The Great Discape Arises From the Deep!

Micah did the cover!

Almost two years ago I came up with a silly little setting. "What if Planescape, but also Discworld"?

You can download it now! It's 36 pages of setting tables, primed and ready to plop down wherever you see fit. 180 monsters! 180 locations! A quest generator!

Enjoy, everyone.

(If you find any mistakes let me know and I can fix them)

Project Updates for 2019

With the new year of 12019 upon us (Holocene Era calendar for life), here's some of the stuff I've been working on and hopefully will be working on in the future.

Unicorn Meat

(This is a module about an abandoned backwoods factory farm for unicorns that has gone full True Detective / LISA the Painful)

The first draft of the module is complete, but first drafts have a way of revealing to you that completion is a fair way away. I've got potential revisions all written down and ready for addition once the mental batteries recharge.

The main change will be one of framing and focus. All of the playtests so far have been about a adventuring party happening upon the events at the farm, and this has brought with it issues of motivation and confusion of what to do. To address this, I feel that a switcheroo is in order: "carvergirls attempting to escape the farm" gets bumped up to the primary hook, while "adventurers from the outside" gets bumped down the list.

All the rest is just cleanup and reorganization of what I've already got down, with a bit of expansion where needed. With the carvergirls bumped up as the primary player option adding a Nightwatch class and their spells is going to happen.

There's a ways to go, but I'm excited. It's gonna be great.

The Great Discape

(This is a weirdo setting of a bunch of strange places on the back of a giant whale.)

I haven't forgotten about it.

The Danscape, while loads of fun to play and run,was a bit of a big, unguided mess. Setting was so big that it might as well not have existed or could have been a single planet, maybe even within walking distance. The 100-long list of species went mostly untouched and unused. It's all diluted, and in the heat of the moment it is too much for a DM to use adequately on the fly.

I had some thoughts of paring the setting down, perhaps adding the Wanderers as the main races, but that didn't come to fruition.

Because I've already got a project with "scape" in it already. (Draft here.)

After some feedback from folks and a good time of thinking, I've got some notions of combining the two, so that everyone is far less confused about everything.

Some ideas and edits that have taken hold.

• Cutting down the number of major regions - already done in the draft, down to 14.
• Adding a list of minor regions (which will include abridged versions of those cut)
• Consolidating the places of note from Danscape to Discape.
• The Discape itself is made of dead gods, because why not?
• There is no off switch to the K6BD influences.
• Filling out the Discape with some more random tables.
• There was that huge race table made for the Danscape. I don't think it will be added in, but I'll figure something out for it.

One of the advantages of jumping from half-baked project to half-baked project is that you can occasionally bake an entire project out of the pieces.

Mother Stole Fire

(This is my "default" fantasy setting)

Broad-view plans for all this is to make a sort of setting gazetteer, in the vein of Chromatic Soup. A map of the Olen River Valley adventure region and a series of background equipment kits have been sketched out and I've got a decent short list of  pre-existing posts to polish and throw together.

Untitled Post Apocalyptic Project

(This has yet to be made)

There is in my head the shape of a game. An apocalyptic game, but after a revelatory apocalypse rather than a destructive one. Fit for fighting monsters and paranormal investigation, but more in the vein of Hellboy and the BPRD than Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green. Something that scratches the Degenesis itch more than a hack can.

If Hellboy + Dreamlands + Esoteric Enterprises + Degenesis + Warframe for some fucking reason sounds like a good time to you, this is one to keep tabs on.

Games I Want to Run

Got plenty of stuff on the docket for this year, but the main plans are:

• Mothership - Got plenty of stuff to use already and I can't wait to get started.
• Warhammer 40k via SWN - Using John B's excellent little hack, I can finally knock 40k off the bucket list.
• DCC - Want to try a longer campaign on this one, I've got plenty of material for it. Once my copy of Chained Coffin comes in that'll definitely see some use.
• Other stuff - Who knows? There shall always be more opportunities.

The Great Discape: Bestiary, 3-of-3

(Bestiary Part 1 and Part 2)

Second from the left senses something amiss with this bread.

Grancia

Locals: Grumpy, damp peasants.
Wrestler: Sheriff & Hood – Heel / face tag team ordered by the king to work together.
Encounters:

1. Band of pilgrims – We crossed paths with a sizable and rowdy company, and the meeting was agreeable all around. A member of their party was going on and on about writing a grand story about it all, though he did not seem a particularly reliable character to me.
2. Hedge Knight & Squire – With the war dragging on, it was not uncommon to find deserters and masterless knights plying their services for a few coins.
3. Holy Fool – They are, save some hooting and hollering at your expense, harmless. It is best to agree with their jeers, laugh along, and perhaps leave them something to eat. Good treatment of one of the mad innocents goes over well in the community.
4. Questing Beast – Head of a snake, body of a leopard, voice like a pack of baying hounds. An ever-popular target among knights errant and eccentric. I met many who had gone out is search of it, and the contraptions and techniques they utilized were singularly mad.
5. Termagant – No one I have spoken to is quite sure what this creature is, but all agree that it is some terrible man-eating beast worshiped as a god in foreign parts, wherever that may be. Claws like swords, burning eyes, and teeth like shields are also agreed upon.
6. A very clever goat – I swear upon Skarl’s red drum this goat was following me. Three towns I saw it in, and each time it was standing alone in the road ahead, staring at me!
7. Sword Naiad – Native to freshwater lakes, they are boisterous and combative, and love throwing swords at people on the shore. They will avoid doing so for young girls, and instead hand them the swords directly.
8. Snail Errant – Two and a half to three feet tall at the shell, they get into places that snails are not meant to go. One might find them stuck to the ceiling of a cottage, crawling through the pews in church, or saddling up to joust.
9. “Dragon” - The king’s spectacular trophy was, alas, little more than a stuffed and mounted alligator. I declined to tell him this, as he was as giddy as a schoolboy about it.
10. Actual Dragon – A majestic creature, and made all the more majestic by putting significant distance between myself and it.

Everyone here is tripping out of their minds.

Adura

Locals: Sex, drugs, rock-and-roll; bloodthirsty, entitled, deviant.
Wrestler: MAXIMUS MAXIMUS – Craven crowd-pleaser and town bicycle.
Encounters:

1. Beast with Two Bellies – These perfumed chimeras wander the streets, offering their many services for coin. Unlike most in Adura, they are free from masters or obligations.
2. Tortured Oliphaunt – Long years in the Colosseum had broken this magnificent creature. Even its retirement now to a nobleman’s garden could bring no relief, as passersby find it amusement to throw trash into its enclosure.
3. Devil-Worshipper – Devil cults come in two varieties: those that shed blood to avoid notice, and those that shed blood to be noticed. They love nothing more than fighting each other, as it one side is dying for the sake of the other no matter how it’s looked at.
4. Slave Neonate – People recently and forcibly invested in a mystery cult. Utterly obedient to their superiors, cruel and violent when left to their own devices. Eat a specialized diet soaked in mind-altering substances. Eyes lack pupil or iris, being an ever-shifting mix of colors. Popular among the nobility as servants and guards of their latifundia.
5. Escaped White Lion – Its eyes rolled with desperate panic as it tore through the marketplace. I could see the gashes in its hide where the demons possessing it had begun to leak.
6. Deserter Legionnaires – Deserters are everywhere, and hunted often for sport as much as law. Several of the bands claim to wear their old colors in loyalty for a supposed heir building strength out in the wilderness, but that is unlikely as clean or as clear as claimed.
7. Underpaid, bored mercenaries – The noble houses of Adura tend to hire from Terc, Grancia, and Carabrandt, offering promises of gold and narcotics. They deliver on their promises, but never enough.
8. Unbound House God – Chaos-banking practices have left the a great number of fabulous villas to rot. Without a family to tend the hearth, the inhabiting lares inevitably go mad.
9. Equine Senator – The madman made his horse a senator, and the beast is the best statesman in the country. I spent an entire afternoon listening to a horse make whinnying noises to a crowd in the forum and I cheered.
10. The Emperor, mid-assassination – As I heard it: “The emperor passed by an oracle one day, and was warned of the day of his death. He took the warning to heart and has been leading his assassins on a chase for the last forty years, or thereabouts.”

