Within the Precipice, the greatest certainty is uncertainty, and dangers abound. Of course, some areas are more unstable than others, and the farther one wanders from the relative stability of one’s own world, the greater the distortions are likely to become.
The forthcoming Open Alpha v1.2 update will provide significantly more of this uncertainty and danger to the Enigma table, which represent the wide range of strange and perilous phenomena one might encounter. This table is broken up into several layers, and the specific cards (borrowed from a standard 52-card deck) that comprise the enigmas that one might encounter vary by layer. Closer layers tend to contain ominous curiosities, while more distant layers have more esoteric and deadly secrets.
But what are some of the enigmas we’ve seen in stories so far, as our protagonists have found themselves in the Precipice? And how might they be reflected in mechanics? In this fiction primer, we’ll find out!
Impossible Debris (Arbelos)
Hazhlet had been slinking through the treacherous corridors for an hour. She had passed the hangar several times, where Riston repaired the hauler and talked. As she looped the base again, she could hear the hiss of the torch alternating with the stream of questions and answers. However he had managed to secure Dr. Etaic’s blessing, it had opened the scientists’ lips, and several had flocked to the bay like wastedrifters on a fresh corpse. The reporter must have been right about the lack of a nightlife. Clearly everyone on the base was bored enough to show up and gossip. Hazhlet caught a few words here and there. “Dimensional aperture,” “waveline cascading,” “fractal growth patterns in the plants.” She’d walked by the dozen or so labs several times now, her eyes flitting inside.
The gist was clear enough to her. The Icano Disaster Area was much more than just a desert left behind by Herunock biophagic weapons. She’d seen that with her own eyes. The glistening, green water that flowed uphill and turned to fire. The subtle cold that pervaded everything. And, of course, the horrible machine. Something had gone truly wrong here, she thought. Those details are for the scientists to discover. My mission should be simpler. Protocol says extract with the M-Trak. Why am I hesitating?
She rounded the corner to the medical room and stopped instinctively. The door was cracked, and voices came from within. She slid along the wall to listen, and heard Etaic’s even, erudite tones.
“I hope that I can repay the favor you did me a year ago, my friend. The Astiagens would have paid a lot more handsomely than I could have, had you decided to simply turn me over. I’ve always wondered why you didn’t.”
“Money’s not everything…” came Auglez’s voice. “Oh, I need to eat to live, but so does our country. If your work can restore the Icano delta… we can get things back on track. Without the Astiagens, without the Oberects… our own….”
“I can’t promise I’ll solve this,” replied Etaic. “The rift is far deeper than anyone else knows. When the rupture device detonated here, something went awry in a way we still don’t fully understand. We suspect that the displacement cut a two-way path, and something flooded back in. It is integrating into the world, but it seems to be testing our very laws of physics in the process. When we’ve ventured out far enough, we’ve found plants that can grow in ice, samples of seemingly familiar metals that destabilize at the basest level in minutes, and crystal structures that should be impossible. And the flow is increasing. I fear we’re dealing with things far beyond the Astiagens and the Oberects now. You saw one yourself, from the sound of it.”
-From Arbelos Chapter 4: Footsteps on Metal by Max Brooke
The ventures undertaken by the Varallen Irregulars (at the behest of Astiagen Coalition’s military advisors) tend not to stray far from the proverbial shores of Arbelos. But the dropbase run by Dr. Solanon Etaic and his colleagues sits much farther from the familiar. This poses additional risks to its inhabitants, but also gives them access to objects and materials that couldn’t exist within the physical bounds of Arbelos. Dr. Etaic and his cadre of scientists set out with the hope that their discoveries might allow them to reverse the collapse of the Icano Peninsula into the rift, although the more they discover, the more distant this dream seems to be.
Debris is a common sight in many parts of the Precipice, the wrecks of past ventures and the mangled machines of those less fortunate. The debris found in enigmas in a close layer provides a minor benefit to players pursuing an intelligence (♦) mission, but debris found at more distant layers might provide strange artifacts and even powerful weapons to anyone who discovers it.
