The Moon Realm

Since posting about the DAWN REALM a few months back now I've had a rethink about how to approach the spirit realms that sit parallel to the Here & Now. For all the novelty of "switching codes" when dipping toes into other places (and the notion that stripping the character down to its essence could be represented at the table i.e. by taking elements from the character sheet and writing them out afresh) the reality is it's disruptive to play. This isn't necessarily bad, but I'm much less convinced it adds anything to the experience than I was previously.

It also reduces the amount of player-facing chaff and allows them to get down to what the game's really about: exiled stone-age psychonauts exploring the spirit realm, just like Dungeons & Dragons [is/used to mostly be] about dungeons and dragons. 

A map of the Moon

Fly me to the Moon

Travel to the Moon Realm requires:

White Chalk: The Cold Moon 1/12 (Almanac 25)

Each full moon I intend to publish an update to the White Chalk sandbox here on this blog, describing the calendar year of a fantasy proto-Neolithic somewhat parallel to the world in which we live. At the time of writing we have already experienced 2 full moons (14th January 2025 and 12th February 2025), so I have 2 further posts due prior to March's full moon.

To begin I have drawn just one six-mile hex, divided further into 1 mile hexes. You can read an introductory overview in this post:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/02/white-chalk-almanac-25.html

Draft planisphere for the first month of the year, discussed below

The Cold Moon rise with bitterness: though the shortest day—the solstice—is already passed, the worst of winter is yet to come. The peoples of the Chalk Coast brace themselves for battery by the cruel winds of the north.

City of a Hundred Gods pt 3/10: further along the Ladders

We return to the Ladders, the slum dwellings on the immediate interior of the City of a Hundred Gods. Day and night encounters are rolled on a 1d20 table found in the post linked below and repeated at the foot of this one.
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/12/city-of-hundred-gods-part-210-remaining.html

The whole city is divided into wards, each one possessing a local spirit elevated to the status of god by those who worship it, both within and without the city. Each ward possess a handful of unique day and night encounters and additional details concerning the god's followers and priests—as well as others living and working in these streets.

Anselm Kiefer, Die fruchtbare Halbmond (The Fertile Crescent)

The Ladders refers  for both the high incidence of ladders to access the irregularly stacked mudbrick housing, but also for the tiny lanes intersecting the two parallel orbital avenues like the rungs of a ladder. It is a tightly packed slum rife with dirt, disease and regular fires.Though the Lord of the Dead treads the clay-tiled streets without fear this is also a place that expresses the wild, complex beauty of human life in all its glorious diversity. The Ladders provide an explosion of colour, scent and sound to rival the most potent entheogenic experience.

CW: animal slaughter, cannibalism

White Chalk (Almanac 25)

I'm so poor at keeping up with these annual challenges, so I thought I'd run my own.

Here is a single, 6 mile hex: it is divided into 30 one mile hexes, because PARIAH is a game of overland exploration (among other things). This is a development of White Chalk, itself an outgrowth of earlier proto-Neolithic Britain thoughts.

Initial 6 mile hex, divided into 1 mile hexes.

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The aim of this post is to provide an overview of a region by zooming into one six mile hex. Over the course of this year, I'll be producing regular posts providing typical events for this region as the game year. These include:

• seasonal movements of birds, animals and humanoids
• weather hex-flower specific to the season/month
• Star charts and astronomical information (meteor storms, eclipses etc.)
• plant and fungi information (foraging for food and medicine)
• human cultural information (festivals, rituals, transhumance etc.)

Like my other PARIAH sandboxes this is set in a fantasy proto-Neolithic i.e. late stone age with many anachronistic elements. Unlike the other setting (City of 100 Gods, Atop the Wailing Dunes, City of Ghosts) the climate is temperate rather than tropical. In fact, the entire map is based on the south coast of England, not least because this particular part of the UK is right on my doorstep—indeed, it is my doorstep.

N.B. This was largely inspired by the many Neolithic sites around Sussex, Hampshire and Kent. If you have come to this blog as an outsider to the weird hobby of RPGs please understand this as a piece of speculative fiction rather than archaeology.