Somewhere inside, books are being thrown and a senator is being hit over the head with a chair leg.

Nam Pheiroc

Locals: Straightlaced, stubborn, proud, puritanical, loud, varied.
Wrestler: The Founding Father – beloved political pastiche character.
Encounters:

1. Doughboy – The Republic used these homunculi as foot soldiers a generation or so ago. Most have retired now: you’ll find a few still as soldiers or police, but more often I saw them as handymen, farmers, or day laborers.
2. Tyrannocygnus Rex – There’s no beast nastier in all the Great White North. Their migration south leaves a path of destruction made worse by the return trip – livestock devoured, trees torn up, shit everywhere. The government pays a bounty per head.
3. Baron Blue Aurochs – Along the frontier it’s common enough to see wagons the size of houses pulled by these beasts. They are surprisingly well-tempered, leading to their usage as mascot for logging companies and inns up and down the Tinnemank Line.
4. Melon Heads – According to folklore, they are the inbred offspring of some of the first colonists and the Locals. Potentially true, though I am uncertain. Less uncertain is that the meanest witches in all the Republic hail from their mountain villages in the backwoods of coalmining country.
5. Jersey Cow Devil - The cow stood up on its hind legs, let out a shriek as if a woman dying, and beat in her farmer’s skull with a hoof. By the time Hans and Harold had run out of the barn she had already flown off on blood-slick wings.
6. Montauk Monster – A hairless, beaked thing that will wash up on riverbanks and beaches. After a few hours of apparent death, it will animate, grow black and gray striped fur, and trundle off into the woods. I have yet to find one dead of natural causes.
7. Minuteman – A sort of embossed metal plate with a ghost trapped inside it. They are equipped with saber and musket, but can only maintain their form a minute at a time after they have been triggered. Used during the forming of the Republic.
8. Thunder Eagle – Primarily white, with brown and red stripes on the flight feathers. Produces thunderclaps when it beats its wings.
9. Appleseed Giant – Tall, broad, ruddy, bearded. Allies of apple dryads, they plant orchards wherever they wander. If you hear singing over the hills regularly interrupted by spitting, it’s most likely a Red Johnny.
10. The Cracked Bell – The original is enshrined in the capital, but replicas can be found in courthouses and church steeples across the Republic. The tone they make when hit is alien to the nature of musical arts: I was struck by a painful headache and a bloody nose upon hearing it for the first time, though no one around me seemed to be effected. No symptoms occurred the second time.

From the Würm RPG.

Pleistos

Locals: Swarthy, stout, hirsute.
Wrestler: All-Father – Longtime, well-respected veteran. Mentor of heroes.
Encounters:

1. Fighting Irish Elk - A rowdy beast, always looking for a good scrum. They practice their secret cervine battle-arts constantly, awaiting the next fight for territory and mates. I have even seen them attempt fisticuffs! (Though their gigantic antlers make this difficult).
2. Glacier-Clinger – Their limbs are hooked, to provide purchase on the icy cliff face. A long beak is used to drill into the ice to seek the red bacterial bleeds that serve as their primary source of nourishment. They can glide short distances on flaps of skin.
3. Paraceratherium – Domesticating one is a task only a few can manage. Success, however, is marked with a great and lasting honor to their clan. I met with an old man whose grandfather’s grandfather tamed one, and still the chiefs of other tribes honor him with gifts.
4. Pyroestatic – Mastery of fire brings a greater power with it. The spirit is set ablaze: the eyes burn, the voice sparks, what is old and dead is burnt away and there is only the light of reaction. Ah, freedom! Joy and life!
5. Sabretooth Stalker – A tusked lion that walks on its hind legs. Many of the local tribes believe that a witch can transform into the beast (and the other way around), so as to lay bloody curses on their neighbors.
6. Moss Mammoth – Their fur is heavy with green from the plants that call the gentle beasts home. In the spring the flowers bloom pink and white, making a most beautiful sight as the herds pass by. A crown of moss mammoth flowers is often considered an offer of marriage. 
7. Murder Bird – Flightless birds that adore the act of killing. They will plan out their attacks in advance, for it is the only thing that gives them pleasure. Many make games of it, developing signature methods or calling-cards left for the grieving.
8. Eaters of the Dead – The dead are interred in sacred caves, so that they might not rise as these gray-skinned, yellow-toothed monsters. The woods at night are filled with their glowing eyes. It is common knowledge that killing one without destroying the heart in fire means that the cannibal’s spirit is free to possess another.
9. Story-Keeper – A man can only store so many stories – the greatest of the keepers have learned how they might hold onto a story when it is no longer in their head
10. Great White Buffalo – The goal is to hunt, to chase, never to kill. To seek it means to become greater, to be made wiser, to hone skills, to go beyond the horizon. Once a generation, certain young men and women go out from their homes to track it, and return with all the glories of kings.

All that's left after.

Lucabiel

Locals: Famished, diseased, clinging to life.
Wrestler: Big Oil – Heel. The man who sold the world.
Encounters:

1. Child-eater Rats – The protections are many – guard dogs, poisoned wastemeat, sigils and signs and talismans, armored cradles. The rats are too clever by half for these tricks.
2. Plague-Mold – Flooded buildings become breeding grounds for this particular rot. If the spores enter the lungs, one can look forward to a long future as a half-dead “blackspittle man”. The infection never kills outright, but it leaves in the victim a new voice, and song’s plucked out of memories not their own.
3. Abandoned Relief Worker – When the NGOs pulled out, they did so in a mad rush and piecemeal panic. Leftover supplies were scavenged and spent, leftover people found themselves with little to lose.  Their baby blue helmets and once-fine firearms are a varnish of the forgotten past over the barbarism they have embraced.
4. Arcology Crawler – The extraordinarily wealthy retreated into personal paradises when disaster struck, and took all of their treasures with them.  These armored eggshells are followed always by a crowd, either begging for scraps or howling for blood.
5. Dopamine Slug – The only source of joy and release from pain in this land. The slugdens are the center of the community; providing, food, shelter, guards, whores, and the daily fix. The slugfarmers are fantastically rich willing to pay handsomely for new breeds or a rival’s secrets.
6. Abbatoiran – Trained to cater to the richest of palates: panda foie gras. Tiger-eye soup. Manta-fin steaks. Mermaid caviar. Unicorn burger. With their clientele gone and their stocks vanished, they are left only with their knowledge of the knife
7. Favela Wobbegong – Children quickly learn to toss stones into flooded gutters before trying to cross, less they lose a foot. The sharks’ camouflage is a fine imitation of garbage.
8. Feral Designer Pet – Paradoxically, these freakish, shivering, bugeyed creatures have survived well in the absence of their masters. Perhaps they jumped ship to order rodentia, or they are simply too absurd to die.
9. Raggy-Man – Devil-figure of the local folklore. A man and a woman; the woman is described as once-beautiful, wearing a tattered evening gown, but now twisted so that her head faces the reverse of where her feet point. The man wears a hooded patchwork jacket, and bears a beard and eyebrows that cover everything of his face but his nose and too-wide mouth. They are seen in distant ruins, laughing, dancing, copulating, and always offering gifts of the past at terrible cost.
10. Pollutitan – Nameless fetus of Lucabiel, screaming for toxic pap, shuffling towards the City to be born.

