ENTITY 08: THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT

The ideal conditions for human life are between 30% and 60% reality. Below that, shapes become unconstant. You become larger and smaller based on your mood and feelings. You hands distort. Space and time bends. 

Earth is in the "Goldilocks Zone", with truth levels that are perfect for human life. Any higher and humans would never have been able to become sentient. Any lower and human life would never be able to become organised into human shape - we would exist as scattered shapes and strange resonances.

Haunted Houses. Empty Sewers. Abandoned amusement parks. These are the Low Reality Zones. Away from human influence, they warp and bend and grow carnivorous. The further you get from human culture, the more strange you become. Your body and your mind slowly expands and mutates and fractures in on itself. 

So you can see why the space program was a failure. 

ENTITY 07: CULTURE VAMPIRE

Artist: Elijah Kass.

As we have established in previous entries, reality is a weak and unstable force. So, how do our forms stay stable? How do humans keep themselves in the same shape day by day? Keep their houses and thoughts and the objects around them from twisting away and mutating into wild and terrifying shapes? 

The answer is Culture. Culture is a physical force that exerts crushing pressure on you, like gravity. It constrains you and shapes you, forming your physical and mental form into a shape that pleases it. Culture is what keeps us from exploding into twisted masses of flesh when we pass through low-reality locations. 

Culture soothes over everything and makes you unable to see the weird stuff at the edge of the world. You simply forget it as soon as you look away. Pedestrians step around the strings of drool from the beast looming over them and chatter about how rainy it is today. Loners and adventurers have built up sufficient counter-culture defense systems to be able to see things, but even they sometimes find the concepts slipping from their mind, like trying to hold onto fog. If they ever retire, they'll forget it all ever happened. 

The Culture Vampire is a weak, shrivelled thing that survives through it's ability to manipulate the Absolute Culture Field.

ENTITY 06: EXCESS REALITY SQUAD

Art by D4rk

This elite special ops unit is trained to contain hyper-real objects and persons. The world is mostly fake, so any object that is 70% real or more can cause extreme damage to the fabric of the universe. In the presence of these hyper-real objects, fictional concepts begin to break down. The fundamental storytelling instinct that humans use in order to understand and interpret the universe begins to disintegrate. Reality Exposure begins to set in.

In the first stage of Reality Exposure, subjects begin losing their understanding of basic fictional concepts - like The Economy, or Nationality. 

In advanced stages they no longer understand more important concepts like Truth, Beauty, Love, or Human Connection. 

In the terminal stage, they completely lose the concept of the "Human Being". They are no longer a Human - just a collection of organs, flesh and brain matter. The exposure continues until finally they lose even that. They become nothing but molecules, randomly vibrating through space. 

Physically, nothing changes. But no-one who looks at them would recognise them as a human at all.

Megamall23, week 1: The Avenue

Here's the start of my Dungeon23 project. I don't think I'll be able to post an update here every week, but I wanted to start out with an update. 

I stole the layout of the real American Dream mall and cut it into rough dungeon sections to get me started. I decided a horizontal layout would be best. Not only does it evoke an actual Megamall better, it also helps make sure the space is naturally jacquayed. This space automatically has a lot of entrances and connections between sections. The players immediately have a lot of choices about where they want to go.