Rw The Rot - Tumblr Posts
The continued genius of this throughout progression of the campaign itself is so underspoken!
I took the “typical” route as rivulet from instinct after the scugs I already played before them: East toward the Leg, or shoreline. Seeing that Rivs already had the mark of communication, it made the most expedient sense to beeline to check on Moon and then round back to visit Pebbles. When you do this and let Moon check out the pearl you spawned in with, you gain a bit of ominous foreshadowing of what it is you’re here to do. Ever since the Hunter campaign, LTTM’s “arc” of condition has been one of incremental improvement, while any peek into Unfortunate Development through the cycles has only reinforced just how terminal and inevitable its demise will become with time.
If you’ve been paying any attention, you know before you even leave the drainage system why the uncontrolled flooding, why the unstable rain cycle. What you don’t know is just how bad things have gotten. You’re preparing for a worst infestation of The Underhang, more squelching but familiar danger waiting in The Leg. How you’ll definitely be taking the Transform array path this round.
But unless you’ve really been thinking about the world layout and the placement of the memory crypts within it, you aren’t expecting what you find when you go for the mirros bird mad dash you probably have half a dozen times before.
Live, fresh cysts everywhere. It’s not slithered down The Leg, it’s trickled out from where it’s overflowing from the body of the colossus standing over it. With entire pieces of infrastructure that shouldn’t be there. The superstructure’s collapse has already well started.
And by the time you get to the underhang you can even see the nothing where one of those pieces used to be. The rot’s predictably worse but somehow not nearly as bad as expected, yet you remember it’s still only the exterior.
But you can handle rot with patience and care. No matter how bad the inside is, I had visited Pebbles so many times over in previous campaigns. I knew the structure’s map, I knew where to go.
Except I didn’t, because this was not the Five Pebbles region anymore. This was The Rot, a cored out, disorienting, completely unrecognizable labyrinth of flooding and corruption at every turn. It is malignant and hungrier than ever, literally running short on space to bulge over and turn into new and hideous caverns. Deeper in, most of the neuron flies to be found have to be plucked out of the grasp of proto-long legs already digesting them first.
What I’m trying to say in too many words is the environment tried so well to hint at exactly what we were going to find after stepping through the underhang, and it still undersold it enough to keep the actual reveal a horrific one. I just I love how much intention and thought there is in so much of downpour’s designs it makes me rabid.
I love the world state of Rivulet so much.
The rain has gotten worse. The world you know is is dying. The weather is erratic, there is no time, you are constantly on a timer. The skies are grey and the water is ever-present. There is no break from the death fits of a dying god. Best this world can receive is to be put out of its misery so a new era can come.
day 13: five pebbles
i did not use the sketch that was meant for today i just. i dont have the energy nor willpower to complete it. saving it for another day
anyways, take your five pebbles rotting out, youre welcome have a nice day that is all