The long-unawaited and un-asked for sequel to a long-ago post. This post is also a Glåugust one, specifically for the prompt “background world event”.
Sidebar, but I’ve always thought the City of Brass should have a proper-name, so that it can be X, the City of Brass, same as Sigil’s got a title of its own.
Perhaps the true name of the city is a secret.
The City of Brass exists within a spherical field of notable (and sometimes even extreme) cold - from the perspective of natives to the Plane of Fire, naturally. From the perspective of visitors to Fire, it’s about as hot as, say, desert travel. The heat-reducing protections on the City of Brass also work to ward off weather which would destroy civic infrastructure - for example, rains of molten gold, pyroclastic simooms, or “the sky has been replaced by burning magnesium”, among others. But the weather isn’t worked all the way down by the layers of protective spells, and it can still be quite harsh…
1-15 Clear Heat - The air is dry, and it’s about 35°C. This is considered an average day in Fire.
16-25 Close Heat - A thick layer of hot, hazy air has settled on the city. For those native to Fire, this is a normal, uneventful day - for those not native to Fire, it’s a choking, sweaty heat, shimmering and swaying.
26-35 - Ash-storm - Flaky grey ash blows through the city on stovepipe winds. Gets everywhere, builds up in drifts, and reduces visibility to barely more than a few paces. The Afarit lords are especially on guard, and even an innocently curious trespasser might be taken for a thief.
36-40 Hot Haze - Low, shimmering, miserably hot even for Brass. Embers float through the air, and pockets of strange gases rove the streets.
41-45 Sulfurous Storms - Electric-blue fire roars far above, casting the city in a strange light. The smell of burning sulfur is strong, and occasionally, little burning blue projectiles plummet down through the protective spells to burst like fireworks against the city’s metal roofs.
46-55 Roaring Winds - You’ll hear them a few days in advance, before they hit the City. At the edge of the city’s protective barrier, they call these things “jetfires”, because, well - they hit Brass first as a wall of shrieking yellow flames carrying behind them a scraping ashstorm, cooking the exposed on one side and abrading the unprotected. By the time they reach the actual walls of the City, however, they’ve been worked down to just hot, stinging, high-speed winds, tearing through the city from one side to the other - this blows all the ash out of the deep places, stokes fires, and probably messes up your hair too.
56-65 Smog Days - Either the roiling flames around the City have passed through burning Earth, or the workshops and foundries are working overtime - visibility is barely ten feet, as a roiling, coaly, hot smog filled with swirling embers settles on the city. Uncomfortable for afarit and other natives of fire, potentially deadly for unprepared mortals. The afarit try their very hardest to prevent this kind of weather from coming to pass - it’s bad for business.
66-75 Hot Rain - The city passes through some pocket of Water upon the plane of Fire, and, in boiling it, rapidly produces a humid, foggy steam-cloud which gathers at the top of the protective magical spheroid around the City. Inevitably, it will begin to drop a warm rain onto the city, which is stinging and unpleasant for the afarit and azers, and a treat for visitors - even warm rain is cooling on the Plane of Fire.
76-80 Boiling Rain - As above, but the water is literally boiling. The air feels like a sauna. Nobody is happy - Those from Fire hate the moisture, those from outside of Fire hate being, uh, boiled.
81-85 Fire-Rain - On the Plane of Fire, we move beyond the standard metaphysics of the Material Plane into the esoteric and pre-divine. One such thing is the phenomenon of Liquid Fire, which is not molten metal or earth, but simply pure elemental fire in liquid form. It makes up the Sea of Fire, and the Afarit are always astounded by how much they can sell it for - it’s everywhere! In fact, it falls from the sky! Oh, we didn’t mention that? Well, yes - this weather is a rain of liquid fire splashing down onto the city, running like lit petrol in the gutters, filling up the cups with pure burning. We advise a very stout umbrella and a run for home.
85-89 Earthmotes Overhead - Earthmotes are floating chunks of elemental earth - most common in Water and Air, but not impossible to find in Fire. These ones are coated in a hard layer of obsidian, or maybe native metal or blackened stone. Their presence starts a prospecting craze, as Afarit fly up, competing with Azer in dinky airships and outsiders with flying spells, in a rush to see if they can strike something valuable - adamant, gold, gems, truemetal. Watch out, though: if the earthmotes get too hot, they might drop globules of lava onto the roofs.
90-91 Copper Bounty - Earthmotes full of copper from the Plane of Earth enter the Sea of Fire beyond the city, casting up miles-tall pillars of brilliant green flame and thick, roiling clouds of smoke. Everything looks like the set of a bad play in a Hiver’s inn come to life, with lurid greens, stark shadows and smoke gathering thick in the low places. The city leaps into a frenzy of harvesting and processing - one naturally needs copper for brass.
92-93 Fire Tornadoes - Oh, fuck! They come spinning off the Sea of Fire, tall, narrow, gloriously beautiful and exceedingly dangerous. Only the Afarit have the power to toy with them - see them fly up and catch a cackling ride on the spinning flames. The place where the twister meets the ground is a point of blue-white heat hot enough to melt stone, and the twisters drag these torches all over town, drawing crazed glowing lines like the pens of angels.
94-95 Positive Energy Storm - Everything is suffused with a radiant glow, the sky above crackles with luminous rifts, strong winds blow off all the smoke, and the City looks almost angelic! Almost. A generally happy time, though be careful of side-effects. While the storm is on, wounds heal quicker, the recently dead sometimes revive inexplicably, illnesses sometimes vanish without reason, conceptions are bound to result in twins or triplets and absolutely nobody has the morbs.
96-97 Negative Energy Storm - The sky is literally burning black, and a very rare darkness comes over Brass. This city is not adapted for the dark, and paranoia shoots right up as whole districts are suddenly plunged into lightless bedlam. This is hardly helped by the knock-on effects of the storm - wounds don’t heal, or even worsen, those recovering from illness suddenly grow gravely ill, some of the worst-afflicted may even just die, unattended bodies spring to life as feral (or sometimes sapient) undead, conceptions are impossible, the city seems to wail, and absolutely everybody has the morbs.
98-99 Great Groanings - In the still air, the earth beneath the city creaks and groans, and almost seems to stir - plumes of dust and smoke rumble out of the vents in the street, buildings shake, roads crack, and in the farms and mines beyond the city, there are sudden intrusions of lava. Whenever there is a groaning, the army of the city are always on the streets, and always especially harsh.
100 Imix! - The great Elemental Evil of Fire manifests above the city - the roaring inhuman inferno, in true primordiality, like a rogue sun, hell-orange and blood red. Smoke falls, molten metal rains, exposed water evaporates. This is cause for an immediate festival celebration among the afarit - some free slaves en masse, some sacrifice them, some burn their valuables to send the smoke up to Imix, some gather the raining molten metal to shape them into devotional icons. For everyone else, it’s cause for immediately fleeing for shelter - even the city’s protective spells cannot truly resist Imix for long.
Random note, but, sometimes D&D sources will describe things as being in the “North” of the City of Brass. North of what? North in relation to what? Does the Plane of Fire have a magnetic pole?
Some kind of huge realm of pure molten iron? That would kind of go hard, actually.
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