Field Guides #3 - Disco Orpheus

28 January 2024

Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• Anatomy of a Dance Hall
  • How do you get in?
  • The Culture
  • The Beat
• Rooms in the Disco
  • The Dance Floor
  • Lamplighter's Catwalk
  • Purgatory Low Ten
  • Other Underground Hot Spots
• Faces in the Disco
  • The Bouncer
  • Mother LaBelle
  • "Slipstream" Footwork
  • Other Dancers
• Problems in the Disco
  • Moshbots
  • Shades
  • Culture Vultures
  • Encounter Table
• Hooks
• Touchstones and Inspirations

Intro

When you want to be exhausted, you hit the club. When you want to be obliterated, you find Disco Orpheus.

Bastion's hottest club embraces the city coffin-like from below. Part underground, part Underground, Disco Orpheus quakes the earth and cleanses the soul. You'll feel the beat before you ever see its walls: heart-throb, all bass, torching your worries like a hot coal to the lips. Feel that pain slough off, drain down, stain the floor, the walls. Who would ever want to leave?

Anatomy of a Dance Hall

The Orpheus wasn't built so much as grown grown. Like all great ideas it started at the dance floor before extending amoeba-like through bordering tunnels. The culture spread hot underground, co-opting old machinery, absorbing the past into itself, symbiotic with metal below and city above. Attendees are free to wander and add new rooms at will. The whole place is a freakazoid's fever quilt - a patchwork monument to endless expression woven into the fabric of time and space. Eagle eyed viewers know this: the shadows on the wall don't match up with the crowd.

How do you get in?

Where is harder than how, here. The Underground connects everything, so with mostly infinite entries you can always squeeze through the cracks with persistence. Most prominent entrances, though, appear in the dead places. Boroughs left to rot by time and greed, labeled behind sneers as lost causes, urban wastelands, death unchecked: these are where doors poke through the ashes. No matter how much life you stamp out it'll always grow back. The Orpheus reaches underfoot like ancient mycelium; the bouncer stands refracted at every door. And if you can't see the sign through the rubble, you can always follow the beat.

The Culture

Colors stay bright and spirits stay high. Start with Club Kids and go bigger from there. Identities bleed away beneath the costumes - your silhouette matters as much as what it hides. Tolerance for the bland differs in the sprawling tunnels, ranging from disdain to illegality the deeper you go. Artists find inspiration in the corpse of Bastion's history, giving decaying tech a new purpose and clothing themselves in the rust of yesterday. Decrepit AI remnants find odd joy in this ritual, let themselves be added to outfits and art, and leave their nests behind to join the endless dance. Ask anyone who they're wearing and they'll tell you the same thing: what Mother gave me.

The Beat

Special: if the Beat is ever silenced in an area, shades swarm in and go ballistic.

Heart's sweet blood drips from speakers, old pipework, cracks in the walls, flooding the static between spaces and bouying the crowd with holy rhythm. Is this what it means to be New Wave? How it sounds depends on who's spinning. Some nights it's trance, others it's bass so hard it could beat you in a fist fight. Always, music pumps through the Orpheus' veins and holds a candle to the dark. Silent tunnels get outfitted with sound tech or amputated like leprous limbs. This much is known: if the Beat is lost, so are we.

Where's the music coming from?

Rooms in the Disco

Squeeze through the crowd. Let the lights wash you clean.

The Dance Floor

Special: at the end of each song, the weakest dancer on the floor fades out and becomes a shade.

Orpheus' lynchpin and source of the Beat. Everything revolves around this. Bright lights, vivid colors - poison for your retinas, but great for the soul. Unending pounding feet have eroded away the original LED floor, leaving only a pit of washed out color centered around the DJ. Join the party, avoid the goons, and never, never stop dancing. Nobody wants to fade away.

Who's spinning tonight?

The music wasn't meant to last this long. Proximity to the Beat has warped the turntables, turning each night's host into a catalyst for metamorphosis. These effects come into play on the Dance Floor and anywhere else the music is especially prominent.

Lamplighter's Catwalk

Special: crossing the catwalk without incorporating the Judge's Category into your clothing gets you attacked by a canopy of wires (Taser Tips 1d8 Dex) and thrown in the river.

In decades past a machine was built (created? born?) under the earth with one goal: to inspect textiles for scant traces of divinity. Slowly its influence spread as people paraded themselves beneath for appraisal or laughs or maybe something deeper. Over time these visitors built procedures, decorated, left offerings to this Judge shaped as scattered poetry and vibrant dance. Is this religion or a prank? Does it matter? Either way the catwalk spills like ritual blood across a roaring river, flanked on either side by ancient miner's lanterns. The Judge as a half-born moth dangles from above, wires spilling from its blinking frame and bulging from cavern walls. Its stadium-sized TV face only displays two icons but each contains multitudes: a thumbs up, or a thumbs down.

At sunset the most enlightened catwalk acolytes open their minds and intuit the Judge's fashion desires, distilling terabytes of data into a single phrase: the Category. They'll post it publicly for the hoi polloi but won't help you throw together an outfit - passing judgment is all on you. Don't like it? Hope you can swim; the river flows straight down to Purgatory Low Ten. Or you could always find a way around.

What's tonight's Category?

Purgatory Low Ten

Special: anything left in the Orpheus' water long enough slips through the cracks and falls here.

