In our version of Duskwall…
I love those creative spaces Harper creates for groups to fill, making every game unique. So I wanted to ask you about those little details that make Duskwall your own. Care to share?
In our version of Duskwall…”
* Red Sashes have an “eastern” look, the Temple of the Path of Echoes have a pagoda-like architecture and the duelists live in a “dojo” but they use more middle eastern outfits and duel techniques.
** Each “dojo” is protected by an ancestral sword that holds a sliver of each swordmaster that has wielded it ( #theMalkavs stole one).
** The Temple of the Path of Echoes is protected by armor animated by the spirits of brave iruvian warriors bound by ghost locks.
* The Leaky Bucket is a neutral ground for all factions to share. It’s also a melting pot for people around the isles to gather, iruvian lanterns hang beside sevorian witch-candles and electric lights. Currently the tavern is composed of three different buildings, one original and two annexed. Its neutrality is sponsored by the Crows.
** Only has female waitresses.
** It is owned by Lorette.
** It has an exclusive gambling table placed under a stuffed crow.
** It’s the only area where prostitutes can work independently inside Crow’s Foot, otherwise they work for the Lampblacks or else…
* All spirit masks look the same, making it hard to recognize Whispers.
* There is a secret net of canals under Crow’s Foot only Gondolier knew. A crew of smugglers working for the Lampblacks have stolen a map picturing this net. The Hive have purchased another map from the Gondoliers, and are pushing for complete hold.
** After midnight the spirits start haunting the waters, and a Whisper is needed to navigate safely the hidden canals.
** Duskwall waters are filled with the bodies. Thousands of spirits dating before the Cataclysm plague the depths but are bound to the water. Falling to the canals is a death sentence. Bodies disappear never to be seen again.
** With the help of the Gondoliers the Hive has set a series of secret caches in the crypts below Crow’s Foot, that can be accessed though the abandoned canals below the city and some sewers.
* Hive workers can be identified by their yellow girdles.
* Iruvia has (or had) a royal family. The old painting #theMalkavs stole numbers at least 20.
* There’s a haunted library at the end of Narrow st.
** it stores ancient documents from the first days after the Cataclysm. The Grimoire of Saint Vestine is among them.
** the Grimoire holds the spirit of St. Vestine. Thanks to #TheWarts It is now in possession of Vladimir Kristov, a successful historian and novelist.
** It is run by six possessed librarians occupied by five spirits. They can be recognize by their height, grey robes and beards and blue fire lamps.
** it is warded by runes that alert the whisper librarian.
* the City Watch won’t bring order to Crow’s Foot until the war between the Lampblacks and Red Sashes ends, making it a haven for criminal pursuits.
* the Wester Family, a low ranking noble house with people on the Council paint themselves as extravagant and occult.
**Lady Remira Wester stages illegal seances with smuggled electroplasm, charging a fee to any noblemen who wants to take part on their depraved parties.
**All noblemen are talking about the mysterious Madame La Mort (actually #theMalkavs disguised as medium performers) and the last seance at Remira’s house where the murderous spirit of Lord Veleris Wester manifested and threatened the guests.
***Lord Veleris is pissed.
** Lord Veleris has being enslaved by Lovelia the Whisper and now acts as her personal murder-ghost.
** Now with proof Inspector Morlan can raid Lady Remira’s house and bring her decadent clients to justice.
* Inspector Emeric Morlan is bound by bureaucratic red tape. The Wester family has some important connections among judges and councilmen. There is a trial waiting for happen.
* #theMalkavs discovered that the Morlan family has some kind of grudge against the Westers.
* There’s a ghostly information net that Whispers can consult, not too different from eavesdropping rumors. The dead can talk.
** Using this net opens up your mind to any ghostly influence up there. You are easier to find by vengeful spirits in there.
* Being attacked by ghosts deals both ethereal and physic damage.
** Lovelia has a beautiful frostbite scar on her chest to show it. Whispers can be recognized by this kind of marks.
* There is a race of Time Daemons charged with regulating the time flow in the material world. This are atemporal beings, invisible to most humans. Not inherently evil nor benign.
