D20x5 Supreme Space Marines

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D20	These space marines are
1	the children of venerable warrior-clans, inculcated from birth with their ideals and discipline.
2	exposed to a virus that causes extensive mutation when they're recruited. Those whose mutations are non-viable, or even just not beneficial enough, are culled.
3	turned into unrepentant killers by the combination of immersive virtual simulations and mind-melting doses of psychedelics.
4	uplifted gorillas who've been modified to have a fully bipedal stance.
5	dead soliders revived and rewired by the injection of a miraculous serum.
6	war-slaves who've had their very genes twisted to adapt them to the battlefield.
7	subject to brutal surgical enhancement, their musculo-skeletal systems almost completely replaced with stronger synthetic tissues.
8	fanatics abducted from a lost colony that went feral, and led to believe that they're in some sort of martial afterlife.
9	cultists who believe they're blessed by a god of war, and honour it with rites of carnage.
10	clones of physically exceptional specimens grown in tanks in large batches. Only the top performer in each batch is allowed into their ranks.
11	infested with bio-engineered tumours that give them an incredible ability to bounce back from injury.
12	recruited from some of the most dangerous places in the galaxy, where simply surviving to adulthood is proof of merit enough to join.
13	neo-humans sent back in time to ensure their own future existence.
14	conscripted orphans indoctrinated to see their fellow marines as their family.
15	human brains implanted into android bodies.
16	implanted with an A.I. companion that watches their every move and explodes inside their skull if they ever betray their superiors.
17	metabolically adjusted, turned into candles that burn bright and fast, able to move and react blindingly fast yet aging rapidly.
18	injected with artificial super-hormones that turn them into jacked giants.
19	ritualistic cannibals who believe that by eating their enemies they can take their power and wisdom.
20	criminals that have had their nervous systems hooked up to control rigs.

D20	These space marines serve
1	a pacifist hive-mind as ultra-violent deviants severed from the whole in dutiful damnation.
2	the highest bidder as elite mercenaries.
3	a revolutionary government, and are primarily occupied by hunting down remnants of the previous regime.
4	a more technologically advanced alien civilization as expendable human auxiliaries.
5	themselves, as the upper ranks of a Prussian-esque army-state.
6	as the personal army of an immortal aristocrat.
7	as the garrison protecting the border with wild space from invasion.
8	as the outward face of a xenophobic, isolationist polity.
9	as the in-house private military of a mega-corporation.
10	as the militant arm of an interstellar church.
11	a digital gestalt of uploaded scientists, philosophers, and engineers who promise utopia by any means necessary.
12	a defeated and dismantled nation which they seek to restore.
13	a distant master as conquerers carving out new territories.
14	as the fearsome enforcers of international law.
15	the greater good, as determined by their utilitarian calculation-engines.
16	as defenders of honest folk against rampant piracy in an anarchic bubble of space.
17	as privateers plundering riches for a trade empire.
18	a galactic tyrant (who they plan on couping) as bodyguards and stormtroopers.
19	on the front lines against exponential von Neuman probes and other existential threats.
20	their empire as a vanguard that's reputed as never having known defeat.

D20	The space marines are immediately recognizable
1	by the massive pauldrons on their power armour suits, which contain autonomous turrets.
2	by the extravagant horns on their helmets - really electronic warfare transceivers.
3	by their glittering, gem-like cybernetic eyes.
4	by their monomolecular-edged greatswords.
5	by their hydraulic gauntlets that could punch holes in a tank.
6	by their auroral cloaks, wreathes of magnetically-manipulated plasma that protect them from energy weapons.
7	by their back-mounted rocket-wings that let them soar above the fray.
8	by their chimeric companion-beasts.
9	by the red and gold paint they slather on all their stuff.
10	by their elephantine battle-standards that can shoot laser beams from their eyes.
11	by their tattoos, made from the ashes of their fallen comrades.
12	by the silvery fog of micro-machines that follows in their wake.
13	by their electrolaser discharge packs that can call down lightning.
14	by their barbed, prehensile mecha-whips.
15	by the snarling face-plates of their NBC suits.
16	by their bulky gyrojet rifles that shoot shaped-charge explosives.
17	by the scorpion-tail attachments on their armour that can fire envenomated darts.
18	by their blood-streaked mohawks.
19	by the cobra-like movements of their characteristic martial art.
20	by their booming war-songs, tuned infrasonically to induce panic and disorientation.

