region that contains far, far more than could be described in even ten times the number of pages (and this is a good thing—plenty of room for mystery and exploration). This chapter provides additional locales in the Steadfast to use in any campaign.
THE JUTTING REMNANTS
(WYR LOWLANDS)
Everywhere you look in the Ninth World, you see the numenera. That hill over there? It’s actually an ancient structure covered in sediment and plants. The flat expanse beyond it? A smooth area of paved stone, blanketed by a thin layer of soil and grass. The jagged edge of the stream running past it? The bare metal hull of what seems to have been some kind of vehicle. The floating tower high above? Well, that goes without saying.
THE STEADFAST
But in some places, it seems, one finds even more numenera than usual. It’s just more obvious, less a part of the landscape and more like a graveyard. One such locale is the lowlands around the Wyr River in northern Malevich, which is filled with what some people call the Jutting Remnants. These scattered and broken pieces of some enormous edifice jut up out of the shallow waters of a wetland that stretches for more than a dozen miles, winding through the rocky outcroppings of the hills.
The Jutting Remnants are mainly metallic, although some
have synth components as well. The various pieces are similar enough that it is not hard to imagine that they were once part of a whole—a very large whole. Speculation is that it was a vehicle that crashed, although other people wonder if it didn’t explode high in the sky. Of course, it could just as easily have been an object or a structure that no Ninth Worlder could understand, having met a disastrous fate that is just as incomprehensible. Regardless, jagged metal bits and spars, flat sheets like sloughed metal skin, and twisted pieces of something quite complex now lie scattered in the shallow waters. Each metal bit immersed in the water corrodes, but at an almost immeasurably slow rate. Occasionally a particularly strange component spurts forth some kind of unknown fluid into the fen, or it buzzes and sparks with dying gasps of energy. Aside from simple, useless debris and the occasional cypher or oddity, the following are a few of the other recurring types of remnants one can find.
Powered Rings: Throughout the scattered debris, one common element is rings of metal about 25 feet (8 m) in diameter. Sometimes these rings lie flat (and thus are completely submerged), but most often they stand upright in the murk, protruding high above the waterline. Various points on the rings glow with a blue radiance, and each whole ring vibrates ever so slightly.
A few industrious or ingenious tinkerers have found ways to tap into the power that courses within the rings. This power is used to re-energize cyphers, artifacts, and other devices. Just as often, however, a careless or unlucky technician attempts this feat and dies in an explosion of blue light. A few people have reported explorers getting blasted with blue flame for just coming close to one of the rings. Because of all this, many now give them a wide berth.
Black Bells: When explorers wander through the Jutting Remnants, they sometimes come upon weird structures of various sizes made of dark metal, half submerged in the mire and water. They call these black bells. Black bells are most often spheres or hemispheres (more or less) with powered hatches that are almost always quite difficult to open.
“Every black bell holds a secret—many, in fact, but you can’t find them all,” a veteran explorer will tell you. And it’s true. The latter part of the statement is particularly strange. On one day, for example, an intrepid nano might manage to open a black bell and get inside. They’re usually not large or roomy. The nano discovers interesting parts inside that she removes to cobble together some cyphers. After a thorough search turns up nothing more, she leaves, and the bell reseals (they always seem to do that). Two days later, a pair of jacks comes to the same
The Jutting Remnants are located in the kingdom of Malevich.
The piers also make it easier to cart away any good discoveries.
Empty Pockets: The so-called empty pockets of the Jutting Remnants are spots where the water and plant life are displaced by . . . something. It would appear that something invisible, usually about 10 to 15 feet (3 to 5 m) in diameter, rests in the waters of the fen. Investigation reveals nothing—the pocket is as empty as it appears. However, explorers have managed to activate something in the pocket that has drawn them in, revealing an object with a hollow interior that is larger than the exterior—the area of the displacement— would indicate. Some of these intrepid souls have suggested that the pockets are, in fact, inside out in a way that is difficult to understand, and the reason that people can rarely see or feel an empty pocket is that they’re looking for the outside when what they’re finding is the inside. This would indicate that the hollow “interior” is actually the exterior. In any event, the interior/ exterior—whichever is so hard to access— often contains valuable numenera items and components.
Dangers: The dangers are many. The Remnants are thick with Stratharian war moths, ithsyns, and the amorphous, acidic
morl. There are also the parlous green, carnivorous, quasi-intelligent plants that grow in the fens throughout the Dark Hills. Parlous green seem to thrive in areas with the thickest concentrations of numenera pieces and parts in the wetland.
BALLASTER
In the spring months, sometimes the waters of the fens rise when the Wyr overflows its banks. In such times, the floods churn up particularly strange things from the mire. Creatures that otherwise would never see the light of day, wondrous or dreadful bits of numenera, and diseases or worse are brought to the surface. In no place is this stranger than Ballaster.
Ballaster is another small, isolated village in the Dark Hills. A limited collection of buildings running along the side of the Wyr, Ballaster is no stranger to the rising spring waters, yet black bell and, after considerable effort,
they get it open again. The bits the nano removed are obvious, but despite being less skilled in such things, the jacks find a discovery that the nano missed. That’s the truth of black bells. Upon subsequent visits, there’s always something that went unnoticed before. It’s always worthwhile to go back and look again a day or two later—and maybe again a day or two after that. Sometimes a black bell is stripped completely bare on the inside, fully scanned, and utterly studied. And then a year later, someone goes in and finds a panel that no one found before, behind which lie the controls of a completely new discovery with its own unique functions.
