Friday, December 2, 2011

What's On the Other Side of That Portal? (Random Table/Any system)

What's On the Other Side of That Portal?
  1. The hot, swirling white sands surround you with un-repressed malice, the harsh tang of borax and the reflected glare of a too-close diamond-bright sun...
  2. Mottled orange and tan buttes rise up from the fetid yellowish mists like half-chewed wads of gum spat out by some indolent colossus...
  3. Oily, black waves lap sullenly across the deep cobalt-blue shingle beneath the conflicted exertions of seven fragmentary moons...
  4. All the grasses of the world are jointed and interconnected; it's all one large, planet-spanning macro-organism, really...
  5. The dark red trees loom menacingly over the few clearings scattered seemingly at random within the continental forests of the south polar continent...
  6. The only land available is a few scattered islands along the edges of a vast, half-upturned reef that was thrust up, out of the sea by massive convulsions set off when the third moon exploded...
  7. All nine great seas and both oceans are completely overgrown by a combination of sea weed, bacteria and what appears to be a form of aquatic bamboo...
  8. A vast mega-volcano still rumbles and spews forth cascades of hot ash, poisonous gasses, and raw magma, but aside from that the place is rather peaceful...
  9. Bizarre octangular edifices crumble and collapse upon themselves in the midst of the foul-smelling but flowery overgrowth in-between the peaks of a mountain range that runs nearly from pole to pole of this rotting, forgotten world...
  10. The blue soil is a type of clay rich in iron and iron-scavenging microorganisms, like the ones greedily devouring the iron in your blood, assuming you touched it bare-handed...
  11. All the bulging, bulbous plants of the bloated-looking jungles have a peculiar waxy kind of texture to them--perhaps it has something to do with the pervasive acidic mists?
  12. Hot, dark and toxic--this world is literally crawling with bizarre psychoactively-envenomed pseudo-fungal vermin--the whole damned place is one big fungal ecology run amok...
  13. Twenty-seven kinds of dust have been cataloged for the vast interior deserts of the only continent; not one of them had the least bit of anything beneficial to offer aside from the sorts of grisly side-effects most people wouldn't wish upon their worst enemies--most people.
  14. The delicately phosphorescent pale green seas of this gentle-seeming world are really due to the highly radioactive clusters of crystals that line the sea bottoms--it's pretty, but a slow death all the same...
  15. A barren and convoluted mass of rock, completely sterilized of all life and locked in a cycle that wavers between perpetual drizzle and perpetual frost--at least you can safely drink the water...
  16. Hot, humid and completely covered by floating masses of aerial vegetation held aloft by self-renewing blisters and sacs of lighter-than-air gasses extracted from the oceans by dangling tendrils the diameter of redwoods...
  17. The entire world is swaddled in twisted and fractured sheets of green-black glass that are all that remains of those lost to a terrible war...
  18. Six continents huddle around the northern polar sea as if to somehow avoid the terrors that swarm beneath the south polar ocean...
  19. A frozen, bitter-blue world where the air is barely able to remain a gas and the sun is but a vague and disreputable glimmer behind the ever-snowing clouds...
  20. No islands or continents trouble the violet-tinged waters of this world, only the writhing atolls of competing coral reefs and their attendant masses of polyps and symbiotic species that have adapted to a specific reef-ecology...
  21. The entire world is one massive savanna that eventually rears and curls and thrusts itself upwards into hills, then mountains and finally into a pair of great peaks at each of the poles...
  22. An egg-shaped ellipsoid, the world not only protrudes out of its atmosphere, it may not be fully in any one universe either...
  23. A deeply scarred and nearly destroyed world scoured and gouged by anti-matter bombardments and worse--but somewhere deep beneath the bombed and bored-out layers of overlapping shell-like formations, in the deep and poisonous depths, there remain things worth salvaging that otherwise sane individuals continue to seek after, despite the horrors, the dangers, the things that seek after them...
  24. Wave after wave of tiny flukes encrust every shoreline and beach, forming writhing, dying masses of nutrient-dense materials that attract land-based species to their intoxicated doom...
  25. The valleys of the high ranges are covered by ton upon ton of glistening mica fragments that have accumulated in these places over eons...
