Purple Rain (Wermspittle)

Well, there is a rage in the storms of late years which really transcends bounds; I do not remember if I have noted it in these sheets before: but I never could have conceived a turbulence so huge. Hour after hour I sat there that night, smoking a chibouque, reading, and listening to the batteries and lamentations of that haunted air, shrinking from it, fearing even for the Speranza by her quay in the sequestered harbour, and for the palace-pillars.

The Purple Cloud

M. P. Shiel

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Nothing lasts forever. Even those vast aerial horrors that go on to kill off entire worlds eventually succumb in turn to some mysterious process of nature. Even Purple Clouds die. Not quietly, not gently, but ferociously and violently. Purple Clouds do not go quietly into oblivion, they become intensely agitated and wracked with lightnings and hurricanes, tornadoes and storms. Thunder shatters the gloomy silence brought upon the world by their deadly vapors. Where once they stole into the world like quiet thieves, these aerial horrors depart in a spectacular tempest of sound and fury witnessed only by the unburied dead left to rot where they fell.

Rain washes the purple stain from the clouds. The skies become a raging battlefield between vast aerial horrors and unknown forces, and those few survivors left down below upon the tainted and toxic surface of the world find themselves faced with an entirely other form of holocaust...

Sometimes...Some fragment of a Purple Cloud, beset with the thunderous wrath of a vengeful atmosphere and cast down from its lofty throne over a world it had all but murdered will flow through some Weak Point or other aperture in its blind panic to escape. These sorts of reduced and diminished Purple Clouds are known as Purple Tempests or Purple Rain and while they have been stripped of much of their former glory, they remain formidable, terrible things even in their last death throes.

Exposure to the Purple Rain causes temporary fits of madness, violence, and has been known to make doves cry. Chemists and others collect the stuff to use it in various processes; the Pruztians were the first to learn how to distill a potent nerve gas from it.

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Minor Miasmas  |  Purple Wisps | Purple Haze | Deep Purple Smog |  Purple Rain 
Purple Clouds | Purple Horde
Srumachis

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Inspiration: The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel, with a little assist from this guy. Happy Thirtieth Anniversary!

Six Pillows

Six Pillows by Albrecht Durer;
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum

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Early to bed, early to rise; keep a sharpened stake handy, and always keep an eye out for mice...

 Old Wermspittle Nursery Rhyme

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Getting a good night's sleep is essential to one's health and well-being. Everyone knows this, many people say it, few get the opportunity to experience it in Wermspittle where insomnia is rampant, nightmares are far too commonplace, and there's often something under your bed or weird distracting sounds or things other than rats crawling around in the walls...really, it's a wonder anyone gets any sleep at all in this place...

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1. Pillow One. A sturdy sack of goose-down, this pillow looks exceptionally comfortable and inviting to a weary traveler...
   

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   Soft, soft pillow (unique) [AL N, MV n/a, AC 7, HD 1+1, #AT 1, DG 1d4 per round (suffocation), SV F1, ML 6, Special: Only ever attacks with surprise for +4 bonus to hit on first attack. If initial attack fails, pillow goes flaccid and tries to appear harmless for next 1d4 hours, after which time it may attempt another attack. Takes only half damage from blunt weapons. Anyone suffocated by this pillow has a 30% chance to rise as a minor undead.]

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2. Pillow Two. This pillow appears a different shade of purple every time you look at it...
   

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   Lurid Purple Pillow (unique) [AL C, MV 9' (3'), AC 7, HD 1, #AT 1, DG 1d4+Poison, SV F1, ML 9, Special: This pillow is saturated with vapors from a recent Deep Purple Smog Event and there is a lingering trace of the Purple Vapors, possibly a weakened Purple Wisp lurking within the thing.]

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3. Pillow Three. There's nothing exceptional about this pillow whatsoever...
   

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   Dastardly Cuddler (unique) [AL N, MV n/a, AC 6, HD 1+2, #AT 1, DG 1d4 per round, SV F2, ML 12 (fearless), Special: This nasty cushion simply lies there waiting for the opportunity to strike from surprise with a +2 bonus to hit on its first attack. When it strikes, this foul thing wraps itself around the victim's upper limbs and chest and squeezes relentlessly. It will not stop trying to crush its victim until destroyed. It takes only half damage from blunt weapons, the other half affecting its victim. It is highly flammable, but shares all damage it takes from fire-based attacks with its victim on a 50-50 basis.]

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4. Pillow Four. There's a faint whiff of something sulfurous coming from this pillow...
   

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   This pillow conceals a hidden Grobbly-Bonk map...

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5. Pillow Six. [Note: Pillow Five was lost in an unexplained fire suspected of being a case of spontaneous human combustion. It will be missed.] This pillow seems slightly damp...and sticky...
   

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   There could be a small swarm of freshly hatched vermin squirming around within this increasingly soggy pillow, or perhaps something Squick and Ichorous, some sort of Unsightly Stain, or maybe it's just some Strange Ovum...

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6. Lucille. This pillow is the favorite method of capturing potential new Thralls by a local Somnambulist who has concealed a small clockwork device underneath the pillow that will snap open a vial of chloroform in the middle of the night...
   

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   Stitch-Sack Clutcher (unique) [AL N, MV  9' (3'), AC 7, HD 2, #AT 1 (Clutch), DG 1d4, SV F1, ML 5, Special: The clockwork mechanism secreted beneath this pillow can be spotted by simply checking the bed, but it is amazing how many people simply forget to do this on a regular basis. When the timer runs out, this pillow will clutch onto the victim while soporific fumes spew forth from it. Save at -1 to avoid falling unconscious for the next 3d6 Turns from the chloroform.] A Sleeping Thrall named Janoz is waiting for the clock he is watching to strike the designated hour, at which time he will lurch out of the closet where he was hidden behind a secret panel, scoop up the unconscious form of the victim, and carry them off to his master...

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Six Sleeping Thralls | Six Somnambulists | Six Dreamers
Six Scenario Seeds for Somnambulists

Lesser Oneirical Beasts
Red Bestiary Index

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Three different victims of so-called 'night terrors' have been reported to the local authorities. Each one a fairly healthy, robust, well-armed denizen of the Low Streets and not the type to get suckered by some trollop with a razor or any of the usual perils of the night. In fact each one is rumored to have been strangled or smothered in their sleep, prompting some alleyway experts to declare it all the work of Stranglemasses. So far there is no proof, no leads, and no comment from either the Red Watch nor the Street Patrol.

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Monikins

"Whether we belong to the class of quadrupeds or not, is a question that has a good deal embarrassed our own savants: returned the stranger. "There is an ambiguity in our physical action that renders the point a little questionable; and therefore, I think, the higher castes of our natural philosophers rather prefer classing the entire monikin species, with all its varieties, as caudae-jactans, or tailwavers; adopting the term from the nobler part of the animal formation. Is not this the better opinion at home, my Lord Chatterino?" he asked, turning to the youth, who stood respectfully at his side.

"Such, I believe, my dear Doctor, was the last classification sanctioned by the academy," the young noble replied, with a readiness that proved him to be both well-informed and intelligent, and at the same time with a reserve of manner that did equal credit to his modesty and breeding. "The question of whether we are or are not bipeds has greatly agitated the schools for more than three centuries."

The Monikins

by James Fenimore Cooper

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According to the surviving copies of the heavily-redacted shipping manifests, at least twenty breeding-couples of Monikins were brought into Wermspittle by the ANGSOC Refugees. These Monikins were mostly accounting-slaves, trained to perform various tricks of bureaucratic legerdemain, but a few were also trained to act as covet observers and body-guards. The Monikins were originally inhabitants of several lush, tropical islands situated within the same Antarctic archipelago from which the Tsalalians were displaced by the Horrors unleashed by meddlesome explorers investigating the nature of the Polar Monoliths first described in the Sibylline Leaves during the reign of Kalushma the Sagacious nearly eleven-hundred years ago...

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Monikin
No. Enc.: 2d4
Alignment: Neutral (60%), Law (30%), Chaos (10%)
Movement: 120' (40')
Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 1+1
Attacks: 1*
Damage: 1d4 or by weapon
Save: as Zero-Level Human
Morale: 7

Monikins with a DEX of 14 or better can use their prehensile tail to wield light weapons, small bucklers or wands.

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Monikins can advance in any class, as long as they have appropriate stats. They tend to be very fashion-conscious and approve of good manners, good math skills, and good breeding. Their original society was very focused on selective breeding along caste-lines, something that their time in servitude to ANGSOC only reinforced and strengthened. They greatly fear and distrust Winged Monkeys whom they consider to be degenerates that they do not approve of at all, to the point that a Monikin will ask a stranger to convey anything they might have to say to such beings so as not to interact with them directly for fear of social contamination or censure by their betters.

There is a sizable Monikin community of scholars and money-lenders at the Academy in Wermspittle that have quietly been pursuing their respective areas of study and diligently refraining from any overt involvement in politics, ostensibly because of their many generations of mistreatment at the hands of ANGSOC. However, there are persistent rumors that imply that the Monikins are not nearly as hands-off when it comes to such things as they would have others believe...

