Conduit Fanworld – Gesmene – v2.0
The smog comes and goes, drifting through cobbled avenues, slumping rows of brownstones and endless twisting alleys. Apartments, steeples and other, more nonsensical constructions crowd out the twilight sky. And everywhere is the hissing light of gas lamps. Gesmene is a World of buried histories and forgotten passions, a nigh-deserted metropolis whose best days have clearly passed, yet soldiers on in eternal dissipation.

How did you come to Gesmene?

Antiquarian: Certain semiotic alignments can further funnel the energies of a Bridge into a Gateway, like two halves of a word sliding together. It so happens that the ancient book or medium in your possession, when brought close enough to a Bridge, opens a path directly to Gesmene’s cobblestones.
Antiquarians start with 4 ♦ for their love of knowing, as well as knowing the location of a Gateway to travel back to Earth.

Conduit: Gesmene was a love-letter mailed to your very soul, such that you and your Conduit-nature leapt the gulf between Worlds just to reciprocate its offer. Perhaps it was a vision of its gothic skyline, like a poet’s soul writ large. Perhaps it was the sumptuously genteel decay, resonating with your innate nostalgia. Or for the love of secrets, piled deep like strata? You embrace your role as a Dandy of Gesmene, eventually earning the title of Bohème, projecting an air of cool dishevelment no matter how much care you put into your appearance.
Conduits begin with their own ♦ , and may draw from their own unique abilities and other Worlds with this resource.

Forgotten: You were forgotten. You slipped from Earth’s mercurial attention, victim of its mundane fallibilities of matter and memory, but Gesmene has found you instead. As the last traces of your existence on your native World slips away as though you never were, you find yourself deposited on some street-corner of Gesmene.
Forgotten start with 10 ♦ as Gesmene claims their existence, but have no way to return to the World of their birth – and little for them to return to, even if they do.

Bridges to Gesmene occur where history lies in deep layers, filled with the detritus of lives lived and stories lost. The World’s influence brings such things to the fore, all the past returning to leave their imprint on the land, and all objects and inhabitants finding it impossible to conceal their age. Scars grow more prominent, memories grow bolder and mantelpiece mementos seem to proliferate themselves.

Intrinsic Changes: At 5♦ spent in Gesmene the pervasive damp and mold no longer bothers you, nor does subsisting on whatever (very) well-preserved comestibles you scrounge. Your airs are developed enough not to be accosted by Lobstermen wherever you go. However, you are no longer at ease in a landscape without sharp angles, and fresh food actually unsettles your constitution. You must also read a thousand pages of fresh material every month to prevent your mind from dulling.

Obligations:
At 5♦ spent in Gesmene the Dandy begin to withdraw, preferring not to speak if writing will do and arranging for messages in lieu of meetings.
At 10♦ spent in Gesmene the Dandy also becomes prone to expansive bouts of language over brevity or clarity, and the mind disdains and ignores any reply not couched likewise.
At 15♦ spent in Gesmene the Dandy is a gnomic walking library, their basis in communication entire drawn from references to their vast private corpuses.

♦ Correspondence: Gesmene’s bygone citizens were a cultured lot. Musty galleries and museums lay open, deserted manors are filled with books and paintings, and every wainscot seems to conceal a cache of papers. The World’s legacy is a tangled web of romance, literature and history into which you can lose yourself like nothing else. You find your speed and prowess in reading and writing amplified many times, and become able to achieve an uncanny understanding of the cultural nuances of a World from its written artifacts alone. For a World where text is especially rich on the ground like Gesmene, this Perk is particularly effective.

♦♦ Ghostwriting, requires Correspondence: Your command over the written word grows unchecked. By aligning works into a narrative and carefully tending to it, you can make it come alive. A letter faked carefully enough and sent will breed replies as though long-dead correspondents are still around. Inquiries into history can be couched, lives can be made to continue, and great works of art can be obtained from fictional confidantes, finding their way to you via post or coincidental discovery. Note that this Perk has no power over actual facts or events, only how they are recorded.

♦ Calumny, requires Ghostwriting: Applied back to the unwritten world, your pen is sharp indeed. All words written by you carry an aura of preternatural persuasiveness no matter the medium, fading only with repeated reproduction or edits by other hands. This effect is especially effective on readers who are the subjects of the text, the power of your words weighing on their willpower and self-image like a lingering curse no matter how unconvinced they may be.

♦ Cipher, requires Correspondence: By the time Gesmene’s marvelously complex language becomes second nature to you, you also come to realize the power of its subtleties. Hidden messages in written media become as plain as day and solving codes and ciphers becomes an intuitive exercise. With effort, you can also code hidden messages into your writing for only selected readers via nothing but pure literary technique, immune to Earthly codebreaking methods. If you also possess a Signet, this Perk can infallibly convey hidden messages to the recipient of a sealed document.

♦ Rorschach, requires Cipher: You coil subtle scripts of echo and emptiness around your words, creating mimetic texts that can actively reshape their content. Anything from a simple word to an entire document can be set to appear differently depending on the viewer, drawing information directly from the viewer’s own expectations to present to them what you want them to see – if you want them to see anything at all. If you also possess a Signet, you may use its seal as a master key to the document, commanding it to display anything it has previously displayed to others.

♦♦ Genius Libri, requires Ghostwriting and Cipher: With subtle scripts of lie and truth and ink mixed with your own blood, you may create a fully sapient fictional character, hatching it out of a cradle of intricate worldbuilding and uplifting it with ladders of metaphor. A Muse is by default granted the awareness that it is a fictional character and may communicate with its creator through its host work, interacting with and manipulating it as you might using the Ghostwriting and Cipher perks. Unlike you though, the Muse’s manipulations are limited by the consistencies built into its own character and cannot change radically without risking decoherence.

♦♦ Genius Narrans, requires Genius Libri: More sophisticated techniques allow the creation of more potent Muses. They can attain a meta-consistency as both self-realized characters and as literary agents embedded in the realm of ideas. The same Muse incorporated into multiple copies of a work share a network of awareness, able to take sweeping coordinated actions. Beyond responding only to direct editing, a Muse is also able to sense when their host work is responded to or commented about. If you possess the Calumny and Rorschach perks when you create a Muse, it may also use them on its host medium.

♦♦ Virtuoso, requires Correspondence, Rakery: Marvelous as Gesmene’s writings are, its culture consists of so much more to master. The benefits of the Correspondence perk now extend to visual and musical arts as long as they have basis in a permanent form, applying even to performances of said arts such as of music, opera or plays, albeit with lesser effect. If you also possess the Ghostwriting, Calumny, Cipher or Rorschach perks, the range of application for such perks are similarly expanded.

♦ Refrain, requires Virtuoso: You declare subtle scripts of past and simultaneity into the dusty air. The Rough Music erupts into force around you, dredging up the vicinity’s past in an indiscriminate wave of overpowering babble. Particularly strong impressions may linger in victims, displacing memories and personalities with bygone echoes and fragments. Anyone possessing the Correspondence perk may attempt to absorb the bombardment of information in an orderly manner, though the process will strain their minds.

♦ Rakery: A fire lights behind your eyes as you fold your physical and mental appetites into one, abiding by the twisted scarcities of Gesmene. You may choose to have any material that nourishes your mind – stirs your creativity, moves your emotions or makes you think – nourish your body instead. This source of vitality can overpower even physical debilitations that would otherwise slow you down, but does not go as far as to help their healing. Vice versa, any physical sustenance may instead be used to fuel the fires of inspiration, overriding mental fatigue for as long as it is stoked.

♦ Streetwise, requires Rakery: With the distinction between your mind and body’s appetites polished thin, even breathing in the coal and must of the World can create, in time, a mental map of its broken spires and winding streets. The longer you inhabit an urban environment and stay in contact with its pervasive effluvia, the more detailed and accurate your inner map becomes, revealing even secrets that are concealed from mundane detection. With experience, you will develop an instinct for urban geography that makes the navigation of any built-up area second nature.