D20	These space marines' headquarters
1	is on the ocean floor of a planet almost totally covered by water, with an atmosphere consumed by perpetual typhoons.
2	is a bunker-complex within a mountain range on a radioactive hell-world ravaged by hordes of mutants and flesh-scouring, cancerous dust storms.
3	is on a fragment of a shattered ring-world.
4	is hidden on a frozen rogue planet drifting in the darkness between stars.
5	is an aerostat-habitat floating in the upper atmosphere of a storm-wracked gas giant.
6	is a moonlet that's been hollowed out and converted into a semi-mobile fortress.
7	is built into a canyon created by a glancing shot from a planet-cracking weapon.
8	is at the heart of a populous arcology where every three-dimensional city block has its own militia, all armed to the teeth.
9	is a satellite in an incomplete Dyson swarm, the sole safe point around its sun, which is constantly spewing out solar flares.
10	is built atop a mountain of bones they've collected.
11	is a corpse-world overrun by toxic fungi, formerly united by a single vegetable-consciousness that was killed by the space marines.
12	is on a desert-world that's home to aggressive silicon-based life that can tear armoured vehicles apart with their crystal talons.
13	is deep within labyrinthine catacombs excavated by a now-extinct alien species.
14	is on a low-gravity world, among the boughs of a cloud-drinking giga-tree.
15	crawls on titanic treads with the twilight-band of a planet close to its sun, outracing the iron-smelting heat of its day.
16	is on an obsidian ruin, the remains of a planetoid that ruptured and spilled its molten guts into the void.
17	is the rusting hulk of a crashed spaceship.
18	is on a hollow planet constructed by hyper-capable precursors with a white hole at its core. The reverse time dilation caused by the white hole allows the space marines to swiftly (relatively speaking) build up their forces.
19	is within a dense web of carbon nanotubes patrolled by spider-drones.
20	was recently blown up by infiltrators, and they're scrambling to find a replacement.

D20	These space marines' preferred tactic
1	is to ride into battle on motorcycles and microlight aircraft like futuristic knights.
2	is marching as closely as possible behind a wave of obliterating artillery-fire.
3	is to lay down overlapping fields of voluminous fire to make the battlefield a bullet hell.
4	is to rapidly develop field fortifications to turn any confrontation into a siege.
5	is stealth, bringing assassinations and creeping terror, defeating the enemy before they even realize they're under attack.
6	is to win air superiority then rain bombs and paratroopers down on the enemy.
7	is to foment discord and rebellions, divide and conquer.
8	is to tunnel beneath the enemy and erupt among their ranks.
9	is to lure enemies into traps and ambushes.
10	is to concentrate their armour and firepower to smash through enemy lines.
11	is wild experimentation, discovering the next paradigm of combat before anyone else has the chance.
12	is honourable and epic duels that will be written glowingly about for ages to come.
13	is shock and awe, putting the fear of god into their enemies' hearts.
14	is to make the very environment inhospitable to their enemies. Unleashing chemical weapons, breaking up the ground, and so on.
15	is surgical strikes and special operations.
16	is to destroy their enemies' logistics and starve them out.
17	is to engage from the furthest possible range with missiles and snipers.
18	is to fearlessly wade into the thick of things.
19	is a precise balance of combined arms, presenting no weakness.
20	is to mob and overwhelm with more-or-less human waves.

D6x6 Loopy Locathah

Boys have a dozen kinds of elves in their homebrew setting. Men have a dozen kinds of fishpeople.

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D6	The fish these locathah most resemble are
1	catfish.
2	goldfish.
3	parrotfish.
4	tuna.
5	pufferfish.
6	salmon.