Mysterious Thresholds (Swarmworld Arcturus)
Maris, safe in the control sphere at Komodo’s heart, surfaced a few moments after the faun’s head. The transition from murky ocean depths to stark, hazy light forced Maris to blink away the ghosts that had swum in her periphery, moving in the impenetrable black of the water.
She had never felt their direction change. Despite her efforts to coax Komodo to turn back, to return to shore or even just swim closer to the surface where she could connect to Deniz in Zilant, the faun had continued to descend, deeper, deeper. She’d tried pulling on the control gauntlets with all her strength, but they barely moved, and when they did, the faun did not seem to care.
At least they were not underwater, but there shouldn’t have been anywhere not-underwater for them to be. Water streamed down the armor plating of Komodo’s chest, rippling blotches of color over Maris’s control sphere view. There were shades of brown—dark and rich like soil, light and golden like sand—and shades of gray, pale yellow, and a few almost-greens. The palette didn’t belong to any part of Antillia she knew.
Komodo turned around to face the way they had come. They were standing on a flat surface, which looked like some kind of soil or sand had been meticulously leveled. This level stretched for hundreds of meters to either side of them. In front of them, a sharp slope of the same sort of material connected this plane to another, higher by a little more than Komodo’s standing height. Set into the slope was a pool of water, rectangular and sitting at a steep angle. The surface of the water, too, was at the same angle, but, in blunt defiance of gravity, perfectly placid. That’s where they must have emerged from, but Maris didn’t quite understand how it could be. Tiers just like this one continued up, one after another after another.
From Swarmworld Arcturus Chapter 4: Beithir by Brandon Perdue
Sometimes, entering the Precipice is a lengthy process, drifting from reality over slow kilometers as the surroundings become more and more strange. Other times, it can be an abrupt drop. At the end of Maris and Komodo’s watery plunge into the Precipice, they found themselves facing a gateway portal. These thresholds open paths through the Precipice, taking travelers farther from their world of origin or back toward it. Some thresholds are static locations, but many are shifting things, existing only briefly or according to some inscrutable pattern.
Thresholds can be found at all layers of the Precipice. Discovering these points of egress not only provide players with ways to escape an encounter, but they also provide strategic benefits to players pursuing a survey (♠) mission.
Unexpected Foes (Harness)
Suddenly, another massive form moved into the light, and his heart jumped in his chest. The thing rivalled the Occhscene harness’s height, and its surface was like a grayish, milky-marbled stone. It was shaped like a broad-bearded man in skirted, antique armor—like in the smashed friezes littering the slopes of the Nave. As it moved, its surface flowed, contracting and lengthening like muscle, but with the bloodless, sallow coloring and crack-worn surface of a statue.
His breath caught in his throat. A Lithioi. Not here. Not still… Everyone knew they had been destroyed during the Iconoclasm—they were why there was an Iconoclasm.
-From Harness Chapter 4: Possibility by Michael Gernes
The risks of the Precipice are not confined only to distant layers, of course. When Orlondo finds himself face-to-face with the colossal stone soldier, he stands just barely past the threshold. This implacable Lithioi is a foe cast not across space but across time, presumably hidden for centuries within the domain beyond realms. This absence allowed it to escape the Iconoclasm, but the recent flare of the Precipice now pits it against Ysolt and Orlondo centuries after its contemporaries crumbled into rubble and myth.
Unexpected hostile forces can appear at all layers of the Precipice, although in game terms, they are most likely to appear at more distant layers. Still, an individual Encounter can always adjust these probabilities by altering the cards shuffled into the Enigma deck, or replacing the default results with World- or Encounter-specific results. Most of the time, foes of all stripes are best avoided by players, but those pursuing a personnel (♥) mission can often gain a strategic benefit from subduing them.
For more of the strange, wondrous, and deadly enigmas one may encounter in the Precipice, check out the Enigma table in the forthcoming Open Alpha v1.2 update!