WFRP: Where the fog is the thickest, the Ruinous powers hide

My shameless mining of the works of Charles Dickens continues. This time, the writing comes from Bleak House.

/Magnus

Altdorf. The Chill Month lately over, and our Lord Chancellor sitting in his gilded courts of law. Implacable Ulriczeit weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Jabberwock, forty feet long or so, waddling like a humongous lizard up Imperial Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Reikland marshes, fog on the Hagercrybs heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Drecksack pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a dwarfish balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in the Courts of Justice, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

Adolphus Altdorfer
Angestag, Kaldezeit 2, 2523 IC

WFRP: To dream of a garden of green, a sky so blue

And now for the next reworking of the writings of Charles Dickens. I turn again to a short paragraph from Nicholas Nickleby.

/Magnus

I was working late at the coaching house. I closed an account-book which lay on my desk, and, throwing myself back in my chair, gazed with an air of abstraction through the dirty window.

Some Altdorf houses have a melancholy little plot of ground behind them, usually fenced in by four high whitewashed walls, and frowned upon by stacks of chimneys: in which there withers on, from year to year, a crippled tree, that makes a show of putting forth a few leaves late in autumn when other trees shed theirs, and, drooping in the effort, lingers on, all crackled and smoke-dried, till the following season, when it repeats the same process, and perhaps, if the weather be particularly genial, even tempts some rheumatic sparrow to chirrup in its branches.

People sometimes call these dark yards 'gardens'; it is not supposed that they were ever planted, but rather that they are pieces of unreclaimed land, with the withered vegetation of the original brick-field. No man thinks of walking in this desolate place, or of turning it to any account. A few hampers, half-a-dozen broken bottles, and such-like rubbish, may be thrown there, when the tenant first moves in, but nothing more; and there they remain until he goes away again: the damp straw taking just as long to moulder as it thinks proper: and mingling with the scanty box, and stunted everbrowns, and broken flower-pots, that are scattered mournfully about — a prey to 'blacks' and dirt.

Adolphus Altdorfer
Backertag, Brauzeit 14, 2523 IC

WFRP: The friendless tides, the empty faces

This installment of my reworkings of the writings of Charles Dickens turns to a short paragraph from Nicholas Nickleby. It neatly illustrates the bleak aspect of Altdorf that is present in many texts covering the city.

/Magnus

There are people enough in the world, Heaven knows! and even in Altdorf, but few complaints prevail, of the population being scanty. It is extraordinary how long a man may look among the crowd without discovering the face of a friend, but it is no less true. Everyday I look, and look, till my eyes become sore as my heart, but no friend appears; and when, growing tired of the search, I turn my eyes homeward, I see very little there to relieve my weary vision. A painter who has gazed too long upon some glaring colour, refreshes his dazzled sight by looking upon a darker and more sombre tint; but everything that meet my gaze wear so black and gloomy a hue, that I will be beyond description refreshed by the very reverse of the contrast. Some colour, some freshness, some vitality to lend succor to my troubled mind.

Adolphus Altdorfer
Backertag, Erntezeit 12, 2523 IC

WFRP: Walking, looking, listening

Note that this text is an adaption of a section of the Charles Dickens story The Old Curiosity Shop. I retreived the text from the Project Gutenberg site, and made some minor alterations to fit it within a WFRP framework. I make no claim as to possess a literary talent such as Dickens did, and I am merely using his prose to experiment with finding ways to describe the city of Altdorf and enrich my game. So without further ado, here's the experiment.

/Magnus

Night is generally my time for walking. In the summer I often leave my room at the University as the sun settles, and roam about streets, the docks and the plazas until hunger or thirst gets the best of me. I walk, I look, I listen, to learn how the pulse of our great capital beats.

I have fallen insensibly into this habit, because it affords me the greatest opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets. The glare and hurry of broad noon are not adapted to philosophical pursuits like mine; a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the daylight; and, if I must add the truth, night is kinder in this respect than day, which too often destroys an air-built castle at the moment of its completion, without the least ceremony or remorse.

That constant pacing to and fro, that never-ending restlessness, that incessant tread of feet wearing the rough stones smooth and glossy— is it not a wonder how the dwellers in narrow ways can bear to hear it! Think of a sick man resting in a white-washed room with an open window at the Königplatz, listening to the footsteps of the passers-by, and in the midst of pain and weariness obliged, despite himself (as though it were a task he must perform) to detect the child's step from the man's, the slipshod beggar from the booted exquisite, the lounging from the busy, the dull heel of the sauntering outcast from the quick tread of an expectant pleasure-seeker— think of the hum and noise always being present to his sense, and of the stream of life that will not stop, pouring on, on, on, through all his restless dreams, as if he were condemned to lie, dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and had no hope of rest for centuries to come.

Then, the crowds for ever passing and repassing on the bridges (on those which are free of toil at last), where many stop on fine evenings looking listlessly down upon the water with some vague idea that by and by it runs between green banks which grow wider and wider until at last it turns into swamps, and then joins the broad vast sea — where some halt to rest from heavy loads and think as they look over the parapet that to smoke and lounge away one's life, and lie sleeping in the sun upon a hot tarpaulin, in a dull, slow, sluggish barge, must be happiness unalloyed — and where some, and a very different class, pause with heavier loads than they, remembering to have heard or read in old time that drowning was not a hard death, but of all means of suicide the easiest and best.

The Reikmarkt at sunrise too, in the spring or summer, when the fragrance of sweet flowers is in the air, over-powering even the unwholesome streams of last night's debauchery, and driving the dusky thrust, whose cage has hung outside a garret window all night long, half mad with joy! Poor bird! the only neighbouring thing at all akin to the other little captives, some of whom, shrinking from the hot hands of drunken purchasers, lie drooping on the path already, while others, soddened by close contact, await the time when they shall be watered and freshened up to please more sober company, and make old clerks who pass them on their road to business, wonder what has filled their breasts with visions of the country.

Adolphus Altdorfer
Wellentag, Nachgeheim 4, 2523 IC