Wilderlands Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wildermods) wrote2018-02-07 11:01 pm
wildermods) wrote2018-02-07 11:01 pm
THE BRUGH
THE BRUGH
The Brugh is a pocket dimension currently attached to the Wilderlands. This faerie realm has an enchantment on it that's led to its residents being frozen in time, making it so the PCs can wander the hallways of the faerie castle without being bothered. For an unknown reasons, the PCs might occasionally be shifted between the Brugh and the main quest, usually swapping places with another character (this will be how players with more than one character swap them in and out of the main quest, as players may only have 1 character in the main quest at a time). Players can also sometimes shift all, or their only, characters to the Brugh if they want to sit out a plot in the main quest, or spend some time "slowatused."
The frozen Elves in the Brugh are breathtakingly beautiful, pointy-eared humanoids with delicate almost cat-like features. Or at least that's what their glamours would leave the characters to believe. There's something of their true nature in their eyes, which are hard and cold.
Only the PCs and a few small creatures in the Brugh can move around freely, such as the tiny faerie bunnies known as pooka. The pooka do not talk and are impish in nature, delighting in pranks. They enjoy committing pranks that create unevenness, like stealing someone's left shoe but leaving the right. While the pooka are mischievous, their pranks rarely ever cause actual harm.
While in the Brugh, characters will have all their needs provided for. There are many comfortable couches and beds to sleep in and while the castle is on the cool and dark side, there are extra clothes to steal for warmth. Despite the Elves themselves being frozen, conveniences in the castle are still fully functional, like the running water in the bathrooms, and the endlessly burning torches.
For some reason, scattered all around the castle are pairs of glasses (all the same identical wire-rimmed style), poppies, and left socks (only the left ones). There are also unnervingly mundane tchotchkes on many shelves, the most significant of which are endless Byers' Choice dolls and Snowbabies figurines.
Characters can practice their magic in the Brugh but will find that it only has minimal effects on important parts of the landscape. For instance, someone could practice breaking crystal in the crystal gardens but wouldn't be able to use their magic to break down locked doors.
The crystal gardens inside the castle feature delicate flowers and sculptures made of crystal and glass. Not many natural things can grow in the Brugh, so the Elves have contented themselves with having artists they capture create clever facsimiles, things that only resemble actual life.
Due to the gardens being left untended, much of the crystal has spread through the castle. It sometimes randomly blocks hallways and rooms and must be broken and "weeded." There are only two ways to do this: by singing a song loud enough to make the crystal resonate until it breaks, or by dancing so awkwardly the crystal cracks in sheer secondhand embarrassment.
The Feast Hall is a massive chamber where the faerie host was frozen in the middle of eating and revelry around a massively long table. The food there seems to magically replenish itself, meaning the PCs can have guaranteed meals anytime they want.
Stolen from many worlds, the food is a mix of alien-looking food and familiar fare (roasted meats, fruits, heavenly wine, cheese, bread, sumptuous desserts...) but all of it is extremely delicious in an almost otherworldly, impossible way. Characters may even find some foods that they also have in their home universes, stolen from worlds like their own.
In one area of the castle, indoors, there's an area that looks like it's outdoors, complete with a seemingly artificial twilight sky. A magical hedge maze lies in this area, one of the few green things inside the Brugh. The hedge maze is enchanted and when one enters it, there's a compelling sense that there's something important at the center to find.
At some points in the maze, wanderers can sometimes hear the alarming sounds of rustling, footsteps, and ragged breathing, as if they're being followed. When this happens, it's wise for them to keep moving before they're found. It's possible to get lost in the maze for days but it usually spits people out before they die of dehydration.
The maze may, at times, have something genuinely useful hidden with it, but these items will only appear sometimes, and characters must pack supplies and prepare for a long expedition within. These deeper incursions into the maze will have time-bending qualities - weeks can pass for an expedition team inside while no time passes outside the maze. Longer expeditions also run the risk of the PCs actually crossing paths with what lives inside the maze.
The Brugh has a massive library that has books stolen from every world imaginable. While many of these books are normal books, some are magical, containing spells or other oddities. For instance, some books scream or curse at the person who opens them until they close them, others flap around the room like birds until they're caught and closed, and others have text slowly appear and get revised as it's written for the first time by an author in another world.
The only books characters will not find here are ones that detail stories about the canons of characters in the game. If a character reads a book about the world of a character not yet in the game and the character apps in later, they will forget what they read about their world.
The Elves have stolen the mystical artifact known as the Mirror of Erised from one of the many worlds it exists in. The room it's contained in is a very plain room with what mostly looks like unwanted furniture and other junk.
The Mirror has the words "Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi" inscribed around the frame, and has the ability to show the viewer their heart's deepest desire. Many have wasted their lives before the mirror, losing track of reality as they were deluded by what they saw. Some have even been driven mad by seeing their most desperate desire, unable to achieve what they were witnessing.
The Elves are incapable of creating their own beauty so they often steal musical instruments (and musicians) from the worlds they raid. Therefore the music room in the Brugh is massive, filled with uncountable instruments from a wide variety of worlds. Some of these instruments are normal Earth instruments ranging from violins to keytars. Others are completely alien. Some even look like they require more hands to operate than humans have.
