THE CELESTIAL LIGHTHOUSE

 

🎨 Yuming Li

The Celestial Lighthouse

Found 2 hexits outside The City, it sits on a rock outcropping overlooking a vast coral wall that protected the bay when the Once-Sea lapped its stone. Now the lighthouse IS the port. Black-oared celestial ships, manned by the citizens of Leng, visit the city and trade exclusively in red gems said to contain moral souls.

Found here, in the lighthouse's repurposed life, are women of the Kite Guild, running mooring lines from the black ships, the Astrologers Synod gathering evidence to demonstrate how the black ships mess with fate, and the Scarb Handers whose giant beetles roll wicker spheres packed with goods to and from the City. Occasionally the aging clergy of Saint Posideon have to travel to sanctify the area around the lighthouse as the Kite Guild swears they can see the sands shifting with the movement of the dead sea.

THE GODS OF THE CITY: Maybe Not The Gods Of The World

 

A very excellent post that is 1:1 about how I think about the gods: https://riseupcomus.blogspot.com/2023/11/gods-are-high-level-pcs.html

I think this is really driven home when you watch the old Clash of the Titans or read any Greek myth. The gods are just meddlesome. And they are certainly not above screwing a mortal over the smallest of slights. And when they appear, they often go big. 

Think for the Veridian Moom, I might position the well-known gods (Zeus, Hera, Apollo ect.) as saints while their "parents" or titans (Cronus) are more the forces that drive the world.

THERE IS A CITY: Which Has A Borrowed Moon

There is a wizard-built city that sits upon the Once-Ocean's pink sands. 

From afar the city's ossin alabaster stone bakes under a cloudless azure sky, nothing amiss.

But the pack lizards, zeorses, and desert stags shy at its gates.

There, between twin statues of St. Neptune that guard those gates, one glimpses the city's most famous feature: the green-blue borrowed moon.

Invisible to all from the outside, but whose presence is known to the citizens as the once-shore knew the tides.

Mike Z