The Campaign Builder's Guild

The Twilight Cities are incredibly ancient: even the youngest is built on ruins many millennia old.  Tombstones of sublime and faded ages long since decomposed by a series of half-forgotten cataclysms* and the gnawing erasures of time, only seven of the once-great metropolises remain inhabited, and even these are largely empty, their streets dusty and silent, their labyrinthine undercities crumbling and hollow.  They fall roughly into two broad types: some, like Dolmen and Somnambulon, are ruthlessly authoritarian, oppressive city-states, while others, like Baranauskas and Lophius, are chaotic and unstable, held together with more occult codes and coherencies.  They writhe, devour, rut, seethe with moribund energy: putrid and hideous, like chancres on a diseased fleshscape.

The Twilight Cities cling to the fringe of the so-called Slaughter-lands, a wild waste where prowling clouds of sentient eldritch radiation cause the dead to walk, otherworldly horrors from the Membrane Wars lurk in dark lairs and ruins, and the Red Rains metamorphose those who sip of them into murderous doppelgangers of their former selves.  This is a world no longer merely dwindling, no longer dying, but rather become a great corpse peopled by maggots and worms, the fester-spawned parasites of a Cadaverous Earth.

Yet even as the world spasms its last breath, sloughs free the shredded vestiges of history, bloats with corpse-gas and grins with the shriveling onset of rigor mortis, a phoenixian ember flickers in some black and cyclopean socket.  Pink new flesh squirms beneath the scabbed surface, and long-chained entities await the Great Unfettering.

* The Membrane Wars, the Pallid Decimation, the dementia epidemics, the Suppuration'¦

Somnambulon, The Sleepwalker's City

Thronged by a zombie proletariat condemned to brute psychic vassalage, Somnambulon is ruled by a ruthless clan of industrialist nobles, the so-called Lords Revenant.  Existing symbiotically with a cadre of numinous parasites (the zehrer) passed down from generation to generation, the nobility possess unnaturally long lives and a variety of eldritch abilities which they use alongside their advanced technological warmachine to maintain power.  Cutthroat mercantilists of the first order, the Lords Revenant enjoy the spoils of their success from their mausoleum-palaces, manses part temple, part tomb, part keep; sprawling about these ornate megaliths are the smoke-clotted factory districts, the vicious waterfront along the Sinew River, and the vast, rude, lawless shanties of the Unbound, a ragtag but defiantly lively lot whose music and carnival antics contrast harshly with the black grimness of the Lords and their shambolic subjects.

Crepuscle, The Mottled City, The City of Red and Black

Crepuscle lies at the intersection of the Radula and the Sinew Rivers, and as such is a major trading port, principally dealing with Skein, Moroi, and Somnambulon.  Its streets are colourful and pastiche, cosmopolitan in the extreme: here are soul-tinkers and mechanoapes and dyadic naghini, hagmen from the south, graft peddlers and arcanists and sigil-scribes, yapping zerda foxfolk seers, mantid costermongers, ghilan of every breed and quick humans of every race.  Justice is administered in stylized gladiatorial courts, wherein the defendant must defeat a pantheon of combatants (including the Blind Man, Guilt, and Reason) to secure his or her innocence.

   Apart from its bustling markets Crepuscle is distinguished by its labyrinth, a huge maze at the center of the city which few dare enter despite the legends of unfathomable treasure and wisdom to be found within; its walls are scriven with runes in some long-forgotten language, a tongue which those who spend too long wandering the endless passages begin to inexplicably babble in.  These lost souls, the so-called mazeborn, are chained to the walls of shrines in the temples of the Gibbering Goddess, where robed neophytes record their rambling glossolalia.

Skein, City of Silk, The Clockwork City

A shuddering, iridescent carnival of a city, the snarled urban sprawl called Skein juts with a hundred cyborg spires against the bruised and hazy sky.  In the clockwork factories at the city's industrial center, a verdigris-riddled army of automaton limbs peel and unravel the delicate casements of silkworm moths.  The silk is cut and dyed and woven by a horde of arthritic and ink-spotted workers in the warrens of the Sepia, Indigo, and Damask Wards.  From here it is loaded by spidery iron cranes and hulking dock-laborers, muscles squirming with symbiotic grafts, onto submersibles equal parts gearwork and crustacean or leathery dirigibles.  These vessels clot the sluggish coils of the Radula River or ride on dry winds from the glowering Slouching-Devil Mountains (winds that bring thunderstorms and murders of predatory imps and bouts of disturbing erotic nightmares).

   The city's other boasts: a long tradition in the crafting of expensive (but efficient) automata and a mastery of the centuries old, carefully cultivated practice of demoniac husbandry.  Blurring the lines between puppets and puppeteers are the five supreme rulers of Skein, the Moth-Kings, wizened scholar-husks who traded flesh and memory and essence to arcane entities beyond human fathoming in the distant past, perhaps as far back as the Membrane Wars.  They brood in their shadowy, palatial spire, queasy shapes somewhere between men and corpses and diabolic phantoms; they rely on less overtly otherworldly mouthpieces to deliver their rare but irresistible commands.

Baranauskas, City of Bodysnatchers, The Maggot City

The Skin Markets of Baranauskas are famous across the Cadaverous Earth.  Guilds of tomb raiders and grave robbers of every stripe daily plunder the nearby Slaughter-lands and even the ruinous Hecatomb Cities of the deep waste, returning with the musty relics of bygone aeons '" and with scores of bodies.  The relics are pawned in the scabrous little Curio Bazaars, but the bulk of goods traded in Baranauskas take the form of carved bones, flayed flesh, blood, and bodies, though there are also large sections of the Markets dedicated to the trade of slaves or the solicitations of prostitutes.

Here also are the glyph parlors, the graft peddlers, and the tissue-shops, where libertines, mercenaries, thugs, and adventurers purchase flesh-hexes or augment themselves with extra limbs, poison glands, or squirming cosmetic tattoos.  Even the human citizens (a sizeable minority) are practicing cannibals, but the hagmen, the cestoids, the ghilan, and innumerable other grave-spawn depend on the city's grisly produce for subsistence.  One will also find mercantile agents of the Lords Revenant in search of fresh bodies for labor purposes.  Though superficially a liberal, even anarchic city, Baranauskas is essentially ruled by a loose oligarchy composed of high-ranking members of the Robber Guilds and wealthy merchants.

Dolmen, City of Spiders

Xenophobic and isolationist in the extreme, the city of Dolmen is the domain of the lilix, spidery and matriarchal, ruling through a rigid caste-system.  Below the city are the vast breeding caves, where a near-blind, colourless race of subhumans are bred as livestock and slaves, to work new tunnels into the unyielding earth or be consumed in the gory meals of their mistresses.

Above these stone pens the city's core thrusts upwards in tiered levels, a bizarre geometric radiation of temples and armories and dwellings, trading halls and factories and torture-halls.  Here the city's mortal gentry live a penumbral existence: chalky-skinned freedwomen dressed in black and red lace who tattoo extra eyes on their foreheads and keep cadres of male slaves.  At the center of the upper city are the harems, banquet halls, council chambers, and living quarters for the lilix themselves, where the males are kept as footmen, concubines, and bodyguards while the women drink marrow-wines and sanguine cordials.

Beyond the limits of the city is the foreigner's quarter, a trading hub and center of exchange where the normally unyielding web of etiquette, taboos, and laws is relaxed and the lilix reluctantly deal with outsiders; here the Sinew River flows down from its point of origin in the nearby Chelicerae Mountains.

Moroi, The Gaunt City, City of the Elder Tree

At the center of Moroi, towering over the baroque intricacy of its rambling streets, the Elder Tree claws at the sky with gnarled fingers.  Sublime, incomprehensibly huge, and old beyond all remembrance, the Elder Tree remains magnificent even as the Resin Merchants despoil its ancient grandeur.  The tree is penetrated, ravished, ensnared in a vampire-machine, a twisted complexity of tubes and gears and churning pipework that invades its withered bark and sucks the god-tree dry.  Two more of its brethren loom over the city like headstones, ossified and empty, the machinery entangling them turning slowly to rust.

   The Resin Merchants of Moroi drain the Elder Tree of its puissant sap, the substance dubbed ichor or nectar: a potent arcane catalyst which, when ingested (usually via injection) infuses the user with eldritch energy.  Those with latent power are tracked down by the city's recruiters, chained and injected with heavy doses of the drug and converted into babbling living weapons, till they burn from the inside out or go mad completely.  Large amounts of the drug also finds it way into the marketplaces of Skein, Crepuscle, and Baransauskas.

Lophius, The Corsair City, City of the Lamprey

Straddling the Maw, the swampy delta where the Gland River empties itself into the Sallow Seas, Lophius is a considerably younger city than its brethren to the north and east, though still centuries old.  Though predominantly human, Lophius teems with other creatures as well, many of them amphibious: leechkin, hagmen, and certain wetland strains of ghilan.  Though certainly a hub for commerce, Lophius became rich through piracy and other activities generally regarded as illicit in the other Twilight Cities, acting as a haven for thieves, smugglers, and corsairs; its only government is an informal kleptocracy comprised of whatever particular clan of cutthroats last seized power.

   The other principle faction within Lophius is religious, as the city is a major point of pilgrimage.  Idols dredged from the fens by scavengers or from the briny depths by daring sub-mariners are erected in the ramshackle shrines of the Driftwood District, attended by a priests with seaweed in their hair and shells for holy symbols; each upstart deity competes with the others for petitioners, a thousand bickering godlings in a maze of skeletal shipwrecks-cum-churches and barnacled wooden fanes.

   Quite distinct from the carven deities of Lophius are the true gods of the swamp, nameless elemental demons of stagnation and wasting illness, brooding in the brackish waters.  These fey, muttering entities are kin to the mad, primordial beast-gods of salt and nacre that slumber in the deeps of the Sallow Seas.

Adventure

Adventurers come in many varieties.  One might play as an exiled baron of the Lords Revenant, a vampiric aristocrat possessed by an heirloom spirit; or a member of one of the Robber Guilds of Baranauskas, a grizzled tomb raider contending with malevolencies and the elements in the Slaughter-lands, questing for lost technology; or a sneak from Lophius, some tattooed, moustachioed footpad or duelist dealing death with knife and pistol; or an arachnoid assassin, a male lilix courtier with a wit to match his deadliness; or a magister attended by a homunculus leashed with a warded silver chain; or a half-mad witch-savant, an ichor-junkie hurling drug-fueled hexes; or even a misshapen graftpunk with stitches or inked sigils still raw from the augmentations of the tissue-shop or the glyph parlor.

   Adventures tend to oscillate between survival in an unforgiving and hazardous wilderness and gritty urban intrigue.  Adventurers might loot haunted tomb-cities in the Slaughter-lands or mount expeditions to retrieve lost secrets from abandoned libraries where the dead walk.  They might pursue bounties on brigands and savage leechkin and nameless demons in the clotted swamplands of Lophius, or escort caravans for the Resin Merchants across the disconcerting amorphousness of the Tallow Plains where the wax-born roam.  They might become prospectors in the Slouching-devil Mountains in search of ur-fossils, or scholars seeking the lost poetic incantations of Vurlu, or street-fighters for hire in the chaotic markets of Baransauskas, or perhaps gentleman burglars preying on the aristocracy of Somnambulon.  They could converse with sentient automata clothing themselves in flayed human skins, forge contracts with creatures born of the Suppuration, drink blood and whiskey with grave-spawn in riverside ghul-bars and saloons, battle nests of fettergeists in the undercity of Skein, or poach tenebrals in the shadowy hunting grounds of magister-princes.

This is very intriguing, and I have no idea how it has slipped by my attention until now.  In your first paragraph, when you mentioned a city named "Somnambulon," I was wondering if it would be zombie-infested, and I found out with further reading that I would not be disappointed!

Honestly, I can very much imagine stories being written in this much moreso than adventures taking place.  All the cities seem to be wont for some vignettes or epic ballads being written of them.

Welcome to the CBG, I hope to see more!

love the adventure tidbits.  Much to look forward to.  Somewhat wolfe-esque...

Quote from: LordVreegSomewhat wolfe-esque...

And with a definite touch of Mieville's "wierd punk" flavour.  This setting was practically designed to get me Jonesing.

[ooc]Thanks everyone for their replies.  And yes, the Cadaverous Earth plunders liberally from Wolfe, Vance, Mieville, Mervyn Peake, and Stephen King, though I hope the resulting synthesis is somewhat intriguing, if not precisely original.  I've used bits and pieces of it in various stories and games; this setting is something of a conglomeration of ideas and tidbits.

More to come soon on the different species...[/ooc]

Hagmen

The hermaphroditic hagmen predominate in the southern regions of the Cadaverous Earth.  Somewhat resembling anthropomorphic eels, hagmen are vermiform, with slimy, elongated tails, lacking legs.  Their upper bodies are more humanoid, including a pair of long, bony arms and vaguely human heads, albeit with horizontal mouths with many teeth, beady eyes (though not blind, hagmen have poor eyesight), and whisker-like barbs; they often sport a mane of shaggy hair that looks like swampy vegetation, especially if a hagman submerges itself in water, a common hunting tactic.

   Hagmen possess both testes and ovaries and so have interchangeable sexes; they have developed complex cultural gender constructs '" unfathomable to most humans '" that reflect their intersexed natures.  The name 'hagman' was chosen for its androgynous implications, but many hagmen consider the name crude.  Most 'civilized' hagmen can be found in cities such as Lophius, Crepuscle, and Baransauskas, where they tend to congregate in amphibious ghetto districts with communal dwelling places somewhere between bathhouses and residences.  Other major structures include the hatcheries and temple-brothels, where hagmen that have chosen to become female ritualistically mate with males in honour of Myx, an aspect of the nebulous, multiply natured hagman deity representing fertility, lust, and creativity.  Hagmen have integrated into urban society as fishermen, agriculturalists (farming seaweed and marine livestock), submariners, amphibious warriors, dockworkers, artisans, and even scholars.

   There are many less urbanized hagman communities, most of which conform to a tribal structure; these 'savage' hagmen are hunter-gatherers with some primitive farming techniques, and are known for their deep racial prejudice for the leechkin with whom they compete for territory and food.  The hagmen denounce the leechkin as the unclean spawn of an amorphous devil figure, a vampiric adversary-demon representing parasitism and degradation.  Vestiges of this race-hatred linger even in metropolitan centers, though many progressive hagmen and leechkin have learned to set aside their differences.

   Apart from their prejudices, the hagmen of the Twilight Cities have inherited their tribal cousins' religious beliefs, albeit adapted to a less primeval cultural landscape.  They worship a monotheistic deity with a myriad of different aspects, and their system of arcana or witchcraft is integrated directly into their religion.  Each aspect of the Aeon-Worm (a rarely-used epithet of the gestalt of the hagman deity's personalities) is attended by a cult, with rituals and ceremonies tailored to the venerated aspect's portfolio.

Leechkin

Often deeply disturbing to humans first encountering them, leechkin are hairless humanoids with green or black skins, bloated torsos (which shrivel if the leechkin hasn't fed), and long, spindly limbs.  Their faces are rudimentary: leechkin have almost no neck, their ears are mere holes, and they have no mouths on their faces '" only a pair of small yellow eyes and a set of nostrils.  Instead, they possess two individual mouths on their palms, each resembling a lamprey's maw with many serrated teeth.  While hermaphroditic like the hagmen, leechkin do not possess the shifting mutability of gender of that species: instead they are essentially sexless, with individuals assuming the role of male or female in a temporary fashion during procreation (the 'male' grows a sperm-sac which the 'female' consumes, impregnating 'herself').

   Leechkin are haematophagic, consuming a diet entirely of blood.  While many creatures on the Cadaverous Earth are cannibals of necessity, the leechkin dependency on blood, like that of the lilix, has led to their demonization in other cultures, and leechkin are often regarded as unclean or monstrous, especially by the hagmen.  This conception is exacerbated by certain bands of tribal leechkin who after months without proper feeding succumb to a bloodthirsty psychopathy, degenerating into murderous animals.  It is not uncommon to find a steamboat drifting aimlessly in the southern swamps, its crew bloodless, covered in small red circles like gruesome love-bites.

   While the bulk of the leechkin population dwells in the swamps themselves, some leechkin communities can be found in the Twilight Cities, particularly in Lophius.  The leechkin mindset is inherently parasitic, and leechkin culture denigrates the very idea of 'work,' scorning the lofty accomplishments of men as mere frivolity; thus, the bulk of urban leechkin are simply beggars seeking enough coin to purchase their next fix of blood.  As leechkin tend to be regarded as untrustworthy rogues, some find employment as enforcers, torturers, and other underworld figures, which hardly helps their species' reputation.

   The leechkin religion is animistic, with shamans serving as healers and sorcerers.  The leechkin have some traffic with the nameless gods of the swamp, whom they seem to regard as avatars of the natural environment.

Lilix

Rulers of the city-state of Dolmen, the lilix are spiderfolk, a race of anthropomorphized arachnids, each possessing eight limbs and eight eyes.  Other than these obvious differences and a set of mandibles in lieu of a mouth the lilix are essentially humans with grayish, sometimes hairy skins.  They are further distinguished by their ruthlessly matriarchal culture, their appetite for blood, and their capacity for artistic, political, and intellectual intricacy.  Those few lilix that live in cities other than Dolmen tend to be advisors, architects, artists, and spymasters.

   The lilix political structure is a kind of gynocratic fascism, a caste system placing the pallid subhumans at the bottom (humans bred for centuries for slave labor), with human freedwomen and their male concubines above (a kind of lower middle class), then lilix males, the courtier caste, and finally lilix females, the queen caste.  The males tend to be taut and strong, bred as they are for their sexual appeal, their obedience, and their fighting ability.  Lilix females are leisured and so tend towards softness and roundness, with elder females achieving a heavily fetishized obesity.  A rigidly conceived and highly ritualized state religion closer to a dogmatic bureaucracy than a living faith codifies and attempts to legitimize the stratifications of Dolmen.  The holy texts of the religion are embedded in ancient tapestries reputed to be spun by the creed's central mother deity, an elder spider-goddess called Virlum.  The tapestries are hung in the inner sanctums of official temples; any reproduction or facsimile would instantly be declared blasphemous.  As such the all-female priesthood is able to keep the religion under firm state control, reserving the right to interpret the tapestries and so maintain power.