** Time Daemons are depicted as lions wearing iron crowns.
** One of these demons occupies an ancient mausoleum in the city graveyard.
*** The trapped time-daemon reached out to Nienna, warning her of dark times to come, implying that there is another time-daemon on the lose and alerting her to keep an eye for the house of clocks.
* There is a Deathland Scavengers warehouse on Crow’s Foot stacked with haunted items and rogue spirits.
** the Deathland Scavengers brought an idol from the Brokend Lands that holds a daemon, it is now trapped by a seal drawn by a whisper of #theWarts
* the seal was designed by Roethe, a demon in disguise, and can be only broken by him.
** there is a possessed broken-wolf on the lose. It became known as “The Wolf of Crow’s Foot.”
* Acaste, high priestess of the Forgotten Gods thinks that this wolf is a servant sent by the Lord of Beasts to empower the cult and is trying to capture it.
* The wolf is actually possessed by numerous ghosts. Warped and corrupted it haunts the streets of Crow’s Foot.
* The cult of The Forgotten Gods is a syncretistic religion that merges divinities, spirits and gods from before the Cataclysm.
** It is mainly a death cult, focusing on the those elements of the old religions. There is no single God of Death, but all gods are different aspects of death itself.
** The cult is run as a matriarchy.
I will update this post after more play.
. Very interested. Great idea. I love the haunted water parts since our last game had a gondola chase that ended up with the PCs capsized into the water, unfortunately I wasn’t instill much sense of danger, that time.
Sweet! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Colour me curious, what are ‘Hive workers’?
I really like the neutrality of the Leaky Bucket. Sublime.
The faction blurbs John Harper posted a while ago.
“The Hive: A guild of legitimate merchants who secretly trade in contraband. Named for their symbol, a golden bee.”
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112767357581554417629/s/factions%20blurbs
Oh yeah! Right! I had forgotten about those blurbs…. I think I need to print them out and add Them to my GM cheat sheet.
Our Leaky Bucket plays host to a struggling theater company, which serves as the association vice of the Slide as well as the source of the crew’s name (the Gaffers) and their “Pack Rat” special ability (a wide range of props and costumes)
Because of the lightning barriers the city is built up and rebuilt, and sometimes areas get completely cut off. The crew’s hidden lair is in one such a place, a narrow and oddly shaped building accessible only through a maze of narrow corridors behind and beneath the Bucket, or the roof.
I’ve run a bunch of Ghostlines, which is set in the same world. I added besides lightning oil the other main fuel that the big cargo transport trains ran on was Deadstone coal. Both of which were mined in very dangerous mines near spirit wells and that the big secret was that they were in truth compressed ectoplasm mined from the land of the dead.
I always want to steal all the things I read here. So many cool ideas.
The Spectral Sisters ventured near the city walls to the East of Crow’s Foot and encountered the arcing lights of the electro-plasmic defences. Ghosts filled with malice and despair fling themselves hopelessly at the walls in a desperate attempt to possess the souls within.
They are shredded into tendrils of form, bursting like insects to a blue electric lamp, causing a stupendous light show that comes in waves. Predictors of this ‘Western Lights’ or Aurora Spectralis command front page of the ink rags if they ‘get it right’ and hordes of Duskwall citizens flock to the ramparts to witness the death of a million ghosts.
Talking about the electro-plasmic walls around the cities reminds me in my Ghostlines game. I had ghost animals, specifically crazied spectral hounds that prowled right outside the city electro walls — rather like how wolves prowl at the edges of ancient human settlements. The spectral hounds were seldom a real problem for the line bulls guarding the trains; however some of the human ghosts outside the city walls would go feral themselves and transform into hound men. The hound men would cause real trouble as they still had some measure of intelligence and would tactically lead packs of spectral hounds to attack the trains.
In my one game of Ghostlines, the train was rigged up with a ghost catcher on the front, basically a large lighting web generator on the front of the train that fired to capture ghosts on the tracks. This was especially useful when the trains left the station to deal with the spectral hounds and hound men that often haunted the outside the city walls ready for when the electro-walls to drop and let the train through.
* There’s a haunted library at the end of Narrow st.
