Celestial Exiles

Whenever a large group of people interact, those with power will inevitably decide that certain individuals are inconvenient.  A time honored solution to this problem is exile to the provinces.  This solution is particularly attractive when it is nigh impossible to return without intervention from the exiling authority (sometimes you want them back).

The Celestial Empire is no different.  Where the Celestial Empire *is* different is that, being at the top of the g-well, they can drop their troubles off literally anywhere on the globe.  Or the moon, for that matter, but that's a whole separate set of anomalies.  You can do the orbital mechanics and such for how long it takes to lob an object upward from somewhere outward/down from the Celestial Palace (roughly 15,000 miles up, give or take a bit) and drop it onto terra firma in the equivalent of Saskatchewan if you like, but let's just assume that they can and that the transit time for a one-way trip is unimportant.  They can then decide if they feel like dropping supplies, reinforcements, etc.  - or not.  The thing about exiling nobles is that they don't go alone.  They have staff and bodyguards and obnoxious political supporters to accomplish whatever nominal task you sent them out for besides "not being here".  So the drop zone can get pretty big depending on the rank of the exile, or be fairly small for someone genuinely unpopular.

What all of this means for folks with a gravity habit is that the Celestial Empire is in the habit of dropping large groups of well-trained, well-armed, absurdly ignorant and incredibly desperate people literally out of the blue.  Have fun with that.

Drop Pods of the Celestial Empire

The bulk of the Celestial Empire is centered on the midpoint of the Beanstalk, at an altitude of roughly 15,000 miles.  Climbing down is analogous to circumnavigating the world on a stairmaster.  Even if you've got the thighs for it, it's really time consuming.  Falling, on the other hand, is relatively low impact (initially, anyway) and a whole lot faster.  In a nutshell, the drop pod is exactly that - a modified hollow seed pod for dropping people and cargo to places farther down the g-well.  Don't ask me how they aim what amounts to a giant dandelion seed, but they seem to be accurate to within a couple hundred yards or so.

Game stuff:

• While they can vary in size, these are roughly equivalent to ship's boats.  Cargo/Personnel capacity equivalent to anything from a dinghy through a small pinnace.
• Due to assorted peculiarities in the laws of physics around anything as decidedly impossible as a live space elevator, pods fall at a more or less constant terminal velocity of 300 mph.  This means that they may end up falling for a little over two days if they go all the way to the surface, followed by some pretty rough (but non-lethal) bouncing.  Cavalry (and other mounted troops) may not take this very well.
• The counterweight is actually "down" from the midpoint, so they can drop in that direction as well.
• You're more or less on your own to climb back up, but supply pods can be dropped along your route.

The Beanstalk

From my Weird Stuff That Won't Get Played file:

Beanstalk - The climbing vine of any of a large variety of legumes.

Beanstalk - SF geek slang for a space elevator.

This one's both.  It's not exactly natural, but it is alive.  It isn't exactly an elevator as such - more of a bridge.  If you've got the time and inclination, you can walk all the way up the stalk to the counterweight.  This would generally take about three years to get to the main station at the halfway point (14,625 miles or so).  The thing about large foot bridges is that they are seldom unoccupied.  No, not trolls (mostly).  Medieval bridges were lined with shops and houses like any other street, just moderately cleaner (just as easy to chuck the refuse in the river as in the gutter) and often with mills in the stream.  The main stalk is hollow and has a horizontal cross section about 250' across, or about the same area as one of the original World Trade Center towers.  The assorted "floors" vary in height, but are usually less than 30 feet.  There are various types of passageway that allow access between levels - it's a living plant, but was designed by wizards (or someone sentient and a bit off, anyway).  There are also access points to the outside, where leaves the size of small baronies become archipelagos in the sky linked to the main stalk by their tendril.

The takeaways:

• Live, plant-based wizard's tower.  Height not measurable by conventional means.  A little under 30,000 miles if you must count.
• Surface area roughly that of Australia.
• There's stuff living there.  Some of it's a little strange.

The Immortal Heroes of Summat

There's a Frostgrave scenario with statues that these might be handy for.

I bought a bag of 2" "Army Man" knights.  Painting one of each pose as statues leaves me with 30 more for whatever nefarious purpose strikes my fancy.  Mostly attempting to rehabilitate my fine motor skills, truth be told.  I'm not really up to painting 25mm figures again just yet.  Raw Umber damp brushed with Robin's Egg Blue drybrushed with Seafoam Green yields a reasonable facsimile of a patina on bronze.

 Normally I don't like cast on shield heraldry, but the drybrushing works pretty well with these to bring out the designs.

Larger than life, but not into colossus territory.

Herd Snail

Number Appearing: Herd

Size: Watermelon to cargo van

Armor:  Thick stony shell

Resilience:  Surprisingly difficult to kill

Intelligence:  Not that you'd notice.

Communication:  Not much.

Disposition:  Sluggish.

Violence:  May stab other snails as foreplay.  Otherwise no.

Enemies:  Rustlers, assorted carnivores, Gourmands

Aims:  Not as such.

Peculiarities:

• Vulnerable to salt.  Snailherds use goads tipped with rock salt.
• There are legends of very patient knights training the beasts as Destriers for no readily apparent reason.  Snail jousting may be popular in faraway lands that haven't heard of cricket, competitive walking, and other forms of spectator tedium.
• Those raised as livestock usually don't get much bigger than a small cottage, but keepers of snail lore maintain that they never stop growing and do not die of old age.
• Rustling them via herding isn't really practical.  Rustlers on the Beanstalk tend to roll them to a waiting flying boat at the nearest leaf edge.  Turns out that the hulls of flying boats are inexplicably delicious to herd snails, so one way or another they don't go very far.

Treasure:  Love darts (piercing blades of a size relative to the snail, very effective vice boneless creatures), vaqueta steaks, Copious quantities of disgusting acid-proof slime

Format cheerfully swiped from They Stalk the Underworld

Cloud Kraken

We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Number Appearing:  No survivors have reported seeing more than one

Size:  No survivors have ever seen the whole thing - but big enough to take an air ship

Armor: Not really

Resilience:  Tentacles are rubbery, hard to cut, and long enough to keep opponents away from the vital bits

Intelligence: Cephalopod

Communication: Skin pattern changes, to include bright flashes that mimic lightning.

Disposition: Hungry

Violence:  Great big tentacles leading to enormous beak

Enemies: Sky Whales

Aims:  Live fast.  Die young.  Leave an enormous floppy corpse.

Peculiarities:

• Some survivors report a strange "Ulla Ulla" sound in the vicinity of the encounter.
• Hunt throughout the Troposphere, but won't come below the cloud deck.  Won't come within a few hundred feet of the ground in most places due to trees, hills, etc.  Unexplained disappearances on the Sea of Grass may be linked to foggy weather.
• Can create a noxious opaque cloud the size of an air ship when they feel the need to cover their escape.
• Flying Squid are a real thing, which is pretty darned peculiar.

Treasure:  How do you feel about calamari rings?



Format cheerfully swiped from They Stalk the Underworld

Obligatory PSA

I don't really post about my personal life.  I don't generally feel that it's of interest to the three of you or the hundreds of adoring spambots that congregate here.  But I've been out of action with a brain injury for the past six months because someone decided that the screen of his phone was more important than looking through his windshield and ended up parking in my trunk at about 40 mph.  So if y'all could refrain from playing Angry Birds whilst driving or operating heavy machinery that'd be fabulous.