Whisper to the Meat.

Carnesarx 

Locals: Red, pink, white. Fleshy, soft, strong.
Wrestler: The Butcher – A giant with a strange accent. Sells meat to the audience while in the ring.
Encounters:

1. Daggermite – They have a single sharp tooth by which they gouge out a burrow in beast-flesh. The locals use them as tools, though poor preparation or training leads to a knife that turns on its owner.
2. Leukocyte Ooze – Internal guardians of the Beasts and perpetual banes of bloodwells and marrowmines. Those who dig too deep are greeted with a flood of devouring white antibodies.
3. Lord of the Ring-Worms – The typical worm might range from the length of a finger to a hundred feet or so. The lords, dormant for millennia, grow to the rang of tens of miles in length. The one at Obrol-Duul is attracting cultists from all over the country, hoping to see its waking.
4. Saucemeister – A spongy creature on four stumpy legs that oozes a tangy brown substance – perfectly edible and quite tasty. Possibly a leftover wizard’s pet.
5. Gristle-Grinders – These creatures are mostly mouth and very little brain, with rows of teeth that spin like sawblades. If provided with food or some entertainment, they can be domesticated as guards or tick-hunters.
6. Bloodletter Nymphs – Their right arm is a slender blade of bone, which they use to carve open beastflesh so that they may lap up the blood. Their mouths and necks are stained red, and their breasts are dotted in scabs.
7. Leathercloaks – Traveling tanners, forever shrouded in their veils of hide. Many folk consider them untrustworthy, unwanted, and even semi-human – none of my interactions implied anything of the sort.
8. Acne-Imp – A fat, oily little pustule-puck. Grievously disgusting and proud of it. Personal punting record: 0 yards, on account of their propensity to burst.
9. Vegan Sabateurs – The introduction of invasive vegetable species to the local environment can wreck havoc on the local economy and society: tick farmers find their grazing lands decimated by broccoli, meatminers have to deal with veins of potatoes and carrots, haruspexes have no idea how to read omens from corn, and so on. As such, it is a favored tool of political agitators, who are often found hung by tendon-nooses declaring them as “leaf-eater”.
10. Rotwight –  Regions of sepsis create all manner of putrid undead, but the worst is by far the rotwight. A soul severed from its body, it is submitted to an effectively infinite amount of spiritual decay (being without matter, it cannot ever fully rot away), and the the result is an ever-fouler monstrosity.

01001001 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01111001 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00111111

Kybern

Locals: Pale, black plastic carapaces, dark and wiry hair.
Wrestler: The Database – Gimmick is jumping between bodies.
Encounters:

1. Maintenance Drone – The autonomous arm of the Central Processing Authority. They are fractal-finned spheres of black or white, with a red cyclopean eye. They float a few feet off the ground and might repair machinery under their glowing gaze.
2. Squatter-Killer – Residence outside of CPA-approved districts is a punishable offense, executed by sanctioned hunter-killer units. Shiny black tigers, eight legs and a gun-barrel head.
3. Datavore – I was repeatedly warned to host multiple backups of my work, in case the local antibodies failed. While paper was safe there was little to be had, the Kyberni computational machines have yet to shake off their self-evolved disease. I made do by writing very small.
4. Cablesquid – It does not require water to live, instead making its home inside air vents and duct work.
5. Pistonbird – They hunt for bugs by tapping their blunt beaks against pipes and server-frames, driving prey out of hiding. The tip of each flight wing bears a glowing white dot.
6. Fileworm – The other bane of record-keeping here are the worms – instead of simply devouring information outright, they will corrupt and impregnate it, and the spawn will continue the cycle.
7. Black-Cap Hackjaw – They use their powerful underbitten jaws to crack open server banks and eat the innards. Their heads are so large and heavy that they can easily be thrown off balance.
8. Orb-weaver Pirate – The pirate-spiders were the most reliable source of supplies and news from the outside.  They’re referred to by knowing locals as “my three problems”. Finding them is the first hurdle, affording them the second, and returning before the monitor drones notice your absence the third.
9. Rust-Eater – A scavenger of dying machines. The locals treat it as a sort of psychopomp, and so you will often see the placid beasts festooned with strings of lights and artificial garlands as they meander through the streets.
10. Servant Node – The CPA’s network does not reach everywhere in Kybern, despite claims to the contrary. These columnar servitors act as remote way-stations, powering and housing fleets of drones working in outlying regions.

O-wea-oh, whoa-oh.

Carabrandt

Locals: Elaborate dress covering up ecstatic self-mutilations
Wrestler: Maniac Machion – Gibbering lunatic, tore out his own eyes upon viewing his art.
Encounters:

1. Gilt Gargoyle – Misshapen monsters that lurk on eves and buttresses, with skins of gold leaf and pigeon shit. They know all your sins and love to remind you. On rainy days they take spit-shots at congregants on the steps below (with exceptional aim).
2. Formaldehyde Saint – The church keeps its virtuous dead in glass tanks, posed in poses of benediction. Impossibly valuable. The greatest cathedrals might have dozens of them. Children are often taught their mudras under a saint’s unseeing gaze.
3. Flagellant Atavist – Pain has stripped these hunchback’s minds down to the most reptile remnants. The priests officially denounce their actions, but make no moves to stop their preaching nor the growth of their movement.
4. God-Bearer – Virgin births are so commonplace that enterprising young women have set up support networks, where they meet weekly for coffee and to discuss the business of expecting divine beings: throwing up fire in the morning, prophetic dreams from the unborn, episodes of glossolalia, dealing with all the new and ridiculous titles men shower them with, and so on.
5. Prophet of Horns – Horns are a sign of divinely-granted insight. The fasting stylites cultivate them until they can no longer walk under the curling weight of their own inspiration.
6. Canonic Chirugeon – When they find a disagreement between the world and their law, they will change the world. Those who act contrary to the text must be pruned back into place. They dream of an eternal Orthodoxy, and would shift the Discape itself to create it.
7. Divine Cannibals – Their god made itself flesh (or was it imported from Carnesarx? The record is unclear) and they feast upon it. They commit their acts jovially and with decorum, but they maintain that there is no hope for the soul without it.
8. Tabernacle Moth – The interior of the cocoon is a site of transubstantiation. A man is put inside with the grubs, and months later is reborn anew. All wrongs remitted, all flesh cleaned.
9. Church-Drake – Sleepy, serpentine, and large enough to curl all the way around a cathedral until the doors are framed by the tip of its nose and the tip of its tail. Vibrant blue scales with a gold underbelly.
10. Knight-Absolver – They are sworn forever to mercy, and so may never injure. If they strike, they strike to kill. Their armor is ivory white, often muddied by slum-mud from their ministrations to the wretched and poor.

But what does it mean?

Jahan

Locals: Clean, chipper. White robes with splashes or shapes of primary colors.
Wrestler: The Visionary – Nice guy, cult following that might be a real cult.
Encounters:

1. Studio Familiar – Halfway between a lemur and a rabbit, about nine inches tall, can float through the air with ease. Seem to live for holding palettes and fetching brushes.
2. Eggshell Anklebiter – Sleek, white, hairless. A more refined form of a general pest. Personal punting record: 10 yards.
3. Dancing Silhouette – The shadows on the walls beckon me to join them. I admit, I did so for a time, dancing to the unheard tones of a band only they could hear. There is a loneliness to these creatures, trapped as they are in their walls.
4. Ear Worm – A slim parasitic worm that roots itself in the ear canal. Triggers the nerves there to create the illusion of constant music.
5. Gallery Shuffler – Placid, saggy skinned quadrupeds that are found mostly in rented warehouses and studio apartments. They feed on leftover ideas and are terribly incapable
6. Interpretative Monster – It has no set properties, changing in means and meaning depending on the observer. Each specimen has a mildly variegated appearance, meaning that not only will it possess different attributes to two different people, but no single person will encounter it in the same way twice.
7. Deconstructor  - Whatever they touch is broken down to fundamental parts. Signs are removed from their signifiers, chemical bonds dissolve. It appears as a black cloud of agitated vapor, occasionally swarming around the corpse of the man that released it.
8. Polluckite – A tornado made out of paint. If there was any body at the center of it I did not see it, having been blinded by most of a tube of Salubrious Seafoam No. 4.
9. Memeovore – They eat ideas, plucking them right out of the brain. This is quite interesting to watch, as they are able to mesmerize their victim, saw open their skull, pick out the ideas with the specialized grabbing fingers of the right hand, and safely-reattach the cranium in under three minutes.
10. Abstracticon – A collection of bright shapes arranged in the vague form of a flattened, cubist giant. They can only move sideways, being trapped in two dimensions, but yet can move sideways in any direction.

And that's the end of the bestiary. 270 / 270 entries.

(Image sources are, in order: Bayeux Tapesty, Pollice Verso by Jean Leon Gerome, Wikipedia Commons, Würm, aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Scorn, Procession of the Flagellants by Goya, and Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red by Mondrian.)

The Great Discape: Bestiary, 2-of-3

(Here is Part 1 of the bestiary)

Ia llrghoygh m'phughn blryrl phnu'ghrghn.

Pthnaghtoth

Locals: Gangly albinos, dark circles around pale red eyes.
Wrestler: The Innsmouth Watcher – Dour, depressive, immune to displays of kayfabe.
Encounters:

1. Polyp-Head – A clump of blood-red coral grows from the stump of the neck. Some of them still carry around their skulls in their claws, which have been scrimshawed in maddening Mandelbrot patterns. They are not violent, not normally. They aren’t trying to hurt you.
2. Carnivorous Mushroom – It is easy to get lost in a fungi forest, and even easier to lose one’s focus. Keep a careful eye on any mushrooms lower than your knees that are cream colored with brown mottling. If such a mushroom launches itself at you with its single, muscular foot (so as to bite a chunk out of you with the toothy mouth atop their cap), you have successfully found it.
3. Cave-Squid – These creatures live at the bottom of ravines, far out of the light. They are blind, translucent white, and large enough to bite a man’s head off, but are intelligent enough for animals. One could potentially trade food for something it has dredged out of the river.
4. Hemogifter – I have seen only one of these creatures, lounging on a cliff in the fitful sun. The ring of blood-swollen corpses around it, all incubating the creature’s larvae, dissuaded me from approaching further.
5. White Librarian – Knowledge is dangerous in Pthnaghtoth, and so it is given over to the White Librarians. They wander the land, dependent on what food and goods the townsfolk might leave out for them (No Librarian will come close to a settlement, and no one will come close to a Librarian). They keep their books chained and padlocked, and I saw one at a distance who kept his tomes impaled on metal spikes.
6. Moon-drunk Villagers – Under autopsy, the attackers’ brains were smooth as stones, except for a few that looked to be developing folds in regular clockwise spirals about half an inch across. My landlord, when pressed (for he knew a bit of Citycant) stated that they were ‘moon-drinkers’, and left it at that.
7. Bloody Tongue – It had no head or neck, just a hump with a gaping hole and a thrashing, wet-red tongue. It walked on its knuckles like an ape, and made a sound similar to a group of schoolchildren in a woodwind section. My guide said that we were lucky that only four of our porters and two mules were killed.
8. Black Goat – A bloated, bleating, eternally pregnant thing, spewing forth her misshapen legions. Their golden eyes are apparently a necessary component for curses. (Rumors of tantric worship rituals go unsubstantiated, though I have seen at least four children with slotted pupils and bristly beards)
9. Trapdoor Velvet Worm – One of these devoured my zorse! I had hardly set foot on the ground to rest when I found myself holding nothing but reins and a severed head! The slime, I found out soon after, was caustic enough to eat through my clothing – I had a great deal of explaining to do when I next arrived in town.
10. Shelled Shog – The protoplasm constantly bubbles and shifts, occasionally growing organs of sight or vocalization but generally remaining as an unformed mass that drags itself about by means of pseudopods. Its shell, which is a squat spiral shape and striped with bands of ocher, is used as building material in the rare occasions when it can be retrieved.

Live, die, repeat, deliciously.

Saccatose

Locals: Fat, toothless, brightly colored, sticky.
Wrestler: The Candy Clan – Rambunctious redneck family, three sons and Ma.
Encounters:

1. Snaggletooth Anklebiter – A superficially adorable variant of the anklebiter (Blue hair with light purple spots, teeth cannot fit inside mouth properly.) About as trainable as the typical anklebiter. Personal punting record: 13 yards.
2. Lord Fly – An ordinary housefly, now the size of an ordinary ox.
3. Peppermint Pincushion – If one can get past the spines, the eggs make for a good treat and freshen the breath.  Those who succumb to its poison will find themselves reeking of mint for weeks.
4. Gumdrop Ooze – Yellow and green are actively aggressive; red, blue, and orange are generally docile and can be domesticated. Purple is dumb by even ooze standards and seems to enjoy being eaten.
5. Sugar Sloth – One of these lived in the tree outside of where I was living, and I did not see it move for three weeks. Then, one morning over breakfast, it cannon-balled through the window and proceeded to shatter furniture, put holes in the walls, toss the crockery about, and very nearly shred one of my manuscripts. Fifteen minutes later it had curled up on the front step and gone to sleep.
6. Candy-coat Sprayer – They spit hot streams of regurgitated candy-matter out from their three thin trunks. This hardens near-instantly when exposed to air, and after several layers becomes as durable as Aduran concrete.
7. Sugarcane Ghoul – Black-toothed monsters said to lurk in cane fields. A common boogeyman for children.
8. Insulin Eater – My knowledge here is second-hand, and the name is my own. Each township seems to have its own variant of a small, bulbous creature capable of draining the life from a person then and imparting on them a permanent inability to process sugar. Few can say they have seen it in person, but everyone seems to know a cousin or uncle or friend of my friend who has suffered from it.
9. Brainfreezer – Some swift, blue, flying thing I was not able to study properly, on account of it drilling whatever damnable sorcery it possesses into my head as soon as I glimpsed it.
10. Rogue Dentist – My host bade me ignore the beggar with the twisted leg, as he shuffled through town. ‘He’ll just go on about Flourine’, she said, with some disdain. I disregarded this, and snuck him a few coins while my host wasn’t looking.

Take a holiday! Don't think too hard about it!

Xyliasoma

Locals: Lithe, nubile, buck naked, uncanny valley, like an Australopithecus photoshopped for Cosmo.
Wrestler: The Libertine – A dandy, flirts with everyone, innocent babyface.
Encounters:

1. Serpentman Servitor – Even in the land of eternal bliss, someone needs to get work done. Hard-bit and black humored, they trade in smuggled whiskey and dog-ends and have no love for the angels or for their own supervisors. They are surprisingly honest at cards, in that they inform you that they will be cheating up front.
2. Cherubic Secret Police - “Oh, won’t you please smile? If you don’t you’ll make this little angel very sad, and sad angels come in the middle of the night to steal you away to where no one will ever see you again!”
3. Drugflower of Paradise – Ambulatory flower-clusters that spout clouds of white somapollen. I inhaled a lungful within hours of my arrival and found myself a day later with only warm, fuzzy memory blanks.
4. Orgy-Porgy – They might last for centuries, migrating and meandering across the land. The population within is always shifting as people join or depart the festivities.
5. Angelic Thoughtcrusher – A tower of alabaster, seven blue eyes down the center. It is possible to resist its mind-deadening aura, but just so. Repeated exposure leads to permanent damage to critical thinking and fight/flight responses.
6. Serpentman Accuser – They lurk in the shadows of the Courts of Harmony. With innate knowledge of the system that they so despise, they will pry open every doubt, expose every weakness, strike at each frailty, twist every truth.
7. Disembodied Paraphilia – A spirit born of unorthodox orgasm. Released from its creator, it looks to find a new home before the orgone fueling it runs out.
8. Pleasure-Dome – A fleshy dome rises above the trees, a house with many wombs. In many ways they pass for cities, I think, though I saw no one exit them.
9. Cleaning Automaton – A machine-man of celestial brass, who without complaint cleans up afterwards. It is a common retirement for angels that have reached the dimming eons of their divine flames.
10. Guardian Seraph – The keepers of the border, watchers of the empty throne. Ever-vigilant, swords aflame.