D6	These locathah have
1	antifreeze blood that lets them survive very low temperatures, even going into suspended animation rather than simply dying if frozen solid.
2	pharyngeal jaws that can launch out some distance from their mouths.
3	electric organs that can sense electric fields and give electric shocks.
4	the habit of brooding their young in their mouths, and tend to talk like they’ve got a mouth full of marbles.
5	the ability to change colours to camouflage themselves.
6	bioluminescent patches they can flash as a lure or signal to others.

D6	These locathah live
1	in ships that resemble water striders, skating across the waves with wing-like sails. The cabins within them are kept full of water by siphons that run up the ships’ legs.
2	in iridescent bubble-domes at the bottom of bodies of water.
3	in sargasso-mat towns suspended within stable whirlpools by ingenious systems of buoys and Archimede’s screws.
4	in palaces of packed-silt bricks built hanging off the sides of continental shelves. Construction on them is constant as the lower levels are always falling off into the abyss.
5	in yurts of dolphin-bone and fish-leather.
6	in pyramids of shells mortared with marine slug slime.

D6	These locathah mostly interact with surface-dwellers
1	to trade baubles and novelties.
2	to kidnap sacrifices to offer to devouring aquatic god-monsters, so that they don’t have to sacrifice their own people.
3	by being hunted for their delicious meat.
4	as guides for and pirates of ships in difficult waters.
5	by salvaging wrecks for them.
6	by harvesting kelp, coral, and colourful marine snails for them.

D6	These locathah want
1	someone to bring the corpse of their honoured elder on a sacred (and dangerous) migration back to the point they believe their species was created.
2	the source of a curse that’s preventing their eggs from hatching to be discovered.
3	a child that was mistakenly stolen away by a fishing vessel to be rescued.
4	the crown jewels of the undersea kingdom they claim descent from to be recovered from their ruined capital so they can bring legitimacy to their claimant to the kingdom’s fallen throne.
5	someone to test their amphibious operations suits so they can make fat cash from landlubber mercenary contracts.
6	someone to sabotage an enemy clan’s champion in an upcoming wrestling match that will determine territorial rights for the next decade.

D6	These locathah can offer you (or you might steal from them)
1	smooth, water-worn beads of coloured glass.
2	razor-sharp nacreous knives and spear-heads, that can cut you so finely you might bleed out before you realized it.
3	trained barracuda “hunting hounds”.
4	eel-spine darts that are so hydrodynamic they can be fired as easily underwater as on land.
5	domesticated giant crab mounts.
6	caviar, fugu, milt, and all the other delicacies of the sea.

D12 Answers to the Question: How Does This Monster Perceive You?; Or: A Response to a Comment by Spwack on Another Post

1. Imagine an ocean: full of colours, full of motion, full of life. Now imagine a mote of ice drifted into that ocean, and was freezing everything around it into its same dead stillness. The ocean is Chaos. The ice is Order. It, as a monster, is a thing of Chaos. You were born of Order, of higher powers' shaping, structuring, contextualizing, optimizing - and everything you touch comes away with the taint of that monadic web. The monster weeps as it claws out your guts. It damns itself to save its moral universe.

2. Inversely to your actual moral & aesthetic character - it's got a troll-shard stuck in its eye that makes it see fair as foul and foul as fair. Muddling sorts and worse could receive a warmer reception, or you could attempt to pluck the shard from its eye to cure it.

3. In the same way it perceives itself - as a swarm of atomistic meat-particles temporarily in proximity to each other due to emergent particulate behaviour. The spilling of blood and rending of limbs is thus no more meaningful to it than a gust of wind stirring up a pile of dust.

4. As an easy mark out of their depth in a resource-deprived environment. It rationalizes that at least it'll be nicer in conning you or preying on you than the next monster.

5. As an ancient, ancestral foe, with the both of you caught up in a crimson tide of a blood feud. Peace may be temporarily permitted if presented as a delay to build up forces, or to work against a mutual, worse enemy.

6. With a sensitivity to noise well beyond human capacity. Have you ever encountered someone who snorted, or yawned, or ate in an annoying way? To them, you're like that a hundred times over. The gurgling of your gut is an airhorn in their home. Your breathing and farting and sweating is audio-torture. Morally, they may not want to kill you - but you're making it so hard not to.

