What Cities Those Babies In: A D6 Table

Sometimes you find inspiration in the strangest things.

1. There's a city made of snowflakes, every branch interlinked tighter than any bricks and mortar. It is home to a queen among the fairies, who wears a dress that's blue as a strangled corpse. A thousand years ago this queen tricked her rival into being trapped in her dreams - so long as she never sleeps, her rival can have no power over her, nor even mere existence. For a thousand years this queen hasn't slept a wink. The streets of her city are paved with used-up coffee grounds, and the air rings with the squalling of babies, for this is how she's gone so long without sleep. The city sees a bustling trade in coffee, and in changelings, and in kidnapped infants, and in pots, mugs, milk, sugar, cream, cradles, and all the other accoutrements these things need.

2. There's a city in the boughs of a grove of weeping cypresses, which could be mistaken for a single giant tree at first glance - not so. There are great clay pots set in the branches of the lower trees, from which other trees grow, and so on up until the whole vertical forest could overshadow a mountain. The city is a city of rebels - rebel storks to be exact, who've rebelled from their duty of delivering newborn babies. Some found the work humiliating, some couldn't bear to part from their charges, some just wanted more time for their hobbies. The storks have got a surplus of undelivered infants, who they plan on training into an army to defend their independence - storks, having hollow bones, make for poor fighters you see.

3. There's a city whose buildings are bound in leather, where the doorways are hung with vellum curtains. This was the city of the wizard Rubigallega the Architecton, who transformed her own grimoire into it - every citizen was and is a spell contained within. Rubigallega died some months back in unfortunate circumstances, but like every good wizard she had contingencies - too many contingencies, in her case. She created clones which her soul could fly to and repossess in the case of her death, and, fearing what might happen if those clones were destroyed, created clones of them as well. Now the city and its spellbound citizens must care for thousands of clone-babies, and finding the one bearing Rubigallega's soul is like finding a needle in a diaper-stack.

4. There's a city of air-vents and incinerators, where the citizens go about in skintight suits and absolute chastity. A generation ago a druid passed through the city (back then it was much more normal) and begged at every door for a place to stay. Being unbathed for a very long time, he was refused wherever he went - "too many mouths to feed already" was the most common excuse given. In a rage the druid cast a cast over the entire place. "You shall know from this day forth the true meaning of 'too many mouths to feed'" he intoned. And they did. Any human cells in the city once parted from their body have a good chance of growing into a baby, in naked defiance of thermodynamics, from shed skin to spilled seed. The odd architecture, fashion, and sexual mores of the city are the only way they've found to prevent being drowned in a tide of babies.

They don't incinerate the babies, they incinerate the dust before it's had a chance to grow into babies. Just wanted to make that clear as otherwise it'd be way too morbid.

5. There's a city that's built on and along a cliff-face that's fallen away from the canyon-wall it began on - kept mostly-upright by bindings of thick bronze chains. The city is governed by an order of paladins (the Order of the Plump Pelican, if you must know) who take it as their mission to save and rehabilitate those children deemed as evil - The Omen-type babies, the cursed bloodline babies, the half-vampire/half-werewolf babies, the ancient reincarnated warlord babies, and so on. The city is full of nurseries, and schools, and a great many time-out zones. Most of its graduates go on to live normal lives, some truly decent, some just a bit mean. It's whispered that the few truly irredeemable ones are locked away in anchorite-cells drilled into the canyon like the tunnels of boring worms.

6. There's a city of rag-tents and bookshelf-shacks that lies in the land beyond the shadows under your bed. It is a city populated entirely by runaway children, and by the fanciful and freaky critters of that land who flock to them. The city is also home to the bogeyman called Lenny Lardslake, who's so very fat in all the wrong places - the belly on his forehead droops over his eyes. Lenny Lardslake has a diet of abusive and neglectful parents, slurping them all up at once like noodles. Children of his victims, having nowhere else to go, and not being very fond of their parents anyways, often follow behind him when he returns home, carrying their siblings that are too young to walk with them.

For context, dromedary was asking which cities the following opera sets were in: