Tell me about the Night Land. What makes it such a difficult environment for survival?

The instant you bring it up, at least two dozen anons will suddenly talk about how its the most depressing and hopeless setting ever with the most powerful bad guys ever and you can't win ever and everything is super doomed and shit.

But then you posted a picture of a nigga who fights that shit with a pizza cutter so get ready for a slew of response posts talking about that pizza cutter is apparently God's foreskin or something.

It's just an aggressively horrible place full of supernatural and conventional dangers, with no fucking food or easily accessible water unless you have Redoubt food pills and powdered water (lol)

Really the recurring theme of the story is that even the protagonist, who is fucking Beowulf with a chainaxe, is not a match for any of the major monstrosities in the Night Land... Like, at all. It isn't even a question.

This is a world in which immediate suicide is the correct response to 100% of the major threats.

It is the primordial soup that life came from which got corrupted over time, no continuously spewing out malformed abominations and deranged abortive version of creatures that existed in the past and the present.

That's the diskos, the chosen weapon of the men of the Last Redoubt, you illiterate! Yes, it is a pizza cutter.

It's the kind of place where the only reason a house lets you by is so that it can slowly kill your beloved in your arms while an army of a hundred thousand watches helpless from the last 100 square miles of safety left.

The giants and cavemen and spiders aren't what's scary. What's scary is that the first group of people that go to save the lesser redoubt forget their mission and go to die in the house of silence, the place everyone in the book knows is the root of evil.

Can someone tell me which book this place is from?

The Night Land.

The Night Land. It's going to be a really hard read. The description of the monsters, evil forces and bleak landscape of the Night Land is fantastic, but apart from that, it's written terribly and half the novel focuses on the romance between the protagonist and some girl, which derails it and goes on for way too long.

The guy had an amazing imagination, but damn, he could not write for shit.

>half the novel focuses on the romance between the protagonist and some girl
And I hear that entire subplot is shit because the author apparently didn't know how to white or even talk to women.

>This is a world in which immediate suicide is the correct response to 100% of the major threats.
Hell, some creatures are even strong enough that trying to bite into a Capsule Of Release in time is near impossible in their presence, so even that might not save you in the long run.

The don't have one, they are just stone cold killers.

Does anyone have a PDF of this book in French?

What a specific request

Maybe theres a french version here
en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Night_Land

>shadow shadow bo badow
Hah.

Just started reading this book.

Like 9/10 sentences begin with "And" it's fucking killing me

>powdered water
Just add water to make it into water?

...

>the world is so shitty all people possess ability to commit mental sudoky in order to avoid fate worse than death awaiting outside the Last Redoubt
Gee I dunno. You tell me.

Can you link some of the expanded stories set in the universe? This really activates my almonds.

Kill all the people hiding out in the Last Redoubt.

Here's a link to the series of stories with the giant demonic ice castle (amongst others);

nightland.website/index.php/stories/night-land-stories/nightmares-of-the-fall/47-out-part-1

Powder that, as soon as it is exposed to air, somehow pulls moisture out of it and creates water.

This was written in like 1910, to be fair it was an incredible piece of sci-fi for its time. Hodgson later got hit in the chest by a fucking artillery shell in WWI.

How do you even handle that? Open the bottle and it just turns to water all of it.
Or does it come in single serving packs

Is the protagonist of this really armed with a giant pizza cutter?

CAAAAAARLOS I'LL FUCKING STRANGLE YOU

Yes, giant pizza cutter is the apex of billions of years of military technology, it's the best weapon created by Man.

In Space Quest there was a can of dehydrated water. The concept was that it was a cylinder full of hydrogen with a chamber on the end that you would put your mouth on then press a button. The chamber would mix the hydrogen with the oxygen in the air to create a mouth full of water you could drink.

I doubt that is how the powdered water is supposed to work but maybe it is something similar to that.

The problem with all these is that such chemical reactions heat up very strongly or are explosive.

>This was written in like 1910, to be fair it was an incredible piece of sci-fi for its time. Hodgson later got hit in the chest by a fucking artillery shell in WWI.

One of the greatest losses to fiction ever. Dude had such an incredible imagination.

Just finished reading pic related, really amazing book, would definitely recommend

The story to read is "Awake in the Night Land" by John C. Wright. All the amazing Night Land setting and atmosphere without the painful prose style.

What’s that? You want to be spoonfed? OK here it is:

blog.wsd.net/brfendrick/files/2012/05/AwakeintheNight.pdf

Holy shit, that was beautiful. Thank you for showing this to me user, do you have anything else like it?

Not him but;
There are several other stories that comprise the rest of Awake In The Night Land, each one somehow more grim than the last, but I have never been able to find PDF's for any of them whatsoever.

Yeah I love that story. I don’t know if there’s more PDFs online, but John C. Wright wrote a bunch more Night Land stories, you can get them on Amazon.

An party of adventures that could survive on a demon world or in the lower planes will do fine outside the last redoubt.

>Any party

That thing looks hella weak. I think one photo torpedo would probably do it in.

behold the REAL horror user

I am 99% convinced the bloodborne pizza cutter is a night lands reference nobody got because nobody but 12 anons have actually read the damn thing.

That's! That's not how any of this Fucking works!

Pretty much this. If you can survive in the Negative Material Plane you'll be fine no problem.

A party like that could basically start clearing the Night Land like it was a mid level dungeon.

LOL a Fucking house are you Fucking SHITTING ME!?

LOL just don't even go inside it! LOL a High level Wizard casting Wish against that thing would BTFO it!

>author apparently didn't know how to white

They all die as Pneumavores raveno7sly descend upon them and their "Dragon" progenitors as well.
All whilst The Wailing Thing and The Country From Whence Comes The Great Laughter have a fucking fit at the hilarity of it all.

>Hodgson later got hit in the chest by a fucking artillery shell in WWI.
What you mean a dud smacked right into his chest or did someone survive to note that it specifically detonated on his bare man titties?

...

This all seems kinda stupid.

Welcome to Veeky Forums

Yeah. These threads really nowhere since everytime someone mentions doing anything you get the tides of people screeching that nobody can do anything ever.

Why the fuck would I want to ever play in this setting then, assholes?

It is not a setting for playing in, at least not for most groups.

You mean kind of like WH40K?

Why are you even here?

Read night land a few months ago, awake in the night yesterday and I'm jonesing for more. Can anyone recommend anything? This is some top tier stuff. I can see how some powerwankers have a fit since their waifu/husbando from dnd doesnt fit with the way they want in the nl universe, when the thing isn't what you can kill and what level are you.

>Why the fuck would I want to ever play in this setting then, assholes?
I have no idea

There is always the option of dnd. You know you can shoot fireballs in that game right?

See
and

The setting itself could be a good one to play in if updated for a more modern audience but with at least an honest attempt to keep the flavour. The original was written in 1912 and the sci-fi is made for the science of that time.

Leave the date vague at best, that should go without saying beyond "far enough forward for continental drift to have been a notable thing". It gives enough time for a lot of knowledge to have been lost by time and many methods.

The Earths rotation has slowed down to tide-lock, possibly assisted by a near miss with a displaced exo-planet in the depths of prehistory.

The sun hasn't gone out but everyone thinks it has, not that it matters because the Last Redoubt and the Great Canyon are on the night side of the planet.

The stars and moon, assuming moon survived the near miss, are invisible because a supervolcanic eruption shit a load of dust into the atmosphere and the constant churning of air at the Day/Night interface zone keep it from settling. Point is that the thick dust and other higher atmospheric bullshit keep the stars and moon invisible.

The Earth Current is a combination of the Last Redoubt's geothermal power source and the ancient A.I.

Most of the monsters out there are the result of natural processes. It's the nightmare shit around deep sea vents but drier. It's explainable but still horrific.

It's the other shit that is far worse and beyond "it's dangerous, don't touch it, don't let it notice you and try not to even look at it" there isn't much more that you can say for sure.

For the last few million years at least all humanity has known is the world at the bottom of The Canyon safe inside the Last Redoubt for so long that nobody remembers what the Redoubt was actually called and only acknowledges that there were other Redoubts as a probable historical theory. There are no other humans save those within the walls. Nearest are the pale near-men by the sea in stone and skin huts who live off of fish and slime-weed.

The geothermal heat is retreating or moving over the last few millions of years. Estimated time till black out 5 - 6.1 million years at most. It's an inhumanly long time but the Redoubt has been inhabited for far longer than that but nobody is sure anymore how much longer than tat. Nobody knows who built it, presumably there are fossil records if you dig outside, assuming it was ever safe to dig outside.

It's a very insular, very fatalistic and ultimately pessimistic mindset. In the end there is no hope, be grateful you won't live to see the end.

Except you might because reincarnation is a proven phenomenon.

Then one day/shift a radio signal is detected from somewhere outside the Canyon where nothing lives.

Are you bad enough dudes to pick up a pizza cutter, brave the nightmares of The Night Land and find out what the fuck is going on?

>The sun hasn't gone out but everyone thinks it has
Missing the point, honestly.
Why does that even need changing?

Because 30 million years is not long enough for the sun to run out of fuel for nuclear fusion.

Back when the book was written if nuclear fusion was even known it was as a crackpot fringe theory.

I don't want to be all 'dragons exist so why does X need to be realistic', but why does it matter that the stellar physics is right?

I feel like the symbolism of the sun and stars having burnt out and plunging the world into darkness is the most important thing. It isn't the same if they're just mistaken and the sun is totally fine.

How about the earth, for what ever reason, is ejected from the solar system and is drifting ever further into the interstellar blackness?

Many of the "expanded universe" stories written after we figured out how starts work have explained away this discrepancy by saying that the sun did NOT reach the end of its natural life cycle, but that it was prematurely fed upon by certain unimaginably huge manifestations of the Dark Powers.

Meanwhile, Greg Bear's spiritual successor "The City at the End of the World" is set in roughly the year 100 Trillion. The Sun has been artificially rekindled several times, but there are no longer enough resources to keep it up.

Stop reading it as soon as possible.
Its terrible. The setting might be cool but the writingstyle is absolutely atrocious and it is easily 70% too long for what is happening.

The way that Veeky Forums talks about the Night Land is literally the most reddit thing on this message board.

It's almost Usenet level cringe.

>EVERYTHINGIDONTSPECIFICALLYLIKEANDENJOYLIKEHOWIDO40KEKISREDDICKREEEEEEEEE
Fuck off and die, you utter autist.

It's a 40k Daemon World

>Prefacing your reddit tier shitposts with "Literally"
Get back to tumblr cuck

...

I'm currently building a campaign inspired by pic related, and in looking for more material to add in quickly found that the Night Land was obviously an inspiration to the writer.

In order to provide a space for low level characters, I'm adding some intrigue into the Redoubt, with a strict social caste system determined by magic usage and bloodlines. Since the battle against the darkness is such a pivotal theme, I want to tie magic usage to light, such that a caster in darkness can't use their spells. Low level light spells can provide reddish light which can then be used to cast low-level spells, but in order to cast the most powerful spells you need a source of bright white light to power them.

After they've gained some experience in the Redoubt, I want to boot them out into the Night Lands, where they'll suffer for a while fighting the innumerable shadow creatures, but eventually they'll find other points of light in the world, inhabited by the non-human races, generally based off of creatures that thrive in the dark like bats and moths and deep-sea creatures.

Not to mention that his other series are love letters to it and Paradise Lost.