If you need some excitement, imagine a yak.

Terc

Locals: Like scarred leather, wear layers of ragged clothing to fight off the cold.
Wrestler: The Mysterious Stranger – Mute, never actually scheduled, appears from nowhere, seemingly unbeatable.
Encounters:

1. Yak herder clan – The economy in Terc is primarily based upon yaks and yak products. Each clan marks the horns of their herd with ancestral totems, worth many times their weight in gold and blood.
2. Local warband – They come in three flavors: the practical bands of hardened survivalists who know the waste by heart and by gut, absurdist gangs who cluster around symbols, aesthetics, and philosophies plucked right out of the freezing air, and the puritans who hate all joy and wear belts on their hats.
3. Hoarfrost boar – The white-tipped fur is highly prized by foreigners who don’t have to deal with them murdering yaks, or deal with them murdering people, or deal with them swarming across the land in herds no eye can count, or have anything at all to do with the dreary, gory process of hunting them.
4. Sanctuary Nymph – The story is always similar: separated from clan or band, the sun has set and the cold settles in and then! An orange light. A mound of dirt. A cave beneath, clean and warm. A woman with a lit hearth and stew nearly done. A bed with feather pillows and a soft quilt. The end is always the same, waking up on the ground as the sun rises.
5. Man-Chaser – In the wastes there is often nothing between you and the horizon. The world is vast and the sky is vaster, and more terrifying than either is the smudgy figure you might see where they meet, chasing you.
6. Star Bones – Meteorites are star-eggs, cast down from the heavens during the nebular reincarnation process. Inside one can find the metallic bones of the dormant star, awaiting rebirth. The greatest weapons of the Discape are forged from this material.
7. Puritan Cloudship – These mighty vessels are the remnants of an older society (or so I am told), and their inhabitants have done their best to prevent age from destroying them. Their arrival marks the time for flurries of informative pamphlets about dancing-devils and sin-liquors, and sermons blasted from on-high.
8. Waste Navigator – The initiation is a simple one, and absolute. The navigator in training is taken out into the waste, stripped bare, castrated, trepanned, dosed with psychedelics, and left to die. If he is worthy, the earth and sky and stars unfold their secret paths to him and guide him back to civilization. If he is not, he shall die, or wander the waste forever screaming “A map! A map! I am working on a map!”
9. Hot Spring Beast – A lazy, rotund, blue-spotted creature that wallows in hot springs. Its red face is deceptively like a man’s and constantly smiling.
10. Half-buried Permafrost Leviathan – It was a beast of an ancient sea, the eater of whales. Now it sleeps, an icy hill, and dreams of seas to come.

Where everything weird washes ashore.

Dyrfort

Locals: Mutants and conspiracy theorists, bug-eyed and misshapen.
Wrestler: The Truth – Clearly believes everything he says in promos. It’s not an act.
Encounters:

1. Tropical vacation Bigfoot – The secretive ape-men of the Phlegmatic Forest keep their summer homes here. They were quite welcoming, inviting me to join them for an evening barbecue on the beach, filled with fruity beverages and discussions of philosophy.
2. Chemtrail Bird – Brilliant white and with a wingspan of over sixty feet, these high-altitude gliders produce chemical agents that then disseminate to lower climes. These are mostly mild mutagens and carcinogens, which when mixed together in a body over decades, become the “Dyrfort Cocktail”.
3. Moth-men – Secluded creatures that live a cloistered existence within a large, concrete structure – an old factory of some sort, I believe. I saw them only once, standing amid the smokestacks with their backs against the dawn before descending once more into their lightless home.
4. Lights in the Sky – They can be seen over the ocean most nights, and often during the day. Their numbers or movement patterns are rarely consistent: one might hover over the same place for hours, or the sky might be filled with dozens racing from horizon to horizon.
5. Atlantean Expatriate – Attempts to wrest magical or technological secrets from this individual went nowhere, regardless of the method. They were quite reluctant to speak of their home, and provided nothing but contradictory information and clumsy dodges of my questions. The infantile, spoilt demeanor did little to aid matters, and I was led to admit defeat.
6. Men-in-Black – Human in appearance but alien in nature, they appear only in mated male pairs: If females of the species exist, they have not been discovered. A typical hunting strategy is to single out and abduct an individual, aided by limited teleportation abilities.
7. Cattle Mutilator – A variant species of the vampire, possessing a jawless mouth that extends down to the abdomen lined with a grotesque array of mandibles. It will curl up into an armored ball when threatened, and is known to carry leprosy.
8. False Flag – In truth, it is a kind of fungus consisting of a thin trunk and a large sheaf of fleshy material. This leaf is coated in chromatophores and can change colors and patterns quickly, oft leading to confusion when coupled with its heady pheromones and mild-altering spores. Their appearance on battlefields, eating the corpses of the dead, only troubles matters further.
9. The Goats that Stare at Men – Capable of inducing heart attack through their sheer psionic prowess.
10. Reptilian Overlord – An ancient, bloated, lizardlike creature. A drooling idiot long brain-dead and dependent on computerized life support, it remains responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened to your life, as well as orchestrating every individual event in Discapian politics it favor of its shadowy cabal of likewise inept reptiles.

It's like having your soul ripped out through your mouth.

Zicor-120

Locals: Stoop-shouldered and downcast wage-slaves, wear silk nooses around their necks.
Wrestler: The Sellout - “Hello, fellow kids!” His suit is plastered with brand logos.
Encounters:

1. Patient 0 Marketer – The origin point of a commercialist plague. Their mind has been rewritten into a mess of memetic virii, lacking all personality and possessing only the most basic survival urges.
2. Focus-tester – Men who have been reshaped by their own overpowering, laser-focused mediocrity. It cascades off of them in an aura -  dismissing verisimilitude, dulling color, unraveling subtly, encouraging susceptibility.
3. Aging Mascot Character – They are a fading breed – automatons, homunculi, chimeras that have outlived their creators and their contexts. Reboots fail, rebrandings never catch on, and their owners still drag them in trademark chains, to dance before the crowds that once loved them.
4. CEO out to “find themselves” - They are easily recognizable by their diets of gold dust, cocaine, and fecal matter, and their flocks of kowtowing attendants. “Yes, yes, yes, of course” the underlings chant.
5. Advertisprites – Shimmering banners of light and color, singing the praises of products no longer extant. They form nests under roofs and in alleyways.
6. Homeless Veteran of the Soft Drink Wars – He shed blood for the Blues, or maybe the Reds, and now he sleeps in the gutters. The pension didn’t cover the updated terms of service on his citizenship subscriptions.
7. Herd of Stockholders – A herd of sheep with human heads, wearing silk neckerchiefs. They are the most skittish creatures on the Discape, frightened to tears and panic by any implication that their treasure hoards (of broken clocks, sheafs of crumpled newspaper, and bits of string) might be threatened.
8. Descision-Maker – I did not see one of these individuals, but I was informed that they are very, very small, and live their entire lives inside a very, very small, iron box, inside a granite box, inside a lead box, inside a treasure chest that can only be opened with a needle that is found inside a needle that is found inside an egg that is found inside a chicken that is found inside a tiger that is lurking in the half-blooded sub-basement of an abandoned office complex with a sign on the door that says “Condemned – Radiation Hazard.”
9. THAT FUCKING PRINTER – DON’T TOUCH IT, DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING, IT WAS WORKING PERFECTLY YESTERDAY.
10. The Visible Hand – Tendons and muscle fibers still dangle from the stump of the wrist. It is a vengeful and terrible lord, smiting all that fail or disappoint it (which appears to be everyone)

Even in peace, there is passion. Live, damn you, live!

