With a populace of just over a million, the majority living in slums, Sphäre is a notorious hub for Aquilus' most sophisticated marketplaces for predictions. Patrons can stroll streets and side alleys, finding fortune-tellers who desperately pitch information and visions of a potential future.
Prophets and seers are not born with gifts however. They are addicted to stardust, each speck containing a part of the collective memory and potential of the universe. This allows the addict to enter cosmic consciousness, experiencing everything as a whole, rather than a chain of separate events. The raw dust is transformed into an ingestible narcotic in Sphäre's underworld by the nefarious elite, a dark and twisted experiment in how the future can be defined by those who stand to profit from it.
There is no cure for stardust addiction, which causes irreparable mental and physical trauma, loss of purpose and meaning, and eventual descent into self-destruction.
Roll on each table below and combine results:
Discoveries
You come across... (d12)
- A city quarter where bio-mechanical humanoids reside, shunned by the populace. Some are former prophets. They spend their days churning complex clockwork machinery for no known purpose.
- A building where dead, celebrated prophets can be visited. They are entombed in clear, solid black glass. They appear to sometimes move inside if closely inspected.
- Shops that sell crystal balls and divination cards. Some offer unusual items, such as luminescent superconducting ceramics and liquid crystal gel.
- A desolate necropolis where dead prophets are buried. It is decorate by enormous stone carvings resembling children's toys. Sphäre's children have carved these.
- Walled section of the city covered with obscene murals. There are hundreds of intricately carves marbled staircase that lead to nowhere.
- Garden overgrown with weird fungi and lichen. Here stand statues depicting Sphäre's greatest prophets. Each day their poses magically change.
- An ancient golden barge which can fly, ready to take travelers to exotic destinations. It's very expensive.
- A building adorned with millions of valuable gemstones. Nobody seems to ever try to steal them. It is illuminated within by oil lamps which are rumored to burn for eternity.
- An park where statues of false idols stand. They have all been decapitated. Plants rarely grow here.
- A river of pure milk that that glows by night. Mothers come in the mornings with buckets, to collect sustenance for their children.
- A quarter on the outskirts of Sphäre, where a project has been continuing for hundreds of years to dig an endless hole to reach to the other side of the world.
- Huge monoliths believed to have been designed by an ancient species. Some say they are inhabited by souls of Sphäre's original prophets.
Encounters
- 2d4 children of prophets
- A suspicious hypnotist
- A fanatical cartographer
- A scared writer of riddles
- 1d3 feared elites
- A traveling show of mutants
- An enigmatic wealthy outsider
- 1d3 merry priests
- Sphäre's oldest sage
- 1d4 disaffected plague victims
- 1d4 decadent court jesters
- A bio-mechanical human
- ...standing in front of a young oracle and being entertained by amusing cantrips.
- ...bickering they paid too many gold coins for a prophetic reading.
- ...demanding the players make a payment to the city.
- ...holding a basket of fresh, bloodied, human ears and eyes. These belong to prophets.
- ...attempting to crack open some very large unhatched eggs.
- ....kneeling in tribute to what they claim to be a demon summoned from another plane. There is nothing there.
- ...mercilessly beating a beggar, whilst laughing the entire time.
- ...bizarrely-deformed, running out of a palm reader's shop and screaming.
- ...picked up suddenly by a dark-winged shape that swooped from the sky.
- ...attempting to trade potions for armaments with the PCs.
- ...fending off a swarm of biological horrors.
- ...loudly predicting doom.
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