   Like the primitive leechkin of the swamps the lilix are haematophagic, subsisting on the blood and liquefied bodies of humans and other creatures.  At a lilix feast all the food is liquid: bowls and sauciers of half-coagulate blood jellies, marrow juice, and pulped, runny meat, washed down with goblets of thinned arterial blood they drink like wine or xocolatl.  A carrion perfume cloys the upper levels of Dolmen, raw and coppery, mingling with the fecund pheromones of the lilix and the sour tang of the flesh-castings carpeting the black marble floors.

Ghilan

The origins of the ghilan (singular: ghul) are clouded in mystery, remaining a subject of major scholarly speculation.  Some claim they were born during the Pallid Decimation, when (legend has it) the Ravager-Worm Hirud ruptured the world, the dead arose, and the earth was alight with funeral pyres; others claim they are the dilute offspring of some elder demon race.  Whatever their genesis, ghilan have become the principle grave-spawned race on the Cadaverous Earth, and can be found in all of the Twilight Cities.  They resemble the quick in most respects, but have chalky, leper-gray skin, sharp teeth, claw-like nails, and cat-slitted eyes.  Their 'life-spans' are theoretically unlimited, and few diseases affect them; though grave-spawn (or 'undead,' a term that has passed from the status of racial slur into a kind of quaint archaicism), they do not decompose, and they are far from the mindless zombies of Somnambulon or the hunger-obsessed haunts of the Slaughter-lands.  Some grave-spawn live for hundreds of years, though most die of hunger, thirst, violence, or accident before they reach a hundred.  Ghilan are carnivorous creatures, ingesting only raw meat, and are shamelessly cannibalistic, eating both humans and other ghilan (they tend to dislike seafood and so find the flavor of leechkin or hagmen distasteful).

   Ghul reproduction is surrounded by such a haze of mythology that their true method of procreation seems disappointingly mundane.  Like most grave-spawn, ghilan are the hosts to parasites, in this case to a strain that survives in necrotic human flesh.  Those that eat uncooked human meat infested with a ghul-worm or fluke may potentially be transformed from a normal human into a ghul.  The parasite essentially kills its host, then revivifies it after making several alterations, using the brief period of clinical death as a kind of liminal space, a cocoon-state in which the host is metamorphosed into a ghul.  The newly reborn ghul will be afflicted with moderate to complete amnesia but suffers no other damage apart from sterility '" though rumors persist of half-ghul children, they are thought to be merely the imaginings of grotesque minds.  Sexual intercourse between ghilan and the quick remains possible and is quite common despite vague taboos surrounding such couplings.  Self-infection with a ghul-worm is not unheard of, but the invariable memory loss involving the change deters most who would seek to transcend death in this manner.

   Ghilan culture resembles that of the quick closely.  On the whole, ghilan tend to be more solemn and ritualistic in contrast with the frenetic quick, who seem to the ghilan a loud and reckless breed (though many ghilan profess a certain nostalgia, only half remembered, for the heady, frenzied days of life).  They are a nocturnal race and abhor direct sunlight, though it does them no actual harm.  Because of their longevity many ghilan eventually obtain enough wealth and power to live relatively luxurious lives.  Some become decadent, macabre libertines who savor meals of the softest flesh and attend theaters, gambling halls, drug dens, and orgies with regularity, spending their nights in hedonistic debauchery.  Others prefer a more staid living, becoming administrators, priests, and even monks '" there are more than a few ghilan in the Order of the Weeping Lady, cloistered in the monasteries of the Chelicerae Mountains.

[ic=Inchoate]The sap of the Elder Tree pulsed in his veins, filling him with eldritch light, a suffusion of celestial nectar, throbbing in time to his heartbeat '" elemental, transcendent, eternal.  Sketching an arcane character in the air with the articulated finger of his clockwork gauntlet '" sigil scribed, twined with cabalistic wires feeding into his bloodstream '" the aspiring witch Magnus Shacklebane muttered the invocation fervently, his eyes clouded with tenebrous puissance, the bloodstone in his right fist sizzling, scorching his leather glove.  Laboriously he pronounced the prolix syllables of the incantation, giving each torturous, convoluted phrase of the formula its proper weight, affecting the serpentine sibilance appropriate for the ritual.

   The air before him shimmered.  Behind his square glasses Magnus' eyes widened, glowing with sepulchral light.  The distortion intensified as the adolescent witch continued the invocation, gesturing with his gauntlet and holding forth the bloodstone.  There was a queasy smell '" brimstone, copper, burning blood, the syrupy reek of nectar.  A vague manifestation half-solidified: a grotesque but monstrously charismatic visage, at once gibberingly mad and unfathomably wise, its eyes sublime voids.  For one ephemeral moment those abyssal eyes stared back into Magnus' own; but then, as the bloodstone singed through his impskin glove to burn bare flesh, the would-be witch's tongue stumbled over a single whispered syllable.  The face flickered; the bloodstone slipped from Mangus' hand and fell to the floor, where it shattered into a thousand iridescent shards.  The face, only a hazy insinuation, melted into a wisp of red smoke.[/ic]

I am not worthy :O

This is absolutely brilliant and I demand more. More!

Excellent stuff, looking forward to more.

The Watchdogs of Baranauskas

The three colossi known as the Watchdogs (or just the Dogs) of Baranauskas are huge, venerable creatures that guard the three gates of the walled inner city '" the Witch's Gate, leading to Moroi, the Eel's Gate, leading to Lophius, and the Butcher's Gate, leading to the Slaughter-lands.  The Watchdogs were created four hundred years ago, commissioned by the Robber Guilds and the Rag-and-Bones cartels from the mad magister Orlando Petrifax, a specialist in fleshcraft; though many of their constituent parts have been replaced over the centuries, they remain at the three gates of the Maggot City, motley sentinels easily capable of dispatching any wandering horror or band of mutant brigands that might dare approach Baranauskas from the Slaughter-lands or elsewhere.  In times of war the Dogs have very rarely been unleashed upon the battlefield to aid in the destruction of some particularly malignant foe.

   The Watchdogs are gigantic, vaguely canine creatures formed from innumerable scraps of glyph-scribed, hairless flesh grafted irreverently atop the puissant bones of malformed dire-beasts or giants dug from the Slouching-devil Mountains.  Petrifax apparently conjoined these bones without respect for their previous owners' anatomy, resulting in strange, unwieldy configurations of limbs, odd protrusions, and bizarre skeletal structures.  As a result the Watchdogs are misshapen and monstrous, their deformed skeletons clothed in a grisly patchwork, a palimpsest of stitched skins.  Within their sigil covered bodies strange presences squirm and rustle, pressing against their fleshly prison '" the animating spirits the magister bound within the Dogs' warded skin, to give his creations life.

The Dogs are chained to their gates but can wander a fair distance, though they are well trained and so spend most of their time dozing in the shade of the walls, the terrific stench of their breath and the sickening quantities of formaldehyde used to preserve their bodies assailing those who approach the gates of the Bodysnatcher's City.  They are fed every three days, glutted on huge bowls of raw meat '" a spectacle which draws large crowds of visitors who haven't witnessed the Feeding before.  An elite unit of the city guard comprised of magisters and beast-masters tends to the Watchdogs, called the Kennel Masters.

The Suppuration

Most of the various apocalypses that wracked the Cadaverous Earth in aeons past have dwindled into myth and legend, alluded to only in the footnotes of moldering texts or in the distorted narratives of fablers.  The lingering effects of such disasters still haunt the present '" the Red Ravishing, when the earth flooded with blood, still persists in the Red Rains, the demoniac scourge-armies of the Membrane Wars have scattered across the land while old war-engines are slowly subsumed by rust, and a slew of plagues still recur with devastating frequency '" but the origins of the world's current afflictions have largely been forgotten.  The Suppuration, however, cannot be so easily expunged from memory, as it continues to seep clots of destabilizing unreality, bearing new litters of alien monstrosities on the far side of the Slaughter-lands.

   Few have seen the Suppuration itself (and returned with their sanity intact), but those who have describe an unimaginable chasm or wound, a reality sore dribbling unseemly accretions of the uncanny and whining with a kind of keening wail.  Though the exact nature of the Suppuration is far from understood, it seems evident that it is more than a mere dimensional orifice or portal like those used by invaders during the Membrane Wars.  Rather, the Suppuration seems to be a kind of chaotic womb, a cesspool of diseased imaginings.  The beings that emerge from the tempestuous swirl of the Suppuration are not demons or daevas, are not visitors from some otherworld or alternate plane, though such creatures do exist in abundance across the Cadaverous Earth.  Rather, the things that crawl and slither forth from the gushing lips of that ghastly birth canal, licking the pus of the Suppuration's afterbirth from their flickering forms, possess an unplaced but undeniable familiarity, made twisted by their hideousness.  They are like the nightmares of the world's collective subconscious, welling up through the rift in a shadowy, dissonant headbirth - the oneiroi.

[ic=Gaolor] The witch unlocked the door to the cellar and began his descent, one hand trailing along the decaying brick wall, the other grasping a glossy black taper for light.  Flesh-colored boots padded down the slime-slick stone steps.  In the candle's flicker the witch's face was thrown into unnerving chiaroscuro, its hard lines sharpened, violet-stained smirk made crueler, wolfish yellow eyes more predatory.  The trailing hand tapped at the crumbling brickwork with long, black nails.

   At the bottom of the stairs the candlelight bloated to fill the high corners and skeletal vaulted curves of the chamber with a swollen gothic glow.  A legion of shadows sprung forth from the dim recesses to cavort along the walls, caressing the grotesque marble gargoyles with lithe, black fingers.  The witch used his taper to light other candles about the room; the shadow-dancers withered and diminished.

   In the center of the floor, surrounded by a chaos of scrawled inscriptions, engraved wards, and circles of red powder, the creature squatted in a cage of black iron, peering at the witch through the bars with coldly hateful eyes.  It stroked its wrist with a seven-fingered hand and hissed.

   'Hello, Marquis Naberius,' the witch said, revealing a mouth full of sharp white teeth.  'I have questions for you.'

   The creature shifted its weight in its cage before venturing forth into the light.  A huge black raven's head sat on a slender body with dark purple skin etched with livid orange tattoos, like lines of flame.  The lower half was coarse and hairy, with canine paws and tail.

   'Music!'  The creature demanded, its voice welling with weird echoes, as if it were speaking across a long distance, or from deep underground.

   'How ill-mannered of me,' the witch apologized.  'One moment, my good Marquis.'  He crossed the chamber '" careful not to break the protective markings on the floor '" and withdrew a small wax cylinder from a pocket of his long coat, which he inserted into a polished phonograph.  A strange, haunting music something like a nocturne began to play, filling the room with spectral voices and the spindly plucking of strings.

   'Ahhh'¦' The raven-headed thing sighed.  Its long digits traveled up and down one sinewy arm, lingering at the shoulder where black feathers segued into smooth humanoid flesh.

   'And now then, my excellent '"'

   'Hush!' The creature commanded, eyes squeezed shut, listening.  The witch's mouth twitched in irritation, but he allowed his captive several minutes to savor the lush macabre textures of the music.  While he waited he smoked a long cigarillo plucked with splendidly manicured fingers from an enameled ebony case.  Soon the air was filled with wraiths of pungent blue smoke.  The Marquis was making shadow-puppets on the wall, its fourteen spidery fingers contorted into fanciful configurations '" lion, three-headed wolf, winged serpent, a man and woman copulating.  A tremor of disgust and, beneath, quiet fear traveled down the witch's spine.  He twirled a black ringlet of his wig, and reminded himself of the wards he'd placed, the sigils he'd spent days laboring over before binding the creature to a corporeal manifestation.  Were a stray rat to evade the clutches of his vermin-catching homunculi and break even one of the circles'¦ He dismissed his anxieties as the Marquis stirred.

   'Very well,' it consented.  'Ask your precious questions, mortal manling.'[/ic]

[ooc]Comments?  Criticisms?  Suggestions?  Analyses?  Ideas?

If there are any aspects or references posted so far that catch your eye, mention them and I'll write more in the same vein.
[/ooc]

I like the little story/vignette. Generally 'witch' is more of a female reference and warlock the male, any particular reason why you used it?

[ooc] Mostly I just like the sound of "witch" better, and I've found that most magical terminology is defined pretty loosely.  Calling male spellcasters wizards or warlocks conjures images of robed, bearded figures with staves, whereas the spellcaster archetype I'm trying to tap into is more profane, subversive, sinister, and macabre.  I think (I'm not sure about this) that use of the term "warlock" for a male witch was fairly inconsistent (hence "witch doctor" etc).  Plus I'm trying to generally play with gender in the Cadaverous Earth, hence creatures like the hagmen and the lilix.[/ooc]

Shades

Shades are sentient parasites capable of possessing corpses to create grave-spawn.  Unlike the ghul-worm, which is essentially brainless, or a zehrer, which coexists symbiotically with a still-living mind, shades completely dominate their already dead hosts' bodies, though unlike zombies they are highly intelligent.

   In their raw form shades look like pools of liquid shadow, capable of slithering and adhering to walls or ceilings; they enter a host through the mouth, then invade the creature's brain and skin.  Those possessed by shades walk stiffly, like demented puppets, fleshy marionettes being jerked by unseen strings; beneath their hosts' skins shades will pulsate and quiver with unnerving subcutaneous rhythms, covering their forms with rippling gooseflesh.  The eyes of a shade are clouded black.

   Because shades possess only the dead, their hosts eventually decompose, requiring a shade to seek a new corpse to inhabit.  It is common to see shades preserving themselves with embalming oils and bandages; some have skins that have been tanned into a kind of leather, and others remove their host's now unneeded organs.  Like most grave-spawn shades are intolerant of sunlight, which forces them from their host bodies and causes them great pain.  As a result they are entirely nocturnal and usually live underground during the day.

Despite their macabre natures shades are quite civilized and coexist peacefully with other organisms in cities and settlements which tolerate grave-spawn, which includes most of the Cadaverous Earth.  They are very difficult to kill; only prolonged sunlight or extreme amounts of damage can disperse a shade in its true form, and shades can always find new bodies to inhabit if their host is destroyed.  As a result they can endure for centuries, watching generations of the quick grow up and die.  Because of their abilities shades make amazing spies and assassins: after killing a target a shade assassin can then enter the newly-dead corpse and impersonate their victim, though of course such a grisly disguise does not weather close inspection.

Cestoids

Possibly the ugliest living creatures on the Cadaverous Earth, cestoids resemble hybrids of giant centipedes and tapeworms, with long, segmented bodies, many legs, chitin exoskeletons, and soft underbellies.  Their 'heads' are little more than mouths, circular and many-fanged.  Ringing a cestoid's maw is a clutch of many-jointed, hairy limbs which they use to manipulate tools and shovel food (rotting flesh, preferably offal) into their mouths.  Their eyes are rudimentary, their vocalizations bestial; they communicate mostly through pheromones and touch, and can understand human speech.

   Despite their monstrous appearances cestoids once ruled a vicious and expansive empire established by the hideous entity called Hirud the Ravager-Worm, a dark, animalistic god and possibly sire of the entire race.  For nearly a millennia after the Pallid Decimation the cestoids held power over much of the Cadaverous Earth, enslaving lesser races for their own purposes, ruling from the subterranean city of Riquis-Erebu, capitol of their Imperium.  They communicated their desires through human interpreters trained in comprehending their opaque language and devoured all who resisted them.  After Riquis-Erebu fell '" brought down by an alliance of rebel states spearheaded by the Witch Army of Moroi during the height of that city's power '" the Imperium collapsed and the cestoids were scattered.  Many were killed in a genocidal scouring campaign, hunted to near extinction.

Though still distrusted, the remaining cestoids have reintegrated somewhat over the long ages as the world died and history withered.  They are a dwindling, pariah race tolerated in the Twilight Cities but pushed to the margins, usually underground.  They often dwell in sewers, or the maze-like tunnel systems that riddle most of the old cities, subsisting on garbage and filth.  Those few who rise above this troglodytic degradation are usually merchants of some variety or mercenary warriors '" cestoids are incredibly terrifying combatants, wielding numerous melee weapons at once, gnashing at enemies with their maws while blows bounce off their armoured hides.

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The Walls

The walls of the Maggot City are thick and extremely tall, built of ruddy stone with wooden battlements constantly being replaced along the top.  In addition to the gun emplacements, trebuchets, and soldiers who man the walls, Baranauskas maintains a legion of specialized archers and crossbowmen.

The obscene number of bodies in the city attracts hordes of ravens, vultures, and crows to the City of Bodysnatchers, and were such carrion-feeders to descend upon the Skin Markets the city's economy would be devastated.  To ward off unwanted aerial intrusions a band of mercenary archers called the Black Arrows (after their fletching) defends the city walls (alongside a series of leering straw scarecrows, though these do considerably less to deter would-be scavengers).  Though these defenses are effective, many birds still enter the city limits, and there is an obelus reward for any crow corpse brought to the city bounty office in Resurrection Row.

Hexwarren (The Witch's Gate)

The arcane district of Baranauskas is Hexwarren, by the eastern Witch's Gate.  A commercial district, Hexwarren is composed of glyph parlors, tissue-shops, alchemists, and booksellers.  Eldritch texts, scrolls, charms, amulets, pendants, talismans, potions, and all other sorts of arcane bric-a-brac can be purchased here, but most come to Hexwarren looking to augment themselves with biomechanical and bio-eldritch implants or purchase glyph-born servitors, fleshcrafted creatures like organic automata not dissimilar to the zombies of Somnambulon or the clockwork automata of Skein, though somewhat less pervasive.

In Hexwarren one might have an orison or sigil of power tattooed on a limb or torso, turning one's body into a living hex to poison or enflame with a touch, manipulate objects with pure thought, or conjure some transformative effect '" scales, fur, wings, horns, fangs.  Toughs and mercenaries have slabs of muscle grafted to their bodies, while adventurers buy extra limbs from unlikely beasts.  The city's supply of nectar, the sap of the Elder Tree in Moroi, can be found in Hexwarren, and junkies clamor constantly at the few dealers, all agents of the Resin Merchants who sell the highly addictive drug at a greatly marked up price.