Daigrand

Locals: Buff and/or vavoom, blue hair, cool scars or tattoos, no volume control
Wrestler: Anikyodai – Literally on fire with MANLY ENERGY, the facest face.
Encounters:

1. Rubberfaced alien minions – The swarms serve a multitude of masters, and come in a million different varieties of bizarre head atop a man’s body. They’ll go down with a single hit, but bless them, they try.
2. Ara-ara-amazons – I cannot recall the last time I found myself in such pleasant company. Despite their massive physiques and fearsome weaponry, they are by and large most gentle, modest, and considerate in nature. I left their camp refreshed, well-stocked, and well-cared for.
3. The Tsun and the Yan – Twin fetish-cults, held by savages in the wilderness. The first considers beatings, scoldings, injury and grief to be considered signs of affection. The second holds that one’s beloved is only loved through murdering those around them.
4. Giant Automaton – The creators of these mighty machines are unknown, and were most likely mad. They are each unique in appearance, range from the small to the gigantic in size, often have transformative properties, and are well-equipped to fight the giant beasts that arrive so often. The pilots are all mad as well, but generally in the gregarious, passionate manner
5. Kaiju Spawn – The parents rise from the sea, claw up from the earth, or fall from the heavens. The babies are about the size of houses, and will drop off their parent’s back when curious, hungry, bored, or otherwise rambunctious. The locals find these cataclysms a great form of entertainment.
6. Isekai Dweeb – These sad, shut-in adolescents are strangers to the land, arriving from some far-off place. They speak no language anyone can understand (and only broken scraps of ones that anyone can) and lack even the most basic survival and social skills. They seem to expect that the world operates according to some alien set of rules, that they will suddenly be whisked out of their self-imposed isolation, received great cosmic power and a harem of attractive women, all by doing nothing.
7. Martial Art Master – The war-arts tradition of Daigrand is a tangle of mentor-student chains in orbit around constantly warring schools. Secret techniques are bought and sold by the baker’s dozen.
8. Bitter Shitheel Rival – This particular youth hounded me the entire time I was in the country, constantly trying to prove he was better than me in combat. A wasted effort, as I make it a point to avoid conflict whenever possible on account of dearly loving my blood and organs.  Clearly a dangerously unstable individual who has wasted his life fighting a one-sided feud.
9. 「VETERAN OF THE PSYCHIC WARS」–The medium-warriors of old fought each other by projecting their spirits and investing in them all manner of menacing arcane powers.  The eternal wars wore their toll on those men and women, so that now the practitioners are few. Their names are powerful, and must be bound upon the page.
10. Forest God – The pocket forests of Daigrand are serene places, held by gods that do not intrude on the realms of men. I saw only one, in the late and golden evening, standing beside a stream: an ancient creature of fur and moss, old as the roots and stones. It passed me by without as much as a look, and all was well for a time, before I came to realize that I would never see such a sight again while I still live.

"As we are, you will in time become."

Qon

Locals: Silent, shrouded in gray veils from head to toe.
Wrestler: The Tombtender – The unshakable and utterly neutral referee.
Encounters:

1. Mausoleum Crow – They perch on family tombs, to recite the generations of the dead to visitors. They do say ‘nevermore’ on occasion, for tradition’s sake.
2. Memento Mori – A human skull on the ground, lights like distant stars in its sockets. Never seen to move, but always following, always in sight. If one takes a fondness to you, it might follow you for a day, a month, or until you die.
3. Tomb-Looter Clan – The family business isn’t glamorous, but it is business. On weekends they will spend time building their own tombs with impeccable craftsmanship. They will need nothing when they are dead, they say, but they might as well give the next generation a good time and a decent haul.
4. Bonesmith – Bone is the most common material in the land, save stone. The scrimshawmen and bonemolders of Qon are the best on the Discape.
5. Ungrateful Dead – Mishandling the bodies of one’s ancestors is a most heinous offense, though the laws permit no punishment by mortal hand for it. More than enough torment will be visited upon the guilty by the filial spirits.
6. Gravegobbler – A creature that is little more than a mouth, a stomach, some roots, and a false tombstone of cartilage, ready to spring open and devour anyone to walk over it.
7. Reaper Men – I saw a band of these creatures in the distance, tending the colorless fields with their scythes. This is to provide offerings to the dead: they spread grain and coins at the mausoleum mouths.
8. Canopic Golem – Among some ancient dynasties, it was common practice to place one’s organs into a stone facsimile, awaiting their gods’ touch and their eventual awakening. Their sleep is over but not as they had planned.
9. Crematory Eel – A splash of ember-orange wriggles across the endless grey. They burn tunnels through rock and build honeycomb nests under the hills. Flesh they bite will turn to ash, upon which they will feed.
10. Psychopomp Dog – Guardians and guides of the dead. It’s best to leave them to their duty; They will come to you if you need them, but please be respectful and do not rush to pet or play with them, lest they get distracted from their assigned tasks.

Touching the platonic solid of cosmic power is generally a bad idea.

Cosmotrov

Locals: Statuesque, overly muscled with silly outfits and impossible flexibility.
Wrestler: Dr. Stupendous – Stupid hat, stupid mustache, stupid powers, super-heel.
Encounters:

1. Eater of Worlds – Current main exhibit in the Museum of Heroism, the Eater of Worlds resembles something of a great mechanized squid. It is shriveled and dormant now, but was apparently quite terrifying in its prime.
2. Energy Being wielding MIGHTY COSMIC RAYS – There was a flash of greenish-yellow light about the size of a man, whose shining rays mutated all that they touched. Some of those touched become new heroes, others got cancer. All  present considered this utterly mundane.
3. Parasitic Thought Bubble – They are harmless, all save their habit of broadcasting one’s inner monologue to the world. A terrible embarrassment, but people tend to be sympathetic. After the laughter, of course.
4. Mob of Downtrodden Underclass – Unable to lend any aid, I watched as Mighty Tom was dragged out of his home in chains and beaten to death with shovels and clubs. He had done nothing to harm them, but his existence within the system was enough.
5. Apoco-bot – Gigantic purple automatons, commonly found attacking the cities of Cosmotrov in attempts to conquer or destroy it. I grew used to the attacks by my second week in the region, and took up watching them (from afar) with the others at the coffee shop.
6. Chimeric Experiment – Combining two animals, or an animal with a machine, is such a common pastime that they are numerous enough to march in the streets, demanding rights and representation. 
7. Cosmic Reboot Button – A shining red disc, floating amid a pillar of light. It is believed by some to wake up MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI from His slumber, and by others that it has been abused in the past.
8. The Z-Listers – Minor heroes hyped and then forgotten. They band together in squalid communes to keep themselves afloat.
9. Lyefield Abomination – Its feet were formless nubs, too small to carry the gargantuan musculature and thrice-broken spine it has been cursed with. It sat huddled under newspapers in an alley mouth, begging for death.
10. Mooks – A foul collection of goose-stepping thugs, willing to bend the knee to any tyrant able to give them an excuse to pillage. 