  26. The plant life of this world all has thorns, even the thorns have spikes, barbs and burrs that make overland travel a real chore, challenge and difficult undertaking...
  27. Every Summer Solstice the oceans, skies and landscapes of this world run red with the seasonal release of massive clouds of pollen gouted forth by gargantuan under-sea plants...
  28. The only areas not completely sheeted-over in heavy gray ice are the fumarole-caverns located at the South Pole...
  29. The world is one vast swampy morass with 42,000 jumbled monoliths scattered across the equatorial region...
  30. What was once a thriving metal-based ecology has recently collapsed into mounds of flaking, oxidized particles...
  31. The ground squirms with so many layers of vermin feeding upon one another that there is no solid ground for nearly half a mile deep in most places...
  32. The trees in this place whisper amongst themselves even as they lust after the juices they can wring out of dead bodies...
  33. Hot, red vine-jungles cover the sheer walls of deep abyssal clefts which are the only pockets of atmosphere, and life, on this world...
  34. The great oceans are separated only by a tiny strip of land where a zig-zagging line of massive crystals hovering above intricately carved daises seem to hold back the crashing waves, allowing this place to linger on for just a little bit longer...
  35. Dense rainforests stretch from one massive smoldering caldera to another...
  36. A frozen waste dominated by colossal ruins patterned after a particular fractal sequence...
  37. Airless and dead, with but a token force of undead patrolling the deep galleries of what once was a vibrant, if macabre, culture now terminally in decline...
  38. All the domes are broken, shattered by incredible violence, and the once pent-up biological specimens of a hundred different alien ecologies are now locked in a life or death struggle all across the face of the world...
  39. Someone wiped away the last vestiges of whomever once lived here; only a few curiously etched stones or shards of eldritch metal remain to show that this was not always a wilderness...
  40. Seven rivers criss-cross the three continents of this warm, verdant world given over almost entirely to herds of highly socially-evolved cattle...
  41. Only the tropical island at the top of the world has escaped the crushing ice of the raging glaciers just outside the perpetual sunlight of the Great Polar Mirror...
  42. Vast tunnel and cavern networks have been carved-out by the relentless action of underground rivers harnessed by those who have lived here since before the sun went dim...
  43. The oceans and lakes, streams and all other aquifers of this world are infused with a bioluminescent orangish gelatin-like substance that might in fact be alive...
  44. The dark gray grit of the bowl-like crater-depressions scours the roughly circular regions clear down to the bedrock as they whirl and twirl like dust-devils without the slightest wind...
  45. The rains carry with them tiny organisms that embed themselves into the flesh of anyone they come into contact with, eventually subverting their nervous systems and becoming them...
  46. The hills are alive with the crawling, gibbering hordes of empathic insect swarms silently crying out in their collective anguish over the cruelties of nature and fate...
  47. Who would build a massive, but featureless, trapezoidal tomb upon a world of throbbing violet forests and limoncello-mists?
  48. The seas teem with venomous insects and the fish wallow around in the mud on their great blobby lobe-fins while they hunt cray-ants with their long wicked spurs...
  49. Reed-choked marshes and lush lagoons occupy the heavily eroded remnants of ancient craters pock-marking the entire western hemisphere of this world...
  50. Placid green sand dunes gently undulate off into the distance so that you barely notice that they are actually undulating...
  51. Clusters of warty lava-domes bulge over the rims of extinct volcanoes like some colossal petrified froth...
  52. Sharp, narrow spires of wind-polished stone rise smoothly into the ultra-thin air with a majestic malevolence that sends shivers down your spine no matter how many times you've dreamed about them before...
  53. The entire world is one massive, cultivated garden managed by an unseen agency with a peculiar sense of humor...
  54. The peaks of the highest mountains have been extended with some smoky, translucent material to form disturbing shapes resembling gigantic kidneys, bulbs of garlic or sponges...
  55. The cold moors and icy plateaus of this world are the hunting grounds of vicious lichens and carnivorous mosses...
  56. What do you see?
To Be Continued...

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