   Hexwarren itself is a rambling, tangled district of stone and wood with many narrow streets and lanes, interspersed with larger plazas or quadrangles, notably Murrain Square (where various venoms and antitoxins are sold) and Tatterdemalion Court (where graft peddlers congregate).  Major buildings include the city's moldering but incredibly extensive library, the so-called Vellum Citadel; the glowering, gargoyle-encrusted Fane of Dust, an all-ghul temple dedicated to distant star-gods; and the small Academy of Witchcraft, where would-be spellcasters can seek professional training for exorbitant tuition rates.

Slimesquallor (The Eel's Gate)

The hagman ghetto of Slimesquallor smells of stagnant water and the mucus excretions of its occupants, sticky trails that leave the streets slick.  Here the architecture is mottled with fungus and moss, as a result of the dampness peculiar to the district; some hagman additions have also been erected next to the brown stone structures that make up the bulk of Baranauskas.  The hagman buildings are coiled, undulating edifices with many pillars, open spaces, and large chambers rather than honeycombs of smaller rooms.  Apart from the enormous residential buildings there are hot mud-baths (distinct from the usual slimy pools hagmen bathe in), numerous shrines to the plethora of hagman god-aspects, and an indoor fish market.

Resurrection Row (The Butcher's Gate)

Resurrection Row is a rather ragged district named for its central street, a winding, crooked lane leading from the Butcher's Gate to the inner city.  A poor, shabby district, Resurrection Row is distinguished from the shanties only by its position within the walls of Baranauskas and the old stone edifices which rear up above the tightly packed rows of tenement housing.  Though there are a few shops here, most bodysnatchers and tomb raiders returning with a haul from the Slaughter-lands make for the Curio Bazaars and the Skin Markets rather than lingering in this dilapidated district.  As a result of its impoverishment Resurrection Row has become a haven for thieves, pickpockets, and cutthroats, who gather in rookeries when they're not plying the markets or the back-alleys of Hexwarren, Pulsetown, and Velveteen Circus.

   The city's bounty office is located in Resurrection Row, as well as a large number of warehouses and rough taverns, most of them geared towards the quick.

The Skin Markets

The Skin Markets reek of carrion and continuously bustle with thousands of merchants and customers, especially at night when the city's ghilan wake.  The Skin Markets are roughly divided into four huge, open-air Courts or atria, not including Velveteen Circus which is more properly a district in its own right.  The atria are bounded by huge, ancient buildings, the lower floors of which are occupied with shops and storerooms; passage between the market quadrants is achieved through a series of corridors accessible via tall, arched doorways.  The upper floors of the Market buildings are given over largely to the offices of the multifarious Rag-and-Bones cartels.  The atria themselves have a transient, constantly shifting architecture composed of booths, tents, stalls, and ramshackle wooden buildings, labyrinthine even to the initiated.

The first atrium is the Court-of-Flesh where whole bodies can be purchased, typically from large wagons piled high with the dead.  Flayed skins, leather, vellum, candles, and slaves are also for sale here.  Numerous eateries sell fried or boiled meat from various species, predominantly that of humans, pigs, dogs, and lizards, though a few booths sell bowls of mealworms, broth with noodles, and deep-fried spiders.  The chief buyers one sees in this atrium are quick humans and ghilan, with a smattering of hagmen and cestoids.  There are a few ghul-bars here, though fewer than the Court-of-Blood, and there is also usually an array of embalming fluids and preservatives available as well.

The second atrium is the Court-of-Bones.  Here are crates and wagons full of skeletons, but also carved bone trinkets, bone weapons (much more common than metal ones in the City of Bodysnatchers), bonemeal, and marrow.  The Court-of-Bones also has many fortune-tellers and gutter witches who cast the bones for a few coins, supposedly to glimpse the future.  Though there are fewer eateries in the Court-of-Bones than in the other atria there are several dice halls, notably Death's Gambit, The Reaper's Luck, and The Ribcage.

The Court-of-Blood is the third atrium, dealing exclusively with fluids.  It is common to see merchants here displaying several barrels full of liquid, variously labeled: 'arterial,' 'venous,' 'plasma,' etcetera.  Blood sausage and half-coagulate jellies (a lilix delicacy) can be purchased here.  The Maggot City's population of leechkin and lilix, though fairly small, can be found here in inordinate numbers. The Court-of-Blood contains numerous ghul-bars around its edges, taverns catering to ghilan serving hot and chilled blood (sometimes sweetened or with added alcohol) in skull cups, in addition to various foodstuffs; the best known of these are the establishments Sanguine Bliss and Porphyria.

Finally, the Court-of-Innards sells viscera, offal, and organs of all sorts.  Some graft peddlers do business here, though most of them are concentrated in Hexwarren; the fourth atrium deals mostly in raw materials for consumption and fleshcraft.  Pickled brains, hearts, and spleens are displayed in jars; bowls of freshly plucked eyes stare at passersby; barrels full of intestines glisten with briny preservatives.  Here one might snack on sweetbreads or a shish-kebab of eyes, sip chitterling stew or brain soup with head cheese, chew on boiled tongues, or munch on stuffed gizzards and kidney pies.  A crowd consisting of a large number of cestoids adds to the grotesquerie of the place.  Though most oracles do business in the Court-of-Bones, a few soothsayers look through piles of steaming organs in the Court-of-Innards to predict the future.

Velveteen Circus

The red-light district of Baranauskas, Velveteen Circus is close to the Skin Markets, hovering near the edge of the Court-of-Blood.  Low class brothels and higher quality pleasure houses do business here, alongside opium dens, ghul-bars, taverns, and restaurants.  The brothels cater to both quick and grave-spawn, though the seedier places pay little heed to such niceties as living or undead.  The more expensive establishments cater to fetishes and peccadilloes, and many of the girls and boys have been modified in tissue-shops to better suit the often perverse preferences of the clientele '" everything from full body tattoos and extra limbs, heads, and orifices to more surreal augmentations and mutilations, bestial xenografts, radical anatomical alterations, or grotesque enlargements.

The Curio Bazaars

Although named for the collections of relics and scavenged miscellanea found in its many pawn shops and junk-dealers, the Curio Bazaars comprise essentially all merchants not found in the Skin Markets or Hexwarren.  Interspersed with the shops selling lost technology and the detritus of the past are hawkers with carts of fruit, cabinet-makers, knife merchants, blacksmiths, armorers, clothiers, tanneries, and dozens of other businesses.  In the Curio Bazaars one might find a mangy ghul street-seller with a booth full of pocketwatches, or a booth with piles of porcelain and silverware, or an ancient idol of some chthonic deity inscribed with mantras in dead languages.  A shop window might display an impossibly old runesword, or mannequins garbed in silk dresses from Skein, or a selection of fresh produce, or the crown of a long dead sorcerer-king.  The Robber Guilds have their headquarters here, half a dozen prominent structures with a certain faded grandeur where the innumerable tomb raiders and scavengers who plumb the Slaughter-lands congregate.

Pulsetown

The main residential district for the quick in Baranauskas, Pulsetown is louder and more energetic than the Worm-Hive, though smaller in size.  Apart from its sprawling housing blocks Pulsetown is distinguished by several prominent landmarks: the Temple of Striga, the fighting pits, and the Hollow Skull playhouse.

   Striga is a goddess of blood, life, and vitality and has a congregation almost entirely of the quick.  She demands sacrifices, and the temple chimneys constantly smolder, the burnt offerings filling the sanctum with the aroma of cooking meat.  Cannibal funerary rites apotheosize members of the faith, and diluted blood is usually consumed at sermons.  The religion has strict dietary laws and other requirements and forbids the consumption of inhuman meat ('unclean').  Worshippers of Striga believe that the Red Ravishing was a kind of tribulation from the goddess, and that soon a day of judgment will come and the faithful '" those 'pure of blood' '" will ascend to become divine vampire-seraphs, ruling a newly ordered and revitalized earth.

   The fighting pits are a series of small arenas close to the Skin Markets, dedicated to combat sports and other spectacles.  Gladiatorial competitions, beast-baiting, and other bloodsports are held in the pits, which draw large crowds of gamblers and simple spectators.  Baranauskas' few cestoids of any wealth are all gladiators, deadly fighters who feast on their dead opponents.  The current Grand Champion of the pits is the five hundred year old shade gladiator called the Rotten King, a supremely skilled swordsman who has worn many different bodies over the course of his career.

   The Hollow Skull playhouse is the largest and most popular playhouse in Baranauskas, known especially for its revenge tragedies.  A huge domed structure converted into a theater, the Hollow Skull attracts the wealthy and the poor alike.  Many spend the day at the fighting pits before visiting the Hollow Skull in the evening, then heading to Velveteen Circus for a night of pleasure.

The Worm-Hive

The grave-spawn district of Baranauskas, the Worm-Hive is a conglomeration of spires and tower-blocks that looms darkly above the seething Skin Markets.  Its many windows are universally shrouded with black curtains during the day, warding off the much-loathed sun while its residents slumber.  The lower levels are dedicated to ghul-bars, a smattering of shops, and cheap honeycombs of housing, each room a narrow cell.  The upper levels are progressively more lavish, and the towers of Worm-Hive are crowned with ornate manses often with attached chapels and courtyards.  A series of covered bridges link the spires together in dense, claustrophobic clusters.

   Large portions of the Worm-Hive remain empty, whole spires given over to dust and cobwebs, though most have long been looted of anything of value.  Squatters and animals have moved in, and one of the spires is rumored to be infected with a cluster of gibbergeists, floating horrors who babble an eerie sing-song jinx incessantly; those who hear this twisted song can be lulled into a trance-like state in which they too may begin to babble, eventually degenerating into gibbergeists themselves.

The Catacombs

The catacombs of Baranauskas are incredibly extensive and largely unexplored, but they are far from uninhabited.  Most of the city's cestoid population and its few leechkin make their homes underground, along with the poorer ghilan and other heliophobic grave-spawn such as shades, eidolons, haunts, and predatory geists.

   The Maggot City's sewer system bleeds into the catacombs in numerous places, and the two are often indistinguishable.  Whole clans of wiry sewer-scavengers or toshers, equipped with lanterns and caged canaries, make a living plundering the sewers of lost valuables and accretions of coin, bones, and metal.  The sewers are hazardous, the air polluted, the tunnels sometimes flooding during the short rainy season; disease and even cave-ins are also major dangers.  In addition, the runoff and other waste pumped into the sewers from Hexwarren is tainted with a number of eldritch substances.  The result is a population of warped, unlikely creatures: quasi-sentient giant rats, monstrous fish-like things, and other, less recognizable beasts.

   There are older, stranger things deep in the bowels of the city.  Rumors persist of shrines dedicated to Hirud dating back to the times of the cestoid Imperium; of rogue demons and renegade servitors, gruesome sigil-scribed horrors; of tribal, bloodthirsty men, skinchangers capable of transforming themselves into bats or hyenas or huge spiders.

The Shanties

In contrast with the grim stone structures of the city proper, the shanties of Baranauskas are built of mud, wood, adobe, and brick, huddling close to the towering stone walls.  The shanties are low, unplanned, and filthy, consisting mostly of shacks, cheap alehouses and brothels, tanneries, and second rate shops.  Freelance tomb raiders and merchants deal here instead of the city proper, and the few black-market items banned in Baranauskas itself can sometimes be found here.

Li'l something I cooked up this morning.

(http://b.imagehost.org/0288/Leechkin.jpg) (http://b.imagehost.org/download/0288/Leechkin.bmp)

[spoiler=OR...](http://b.imagehost.org/0323/Leechkin_B_W.jpg) (http://b.imagehost.org/download/0323/Leechkin_B_W.bmp)[/spoiler]

That's fantastic!

[ooc]HOLY CRAP!  That's awesome - just as I envisaged them.  I don't know if you were tapping into the same visual reference I was thinking of - the Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth - but that's perfect!  I'm really flattered.[/ooc]

I really like this.  Reminds me of better days here, when setting material was flooding the boards and excitement at every one filed me with every new post.  Keep it up, and I'll be impressed.

It goes without saying that I really enjoy this effort. I am reminded of early GRRM and the poster Deadone in addition to the other references named.

I want to hear rumours of what lies beyond the Slaughter Lands.

Quote from: Rose Of MontagueReminds me of better days here, when setting material was flooding the boards and excitement at every one filed me with every new post.

Not to mention, those were days when those with artistic skills were drawing concepts for other people, writing music for settings, and generally helping their fellow campaign builders out.

[/off topic]

[ic=Mimesis]Lichens writhed through its frame, colonizing its limbs, its crevices.  Rust gnawed at exposed parts.  It picked its way towards them with spidery marionette motion, one spindly limb at a time.  With almost avian movements it cocked its head from side to side, unblinking eyes gleaming.  It scuttled into the circle of flickering gaslight.

The automaton wore a ghastly mask of dirt-smeared skin stretched over its visage, its metal cheekbones poking through the scrap of flesh, its beady optics '" the glossy black of an insect's '" staring out from rents streaked with scabrous tears.  The rest of its body was similarly garbed, its elongated limbs and torso fit with a flayed suit, a demented parody of the human form.  Through the inevitable tears and rips, most prominent about the thing's joints, its brass and iron exoskeleton was visible; beneath the shredded outer layer inner mechanisms clicked and chittered with clockwork vitality.  There was something pathetic about the hideous flesh-rags of the automaton, something tragic in its failed imitation, its wretched longing, its ultimate and unavoidable numbness.  For a moment a glimmer of melancholy '" alienated, desperate, human '" flickered in the black depths of its eyes, the ephemeral suggestion of a soul.[/ic]

This is one of the best settings to surface on the CBG in a long time.

Eidolons

Consumed by satyriasis, the insatiable incubi known as eidolons are a cambion race, an all-male breed of grave-spawn with the ability to drain youth and vitality in order to rejuvenate their physical bodies.  Narcissistic in the extreme, eidolons are tall, exquisitely handsome men with bloodless, alabaster complexions, green eyes, and shimmering black hair (frequently worn very long) that becomes grey and eventually white if the eidolon fails to feed.  Sunlight does not destroy them but it does strip them of their glamer, revealing their true bodies '" twisted, malformed old men bloated with tumorous growths '" and dispelling the aura of hypersexuality they usually emanate.

   One of the few grave-spawn races regarded with near universal loathing, eidolons lead clandestine lives, blending in with the quick, often in the upper levels of mortal hierarchy.  Having infiltrated human society eidolons begin to feed on young men and women in order to sustain themselves.  Most are hundreds of years old, their true manifestations resembling walking corpses.  To forestall deterioration eidolons seduce beautiful youths and feed off their desire, beauty, and vitality through copulation.  In doing so, eidolons physically age their victims several years while restoring their own youth in the process.  Insufferably vain, eidolons find fresh prey frequently, lest their own beauty begin to ebb; eidolons who '" perish the thought '" discover silver hairs in their usually immaculate black manes immediately seek out a new victim, often coupling with the unfortunate individual until they are little more than a desiccated husk.  While rape can suffice to regenerate an eidolon's glamer, they consider the act vulgar and unsophisticated in the extreme.

   Eidolons are aesthetes with a great appreciation for beauty.  Sadistic, self-serving sociopaths without conscience, they are adept at feigning passionate love for their prey and are usually highly accomplished poets, artists, or musicians, as well as being superb conversationalists and beings with exceptional taste for the finer things in life.  Eidolons reproduce by impregnating human women, siring male stillborn children who frequently kill their mothers during birth, then revivify as newly spawned eidolons.

I really love your writing style.  I lose myself in the richness of your words and find myself pulled into this world you are painting.  I have to say that the ony thing that seemed out of place to me was your first sentence "The Twilight Cities are incredibly ancient: even the youngest is built on ruins many millennia old." ... but maybe I'm just thinking differently... seems as if the *oldest* should have been built on ruins many millennia old.

As a setting, the way that you have richly woven the macabre scenes, it seems as if any kind of game mechanics would ruin it.  So, I am avoiding that and enjoying the steady portrayal of your vision...

[ooc]Thanks for the praise, Wudiil.  The line about millennia-old ruins is intentional.  I'm trying to invoke a "dying earth," atmosphere to some extent, which hinges around the premise of a ridiculously ancient world.  Think about cities like Rome or Jerusalem or Baghdad - these are already several thousand years old, and barring atomic catastrophe or something similar, they'll probably still be around in one form or another in another thousand years.  The cities are built on ruins: most of the buildings themselves aren't actually that old, but a whole palimpsest of older civilizations are stacked up in progressively eroded layers beneath the present structures, like ancient Troy.

I may eventually get around to translating the setting into mechanical terms, but I'm not sure what system would suit it best.  I just bought 4e, but True 20, FUDGE, or something else entirely might well be better suited to portraying the world.  For now though I'm going to post only fluff, as its really the aspect of world-building that I'm most interested in.

Coming soon are the fetch and the Red Rains.[/ooc]

The Fetch

At the end of the epoch known as the Aeon of Dust (dubbed The Desiccation by some historians) the Cadaverous Earth was inundated with an enormous flood called the Red Ravishing, a cataclysm whose origins and details are long lost but whose echoes still reverberate in the present.  Ushering in the current era, the Aeon of Putrefaction (or The Festering), the Red Ravishing was essentially a more pervasive and persistent incarnation of the Red Rains which still plague the world today, particularly in the Slaughter-lands: a downpour not of water but of a crimson liquid with at least the appearance of blood.  The Red Ravishing caused more than mere flooding, however '" it gave birth to the sinister creatures called the fetch.

   The fetch, or murderfolk, are the malevolent husks of those who drink the Red Rain.  Even a single drop, if imbibed, will provoke the transformation, an invisible and poorly understood process in which the victim's mind becomes corrupted, unhinged in some radical and almost invariably permanent fashion.  The Red Rain destroys any feelings of remorse, pity, kinship, love, affection, or conscience: it eradicates morality, obliterates the super-ego, unchains the inhibitions, and plunges the consciousness into a state of distortion, psychosis, and intense hatred for everyone around them.  Despite this fundamental psychic disordering, however, the fetch are not possessed by all-encompassing rage, at least not at first.  Although filled with dreadful sadistic hunger, the fetch are still fundamentally the same individuals they always were, and can speak, plan, and bide their time until opportunity presents itself.  They will 'masquerade' as their former selves, lulling their companions into a false sense of security and then turning on them when they least expect, slowly and torturously killing all living beings they can find while grinning with horrific pleasure.

