Unknown Armies Otherspace: The City

ACCESS

Alan Madagascar wrote the equation that created the City, a formula that procedurally generated the world he saw every time he closed his eyes. He was able to transit into the place by simply constructing and solving the equation in his head. As he got older, he had trouble remembering the formula. He transcribed it into notebooks, so that all he had to do was input the final value to reach the other side.

Today, there are two ways to get into the City. Find a written copy of the formula, or derive it yourself. The former is the only hope a normal person has. The latter requires either extreme mathematical skill, lesser mathematical skill and a powerful computer, or a magick school fixated on architecture and buildings.

Either way, just drop a value in for X (the seed) and you’re off to the races. You must be inside a structure for this to work. Leave the building, and you’ll exit into the City.

Leaving the City is as easy as going back through the door you came through.

DESCRIPTION

The City is a vast and ugly metropolis, abandoned by people who never existed in the first place. There is no ground level, only vast viaducts over spillways over sloping buttresses and lower tiers of apartments and mechanisms. It is variously cloudy, rainy or sunny. There are rail lines and freeways but the majority of the sprawl is made of stairs and walkways and mezzanines. It is both walkable and utterly indifferent to humanity. There are many staircases. Some of the water features still function, while others are dry.

The signs and billboards and posters and graffiti are generated randomly from the mind of the creator. Sometimes a doorway opens into a vast library filled with procedurally rendered books. The text of these volumes is in a script unfamiliar to the reader.

You can wander forever in the City. The parts beyond your line of sight are created by the formula as you move through it.

The primary hazard is falling. The secondary is forgetting where you came in, so you can’t find your way out.

INHABITANTS

Alan imagined a world devoid of human beings except himself. He seeded the generation formula with various creatures - pigeons and other city dwelling animals that would fit the aesthetic without spoiling his solitude.

He put parameters for plants in the City. Weeds growing in the gaps between the vast planes of concrete. The occasional ivy or kudzu vine crawling up a wall. A small tree in a fenced enclosure inside a train station, reaching upward toward a broken window. Flowers and the occasional fruit or berry.

It’s possible for two people who enter the City at separate points using the equation to meet, at the point where both the seeds they used output the same result. Such encounters are rare because there aren’t many people who know how to get in, and the odds of overlapping are slim unless both use seeds deliberately chosen to produce similar results.

The formula that creates the City was specifically designed to avoid creating intelligent life, but it’s not mathematically provable that intelligent life could never occur with the right seed if enough iterations were run. Nobody has ever confirmed the existence of a City Dweller. There are stories about silhouettes on rooftops, footsteps in stairwells. Faded posters torn from walls.

WHAT YOU HEAR

Skilled mathematicians can create specific things in the City by choosing the seed. Very skilled users can actually modify the formula to produce results they like better. Inexpert tampering is risky. Most of the time it just doesn’t open the portal. The real hazard is creating a universe that compiles, but has properties hostile to life, like no oxygen.

A City’s library will very occasionally produce a record of a forgotten dream from the mind of the person who solved the formula. These books are one-in-a-million and basically impossible to find without divination magick.

If rituals are really echoes of physical laws from other realities, that means the City should be reachable from any universe where someone solves the formula. That makes the City a “borderworld” which can be used to reach other worlds. Or for things from other worlds to reach ours.

Modifications to the equation could expand the gateway between the real world and the otherspace, until all exits from all structures lead into the City, causing it to “multiply” exponentially and occupy all physical space. This provokes a response from the universe’s error correction mechanisms, with Surgeons and Authorities descending on the offending mathematician to excise them and their dangerous formula from reality.