A closer look at the Wendigo

All monsters begin as something mundane. The fractal begins with simple rules, and then spirals out into something more, and sometimes, something much worse. The origins of the Giants are unknown to the Psychonauts, but the origins of the Wendigo are not. The Wendigo were once human.  

The Wendigo are what happens when the hunger of the Grey Locust is left wild and uncontained by the Locust King and the constraints that the Grey places upon the Hungry Empire in an attempt to maintain its cold order.   

The hunger drives them, and in the early stages they still seem human.  

The Stillborn  

From a distance, one might mistake the Stillborn for people. Up close, the mistake is unlikely. The Stillborn's skill has gone white and chalky, and clouds of dry skin cells explode around them with sudden movements. Their eyes have gone milky blue-white and the skin has tightened all across the face to give the eyes a sunken look. The Stillborn's hair has bleached to translucent silver and seems to defy gravity, floating about the skull like an unholy halo.   

The Stillborn still speak, but their language is unintelligible to any non-wendigo. They have their own culture and mythology, those none who understand it are able to transmit it back to those who still understand human speech. The path to hunger is nearly always a one way journey.   

The Hungry Ghost  

As the body is consumed by the hunger, the Stillborn go from emaciated to truly skeletal, with skin stretched so tightly of bone and sinew that they could be mistaken for desiccated corpses if they choose to remain still. The teeth sharpen and elongate and the eyes decompose completely in the head, replaced by cold blue lights. At this point, the Wendigo is known as a Hungry Ghost. The Hungry Ghost, like the Stillborn army, still physically eat. However, they no longer attempt to cook their food, and seem unable to digest it- as the food sits inside their huge distended bellies.   

The Ravener  

The final state of deterioration. The Wendigo's head is now a skull with glowing eyes, resembling nothing so much as the terrible love child of an elk and a bear. Carnivores teeth poke out of a herbivore's jaw. A predator's eyes sit uneasy in the skull of a prey animal. What skin remains is ragged and wispy and flutters in the slightest breeze. The Ravener is an animate skeleton that glows with a cold blue light. The body of the skeleton too is twisted, elongated and ape-like, but with the hooves of an ungulate, the ribcage and fore paws of a polar bear, and bizarre protrusions extending from the individual vertebra of the spinal column.      

The Leviathan

The Fading Lake and the Drowned City are not deep bodies of water for the most part, but there are deep parts. And in those areas, sink holes and trenches, buried caverns formed of sunken bits of a long past golden; here the Leviathan makes its nest.

Most of the time, the Leviathan is content to remain hidden beneath the waves, feeding upon whatever has left the scars in its mutilated hide. Most of the time. Some of the time, the great giant sea monster explodes up to the surface and devours settlements on the Coast. Like the Behemoth, the Leviathan is singular. There is no more than one to bear the name. Unlike the Behemoth, the Leviathan is predatory, and those sentient beings that it devours it certainly does not devour by accident.

Unlike the Behemoth, there are not structures on the back of Leviathan that the Psychonauts might plunder. But when the Leviathan is active, the ancient underwater tunnels and structures where it normally sleeps are open for exploration by the bold and near suicidal. But psychonauts should be wary. The Leviathan got its scars somewhere.

The Behemoth

The largest Thing to walk upon the Wastelands; the Behemoth is, like the Leviathan and the Sentinel but unlike the Watchers and Trolls and Colossi, singular in existence. Psychonauts who have studied the Behemoth are uncertain whether the behemoth has always been singular or whether the great beast is the last of some monster species.

The Vast majority of the Behemoth's time is spent sleeping in the southern wastes. The Behemoth sleeps so long that dust will cover much of the giant's flanks and scrub grass and tumbleweeds will seed and take root. The Behemoth does not sleep long enough for cities to spring up, but upon each waking Psychonauts have observed a hut or ruined tower or two upon the back of the Giant. Because of their location, the story inevitably places things of great note or merit in these structures and brave Psychonauts will frequently attempt to climb the behemoth and explore the structures.

When the Behemeoth awakens, it feeds. The Behemoth is an omnivore, although seemingly by accident. The great giant lumbers across the landscape and grazing by devouring whole hillsides as it literally bites the tops of hills and mountaintops alike. It can devour whole camps or settlements this way, though most scholars agree that this is almost certainly accidental.