The area of the Brugh outside the castle is a very dreary nearly lifeless place filled with dead trees and endless winter. The only area with growing things in this snowy expanse is a mysterious meadow of flowers that only appears when someone is feeling extremely homesick. When the character stands in the meadow, they'll see an entirely different sunny sky. When they leave, the meadow will disappear.
If one wanders away from the castle, they'll find the world growing stranger in appearance, and there is an added unfinished quality to the landscape. It is as though details such as leaves and bark on trees don't exist until closely observed. The further one walks away from the castle, the more outlines of objects and the dead trees become smudgier and more faded, like a drawing getting washed away until all that's left is outline in pencil. Those who wander also find themselves fading and anyone that wanders too far disappears and never comes back.
The further one gets from the castle, the more they risk running into the dromes. Like psychic spiders, dromes spin dreams drawn from the minds of their prey. The dreams are traps, but though there are signs they're not real, those trapped in them may not realize they've passed into a dream. Those that eat anything in the dream will want to stay there for ever. The drome will watch their victim eating dream food until they starve to death and then eat them in turn.
Dromes appear in the dreams they create, and if their victim realizes they're not supposed to be there, they can be killed there with imaginary weapons. This is usually the only way of escape. Outside the dream they are large and pale and puffy, and can easily be killed by beheading.
All that said, the dromes are not actually malicious creatures. Kidnapped into the Brugh to be used as tools by the Queen of Faerie, they're usually harmless in their own world, using their hypnotic abilities to entrance and capture their normal prey: crabs. They're very simple creatures that don't entirely understand where they are or that what they do to their victims is wrong. All of them dream of going back to their own world, and are homesick for the sea.
Due to the dromes and the Queen's power to control dreams and make them solid, reality is not to be trusted in the Brugh; words, dreams, and even thoughts have power in shaping the landscape. Even the Queen being frozen hasn't changed the Brugh's deceptive nature.
The bathrooms are absolutely majestic, made of marble and gilded in gold. They have large warm baths and showers, steamrooms, and bidets in the toilets (because of course the Elves are that fastidious). These rooms are stocked with stolen toiletries from many worlds, such as luxurious oils, lotions made from flowers that only grow on a single mountaintop in a single world in a single universe, and bath bombs from Lush.
Due to overgrowth in the crystal gardens, crystal often blocks the bathrooms and characters will have to sing and dance to get through.
The scrying glass room is a simple stone room with a pool at the center, 3 feet in diameter, in a metal basin set in the floor. This pool can allow someone to view their homeworld if they concentrate on it. The more homesick someone is, the clearer the view.
Due to time being frozen until they return home, this view of their world is frozen as well, only allowing them a snapshot of what they left behind. However, they are able to view whatever they want, wherever they want, in that frozen moment.
On rare occasion, the glass shows important locations in the Wilderlands that may need to be communicated to the main party on the quest.
The Elf Queen's throne room is one of the most unnerving rooms in the castle. Most of its surfaces are covered in mirrors. The Queen herself is seated in a throne at one end, and she stares out at the masquerade in front of her with a gaze that is somehow menacing despite the gentle smile on her lips.
The masquerade ball in front of her is frozen in mid-dance, with many of the Elves wearing masquerade masks.
Also frozen around the room are very sad-looking people that are not Elves. They are human - or alien - and have vacant expressions like they've either been brainwashed or are simply feeling so much despair they barely have any personal identity left. These non-Elves are all clearly working in servitude: some are servants passing around wine, others are musicians, and others are wearing ridiculous costumes and seem to be in roles as dancers or court fools.
And then there are the children. They are dressed in beautiful clothes, with audiences of Elves gathered around them. These Elves do not have the kind faces of those who truly love children, instead their expressions are hungry and possessive, the way one might look at a precious trinket giving them entertainment. These children are frozen mid-dance and mid-frolic but they do not look happy, and even if this world wasn't frozen, they would never age. To the Elves, they are just toys, meant to dance and sing for their amusement.
The most alarming part of this room is the effects caused by the mirrors. While the glamours of the Elves are still in place, making them beautiful on first glance, they have been weakened by the Elves being frozen. If one looks in the mirrors around the rooms and concentrates hard enough, they'll see glimmers of the Elves' true forms, which are only vaguely humanoid and so horrible that they're difficult to look at for long.
The Waterfall room has a small glade, with a twenty-foot-tall waterfall that flows in from some outside source. When someone looks into this waterfall, they will sometimes see their memories playing across the surface of the water. With great concentration, one can sometimes choose what memories to view, but most of the time the waterfall is capricious, sometimes playing happy memories of things the viewer misses, or sad ones from terrible moments in the past.
Memories can be shown to other characters, but it takes a lot of focus. Players can also treat the waterfall as sometimes showing the character's memories against their will, too, if they want to let something slip where another character can see it.
Though the waterfall is capable of showing uncomfortable things, it sometimes projects a compulsion for individuals nearby to come and view it despite not wanting to.
On rare occasion, the waterfall shows memories that are not that of the viewer, sometimes providing useful information about the greater quest.
The door is big, and red, and locked very, very tightly. It would be lovely if not for what's on the floor in front of it: trails of deep brown stains and the occasional bloody hand-print. There are also scratch marks in the floor and if one looks closely enough they might even see some broken fingernails.