Tannok Attributes
Level: 7
Laws: Substandard Physics
Playable Races: Human
Foci: Conducts Weird Science, Leads, Lives In The Wilderness, Looks For Trouble, Wields Two Weapons At Once
Skills: Stealth, Sprinting
Connection to the Strange: No known portals directly from the Strange enter Tannok. However, the amount of reality seeds propped atop Tannok's mountains tends to draw in hostile creatures like Kray, Aposthame Rangers, or even the Embassy of Uentaru.
Connection to Earth: Tannok can be traveled to from Earth by a handful of gates. These gates have existed for thousands of years, and have most likely been sequestered away by ancient humanity. Weather these sites are called demonic, satanic, unnatural or not, they still exist today.
Age and Size: Old Recursion
Spark: 10%
Trait: Craven: You do not willingly enter dangerous situations. The difficulty of any initiative actions is reduced by one step. You fall to pieces when you have to undertake a dangerous task alone. The difficulty of any potentially dangerous task is increased by one step.
Fear is a powerful motivator to animals and sapient beings alike. Earth has been home to countless cultures, civilizations and legends thanks to human kind and their vast soaring imagination. Sometimes humans view the unnatural and dark nature of horror as entertainment, or even a method with which to teach. Tannok is the amalgamation of 10,000 years of fictional leakage from the darkest depths of the human psyche: fear, phobias and horror.
Tannok is comprised of incredibly sheer mountains that reach up to 10,000 feet in elevation. The mountains are virtually adjacent to each other, forming large acute valleys filled with squirming filth and unknowable horrors. All thrown into these pits are heard screaming for hours and are presumed dead. Metal platforms make up most of Tannok’s flat space, taking up millions of square feet. These platforms are always 50 feet thick (vertically) and positioned around Tannok’s mountains. Light only gets to a small portion of these surfaces, the rest being in complete darkness.
The Arachnii are apex predators similar to colossal spiders. Their hide is a dark gray with rust red spots on the thorax and pincers. This is because their fur is made of crude iron. The bigger and “rustier” an Arachnii is, the older and more dangerous it is. It’s unknown where they lay webs or build dens…but Arachnii attacks are more common near the lighted mountains. The competing predator to the Arachnii are the Despair. Despair are tremendously big snakes, that burrow holes and “dens” in the metal platforms. A strange property of their scales causes metal to fall apart, leaving behind small and rough shards of metal (similar to finely broken glass). The venom of the Despair does not directly cause death in humans, instead leading to the appearance of small clusters of hexagonal holes. These holes gain the texture of earthworms and later result in a painful death.
Tannok is subject to the laws of Substandard Physics. Modern miracles like gunpowder, electricity etc do not function correctly. Light in Tannok seems to have an “end-point” at which it can no longer travel. For most light sources, it stops at a few feet, making them barely useful. The light emanating from the mountain seems to only cover a few hundred feet into the platforms near it, meaning the few people that are stuck in Tannok live in those areas.
The only true reason a sane being could find for travelling to Tannok is its mountains. Atop each is a dull beacon of light that stems from a Reality Seed. These seeds attract and draw in many of the squelching horrors the Strange hosts. Most of them become lost due to the impenetrable darkness, while only a few have made it out alive. The Aposthome Rangers consider Tannok as a Class-15 Recursion…enter at your own death.
Creatures:
The monstrous beings of Tannok are squamous and terrifying in any way possible. Creatures from the Numenera and The Strange bestiary are recommended, with slight alterations. Channel people’s fears and phobias into any creature encountered by PCs in Tannok. CRAZRs are covered in peeling flesh layered with dead eyes, Trawls carry bags of screaming babies, and Etterick are filled with hornets the size of your thumb. If it makes you uncomfortable imagining it, it would exist in Tannok.
People of Tannok:
There are very few humans in Tannok except those who live in constant fear. Like the wandering nomads of the Pleistocene Era they wear dank scraps of hide from slain rodents the size of wolves, and wield small splinters of rusty metal from the great scaffolding. They are not literate, but speak a broken form of English that could possibly be proficient enough to have a conversation with a Recursor. Evidence of some ancient civilization can be found far into the dark regions of Tannok, but any huge populations were extinguished long ago by the constant abominations of their nightmares.