7. It sees time as a solid block, all moments existing at once, a totally-determined five-dimensional structure, with the two of you stuck within like hot dogs in aspic, twirling about each other in a dance that was always meant to be.

8. As a maddening ambiguity that pains it to even attempt to unravel or comprehend. In truth, you carry with you a cloud of surface-pollen and -spores, to which it is terribly allergic. This allergy causes its brain to swell and derange its thinking while you and your lingering traces are about.

9. To its infrared-sensing pits, used to the cold and darkness beneath the earth, you are a sunken sun, shining with hot-blooded incandescence. Its religion holds you to be the same. In its mind and in its sight, you are a god who has descended to sacrifice your light and life for the good of the world. You might fight, you may demure, you may flee, but by a thousand years of myth and history it knows the role you are fated to play.

10. As an intensely-demanded commodity, an ermine that just stumbled in front of a hunter. It's got nothing against you personally, but it could make a lot of money off you if it brings you back for processing.

11. As an agent of a foreign (yet still underworldly) enemy of theirs - your bumbling about a mere ruse to throw off the scent. Guilty of collaboration until proven innocent, by lash and thumb-screw and trial by fire.

12. Like a plate of sauce-slathered ribs to a starving man, you smell irresistibly delicious to it.

A Diagrammatic Examination of the Great Wheel

See this incomprehensible collection of squiggles above? That is how it All works. Let me explain:

The Wheel Turns, The High Are Brought Low, The Fallen Rise Again

So first: from the outer planes to the astral plane come the basic conceptual building blocks of the cosmos. Not good and evil, right and wrong, pure and simple and straight from the tap, but rather the necessary factors for those things to exist.

Think of it like the Goldilocks zone around a star. For life to exist you need a certain range of temperatures, a minimum amount of water, insolation, protection from meteorites and high-energy radiation, and so on. For any particular Order to exist, you need legibility, rationality, stability, etc.That sort of stuff comes from Mechanus and its cluster of fellow-planes. From the Grey Waste comes despair, from Pandemonium delusion and paranoia, from Bytopia love, and around the Wheel it goes just like that. The outer planes don't provide any single system of Order or Chaos, Good or Evil themselves - Mount Celestia doesn't say "maximize your utility" or "obey the categorical imperative" (at least it's not supposed to). Those emerge later. As well, these outer planes' emanations can be twisted from their original purpose - both by those merely affected by them and by the beings spawned from the outer planes' very essence - love can become abusive control, or stalking obsession, and despair can be overcome and leave you stronger for it. That's how some angels can be dicks and some demons redeemed.

When these conceptual emanations leak into the astral plane, they calve off from the universal wellsprings of their parent-planes, like icebergs from a polar ice cap, and become particular, distinct manifestations. At the lowest levels, these manifestations might simply appear as background characters or themes in mortal dreams, or as flights of fancy in waking minds. These manifestations can also find context in each other, merge, and grow more complex. When these greater manifestations become self-aware they are called gods. It's in the astral that love becomes Eros, or Aphrodite Ourania, that war becomes Heironeous, or Hextor.

A god that remains in the astral alone is latent, a sign unwitnessed, and few of their station can be satisfied with that. They find expression in the material plane, in the transmutation from concept to creation. To do this their power must pass through the inner planes of elements and energies. Your can think of these inner planes of positive and negative, fire, earth, air, and water, as the palette of the gods, to be mixed and applied by their miracles to the canvas of the material plane.

Elementals most often take humanoid form, because these days most gods are humanoid, and their power is one side of the process that gives the raw energies of the elemental planes structure. At the far reaches of the elemental planes you might encounter elementals of reptilian, molluscoid, or stranger form, living fossils of eons past.

On the material plane the Great Wheel earns its name. It is not a simple waterfall torrenting from the outer planes on down, but a cycle. In return for their miracles, mortals grant the gods regalia, demenses, and legions for their naked symbolism, through worship, theology, philosophizing, and propitiation. When they pass from the material plane, mortal souls are drawn to the outer planes that match their nature, expanding those planes' universal conceptions further through the unique particularities of their being and experience.

