Congruence Hazards

Congruence Hazards litter the landscape of the 4th epoch. Either as broken down relics or mutated deviations from their original product, or as unintended side-effects of long lost practices, the inexplicable frequently occurs in this world. The list below highlights only a scant few of the possible scenarios, traps, and hazards that might be encountered.

Blood Sands

Sands that have had congruence shards and cores broken into their mass as fine grains. The sands are attracted to sapient organisms, look a dull red, and stick to hosts like magnets. They cause degenerative defects on people, ranging from major skin damage and irritation, to bleeding, respiratory problems, and internal organ failure. Two types of blood sands exist, stationary and ‘hunting’ sands. Hunting sands tend to move at a rate equivalent to a crawling human, but move rapidly within a meter or two radius. Hunting sands are more dangerous, as they have more congruence shards broken in them, and the debilitating effects are more pronounced. In very rare instances blood sands can give birth to a new Strigoi.

Blinding Lights

Anomalies that refract, bend, stop, warp, dim, and just mess with light in general. The range of the blinding lights can be as small as a toaster oven, and as big as the northern lights. More directly harmful varieties increase the intensity of the light passing through to levels where anything with eyes, sometimes even with protection, will become blinded.

Degenerative Mists

What appears from a distance as a swarm of insects, degenerative mists are the remains of bugs which have been exposed to high levels of congruence, giving these swarms a sort of unlife. They attempt to strip sapient beings of congruence physically by biting and tearing into anything that has a large enough congruence signature.

Thunderous Stars

A nebula of tiny nuclear reactions form spontaneously combusting stars, light shows, and bursts of fire and elements before fading relatively rapidly. The noise of the initial combustion is akin to a thunderclap, and the deaths of the mini-stars are silent 99.98% of the time, though sometimes they ‘supernova’ in a large explosion.

Mirrored Pool

An area in a mirrored pool spontaneously evaporates liquids that enter in range of sapient beings and take on relevant shapes to the person similar to a pool of memory, and returns to its initial form once the person leaves the range.

Haze of Memory (2 variants)

1) Hallucinogenic style areas that absorb the victims memories the longer they last in there. It appears like a small off-color fog bank, getting more vibrant and thick the denser and more dangerous it is.

2) A miasmic fog that replays moments of living being’s lives on its fog like a light show.

Sinking Fronts

Materials in the area are only solid until a living being makes contact with the exact spot that is touched, at which point it dissolves or disintegrates. Affected areas usually only penetrate up to a meter’s depth in thickness.

Whispering Winds

Invisible air currents that take sounds from an area and move them to another location, usually completely impossible to track, without losing audio clarity. A kid could hear the sounds of battle from several miles away in their peaceful little village, or could hear the sounds of a monster snoring from that same distance, before the whispering winds vanish again.

Gravity Warps

An area morphed by a gravity warp registers random items and objects as having massive amounts of gravity or negative gravity, resulting in a strange and unpredictable ping pong mess for anything that isn’t nailed down.