Screaming Vortex - Messia: Messia is a blasted, rocky world in the outer reaches of the Gloaming Worlds choked by a thick, poisonous atmosphere. The brightest day on Messia is a sepia-tinted twilight when its fierce white star, Xoson, burns it away through the pollutant streams in the air to scorch the earth. Acid-storms and storm-force winds scour the surface at regular intervals, forcing its hardy inhabitants to shelter below ground for extended periods. Messia's only slight redeeming feature is that it spins very slowly, taking more than a standard year to complete one rotation on its axis and thus creating an extremely long single local day.Conditions on the cooler night side offer some relief from the burning glare of Xoson. On the nightside of Messia, chill mists cover a landscape that is rapidly overgrown with slimes and fungi growing from hardy spores lodged in the blasted rock. Larger creatures start to break out of their underground burrows to take advantage of Messia's long night to hunt and procreate before fleeing back beneath the rocks at the coming of the dawn.Two great anular cities exist on Messia; Mekonta and Zanok, at the north and south poles, respectively. In each place half of the city is ruined through the long Messia day while its inhabitants remain in the other nighttime half of the city feverishly repairing damage on the dusk edge even as they are abandoning structures along the dawn edge. This gives both cities a decrepit, patchwork appearance, made up of conical roofs of iron plating covering rough walls of acid-eaten rock. Higher sciences are long lost on Messia, but the polyglot inhabitants of the cities still work with metal, building engines, vehicles, and firearms with passable skill. The demand for promethium to drive their engines and heat the cities during the long Messia night forces them to send frequent expeditions out into the wastes. Semi-nomadic "drill-barons" take their giant rigs out into the morass on the nightside or the blazing desert of the dayside.Such expeditions are well-armed and escorted with a variety of armour-plated land cruisers and Stubber-armed Attack Bikes. In the wastes they might meet all manner of aggressive wildlife from swarms of hairless mole-rats to giant, acid-spitting leeches. Clashes between the rival drill-barons over particularly choice sumps are not uncommon. Two of the hundred-metre-long drill rigs in battle is a sight to behold as they clash like prehistoric beasts, monstrous drill bits rending into one another as their outriders circle like dervishes. The stakes are high and the fighting desperate. The gang of a losing rig will be reduced to scavenging and piracy, desperately seeking another rig to capture before their own promethium fuel runs out.These skirmishes pale in comparison to the danger posed by Messia's ever-present mutant hordes. Whatever catastrophe originally blotted out Messia left horrifying contagions that create vast populations of feral wasteland mutants. On the cool night side the mutants walk slowly with a shambling gait. As the night wears on, they bulk out and mutate monstrously, soon banding together to hunt for blood and warm red flesh to feed their unspeakable hunger. A moving rig is relatively safe, crushing its way through the mindless crowds, but when the rig stops to drill, the outriders must form a constantly moving protective ring to keep the mutants at bay.Curiously, the mutant hordes seem to be most drawn towards the dawn edge of Messia and undergo a strange transformation as they emerge into the star Xoson's unrelenting glare. Their bloated flesh hisses and sizzles as the mutants wither into mummy-like scuttling things. Mutants found on the day-side are fast and ferocious, capable of using weapons and planning ambushes, and even of turning captured vehicles against their former owners. On the day-side, a rig is most vulnerable while moving, and its escorting vehicles probe ahead constantly looking for traps or deadfalls set by the devious mutants.The mutants migrate constantly towards the dusk edge where the fall of night drops. The day-side mutants must flee as chilling mists enwrap the land. After lying putrefying and insensible in the muck for a time their withered bodies rise again and the cycle continues as they begin their shuffling march towards the dawn.