To the Scavenger Folk, the waking time of the Behemoth is a time of dangerous omens and ill portents, not the least of which because the Behemoth could simply decide to sit on a Scavenger Camp without noticing that it had done so.

A brief Snapshot of the Foglands

The Foglands is an eerie place for new arrivals to experience. The concrete hard sand dunes and broken rocky ground have been desaturated by some earlier tragedy and most of the landscape is the weird monochrome of a 1950s television broadcast. The sky, by contrast is a toxic looking bloody orange by day, and a deeper near opaque orange black at night- marked by a hallowe'en orange moon. The brackish lakes and inland seas are nearly all a rusty orange from the oxidizing metal and salt content of the water. Grey and Orange. Monochrome and and garish contrast. The visuals along are enough to make some new arrivals lose what lunch they brought with them for the incursion.

Fading Lake Regional Locations: The Witch Hut

The Witch Hut

A traditionally Forboding hut sits on the edge of the Fading lake, standing on low stilts to appear to float in the water when the lake is high. A Witch is always present in the Witch Hut. Which one is present will vary, although the Witch will rarely be a named Archetype, and will rarely admit a definitive identity- least of all to a green Psychonaut not worth her (or more rarely his) time.

Playtesting the Foglands

My Intrepid band of Psychonauts have run our first play test of the foglands. Entering the fog lamps true the gate room in the ring, but without any activated watchtowers, they ended up at the altar Stone plinth.

There they encountered the Colossus Giant, and our three Psychonauts disagreed on whether or not one could communicate with a Colossus. Much Amusement was had, and no Psychonauts were harmed in the making of this joke. And certainly no Psychonauts were eaten by Giants.

Two Psychonauts went scurrying through junkyard tunnels aided by one of the wildfolk, an intelligent badger who gave his name as... ...badger. within the tunnels, they ran afoul of a giant Ghostly monstrosity which looks vaguely like a caterpillar built of human parts and wearing a small faceless mask; which they took with them after Escaping The Thing.

the third psychonaut not decided it was more productive to bait and taunt the Giants until by a series of improbable successes he ended up with a parachute and a corpse of another psychonaut riding one of the winged Watcher Giants to the temples and shrines surrounding the Screaming Stone.

The area around the screaming Stone was populated by the hungry and agitated troll Giants. Here the Psychonauts briefly reunited before the more adventurous psychonaut acted as a distraction to draw off the trolls well the other two Ren two and attuned to themselves to the Watchtower at the head of the Totem Wastes.

Their goal achieved, the distracting psychonaut used the mask taken earlier to drive away the trolls and the play test ended in Victory.

Wastelands Regional Location: The Fading Lake

The Fading Lake

The Fading Lake is a brackish lake whose water line rises and falls with mysterious apparently non-tidal rhythms. The Fading Lake harbors secrets beneath the silty bottom, but Psychonauts will be hard pressed to explore those secrets without impressive preparations. Some experienced Psychonauts have claimed that beneath the silt is a half flooded temple from the time of the Mirrored City, whose machinery still runs. They further claim that the turning of these ancient clockworks is what causes the waters of the lake to rise or fall. Other experienced Psychonauts who have sought to prove or disprove this claim have failed to return to the Foglands for later incursions.

Wastelands Region Location: The Haypenny Camp

The Haypenny Camp

The chief competitor to the Salt Market, the Haypenny camp is cleaner and tidier, but also smaller and less well stocked that its more famous Plateau based competition. The Haypenny camp is also nearly half settlement if one looks purely at the number of tents, and sacred hospitality is practised in both the Open Market and the Old Camp. The people of the Haypenny Camp are not free peoples, but no Stillborn Army or Hungry Empire either. They sit in between, balancing on the blade of rusted straight razor, trying to survive on the business provided chiefly by newly arrived Psychonauts.

The genre savvy Psychonaut will quickly realize that the Open Market operates as the starter shop and the Old Camp functions as the first hub village for Psychonauts making incursions into the Foglands.