Monikin Elders rejected the admission of Uberschimpanze into the ranks of eligible students for decades due to a misunderstanding based on the Uberschimpanzes lack of suitable tails, leading the Monikins to reject them as actual primates. This unfortunate incident has led to a bit of friction between the two groups, a situation made worse by the machinations of the Marmoset clans who have never really accepted the Monikins based on their dismissal of mustard as a mere condiment...

Inspiration: The Monikins, by James Fenimore Cooper, was published in 1835 and is a strange, satirical novel more about finances and money than monkeys. It is also available via The Internet Archive, or at the highly recommended ERBzine site. The author's daughter Susan provided an Introduction to The Monikins in 1861 which might also be of interest.

Once They Were Liberators...

People rejoiced when they first strode forth into the morning sunlight. The Franzikaners had finally made it through the trenches, the mine-fields and the last-ditch legions of conscripted dead. Brave Tripod-Hussarls and swarms of smaller, more specialized tripods broke through the ranks of Sturmgraben, zinn soldiers and other units left behind as the Military Governor fled to Morsgrieven to take up his exile-in-disgrace for having lost his post. They ended the First Occupation by the Pruztians. They instituted a firm and rigorously maintained peace. The old Lethal Chambers remained active, perhaps even busier than before. Sedition, treason, saboteurs, dreamers and spies were everywhere--the Franzikaner Triumvirate (no one ever really one called them the 'Administrative Troika',) reminded everyone of these things daily. Hourly. The old Resistance that had fought and died and suffered for so long under the Pruztians and their ANGSOC lackeys decided that they had no choice but to bring the Pruztians back in an attempt to drive the tripods out. And that was the beginning of the Second Occupation...

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The low-lander farmers around Sprungen are convinced that you can follow the Red Weeds that continually invade their crop-lands back to the Imperial War Gardens at Naris, right in the heart of the Franzik Empire. Whether or not it is true, their saying has taken on the weight of established and accepted folklore. It might as well be true.

The Franzikaner forces did harden many of the Smog Shelters against the more common forms of Black Smoke. Those shelters that they upgraded received a green-brass plaque showing the beloved/much feared Red Tripod of the Imperial Grand Army.

Despite intense fighting, massive destruction and loss of life, the tripods were never fully driven out of Wermspittle. Some suspect it was their use of Resonators that allowed them to open, close or disrupt Weak Points that gave them an edge over their opponents. Others claim it was the Franzik Empire's annexation of the Near Worlds and the establishment of the massively fortified Grand Octants that made the difference as it allowed them to transport tripod units around the known static defenses and traps set by the Pruztians. Where the scout-tripods reported mine-fields or artillery emplacements, the Franzikaners stalked off through Weak Points to an Adjacent World and proceeded on their way, forcing the Pruztians to invest in as many alternate routes as they could reach, or else leave a gap for the tripods to move past them. It was a logistical nightmare and instead of giving up on the traditional forms of conventional warfare as taught in the military colleges of High Pruztia, the empire chose to resort to the use of manufactured plagues, setting off a terrible back-and-forth of weaponized contagions that quickly decimated the ranks of both sides and everyone else within close proximity. The waves of war-poxes accounted for more death and destruction than even the wide-spread aerial bombardment each side had used to disrupt all rail-transport and to reduce once proud and beautiful cities to a stone-age level of barbarism.

Darkness descended in a cloud of Black Smoke, leaving civilization in a shambles; the majority of the world was cast down into a global medieval age where the old empires still carry on their war amid the ruins...

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Inspiration: Primarily The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, of course, with a nod to Mr. Chamber's Repairer of Reputations, as well as a few of the usual suspects from the Vermiform Appendix.

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Mr. Nemor Arrives in Wermspittle

Portion of suppressed aethertype purported to depict a so-called 'Nemor Machine' in operation.

'When certain crystals, salt, for example, or sugar, are placed in water they dissolve and disappear. You would not know that they have ever been there. Then by evaporation or otherwise you lessen the amount of water, and lo! there are your crystals again, visible once more and the same as before. Can you conceive a process by which you, an organic being, are in the same way dissolved into the cosmos, and then by a subtle reversal of the conditions reassembled once more?'

The Disintegration Machine

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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They found the raving lunatic wandering about the White Orchard. He showed the tell-tale yellow eyes that came with prolonged exposure to Yellow Wallpaper or the printing industry--both quite unsavory implications. Upon examination by the Zinn Woodsmen, all they could gather from his incoherent babbling was that he wasn't from around there. So he was turned over to the Academy as a foreign scientist, after registering a report on him with the appropriate authorities as a possible subversive or agitator.

