Hollow Moon Planetology: Blue Moon - Emergence
by Sharon Dornhoff((Sean axed this post to save space,
the first time, but I've gotten some e-mail asking what happened to
#3a, so here it is again. Please excuse the overblown prose; I've
been trying to give the HM a bit of a Dunsany-ish "feel".))
Emergence: A First Look
When a Voidship first rises from the darkness of Mare Orientale,
what greets the passengers' eyes is yet another ring of mountains,
surrounding the crater in a perfect mirror-image of the external
Cordilleras. Indeed, the interior landscape of the Hollow Moon so
closely corresponds to that of the outside, in its placement of
seas and of exposed crystalbarrens, that one can use any map of the
outer Matera -- or Luna -- for the layout of this new game-setting,
by means of a mirror. Until an explorers' vessel has cleared the
peaks of the craggy ring-mountains, nothing but pitch blackness can
be distinguished in the emptiness beyond the peaks.
Then, the PCs ascend above the mountaintops... and behold the
wonders of the Firmament.
Stretching off into the distance both north and south of the
Orientale Peninsula, and rising up and away farwards to the outer
limits of vision, the interior vista of the lunar Farside opens out
overhead, curving around to meet itself in a crystalline dome half
as vast as the continent of Brun, itself. On the night of a new
moon, this incredible expanse of translucent mineral-flats glimmers
with a subtle, deeply-embedded radiance: a soft, eerie,
unearthly-luminous glow of refracted, penetrating sunlight, in only
the deepest blues, greens and violets. Cracks and blemishes hidden
within the crystal -- invisible to onlookers in orbit, from the
outside -- are thrown into razor-sharp contrast by this light, as
they branch forth from Mare Orientale in a frost-feathered mosaic
that reaches thousands of miles across the Farside's dome. Dimmed
and colour-shifted by its passage through thirty miles of dense,
cracked, imperfectly-transparent crystal, the faint indigo
illumination of the Firmament's meagre "sunlight" is barely enough
to render visible the stark profiles of mountain ranges, the liquid
shimmer of wave-tossed seas, and the cold gleam of ice-rimed
crystalbarrens that spread out over the Nearside, beneath it.
Dim-lit or not, it's a panorama well worth the seeing. With no
interior sun to obscure one's view of distances, as there is in the
Hollow World, sharp eyes can actually distinguish the entirety of
the Nearside without need of spell or spyglass. Cradled in a vast
"bowl" of inner landscape, the nearward realms' most-prominent
features are as readily recognised -- dropping away gently, like a
never-ending and much-eroded mountainside, to a depth of some
thousand miles at the "bowl's" centre; only to rise upward to the
Nearside's far-off opposite rim, and meet the crystal Firmament
once more -- as are our own moon's maria, at over two hundred times
that distance. By the sub-lunarean "day" of the new moon, as the
Firmament glows its brightest, valleys, canyons, and raging rivers
may be glimpsed, amongst the towering Jura Peaks and the expansive
Stofler-Walter-Purbach-Arzachel Range, by the faint blue light; the
effect is much like being inside an ice-tunnel on a Mystaran
glacier into which only traces of blue light penetrate ... albeit a
tunnel as big as an entire world! At fulldark, when the Farside's
dome of crystal lies in shadow, only the eldritch luminescence of
the light-capturing corals in the easter and equatorial maria, the
lantern-adorned cities of men and Cacklogallinians on the shores of
Mare Foecunditatis, and the infernal red heat of the Apennines and
other unquiet volcanoes, reveal the nighted contours of the lunar
world.
Close by, where the Orientale Peninsula roots itself on the
Nearside's rim, the black-crowned pine forests of Stygia cover the
highlands, grim and foreboding, between the Cordilleras and the
murky Mare Humorum. To the north, the largest and most-trackless of
the crystalbarrens -- open regions of icy, inhospitable bedrock --
sprawls across fully one-seventh of the Nearside's inner surface:
the Oceanus Procellarum, hunting-ground and homeland of the nomadic
cryions and their traditional nemeses, desert ghosts. On its far
shores rises Mount Copernicus -- tallest mountain in the Hollow
Moon at 37,000 feet -- while along the northernmost coast of
Procellarum, the Juras' volcanic fires belie the arctic climes of
Mare Frigoris. Maria Imbrium and Serenitatis, whose crystal ground
gives way to liquid seas beyond the Haemus Islands, keep the
rapacious Qaurikkas and frost salamanders of Frigoris at bay from
the equatorial midlands, and flank the steam-enshrouded Apennines
and Caucasus Mountains east and west. In the Lull Times,
Modrigswerg of the Caucasus have been known to welcome traders who
brave the trek from the Rimlands; brooding in their timeless
aeries, the pteryx share no such hospitality, Storm Time or
Lull.