(Image sources are, in order: Bloodborne concept art, Adventure Time, Hieronymus Bosch, Wikipedia Commons x3, Gurren Lagann, Commons again, and Jack Kirby)

The Great Discape: Bestiary 1-of-3

 (Need a refresher? look at Part 1 and 2)

And all the hosts of angels cried out "Doot doot doot."

The City in the Center / The City Above

Locals: Splendorous and brilliant, luminous and ecstatic.
Wrestler: Keeper of the Secrets – Has a signature move called the SUSHAI SLAM.
Encounters:

1. Minor godling – The gods are constantly sub-creating their own short-lived spawn, birthing them from the eggs embedded in their backs. They possess only a fraction of their parent’s power, but still might be potent.
2. Messenger Servitor – Direct communication with the divine is rare, and so these flame-feathered intermediaries will flit back and forth between the City and the rest of the Discape. Messengers traditionally identify what god they serve by means of an elaborate hat, and the advertisement they shout.
3. Censor Tortoise – Their hollow shells are pure gold, and constantly letting out sweet-smelling smoke. They will bestow good favor on those who feed them.
4. An Eye or Ear of Death – The 108 Deaths have their own servants to keep watch over the life threads of the Discape. Being in the service of the inevitable, they are fond of gambling and games, as fate is just as dead as the rest in their line of work.
5. Ascended Pilgrim - Many of the pilgrims that manage to reach the City never leave. Surrendering their former lives and identities, they stroll the streets of the City praising the gods they adore forever more.
6. Choir Engine – A shambling automaton built of angels and pipe organs, leading processions of pilgrims and priests through the City.
7. Reformed Sinner – Of a different caste than the pilgrims who stayed, sinners are those who were taken up by the gods for their transgressions and repented, whether they wanted to or not.
8. Rosary Bird – They weave nests atop of prayer-wheels out of strings of beads. They are a plain dun in coloration but will avidly and ferociously seek out brightly colored beads for their homes.
9. Ambrosia Beast – Constantly exudes a delicious honey-like substance. Often used in fountain displays.
10. Prayer-Eater – Excess prayers (the foolish, shortsighted, unneeded, or unheard) have more than once caused upheaval in the City (prayer inflation is a major issue in the divine economy) – thus the Prayer-eaters were created. Red-gold, potbellied things like crocodiles, they sit on the outer walls of the City and snap up any incoming prayers that aren’t worth the gods’ time.

You can, in fact, see your house from here.

Vüngelbraeskilnük

Locals: Sharp-eyed and sharp-edged, harsh and unforgiving.
Wrestler: The Avalanche – Crowd favorite, refers to self in third person.
Encounters:

1. Nightgaunt – Faceless guards of the mountain, they might carry a pilgrim as steed, push him off the path only to catch him below, taunt and tickle him, or simply watch.
2. Ice giant – Big, blue, boisterous men who sling boulders at each other from their towers and kick down avalanches on paths in jest. If one hears laughter like thunder, it is best to be cautious.
3. Cliff Clinger – Something akin to a hairless grey-blue ape, with arms thrice as long as the rest of its body. They feast on bird eggs plucked from their nests, and hate the Nightgaunts.
4. Snow Maid – A woman-shaped space plastered with snow. Two eyes of glacier blue. Believed by some to be the female form of the ice giants.
5. Vüngeleagle – Giant four-winged eagles that never come to rest on the ground. Their eggs are heavily cushioned and reinforced at the bottom, to survive impact with the nest.
6. A very clever goat – It got up here before me. And now it is laughing.
7. Immortal Ascetic of Emptiness – Removal of the soul is a common path to enlightenment. Such pilgrims will never finish their journey to the summit, and many who come across them will find themselves in the same.
8. Snowflake Painter – One in a billion flakes bears the marks of this cloud-dwelling creature. A single painting, if recovered without it melting, is worth a kingdom in the Lands-in-Balance.
9. Rockbugs – These pillbeetles are the most consistent source of food on the mountainside.
10. Disciple of the Drum – Many pilgrims climb not to reach the City Above, but to sit at the feet of Skarl and drum with him. They might be known by their hide drums, painted in great detail with the sign of the Heart.

"Ankh-Morpork", by Jameli

The City Below the Center

Locals: Of all types. Colorful, loud, poor.
Wrestler: Dorinoples, the announcer. Incredibly enthusiastic.
Encounters:

1. Teratomic Gang Enforcer – The Low Arcs of the city are rife with poverty and disease, ever growing in new, horrid metastatic forms. The inhabitants of these districts bear the brunt of it all in body and soul.
2. Gutter Urchin – Their ragged purple spines secrete a toxin that swiftly induces violent spasms, followed by muscle rigor and paralysis.
3. Eaves Dropper Crow – These bulb-skulled birds have taken to falling from on high atop the heads of the unsuspecting, so as to startle them into dropping whatever street food or shiny baubles they might have in their hands.
4. Purse Cutter – The tip of its prehensile trunk bears a thin bone razor, which is typically only used for dominance displays and trimming its fur. Thieves love the little creatures, as they are both cuddly and easily trained.
5. Reticulated Anklebiter – Waging an eternal turf war against packs of feral cats and the swarms of giant rats. Personal punting record: 17 yards.
6. Pigeonherd – The enterprising poor will always find a niche in the City Below. These grey-cowled folk tend to vast flocks of clipped-wing pigeons, fattened on whatever they might find. Feed on a bird, sir? Tuppence a bag.
7. Garbashlop Vendor – Street food is a traditional standby in the City Below. It has the added bonus of making sure the population is inoculated against most diseases before they can handle solid food. The homunculi that tend the vats are often seasoned surgeons and barbers, hand washing optional.
8. Fatcat – Tomcats in the City Below are the meanest on the Discape, and the worst of the tomcats are the ones who are mean enough to get other cats to do their dirty work. Like patriarchal dons, the scarred blobs rule over their backalley domains, rolled about by their harem.
9. Laboratory Runoff – Fluorescent oozes bubble and fizz in the alleys, gutters, and canals. Magically toxic, stink of ozone, bear an octarine sheen.
10. Chaosicratic Firebrand – There are those that follow a certain creed; if the City Above is the place of Law, the City Below must be the home of Chaos. These rebels (often identified by the burning hair and smell of gunpowder) seek to overthrow the Arcarchs and institute a ravening, unbound democracy.

The blood is the life, you know.

Sanguine Savanna

Locals: Tall, dark red, bald, yellow markings.
Wrestler: The Bloody Tear – A Byronic hero, seeking his lost love. Good dancer.
Encounters:

1. Balloonbeast – Docile gasbags that roam the savannah sky in herds. If domesticated, one can carry a rider and a mule’s-worth of supplies. A surprisingly gentle ride.
2. Lightningling – These electric sprites can be lured down from the clouds by means of elaborate glass bottles and copper rods. They don’t appreciate it, but are willing to bargain.
3. Russeceroses – A dish-shaped horn on their head collects rainwater. The songbirds that bathe there will tell the russecerose stories of all the places it has seen, which the beast dutifully remembers.
4. Rosemane Tiger – The petal-fur around its neck will close when sleeping or sneaking. Its red-and-black fur is highly valued, despite (or more likely because of) the curse placed on killers of the creature.
5. Ourobouric Giraffe – To escape predators, it can fold its legs around its body and roll away at high speeds. It will die if it stops biting its tail, reason unknown.
6. Bloodpyre Bullnewt – They emerge from their hibernation with the coming of the rains. They are large, foul tempered, and wear crowns of fire and blood they won from their wars against the Rustoads.
7. Blimp-Drinkers – Cigar-shaped balloonbeasts with coiled proboscises. After feeding, their translucent-silver bodies will take on a fresh pink coloration.
8. Devil-Clouds – A roiling, bruise-purple mass of horned and fanged faces – laughing, jeering, screaming, spitting brimstone, eating each other and being eaten. Will sometimes sweep across the grass, devouring anything in its path so long as the wind will carry it.
9. CRIMSON BABOON – An important lesson: It is not naturally red.
10. Thunderhead Heavyheart – Whose head is a thundercloud, whose voice is thunder, and who holds in his hands a heart.

