Twilight Cities of the Cadaverous Earth

[Steerpike]

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

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

[Steel General]

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

[Steerpike]

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

[Steerpike]

Shades

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

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

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

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

[Steerpike]

Cestoids

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

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

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

[Steerpike]

Districts of Baranauskas

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The Walls

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

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

Hexwarren (The Witch's Gate)

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

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

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

Slimesquallor (The Eel's Gate)

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

Resurrection Row (The Butcher's Gate)

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

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

The Skin Markets

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

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

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

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

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

Velveteen Circus

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

The Curio Bazaars

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

Pulsetown

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

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

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

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

The Worm-Hive

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

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

The Catacombs

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

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

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

The Shanties

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

[SA]

Li'l something I cooked up this morning.



[spoiler=OR...][/spoiler]

[Ishmayl-Retired]

That's fantastic!

[Steerpike]

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

[Numinous]

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

[Tangential]

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

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

[Ishmayl-Retired]

Reminds me of better days here, when setting material was flooding the boards and excitement at every one filed me with every new post.

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

[/off topic]

[Steerpike]

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

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

[Kindling]

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

[Steerpike]

Eidolons

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

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

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