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What’s weird about the club downtown?

1 – It’s run by the fey, and alongside the coat-check, you can hand in your reflection for the evening as well. Without a reflection, your soul doesn’t get stained from sin, so you can do whatever you wish and not end up karmically tainted by it. (In more concrete terms, you don’t feel bad about it, either. And you don’t even feel bad that you don’t feel bad.) The club keeps your reflection if you can’t pay up, and sells them on to desperate vampires at extortionate rates if you leave it too long.

2 – The music is a ritual. It’s one of the longest the world has ever seen, and it’s been performed by ten artists over about fifteen years; they come on stage and perform certain notes to add to the oversong. When it’s complete, they say that the whole club will ascend, but that’s probably just a spiel to get people through the doors.

3 – It’s infinite; there’s a room for every kind of music that you could imagine. However, seeing as the number of people in the club is finite, the less popular the musical style is the fewer people you’ll see. A number of shadowy organisations hold meetings in the throat-singing room, convinced that they’ll never be interrupted.

4 – You can only get to it by elevator. There are six elevators that go there, spread across town, and each of them has a slightly different combination of button-pushes that allow access. A lot of the elevators come with a “test” of some kind – a creepy-looking woman or child entering the lift and asking you weird questions – but that’s just to put off the tourists.

5 – It’s on the inside of a sphere; you can look up and see the other dancefloor. Which would be difficult enough to handle if you were sober, and you definitely aren’t. Some people like to throw small change up into the centre to see if you can get it to float in the middle of the sphere; the bouncers kick you out if they catch you doing it, though.

6 – It’s Valhalla for ravers. If you die on a dancefloor – generally thanks to an overdose, dehydration, or looking at the wrong guy in the wrong way and getting your head kicked in – then you come here, and dance all night, and sleep all day in the back of the chillout room. It’s jam-packed with the most hardcore party people available from throughout time, and they’re all impossibly irritating to be around if you’re sober.

7 – They’ve been playing the same song for the last twelve years. It’s incredibly long, and they just turn it down and leave it running when the club closes. Regular attendees believe that the mysteries of the universe are contained within the song – eventually. It seems to be about two years behind whatever’s fashionable when you hear it, which is pretty good going considering it was written last century.

8 – The place is jam-packed full of birds; owls, crows, hawks, ravens, etc. The staff’s main job is cleaning up after them, but if you can deal with the droppings, it lends the place a fantastic ambience.

9 – It’s pitch black inside. Most of the things that come here can see in the dark, and indeed prefer to function without light, so they don’t need it. Torches (and therefore phones) are banned; you can use night-vision goggles to see what’s going on, but expect the other punters to laugh at you and try to steal them.

10 – It’s in a rooftop garden. The plants here are unnaturally lush and vibrant, no matter what time of year it is – you reckon that there must be a dryad in charge, or at the very least a druid – and, occasionally, you see a deer or a fox scampering away down one of the corridors. Some of the more elaborate cocktails come served in pitcher plants or sliced-open cacti; the regulars tend to stick to glasses, though.

Glimmers is a series where Chris and Grant, the creative leads behind Rowan, Rook & Decard, create an urban horror world through the use of Dx tables. Because who has time to read a full setting book?
[GLIMMERS.] The city is alive. The city is connected, with streams of light and noise and people, to every other city; they are all the same being, all branches of the same concrete-and-glass tree. There are streets between them, forgotten streets, with secret names and grim inhabitants. (And: there are wild-lands, dark places, the Spaces Between, where nothing seems right. Airport waiting rooms. Churches, at night. Backwater villages.)
There is vast power in the thrum of machines and the buzz of traffic, and it can be yours, for a price.

Image by electricnude on flickr

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So: you broke up with a witch. How bad is this going to be?

1 – It’s fine, because they kept some of your hair, and made a copy of you that doesn’t complain or leave the cupboard doors in the kitchen open. So it’s fine. It’s all fine. It doesn’t want to hunt you down and eat you or anything; and even if it did, that wouldn’t make it more powerful, or more “complete.” So go to sleep.

2 – You figured it was amicable, but when you went for a piss this morning, there was blood in it. And, eventually, painfully: thorns. So: that’s a problem, and they’re not answering their phone when you ring them to try and figure out what’s happening.

3 – They turn up at your house the next day with no knowledge of what happened; turns out you broke up with one of the meat-puppet doubles they employ to get shit done, and they’ve got no knowledge of it. They (or… the meat-puppet, you suppose) seemed really upset, and stormed out of the cafe after the break-up, and they can’t contact it any more. They need your help getting it back.

4 – They trap you hexwise in the day of the break-up, forcing you to re-live it over and over again until you get it right. Unfortunately, you haven’t a goddamn clue what “right” is, because not breaking up doesn’t seem to fix it. You’re on loop thirteen now and you’re starting to come unhinged.

5 – They transform into a cat, sneak into your house, and kill your pets. At least: you think it was them.

6 – Everyone in town starts looking at you funny. Pretty soon, your friends stop responding to your messages; even your mum makes an excuse and hangs up on you. The next week, your face is in the papers: everyone seems to recognise you as someone who masturbates in public parks. And: you don’t, just to be clear. It just seems that everyone else believes you do.

7 – You didn’t break up with them; they broke up with you, and to soften the blow, they cast a spell over you to make you believe you triggered the split. It’s just kinder this way. Which makes you wonder: what other memories from your time together are false?

8 – It’s amicable; you both realise you need different things, that you’re different people, and you kiss one last time before saying goodbye and walking away. Except: you were never going out with them in the first place. The whole relationship was just a spell, a potion you drank several months ago – a hallucinatory whirlwind romance with the partner of your dreams, who also happens to be the witch who brewed the concoction – and now it’s worn off, you wake up with a crushing hangover and a heartbreak to match as reality sets in. Can you survive without another dose?

9 – They sigh, and nod, and transform you back into your original form: their raven familiar. Except unlike the previous transformations (you assume) you’ve retained your human intelligence and memories, and now things are kind of weird when they ask you to help out with spells or bring other lovers back to their lair.

10 – They’re furious, and summon a great curse upon you; the sky darkens, the winds howl, lightning and hail smash into the ground and rivers break their banks and overflow. People are in serious danger should this continue; do you really want to go through with it?

Header image by Allan Wan on Flickr

Glimmers is a series where Chris and Grant, the creative leads behind Rowan, Rook & Decard, create an urban horror world through the use of Dx tables. Because who has time to read a full setting book?

[GLIMMERS.] The city is alive. The city is connected, with streams of light and noise and people, to every other city; they are all the same being, all branches of the same concrete-and-glass tree. There are streets between them, forgotten streets, with secret names and grim inhabitants. (And: there are wild-lands, dark places, the Spaces Between, where nothing seems right. Airport waiting rooms. Churches, at night. Backwater villages.)

There is vast power in the thrum of machines and the buzz of traffic, and it can be yours, for a price.