Damnéd Guttersnipes!

They look like children - any children they want. So we call them guttersnipes.

One moment a scruffy urchin, the next a stroller-bound bairn, or Little Lord Fauntleroy, or whatever you can imagine. Just not what they can imagine.

You see, whatever you were expecting when the thought "child" occurred to you upon seeing them is how they present themselves. Whether this is mere glamor or true transformation is not known. The effect is party-proof: whoever saw it first generates its form in their mind, and that is what all will see until they leave your sight.

But why exactly you think you are seeing a child is not known, nor is their true form, if they can be said to have one. Those few who are honest among them claim to have forgotten it in the long years in our Ouroboros. Most recall that they once lived in another version of our city, one where cruel child lords ruled: they wanted to be like these lords. Instead they have found their way here, where children are often mistreated and usually discredited as cheats and liars (they are, both real ones and guttersnipes).

Guttersnipes as a whole are capricious and mischievous, often straying into downright malevolence when the humours take them. Naturally they use their youthful guise to great effect among us, sowing chaos and malefaction every which way they can.

For whatever reason they cannot be banished by the blind masons, something the latter are eager to hide from their elvish masters. They fear they will be sent back to the pits to undergo some fresh hell, a return to the ocularum or worse. So there is an uneasy truce between the masons and the guttersnipes: they will be left to their tricks and japes so long as they stay far from the watch of the elves. The blind masons call this the Accord, the guttersnipes call it Our Naughty Little Secret. *shudder*

There isn't exactly a magic bullet for countering guttersnipes (though real bullets work fine). There is no dead giveaway, no telltale mark hidden somewhere upon their skin (many are the children who have been cruelly stripped down to their undergarments when adults search for such a thing). And they are highly intelligent: if one can hold conversation with the philosophers of Ouroboros, one can certainly play the innocent.

But while they represent a force of chaos and often petty crime, they aren't exactly evil. After all, so long as the Accord with the masons is in effect, they must keep their presence relatively hidden. While many know of them, and most have heard tales, none among them are so brazen as to raise their heinous acts to the awareness of the city (and by extension the elf houses) at large.

So there is an uneasy balance in Ouroboros. As there always is...

Anthony van Dyck

"Parents"

It is unfortunately common in our fair city that the guttersnipes trick honest men and women into financing their nefarious schemes and gaudy lifestyle.

This is easily done. The guttersnipe, arriving in the home of those with young children, will instantly be mistaken for their true offspring. From there, the guttersnipe will proceed to rob the parents blind, all while receiving room and board.

All that would be fine, if not for the fate of the true child. For the ruse to work, they must not return home while the guttersnipe is at its work. The honorable impostor will merely kidnap the child and hand them off to its gang of cronies for safekeeping until the work is complete. But too often these days, the children are drowned in the sewers, cut up and left in different alleys, or simply vanish.

Usually the business is concluded inside a week. But there are known cases of guttersnipes staying on rather long-term, even permanently, if the setup is particularly sweet (who doesn't want rich parents?). Most of the victims never realize this, but some do, and often this ends in violence. But in Ouroboros, where anything is possible, even this is not the case. Rarely, the parents will keep the guttersnipe even after the jig is up. Some even prefer them to real children. The conversation is better.