   The fetch are not grave-spawn (and indeed some grave-spawn and other creatures with psychic models intrinsically different than a human's are unaffected by the Red Rain); as such, they are subject to the same frailties and vulnerabilities previous to their metamorphosis.  Most fetch in the Slaughter-lands persist only a short while after the Rain that created them; after murdering their companions and any other living creatures nearby they become roving monstrosities, degenerating into ravenous, snarling killers and eventually resorting to auto-cannibalism and subsequent death by infection, blood-loss, or starvation.

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Eldritch Theory

Witchcraft is the practice of imbuing a sigil, phrase, or other symbol with arcane power.  Words, glyphs, and incantations have no power in and of themselves: were I to simply scrawl the apotropaic Sigil of Arcane Abhorrence on my door, I would not ward off malignant eldritch creatures and spells, as that mark is intended.  Rather, a witch must empower or infuse his or her symbols with psychic potency, interpreting the symbol and understanding it as an object of artifice, a semiotic shadow '" giving the symbol meaning.  This interpretive or critical act is at the core of witchcraft, thus allowing the shamanism of the leechkin, the ritualism of the hagmen, the sigil system of fleshcraft, the ornate mysticism of the lilix, the baroque incantatory nigromancy of Moroi, and other forms of arcana to all coexist: while all of these 'competing' systems utilize different symbols, they rely on the same mechanism to imbue those symbols with power.

The process '" sometimes dubbed 'invocation' in technical terms '" requires the mind to saturate itself in the chaotic juices of the collective unconscious, a kind of aether-realm from which all images emerge. The more complex the spell, the deeper the witch must penetrate this mindscape, and such sojourns are not without difficulties and hazards.  Only those with strong psychic potential who have trained their minds to withstand the whirling entropy of the aether can draw on it to cast the more powerful or intricate spells; those who attempt to channel eldritch energy into a sigil or phrase who lack the proper control or have taxed their abilities too vigorously may succumb to the nightmarish intoxications of the aether and lose their individual coherency.  These wretched souls become mad, dangerous things, channeling raw numina haphazardly.

Nectar

The puissant sap of the Elder Trees of Moroi quickens and catalyses invocation by breaking down barriers between the individual mind and the collective unconscious, allowing a witch to tap into the aether with much greater facility.  The sap itself, known as nectar or ichor, takes the form of a pale golden serum, and is usually injected.  It is highly addictive and can cause hallucinations, euphoria, night-terrors, and other side effects as well as supercharging a witch with numina.  Prolonged use, however, can eventually wear down all distinctions between an individual's mind and the aether, plunging the user into madness.

   It has been speculated by arcane scholars that the dementia epidemics that contributed to the decline of Moroi during the middle of the Aeon of Dust may have been linked to the overuse of nectar.  The vast number of active witches in the city at the time may have created a cloud of psychic effluvia as a result of their mass channeling and invocation, resulting in the bouts of madness and dysfunction that debilitated the once-great city-state.  Although evidence is inconclusive, it has also been suggested that the Suppuration itself is in fact a larger-scale symptom of centuries of invocation, a kind of psychic bleed as the collective unconscious oozes into the material world '" in other words, the practice of witchcraft may have worn away at the fabric between realities, perforating the aether and allowing it to intrude onto the physical.

Hexes

Hexes are spells that can be invoked through incantation.  Hexes can transform the caster or someone else, curse, augment, heal, or harm the witch or another individual, or evoke some effect on the environment.  Common battle-hexes include Eldred's Excellent Exsanguination (which boils the target's blood), Catskull's Green Corruption (which manifests a voracious fungus that devours the target from the inside out, then uses them as a grisly, mushroom-covered thrall), Vorl's Black Dismemberment (which causes loss of limb), Morith's Nine Mortifications (a series of hexes that can numb, paralyze, maim, or cause complete muscle death), and the anonymous Withering Gaze (which hexes the eyes of the witch so that his or her stare has a desiccating effect, turning opponents to dust).  Hexes can also be employed in order to graft new limbs or flesh.

Glyphs

Also called sigils or wards, glyphs are ideograms physically inscribed on some surface, be it wood, stone, paper, metal, glass, bone, flesh (sometimes called a 'flesh-hex'), or a similar substance.  They tend to express permanent effects rather than ephemeral eldritch events.  For example, a hex might invoke a pair of leathery bat-wings or a gout of eldritch flame, but a glyph might bind a rogue shadow elemental into a lead phylactery, ward against poisons and toxins, or blind anyone who read it.  They are instrumental in controlling otherwise dangerous entities such as demons.  Glyphs of this sort are most commonly used in fleshcraft to bind spirits into dead flesh, revivifying it (for example, the servitors and Watchdogs of Baranauskas), or in diabolism to protect a witch from a demon.  The magisters of Skein utilize silver collars etched with tiny sigils to keep fully manifested demons as pets, bodyguards, and servants: such bound demons are called homunculi.

Very cool writeup on witchcraft.  I was watching TV last night and ran across a show about mushrooms.  I learned something interesting which I thought I would pass on as it seems like it would fit well... There is a mushroom in Russia (it's a bright red mushroom with white spots on it... funny enough, looks like the mushrooms that little garden gnomes sometimes hold).  Anyway, it has three active substances... two are psychoactive and another is slightly poisonous.  The shaman would eat the mushroom.  His liver (or maybe it was his kidney) would filter out the toxic substance and his disciples/apprentices would drink his urine so that they could get the benefits of the psychoactive substances without the ill effects of the toxins... just thought that was cool. :)  

[ic=Hubris]The sickly sky above Lophius glowered and spat, swollen rainclouds fit to burst, threatening to engulf the disjointed streets with a torrential downpour.  The canals were already flooding, the mossy bridges of granite and marble lapped at by the murky waters, the feet of their decorative statues immersed.  Out over the Sallow Seas distant thunder cackled, promising a storm.  No ships would sail from the docks of Bile-Mire or Chainwater tonight, lest they join the wooden carcasses in the Driftwood District.

   The Gland River battered the pillars of the Bridge of Bravoes, swirling about the huge statues supporting the ancient bridge before rushing out to the open sea.  In the midst of the worsening downpour two men regarded each other while the crowds behind them jeered and shouted, humans shivering in the rain, hagmen turning their greenish faces upwards, exulting, black-clad ghilan mute and motionless.

   'Draw steel, wormfood,' Iccelus sneered.  The graftpunk moved with predatory grace, brandishing the glyph-etched rapier Red Laughter and an evil-looking dagger, crooked backwards in his off-hand.  He twirled the curved knife and snarled taunts at his opponent.  'Corpse-fucker.  Halfman.  You should scuttle off to Bad-Fen where you belong, or go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.'  There were cheers from the crowd.  The young man's black eyes flashed as he walked forwards, blade held out before him, grafted muscles taut beneath tattooed flesh.  'You heard me.  Haul your maggoty arse off or I'll send you back to the pit what spawned you.'

   The other figure said nothing but favoured the youth with a sharp-toothed and yellowed grin.  He removed his tinted spectacles and drew his sword from its scabbard with deliberate slowness, rasping the blade against the tough manskin sheath and assuming a creeping sidelong stance.  A broad-brimmed black hat slouched across his features, shading his face and warding off the rain and the hateful sun; drops of water beaded on his brown leather outfit and pattered off the sewn-in steel disks.  Behind the pale fighter were more of his ilk '" gray-skinned, dour spectators with mocking amber eyes.

   Iccelus' shaved head gleamed wetly.  His many earrings jangled as he advanced, drunk with rage and fear.  With a wordless howl he hurled his dagger; it spun through the air in a silvery arc, thudded into the living man's adversary.  The ghul wrenched it from his chest with a smirk and licked the naked blade clean.

   'Thrice-damned unman freak!'  Iccelus' face contorted with a paroxysm of raw hate.  He danced forward and lunged in a spasm of grafted muscle, his augmented calves writhing.  Red Laughter darted out, impossibly fast, bathed in a crimson aura of eldritch energy '" and then spun from its wielder's grasp, knocked aside by the ghul's own blade.  It clattered on the flagstones of the bridge and shattered, the demoniac spirit bound within dissipating in a brief ghost of brimstone smoke.  Its sigils, previously a blazing red, grew dull.

   There was a shimmering blur as the grave-spawn duellist riposted, and Iccelus' shout of frustration turned to a choked gasp.  He clawed at the sword now skewering his throat, gurgling; blood dribbled from his mouth.  The ghul swordsman chuckled and wrenched his sword from the graftpunk's neck.  Iccelus fell to the ground and lay still, the pool of blood spreading beneath him already being washed away by the rain.  The crowd's yells died with the youth.  They began to back away with suddenly fearful looks.

   'Ah, the heady confidence of the young and the living,' the ghul rasped, his voice like snakeskin.  He twitched his head and two of his men walked forward, seizing Iccelus' body by the ankles.  'Dinner's on me tonight, boys.'
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The Goremother

The oneiroi called the Goremother '" sometimes called Mother Carrion '" is a grotesque amalgamation of woman and oversized crow.  Tall and statuesque with a taut, scarred body (invariably unclothed) the Goremother is usually hunched over when on the ground,  a tangled mane of long, black, knotted hair hanging round her face in ragged clumps.  Her face has a savage beauty to it; her eyes are huge, black, and idiotic, and her full lips are usually smeared with blood, dribbling down over her neck and breasts.  In place of arms the Goremother has enormous wings as of a crow or raven with filthy, matted feathers.  She often uses these wings as a kind of cloak when she isn't flying.

   Born of the Suppuration, the Goremother now hunts in the Slouching-devil Mountains and the badlands to the south.  She constantly maintains a brood of monstrous progeny, a race of huge crows with human faces, much despised by the people of Skein; these she spawns by first coupling with mortal men, captive prey she mates with before devouring.  Her squawking offspring clamour incessantly for food, and so the Goremother spends most of her time hunting.  Usually she selects mountainous goats or other animals, but she particularly prizes human meat.  Whatever her prey, the Goremother will usually fly high above the ground in search of victims before swooping down with a hideous wail and consuming them on the spot.  Her belly glutted with a gross surfeit of food, the Goremother then returns to her eyrie in the mountains.  To appease her whining, cacophonous children she retches up her half-digested last meal into their open mouths.

   Unlike some oneiroi the Goremother is not a highly intelligent creature, though she compensates with a great deal of predatory cunning and intuition.  She cannot speak more than a few words, and these she utters rarely '" usually they are instructions and threats to her mates or cooing endearments she whispers to her brood, though she can also sing mellifluously, an ability she uses to lure some victims close to her.  Once grown to maturity her harpy-crow children abandon their progenitor, haunting the hills and passes of the Slouching-devil Mountains and surrounds, subsisting principally on carrion but occasionally harassing travelers and prospectors.

Though some foolish hunters and adventurers have attempted to slay the Goremother, all have fallen before her considerable power.  It is said that she can be mesmerized by mirrors or brightly shining objects and slain by penetrating her heart with a silver arrow fletched with one of the feathers of her own children.

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The Teeth

Most of old Lophius is submerged, stone corridors flooded, vaults and halls overgrown with barnacles and seaweed, temples and tombs and marketplaces haunted by lampreys, cuttlefish, and eels.  Only a few daring submariners, reckless men and women clad in steam-sealed suits and accompanied by hagmen guides, brave the treacherous underwater city, returning to the surface with briny treasures; the rest of Lophius' residents dwell on the Teeth, seven protrusions of rock and architecture which form the canal-ridden islands on which the new city is built.  The islands are named the Talon, Crucible, the Viper's Head, Crooked-Finger, Hunger Rock, Greenfang, and Murmur Isle.  The gangs of Lophius are not criminal per se: rather, they represent rough factions controlling a given section of the city through force and fear, protecting the district but extracting taxes from their citizenry as well.  Only Shellhome and parts of Crucible, Hunger Rock, and Murmur Isle are free from their presence.

Shellhome

The only district not located on an island, Shellhome is a suburban shantytown, a spatter of buildings clustered round the Brooding Bridge that leads to the Vespergate district on Greenfang.  Here fishermen lower wicker cages into the greenish waters, while their wives prepare meals of crayfish or terrapin in houses formed from the empty shells of some extinct lineage of colossal snails or nautilus.

Greenfang

The large island of Greenfang is crisscrossed with canals, and allows access to the rest of Lophius via three prominent bridges (not including the Brooding Bridge connecting Lophius to the mainland): the Iron Bridge (to Crucible's Foundries), Devil's Arch (to the Viper's Head's Coil), and the Bridge of Bravoes (to the Talon).  Water-taxis and gondolas are the predominant form of transportation, as opposed to the rickshaws and carriages prominent elsewhere in Lophius.

Vespergate

Past the Brooding Bridge '" a huge, gargoyle-guarded edifice smeared with grime and covered in moss '" lies Vespergate, the largest district on Greenfang and the entrance to Lophius, City of the Lamprey.  Foggy and crowded, Vespergate is one of the central residential districts of Lophius, principally inhabited by the quick, though leechkin beggars plead for blood and coin in the gutters and various other races can be seen, especially on the central Street of Mists, a winding avenue that runs from the Brooding Bridge to Devil's Arch.

Snailsump

The major hagman ghetto in Lophius is Snailsump, an amphibious district which merges with the Gland River.  Large hatchery towers loom above the communal dwellings and mud baths, while cultists do service to the divine aspects and temple prostitutes moan in the sacred pleasure-houses.  Stairways carved into the sides of canals lead to the underwater portions of the district, which includes the prominent submarine bay where many of Skein's submersibles dock.  The hagmen do not conform to the usual gang structure, rather being ruled by a cadre of elders, most of them religious leaders.

Bad-Fen

The less-moneyed grave-spawn district in Lophius, Bad-Fen is populated by ghilan, shades, and a few other miscellaneous undead not rich enough to afford the clifftop manses of Groanward but neither so poor as to seek refuge in the caves of Skullford on the Talon.  Ghul-bars are common here, and there is a small corpse-bazaar '" nothing close to the Skin Markets of Baranauskas, of course, but a sizeable marketplace nonetheless selling various bits and pieces for food and eldritch purposes.  Leechkin and cestoids (of which there are very few in Lophius) linger in this district as well.

   Most of the buildings are damp and mildewed, with a morbid, eerily quiet atmosphere punctuated only by the muttered half-whispers of ghul speech.  Two gangs contend the district: the grim all-shade gang called the Silent Ghosts '" every member save a handful of 'speakers' has their lips sewn shut '" and the ghilan gang the Devourers run by the so-called Mr. Gray from the ghul-bar The Sepulcher.

Chainwater

Greenfang's major dockland, Chainwater is a murky maze crowded with steamboats from Skein and Crepuscle, grim galleons from Somnambulon, and even the macabre vessels of the lilix, far from their northern berth in Dolmen.  It is comprised principally of warehouses, shipwrights, and offices, but the gang called the Chain-Warders is a major presence here, taking a docking fee from all ships and boats.  They contend with the Silent Ghosts of Bad-Fen and the Ophidians of the Viper's Head looking to expand onto Greenfang for territory.

Crooked-Finger

A tall pinnacle of stone and wood, Crooked-Finger rears up out of the water like some ancient obelisk, a monolithic spire with tiered layers, each a self-contained district.  The tiers bear fanciful names culled from some elder tongue, quite distinct from the usual naming conventions predominate in Lophius.  Built vertically rather than horizontally, Crooked-Finger spirals upwards through a series of stairways and ramps with gates separating the various wards, each marked with that ward's name.  The oldest, largest bridge in Lophius, the Elder Bridge, links Crooked-Finger to the Viper's Head in Serpentside.

Bregm

Bregm is an incredibly important district in Lophius, and the bottom tier of Crooked-Finger.  It contains the city's largest slave market, one of the cornerstones of the city's economy: captives brought in from raids from the Bluebottle Archipelago, the settlements of the Serrated Coast, the swamplands surrounding Lophius, and elsewhere are bartered in the myriad auction houses of Bregm, sold off by pock-marked and mean-smiled auctioneers to industrial overseers for use in the Foundries or the factory districts of other cities, to captains looking for cheap oarsmen, to leering fops as fancy-boys and girls, or to wealthy merchants as servants.  The gang called the Shacklers hold sway here, keeping a take from every auction house from the lowliest platform selling malformed laborers and old women to the high-scale bidding places where the clientele sip absinthe, madwine, blood, and sherry while eunuch warriors and voluptuous concubines are dearly purchased.

Skaumn

The pleasure district, Skaumn is filled with brothels, drug dens, and bars.  Most of the establishments here cater to the quick '" the majority of ghul-bars can be found on Greenfang in the shabby district of Bad-Fen.  Run by the opportunistic pimp styling himself as the Vermillion Prince, Skaumn is a highly lucrative tier held tenaciously by the Crimson Cloaks, the Prince's gang of red-caped bravoes, foppish knife-fighters and pistoliers.  Unlike the pleasure houses of Per-Bashti, the brothels in Skaumn tend to be cheap and greasy, and the girls and boys who work there are treated poorly.  Nonetheless it is amongst the most popular wards in Lophius, often the first stop for sailors after docking in Chainwater or Bile-Mire.

Pelloch

Casinos and chance-houses of every sort line the winding streets of Pelloch, a profitable tier of Crooked-Finger held by the gang called the Drakes, led by a masked, mysterious woman calling herself Dame Fortune and renowned for her business sense, her velvet dresses, and her two bodyguards, a pair of sleek, androgynous fighters who wield razored war-fans.  Making her base of operations in The Laughing Eye chance-house, Dame Fortune keeps control of Pelloch ruthlessly and enforces strict rules against cheats: her enforcers maintain a very active presence in all establishments in Pelloch, preserving a high standard of fairness, unlike most of the other gambling places in Lophius such as the rough corsair card-halls of Bile-Mire on Crucible.  Pelloch is distinguished by its variety of games as well as by its fairness.  Here one can play games with hexed cards that can curse another player; games with sigil-scribed, multi-faceted dice; games where the board is composed of interlocking clockwork pieces; where the pieces are tiny homunculi, spattering the board with black blood; where players assume elemental positions, playing in partnerships and building chains of cards with names like the Gallows Tree and the Thorn-man; where the loser forfeits fingers or slaves or blood or more arcane properties.  Here are tea-houses where one can play the convoluted game of Imbroglio with ivory pieces, boxing clubs and knife-fighter's circles, and fighting pits where slaves are forced to fight crocodiles, swarms of spiders, or blood-crazed leechkin captured from the swamps (though these arenas do not compare to the pits of Baranauskas' Pulsetown).