Named after the paranoiac apocalypse bunker at its lowest point, Purgatory Low Ten is the waterlogged tunnel network where disco goes to die. She's built like a rambling ant hill and flooded to high hell. The Judge's river empties into here along with what feels like half the world's oceans. Dancers in the world above avoid this place like it's the next life, talking around it in muffled curses. It's the Doldrums, baby, the Bends, the scavenger in the Orpheus' ecosystem, taking in the dead matter that falls down the drain and keeping it enshrined or, in a sense, alive.

Is it any surprise that the dancers have a tradition of water burial? Cause of death doesn't matter, the PLT accepts all - just chuck 'em in a pool and send them to the next one. The culture vultures nesting here will break them apart, keep the parts that matter, and let the rest flow down to the bunker. Everything that passes in the Orpheus ends up here: people, places, ideas, all getting stuck on rare spits of dry land or exposed piping. Layers and layers of culture from the Before Times or even last week lay preserved in the tunnels, along with all the treasures therein. Nothing is truly gone until it passes through the bunker's doors. In this way the old world will never die.

What's that waterlogged relic?

Other Underground Hot Spots

Faces in the Disco

Notable dancers in a sea of masks.

The Bouncer

Armor 1 | Holographic Pistol 1d8, damages all three saves equally.

Special: if killed, splits into two identical Bouncers.

The only way to patrol theoretically infinite entrances is to become theoretically infinite. So it is that the Bouncer (how brave!) obliterated his identity in grave ceremony to shatter himself across time and space. Now he waits behind each of the Orpheus' doors, everywhere, with only a little stool and ratty zines for company. "He" waits is maybe not the right word because it's more like a seed of him waits, something sent scattershot across the universe and taken root just to make sure you're old enough to drink. He (they?) is (are?) friendly enough but growing from the atomic corpse of a splintered man naturally leaves some holes in the psyche; these get filled in by whatever environ surrounds a particular entrance. As he has spread across the world so to has the world spread into him, and if you want that stamp on the back of your hand you'll have to figure out what he wants in return.

What does this version of the Bouncer want?

Mother LaBelle

CHA 15 | Heart-stopping Shout 1d8 CHA blast

Orpheus' founder. Disco royalty, local legend, host, model, fashionista, HBIC. Mother LaBelle at the end of her long life now wanders the club's twisting halls with a bigass megaphone and a trail of gaudy sycophants. To some she might be a queen or even a god but in her own mind she is a clockmaker, someone who long ago set a complex machine in motion and fashioned herself into a gear. Such is the breadth of her experience that the sights and sounds of the Orpheus' clientele no longer catches her attention - she only cares about that new shit, the bleeding edge. She won't even talk to you if you haven't passed judgement, but the juice is worth the squeeze: her knowledge of dance extends past the physical and out beyond the veil.

It's tempting to say she's dressed as feverishly as the rest of the club but in my heart she just looks like Crystal Waters in the 100% Pure Love video.

They say: with a horrific engine in Purgatory's bunker she created the shades to ensure the party never, ever stops.

What dance can Mother teach you?

"Slipstream" Footwork

HP 13 | STR 8 | DEX 15 | Pressure Point Pinch 1d10

Well, here he is: the last man on your nightmare blunt rotation. "Slipstream" Footwork is the guy you call when you need to get anywhere fast and don't mind paying for it. He's got a face like a dying car salesman and makes weird comments about how much food you eat. Everybody hates Slip and he relishes this because he has what they don't: the implanted thyroid of a rabid mutant. This thing spews otherworldly hormones through his body at all times, allowing him to navigate the Underground with perfect clarity and minimal tumors. The Orpheus' tunnels are inconsistent on a good day and prone to collapse, blockage, or general malaise, so he always finds work. His shortcut services start at $100 and go up if he's having a bad day. He won't help a lick if you run into trouble and he'll leave you behind if you even think about insulting him. Alas, such is the price of public transit.

Where does Slipstream's shortcut lead you through?

Other Dancers

Problems in the Disco

There's always a party pooper.

Moshbots

HP 6 | Armor 1 | STR 13 | DEX 13 | Screaming Jostle 1d8 STR

Critical Damage: you go flying into someone else dealing an additional 1d8 to both parties.

• dying AI cores given chance at new life in humanoid metal bodies.
• each has the same unexplained reaction to the Beat: violent brutal dance.
• instantly shut down when exposed to calming music.

Omens: stopping feet, synthetic hollers, annoyed crowd

Shades

Static Hum 1d6 CHA | Critical Damage: target fades out into another shade.

• anyone who can't hang with the crowd fades out to let the new blood in.
• look like shadows projected on the wall. distracted and harmless as long as the Beat is playing.
• unable to be directly harmed; must be scrubbed off the wall like graffiti.

Omens: shadows don't match the crowd, mosquito-like buzz, vibrating in your molars

Culture Vultures

Scavenged audio equipment 1d6 STR | Critical Damage: target deafened as equipment sparks to life briefly

• unlucky folks who fell down to Purgatory, stay alive by pillaging equipment from cultures past.
• can't return to the disco proper for fear of getting shaded.
• guerilla fighters driven to survive, but will defend their relics to the death.

Omens: outdated clothing like shed skin on ground, lonely singing, tapping music on the walls

Encounter Table

Hooks

Touchstones and Inspirations

Club kids, ballroom culture, house music, and RuPaul's Drag Race

Anthology of the Killer by thecatamites ("is this what it means to be new waves?" quoted in the Beat)

DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ is a real artist, I just love their name.

All pics aside from the culture generated by Microsoft's AI tool through bing.