Antonio Mancini

Street Encounters 5

1	Scampering child bumps into you, bursts into tears and flees, later another child is hawking something of yours, many interested buyers gather.
2	You pass a coffee house filled with cackling children playing at deadly games, they invite you to join, become violently insistent if you do not.
3	An enraged lady in waiting is locked in a gutter duel with an elvish child dressed in stolen finery, her finery maybe for it is hilariously oversized, yet the child is winning: the guttersnipes have grown bold in these waning days.
4	Two screaming children tussle on the ground, biting and scratching, they are identical, but which is the guttersnipe? Both beg for aid and offer reward: one their parents riches, the other a secret spell known only to the young.
5	Gang of guttersnipes block your path, clad in rancid decadence, wielding razors and sharpened sticks, "alms for the young madam?".
6	Somber (or titillated) crowd gathers, the object of their attention is a dismembered baby, that same baby watches wistfully from their ranks, dressed in tricorner hat and blue frock.
7	Small girl offers you a smoky ball, patterns and colors flash once accepted, too late you realize it has fused with you, children up and down the street cackle madly.
8	Ragamuffin urchin on an auction block, charismatic, gathering a throng of onlookers, peddling dreams (erotic or otherwise), this is of course a trick, they will invade your dreams that night and devour the dinners your mind sets out.
9	A procuress, well-known, approaches you with a delicate offer: many of her clients prefer guttersnipes, would you care to partake? If the secret gets out, she could be ruined.
10	Exceedingly young junkies crowd the alley nearby, few are actual guttersnipes, can anything be done to save Ouroboros' youth from the grips of addiction?

The Blind Masons

The geography and history of Ouroboros is ever-changing, and it is often true that its Tuesday night denizens cannot recall the state of Monday morning. Obviously, the elf houses hate this. While they sometimes benefit from the overnight disappearance of political enemies, it is just as likely a fallen house may rise to power in the same span it fell, throwing all their schemes into disarray and wasting centuries of work. While hegemony can benefit from chaos, it also demands a certain stability.

Without intervention, there can be no status quo in Ouroboros.

The blind masons intervene.

Sculpting

To make a blind mason, start with a slave.

The elf houses keep a great many slaves, mostly of human stock. Usually these unfortunates are stolen from another Ouroboros in castrati raids, but that is not true of those destined to become blind masons. They must be from our iteration of the city, grounded in the instance of reality they would reinforce.

The flux of the city is such that few question the sudden disappearance of a lover or a child overnight (though remembering them after this does raise eyebrows). And true, most have wandered into or been taken by another Ouroboros. But a rare few citizens who vanish have been taken into the secret pits beneath the elf houses, to be broken and made anew.

This is called the sculpting.

To sculpt a blind mason from human marble, a great deal of chiseling is involved. The artifexes reshape the stolen bodies through the holy medium of pain. The eyes go first, spikes of cold iron driven deep into the brain pan. Usually this kills the subject. The elves have ways, of course, to drag their screaming souls back from the void. After the shock of death and resurrection, the real work begins. Every bone is broken in a thousand places. Every limb amputated, then affixed again, and again, and again. There is more, much more, and many things are done that the elves will never speak of, not even to the Reverend Mother. Deniability is key. If word got out...but word never leaves the sculpting pits.

Of course it is easy to reshape a body: a mind is more resistant.

To bend the human mind into a form that can see our city as it should be, it must first be exposed to all it should not. After the bodies are broken and remade in a new image, the fiendish ocularum are placed upon their ruined skulls. This device grants the sculptee vision into Ouroboros, every Ouroboros. To perceive a million million iterations spread across the temporal curve, the mind shatters into just as many pieces. The torture can last for years, but eventually it ends. The mind longs to return to its reality. Understanding of every possible Ouroboros is instilled, and with it a great fear of the malignant iterations that have deviated so far from our own. None will ever see the things the blind masons have seen, not all of them, not even an infinitesimal fraction of those horrors.

But the mind longs to return, and when it finds home, it knows instinctively. The blind masons awaken, the sculpting is complete, they have seen the infinite Ouroboros and know the differences between home and the Other.

This is only knowledge, however, and the blind masons must enforce it somehow or their words will seem the deranged prophecies of mad oracles. This is why they must devour elves.

It is believed the elves were made, or perhaps only changed, in the event that fractured Ouroboros into infinity. Their blood carries traces of this, strong in some and weak in others. This is why the Reverend Mothers must manage the bloodlines so carefully: the blind masons, ensurers of elvish rule, need the highest concentrations of this strange resonance to gain their power. As the elves were reshaped by the great shattering, so too will the blind masons (fueled by their blood) reshape that very same reality. Those chosen to undergo the ritualized devouring are often unpopular, or downright criminal: harem bandits, castrati-fuckers (how this is done is not widely known), failed challengers to the Reverend Mother, and committers of social faux pas. They are conferred the status of martyrs before being eaten by the greedy mouths of the newly sculpted.