** it stores ancient documents from the first days after the Cataclysm. The Grimoire of Saint Vestine is among them.
** the Grimoire holds the spirit of St. Vestine. Thanks to #theWarts It is now in possession of Vladimir Kristov, a successful historian and novelist.
** It is run by six possessed librarians occupied by five spirits. They can be recognize by their height, grey robes and beards and blue fire lamps.
** it is warded by runes that alert the whisper librarian.
Our Crew’s Elite Shadows are a group of orphan street kids escaped from “Madame Cybele’s School for Lost Children”. The orphanage is a large, iron-fenced building in the north of Crows Foot.
There’s also some kind of breach that allows spirits to enter Duskwall from beneath the Red Sashes. No one knows why is there.
* Bluecoats won’t bring order to Crow’s Foot until the war between the Lampblacks and Red Sashes ends, making it a haven for criminal pursuits.
*the Wester Family, a low ranking noble house with people on the Council paint themselves as extravagant and occult.
**Lady Remira Wester stages illegal seances with smuggled electroplasm, charging a fee to any noblemen who wants to take part on their depraved parties.
*All noblemen are talking about the mysterious *Madame La Mort (actually #theMalkavs disguised as mediums and performers) and the last seance at Remira’s house where the murderous spirit of Lord Veleris Wester appeared and threatened the guests.
***Lord Veleris is pissed.
** Now with proof Inspector Morlan can raid Lady Remira’s house and bring her decadent clients to justice.
* There’s a ghostly information net that Whispers can consult, not too different from eavesdropping rumors. The dead can talk.
** Using this net opens up your mind to any ghostly influence up there. You are easier to find by vengeful spirits in there.
* Being attacked by ghosts deals both ethereal and physic damage.
** Lovelia has a beautiful frostbite scar on her chest to show it. Whispers can be recognized by this kind of marks.
* With the help of the Gondoliers the Hive has set a series of secret caches in the crypts below Crow’s Foot, that can be accessed though the abandoned canals below the city and some sewers.
* A race of Time Daemons are charged with regulating the time flow in the material world. This are atemporal beings, invisible to most humans. Not inherently evil nor benign.
** Time Daemons are depicted as lions wearing iron crowns.
** One of these demons occupies an ancient mausoleum in the city graveyard.
* There is a Deathland Scavengers warehouse on Crow’s Foot stacked with haunted items and rogue spirits.
** the Deathland Scavengers brought an idol from the Brokend Lands that holds a daemon, it is now trapped by a seal drawn by a whisper of #theWarts .
* the seal was designed by Roethe, a demon in disguise, and can be only broken by him.
** there is a possessed broken-wolf on the lose.
* The cult of The Forgotten Gods is a syncretistic religion that merges divinities, spirits and gods from before the Cataclysm.
** It is mainly a death cult, focusing on the those elements of the old religions. There is no single God of Death, but all gods are different aspects of death itself.
** The cult is run as a matriarchy.
** Now with proof Inspector Morlan can raid Lady Remira’s house and bring her decadent clients to justice.
* Inspector Emeric Morlan is bound by bureaucratic red tape. The Wester family has some important connections among judges and councilmen. There is a trial waiting for happen.
* #theMalkavs discovered that the Morlan family has some kind of personal grudge against the Westers.
* There is a race of Time Daemons charged with regulating the time flow in the material world. This are atemporal beings, invisible to most humans. Not inherently evil nor benign.
** Time Daemons are depicted as lions wearing iron crowns.
** One of these demons occupies an ancient mausoleum in the city graveyard.
* The trapped time-daemon reached out to Nienna, warning her of dark times to come, implying that there is another time-daemon on the lose and alerting her to keep an eye for the house of clocks.
** there is a possessed broken-wolf on the lose. It became known as “The Wolf of Crow’s Foot”
*** Acaste, high priestess of the Forgotten Gods thinks that this wolf is a servant sent by the Lord of Beasts to empower the cult and is trying to capture it.
*** The wolf is actually possessed by numerous ghosts. Warped and corrupted it haunts the streets of Crow’s Foot.
This is getting far too big for a g+ post 😛
Wiki?