The plane of shadows is, more appropriately, the shadow plane - it is literally the shadow cast by the material, the existential umbra created left by its interchange of essences and energies with the other planes. Through it, uncountable other material planes can be accessed, though it's often claimed that these are worldly penumbras, only inferior copies of the one true material plane.

Enlightenment

Spend enough time meditating, or take a big enough dose of psychedelics, or walk until all worlds fall away, and you see the Big Picture. That's enlightenment. Problem is, there's lots of ways to see the Big Picture, and so enlightenment brings us no closer to universal harmony.

Proponents of Order see the Great Wheel from above, a perfect circle perfectly divided into perfect components all perfectly balanced to do... whatever it is the Wheel is supposed to do:

Yuan-ti see the same view, but they interpret it as a Great Serpent biting its own tail, being born in death.

Some few heresiarchs see it as a vast eye staring back at them, and are driven to cosmic violence by its glare, determined to destroy everything before it can get them.

Agents of Chaos see the Big Picture too, but they don't even look towards the Great Wheel. They look beyond it, to true Chaos, the absolutely unspeakable and incomprehensible howling void. Chaos doesn't get a diagram - Chaos can't be diagrammed.

Sword-saints - because of course you must be enlightened to become a sword-saint - see the wheel turned on its side, the most terrible of all blades, endlessly slashing:

Disciples of the Elder Evils see the Wheel laid flat on its side, a platter serving up the whole of creation to their masters:

It's said that the greatest of both saints and sinners see the Wheel turned upright, a cosmic "I". Whether they interpret that "I" as a solipsistic reflection of themself in the universe or as a sign of ultimate oneness between all beings is believed to determine whether they turn to good or evil, though the truth is always more complicated.

Quarter Hour of Writing Challenge: Spice

As seen on Library of Attnam: https://attnam.blogspot.com/2022/06/challenge-quarter-hour-of-writing.html

Spice - a valuable and portable storage of value, consumable - what's to separate it from drugs? Probably that drugs can be consumed on their own, while spices are condiments - I would never eat a handful of cloves.

This as a restriction lends itself to thinking up interesting spices-as-magic-items. Like oils of +1 weapon or whatever, only good. For example, perhaps there is a sort of salt that transforms slimes into edible rations, or a barbecue rub that, when applied to the dead body of an outsider, lets you then eat it and later vomit it out reformed and reanimated like a summoned monster - angel wings & devil ribs.

Drugs - you assume all the neat stuff is illegal. Spices? More complex. Perhaps there are sumptuary laws. Trade routes disrupted, we need someone expendable to map a new route through the Mines of Megadeath. Some asshole alchemist has figured out a way to synthesize a syrup with 99% of the flavour, steal the recipe and rough him up.

Can also apply the spice to yourself - get yourself so spicy you can't be swallowed or bitten without the monster having a coughing fit. Hot sauce arms race to become the least appetizing culture on the face of the earth.

Spices for things that don't eat regular food regular-like. What's spice to a mind flayer? Repressed libidinous thoughts? Is lead poisoning delicious or disgusting to them? Mercury poisoning? Is there a cattle-species of humanity they're breeding with a weaker blood-brain barrier, developed with the same dispassion we might discuss superior marinade techniques? Were mind flayers responsible for the failure of Roman plumbing infrastructure?

Intelligent rust monsters sprinkling verdigris on a breast-plate. Perhaps there is a commonality between the fancy lads of our kind and theirs in consuming edible gold leaf on food.

Spices covering up bad food - a restaurant that serves negative energy-charged meat drowned in pepper sauce, its clientele are rendered undead from the belly-out, weeping & still-living bodies being dragged behind slithering lengths of zombified intestines.

Spices with esoteric preparations - perhaps the salt used in a binding-circle is infused with otherworldly flavours.

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:

The Quasi-Elemental Plane of Steam

Of that which is written.

Of that which will be:

Defining Elemental Planes

The definition of the elemental planes is a touchy subject. Touchy enough that wars have been fought over it. Touchy enough that we might read "wars" and imagine a few tens of thousands of soldiers tussling on a battlefield instead of tectonic, mytho-poetic, biospherical struggles that crush planets between them like eggs between colliding eighteen-wheelers.

