The Wastelands

Surrounding Aerdeskol, with what used to be water is now the great sea of sand. Shrouded in mystery, ever shifting, it betrays any hopes to accurately study its obscurities. It is only confirmed that the silicon oceans are not to be trifled with, ever spreading with danger. If not treated with the respect it deserves the only result will end up in even the most competent amongst us being swallowed whole.

Water in the Silicon Sea

Despite the surface being dry and parched, water is found deep within the writhing body of sand. Rivers and Lakes still drain into this ocean, cutting subterranean highways under the sand. These pathways rapidly erode the crumbling medium, washing away deeper into the Silicon Sea. For a brief time, a basin may form into an Oasis, joining up with adjacent basins these can form huge lakes, highly volatile in nature, that may burst at any time to explode back into their subterranean causeways.

Superheated Rivers

Precipitation occurs often naturally at these Oasis points, but when the rivers or lakes are found underground, mere feet or closer from the surface they become superheated. When this crosses or travels along a Leyline, the effect is amplified, fusing the silicon together into relatively solid tunnels that hold for some time. Should this tunnel dry up, their structure has been known to hold for years, failing only from flood erosion or crashing in on itself from the weight of the sea above it.

Nomads desperate to hide from the swarm or the furious storms that rage across the face of Aerdeskol sometimes manage to find these caves for shelter, sometimes they find something much more permanent. Should these superheated rivers penetrate through a source of Husk Tar, something more substantial forms.

Subterranean Megastructures

When the superheated ley enriched fluid that pours through the Silicon Sea is contaminated with pure Husk Tar, it soaks into the surrounding cavity, crawling up the walls and across the cavity roof. As the water drains away, the coating hardens, and then grows, cultivating the silicon in the sand around it and digging in roots, creating great caverns that become relatively well anchored in the wastes. These caverns are hard and durable, and even after flooding only minor damage and wear occurs.

The perfect place for a safe house, or a monster's lair.

Dangers of the Waste

Anomalies

Wierd things happen in certain places in the wastes, stories thought to be fiction reveal as fact, what is known to be true becomes a figment of your memory as chaos takes hold, throwing all known laws of reality into a maelstrom of unpredictability.

Crystal Fused Burrowers.

Rare but deadly Skethic, nigh invulnerable, coated in a thick shell of fused silicon soaked in Husk Tar. Often these are found dead by travellers, unable to effectively feed in the wastes, but should one find you walking in front of its trap door, often death is instant as it rapidly consumes your body, gouging itself on your fluids.

Wastetouched Taurid

It is not only the Barbarian or Skethic swarm that becomes affected by the Husk Tar's power. Hungry and desperate a runt Taurid may flee into the wastes, avoiding its predators. Finding sustenance where there is nothing else but sand, it feeds on the Tar and Etherflora, growing and mutating until it's original form is unrecognisable. As it strays after sometime onto the shores of the living, it has become a great menace, a ravaging hungerer the size of a Huskworm itself. Where a Huskworm has no fear or rage, a Taurid is insane, and once in an area, it may not leave for some time, turning homes and factories into its nest.

Skethic Swarms

Though incursions into the living shores are terrible events, and many lives are lost, the activity in the wastelands is exponential compared. Without mountain ranges in every direction to impede their hunting of the ley lines, the Husks may feed and lay their tar without interruption. The hives of Skethic that use the Husks as hives and breeding grounds, sources of moisture and power for them and their young, they at times venture forth from their hives to feed. Thumpers are Skethic's most numerous scouts, not to be betrayed by their silhouettes in the sky, Thumpers burrow underground and through the sand. When a source of food is found and sampled, the Thumpers leave only to return with the greater Skethic swarm to cleave all fluid and sustenance from their meat bag prey.

Kill the messenger or a million more will come.

Husk Tar

Husk Tar is a thick and pitch like substance, a lacquer that coats and seeps into all that touch it. From this thick black mess, foul crystal-like plants grow in the unbearable heat, known as Etherflora. Though these plants may be refined into fuels and catalysts, in their natural form they infect the environment with a toxic ecosystem of spores and carnivorous plants. Though eventually, the sun takes all moisture from these forests, rendering them skeletons only to be covered and taken once more by the sands, whilst they stand and the tar still fresh they create an imposing and life threatening hazard for all but the prepared. Either bring the equipment required to venture through the Etherflora safely, or be ready to spend a long time looking for a break in the tainted land. Perhaps you will get lucky as a sand storm, river or or some other phenonmina surges forth drowning the etherflora and it's tar into the maw of the Silicon Sea.