Wastelands Region: The Womb

The Womb

A collection of natural limestone caves twist beneath the the heart of the wastelands. Expanded by unknown denizens, stalagmites sculpted into strange humanoid forms and new passage way added and small corridors expanded to accomodate foot traffic. In some places, unknown visitors have placed altars and shrines and statues of sacred beings, and time has allowed the limestone to partially encase them in stalagmites and sometimes full limestone columns. The Womb is now a dangerous set of labyrinths used by many denizens as a place to conduct rites of passage and ritual vision quests. Bioluminescent fungi and airborne spores dimly light different areas of the caves with strange iridescent raninbow lights. But beyond the light lurk monsters, including the occasional chimera- suggesting a link between the Womb and the Painted Labyrinth.

Altar Stone Regional Locations: The Screaming Stone

The Screaming Stone

To the East of the Altar Stone Plinth is Screaming Stone. One of three truly enormous humanoid statues (the other two being the Weeping Stone and the Thinking Stone), The Screaming Stone looms above the landscape and stands over three times as large as the largest Giant. The Three Great Stones are hollow structures, though still impossibly heavy and monolithic. Psychonauts could disappear into one of the Great Stones and wander for months, and that's before they discover the vast tunnels underneath each stone monster. The open maw of the Screaming Stone is a massive viewing platform, from which one can view the landscape for miles in any direction and which is a good place to get an early glimpse of the Plateau.

Altar Stone Regional Locations: The Altar Stone Plinth

The Altar Stone Plinth

Psychonauts who find the first gate key will inevitably end up in region of the Altar Stone Plinth upon their first use of the Foglands Gate. The Plint itself is a massive stone, carved as though to be a base to hold some larger statue or vase. The Plinth is as large as a human temple, and the top shows scraping and wearing that is visible on to those tall enough to see the top or brave enough to scale a structure considered sacred to the Giants. What, if anything previously sat upon the plinth is unknown, but the Giants are entirely too willing to place dead psychonauts there as offerings or leave live Psychonauts there- presumably to die of exposure (although their actual motive is a mystery).

Around the Plinth are a collection of stone barrows and dolmen built from large standing stone placed by the giants and then modified by smaller denizens into burial grounds and holy places, hiding holes and ad hoc housing. Psychonauts will find many secrets in these structures and many denizens- friendly, neutral and hostile.

After much exploration, Psychonauts have discovered that a series of more impressive Dolmen, which are connected by a series of underground corridors, are associated with key stars in the Northern night sky. Interestingly, the sub locations in the Step Pyramid region have similar references to key stars in the Southern night sky.

Wastelands Locations: The Altar Stone Region

The Altar Stone

The area of the Wasteland known collectively as the Altar Stone or Altar Stones is a collection of statues and standing stones that radiate out from a central point. The area is apparently sacred to the Giants, as Psychonauts who journey there will find that the area always has a few such visitors. The Giants will prostrate themselves before the enormous humanoid statues, and will leave offerings. Psychonauts should be wary near the Altar Stones, as the Giants visiting the stones are more animated than normal and an unwary Psychonaut may find themselves beaten to death against a rock and then gently placed before one of the stones as an offering from some devout Giant.

Speculation on the relationship between the Giants and the Stones has gone on for as long as both have been known to exist. Some scholars speculate that the humanoid apeparing statues are in fact dead or hibernating Giants. Other vocies have suggested that these are simply altars to whatever gods the Giants worship. Experienced Psychonauts have noted that first time visitors to the Foglands always find themselves deposited in the region of the Altar Stones, and have suggested that the Giant might revere the area itself as a bringer of food. The suggestion being that the giants subsequently built the Altar Stones around the region where unready and easily captured meals appeared with satisfying regularity. Whatever the reason, the Giants aren't telling and certainly aren't going away.

The Altar Stone region is filled with secret rooms and hidden tunnels and labyrinths. Experienced Psychonauts do incursions to explore the Altar Stones frequently. For first time visitors to the Foglands, the Altar Stones are a dangerous place filled with practically unkillable very hungry Giants and ancient death traps that stubbornly refuse to rust or malfunction. The area is confusing and maze-like, with huge stones and statues forming twisting labyrinthine tunnels and troughs in the landscape that the psychonauts must navigate carefully to escape with their limbs intact.