The big four, fire, earth, air, and water, they're not actually essential, but they are nigh-unassailable establishment, the big swinging dicks of the material cosmos. You don't create a world without cutting them in on the action, not unless you want to end up on the wrong end of an apocalyptic protection racket.

Then there's your semi-, demi-, quasi-, pseudo-, etc. planes. The little guys who have to fight over scraps. Get yourself classified as a para-elemental plane in some hip new grimoire, and suddenly you've got more wizards passing through, more gods breathing life into your raw matter - you're in business. You've also made enemies - chances are a few others were eyeing that spot, and chances are you had to kick another plane down to get it.

The Quasi-Elemental Plane of Steam

So: the quasi-elemental plane of steam. It's the para-elemental plane between the planes of fire and water - except that it's been decided that para-elemental plane shouldn't exist. Therefore it's the quasi-elemental combination of the planes of water and positive energy, and a disturbing number of people who claim otherwise end up drowned or burned alive.

Even calling it the plane of steam is controversial. You see, the plane's got two poles: one hot, one cold. It's the hot end that got the name established. The cold end wants it renamed to the plane of mist. There's fence-sitters who hope to get everyone to compromise and call it the plane of vapour, but nobody really likes them.

Life on the plane - actual, flesh and blood life - was probably tracked in on some cosmonaut's boot hundreds of millions of years ago. The founder species were a few species of plankton and mollusc. The plane of steam is relatively conducive to biological life - outside the extreme temperatures at the "poles", you're not going to die just for existing in it unprotected.

The main issue for life is getting energy. Light comes through rifts to the positive energy plane (the jury's still out on whether the material plane's sun is itself a gigantic rift to the same), but can't reach far through all the fog, and the rifts themselves are often unstable - photosynthesis is either localized or situational. Autotrophs on the plane of steam have instead evolved to take advantage of the temperature differential between its poles, or the mechanical motion of the steam itself.

The latter strategy is the much more modern of the two. Natural growth isn't very good at making turbines. Instead of growing turbines themselves, the mechanotrophs of the plane of steam utilize parts that have fallen through from Mechanus, where rotors and blades quite literally grow on trees, cyborganically integrating these parts into their bodies not totally unlike a hermit crab moving into a tin can. While originally mechanotrophs were dependent on parts that randomly ended up on the plane, in ages past envoys from Mechanus began dumping parts into the plane to encourage the spread of mechanotrophs, believing this would in turn spread their Order of Orders. The familiarity of the mechanotroph ecosystem attracted Mechanite immigrants to the plane of steam, who continue to supply the ecosystem with parts to this day, in a self-reinforcing loop.

The Accretion Disk

Even if it's not immediately lethal, the plane of steam is still largely an environment alien to terrestrial life, being an allegedly-infinite expanse of vapour. However, of vital importance to its status are the places that can attract terrestrial visitors.

The largest of these places is a continent-sized disk of matter at the midway point between the plane's poles, accreted from particles over eons and stuck together by the "roots" of autotrophs growing on it (most macroscopic species of autotroph of the plane are descended from molluscs, so the roots are really closer to absorbent tentacles).

Due to its placement and its solidity, the Accretion Disk is a sort of big Berlin Wall for the steam elementals (of the hot pole) and the mist elementals (of the cold pole). They hate each other, but open war would scare off visitors and end up making the plane a bumpkin backwater - perhaps even demoted to demi-plane. Instead, they make their animosity known through furious spying and sabotage - though at the same time, the closeness and clamp-down on violence also leads to clandestine trade and forbidden love affairs.

War's also inhibited by the native life of the Accretion Disk. Like how swamp-plants tend to evolve carnivory to deal with the scarcity of resources, so too do many of the Disk's autotrophs have a tendency to eat unwary explorers. Particularly feared is the Frondtree, which in its adult stage is a harmless filter-feeder, but its larvae are ravenous swarms of air-swimming squidlings.

The slow-moving and humid air around the Disk can carry a great many particles for a long time. For this reason much of the Disk's life has also evolved the ability to release spores, pheromones, and other such materials, many of which have psychoactive properties. Bohemian communities on the Disk have taken to "fishing" for clouds of these vapourous drugs with gas-impermeable bags attached to kites.

