Locations/SouthernShadowlands
As one travels South, the skies pale to an infinite blue, the grass turns to sands, and the air dries and grows hot. The incautious may find themselves entering the realms where the skies pale from blue to bone, the sands grey, and the searing winds bear the scent of death.
Few of those so unfortunate or so ignorant to find themselves too deep in the Southern Shadowlands ever return to speak of the journey. Those whose tongues are not frozen by the darknesses they observed within may tell tales of the hungry sands, the whispering dunes, or the sandstorm that shreds souls.
Hungry Sands
Veil trod forward with care, each footfall preceded by a careful, questing prod at the ground. She considered herself lucky to have found the gnarled branch of black oak that she used to guide her steps. It was only the fault of her concern for the people of the Duneshadows tribe that she grew distracted and put too much weight on the makeshift staff. At that moment the sand gave way and she fell to the ground.
Her arm was buried in the sand up to the shoulder and felt cold. She felt a tug from beneath the desert, then another, and then a steady pull. With a gasp of pain at resisting the pull, she quickly found her proper leverage and yanked her arm free from the sand's grasp.
Veil's arm, pale with the white of death, shivered for a moment with a cold that the desert heat did little to warm. With her face grimly set, she wrapped the arm in cloth to let it heat itself and began to carefully skirt the dangerous area. She'd lost the welcome branch, and her going would be much slower from then on.
Hungry Sands are one of the best known dangers of the Southern Shadowlands. Nearly impossible to discern from safe sand, they are often only discovered when they devour one of the party. Worse even than the quicksilver sand that travellers may find in the living deserts, these sands are more loathe to release what they catch and devour their victims' very souls.
Spotting patches of Hungry Sand, which range from 1 to 100 yards in diameter, is a difficulty 4 Perception + Awareness check. Travelling at half one's normal movement rate and investigating the ground ahead with care and implements can reduce this difficulty to 2, as can travelling at one-fourth normal movement without the help of a pole.
Anyone ending up in the Hungry Sands is automatically caught in a hold and immediately suffers the consequences. Trying to escape the hold is a contested Strength roll against the difficulty four. Due to being pulled downwards, however, this rating is doubled after two turns in the Sands' clutches. Anyone caught can add one die to their pool for every person helping. A maximum of three people can help. If someone with extraordinary strength is helping, add one die for every three dots of strength.
In addition to being frighteningly difficult to escape, the Hungry Sands remove one mote of Essence from their victims each turn. This loss doubles when the rating of difficulty to escape does. When the victim is empty of Essence, the Sands remove their points of Permanent Essence one per turn until the rating reaches zero. Then the victim is dead. Treat mortals as having five motes of Essence for the purpose of the Hungry Sands.
After eight turns, the victim of the Hungry Sands are sucked under and the rate of mote removal is once more doubled. People are generally unretrievable at this point.
Lost points of Permanent Essence return at the rate of one every two days.
Notes on the less deathly sandtraps:
Quicksand: Difficulty 2, doubles after three turns. People submerge after 10 turns, and then follow suffocation rules found in *Exalted* p. 243.
Quicksilver Sand: Difficulty 3, doubles after two turns. After the difficulty doubles, the victim is enough submerged that the tiny, razor-sharp particulates of metal in the sand begin to appreciably cut his body. One die of damage is applied every turn. The victim is entirely submerged after eight turns.
Whispering Dunes
As she moved carefully through the dark desert, Veil felt the hairs on her arm stand up straight. Warily, she topped the next rise. As she did she felt a breath of air caress her ear, and it whispered her name. She suddenly stood at her full height, her ears straining for another word.
"Veil." It was her father's voice. Her heart soared with love even as her mouth tasted the dusty air of the grave on the wind. The voice began to speak, dripping with regret, and even as she smiled and cried tears of joy she knew it in her soul to be false.
In a supreme act of will, she shut out his words even as they turned to pleas and walked away, ignoring the pain of remembrance and once more careful of the treacherous sands.
There are places in the Southern Shadowlands where the winds whisper of the soft hills of the desert, and they speak of loved ones long lost or dead. The voices are not entirely an illusion, borrowing a touch of its owner's soul for the duration. They speak of times long past, joys long lost, and desires they do not have but know will drive those who listen mad.
The voices of the Whispering Dunes will be heard despite any attempts to block ones ears. Those who listen for too long to begin to go mad. One must succeed at a willpower roll at difficulty three to escape the tender speech without too much damage to her mind.
Those unfortunates who fail are still able to rip themselves away from the temptation, but tear their minds in doing so. They will pick up an appropriate derangement, most often a delusion (schizophrenia, as the voices of the Dunes stay with the affected hosts), an obsession with those who spoke to him, or a truly shattered mind.\\
The Sandstorm that Shreds Souls
Veil stumbled wearily down a sand dune, as she'd done a thousand times since entering the damned desert. Losing her balance and the bottom, she collapsed into a heap.
As she began to gather herself, she heard a deep, steady howl rise behind her. As it grew continuously louder, she feared a spirit and pulled the knife that she'd brought for such dangers. As she did so, she looked over the rise and dropped the blade with a gasp. The already dark sky was being blackened by a great cloud that rushed toward her.
She felt the first stings of wind-whipped sand as she tied a cloth tightly over her mouth and huddled beneath her thick cloak for protection. A layer of sand had already been deposited around her feet and she could no longer see where she'd dropped the knife. She suspected that she'd regret that loss later on.
But only if she survived.
There is only one Sandstorm that Shreds Souls, marking out a ceaseless erratic pacing in the South of the Underworld. When it passes over one of those thin places that the lands of the dead and the living share the shadowland becomes a very dangerous and nigh uninhabitable place for the time. Even ghosts fear this dark phenomenon and take cover when it approaches.
When the Sandstorm overtakes a character its spinning sands cut deeper than any blade. They do 15 dice of Lethal damage to anyone caught materialized out in the open. This damage is entirely soakable, but remember that anyone wearing heavy armor in the deadly heat of the south is in for it already. In addition, each person within the storm takes five dice of Aggravated damage, equally dangerous to the material and immaterial.
It is said that at the center of the storm is a great spectral dragon, eyes burning with a pale ghostly flame and wings beating strongly. The legend in the Underworld claims that it was created by a deathlord who set it to walk the Southern desert forever, carrying the Sandstorm with it. The dragon of legend is surrounded at all times by a near-solid wall of flying sand, stained black over the years with the dragon's hatred.
by Domino
Commentations
You can't do indents. If you leave spaces or tabs at the beginning of a line, the wiki interprets it as preformatted text; it will display as monotype without line breaks. Use a blank line to separate paragraphs.\\ _Ikselam
I knew indents didn't come through, but I couldn't decipher what was causing the monotype. Thanks.\\ Domino
