So, Yes. Stealing from Patrick the idea of a city beleaguered without hope. Stealing that line from my favourite version of the Fall of Gondolin, stealing the idea of mechanical beasties from that self-same version of that self-same story. Stealing from Bakshi, stealing from Miller all to make a synoptical gibberish version of, like, Dragonlance (40K).
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| Yes, Tolkien wrote of this occurring |
The good ideas from Dragonlance are awesomely sensually satisfying complicated machines and Tiamat as Sauron - but with a fucking stupid non-Mesopotamian name that will not evoke sorcery and devil-worship, To which I say, every one of the Hydra's heads is named after a different Mesopotamian goddess, Ninti, Inanna, Ereshkigal, Ashtoreth, Ishkur etc. etc. and you need to chant their names in ecstatic frenzy before the game or it Will Not Be Fun.
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The knocker-men are dead or banished from the world, they that were hidden cunning personified. Of old in their deeply dolven forge-citadels they crafted uncanny devices of marvelous contrivance like unto heraldic grotesques of iron and lead and beaten tin with hearts of poisonous fire and lightning. These things became the steeds of the champions of the Tame who rode them to war against the inconceivable abominations that came from beyond the world.
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| This would be the knockermen at work |
For the million-headed Hydra had come from Outside and from Her did issue the abominable spawn of nethermost abysms, they that were infinite hunger and destruction that cleft the sky. And it rained blood.
And the Last Citadel stood like a mountain of steel as reared from the barren plain in rampart piled upon bulwark and bastion unyielding -a thousandfold fortress against the darkness.
From the blasphemous horizon comes a hellish tide of doom. Life recedes. The world is defiled. The Hydra trumpets her challenge with a sound like universes torn asunder.
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Unfortunately the Androtaureans and Kinder-grigs and Scumlickers have passed from the world with the Knockermen, as though the forces of unspeakable chaos thought it unnecessary to have three different comic-relief races and unnecessarily jarring proud-warrior race guys. Everyone denies there was ever an such thing as prissy pseudo-elven proto-ogres for obvious reasons. This leaves only men and elves and dwarves and, I guess, halflings - because I fuck not with canon unless that canon be utterly iredeemable. I reckon the halflings were just some paedomorphic strain of dwarvenkind who arrived at the citadel during the great refugee crisis of whenever it was the Hydra's horrible children arrived.
Everything outside is the wasteland. I fucking loved the word wasteland when I was a child and I can still see the desolation and the skulls. There are savage tribes of mutant fiends writhing in their fiendishness and manifold pulpy weirdnesses such as would be disgorged from a buncha random tables. The Hydra-Spawn belching blasphemous odium sprawl in the crevices of the world or soar through irradiated vermilion skies.
Knockertech devices are of intricately devised metallurgy and diligently serrated meshing cogwork and alchemical essences. They are spiky and fluted and flanged, hissing and churning, grindingly vital in their secret mechanical hearts - the last hope of the world manifest in miracles of forgotten artifice.
They generally manifest in forms like unto the beasts of heraldry as aforetime adorned the regalia of vainglorious knightly orders long since incinerated - the Brock, the Phoenicopterus, the Martlet, the Enfield, the Fierce Tyger, the Tatzelwurm, the Hippalectryon, the Crocuta and the Amphiptere among many others, all cunningly rendered in metal. These devices fight alongside the Forlorn Hope of desperate lunatics that issue forth from the Citadel against the nameless Behemoths of horn and hide. And upon the gleaming backs of fulminating Lindwurmes of orichalcum and in hidden chambers within iron Leviathans the most vaunted zealots of iron law unleash righteous fury and elemental destruction upon the invincible enemy.
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There is a Carcass reference for those of you playing at home. Oh, and some kind of setting for Ron Edwards' Sorceror informed this.
Carcass!
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