JJ climbed into his skimmer, it rising on a faint hum of agravs. "Unable to access the Directory for this area" ze commented. "Looks like it has been a long time since the last scheduled maintenance out here." Sprouting binoculars, a thermal viewer and a radar dome, ze swiveled back and forth. "Visibility limited, excess thermal bloom, noteable EM interference, unable to determine route. I recommend we move away from the Zig, then try again."

08:44, Today: JJ rolled 9 using 2d6+2.  Shapeshift.
08:44, Today: JJ rolled 5 using 2d6+2.  Pathfinding.

As the others seemed to be talking again this time about who should be a guide The Duke starts to wander off. This place was strange. No walls and not even a ceiling. It was so unnatural The Duke needed to assert its dominance over these strange things roaring at the lack of a ceiling and stomping on the rocks to show them this was The Dukes turf now. And he even runs off to smash one particular rock outcropping thats giving him a strange look his new toys hissing as they activate and the rock is beaten into dust with one mighty blow before he gives it a small nudge with his foot.

"That will teach you!! Never look like that at me and my friends again!!"

JJ makes zir new input-gathering sensory organs just a little too sensitive, and is unable to determine that any one direction might be better to go than another... (JJ, temporarily befuddled, gets -1 to zir next roll...)

Still, at least The Duke has officially left The Ziggurat... Progress-- of a sort-- is definitely being made...
This message had punctuation tweaked by the GM at 13:47, Fri 20 Dec 2019.

Grigori takes the driver's seat of his walker and looks at Anchorite, "Welp, you heard her, she deserves worhip." He shrugs, "So I vote you. You should be our guide." He opens an enormous journal that he produces from his lap and begins to leaf through the pages, "Now let me see here."

OOC:  Roll for insight into how we should choose our path to find the Cloister.
This message was last edited by the player at 14:30, Sat 21 Dec 2019.

(Insightful check: 08:49, Today: The GM, on behalf of Grigori, rolled 13 using 2d6+3 ((5,5)).)

Grigori, examining his journal, decides that the best thing to do is to check the transmitter station that helped pass the coded message along from The Cloister to The Ziggurat.

The transmitter station in question is to the east... suggesting that wherever The Cloister is, it might not be WEST of The Ziggurat.

And since the transmitter station demonstrably still exists, and is at least partly functional, then going there might allow the expedition to get one or more additional clues regarding the exact location of The Cloister.

"It would appear that the message that reached us from the cloister most likely was relayed through our near eastermost transmitter station, a rare and poorly understood technology to be sure!" He shuts the book and tucks it back into his robes, "We should head there post-haste if we are to pick up the trail at the most logical point. Perhaps there we can begin to triangulate the origin and continue to follow a trail of breadcrumbs." Grigori futzes with the controls of the walker and it jostles as it dips to allow easy access to the third seat, "Lead the way, Anchorite Tearful. Would anybody else like to come aboard?"
This message was last updated by the GM at 15:26, Sat 21 Dec 2019.

Having neutralized all nearby potential enemies after squashing them into piles of rock dust The Duke now was looking around for more dangers. And then suddenly came to a horrible conclusion.

"We forgot the food storage!!! I got to protect it!!!"

And with that he seems to be fully intend to return back inside to go do just that.

The Duke goes back and gets a box of rations. The box itself keeps things cool and warm things warm. If rationed properly, the rations inside should be enough to feed the expedition for weeks.

The Duke hauling the provisions decides its easiest to park his ward in the skimmer and puts the box in one of the free seats while squeezing hiomself into the vehicle and proceeds to accertain that the goods are properly secured mostly by transferring them to his internal vault.

JJ sent the skimmer hissing off to the east, circling back every so often to wait for the walker.

While it's true that the walker isn't as fast as the skimmer, it's surprisingly fast, considering, so the disparity between the two vehicles isn't SO bad...

One thing that should be amazing is when the expedition gets a mile or two away from the eastern wall of The Ziggurat, because it's only then that one can really appreciate just how huge the thing is. It's one thing to say "Although its center is mostly empty, The Ziggurat is several miles high and about twice as wide/long," and to accept intellectually that that's true, and it's another to see from the outside just how huge the thing is. It's as high as a very, very high mountain, and, as mentioned, about twice as wide. It's really very large-- and lit up, too, like a tourist attraction.

Of course, as also mentioned, it SHOULD have been amazing... but Aesop and Anchorite Tearful had already seen it before, and if the others were not impressed, one might not find it entirely surprising, since the inhabitants of The Ziggurat are, in general, a difficult-to-impress bunch.

(First: tell me how your character feels about leaving The Ziggurat, and seeing it behind them, very, very slowly growing a tiny bit smaller with every mile...

Second: If anyone would like to use the OUTSIDE THE ZIGGURAT playbook to say what the expedition finds/encounters once they're about 15 miles away from The Ziggurat in the hopes of getting a reward, go ahead, first-come first-post. (Feel free to be super-weird.)

If no one does in a few days, I'll use it to post myself...)

The Duke was working hard to protect the goods inside the container. At first it was easy as The Dukes internal storage was empty and beyond a glare at the JJ thing to make sure it had no interest in stealing what he was protecting and stuffing into his mouth, making sure any crumbs and spillage dropped back into the container so there was really no waste. By the time the Duke can not secure anymore of the food he licks his fingers clean and closes the cooler tightly like a pirate taking care of his treasure chest before he looks around and his gaze clings to a tower of shiny lights in the distance. A massive sob seems to bubble up from deep below and as he starts to cry he sings twinkle twinkle little star in a creepy tone. Its a contagious sadness as even the area around them starts to produce the melody for the song a sourceless haunting tune thats carried by an audible wind thats not there at all and that spreads a bitterness into everyones mouth like ash and despair. And the more The Duke sings the harder he cries wallowing in the sadness and its like his sadness manifests around them. Dead trees in which here and there a corpse softly swings in the non existend breeze their bodies no more then mare skeletons and at the end of the song the vehicles find themselves in a clearing with an ancient looking wooden house straight from a horror movie with a single candle behind the window.


ooc: Hope this is whats intended.
Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up2Texzg_Is

(Interesting... The Duke gets an extra +1 (which will stack, if need be) on his next roll, and other good things might be coming his way later...)

Dead trees abound, save in the clearing in which you find yourselves... Do you:

--try to navigate beyond them? or

--investigate the wooden house? or

--do something else...?
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:24, Fri 27 Dec 2019.

Again, sitting aloof and distant within the back seat of the walker, The Lady gazed out the window at the unnatural landscape that was the ‘outside the Ziggurat’.   She remembered when humanity used to live out here ... so very, very long ago.
When things were less certain in their lives, and they prayed to fortune and luck to bring them the resources they needed to survive; or prayed that the great beasts did not find them.

Now, within the Ziggurat, they wanted for nothing, and feared nothing ... except each other.

She missed those times, when her blessings meant something.
When she meant something.


She took no steps to lead this expedition.   One didn’t worship a leader: they simply were the one that made the hard decisions, and received no gratitude or love for doing so.

Instead, she watched the glowing mountain slowly diminish (ever so slowly) behind them as they travelled away from their home.
Her home?   She guessed so, head days.
She was nothing without the worship and attention of sentient beings ... and that’s where the sentient (for lack of a better word) brings were these days.  Right?

But they didn’t love her.
And now, maybe, there were others out there that she might find.
New beings who’s worship she might receive, and return to them in the form of her blessings.

Make so she turned her eyes forward, rather then back.
She watched the nearby trees, and saw within them the withered spirits of nature that had once flourished upon this land.
They looked as dry and unloved as she felt.

And the sorrowful so that drifted about them, brought a tear to her eye ... for herself, and all the once-mighty anthopromorphs of the world.


Soon enough, a ‘cabin in the woods’ appeared before them.
With Luck, it could be a great boon to the expedition ... but without any love, without any attention or worship, The Lady had none to bestow.

Grigori drives very distractedly, had swiveling every direction as he crashes through the trees. One hand is busy jotting notes on a long scroll as the walker bounces and jostles, following the path that JJ scouts out. His companions inside the walker have barely responded to the mumbled stream-of-consciousness narrative that is dribbling out of Grigori's mouth as they've made progress.

An unnerving song approaches from the direction JJ is scouting and Grigori slows the walker with some trepidation. "Do you hear that?" He asks, tucking the pen he'd been using behind his ear and rolling rhe scroll up quickly so he could put two hands on the controls. "Keep your eyes open. They say the things that sing in the Outside are terrible or wonderful, but very rarely adiaphorous. Let's hope this is a member of the latter group."

The walker makes slow progress through the last several hundred feet of dead trees before coming upon the cabin and discovering the source of the singing was The Duke.

Terrible, indeed. That big one seems madder and madder by the minute! He thinks to himself, taking in the scene of the clearing. I wonder if this is one of those houses....

Insight into this house

Something bothers Grigori about the house, but he cannot put his finger on it... Then he does. The house is perfectly like an illustration from a book for young children that Grigori recalled from his youth.

What could this mean? Grigori had heard rumors of sections of the world affected by long-ago psychic warfare... could this area be one of those theorized to respond to human thoughts and emotions...?

"Hmmmm..." Grigori's hand strokes his long beard in the walker's cockpit. Duke's song ends and the woods fall quiet save the sound of the skimmer and walker's engines. He taps the windshield with one long finger and speaks, "That house is familiar..." He wracks his memory for a point of reference, the house's image chases itself from neuron to neuron until he finally pegs it down, "Like an illustration brought to life."

His eyes narrow as he recalls rumors of psychically active sections of the Outside. He looks from one side of the clearing to the other, "This may be a construction, quick, look for something familiar. If this is what I think it is we could be in danger." His thoughts flash quickly to what may be hiding in the subconscious of some of his compatriots, the id of The Duke, the inscrutable Lady, the alien shape-shifting neophyte. He hopes that his mind is the only one that has been mined so far.

OOC: If we have them available, Grigori would broadcast this question to those outside of the walker as well (either radio if there is wireless comms or loudspeaker if he'd have access to one of those) otherwise, is there a window I can roll down and shout?

(OOC: I'm fine with the two vehicles having comm systems so that the two sets of passengers are able to communicate with one another.)

The Duke having overcome his sadness is now wiping the snot from his nose with the back of his hand and admires the green glob for a second before wiping it on the seat of the skimmer. Then the wordspinner calls out this place might be dangerous and he is on alert. If the house was dangerous The Duke will fix it. He works his massive bulk out of the skimmer and when not obstructed in any way will barge through the houses door to find and neutralize the danger.

The Duke attempts to leave JJ's skimmer...

Will JJ lower the skimmer to facilitate this...? Or...?

(OOC: I'll wait just a little while for a reaction...)

JJ lowered the skimmer, in fact ze landed it, moving to back Duke up.

The cottage drawn to her attention, The Lady leans forward for a better look through the walker’s windshield.
Grigori’s assertion that it might be dangerous ... an illusion, a trap^(?) ... makes her very curious.

And so when The Duke and JJ land, exit their vehicle, and move towards the place, she watches on with anticipation.
This message was last edited by the player at 06:07, Wed 01 Jan 2020.

(The Duke, roll Forceful please (in your case, 2d6 +2))

ooc: Knock Knock!!

Shouldn't i also use my +1 from setting the scene as its my first roll after getting it or can i apply it at any time?

11:31, Today: The Duke rolled 8 using 2d6+2 with rolls of 1,5.  Forcefull.

(Good question... my intention was that it would just be on your next roll (less bookkeeping that way. So, 9.))

The entire front of the house shatters like glass.

The Duke is now Somewhat Wounded due to falling shards of sharp... house material.

Inside the house can now be seen, amongst various other rooms (it's like looking into a giant open dollhouse now), a primitive kitchen, where an old woman is stirring something on a stove. "...Oh, visitors," she says. "How careless. That'll have to be fixed, you know. Who's going to pay for it...?"