Chelke

The alchemist's tier, Chelke is held by a band of cutthroat-scholars called the Sons of the Peacock, witches and nectar-junkies who tattoo themselves with hundreds of colourful eyes.  Here are a smattering of glyph parlors and other tattooists, as well as booksellers and herbalists.  Most prominent are the nectar-dealers from Moroi, the alchemical shops, and the laboratories where various eldritch and technical thinkers live and work, making Chelke something of an intellectual's quarter.

The Viper's Head

The gang known as the Ophidians rule the Viper's Head, human toughs with scaly tattoos and sharpened teeth, led by the gorgon Nyssa and her lieutenant Shaar-Illys.  As human Ophidians rise in rank they undergo a series of ritual mutilations.  First they are shaved bald and receive full-body tattoos resembling snake scales; then their tongues are split, forking like serpents'; next their teeth are sharpened into fangs; and finally their ears are removed.  The city's few naghini are almost all members of the gang.

Serpentside

Headquarters of the Ophidians, Serpentside is best known for its venom markets which deal in poisons and combat drugs.  Here casual hitmen and bravoes looking for the edge in a duel can purchase vials of demon-blood, shadowmilk harvested from tenebrals, madwine, 'thrum' from the Bluebottle Archipelago, jabber, mescaline, hundreds of snake venoms, and even bottles of the Red Rain. Clandestine sales of ichor are also conducted in Serpentside, daring the considerable wrath of the Resin Merchants.

The Coil

Renowned for its eateries, the Coil is accessible from Greenfang across Devil's Arch.  In the lavish and often expensive restaurants of the Coil one can sup on turtle soup, caviars, eel or lamprey pies, fried squid, raw oysters, and a hundred different types of fish, to name a few of the plethora of dishes to try.  The Coil is the largest commercial district in Lophius outside of Mandrake Market: a huge fish market does business here, hawkers selling the daily catches of Snailsump and Shellhome.

Crucible

The market island, Crucible is a broad, flat expanse dominated by the Foundries to the south and Mandrake Market to the north and east with the unkempt dockland called Bile-Mire along its western edge.  It is connected to Greenfang, Hunger Rock, and Murmur Isle to the south, west, and north respectively, and is one of the few islands without a major gang presence.

The Foundries

The principle industrial district of Lophius, the Foundries are a series of hulking factories and smaller workshops, seething with the smoldering orange glow of furnaces, clotting the air with thick black smoke.  Also serving as the gateway to Crucible from Greenfang (in Bad-Fen) via Iron Bridge, an ugly modern construction of girders and wrought iron constantly teeming with carriages and caravans, the Foundries are owned by merchant consortiums with links to the cartels of Baranauskas and the vicious guilds of Crepuscle.

Bile-Mire

A ragged dock district, Bile-Mire consists of a series of large wharves jetties along the western side of Crucible, lined with seedy waterfront taverns and bloated warehouses.  Not for accident is Lophius called the Corsair's City: pirates and reavers of every clan and fleet dock regularly in Bile-Mire in between raids along the Serrated Coast, selling off slaves and treasure before returning to their bases in the Sallow Seas or the Fevered Ocean, hidden fortresses nestled amongst the darkness-shrouded Midnight Isles or the deadly maze of the Razor-Chain.

Mandrake Market

The central commercial district of Lophius is Mandrake Market, an eclectic confusion of winding streets and booths, with various streets dedicated to certain products '" food, textiles, weaponry, jewelry, books, and countless other goods.  No one gang holds sway here, abiding instead by the loosely defined principles of Market Truce '" there is no bloodshed in the market, and the well-heeled mercenary warriors who guard the streets will make swift work of offenders.

The Talon

Named for the huge ivory obelisk at its center in the district of Per-Bashti, the Talon is a medium-sized island noted for its glassworks and its flea-bitten residential district of Skullford.  The obelisk was probably once the tusk or claw of a great beast, though the rest of the creature is absent; carved into its white bulk are numerous winding corridors and chambers.

Shardwall

The glassblower's district, Shardwall is contended by the equally brutal Argentines and Tainsiders, a pair of gangs who vie for control of the ward and thus the right to collect protection money from the profitable tradesmen of Shardwall.  Here one can purchase mirrors, silverware, pots, lamps, and all other sorts of glassware, including intricately crafted glass throwing knives and other weapons, fragile but deadly.

Per-Bashti

Headquarters of the Iron Tygers, Per-Bashti is a high class pleasure district quite distinct from the seedy brothel-ward of Skaumn on Crooked-Finger.  The Iron Tygers are a matriarchal gang based in the Talon itself.  Tattooing themselves with stripes, spots, and other markings and implanting barbed whiskers in their faces, the Tygers are loyal to the ex-corsair Mistress Jade.  The women who work the establishments of Per-Bashti are well compensated profession courtesans protected from abuse by the Tygers, and the district has become something of an enclave for battered women.

Skullford

The Bridge of Bravoes, infamous across the Cadaverous Earth as a notorious dueling site, links the Skullford to Greenfang via Chainwater.  A plague-ridden sprawl of shacks, tenements, and dilapidated housing, Skullford is the dwelling place of the city's destitute.  Built atop barnacle-studded cliffs, Skullford is riddled with tunnels and catacombs, an intricate cave-system that was once a network of barrows, with individual tombs and entranceways carved into the cliffside and accessible via roughly hewn stone steps.  Those who do not live in the rickety structures of Skullford itself reside in these caves, alongside the city's impoverished grave-spawn, penniless creatures who cannot afford to dwell in Groanward or even the rougher district of Bad-Fen.  Some of these entities are amongst the less wholesome grave-spawn: thinning eidolons with shrunken faces and emaciated ghilan cutthroats.  There are also rumors of underwater tunnels through which daggols and other deep-dwellers are said to use to infiltrate the city for their own sinister ends.

Murmur Isle

A medium-sized island to the far north of Lophius, Murmur Isle is connected only to Crucible.  It contains three very important areas: the Driftwood District, the religious quarter of the City of the Lamprey and site of major pilgrimage, Gloomwell, location of the House of Shadows, and Groanward, the cliffside residential district of the city's grave-spawn.

The Driftwood District

Perhaps the most famous district in Lophius, the Driftwood District is accessible from Crucible's Mandrake Market via the Whisperbridge, a very long, very ornate bridge lit with candles at night by robed acolytes.  Named for its idiosyncratic architecture, the buildings in the Driftwood District are piecemeal conglomerations of scrap wood and metal thrown seemingly at random onto the skeletons of sunken ships, pulled from the depths and interred on the south side of Murmur Isle.  In contrast with the hubbub of nearby Mandrake Market, the Driftwood District is filled with mystic moans, men and women babbling in tongues, and ceremonial chants.  Stone idols pulled from the muck of the swamps or rescued from the briny depths are all interred in the wooden wasteland of the Driftwood District, each with their own candle-lit shrines attended by tiny priesthoods.  The District is a highly competitive environment in which the various micro-congregations contend for worshippers and thus tithes and donations.  Currently the most popular deities in the Driftwood District include the insectoid god called the Divine Mantis (attended by a mantid priest, of course) aboard the good ship Belligerence, the entity referred to as 'Waadjat' aboard the Mastication, and the turtle-god Draukyr aboard the Umbrageous Archon.

Gloomwell

Gloomwell is built at the base of the Black Stair, a small, narrow district between the rickety chaos of the Driftwood District and the macabre pomposity of Groanward.  Mostly consisting of housing for clergy and petitioners in the Driftwood District, Gloomwell is distinguished by the House of Shadows, a huge and imposing edifice carved from the obsidian cliffs atop which Groanward perches.  Presenting a menacing black façade, the House of Shadows is built mostly into the obsidian itself, consisting of a series of windowless corridors and cells.  It serves as the guildhouse of the Shroud, an organization of professional, deadly assassins who operate openly in Lophius.  Expensive in the extreme, the Shroud maintains a roster of expert killers, including the rogue lilix courtier Xaverius Mazzari, the notorious shade assassin known only as Quiescence, and the quick twin brothers Gaspar and Vetruvion.  Known only to induct a select few members, the Shroud are major power-brokers in Lophius and have been known to step into the tumult of shifting allegiances and betrayals if any one faction seizes too much control.  Their origins are highly secret, but rumors persist of demonic or grave-spawn founders, or that the Shroud are a cult dedicated to a death god, a twisted aspect of the goddess Striga, or a daeva of annihilation.

Groanward

The district of the dead, Groanward is where the city's wealthier ghilan, shades, and other grave-spawn tend to congregate.  It is a somber district along the north side of Murmur Isle with austere stone houses overlooking the river and the Sallow Seas beyond, rambling manses and baroque façades built atop huge slabs of obsidian, battered with spray.  The Black Stair, a winding path cut into this foundation, leads up from the ramshackle Driftwood District and the eerie streets of Gloomwell below; the chants, choruses, and babbling voices gradually grow mute as one climbs the Black Stair into darkness '" the grave-spawn need no light to see by and so the streets are perpetually dim.  Though there are a few shops and restaurants here catering to grave-spawn most of the ghul-bars in Lophius are located in Bad-Fen on Greenfang and the Skaumn tier of Crooked-Finger.  There is also a large cathedral in Groanward dedicated to the star-gods.

Hunger Rock

Hunger Rock is the smallest of the Teeth, and doesn't have any distinct districts; its most salient feature is its colossal lighthouse, now dimmed and dark.  Once a bright beacon lighting the way to Lophius, the lighthouse has fallen into disuse due to the presence of a spirit dubbed the Ravener, possibly some variety of swamp-demon that has chosen to haunt the island for its own incomprehensible reasons.

Gobble and Slake

Oneiroi spawned of the Suppuration, Gobble and Slake are a pair of incestuous twin lovers and wandering horrors who plague the Twilight Cities, having strayed across the Slaughter-lands to better satiate their voracious appetites.  Gobble is female, Slake male; both are humanoid creatures and in fact resemble normal humans very closely, save when about to feed.

   Gobble appears as a tall, vivacious woman with violet, doe-like eyes, flushed creamy skin, buxom charms, and curly auburn hair.  She habitually wears a choker of some sort, usually a silk scarf bound round her neck: this disguises huge stretch marks on her throat.  Gobble can dislocate her jaw like a serpent, revealing a wolfish maw complete with huge fangs, a lolling purple tongue, and breath that reeks of dead flesh.  She possesses long, envenomed talons which paralyze her victims.

   Slake is very similar to his sister, though gaunter and less ruddy, with a handsome porcelain complexion and dark red hair and eyes.  His lips are stained dark crimson, standing out against his sharp white face, and he moves his thin limbs like those of a praying mantis or hunting spider.  When the feed is upon him he opens his mouth to reveal a cartilaginous proboscis juddering like an obscene tongue from his head, which he uses to penetrate his prey and drain their blood.

   Gobble and Slake are highly sophisticated entities and often pose as courtesans or society folk.  They delight in mesmerizing their prey with their beauty, independent of one another, then bringing their victims back to an agreed-on meeting place, at which time they exchange their conquests as morbid gifts.  Other times they share their food: Slake only sucks blood, while Gobble prizes raw meat, devouring those first drained by Slake.

[ooc]Apologies if this thread is getting a bit disorganized; I'm not really adhering to any format, just posting things as I write them.  What do people think of the cities themselves so far?  Do they adequately expand on the memes or synopses of the first post?

Oh, and cool factual tidbit, Wudiil.[/ooc]

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Beyond the moribund Twilight Cities, those last and lonely bastions of civilization persisting with idiot tenacity in this necrotic world, lie the yawning wilds of the Slaughter-lands, vast beyond all measure, a variegated waste peopled with nightmares and corpses, demons and inhuman things, bestial terrors and bastard gods and raving wraiths without names.  From the queasy rupture of the Suppuration to the stony husks of the Hecatomb Cities to the unhallowed battlefields of Etiolation the Slaughter-lands are thick with the dead, the alien, and the un-living.  On the fissured obsidian plains of the Shadowglass Steppes vitreous elementals battle clannish beings of clay and steam; lonely demons wander the Shatters, brooding amidst the shards of forgotten empires and pining for their Hells; bloodthirsty fetch and shambling haunts, the hungry grave-spawn of the Slaughter-lands, lurk in the corridors of ruined palaces or hunt along the stygian waters of Lesion Sea.

   Yet for all their deadliness the Slaughter-lands are not without their riches.  The iron chests of once-terrible colossi echo with the beats of ingenious eldritch heart-engines.  The mythic library of Gloam-Tor is said to hold within its near-endless archives arcane secrets and tomes of power written by the magi of elder aeons, though only accessible to those who bypass the tower's possessed clockwork guardians.  The skeletal commanders of now-broken armies piled in irreverent heaps still clutch runeswords and stranger weapons in their bony hands.  Glyph-scribed coins, sigil-stones, hexed relics, and mountains of jewels clot the treasure vaults of mummified emperors.

   Daily the plunderers come, the scavenger bands, ragtag parties armed with blades and bows and rude guns, eyes gleaming with greed.  Some stick to the fringe within sight of their sprawling homes, picking through the detritus left by less thorough looters.  Others are more adventurous, leading caravans into the deep waste, expeditions bristling with charms and weaponry.  The Robber Guildsmen of Baranauskas are the best organized, but there are many others.  Gentlemen-adventurers of the Lords Revenant with zombie retinues set out from Somnambulon, contending with their rival Houses for the strangest or most powerful treasures.  Lilix males seek the favor of their matriarchs, driving subhuman slaves mewling in the unfamiliar sun before them into Barrow Scrub and the icy northern deserts to plumb frozen temples and tombs.  Hunters from Skein seek to capture rogue demons, returning to the Clockwork City with iron cages containing otherworldly monsters.  Freelancers aggregate in Crepuscle, Moroi, and Lophius, haphazard mercenary groups of quick, ghilan, hagmen, and half a hundred others.

Dour Erg

The largest single region of the Slaughter-lands, Dour Erg is a hard-baked, mean-spirited desert full of desiccated ghost-towns, angry haunts, and clutches of the fetch, or murderfolk.  Moistureless save for the dubious inseminations of the Red Rain, Dour Erg is an abandoned land given over to grave-spawn and empty buildings.  This is a place of blurred shadows, dust, and haze, interrupted infrequently by a tombstone or a monolith or a meeting with some surreal creature.  Gloam-Tor thrusts itself up from the cracked earth somewhere in Dour Erg, as do the ruins of Yutteril, Vertegrazze, and Scrutatos.

   One might walk the streets of one of Dour Erg's many little ruins and stumble across an eyeless woman with a swarm of lampreys for her mouth or a pair of faceless children whose hands are crab's claws or a headless man with a mouth gaping hungrily on his belly '" oneiroi who've stumbled across the Slaughter-lands from the far-off Suppuration.  Or perhaps one might encounter the husk-demon Zaa-Bul, a sentient swarm of maggots and flies inhabiting the bloated shell of a corpse; or the Muttering One, many-mouthed and perpetually cursing; or a nest of cacklegeists, grave-spawn with tongues shriveled and raw from ceaseless laughter.  There are things that look like men or might claim to be men lurking in the shadows of low dunes or broken buildings, eidolons and fetch and wild ghilan.  There are a few of the quick here, genuinely, nomads and barbarians grown leathered and weather-beaten by the bloated sun, but these people are elusive and unfriendly.

The Hecatomb Cities

In the deep waste of the Slaughter-lands are the so-called Hecatomb Cities: ruined metropolises that have been burnt nearly to the ground.  Once proud capitols of world-spanning empires now stand empty, their citadels scorched, their courtyards charred and their avenues strewn with ashes and blackened bones.  They lie to the east of Etiolation, south of the Shatters but north of Screamwood and Lesion Sea.

   Unlike the other ruins dotting the Slaughter-lands, brought down by disasters or the whimpering depredations of history, the Hecatomb Cities were destroyed quite deliberately some time in the very distant past as mass-sacrifices, a great holocaust whose ultimate purpose has been lost.  Some suggest the sacrifice was an appeasement to black and insatiable gods, others that it formed part of some incomprehensible ritual.  A very few speak in whispers of the Fettering and its unspeakable cost.  Whatever the cause, the Hecatomb Cities were burnt with their citizenry trapped inside them, pharmakoi in a grandiose and utterly horrific orgy of flame and destruction.

   Now only fuliginous smears remain: even the names of the cities have been eradicated.  Yet despite the thoroughness of their annihilation, the Hecatomb Cities still harbor a few glints of treasure.  Brave scavengers occasionally enter the Cities in search of these glimmers, indestructible relics that withstood the firestorms and the toll of millennia.  Few reemerge '" most are claimed by the Cities, or something that now dwells within them'¦

The Shatters

A rust-red desert of dead machines and wandering terrors, the Shatters can be found north and east of Etiolation, in the deep waste.  The huge automata called the Behemoths slumber in the Shatters, their limbs broken, immensely prolix clockwork brains inert.  Engines of mass destruction said to have been used in the Membrane Wars, the Behemoths are incredibly ornate constructs complete with balconies, living quarters for crew, barracks, armouries, and a hundred other chambers.  They carried whole armies into battle while laying into enemy forces with their titanic guns, huge shoulder and chest-mounted cannons.  Now they molder, their baroque armour mottled with rust, their furnaces ashen.  Generations of scavengers have picked several clean, leaving only huge steel skeletons; others are more intact.  There are other machines half-buried in the Shatters, along with the twin ruined cities of Cullys and Suchol - sister-cities of bronze and chrome tumored with verdigris, their walls collapsed, machine gods broken or insane.  Berserk automata, swarms of the fetch, and a handful of bitter demons call these cities home, fallen places of smashed cogs and glyph-graved monoliths and maniacal deities of brass and steam, grown twisted and senile in the lightless gloom of the now-deserted temples.

   Scoured by the Red Rain, the Shatters' few human inhabitants are either infected by the Rain or brutal barbarians, nomadic savages who strip the ruins of valuables and revere the Behemoths as the Dead Gods of the waste.

Etiolation

The great gray battlefield known as Etiolation is many miles wide, a huge swathe of the Slaughter-lands drained of all vitality.  Depleted even of colour, Etiolation is a mute, hazy graveyard heaped with countless bodies, all of them perfectly preserved '" no insect, maggot, fungus, or vegetation lives in the silent barrenness, the plant-life that once thrived in the region blackened and lifeless.  The only creatures that stir are scavengers and bodysnatchers picking their way through the unnumbered dead and the slain themselves, former soldiers transformed into haunts by the clouds of eldritch energy that still plague the region, residues of some arcane cataclysm.  Legend says that these energies are the result of an ancient ritual that petrified the Ravager-Worm Hirud at the center of Etiolation; a huge stone figure with the semblance of a giant leech does rise up from the scores of bodies near the middle of the battleground, though if this is truly Hirud none can say for certain.  The sterility of Etiolation is usually blamed on the Worm itself, though which force slew the innumerable soldiers remains a mystery.

   Those that enter Etiolation experience an immediate numbing, nauseous sensation.  Though they retain their essence and colour, explorers experience increasingly severe feelings of misery and apathy, and their colour eventually begins to fade away.  Plants wilt and die, flesh becomes unfeeling, and those who spend too long in Etiolation will eventually waste away, consumed with despair, their skin and clothing colourless, their minds without will, their voices silenced.  This sickness, known as blanchphage, can only be cured by removing the afflicted from Etiolation.

   Despite its hazards, Etiolation is a very popular destination for those who venture into the Slaughter-lands.  Fresh bodies from Etiolation daily renew the Skin Markets of Baranauskas, their weapons and armour pawned in the Curio Bazaars.  There are also numerous war-machines and other devices scattered amidst the carnage, drawing the attention of salvage gangs.  In addition to these secular pilgrims members of the Order of the Weeping Lady have been known to travel from the monasteries in the Chelicerae Mountains in order to behold the awesome sorrow of Etiolation and feel its creeping despair.

Flense Veldt

Plagued by haunts and oneiroi, Flense Veldt is the domain of the warlord Hereku the Flagellator, commander of a piecemeal army of barbarians, feral ghilan, and demoniac mercenaries '" not to mention an elite platoon of the fetch, kept caged until needed in battle.  A cruel, effective raider of great ambitions, Hereku preys on caravans and adventuring parties in the Slaughter-lands, and has even ventured beyond the fringe into more civilized territory, harassing merchants of Crepuscle and Baranauskas.

Lesion Sea

An inland sea fed by a tributary of the Radula River, Lesion Sea is a pestilential expanse of filthy water from which decaying towers and obelisks emerge, mossy headstones to civilizations long drowned in the murky depths.  Tainted with some flux or eldritch influence, Lesion Sea's waters warp those who drink of them, afflicting them with illness or wreaking more alarming changes on their forms, turning them into malformed chimerae, mutant, misshapen things that slip into the bubbling deep or wander the shores, multifarious and deformed.  Grave-spawn have been known to linger on the shores also, writhing on the embankments like ghosts from some mythological underworld.

The mysterious entity called Icthoi '" whether ur-fish or water-demon none know '" dwells in the gloom of Lesion Sea, along with the rough tribes of misshapen once-men metamorphosed by the water.

Screamwood

One of the few truly fertile regions remaining on the Cadaverous Earth and certainly the lushest part of the Slaughter-lands, Screamwood is nonetheless a shunned and avoided place.  An ominous forest of white trees with crimson sap, many of them carved with leering faces, Screamwood is home to the dreaded creatures called the blightings.  With a reputation for extreme sadism, the blightings put even the excesses of the lilix to shame: with tough, pale hides, oozing red eyes, jagged fingers, and fanged maws, blightings are vaguely humanoid but possess some characteristics of plants.  Dwelling in the roots of the largest trees, they are primitive but powerful, adept at hunting the shadowed arboreal corridors of Screamwood and ambushing their prey.  They breed and train a species of huge white wolves as mounts and hunting beasts, vicious albinos with horribly human hands and bony, hairless faces, fed on a diet of raw flesh.

The Shadowglass Steppes

Leagues of volcanic glass veined with cracks of livid magma, the Shadowglass Steppes consist of a series of shimmering obsidian plateaus interrupted by huge, splintered monoliths, calderas, and sluggish magma rivers.  The air is polluted with toxins and super-heated vapors; the ground boils with lava just beneath the surface, and eruptions are commonplace.  Though extremely inhospitable to humans, the Shadowglass Steppes are home to several sentient creatures, primarily clans of elementals.  Ranging from the slender, sharp-angled glass elementals to the squat, simple-minded clay elementals, the haughty, maniacal steam elementals, and the barely-sentient, thoughtlessly malignant magma elementals, these beings wage bizarre wars on the Steppes, contending for territory in a ceaseless exchange of advantages and allegiances too abstract and complex for even the lilix to fathom.

Barrow Scrub

A cold, scabrous badland at the northern edge of the Slaughter-lands near the Chelicerae Mountains, Barrow Scrub is a desolate and rugged region littered with extensive tombs, catacombs, and enigmatic monuments.  Inhabited by various barbarian tribes who make their homes in caves and desecrated crypts, Barrow Scrub is an unforgiving wilderness.  The savages of the Scrub are moon-worshipers and skinchangers who shun grave-spawn and shelter underground during the Red Rains that sweep the region intermittently.  They are very wary of the lilix of Dolmen who sometimes venture into Barrow Scrub, raiding barbarian shrines and villages for slaves.  The primitives fight a guerilla war against the spiderfolk, avoiding any direct conflict.

The demon Morr'ghu, called the Rancid Angel or Rot-shadow, sometimes roams the skies of Barrow Scrub '" a gaunt, putrescent fiend with near-skeletal, leathery wings and a horned, skull-like visage whose shadow inflicts hideous sickness and whose blazing eyes can enflame with a glance.

   Also in Barrow Scrub is an entrance to the subterranean city of Riqius-Erebu, requiring the would-be scavenger to navigate a maze of caves and hewn corridors in the bowels of the Chelicerae Mountains before reaching the chthonic maze that was once the capitol of the cestoid Imperium.

The Suppuration

Most of the various apocalypses that wracked the Cadaverous Earth in aeons past have dwindled into myth and legend, alluded to only in the footnotes of moldering texts or in the distorted narratives of fablers.  The lingering effects of such disasters still haunt the present '" the Red Ravishing, when the earth flooded with blood, still persists in the Red Rains, the demoniac scourge-armies of the Membrane Wars have scattered across the land while old war-engines are slowly subsumed by rust, and a slew of plagues still recur with devastating frequency '" but the origins of the world's current afflictions have largely been forgotten.  The Suppuration, however, cannot be so easily expunged from memory, as it continues to seep clots of destabilizing unreality, bearing new litters of alien monstrosities on the far side of the Slaughter-lands.

   Few have seen the Suppuration itself (and returned with their sanity intact), but those who have describe an unimaginable chasm or wound, a reality sore dribbling unseemly accretions of the uncanny and whining with a kind of keening wail.  Though the exact nature of the Suppuration is far from understood, it seems evident that it is more than a mere dimensional orifice or portal like those used by invaders during the Membrane Wars.  Rather, the Suppuration seems to be a kind of chaotic womb, a cesspool of diseased imaginings.  The beings that emerge from the tempestuous swirl of the Suppuration are not demons or daevas, are not visitors from some otherworld or alternate plane, though such creatures do exist in abundance across the Cadaverous Earth.  Rather, the things that crawl and slither forth from the gushing lips of that ghastly birth canal, licking the pus of the Suppuration's afterbirth from their flickering forms, possess an unplaced but undeniable familiarity, made twisted by their hideousness.  They are like the nightmares of the world's collective subconscious, welling up through the rift in a shadowy, dissonant headbirth '" the oneiroi.

[ooc]The above post should probably belong more properly with the first post, as it serves as a good introduction to the setting and the feel I'm trying to achieve.  I did repeat the bit on the Suppuration, but I thought it was too relevant to leave out.[/ooc]

There is so much at this point that it's overwhelming, but I'm really into this stuff. I read it in the mornings while I'm eating my breakfast. I get the most spectacular brooding visuals from this.

A Note on Languages

The closest thing the Cadaverous Earth has to a common tongue is Shambles, sometimes called Magpie, a pastiche language derived from half a dozen long-dead parent languages.  Spoken in all of the Twilight Cities but most commonly in Lophius, Baranauskas, and Crepuscle, Shambles has a plethora of regional dialects.  It forms the basis for the trader's cant called Jangle, a stripped-down version of the tongue with added hand signals used by merchants during complicated transactions.  Jangle is practically the official language in the overwhelmingly commercial city of Crepuscle.  An encrypted, modified form of Shambles is used in Filchspeak (also called Alleyspeak), a thieves' cant also used in official parleys between gangs in Lophius.  A hand-sign based derivative of this cant used to communicate silently is called Flicker or Fingerspeak.  Shambles itself is a coarsely hybrid language with a rather mishmash grammar and morphology.

Almost all grave-spawn speak Shambles or the language native to their city of origin (usually doing so in half-whispers), but a near-defunct language called Corpserattle, rarely known as Morbis or the Carrion Tongue, is used by the aristocracy of Somnambulon and in all-ghul churches.  It is an eerie language to hear, raising hairs and causing gooseflesh, and is noted for its thirteen noun classes expressing various levels of animacy, life, death, and un-death.

Hextongue (sometimes called Witchtongue) is the language of Moroi and also of witchcraft and incantation, and so is used by arcane practioners, scholars, and intellectuals across the Cadaverous Earth.  It is derived from a number of archaic technical languages but can broadly be described as a hybrid of Shambles and Hellspeak, the demoniac language, from which it derives its alphabet.  Hellspeak is a 'fiendishly complex' and 'diabolically difficult' language, as many a smirking linguist will tell you.  In its true form it is spoken not only by demons but also by the magisters of Skein, and in a bastardized form by the common people of Skein.  A highly analytic language with incredibly ornate characters (forming the basis for most glyphs), Hellspeak has a kind of mechanical precision to it, with each word expressing a single concept (compare to Glatch, below, with its myriad declensions).

The hagmen of the south can learn human speech but suffer from a wet, thick accent due to their uniquely shaped mouths.  More commonly they speak Glatch, or Hagspeech, a guttural, fluid language which can be learned with difficulty by humans, though many find the more extreme uvular sounds impossible to reproduce correctly.  Glatch has a bewildering spectrum of genders and pronouns and has a highly agglutinative, polysynthetic morphology allowing for very long compounds words used to express very subtle concepts; it has eight declensions and six conjugations.  Glatch has a flowing, cursive script, with characters blending into one another.  Southern dialects of Shambles, such as the one spoken in Lophius, utilize many loanwards from Glatch.

The lilix can also learn human speech but invariably speaking with a clicking, sibilant accent quite unnerving to unaccustomed ears.  Their own language is a composed of a kind of chittering, quite incomprehensible to almost all humans.  Usually called Lilix or Spiderchatter, this language is highly unique and has many untranslatable concepts.  Tone and frequency are as important if not more so than the actual 'words,' long strings of almost indistinguishable syllables.  Divided brutally between masculine and feminine genders, Lilix also has well-defined systems of etiquette and hierarchized modes of address.  A radically simplified form of the language is used to command the human slaves of Dolmen '" Chattelchatter.  This variant is usually used by visiting merchants (often via interpreter) to address the lilix, showing deference.  Forcing a lilix female to speak in Shambles is considered gravely insulting, as they deem that tongue uncouth and unsophisticated.

Leechkin have their own primitive language consisting largely of gestures and animalistic noises, called Leechdance.  In urban communities they use a mongrel smattering of tongues without regard to their respective languages, either incapable or unwilling to distinguish between languages.  The result is usually a garbled form of Shambles with phrases borrowed from Glatch, Hellspeak, Hextongue, or whatever other language was being spoken around them.

A myriad of minor languages can be heard across the Cadaverous Earth.  Serpentine is the language of the naghini, a hissing, sibilant language that can be mastered by humans; naghini can speak Shambles with relative ease, though they hiss 's' sounds excessively.  Zerda is the yapping quasi-language of the western foxfolk.  The cestoids have a bizarre, almost totally incomprehensible language based mostly on smell and motion, although during the time of the great cestoid Imperium there were a select few humans used as interpreters for the worm-lords.  Cestoids cannot produce anything resembling human speech, crippling their species socially in conjunction with their unseemly appearance.  Their bestial gargling, gesturing, and pheromone-based language is usually simply dubbed Cestoid by humans.

It's staggering how much material you've posted in such a short period of time. Did you have a lot of it written beforehand, or are you just that prolific?

This is more setting material than I've probably posted in my whole time on the boards (although I am, self-admittedly, a VERY slow worker when it comes to setting design) - and what's more, from what I've seen, it's pure gold!

I really should set an afternoon aside one day to just read through the whole thing - as it is I've been dipping in and out, but loving every warped morsel of it!

[ooc]The bulk of it has been written quite quickly during my free time (what little there is). I guess I write quite quickly - for example, the Note on Languages I wrote in about 1.5 hours this morning.  Updates may slow quite a bit as time goes on and my school year gets more heavily underway.  A few of the vignettes were written previously, but the world itself as presented now is only about 3 weeks old.  Bits of it, though - for example an idea for the cities of Skein and Somnambulon - have been flitting round in my head, in my games, and in some stories for 2-3 years now.

My only worry is getting stale or repetitive, or diluting the content with bland material.

Thanks everyone for posting comments.  Incidentally I love the phrase "warped morsel."[/ooc]

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The Three Arbours

Lacking the strictly demarcated wards of Skein, the islands of Lophius, or the tiered levels of Dolmen, Moroi is a rambling city, but three broad districts can be described from is otherwise bewildering chaos of streets.  Called the Arbours, each has grown up around one of the Elder Trees, the mythic, gargantuan trees '" sometimes invoked as living gods '" from which the substance known as nectar is harvested.  Only one remains living: the other two have been either drained dry or destroyed.  Around their vast bulks Moroi has grown haphazardly, buildings clustered about the aeons-old trunks like worshippers, dwarfed by the Trees' immensity.  Today the three Arbours are known as Ambery, Suckle-town, and The Boil.

Ambery

Beneath the spreading canopy of the last remaining Elder Tree lies Ambery, seat of the Resin Merchants and source of the nectar, the lifeblood of witchcraft across the Cadaverous Earth.  Hulking stone structures somewhere between fortresses and secular cathedrals loom darkly in the shadow of wilting leaves, the many ministries and opulent palaces of the ichor-dealers.  Ambery is divided into four quarters, the official bureaus of the ebbing elite.

   Ambery is patrolled extensively by the city`s militia, who are altogether absent from The Boil and who make only cursory raids in Suckle-town save in Fat-Wolf-Furrow.  Consisting of hardened mercenary warriors in black leather armour, the militia is supplemented by witches recruited by the Order of Chirurgeons and rendered susceptible to suggestion in the Iron Quarter`s laboratories, then pumped full of nectar.  Collared and shackled, these witches are directed by expertly trained handlers, prodded into channelling eldritch power.  There are other forms of surveillance in Ambery '" nests of eyes that can manifest on the walls of hexed buildings, for example, allowing the Resin Merchants to keep a constant watch over their city.

The Aurelian Quarter

Containing the Elder Tree itself, the Aurelian quarter also houses the militia barracks, the colossal Ministry of Ambrosia '" headquarters of the Resin Merchants '" Moroi`s central marketplace, and the silo-fields where Moroi`s nectar supply is held.  The Ministry is the most imposing and impressive structure in the district and indeed in all Moroi, a bulbous domed monstrosity of gilt, marble, concrete, and stone, festooned with wards and gargoyles and guarded by a small army.  The marketplace is far less colourful than those of Baransauskas or Crepuscle, dominated almost entirely by the huge queues leading up the Dispensaries, the official dealers of the Resin Merchants who sell nectar to the addicted populace.  Dwarfing everything, however, is the Elder Tree itself, entangled with machinery, its nectar constantly siphoned from its aeons-old veins and pumped into the well-guarded silos.  Slowly the Elder Tree wanes; its leaves grow paler, drier, its bark begins to rot; it withers and desiccates, even as the sucking proboscii that penetrate it suck more fervently at its ancient flesh.

The Marble Quarter

Arrayed on Canopy Hill beneath the huge leaves of the Elder Tree are the palaces of the Marble Quarter, lavish gated mansions sequestered away from the grime and grot of Suckle-town and the scream-haunted halls of the sanatoria.  Here are manicured parklands and clean squares with brass statues or fountains, tree-lined avenues and rows of baroque homes, each walled with warded stones to deter intruders.

   Moroi`s impressive library and its legendary University '" divided into nine colleges, each with their own grandiose hall '" can also be found in the Marble Quarter, bringing many traveling scholars to the district, hungry for knowledge.

The Iron Quarter

The imposing edifices of stone and black metal at the center of the Iron Quarter are Moroi's sanatoria, asylums for the city's veritable legions of madmen.  Echoing with the screams and raving gibberish of the insane, the sanatoria are administered by the Order of Chirurgeons, an organization of surgeons and fleshcrafters known for their lurid experimentations.  Sanctioned by the Resin Merchants, the Chirurgeons roam the streets of Suckle-town with warded cages seeking prime specimens of the insane, who they incarcerate in the sanatoria.  Lobotomies, bloodletting, and electroshock therapies are the mildest of their methods, and those deemed incurable are condemned to become fodder for the High Chirurgeons' subterranean laboratories, the vats of eldritch liquid and the stained stone slabs where unlikely things are fashioned.  The 'rehabilitated' patients, their minds dulled with drugs and surgery, their bodies warped with chemicals and exotic grafts, join bound witches and mercenaries as agents of the city militia.  These creations are far from the servitors of Baranauskas, those piecemeal vessels of stitched flesh, dead flesh made animate, nor are they zombies, the mindless psychic puppets of Somnambulon '" rather, the thralls of the Chirurgeons are living men and women subjugated into docility and twisted into chimerical shapes, refashioned in accordance with often perverse aesthetics.

The Glass Quarter

The crystalline mass of the Glass Quarter comprises the many glasshouses of Moroi where the bulk of the city`s food is grown.  Positioned as it is on the edge of the Tallow Plains, agriculture is limited in Moroi, and unlike cities such as Lophius, Crepuscle, and Skein, there are no major rivers allowing for fishing.  As such the Gaunt City relies on the glasshouses to produce fresh fruit, grain, and vegetables; specially hexed lights provide the illumination, and susurrating wardens, all of them trained witches, tend the gardens, whispering spells of encouragement to the plants, causing them to grow to prodigious sizes.

Suckle-town

Become a flea-bitten and mongrel sprawl packed tightly with junkies, beggars, and criminals, the Arbour called Suckle-town clings to Ambery like a hungry cub to its mother's bruised teat.  Its Elder Tree has long been exhausted, the sap within drained dry.  Without the vital nectar the god-tree quickly withered and petrified, becoming a great and ruinous fossil.  In the centuries since its death the wretched inhabitants of Suckle-town have invaded its once-sacred bark in a second ravishing, digging caves and tunnels into its marrow and pilfering bits of its rusted machinery to pawn for more nectar.

            The sanatoria of Ambery are laughably, woefully inadequate to contain the hordes of the deranged in Suckle-town, afflicted either by the ichor itself or second-hand through one of the wide-spread endemics of insanity, little echoes of the dementia epidemics of long ago.  Everyone is mad here, or at the very least unhinged, and the many ugly districts bear names only the mad might coin.

Corkscrew-Slough

A mushroom-covered maze reeking of mildew and rot, the damp district of Corkscrew-Slough is lined with opium dens, shadowmilk cafes, bars, and tawdry brothels lit with lurid paper lamps.  Though nectar is the drug of choice for all of Moroi's residents, many of its libertine or simply desperate denizens are lured to other drugs and pleasures, seeking to sample new sensations or stave off misery for a few hours.  Lethe-tea drinkers wander like drowsy children across the catwalks and intersecting stone bridges high above the streets like deranged tightrope walkers, blissfully amnesiac, tripping over the slumped, white-eyed bodies of mindwrack and asherat users, junkies strung out on jabber or buzzing with diluted doses of thrum or raving with lips stained sallow from madwine.  The Phantasmagorian Bazaar, sometimes called the Market of Dreams, panders to Suckle-town's myriad addicts, ringed by the whorehouses and drug-dens '" a rickety place where pallid men sell pouches of powder or glossy hallucinogenic eggs or phials of shimmering liquid.  Moroi's small hagman population '" only a few hundred '" also make their homes in Corkscrew-Slough, dwelling in half-flooded basements and burrows.

Fat-Wolf-Furrow

The industrial section of Suckle-town and indeed the principle factory district of Moroi, Fat-Wolf-Furrow consists of block after block of warehouses and factories, a cauldron of vapours and noxious smoke, wreathing the steel girders and brickwork tumors and tangles of pipes with ghosts of smog.  Here those goods not grown in the Glass Quarter of Ambery or imported from one of the other Twilight Cities are synthesized.  The printing presses also run here, churning out cheap newspapers and books to feed Moroi`s bibliophilia.  Most of the factory workers also make their homes in the Furrow, though some trudge to the slums of Wasp-Hole and Abscess-Weft.

Abscess-Weft

The largest residential district in Moroi, Abscess-Weft is also the most destitute.  Row after row of dilapidated tenements, shacks, and communal halls of ancient stone are packed with the poor, most of them quite mad.  Mingling amongst them are predators and prostitutes and pedlars hawking cheap goods, coal and food and knives and drugs.  Rogue eidolons unable to penetrate the exclusive upper crust of the Gaunt City are forced to feed on the damned of Abscess-Weft, and a hundred different diseases wrack the addicted populace '" harrowflux, spectre-plague, and spontaneous dementia and others more mundane, syphilis and dysentery and malaria, tuberculosis and cholera and influenza.  It is this slew of debilitations and infections that give the district its name, for they seem concentrated here in great profusion than the rest of the city, a veritable encyclopaedia of illness.

Wasp-Hole

Arcane graffiti covers the brick walls of Wasp-Hole's intoxicant, falling-down architecture where gutter-witches and soul tinkers and a score of two-bit hexers with dull sparks of talent and a few syllables of spells crammed into their crania hawk stained manskin scrolls or henna sigils in back-alley glyph parlors.  The petrified Tree hunkers hugely above the mean, piss-dappled and blood-smeared façades.  Inside the rough-hewn corridors carved from the stony bark addicts and madmen wander or collapse in catatonic clumps, and the floor is carpeted with a glass patina of empty syringes still crusty with blood or pus.  Also in Wasp-Hole are dozens of small bookstores and decomposing libraries heavy with must, their volumes slowly being devoured by worms.

   While demon worshippers and those seeking their fortunes told flock to Grease-Welter, the patrons of Wasp-Hole are those seeking charms, warded items, spells, and similar ensorcellements.  Alchemists peddle potions and curatives and aphrodisiacs from gargoyle-guarded shops; wiry bravoes with rudimentary witchcraft and veins dark with nectar sell their services for coin or ichor, eldritch mercenaries and thugs with enough puissance to invoke a crude sigil or channel some second-hand hex.

Manikin-Slump

Sordid and mangy in the extreme, the slums of Manikin-Slump are populated largely by Moroi's grave-spawn, a minority in the Gaunt City mostly consisting of ghilan.  The slums here have windows shrouded black with tattered curtains; others are boarded up entirely or smeared with pitch or black paint.  At night the grave-spawn come out, walking in lightless streets '" whereas the rest of Moroi (save The Boil) is stained sepia by eldritch lampposts come dusk, Manikin-Slump remains gloomy; only the smattering of ghul-bars '" small and thinly spread compared to the thick-on-the-ground cannibal eateries of Baranauskas or Crepuscle '" have any light at all, and this shed only by crimson-tinted lanterns.  A few derelict shrines to stellar deities subsist with meagre congregations, muttering sermons in Corpserattle.

   A murderer is on the loose in Manikin-Slump, killing only grave-spawn.  Dubbed the Undertaker, this shadowy figure has yet to be seen, leaving taunting messages carved into the bodies of his victims.  In the penny dreadfuls printed en masse in Fat-Wolf-Furrow he is portrayed as a masked, top-hatted aristocrat with a black cape and a swordcane, though the veracity of this image is dubious at best.

Grease-Welter

Though demonolatry is hardy as pervasive in Moroi as in Skein, where the magisters' estates contain whole breeding populations of hellspawn and a homunculus is a mark of social status, the City of the Elder Tree has its share of infernal traffickers.  The diabolists of Grease-Welter have erected have a hundred squalid shrines to discordian deities and demon-lords, worshipping pastiche idols of wood and flesh and rusted metal, scrap-fashioned effigies to whom they make unwholesome sacrifices of incense, salt, raw meat, blood and other bodily fluids.  It is here one goes to attend profane congregations, to have entrails read or a demon truth-sayer interrogated, or to forge contracts with fiends in rundown temples and basement sanctums.  Rising above the other wretched shrines is the Hall of Black Bile where the swollen creature Phelaegor is bound, chained with warded silver fetters in a vaulted tomb below the Hall's main chambers.  An obese, gray-skinned, tusked demon with curled ram's horns and four elephantine arms '" each shackled with a warded chain '" Phelaegor can sleep for months but periodically awakes in a bestial rage, quieted only by still-living food.  He supplies the members of his cult with certain substances drawn from his huge body and with spells and eldritch secrets culled from his alien mind in exchange for sacrifices.

The Boil

Unlike the ossified Elder Tree of Suckle-town, the charnel corpse that towers with blackened limbs over the ruinous Arbour dubbed The Boil was not merely drained dry.  In the distant past some disaster caused the Tree to ignite, the nectar within boiling beneath the bark, splitting the Tree's flesh and spilling out into the streets in steaming gouts of eldritch vapour and seething golden liquid.  This catastrophe, known as the Conflagration or the Boiling, laid waste to the part of Moroi now called The Boil.  Fire swept the streets, burning homes and citizens; yet even after the eldritch flames had died and the last embers faded, The Boil remained a shunned, forbidden place.  Strange creatures stirred in the cinders '" perhaps the former residents, perhaps things invoked through the chaotic arcane tempest of the Conflagration itself.  Those who ventured into the charred wreckage in hope of looting the ruins returned with stories of shifting streets, watching eyes, and unspeakable terrors lurking in the ashes '" if they returned at all.  It was as if the district itself assumed a kind of sentience, becoming a faceless but malevolent presence with vengeful appetites.

Today the Boil is walled off with stern battlements of brick and iron heavily warded to contain whatever entities, curses, or creatures were spawned in the fires.  Only a handful of scavengers, universally deemed insane, dare enter The Boil, and most fall victim to whatever dwells within.

            Like Suckle-town The Boil lacks discrete districts, but it can be informally divided into rough regions where certain effects or creatures predominate over others.  The seeping flux of Blistermaze bleeds into the ashen streets of Blackenburgh while the vaguely insectile denizens of Manglespur can also be found elsewhere in The Boil.  Though the sewers and tunnel-systems of The Boil have been bricked up and covered with glyph-scribed plaster, some of these seals have been broken, and excavations now connect certain lower sections of The Boil's chthonic substructure to the rest of Moroi's undercity.

Blistermaze

The oozing walls of Blistermaze are afflicted with a roving pestilence, an architectural leprosy: patches of peeling plaster or crumbling brick will suddenly develop weeping sores and pustules that eventually worsen into membranous cysts.  The cysts swell and grow, incubating the hideous denizens of Blistermaze: scuttling, quadruped beasts somewhere between degenerate humans, hairless dogs, and spiders, hunchbacked, mandibled, flesh-hungry creatures with tremendous agility and poisonous bites, the pox-dogs of Blistermaze.  After having birthed a brood of these chittering monstrosities the cysts and pustules will rapidly close, scab, and heal, leaving only shredded castings and scars.

Manglespur

A tribe of humanoid things resembling naked, emaciated men and women from the neck down infest Manglespur; their heads are cut off halfway up their faces, just before their eyes, giving way to an incongruous and squirming array of tightly clustered insect limbs.  Their appearance is often preceded by a roving mist, tainted slaughterhouse red and reeking of burnt flesh; this unearthly fog cloaks their arrival, allowing them to draw close to their prey on silent, spindly limbs.  Doors have become gnashing mouths and the black sockets of windows are filled with watching eyes in the claustrophobic alleys of Manglespur.  Here the Grasping Darkness oozes from building to building, a crawling death; here the bricks or flagstones can become cackling faces with cruel, biting teeth.  Huge flapping things somewhere between birds and bats with rotting bodies and protruding bones nest in the attics and atop the roofs, fluttering their leathery feathers and cawing hideously.

Blackenburgh

The physical center of The Boil, Blackenburgh is a scorched, desolate ruin whose buildings are little more than burnt-out shells.  The incinerated remains of the Elder Tree tower above the ruins, branches twisted, trunk warped, bark scalded.  Ashes still rain upon Blackenburgh, stirred up by whispering winds that echo with the screams of the burning citizenry.  A few globs of solidified metal melted during the Conflagration litter the ground, once parts of the machine that drained the Tree and whose possible malfunction is theorized to have precipitated the Boiling itself.  Ashen wraiths speculated to be some form of soot elemental have congealed out of the destruction of Blackenburgh, ghostly manifestations of the Conflagration that are dispersed only with difficulty.

I'm enjoying the names of the lnaguages very much.
I find it interesting that outr two VERY different settings have similarities here, including a lesser tongue of the undead and a deeper, older language for the long-lived undead aristocracy...

'Hextongue' is a much better name than my own 'Arcanic', and 'Chattelchatter' is just killer.  What a great idea.  My Anarch and Devilkin might match well with Hellspeak, as well.

Your descriptions of the languages is nearly poetic: each characterization idiosyncratic and utterly lacking the typical triteness we find so often.  

[ooc]Heh thanks Lord Vreeg, and that's true and sort of funny, though it makes sense to have things like an arcane language, so I suppose its not that odd that our settings would share one.

I was trying to be fairly realistic in my portrayal of languages as I feel they're one area that often gets neglected and keyed too heavily to race, without any other description of what separates a language as a language.  The name "Hellspeak" is I belive stolen from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell - Strange animates some dead bodies and they start speaking in the language of Hell (for those who haven't read the book, you should - the first 300 pages are dull, but after that the book is amazing).  It was meant to be vaguely Asian in its morphology, with the precise characters etc, whereas Shambles is English and Hextongue is meant to be a bit German or Latin as the "language of science," crossed with the Hellspeak influence.[/ooc]

[blockquote=The driving Gar]The Suppuration

Most of the various apocalypses that wracked the Cadaverous Earth in aeons past have dwindled into myth and legend, alluded to only in the footnotes of moldering texts or in the distorted narratives of fablers. The lingering effects of such disasters still haunt the present '" the Red Ravishing, when the earth flooded with blood, still persists in the Red Rains, the demoniac scourge-armies of the Membrane Wars have scattered across the land while old war-engines are slowly subsumed by rust, and a slew of plagues still recur with devastating frequency '" but the origins of the world's current afflictions have largely been forgotten. The Suppuration, however, cannot be so easily expunged from memory, as it continues to seep clots of destabilizing unreality, bearing new litters of alien monstrosities on the far side of the Slaughter-lands.

Few have seen the Suppuration itself (and returned with their sanity intact), but those who have describe an unimaginable chasm or wound, a reality sore dribbling unseemly accretions of the uncanny and whining with a kind of keening wail. Though the exact nature of the Suppuration is far from understood, it seems evident that it is more than a mere dimensional orifice or portal like those used by invaders during the Membrane Wars. Rather, the Suppuration seems to be a kind of chaotic womb, a cesspool of diseased imaginings. The beings that emerge from the tempestuous swirl of the Suppuration are not demons or daevas, are not visitors from some otherworld or alternate plane, though such creatures do exist in abundance across the Cadaverous Earth. Rather, the things that crawl and slither forth from the gushing lips of that ghastly birth canal, licking the pus of the Suppuration's afterbirth from their flickering forms, possess an unplaced but undeniable familiarity, made twisted by their hideousness. They are like the nightmares of the world's collective subconscious, welling up through the rift in a shadowy, dissonant headbirth '" the oneiroi. [/blockquote]

Just stunning how close the 'other side' is to the Cadaverous earth.  SOmehow, I am reminded of Moorcocks 15 plains in the Corum books, and the Cadaverous Earth is actually a plane very close to Chaos...

I need to ask, what type of magic fills this putrescence?  What is the source of enchantment?

[ooc]From Witchcraft: Nectar "It has been speculated by arcane scholars that the dementia epidemics that contributed to the decline of Moroi during the middle of the Aeon of Dust may have been linked to the overuse of nectar. The vast number of active witches in the city at the time may have created a cloud of psychic effluvia as a result of their mass channeling and invocation, resulting in the bouts of madness and dysfunction that debilitated the once-great city-state. Although evidence is inconclusive, it has also been suggested that the Suppuration itself is in fact a larger-scale symptom of centuries of invocation, a kind of psychic bleed as the collective unconscious oozes into the material world '" in other words, the practice of witchcraft may have worn away at the fabric between realities, perforating the aether and allowing it to intrude onto the physical."

The Cadaverous Earth is definitely close to various "other" sides - trying to tap into something a bit Lovecraftian.[/ooc]

[ic=Vanity]With its chitin-plated, iridescent walls, its nacreous floor, and the cavernous sweep of its ceiling, the great ballroom of magister Pyrach-Quin achieved a glistening resplendence.  Lamps and tallow candles filled the room with a rich green gloom; lush, lively music echoed about the curving organic walls.  The masked guests revolved around the ballroom in languid circles, or else lingered on the balconies outside.

   Belphora sipped her drink and gazed at the crowd, taken aback by the strange spectacle.  Beside the magistras she felt a grey and tawdry thing even in her best finery.  Each had a dress more vivid and luxurious than the last, silk gowns cut in a hundred styles and dyed a  vibrant myriad of colours, blood reds and midnight blues and soft ebon blacks, golds and greens and purples layered with lace and satin, bejeweled with sewn-in opals and pearls and carnelians.  Many had necklines swooping lower than Belphora might have considered seemly, but the magistras wore them without shame, draping themselves with silver and enjoying the effect their naked flesh had on those around them.  The men were equally magnificent in coats of red and black and dark green, with ivory buttons and ringleted curls '" though they inspired self-consciousness rather than jealousy.  And all of them had their familiars, monstrous and sometimes beautiful things somewhere between pets and status symbols '" the homunculi.

   Each was unique, sharing only the sigil-etched collars and silver chains with their brethren, led in elegant configurations around their owners during the dances, taking care not to entangle the dancers with their chains.  A shadowy thing whose limbs blurred when it walked paced about its magister like a well-trained hound; a hulking, muscular creature with a ferret's head and crimson skin stood with its arms crossed beside its owner; an eyeless, gray-skinned demon whose fingernails were knives muttered from a mouth crowded with tusks; a plump imp with bulbous compound eyes and a baby's pudgy limbs fluttered on oversized dragonfly wings by its magistra's shoulder, whining and mewling until it was fed from a tray of sweetmeats.

   'Some more wine, milady?'  The voice was gentle and urbane, but Belphora nearly screamed when she turned to its owner, a tall, flayed figure whose face was a horned skull, holding out a silver pitcher in one skinless hand.  A purple tongue flicked out from between the grinning teeth.  She stuttered the beginning of a reply and the homunculus' magister turned, eyes dark behind his half-mask.

   'Fornus, you are scaring the young lady,' the man said.  'Behave yourself.'  The demon bowed demurely and turned away.

   'No, no, it's all right.'  Belphora could feel blood rushing to her face.  'I was just '" startled.'

   'I apologize for my homunculus.  Some find his appearance alarming.'  The magister was tall and spare, perhaps a bit older than she was, based on the silver hair at his temples.  'You can call me Sorn.  It's much easier to pronounce than my formal name.'

   'Belphora.  My father is Lord Vlesnk'¦ of the Northern Baronies.'

   'Ah of course.  You speak our tongue well.'  He smiled as her blush deepened, his painted lips curling at the corners.  'Your father '" a liegeman of the Revenants, yes?  Have you seen the Sleepwalker's City?'

   'Once.  It was'¦ quiet.  Not what I expected from a city so large.'

   'Mmm.  I trust you'll find Skein a bit livelier.  Would you care to dance?'

   She nodded shyly, then '" abandoning her drink to Fornus '" took Sorn's arm and let herself be led into the next dance.  The homunculus followed at a distance, a discrete if somewhat macabre shadow.

   The dance was intricate; more than once Belphora nearly stumbled, but Sorn merely smiled and pulled her onwards, ignoring her missteps.

   'You are here with your father's retinue?'  His eyes '" she saw now that they were dark green, rather than black as she'd thought at first '" gleamed in the mask's sockets as he raised his arm to twirl her, placing one gloved hand in the small of her back to help turn her round.


   'N-no'¦ he is conducting business.  In the Saffron Ward, I think.  We were given invitations, but '"'

   'But your father disapproves of this sort of revelry.  You are here without his permission.'  Sorn chuckled and shook his head as she turned again.  'I suppose he thinks us a pack of debauchees, drinking madwine and corrupting innocent young women.'

   She stammered and blushed again; Sorn laughed and pulled her back into position.  'Do not fret, Belphora.  Your secret is safe with me.'

   They crossed the room, turned again, switched positions, crossed back '" and then the music stopped.  The players took up a new tune, dark and heady '" a nocturne.  'Shall we get some air?'  Sorn gestured to an arched doorway where a sultry blue-haired magistra and her many-armed homunculus chatted with a long-haired ghul in the black robes of a sacerdos.  Belphora found herself obeying Sorn without thinking.  Each time their eyes met she felt a strange sensation, a kind of pleasant drowning, as if her fears and anxieties were being washed away, or sucked from her body like bad blood by a leech.  Suddenly she felt as bold as the magistras, shedding her worries like a shawl.  How dare her father forbid her to come?  She would not be treated like a child anymore, would not have to slink away like a thief, guilty and furtive.  When Fornus handed her back her glass she drank deeply.

   The doorway led to a curved balcony; the city spread itself below, glittering in the night, the factory Wards steaming, the gaudily lit pleasure districts alive with tiny milling figures, the occasional spurt of fireworks.  They stood silently and drank in the midnight panorama, listening to the nocturne's velvet melodies.  Out on the black surface of the Radula she could see the lights of distant ships.  Behind the river rose mountains, craggy and sinister.  Belphora shivered.

   'The mountains have an ominous look to them,' she said, wrapping her arms about herself.  Sorn placed a warm hand on her bare shoulder, caressed it almost imperceptibly; Belphora did not seem to notice.

   'The Slouching-devil Mountains are often grim at night.  They are full of monsters '" but you are safe from them here.'

   'They make me uneasy.'

   'You should see the view from my own tower.  It is taller than this one, and faces south '" across the plains.'  He drew back her hair with one strong, white hand, exposing her neck.  Her eyes half closed; she found his voice hypnotic.  Behind them, Fornus stood in the shadows '" Belphora had forgotten him entirely.  Sorn's voice was close to her ear; she could feel his breath on her neck.  'You cannot see the mountains at all.  Would you like that, Belphora?'

   Her eyes were closed, her head tilted; she murmured something, vaguely, and then his lips were on her neck.
Hours later as the night sky began to pale the man who called himself Sorn slipped from his bed and dressed quickly.  He crossed his bedchamber to the large mirror in the corner and inspected himself, brushing out his long, black hair, checking meticulously for the mar of silver.  He squinted at the arched window, where the first rays of sunlight were stealing over the city walls.  Muttering curses he paced over to the window to tug at the thick curtains; as he did so his hand was transfixed in a wan shaft of the early morning light.  His eyes flickered momentarily to the gray and age-spotted claw that clutched the curtain; his brow wrinkled with vexation, and then he flung the curtains shut, blocking out the seeping dawn.

   He stopped by the solar on his way to the undercroft to find Fornus gnawing at a lump of bone, its chains piled unceremoniously on the floor.

   'I trust you had a rejuvenating night?'  The demon said, turning its skeletal visage towards him.  'You certainly look considerably improved.  If you don't mind me saying you were starting to look a bit frayed around the edges.'

   'You'll find what's left of her in my bedchamber,' Sorn replied, ignoring the jibe.  'She's unconscious.  An old woman, to look at her, but you'll find her soul palatable enough, I'd wager.  Make sure you're thorough.  And have the servants clean up afterwards '" she was eager at first but there was some mess towards the end.'

   The creature nodded.  Its purple tongue flicked out, licking sharp and yellow teeth.
[/ic]

Lucius and Tormbolge

Mercenary partners, adventurers, and occasional brigands, Lucius and Tormbolge can most often be found doing contract work in the ganglands of Lophius, scrapping in the Pulsetown pits of the Maggot City, or freebooting along the southern fringe.  Atypical amongst their rough kindred, the veritable armies of sellswords, hired guns and hexers, and other scum that roam from city to city in search of coin and blood, the pair are unforgettable: Lucius at first glance resembles a sickly nine year old boy, while Tormbolge towers seven feet tall with a prodigious girth to match his height.

Lucius is a ghul, having transformed when he was but a child; now slightly over two hundred, he has acquired a surfeit of combat experience to compensate for his size and slight frame.  He purchased Tormbolge from slavers and granted him his freedom after witnessing the huge man fight in a small-town circus, killing a cestoid with his bare hands.  A eunuch and a mute, Tormbolge grew up touring arenas and gladiatorial pits, becoming a peerless fighter, his body augmented by his masters with drug-secreting implants and ugly metal plates, fused to his flesh like chitin.  While Lucius favors knives Tormbolge wields a huge halberd in combat, though he is also an accomplished pugilist.

   Though immune to the temptations of the flesh so many mercenaries expend their earnings on, the two are not without their vices.  Tormbolge has an insatiable appetite, particularly for seafood, savoring pickled lampreys and eels, caviar, and fried fish; he is also addicted to several drugs, including the intense stimulant thrum, although his body synthesizes most of the chemicals he craves.  Lucius has a fondness for fine cigars and is a compulsive gambler, regularly losing whole bagfuls of coin in card games and other contests.  A dreadful cheat with a talent for prestidigitation and a whole collection of loaded bone dice, Lucius has been banned from innumerable chance-houses and has a small bounty on his head in certain regions.  Priding himself on his wry wit and his quick fingers he is an infamous braggart and frequent pickpocket, often requiring Tormbolge to wrest him out of trouble he either talked or stole his way into.

Quote from: SteerpikeLucius and Tormbolge

Mercenary partners, adventurers, and occasional brigands, Lucius and Tormbolge can most often be found doing contract work in the ganglands of Lophius, scrapping in the Pulsetown pits of the Maggot City, or freebooting along the southern fringe.  Atypical amongst their rough kindred, the veritable armies of sellswords, hired guns and hexers, and other scum that roam from city to city in search of coin and blood, the pair are unforgettable: Lucius at first glance resembles a sickly nine year old boy, while Tormbolge towers seven feet tall with a prodigious girth to match his height.

Lucius is a ghul, having transformed when he was but a child; now slightly over two hundred, he has acquired a surfeit of combat experience to compensate for his size and slight frame.  He purchased Tormbolge from slavers and granted him his freedom after witnessing the huge man fight in a small-town circus, killing a cestoid with his bare hands.  A eunuch and a mute, Tormbolge grew up touring arenas and gladiatorial pits, becoming a peerless fighter, his body augmented by his masters with drug-secreting implants and ugly metal plates, fused to his flesh like chitin.  While Lucius favors knives Tormbolge wields a huge halberd in combat, though he is also an accomplished pugilist.

   Though immune to the temptations of the flesh so many mercenaries expend their earnings, the two are not without their vices.  Tormbolge has an insatiable appetite, particularly for seafood, savoring pickled lampreys and eels, caviar, and fried fish; he is also addicted to several drugs, including the intense stimulant thrum, although his body synthesizes most of the chemicals he craves.  Lucius has a fondness for fine cigars and is a compulsive gambler, regularly losing whole bagfuls of coin in card games and other contests.  A dreadful cheat with a talent for prestidigitation and a whole collection of loaded bone dice, Lucius has been banned from innumerable chance-houses and has a small bounty on his head in certain regions.  Priding himself on his wry wit and his quick fingers he is an infamous braggart and frequent pickpocket, often requiring Tormbolge to wrest him out of trouble he either talked or stole his way into.

NPC descriptions?  You're on, my friend...

As a side question, what type of magic do cheaters use?  WHat protections are in these dens of vice?  How do you rate their threat level?

Aside from thsoe icky system questions, I love the dudes.  Such kindred spirits are important.  I have Pdwyk and Harack Don Fadden,  a hobyt and klaxik investigators of the Scarlet Pilums that patrol Igbar, and your two seem the same kind of duo that runs into PC's whenver they are in the area.

Yu say Lucious 'transformed' about 2 hundred years ago...intentional or not?  

[ooc]Lucius' transformation was unintentional - the poor kid just got unlucky and ate some bad meat as an orphan growing up rough in Resurrection Row.

Cheating is mostly mundane - quick fingers are a big asset.  Since magic is generally a fairly laborious process requiring glyphs, sigils, incantations, or some other symbols to function, its difficult to use circumpsectly, on the fly.  Hexed dice or cards are certainly a possibility however (indeed, some card-games feature cards that can hex the player).  Rings, tattoos, or other charms that could increase agility or perception might also be useful.  As for protections, most run-of-the-mill casinos would simply employ bouncers and pit-bosses, though some upscale establishments such as the chance-houses of Pelloch on Crooked Finger in Lophius might use supressing wards, insist on the use of house dice or cards only, or utilize house witches to constantly scan the room for any suspicious eldritch acitivity.

Some gamblers might also have personal protections, such as the use of a homunculus to watch the other players.

Is there a link to Pydwyk and Harack?[/ooc]

WAY   :offtopic:, but...

Quote from: WudiilVery cool writeup on witchcraft.  I was watching TV last night and ran across a show about mushrooms.  I learned something interesting which I thought I would pass on as it seems like it would fit well... There is a mushroom in Russia (it's a bright red mushroom with white spots on it... funny enough, looks like the mushrooms that little garden gnomes sometimes hold).  Anyway, it has three active substances... two are psychoactive and another is slightly poisonous.  The shaman would eat the mushroom.  His liver (or maybe it was his kidney) would filter out the toxic substance and his disciples/apprentices would drink his urine so that they could get the benefits of the psychoactive substances without the ill effects of the toxins... just thought that was cool. :)  

Amanita Muscaria. I believe it's the only Amanita that's not poisonous, actually, although it's historically been considered to be, and American laws consider it to be poisonous (as a sidenote, this produces an interesting legal loophole: as far as the American Justice System is concerned, poisons are legal, assuming that the owner knows better then to think that they're safe. However, since Amanita Muscaria actually is safe... but I digress).

It's native to Siberia, and the scene you described (actually, the reindeer ate the mushrooms first, and the Shaman would then drink the urine of the reindeer) is possible because the primary psychoactive chemical, Muscarin, is water soluble. It can actually be passed in this manner multiple times. This is also possibly the origin of Siberian ("true") Shamanism, which may be the forefather of almost all existing religions. In other words, that mushroom may possibly be God, in a relatively literal sense.

Oh, and the whole garden gnome thing? Not coincidental. Along with the psychoactive reasons, Amanitas tend to grow in a pattern known as a "Faerie Circle", which are believed to attract various mythological folk, such as fairies and gnomes. I suspect that it's also not coincidental that it's the same mushroom (well, amanitas are technically toadstools, really) that makes Mario grow. I imagine that's more due to the already existing mythical connotations of it, though.

[spoiler=Disclaimer]
This is in no way an advocation of the consumption of Amanita Muscaria, or any other drug, regardless of legal status, without very careful consideration of all potential risks. While Amanita Muscaria is physically (and in America, legally) safe, it is still a drug that is apparently powerful enough to invent religion; it's mental effects very probably should not be taken lightly at all.[/spoiler]

Still off topic, sorry:  Very interesting, Sdragon. I knew about the whole shamanic drug-taking thing (coca-leaves in South America, ergot in north-west Europe, etc.), and how it most likely evolved into religion as we know it, but I haven't heard anything about the practice originating in Siberia... How did that theory come about?

To be perfectly honest, I'm not entirely sure how that conclusion was reached. I imagine it was through lots of theological, sociological, archaeological, etc. research and studies. I do know, though, that in some circles, you have to be very careful about using the term "shamanism" when referring to non-Siberian religions.

Now that I think about it, though, it's possible I might be mistaken about Siberian Shamanism being the predecessor of all religions. I'm trying to remember if that's what I read, or if it was simply that Siberian Shamanism was simply the first known religion. That allows the possibility of other developing independently.


Back on topic: Steerpike, you've got some really impressive stuff here. This is seriously just a little over a month old? Incredible.

[ooc]Hahaha for a minute there I thought the thread had been hijacked by a group of mushroom enthusiasts... (no worries though!  Actually quite an interesting bit of horticultural info...)

Like I said, SDragon, bits of the setting have been floating round in my head for awhile and on paper in various forms.  The early story about the witch and the Marquis Naberius, for example, I wrote quite awhile ago; the city of Skein was the major city in a story I wrote (in which the lilx were major antagonists), and Somnambulon was the name of a city in another setting.  Most of the text itself is new, but the ideas behind a lot of the setting are revised forms of older stuff.[/ooc]

[blockquote=Steerpike]Is there a link to Padwyck and Harak?[/blockquote]
yes.   this  (http://celtricia.pbwiki.com/Harak-Don-Farren) links to Harak Don Fadan.  
The New Legion has run into them quite a bit and some of the more bizarre crime scenes they have been investigating, like the orphange with all the zombic children and the keepers all hung until dead...
of course, as you read, Harak has had a little change lately...

Gorgons

There are very few gorgons left on the Cadaverous Earth, but they are long lived creatures and a few linger still.  Probably the descendents of an elder demoness who mingled her blood with that of humans, or perhaps the offspring of humans who slew and drank the demoness' blood, gorgons are daevas, immortals occupying an ontological schema fundamentally different than that of the quick, grave-spawn, or oneiroi: though they can be slain (a difficult but not impossible feat), they are living, breathing, ageless beings.

   At first glance gorgons appear as impossibly beautiful women emanating unearthly sensuality and voluptuousness, veritably oozing with seductive charm.  Their skin is porcelain white, their lips and nails vivid green, their eyes shimmering black.  Crowning a gorgon's head, however, is a nest of entangled black serpents which burst from its scalp in hissing profusion, a writhing brood of venomous snakes moving as if with minds of their own.  Those who look too long into a gorgon's fathomless green eyes glimpse something illimitable and terrifying, some abyssal space beyond human comprehension: invariably such individuals are driven hopelessly mad, and some are actually paralyzed with fear and despair.  Gorgons usually wear veils to prevent those who look upon them from degenerating into gibbering madmen.  Those wishing to disguise themselves more thoroughly incorporate a full headdress to conceal their serpentine hair.

   Gorgons often become the focus of snake-cults in primitive communities.  In urban locales they are usually well entrenched, installed as power-brokers of one variety or another, such as Nyssa in Lophius, matriarch of the Ophidian gang who rule the isle of Serpentside.  Their motivations are quite opaque, and gorgons often lead at least superficially epicurean lives, indulging their appetites while maintaining their power with ruthless intelligence.

Zehrer

Symbiotic companions to the grave-spawn Lords Revenant of Somnambulon, the zehrer are a race of psychic overlords of likely otherworldly origin, quite possibly one of the demon dimensions that once intruded onto the Cadaverous Earth during the Membrane Wars.  Powerful entities with innate eldritch ability, the zehrer merge with their human hosts much like shades, though unlike that breed of grave-spawn they can only exist for any prolonged period within a 'living' host rather than a mindless corpse.

The zehrer do not utterly dominate the minds of their chosen hosts, rather mingling their consciousness with that of their Lord of Lady.  So complete is this coupling of minds that the Revenants have become almost indistinguishable from the zehrer over the centuries. They prolong the natural life-spans of the Lords to up to a thousand years and also gift them with an arsenal of arcane talents.  Flight, pyrokinesis and telekinesis, telepathy (both with zehrer and with other sentient beings), preternaturally rapid healing and immunity to disease, incredible strength and agility, the capability to glimpse memories through drinking blood or eating flesh, sharpened senses, and millennia of experience are conferred to the host of the zehrer, who in return allows the parasite a body to dwell in and sustains the spirit.

Though possessing a great deal of individuality the zehrer are all bound within a hive-mind: they feel the experiences of other zehrer as dull resonances, sensing when one dies (an incredibly traumatic event), when one's host dies (considerably less so), and other extremities of emotion '" as well as communicating telepathically across their communal psychic network.  In addition the zehrer hive-mind allows for the control of Somnambulon's zombies, puppets to the will of the Lord Revenants.  These psychic slaves are utterly denied their individuality and are completely overwhelmed by the instructions of the Lords, obeying any and all directions with total obedience.

The Lords Revenant are divided into thirteen Houses or Families which interbreed exclusively with one another, scorning petty taboos against incest as the narrow rules of small minds.  When one of the Revenants dies their body is carefully preserved with its zehrer still inside, whenever such preservation is possible.  One of the House's few young '" usually the direct heir of the dead Revenant '" is then chosen to receive the zehrer.  Designated a 'Childe,' this youth will be inducted into the zehrer hive-mind during a formal ritual wherein the zehrer transfers hosts, bringing with it the memories and experiences of all its previous hosts as well as its eldritch abilities.  The ordeal is very trying and physically 'kills' the Childe at the moment of their joining with the zehrer, much as a ghul is 'killed' by their own parasite only to be revivified as grave-spawn.

[ooc]I think this thread is starting to sprawl a bit too much; I may soon post a more organized version after completing some more material.  Right now I'm working on the Slouching-devil Mountains and the Districts of Skein.

Is there anything in particular - an area, concept, creature, city, etc - that anyone is particularly interested in seeing more on?[/ooc]

describe an adventure...hook, history and all...

[ooc]Coming up, Lord Vreeg.  I'll assume the players are standard adventurers/scavengers/mercenaries - usually I try to tailor adventures to the players' backgrounds etc quite closely, but I think I can definitely come up with something more general or typical.[/ooc]

i look forward.
I do enjoy your stuff, it's true...
as I believe in putting up (and I can't shut up), here's a current bit of work I am doing...
NSM (http://celtricia.pbwiki.com/NSM-Adventure+Page-DM+only)
Still in process, but indicative, I think...

Like everyone else has said, your writing is fantastic.

Whenever I think of this setting, I always get the picture of a bleak, gray wasteland. Can't help it, the two are tied together :p

The Gorgons are my favorite part so far, and I'm curious as to what other Daeva are wandering around. Immortals in settings always interest me, just to see how people will handle them.

Also, the Membrane Wars.