A More Thorough List of Ribcage Locations

• The Ribcage Castle
• The Ribcage Castle
• The Keep
• The West Wall
• The Western Tower
• The East Wall
• The Eastern Tower
• Babylon City
• Babylon Square
• The Crimson Monument
• The Crimson Wall
• The Ivory Wall
• The Empty Quarter
• The Empty Fountain
• The Hollow Shrine
• The Silver Wall
• The Gilded Wall
• The Dead Forest
• The Broken Gates
• The Iron Gallows
• The Empty Archway
• The Gates of Sorrow
• The Hanging Archway

Expanded Location list for The Drowned City

• The Grave of Brine
• The Drowned City
• The Crimson Tower
• The Ivory Tower
• The Silver Tower
• The Bridge to Heaven
• The Bridge to Hell
• The Gilded House West
• The Gilded House East
• The Circle of Rust
• The Neon Oracle
• The Asylum
• The Reception House
•   The House of Eights
• The Salt Market
• The Burning Lands
• Reactor Number One
• Reactor Number Two
• Reactor Number Four
• The Last Daytower
• Jawbone Ridge
•  Incisor Earthwork
• The Canine Cairn
• Molar Runestone

Some locations of the Southwestern Foglands

The Hart Stones

Venturing to the west in the Lowlands, psychonauts will enter the Skylines. And at the head of the great expanse of the Skylines, psychonauts will inevitably stumble upon the Hart Stones. A collection tall patterned stone menhirs which point travelers in the direction of City of Sleep to the south and the Skylines themselves to the west.

The Western Ruins

Past the skylines, carved into the earth across the great tractless lands, stand the Western Ruins. A series of monuments survive, but any metropolis associated with those monuments are all that remains.

The Broken Statues

The first of the ancient landmarks that the path marked by the Hart Stones that a traveler will find is the Broken Statues. This pair of enormous hollow statues are not in good repair, but psychonauts and scavengers can still dig around in the gigantic structures and risk the ire of the vermin that call the cracked colossi home. 

The Broke Stones

Two circles of massive standing stone stand just south of the Broken Ruins. As large as two men high, the stones are mostly still standing, although several have settled at angles or fallen entirely. On the Summer Solstice, the light of the setting sun will shine will mark a line between the two stone circles.

The Barrows

On the western border of the Sinister Valley stands a pair of earthen mounds raised above a pair of graves. Nature has reclaimed the mounds to such a state that unless one knows where to look, the Barrows can be quite hard to find. Grass has grown back across the earth, bushes and brambles have sprung through the rise in the dirt. 

The Dolmen

In the southwestern reach of the Skylines Region stand a pair of Dolmen: megalithic stone tombs that appear much more ancient that the other ruins in the west. Psychonauts who venture into the tombs will find that the two tombs are connected by a series of catacombs. But though the dolmen are ancient, the catacombs beneath are not empty. 

The North Central and Northeastern Region of the Foglands

The Spine of Glass

There is a version of the Glass Tower in all of the major Realms of the Shadowlands: The Foglands, the City of Glass, Arcadia and the Painted labyrinth. In the Foglands the tower is a twisted tower of malformed Glass bursting forth from the land like a boil and stretching into the sky. The surface of the Spine seems to be composed of glass formed when lightning strikes beach sand, opaque and marred by imperfections and pock marked holes that bore deep into the surface.

The Poison Tree

The Poison Tree coils around the Spine of Glass like Jormungand round the world tree. The fruit of the poison tree is sought by psychonauts of all stripes.

The Cave of the Cryptkeeper

The cliff that separates plateau from lowlands also divides the Canyon, with the Hollow Mountain marking the line between North and South. If Psychonauts wish to access the North of the Canyon, they must pass through the Cave of the Cryptkeeper.

The Drowned City

Surrounded by the Circle of Rust stands a vast inland Salt Sea, under which sits the great Drowned City. inhabited by slavers and scavengers, Wendigo and wanderers, the Circle of Rust is one of the few areas that welcomes outsiders and psychonauts, in much the same way that a spider welcomes a fly.

The Grave of Brine

A vast stagnant Salt Sea dominates the landscape of the Northeastern portion of the Foglands. Ancient rust encrusted towers push up from the black surface of the water, salt crystals crawling up their metal skins. Beneath the waters lurks the drowned city, and the things that make their home within the sunken ruins.

