The Campaign Builder's Guild

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!