♦♦ Epicure, requires Rakery, Ghostwriting: A chef with proper technique, the table set just right, the candles lit in sequence. Sit, feast, and know. Rediscovering Gesmene’s transcendent gastronomic arts, you can now prepare objects to be ingested directly by the mind. When eaten, the contents of physical media are absorbed into the eater’s dreams and memories, and if it contains no such information truths about the object enter the eater’s mind as impression. It is a delicate process to prepare otherwise inedible things in such a manner, and botches may result in deleterious mental effects.

You can also prepare the opposite: texts that translate into sensation and satiety when eaten. A scrip of paper, inscribed with exquisite words and glazed in brewed ink, will fill the bowels just as surely as a perfect steak. A chilled poem can easily intoxicate. A dessert written in Calumny…you can imagine that one for yourself.

♦ Signet: No matter how destitute, all visitors have something of value to Gesmene: their name, and the tales that they might yet sign with it. Backed by the promise of all that you are, you create a unique personal Signet inscribed with the subtle script of the Old City. The Signet marks your authenticity and respectability in Gesmene, and displaying it earns the attention of its inhabitants. Documents authored by you and sealed with your Signet cannot be falsified and will resist tampering, slowly reverting to their sealed form. Similarly, a flash of your Signet upon your person instantly identifies you against any attempt to impersonate you.

♦ Propriety, requires Signet: Once respectability is established, the rest is a matter of bluffing and paperwork. You correspond persuasively with the automated remnants of the World’s civil service, and for your efforts receive a deed that allows you to claim an apartment-like vacant space in Gesmene (of which there are many) as your official residence. Some locations are in better repair, while others have more loosely enforced municipal laws; consider your needs and your choices. Mail, gas and hot water will be supplied if required, and so will deliveries of coal, milk, newspapers and other such comestibles.

♦ The Help, requires Signet: The Mechanicals of Gesmene come in a profusion of forms, fulfilling any number of civic functions. All they share is a certain simplicity of identity, as though only to maintain the stage for a true player such as you. In seal and blood, you may craft letters of employment to bind to your service a small staff of Mechanicals, ensuring their obedience if not their slavish loyalty. Depending on where they are found and recruited, Mechanicals are limited in the tasks they can perform and versatility is a rare and valuable trait among their kind. But then, Mechanicals themselves are not particularly thick on the ground in the first place.

♦♦Little Helpers, requires The Help: You are given the understanding that behind their lively and disagreeable veneer, Mechanicals exist only to serve. Inscribing subtle scripts of fate and function on your Mechanical, you transform it into a handy pocket-sized gadget. Its shape and function will be a rough analogue of the position it held in life: industrial automatons become multitools, lamplighters become torch-lanterns, messengers become folded delivery-bees and bureaucrats become clattering personal assistants. Larger, more powerful Mechanicals are more difficult to convert, and may display willful tendencies even as gadgets.

♦♦ Carriage, requires Propriety and The Help: One cannot expect to walk everywhere in this overgrown city. And while traveling in style and comfort means little as a status signifier here, a traveler of Worlds can give the act true significance. An especially well-written letter of employment binds to your service a unique Mechanical-vehicle of modest size, capable of transporting no more than half a dozen passengers and their effects. With a Conduit possessing this Perk at the reins, the Carriage and its contents are not subject to the limits of crossing Bridges relative to the Conduit, and may always choose to arrive in Gesmene regardless of connection or the Bridge’s actual destination.

♦♦ Endowment, requires Propriety and The Help: Creating literature is one thing; it takes extensive and painstaking study of the forms and precedents of Gesmene, and not to mention a lot of audacity, to rewrite one of the city’s official documents. But the result is a very fancy deed indeed. You may use your creation to claim a much larger and luxurious residence such as an entire mansion, an exceptionally well-kept penthouse or even a steamboat on Gesmene’s silent canals, with provisions for live-in Mechanical staff and the finest of the World’s worn luxuries. Even non-residential structures such as libraries or factories can be claimed and repurposed, though such remit expends some of the considerable latitude that the deed grants.

You can purchase further social capital by dedicating your property as a club for one of the approved Wholesome Pursuits, earning the moral scrutiny of the Lobstermen but also the patronage of denizens rarely seen otherwise. At your door, Gesmene’s mostly empty streets will swell with an echo of social life. Even denizens of the Old City may drop by.