Some black bells are so frequently visited or revisited that people have built wooden piers out to them so that one does not have to wade through the water to reach them.
Morl: level 5, resists most physical attacks as level 6, resists mental attacks as level 3; health 30; makes up to three tentacle attacks at once; those struck must make Might defense rolls or be pulled into the morl’s body and move one step down the damage track each round; see The
Ninth World Bestiary,
page 87 Parlous green, page 237 Stratharian war
moth, page 261 Ithsyn, page 241
The Tower of Moons: Fnx stands almost twice as tall as most humans but is as thin and delicate as a spider’s leg. Roughly humanoid, it has six appendages that appear identical, though it normally uses two of them as legs and four as arms. Its face is nothing but a glowing sliver of blue.
Whatever Fnx was—ancient mechanical man, extraterrestrial, or something far weirder—it is a scavenger and collector now, dwelling amid the Jutting Remains in a complex structure that looks like a gigantic series of multicolored spheres connected by silver tubes. This amazing building is known as the Tower of Moons, but Fnx just calls it home. The tower can be seen for miles on a clear day, but clear days are rare in this region. Within Fnx’s strange home, one is transmitted to adjacent rooms rather than walking there. Each room is a globe, and gravity is oriented so that as one walks around the interior of the globe, the floor is always down. Fnx keeps a variety of scavenged parts and numenera items, including cyphers and artifacts. Its focus, however, seems to be on devices and parts the residents never move or relocate. The rare
visitors usually don’t stay long—most find the village (or perhaps the villagers) off-putting without being able to specify why.
The dozen or so families of Ballaster avoid the sun at all costs and come out of their homes only in the evening and night, or on overcast days (which are frequent). Without exception, they are pale, almost grey. Even their eyes are pale. Skin afflictions, especially blue-black sores and thick discharge, are common among the residents. They do not seem to cultivate crops, keep animals, hunt, or gather.
The leader of the village—the Speaker—is a woman named Cacoethes. She makes it clear, without coming right out and saying it, that visitors are not welcome.
The village has no communal house, no inn, and no tavern. There are no temples, and the residents never talk about any kind of religion. They possess no numenera. The ramshackle buildings drip with moss and dark mold, and some of the villagers’ clothing does as well.
Fnx: level 6, Speed defense and all movement tasks as level 7, all tasks related to the numenera as level 8; Armor 4; controls gravity in immediate distance, so foes failing a Might defense roll are pinned to the ground or fly off into the air
Cacoethes: level 5; defense, deception, and seeing through deception as level 7
with uses that are not obvious. It seems to be looking for one or more specific things.
Fnx is not welcoming to visitors, but it is willing to pay others to search through the fens and bring back objects that look “interesting.” It pays in functioning cyphers and oddities. Anyone who manages to get inside the tower might find stranger things aside from the components, parts, cyphers, oddities, and artifacts that Fnx has recovered.
WYR LOWLANDS HEARSAY
Lost in the Floodwaters: A recent flood washed away a small school with some children and a teacher still in the building. Most people fear that they are lost for good, but a few hold out hope that someone can find them. The leaders of the nearby village, Gurral, have scraped together a small reward for their safe return. Mending Fences: Two small villages on opposite sides of the river have, more or less, been at war for a generation. Hambrose lies on the Malevich side, and Throa is on the Draolis side. An unfortunate circumstance involving Throa fishermen led to the death of an elder of Hambrose, sparking a feud that has been unending and sometimes brutal. Anyone who can broker a peace between the villages would be a hero in the region.
THE WEIRD OF THE WYR
Arachnophobia: A nine-legged spidery creature has been seen wading through the fens. Upon spotting the beast, even the most stalwart warrior has fled in terror, as if it had some sort of control over the fear response of those it encountered.
The Box: One of the items brought out of the Jutting Remnants is a glass box about the size of a human head. The box, when opened, appears empty, but everyone near the box at the time disappears for a few minutes and then reappears with no memory of the last few hours. The box has passed through a number of hands but is still said to lie within the area around the Wyr Lowlands.
The writer Adoral, after passing through Ballaster, wrote in her journal, “I believe that the rising floodwaters of the Wyr bring something to the people of Ballaster. This something, whatever it is, sustains them and preoccupies their entire lives, but it forces them to spend most of their time in their dark, damp homes. I do not fear these people, but I will tell you this: I would fear for my very life if I had to get between them and whatever floats up to them in the spring floods.”
For example, it becomes fairly obvious that Fnx was neither the builder nor the original occupant of the Tower of Moons. In fact, the original owners still appear to live within the structure. Tiny insects buzz about the interior, but occasionally—particularly when viewed in a mirror’s reflection or through different colors of glass—one can see that these “insects” are entities of great stature and obvious intelligence. For whatever
reason, they do not seem to be in sync with the rest of reality in any meaningful manner. So far, all attempts to interact with them or just establish communication have failed. If Fnx can communicate with them, the creature keeps it a secret.