparatus extrude from leg casings into this room - a deeply counter-intuitive control panel with many unlabelled valves controls movement. Incomprehensible gauges, horizon-bubbles, compasses and gyroscopes are watched carefully by the crew in here as they rebalance the present and extra-planar legs to retain grip on both reality and the god-whale. Atmosphere like the bridge of a submarine stalking a foe.
Design notes - inspired by the most complicated mash-up of oil drilling rig, processing platform and floating liquid-natural-gas facility I could think of together with terrible safety standards and no downtime for maintenance. Watch some videos of unsafe behaviours from oil-drilling and picture that but with less room to move and even worse safety practices.
This is a cool concept, industrial facilities lend themselves well to dungeon crawls, and with whales you get a grimy biopunk-y thing and can lean into ethical stuff and in this case since it's a God whale it might be able to communicate with the party. If you're ever in Anchorage Alaska, the Anchorage museum has some good stuff on the history of oil drilling. In particular I was captured by the idea of pipeline pigs, might be a fun element to add to this in some way.
ReplyDeleteI have liked the idea of badly run facilities behind as hazardous as a trapped dungeon for a while.
DeleteThere is definite potential in the horror of the long pipeline crawl to deal with a rogue 'pig' - see Aliens for a great example.
I like this, but I think I would find it hard to run without a bit more maps or description. I realise this is just a quick bit of work for Blaugust, but I'd be interested if you ever had time to work it up more fully
ReplyDeleteI have been hammer down trying to do Glaugust but yes indeed, I think this one has potential and I might try to work it up some more in future (and blog the results of course)
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