Thursday, March 26, 2009

More Words

One way to think of Wohoon is: Gamma World rewritten as weird fantasy rather than a science fantasy setting. Admittedly that's a fine and perhaps spurious distinction. Like Gamma World Wohoon is post-apocalyptic. There will be robots and rayguns and possibly  probably definitely giant radioactive monsters rising from the depths to occasionally stomp across the landscape. There will be mutants, and how.

But in essence it's a fantasy world. Hobbs, elves and dwarfs, goblins, ghouls and giants, the whole schmeer. It's just that it takes place after your basic act of magical hubris blasted the best part of civilization into rubble and splinters. The hills are alive -- in some cases quite literally -- with wild magic. Whole forests are twisted by polymorphic radiation into impossible shapes, ogrish trees with beards of jangling glass and leaves of paper.

Time is broken too. The cataclysm that doomed Wohoon was caused by a cabal of chronomancers, believed to have been flung far into the future, and worshipped by furtive cults as the Gods Yet to Come. In some places time spins backward, or loops upon itself. Skyscrapers and clocktowers rise up from the shallow waters of the Sea of Clocks. The lost objects of a thousand worlds and ten thousand generations accumulate in a junkyard somewhere south. Folk from other times are drawn here as well: lost zeppelineers, dinosaur herders, mad scientists. Undeath is chronomantical in nature, a generally foul attempt to thwart the proper passage of time.

I'm already well past 25 words and the edge of coherence, but here's a few more, in the sentenceless manner Noisms suggests:

Bandits, slavers; nomadic fey; bat-faced goblins, orc parthenogenesis; molemen at the center of the earth; a dragon-locomotive 500 miles long; scattered villages, trading moots, no nations; only local gods.

No comments: