A town for the fearful dead · 3:29pm March 10th
What is that Gardez up to? Still toiling away at his tabletop world. Presented, for those with interest, the town of Cnoc an Fhomhair.
Cnoc an Fhomhair (Town)
Population: Varies – between two and five thousand.
Industry: Trade.
Fae Presence: None.
Imperial Presence: None.
Notable Organizations: Inscrutable.
Taverns: The Open Crypt, in the center of the town’s cemetery, operated by the ghost Evelyn. The tavern is a converted catacomb, with rooms alongside tombs and food served atop velvet-shrouded biers.
The City of the Dawn Walkers, a town of tombs and wakeful corpses, Cnoc an Fhomhair is the depth to which mortals will sink when fleeing death. It is a refuge for those who willingly embrace undeath rather than face the unknown that waits beyond life. The Locrian Pestilence is the only place in Lacuna where such violent rejection of the natural order is tolerated – anywhere else, they would be destroyed. But here, in the crawling, twisted ruin of the Pestilence, they have their asylum.
Most of the town’s residents present as well-kept zombies, the process of decay arrested by the Pestilence’s sterilizing antipathy for life. From a distance they might even pass as living, but the illusion collapses once they draw near – their skin, ashen and bruised, eyes clouded with stagnant fluids, hair brittle as straw. Though they perfume themselves for outsiders, an unmistakable, faint whiff of death attends them. When cut, they do not bleed. They walk along the floor of lakes without breathing. They swaddle their bodies in robes like shrouds, concealing their withered forms beneath rich finery that distracts the eye from any glimpse of their pallid skin. Their beds are slabs of stone, and they use dry kindling as their blankets. They are happy, they insist; they have defeated death.
Other residents slough off their bodies entirely, living as specters or ghosts. This has certain advantages – it is cleaner, for one – but their intangibility is a source of constant frustration. Only weakly able to interact with the world, these spirits are the town’s thinkers, managers, artists and storytellers. They drift with the wind, floating in and out of stately homes, sometimes forgetting which one is theirs. They are melancholy, never insisting on happiness – but surely this is better than death.
The town is an architectural wonder. It hides from travelers, nestled in a hollow on the north side of its valley, but between the encompassing hills its homes bloom like gothic flowers. They rise with rigid, acute angles, roofs crowned with windvane daggers menacing the sky, grand timbers exposed like a starving wolf’s ribs. Ornamental windows tell stained-glass tales. No building escapes the desperate designs of the dead – even the stables are stately and imposing, their thick beams ornamented with bas relief carvings and topped with stone grotesques – chimaeras and basilisks and unicorns, frozen in the midst of their hunt. At the center of it all rises the town hall, a multi-storied timber castle trimmed in iron and bedecked with sharp towers. Within, the fires burn round the clock, chasing away the perpetual scent of death with the pleasant air of smoke and incense.
The Dead
One thing unites the people of Cnoc an Fhomhair – when the time of their deaths arrived, they elected to remain living. This strange elision of death happens throughout the Pestilence, some consequence of the vast and untamed pool of Entropy suffusing the land, and afterward the dead find themselves drawn here, as though the town is a whirlpool, sinking them into its smothering grasp.
The dead are not trapped . They can and do leave, venturing throughout the Pestilence in pursuit of tasks to stave off the boredom of undeath. Often this involves ancient adventures, left unfinished when they died. They may, in fact, look to living adventurers to help them complete these tasks, finding the closure that will give them the courage to move on.
Many other dead prefer to look forward. The town is their life now, and they have no reason to leave. They may welcome outsiders, gracious and hospitable and eager to prove – to visitors and to themselves – that Cnoc an Fhomhair is a true town and not a desperate self-delusion. Or they may disdain strangers, preferring not to face the judgement of the living. The dead are as varied in their temperament as the living.
Evelyn Bramblewine was a gnome struck by wanderlust, who abandoned her kin and the small town of her birth to see the wider world. Her adventures ended in the lair of a ruin cormorant, and in death she drifted to Cnoc an Fhomhair, settling down to run an inn, just as her parents did. She is welcoming to all, and happy to explain the town’s peculiarities to outsiders.
Sir Aldric the Undying was a capable warrior in life, but in death he became a true hero, rescuing countless lost parties from the wilds of the Pestilence. Those he rescues are often not happy to see him, for he appears as a tattered armored zombie wielding an enormous, rusted sword. But if they can get past first impressions, they find he has a courageous heart and boundless desire to save lives – and prevent more people from meeting his own fate.
Lysandra Fogbrush is a ghost, among the oldest in Cnoc an Fhomhair. She never speaks and rarely appears before outsiders, preferring to haunt the town hall and slowly complete the enormous phantasmal tapestries that decorate its rafters. She has been working on them for centuries, pleating common wool thread with insubstantial, luminescent yarns drawn from her own hair. The tapestries tell of strange beasts hunting – or being hunted by, if one tilts their head – a race of graceful, elf-like people. The Diaghan as a younger people, perhaps, not yet masters of Lacuna.
Griselda the Gardener is a skeleton now, having long since fed her flesh to her beloved gardens. She clatters along the rows, her bones hidden beneath thick green robes, and carefully prunes the exotic plants that thrive in the Pestilence’s harsh environment. She is shy, but when outsiders earn her trust, she is happy to share centuries of knowledge of herbs and alchemy.
I’m not really sure what this is. I’ve never played tabletop games before, so I don’t understand this.
But I find creating worlds very interesting and I kind of wish I could do it as well I’ve tried, but it didn’t turn out very well.
I bet the night life is pretty grand.
Very intriguing space. I like the NPCs, especially the gardener.
I'll be honest, the most interesting detail here is the "Fae Presence" statistic. It implies a setting where that's common enough to be worth noting.
It reminds me somewhat of Hollowfaust the city of necromancers.