The Administrative personnel at the Academy soon realized that the strange man dropped in their laps by those rusty bumpkins was indeed some sort of mechanic or technician. So they set him to taking the usual classroom tests for a first-year student. He excelled at mathematics and quickly revised his answers as he learned to read proper Franzik.

Suspecting they might have a late-bloomer Prodigy on their hands, they handed him over to the Medical Review board who examined him to see if  he was Odd, or just precocious. The results were inconclusive when the Senior Academics learned about the situation through their various snitches, spies and the usual channels.

Those were dark days back then. The international situation was rapidly deteriorating. Civil unrest escalated into all-out civil war in Aman Utal. Plague decimated the populations of Naris, Karlogne, Kaismar and a host of other cities. With war looming on the immediate horizon the Regents decided that they could use a mad man to help them prepare for the worst. Wermspittle was suffering under the Second Pruztian Occupation then. The Academy was under the strict discipline of the Imperial Science Apparatus. The Military Governor appointed by the High Chancellery was most enthusiastic about picking the brain of this new-found foreign genius.

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Inspiration: The Disintegration Machine by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This is the last of the Professor Challenger stories written by Doyle himself and can be found at Project Gutenberg (Australia), among other places such as Classic Literature Library. Also there is a bit of Robert W. Chamber's 'Lethal Chambers' as mentioned in his excellent story The Repairer of Reputations, which is included in The King in Yellow, available at Project Gutenberg. There is also a slight connection to HPL's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward...

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Thumbling (Red Bestiary)

They tell a story down in the Low-Lands about how there once was a couple living alone in a small but well-hidden enclave that had been hit hard by a plague that seeped up through the wells and killed everyone else off one autumn. The old couple only had to survive until spring, then they could either hire-on new hands or abandon the place and move on to the East. The months went by slowly as they waited out the bad weather, the biters and the mobs.

The old farm-steader sat and poked at the remains of their cooking fire one winter evening. His wife sat and spun wermfuzz into workable fiber. He leaned back in his creaking chair and sighed deeply. The wife, who still carried the scars of having battled muckwerms and stabberlings and still worse things in the defense of their modest enclave for most of her life stopped her spinning and glared at him with her one good eye. The silence lingered like a fart between them. Finally he cleared his throat and said; “I think it is sad that we have had no children.”

“Ach—but it has not been for lack of trying.” She scowled at him, then dismissed the matter and went back to her spinning. But the idea stuck I her mind; “Even if we did have one, there's not much of a life here for such a young one—they'd have to leave before they grew very big. You know they'd have to go on into the city like all the others.”

“I know.” He stopped poking the fire and went out to check the barricades and fences.

That night the wife fell ill. She was bed-ridden with fever and convulsions. In the space of fewer than seven nights she wasted practically away to skin and bone, save for her belly which swelled-up like a tumor that writhed and gurgled and tormented her badly.

On the seventh night she died as her belly ruptured and a viscous, bloody mass spilled forth. Six Thumblings, they had devoured the seventh while still inside the old woman, pulled themselves free of the gory mess and quickly scampered into hiding to lie in wait for the old farmer to return. They ambushed him. Ate him. Took his thumbs. They've been on the prowl ever since.


The story may or may not be true. Most people agree that it is, if anything, too gentle and too forgiving in its depiction of these once feared and now greatly despised and hated little people.

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Thumbling
No. Enc.: 3d6 (5d20+)
Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: 60' (20')
Armor Class: 7 (A few may wear armor)
Hit Dice: 1d4 hit points
Attacks: 1
Damage: 1d4 or weapon-1
Save: F2
Morale: 7

Tiny, dirty-minded, evilly disposed and vicious little people no taller than a grown-man's thumb, these wicked little folk lurk within the small spaces and out-of-the-way places, coming forth at night to cut off the thumb of their victims. During the Achuin Occupation hundreds of Thumblings served as 'Street Sweepers' who terrorized their former neighbors and persecuted their rivals. They switched sides prior to the First Pruztian Occupation, during which time a small cadre of Thumblings were used as special interrogators and operatives by the Military Governor. The Thumblings are hated and reviled for their collaboration with the occupying powers and they are the frequent targets of Todtenhilzig revenge-killings in retaliation for the extreme persecution they inflicted the doll-makers whom they tended to single out for torture and re-education.

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Source: Thumbling is from German folklore, and has two stories, Thumbling and Thumbling's Travels (also known as Thumbling as Journeyman) that were collected and added to the Grimm Brother's 'Household Tales' collection of fairy tales. These nasty little things do have a few minor similarities to Johnathan Swift's Lilliputians as well as the sort of Little People Mr. Machen featured in his excellent story The White People, but any such resemblance is purely superficial and unintentional on the part of the Thumblings.