The Hot Dark Room has no windows and no doors, nor vents or openings of any kind. You may not enter nor leave.
The air in The Hot Dark Room is still. Your breaths are heavy and labored.
The Hot Dark Room is as wide and long as it is tall. It is not large enough to stand, or even to sit upright.
The walls of The Hot Dark Room are thick, and padded so as to absorb sound. You can hear nothing beyond them.
And most importantly, the Hot Dark Room is dark. And it is hot.
There exists a peculiar custom among golems. When they are young, only a hundred or so years old, a golem will find a fist-sized stone and carve into it a simple shape. They will then travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to find a place to leave it. This location is often isolated, far from the influence of any civilization, in the heartwood of the forest or deep within the plains. They will not bury it, or attempt to conceal it in any way.
The weatherbeaten shells of skyscrapers hunch angular and ruinous, a corporate elephant graveyard skyline. A haphazard menagerie of broken glass and rotting plasteel, reeking of gilt and hubris. Still shining beneath the grime.
It is always drizzling. Drops of dark rainbow-film float down with dreamlike vertigo, oil and light mixing with the glowstick blood of neon ivy. Phosphorescence runs down the acid-burned brickwork and drips off the twisted mandelbrot iron of feral fire escapes. Countless pools of dirty water cling to the architecture, crawling across ceilings and walls, transforming the alleyways into mirror-halls and kaleidoscopes. A wonka-tunnel of claustrophobia. Some illusions are portals leading to the decomposed realms of dead gods, keepers of noxious air and acidic rain, feeding on whatever falls through.
The Coat of Many Pockets is a magical coat with an infinite number of sides, and thus an infinite number of pockets. When you take the coat off and turn it inside out, it transforms into a new coat, entirely different in appearance, and with a new set of empty pockets. The coat effectively functions as a bag of holding, for while it has an infinite number of pockets, and an infinite amount of storage, you will only ever feel the weight of the objects in the pockets of the coat you are currently wearing. However, the process of turning the coat inside out takes at least a few seconds, so this can be inconvenient if you decide to store items several dozen coats deep and need to retrieve them in a situation where time is of the essence.
Conspiracy Engines are pseudo-abandoned superstructures found floating out in Metaspace, usually created by someone rich and powerful in a fit of extreme egotism. They are city-sized orbital computers tasked with unraveling the vast, sinister plot that their creator is sure exists, analyzing billions of variables over thousands of years in an attempt to figure out who really pulls the strings. Thanks to the inherent biases of their creators, their conclusions are almost universally inaccurate. The result is always apophenia on a cosmic scale, enabled by processing power. Seeing patterns where there are none, self-induced schizophrenia brought on by staring at data-chaos until the static seems to resolve into leering faces. Their creators usually either die or go mad, and the structures are left derelict to drift through the existential void. Sometimes they have valuable information. Other times they have valuable treasure. They are generally quite dangerous to explore, outfitted with defenses to match the paranoia of their creators. People have built giant supercomputers in the middle of space for other reasons, but while generally more interesting, those are much rarer, and so the name sticks. Here are some famous examples:
Devils are predators first and foremost. Hells naturally have a very strong anticohesive spin, so the extremely unlikely is commonplace there, and it pays to be aware of your surroundings. Their sensory arsenal is unmatched, their coordination extraordinary, their reflexes supreme. A Devil is able to see far beyond what we would call the “visible” spectrum, into chromatic frontiers that would put pistol shrimp to shame. Their visual art is strange and abstract, requiring special glasses for non-devils to view. Their ears allow them to hear a pin dropped in a busy marketplace, and locate exactly where it lies. Their music is fast-paced and cacophonous, more resembling violent sonic tapestries than actual songs. Their sense of smell is able to detect and isolate ingredients with stupendous accuracy. A favorite party-trick of theirs is to be able to recite the exact composition of a dish by smell alone. Another favorite is to expose who at the party has been having an affair. This is less of a faux pas than it sounds, as at a party of Devils, it is usually almost everyone. Devils have a voracious appetite for scandal.