Past the perils of Stygia, beyond Humorum, the southern outlands'
forests teem with goblinoids that relish the eternal night,
heedless of the hsiao who look upon their squabblings with a
benign, scholarly contempt. On the islands of Fra Mauro in the Mare
Nubium, the relict culture of Patera's pre-Imperial rakastas fish
the crater-lakes and sing an oral history of time immemorial.
Behind the Straight Wall, a manmade barrier against cryion
depredation, the far-more-predatory kopru of the mountains tug
discreetly on the strings of their grand puppet empire -- its
befuddled, non-kopru inhabitants, hiding their mental subjugation
behind a facade of placid civility. Only the constant vigilance of
the Deslandren kouprey-ranchers to the west, and the ferocious
guerrilla warfare of Shaergarde to the east, has kept this taint of
imperialist mind-manipulation from spreading further.
In Shaergarde and the Vesperlands, explorers may at last find those
the elves and hin of Mystara may call kin; in the latter realm, on
the shores of Simus Medii, descendants of the Schattenalfen who
refused Atzanteotl's enticements have found a world in which their
affinities for endless darkness and for the out-of-doors are not at
odds. Near the vesper elves, the broken marshy promontories of "the
Rilles" are a damp refuge for the lupins' eldest and
most-overlooked of forebearers ... the one breed of Hutaaka-kind
which Pflarr would gladly have the world forget. In Sinus Medii and
the waters surrounding, an ancient, vanished race of sea-dwellers
-- known to present-day Mystarans only by their dead -- waits in
eagerness within siliceous-coral halls for their next sign of
favour from the Immortals.
Out beyond Tranquillitatis, south of the Wallaran dreamscapes and
the arid steppes of Sohktar, the shark-kin of Mare Crisium's
shorelines prosper on the land, even as their fellows do, beneath
the distant Mare Humorum's waters. Tranquillitatis, though deep and
coral-rich, lacks inhabitants of its own; the mysterious, shadowed
citadel of Maskelyne casts a gloom across the waters, which even
the gnomes of the Taurus Mounts feel little drive to investigate.
Certainly the witch-wary margasta tribes, who claim the trifold
isthmus between Tranquillitatis, Foecunditatis and Nectaris,
believe the dour city's island to be cursed. They believe the same
-- and rightly -- of the far shores of Foecunditatis, where many in
the montane villages of yaks and goatherds are as human as you or
I. Those of Vedal who are not, of course, prey upon those who
are.
More forgotten cousins of Pflarr's children roam the dry Rhieta
savannahs south of Foecunditatis -- ancestors of the Graakhalian
newcomers in the Janssen Badlands, although joyfully unaware of the
fact. Their other neighbours, the phanatrels of the Nectaris
shores, labour with equal joy for the Altai Scarp's gracious
araneas, innocent of any reason they should dispute their arachnid
patrons' wisdom. Both welcomed and well-sated, in a world where
giant insects are a more common livestock than cattle, the Hollow
Moon's spider-folk need not hide their natures; indeed, their
silken windships are greeted with enthusiasm by the trade-cities of
the Cacklogallinians, and they are much sought after as tutors by
mages of all species. Farward of Sohktar, the Redlands' peninsula
extends beyond the rim into lands they would not be so accepted in,
but that region of poison soils and distorted life is inaccessible
by windship: though the Savage Coast's nocturnal races also have
their refuge, Ka and his allies will not let the contamination of
the Red Curse breach the Nearside's rim.
Of all these lands, and of those reaches of the Hollow Moon unknown
and undescribed, no more than a handful count human beings among
their populace. Lacking infravision or the superior senses of
lupins and rakasta, humans fare poorly in this place; only four
cultures of humans or near-humans have been carried to this setting
by the Immortals, and only once -- the Nephthisian Exodus -- have
they come here by their own methods. Deslandres and Vedal,
Cynidicea and Qaurikka, and the albheldri islands of Haemus all
have human populations; and the trade-cities welcome anyone with
talent to sell or money to spend ... but the Hollow Moon is, first
and foremost, a land of races far better-suited to this realm's
eternal twilight. Whether or not human PCs can overcome the
limitations of their vision and the scepticism of others to become
respected, or are disdained as near-blind clods -- or whether they
get themselves lynched as suspected bhuts or lycanthropes --
remains to be seen, in the adventures to come.