The Cloudminds

Of great importance to the jostling of the elemental planes is the question of infinities. The core planes are claimed to be truly infinite, with the others being merely vast finitudes, or, if one's feeling generous, lesser infinities. The existence of the cloudminds points to the plane of steam being the latter.

They're creatures of incalculable improbability, Boltzmann brains formed from atmospheric fluctuations, whose thoughts are hurricanes.

It's unknown how many cloudminds there might really be out there. Natural philosophers posit that most are so far removed from mortal concerns that their actions are indistinguishable from the plane's ordinary weather. There are a handful who meddle in the affairs of fleshy things though. Among their number are:

• Cloud Ninety-Nine: A self-proclaimed philanthropist who pities mortals for their mayfly lives and idiocy. It says it can translate the minds of mortals into its own vapourous substance, where they can enjoy a blissful eternity. Cloud Ninety-Nine is served by a cult that wears fluffy white robes, and who insist that all others be absorbed into their master before they can graciously follow suite.
  
• Pneumos: Claims to be the god of gods, the prime mover of the multiverse who breathed life into all things. Its proof is dubious, but it manages a cartel that controls the supply of Vital Breath, magically-potent steam that can animate anything that inhales or otherwise contains it.
  
• Cumulatus: Unsatisfied with its merely titanic intellect, Cumulatus wants to make itself supreme. It's formed an alliance with a Mechanite enclave ensconced in the roots of the Accretion Disk - adherents of the Taskmaster Error, who believe that they can best promote the Order of Orders by dominating non-Ordered beings and forcing them to do their proper bidding - getting them to construct a machine-body for it that would accelerate its gaseous thinking tremendously. The Mechanites are, of course, attempting to trick Cumulatus into becoming their lobotomized computer, though Cumulatus is no fool. It's assassinated a few of the more treacherous engineers where it could, but despite its intelligence it's simply too big to act on the scale it needs to, and so is looking for mortal agents to keep the Mechanites honest.

Rust Hulk Pirates

The stifling humidity of the plane of steam makes caring for metal a nightmare. There's a brisk trade between the Mechanites of the Accretion Disk and the cold pole - which dips closest to the plane of water and its cluster - for oils and ungents that inhibit rust. On the Mechanite side, this trade is conducted by massive, atmospherically-sealed, propeller-driven cargo ships, some of which are large enough to contain entire towns.

These ships are tempting targets for pirates, and cost enough upkeep on their own that an unsuccessful voyage can lead to its owners scuttling it. Raiders from the plane of water will take these abandoned ships, plug up the holes, fill the hull with water, and use them as mobile bases of operation for further piracy. As they often lack the knowledge to fully repair or operate the ships, they'll supplement their engines by leashing them to some steam-dwelling leviathans to help pull them along. Battles between pirate hulks and merchant ships are full of explosive de- and re-pressurization as gutted hulls spill fluid and punctured boarding crew suits fill with freezing fog.

Often, these raiders are covertly sponsored by the plane's steam elementals to disrupt the operations of their misty brethren.

When rust hulks aren't taken over by raiders, they tend to become the lairs of dangerous creatures or secretive cults, floating in the semi-liquid slush at the plane's "bottom".

The Orthopraxical Organ

Outsiders are, as a rule, immortal. They can work on time horizons that shadow the histories of mortal civilizations.

The Mechanites in the plane of steam, the ones who haven't deviated into Error, have been occupied with a mega-project here practically since their arrival.

They are making a muscial instrument. They are making the entire plane into a musical instrument. This instrument they call "The Orthopraxical Organ". It contains a great many very large tubes.

When it's complete the Mechanites believe the Organ will conclusively reveal the Order of music, and all the cosmos will have no choice but to march in lockstep with its tune.

The Organ's development has been anything but orderly. The Mechanites have been forced to cooperate with musicians, composers - many of the same bohemians who spend their days fishing for clouds of drugs. They make this compromise because the Organ must be absolutely comprehensive of music. This drive gets them taken advantage of, and their collaborators - if they're able to prove their musical talent - can live like rockstar-kings in their care.