The Campaign Builder's Guild

[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.
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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 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...