The Drowned City

If crumbling Babylon City marks the remains of the Capital of the Hungry Empire, the Drowned City is the gravesite of the once great economic center of the Hungry Empire. The rusted spires of antique towers peak from the oil waters like monsters hunting for prey.

The Circle of Rust

Not all of what is now called the Drowned City was engulfed by the grave of Brine. Some of the structures still stand upon dry land, though layered in several strata of salt. Scavengers continue to pick at the remains of this urban husk and sell their wares at the Salt Market.

The Asylum

The Last King has the Dead Forest and the Iron Gallows with which to dispatch those who displease him. The Salt Market uses the Asylum; a decaying old building that perhaps once served as hospital or prison, but which has deteriorated so far that the truth will be lost forever. Half submerged in salt crusted shores, the Scavengers of the Salt Market lower those deemed guilty or just unlucky into the Asylum to die, go mad or devour each other as a horde watches from the roof and gamble on the outcome.

The Salt Market

Seedy and dangerous, the Salt Market is the best place in the Foglands to obtain secret knowledge and dangerous goods. Little more than a sprawling colony of tents and shanties scavenged from the corpse of the Drowned City, the Salt Market is nonetheless the living heart of the Plateau.

The Burning Lands

A strange Collection of buildings Stands on the northwestern shore of the Brine, The plants there are locked in withered states, and creatures there are distorted dark mirrors of their intended forms. The Three-petal Flower design marks signs and buildings all through the the Burning Lands, and those who tarry too long there fall ill and do not recover.

The Last Daytower

Anomolous amongst the rusting structures the make of the bulk of the Circle of Rust and the Drowned City, stands the last Daytower. Build of sandstone, the last Daytower is a thin cylinder with a domed parapet at the top. A Polished metal mirror is aimed to catch the dawn's first light at winter solstice.

Jawbone Ridge

Inhabitants of the Plateau insist that Jawbone ridge, with its white protruding outcroppings, is the actual jawbone of the great being whose ribs stand over Ribcage Castle. But while the ribcage is clearly the remains of some great being, the ridge is less clearly part of any corpse. But still, the wind whips across the ridge in strange ways and wanderers and psychonauts alike will hear strange voices whispered on the cutting cold winds at the edge of the plateau.

A Few Brief Descriptions of Foglands Landmarks

Location: Foglands, Northwest Plateau, Ribcage

The Ribcage Castle

A vast monolithic ribcage rests upon the Northwestern edge of the plateau. The inhabitants of the plateau have made guesses at the origin of the enormous bones, some ancient kaiju father or mother of the Giants is a popular theory. In any case, resting in the embrace of the enormous ribs is the moldering ruins of Ribcage Castle. The last resting place of the line of the Locust King, the castle is largely abandoned in the era of the Foglands, inhabited only by scavenging monsters a few loyal locust-touched and the Last King himself.

Babylon City

During the Ten Thousand Years of Darkness, the City of Glass extended nearly across all the arable land of the known world, the remaining Free Tribes pushed to to the edges and the margins and the miserable places to survive with the independence intact. In the era of the Foglands, this has changed and all that remains of the expansive devouring City of Glass is a scattering of scavengers and refugees huddling in the remains of the Capital: Babylon City.

The Empty Quarter

Babylon City contracted during the declining years of the Ten Thousands of Darkness, drawing in resources and focusing upon the survival and illusory prosperity of the Capital. The Nobility spoke about making the Capital glorious once more, returning it to a previous golden age. But in the end, the Nobles merely drained the surrounding areas in monstrous parasitic fashion. And while most of the Old City of Glass has fallen in to such disrepair that a traveler might not realize they walked through ruins at all, the Empty Quarter still stands in the shelter of the castle walls as testament to what once ruled the known world.

The Dead Forest

Nobody survives who knows if the lines of metal poles outside the walls of Ribcage Castle were once used for different purposes. They now stand as a means of displaying the perceived traitors whom the Last King has had executed and then stuck on these steel poles for all to see. Travelers are warned that any who pass too near the Ribcage risk running a foul of the King's entourage of loyalists and being branded a traitor, for torture and execution of 'traitors' is one of the few indulgences left to the rotting court of the Last King.