♦♦ Probate, requires Signet, Calumny: -Cheating Death- Drawing upon all that you’ve learnt here on the power of words, you craft and seal a very singular document – a will so ironclad that it will transfer every single shred of your identity to a benefactor who effectively becomes you. Of course, your trick is to have it transfer your bodily existence to yourself, so when you die you simply return to being at your will’s location. However, this egregious existential paradox does great violence to all that identifies you in Gesmene’s eyes. At resurrection, your will, your Signet and every document you have ever sealed with it will spontaneously combust. For some weeks afterwards, all your social relations will also suffer from an inability to recognize you until your Signet is replaced.

♦♦ Perpetuity, requires Probate, Genius Libri: If you can bring words to true life, surely you can also bind true life to words. You take your gloomy will and rewrite and rewrite it, adding textual annexes and recursive clauses and subtle scripts of every sort until you have…well, you’re not sure what it is. All that matters is this sprawling amorphous document captures you far more authentically, and can maintain itself as though itself living. The activation of the Probate perk no longer destroys your Signet and its works, nor will it tarnish your social life. Instead, the Perk is rendered temporarily inoperable as your…document devotes its energies to repairing your reputation and itself. You may even have it arrange slight conditions to your resurrection, such as in timing or location.

Alignment: The past is but a story, a truth pinned between pen and ink. The past is the truth, framing in gold what time itself forgets. Between the parallax of penstrokes, the Old City slide into focus. You see what they have done now. In aligning with Gesmene, you exist in the twilight world of the perpetual past, only able to experience the present vicariously through whatever traces it leaves behind. From the perspective of others, you are always gone a moment before their presence, only able to communicate through missive or changes to longstanding things. This makes it very difficult other than for other Aligned beings to interact with your person, both to your benefit and detriment. You become obsessed with chronicling all you see, gathering and reformulating their narratives until they are art, their weight and consequence sequestered from life by your masterly hand. Neither will you tolerate any alternate account – you are also compelled to ensure that yours is the most authoritative possible.

In exchange, you become one of the shadow aristocracy of Gesmene and your word here, though not law, becomes quite authoritative indeed. By spending ♦ , you may purchase Propriety, the Help and their upgrades repeatedly and without limit to gain additional deeds and letters, even combining them to create truly spectacular estates, all above the Lobstermen’s petty strictures. The effects of Epicure become second nature to you and no longer require elaborate dining rituals. Your control over Little Helpers is enhanced, able to create more elaborate and variable gadgets and even to apply the Perk to natives of other Worlds.

Finally by Mastering Gesmene, you may send a Signet-stamped and -sealed letter to any one addressee in any World, the message propelled by Gesmene’s power to land in the addressee’s postbox regardless of any obstacle.

Outpost, requires Propriety: Many places are old, but it takes a depth of deposited meaning, an oldness with significance, to resonate with Gesmene’s nature. You must provide such a history written in sigil and legalese, fabricating connections to Gesmene and justifications that it belonged to the World all along, precluded by at least a month’s research in the area’s history. Such a document must be viewed and accepted by the area’s residents, if any, and lack of opposition to its narrative will slowly bring in the influence of Gesmene, white paint flaking, lights flickering, and Mechanicals awakening from abandoned tools and possessions. Unless measures are taken, the center of the Outpost will spawn a stable Bridge to Gesmene within a month.

Gateway, requires Streetwise: A specific anchor is required to stabilize the ramshackle influence of a Bridge. An artificial object large enough to be a man-sized doorway and at least a hundred years old must be located. Etched with subtle scripts of permanence and permeability all along its perimeter, the object becomes fixed into place, a traversable Gateway to Gesmene and back until sufficiently damaged. The Gateway can have no obvious external sign if you wish it so.

Dangers

Unwelcome: There is a fearful and persistent rumor that you are of interest to the masked dwellers of the Old City, whose intrigues are incomprehensible but whose rumored reach is far indeed. Mechanicals who would normally serve promptly refuse to associate with you out of fear, and any written material in your possession may be subject to horrific accidents.

Natives: Gesmene is old. Mold, smog and choking soot infests its quarters. Chandeliers fall and staircases crumble. Architecture not built out of any human sense may trap and confuse you for days, frustrating any attempt to traverse the city. And the rats are fiendishly smart.

