Hell Bloom

    Some time in the past Hell Bloom was the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect, leaving the surface a scorched and uninhabitable wasteland. It was colonized by the Noetic Alchemists, who created a specialized high temperature machine ecology to maintain their worldframe installations. These worldframes originally hosted a network of hell realms, specialized digital/astral simulations where the Alchemists conducted their grisly work of processing sapiants into products. When the Alchemists vanished, one of their orphaned creations reclaimed the hell realms and made a strange watery paradise.

Accessing Hell Bloom

    Surface temperatures can exceed 900 degrees, necessitating the use of extreme protective measures. The biosphere is composed of communities of extremophiles that have a tendency to catch fire, meaning the landscape is dotted with flaming pits. The machine ecology will defend itself with cool sprayers, track mounted robots that shoot a freezing spray out of a nozzle. This causes a thermal shock that can shatter many heat resistant alloys. After all that, once a worldframe is reached it is fairly simple to upload yourself or a payload inside.  

    Hell Bloom is both the name of the planet and the name of the realm running on the worldframes. Like most simulated worlds created by the Noetic Alchemists, a high degree of astral radiation makes it more like a dreamscape than a traditional digital realm. Hell Bloom is a verdant morass of swamps and flower choked lakes. Together, the turquoise waters, the green flora and the pink haze in the air form a hyperlight spectrum of impossible colors. The barest traces of the old worlds can be glimpsed, a solitary stone tower, a torture rack covered with strange flowers and vivid veridrgrass. In the sky there is more Hell Bloom; space here is folded into a complicated manifold so the swamp hangs above itself in an impossible vista. It is estimated that Hell Bloom covers around a billion square miles, making a truly vast world, Most of it is wilderness, apart from the cleansing cities and wilderness outposts of the Florid.

The Digital Abyss

    The lakes and rivers of Hell Bloom don’t have bottoms. Rather, if you dive deep enough you find yourself in the Digital Abyss, a particularly nasty astral current. Apart from physical access to the worldframes, this is the one way to enter or leave Hell Bloom. Maskform caravans keep the cleansing cities connected to the wider Chunky Space Maskform society.

The devil of compassion

    The mythic creator of Hell Bloom is known only by euphemism. The native Florid Maskforms call her “the seed of hope” and “the kindest knife”. Digital devils only ever call her “eldest sister” and only in whispers; something about her scares them witless. The only source for information about her are the Florid myths about her. She is said to emerge from the lake every 1028 years. She picks one city to service her; if they displease her they are never seen again. If they do a good job they are granted a boon, which often leads to an ironic doom. Not always though; the founding myth of the Florids is that one such boon paved the way from their society to be established on Hell Bloom.

Florid cleansing cities 

    The major industry of the Florids is hospitality. The cities function as massive bathhouses, offering esoteric cleaning services. The clientele are almost exclusively digital devils; powerful and demented beings that emerged from the astral dross of the Noetic Alchemist’s experiments. Due to their horrible origins, Digital Devils are inherently unstable; they experience continuous mental/spiritual corrosion that manifests on their bodies as black grime. Past a certain point this corruption becomes life threatening and the devil will begin to unravel into component entities. The purpose of the baths is to halt and reverse this process through various cleansing and relaxation techniques. They pay in vials of Devil’s Gold, a valuable metallic astral fluid.

    The cleansing cities are more than mere bathhouses. They contain almost all of the industry required to maintain the baths and to service the needs of the population. They have vast warrens of laboratories, workshops and kitchens working around the clock to meet the needs of Hell Bloom civilization. The flora and fauna of Hell Bloom resist domiscation, so much of the food has to be imported. Each city has a it’s own small army of “wood wise”, specialist hunter gathers who brave the wilds in search of reagents.

The Worker’s War

    Roughly 300 years ago, there were six cleansing cities and they were all ruled by different branches of the same noble family. Each city had a queen and together they formed the spa queen’s council. They hoarded the profits and abused the workers, who they saw as serfs. This status quo was shattered by an event called either the bequeathing, or the usurpation. Workers in three of the houses revolted, and somehow either killed their queens or convinced them to step down (The Florid historical record is mostly just partisan propaganda). Worker’s unions took ownership and a new war came to Hell Bloom. The two camps, Royalists and Unionists soon realized they had to consider a third party, the devils. After an overt offensive by Royalists ruined the vacation of a trio of digital devils, they destroyed the one of the royalist bathhouses and turned it’s queen into a sheet of living skin large enough to cover the ruins. From that point forth the war became a cold economic conflict. Over the last couple of centuries the unionist faction has waxed and the royalists have waned. That order is threatened with a new upset, as the Royalists have allied with Father Corp. In turn, the Unionists have joined the maskform federation. The worker’s war is now a new front in a much larger conflict.

Unionist cities

Glycon - A massive windmill towers above fields of yellow and indigo flowers. The windmill is for pressing the oil from their seeds, in order to fuel the cleansing hot oil baths. The workers here wear heavy protective suits while in the baths.

Loamon - A city built into the boughs of a massive tree. The baths are nested deep into the roots. They use special dirt meticulously cultivated in garden boxes in the tree tops

Thermka - A cluster of towering smoke stacks. The workers wear breathing units to protect them from the fumes of the smoke baths.

Royalist cities

Nibblos - A wide sprawling city built along a network of dams. The pools they create hold swarms of fish that eat impurities off the devils.

Anatomergal - An elegant and imposing castle of stark white towers. They offer full body surgical purges, where the devil is opened up and cleaned from the inside out.

Desalos - Its original name now taboo, this city stands as mute witness to the dangers of war on Hell Bloom. The wind whistles through broken windows and the corridors are haunted by darting shadows. Rumors of a secret stash of Devil’s Gold abound, but few return from this cursed place.

Organisms

Weeping poppy - A flower that resembles a human face. Hazing pollen continuously leaks out of the “eyes”. Mild exposure has a euphoric, narcotic effect. Heavy exposure causes distressing hallucinations of the old hell realms. It is said that each such vision contains a syllable of the true name of the Devil of Compassion.

Gaunt Gargoyle - Tall and thin, this creature sucks water up through its legs, filters it in its body then vomits it out in a constant stream. They scream watery screams, as though this causes them pain. It is said each one contains a small fragment of a noetic alchemist that lives in eternal torment.