Author's interpretation of the sun challenging +Mike Evans for dominance.

Choleric Desert

Locals: Mummified, acrid, voices as biting whispers.
Wrestler: Gundercrusp, the other announcer. Bitter, vindictive asshole.
Encounters:

1. Saltflat Centipede – They do not ever seem to stop growing: hatchlings are the length of a forearm, the largest are claimed to devour caravan trains without stopping to chew. Their dirty-white carapace and red legs form the crest of many a desert warband.
2. Ammoniac Pool-back – These blind giants drag themselves across the land with a single muscular arm: the other three limbs have shrunk to nothing. The pattern of scars on their backs is unique to the individual, and one might occasionally find fragments of meteoric iron embedded at the bottom of those stinking, alkaline pools.
3. Anti-Shark – Apex predator of anti-water deposits. A creature of hard angles and jagged lines of vantablack. Their bites do not bleed: flesh simply vanishes.
4. Spite Elemental – Those who die in the desert are often survived by the hate they had in life. Spite-sprites may last for centuries, as the desert polishes hate to a diamond sheen.
5. Gritwhip – Predatory plants that lurk underground, springing a trap of flailing tendrils meant to cpature or concuss prey, so that it might be brought to the pitcher-mouth. Edible, reminiscent of an over-salted potato.
6. Mirage Hydra – Those pools of water seen in the distance might well be the reflective frills of a buried hydra. Proceed with greatest caution.
7. Salt Harvester – A chitinous mass on ten tower legs, scooping up and sifting through the crust with paddle-like arms. Docile and sturdy, they are occasionally used as mobile villages.
8. Fossilized Ostracoderm – Different from Anti-fish, they are the last remnants of the ancient oceans that once filled these basins. They are trapped in undeath, their small, fishy minds long gone mad from isolation beneath the rock – so mad that they have begin to violate physics all of their own accord, swimming through bedrock as if they were back home.
9. Waterpot Ant – The only reliable source of water in the region. Their abdomens are a bright, faintly luminescent blue. A form of currency along the border.
10. Mummified Dagron – A magnificent creature, killed in and desiccated in an instant by a blast of dehydrating heat. Not to be confused with a dragon or any relative thereof.

There is definitely nothing hidden in this picture.

Phlegmatic Forest

Locals: Hidden, sleek, small of stature, silky hair.
Wrestler: The Moonwatcher – Wise master of secret arts.
Encounters:

1. Droplet Catcher – It has ten slender arms and a hundred slender fingers, and swings through the trees like an acrobat. I do not know what it does with the rain it catches upon its fingertips, for when all are full it shakes them all free in a shower and continues its counting again.
2. Mossbeard – The forests are filled with old, weatherworn stones and outcroppings, left behind when the glaciers of Vüngelbraeskilnük retreated. These stone sages have taken the faces of men and are wise beyond all knowing. The locals hold them in greater reverence than the gods themselves, and permit no one from outside to speak with them.
3. Roostmoose – Its antlers were full of a dazzling array of birds: sparrows, cardinals, orioles, finches, jays, doves, swallows, magpies, wrens, even a red-tailed hawk and a rather confused-looking duck. Such an outrageous racket they made that I presumed (correctly, I was informed later) that they were a parliament discussing policy
4. Treehugger – A ruddy-furred ape with arms four times as long as its body. It will cling to a tree with a mighty hug and shimmy up the trunk to feast on honeycombs or birds’ eggs.
5. The Babbage Squirrels – The species is a language. The patterns in which they scurry, holding nuts or nothing, the storage and cataloguing of the nuts in the mindsap-drenched chambers of their homes, all of this is a code by which the trees communicate with each other. The squirrels are unaware of their greater purpose, and I was unable to make any advances upon breaking their cipher.
6. Mistblower – A stunningly silly creature: a furry sphere of a body atop four thin, knobbly-kneed legs like that of a chicken, with a hairless head possessing gawping goggle-eyes and a rigid trunk like a flute. It spews mist out from its mouth as a means of hiding from predators and to confuse the very same as it scrambles away to safety.
7. Jabberwock Ape - A nonsense beast of children's rhymes, meaning it is potentially the most real thing upon the Discape.
8. Escaped Cacophanoi – When a shaman loses his sound in the forest, he must go on a quest to capture it. This is often a long work, as cacophanoi tend to rest in the strangest of places; my host spoke of how his grand-uncle had spent seven months trying to wrest his noise out of its hiding place (A fallen tree with no one around to see it) and back into its jar.
9. Soulbandit – They are said to steal the dreamself of a man while he sleeps, leaving him in an amnesiac daze in his waking hours until he or a skilled shaman is able to pull him back. I heard only scraps of its dream-appearance: leopard spots, half-man and half-woman, four legs and two arms.
10. Summerglider – A tawny little critter, capable of gliding through the air by means of the skin-flaps between its limbs. A golden glow might be found in their pouches; this is a fragment of the summer sun, which they stole long ago.

by Adam Paquette, for MtG

Melancholic Bog

Locals: Shriveled, clammy, hunchbacked, constantly oozing.
Wrestler: Mopey Earl – Self explanatory.
Encounters:

1. Bog Mummies – The old kings were buried with their warriors, who wielded swords of celestial bronze. This was so that they might protect their liege from demons in the afterlife.  The loss of the metal supplies led to a swift collapse of that people, on account of their kings having their souls regularly ripped out of their bodies.
2. Ventworms – They are nutritious, if one can get past the smoke and resist the heat, and taste like muddy red velvet cake – a delicacy, by bogfolk standards. Wormcutting is traditionally carried out by families of the lowest caste (for the task is deadly), who are also the wealthiest (for the rewards are lucrative).
3. Giant Mutant Catfish – Easily capable of devouring a man, and of chasing him across land should the initial ambush fail. Feared by all, and a feast for the village if it can be caught.
4. Smoke Gliders – They circle about the vents like black kites, feeding on the ventworms and bogcrabs below.  Will dive-bomb trespassers on their territory while screeching in a voice reminiscent of a human infant.
5. Snapping Snake – I can never remember the rhyme for these beaked little buggers. “Red, white and green, dead ‘fore I’m seen; red, green and pink, a safe one I think; Brown with the stripes, its venom is tripe; black, blue and orange, go fuck off?”
6. Venomous Googolpede – The hairlike legs are a rippling curtain heaving the body aloft. The poison will liquify nerves and clot blood.
7. Corpse-Mud – In some areas the mud is so thick and the bog so bottomless that even ghosts are trapped there. The dead congregate in these pits, attempting to claw up to the surface so that thy might properly decompose.
8. Whirligator – A small alligator, perhaps four feet long, whose tail bifurcates into two paddles, which it might use as a primitive propeller system. This adaptation is mostly to hunt fish from above, as local species are well equipped with armored bellies to avoid the threats below.
9. Mosquito Man – The desiccated skin of an unfortunate traveler, animated and held aloft by thousands of biting insects. A variant species of vampire, no doubt.
10. Monolith Slug – A house-sized mollusk whose black hide bears rubbery bas-reliefs of some ancient, abyssal deities.