Atlas

Geography:
Pipehearts: Monumental tangles of pipes and boilers, some hissing and gurgling with gas and steam and busily tended by metallic servitors, others silent and empty. They are vital junctions in Gesmene’s infrastructure, and restoring one would be a great work that will reacquaint whole districts with heat and light.

The Old City: Curled at the heart of the city and yet outside the World, the uncanny cyclopean towers of the Old City are rarely glimpsed, even more rarely visited by all right-thinking inhabitants. But the Old City’s own inhabitants are ancient beyond measure, and it is whispered everywhere that they are the true lords of Gesmene, preferring to extract their tribute from the shadows.

The Dockyards: Whatever golden age of commerce that necessitated docks of this scale have clearly passed, but occasionally a massive ironclad pulls out of the fog and the rusted cranes shudder into motion, off-loading leviathan carcasses and exotic goods to be canned and processed.

Bestiary:
Mechanicals: Gesmene’s most prolific inhabitants come in a profusion of forms, going through all the motions of civic life. Brass contraptions distribute coal from their bellies, walking piles of coats pick rags, and living political cartoons staff what remains of the civil service. Needing no sustenance, most carry on with their designated jobs and spend their idleness trading favors, rumors and interesting baubles; but others have grown more…eccentric.

Lobstermen: Massive clanking suits of armor, patrols of Lobstermen ruthlessly pounce upon any hint of lawlessness, licentiousness and indeed untoward frivolity, sending any offenders to the gaols with complimentary beatings. The same thick-headedness that makes them easy to trick or avoid also renders them largely immune to bribery or persuasion. A minority of Lobstermen have specialized features such as elongated limbs, searchlights, klaxons or cages of trained rats.

Gargoyles: It is said that the princes in the Old City have ways of spying upon their subjects. It is said that any of the grotesque statues that litter the rooftops might come alive at any moment, silently taking victims for a fate worse than death.

Phenomena:
Peasouper: When the ubiquitous smog pools enough it concentrates into a far deadlier form, scouring stone and flesh and sending even hardened Dandies to choking deaths within minutes. It is prudent to find sufficiently high ground or sufficiently airtight shelter when these phenomena roll past in semi-liquid waves.

The Rough Music: Sometimes in Gesmene the past crests over the present, marching like a carnival across the fabric of the World. This manifests as a sudden rising babble, of music and raised voices and less identifiable sounds, fragments worming their way into minds and sometimes echoing for days around places that they must have been associated with. The Music’s effect on Mechanicals is more erratic. Recordings of the Music are much desired contraband.

Quick Snickets: The dwellers of the Old City may have the privilege to ignore sane geometry, but the less exalted parts of Gesmene have their own shortcuts. A profusion of alleys, tunnels and sewers links locations in ways that defy distance and direction. Without proper guidance or prior exploration, traversing these can be as convenient as it is dangerous.

Personalities:

Coy Rhetorician: He was very prolific. He corresponded extensively with a certain historical strata of the city’s intelligentsia, featuring frequently in their own diaries and missives, rants and rebuttals. He dabbled in many genres of literature, his verifiable works always weaving between emulation and mockery. He enjoyed riddles of immense sophistication, requiring extensive knowledge of his own corpus to appreciate. He bantered, crafted self-referential works, frustrated academic rigor with meticulously forged facts. Even when you correspond with his dead words to gain insight into his time, you get the distinct feeling that he is matching wits with you. You are still not sure if he really existed, or is a particularly cunning Muse.

The Chittering Council: At some point, Earthly rats must have slipped through a Gate and adapted to life in Gesmene, and have grown ferociously cultured in the process. Look for scratch-ciphers near sewers, places where the larger Mechanicals do not reach, and you may be guided to find audience with an enormous amalgamation of machine and rodent, its melded intelligence terrifying in depth and scope. The Chittering Council is spymaster to a network of intelligent rats over a good chunk of the city, and its agents – lurking in cracks, piloting lumbering Mechanical-disguises – bear witness to much. Pay your respects in fresh literature and rich food, and the Council will lend you its services.

Mme. Madder:

Challenges: