28 enchantments and 3 wishes in thrice accursed, enchanted, bewitched January.
Today: Enchanted woods of futuristic horror as the 14th enchantment
Downtown Park
A sad broken landmark in an upper level of Lower Downtown, the “park” is a grey concrete wasteland, mostly open to the sky and the incessant downpour. Instead of the soil they maybe once contained, large basins are now overflowing with all manner of refuse and accumulated Downtown detritus, most traces of trees or grass or flowers, of park benches and pavillons long gone or reduced to ruins.
It must come as a massive shock, then, when operatives venturing through the depths of this heap of broken dreams suddenly find their surroundings transformed into – or themselves whisked away to – a lush green forest glade, unseen birds singing and animals rustling about amongst the trees, the wind swaying the branches gently and the rain falling as a warm refreshing spring or early summer shower. Promises of peace and tranquility hang soothingly in the clean air.
The shock of discovering the glade causes 1 AS, 5 PS. This is only applicable the first time a character enters it.
A stay in the glade reduces Stress by 1 for each full hour spent in its soothing environment. However, re-entering Downtown and facing its decrepit urban horror once more requires a successful COOL roll with a cumulative penalty of -1 per visit to the glade. Furthermore, re-entering Downtown after a successful roll also causes a number of points of AS equal to two times the number of visits to the glade. A character who fails such a roll can no longer bring themselves to face the horrors of Downtown and leave the glade on their own accord.
A character will only ever be able to meet another character in the glade if they have visited it together at least once before.
Thoughts
This one actually came up during a discussion that many of the classic fairy tale style enchanted places do not work that well as entries for D&D and other high fantasy games, simply because they are already accepted part and parcel of such settings. A sideline of this argument was then that the very same standard elements preserve much more of their special sense of wonder and mystery in settings where they are, well, … special to begin with – such as an enchanted forest glade right inside SLA Industries’ dystopian Mort city.