The Iron Gallows

Among the forest of iron spikes rising up before the walls of Ribcage Castle is an enormous metal structure now used by the surviving Nobles as a gallows. Likely used for something other than execution during the heyday of the City of Glass, the structure is now a place of execution, perhaps a sign of the fall of the Hungry Empire which feeds upon itself in the era of the Foglands. 

The Gates of Sorrow

Babylon City and the Empty Quarter sit within the walls of Ribcage Castle, as does the Castle Keep itself. Even during the era of the Foglands the walls still stand tall, when the Hungry Empire has disintegrated and the Locust forces have been scattered and turned to scavenging and cannibalism. The only way to enter within the wall of Ribcage Castle is to enter through the front door: an enormous colossal thing known now as the Gates of Sorrow.

Locations of the Foglands in more depth

After leaving the Ring for the first time, the Foglands are where rookie psychonauts will end up.

 

The Plateau

The lands to the North stand upon a great shelf, rising above the rest of the landscape.

The Ribcage

In the Northwest stands the ruins of Ribcage Castle and the remains of Babylon City.

• The Ribcage Castle
  • The Ribcage Castle
  • Babylon City
  • The Empty Quarter
• The Dead Forest
  • The Iron Gallows
  • The Gates of Sorrow

The Canyon

A canyon runs North to South, a vast scar across the horizon.

• The Ghost Station
  • Inbound Station
  • Outbound Station
• The Spine of Glass
  • The Spine of Glass
  • The Poison Tree
• The Cave of the Cryptkeeper
  • The Upper Cave

The Drowned City

Surrounded by the Circle of Rust stands a vast inland Salt Sea, under which sits the great Drowned City.

• The Grave of Brine
  • The Drowned City
• The Circle of Rust
  • The Asylum
  • The Salt Market
  • The Burning Lands
  • The Last Daytower
• Jawbone Ridge

The Lowlands

To the South are the lowlands.

The Skylines

Amidst a stretching rocky desert are carved strange designs in the earth visible the sky: the so-called Skylines.

• The Hart Stones
• The Western Ruins
  • The Broken Ruins
  • The Broke Stones
  • The Barrows
  • The Dolmen
• The Buried Maze
• The Sinister Valley
  • The City of Sleep
  • The Boar Temple

The Canyon

A canyon runs North to South, a vast scar across the horizon.

• The Hollow Mountain
• The Odd Cemetery
  • The Great Cemetery
  • The Mausoleum
  • The Old Cemetery
  • The Cave of the Cryptkeeper
    • The Lower Cave
• The Ghost Station
  • The Southern Station

The Wastelands

The vast marsh and the Altar Stone: a strange monument sacred to the Giants, fill the Wastelands of the Southeast.

• The Marsh Wastes
  • The Haypenny Camp
  • The Witch Hut
  • The Fading Lake
    • The Stilt Shrine
    • The Glass Altar
• The Altar Stone
  • The Altar Stone
  • The Thinking Stone
  • The Weeping Stone
  • The Screaming Stone
• The Womb
  • The Torii Gate
  • The Kiva Hole
  • The Womb
    • The Cave of Joining
    • The Hidden Passage
    • The Innermost Cave
    • The Cave of Unborn Elders
• The Eastern Reach
  • The Totems
  • The Sky Altar
• The Tailbone

Rough Bits of the Foglands again

After leaving the Ring for the first time, the Foglands are where rookie psychonauts will end up.

The Plateau

The lands to the North stand upon a great shelf, rising above the rest of the landscape.

The Ribcage

In the Northwest stands the ruins of Ribcage Castle and the remains of Babylon City.

The Canyon

A canyon runs North to South, a vast scar across the horizon.

The Drowned City

Surrounded by the Circle of Rust stands a vast inland Salt Sea, under which sits the great Drowned City.

---

The Lowlands

To the South are the lowlands.

The Skylines

Amidst a stretching rocky desert are carved strange designs in the earth visible the sky: the so-called Skylines.

The Canyon

A canyon runs North to South, a vast scar across the horizon.

The Wastelands

The vast marsh and the Altar Stone: a strange monument sacred to the Giants, fill the Wastelands of the Southeast.

A First look at the Map of the Foglands