And after this, the sculpting is complete.

Shapers of Reality

But what exactly does all this nonsense mean?

Blind masons walk the streets in twos and threes, shoring up errors in our reality. They can sense that today's market square is not yesterday's, though it may have vanished from the memory of common folk. They remember that there ought be no House of Shurikens and Ammonia, that this is from another city entirely. The blind masons remember reality as it should be, and feel the presence of incursions or more subtle alterations like one might feel a fever.

Then they set about repairing these deviations. How they do this varies from mason to mason, but it is always a highly personal ritual of some kind, something that recalls the reality they were born into: the repetition of a particular lineage, the folk dance of their youth, the carving of sigils learned in school...it could be anything. But it always brings forth the truth and history, unaltered, of our city. Often their fellows cheer them on, or if the aberration is great, pitch in with nursery rhymes and genealogies of their own.

Once the ritual is complete, the affected part of the city (however insubstantial it may have been) returns to "normal". The monsters vanish, the statues of dead gods too, and the market square no longer sells human flesh (unless it was the Square of the Feast, then it absolutely does).

Overall they are a jolly lot. This is unnerving to most, who believe their time in the pits should have broken their spirits. This is false. Sure, their souls were shattered, but they pieced themselves back together with a newfound love of this particular Ouroboros. This is the love of the child for its mother, the child who packed its bags and ran away, making it as far as the street corner before turning back in tears. They cling tightly to the bosom of this Ouroboros, for they greatly fear the infinite other cities, which recall too much their time in the ocularum. As such, they are always glad to mend the world and return it to the comfort of home-as-it-should-be.

Trouble

The procedures presented above are ideals, of course, and theory is often more neat than practice. The truth is, the life of a blind mason is a dangerous one. There is a reason the pits are always full, that the unpopular elves always fear a grisly death at the hands (and teeth) of the masons. Turnover is high in the business of shoring up reality. There are many threats to the work of the masons.

First are the most obvious: violent incursions. An eruption of cavemen, or castrati raiders on a slavetaking mission, or malevolent and intelligent spiders (not like the friendly intelligent ones kept by the elf houses), all pose physical danger to blind masons on-site. Their lame forms cannot defend themselves, so castrati are always nearby when the masons are at work. Many a brave eunuch soldier has fallen in their defense, and animosity between the two parties has always been high. Sadly the castrati have no recourse, as violence against the masons will always be met by swift and brutal death.

Second, there are more existential threats. Reality is sometimes rewritten so quickly that the masons are swept along in the wake of change. Many simply vanish, to be forgotten by all but their fellows, who hold secret memorials in their apartments. Others are irrevocably changed, their powers warped and even, in the worst of cases, turned against us. Many have been the battles between a fallen mason and their former brethren: these are always horrific affairs. The twisted creatures run amok, changing the city willy nilly, faster than even veterans can keep up with. The fallout can take weeks to repair, and sometimes changes are so subtle that the masons miss them.

Last, and most troubling, are the other masons. Our city is far from the only Ouroboros to have come up with the idea, and was probably not the first. They come in all forms, for all purposes. Some have stumbled in, swept up in currents of change, blindly seeking to convert our reality to something resembling theirs (obviously this scales from minor nuisance to horrific catastrophe). Others appear to be sent for sinister purposes, to weaken us for incursion from their side. Many are the forms these deadly agents take, and few resemble our own (though those that do are the most threatening).

Worst of these other masons are those sent from Thor, the great enemy to Ouroboros. Scholars and masons alike suspect it is an Ouroboros that is utterly inimical to the other iterations, a city whose sole purpose is the destruction of its sisters. Some of the worst incursions have resulted from their interference, or so it is suspected. Ultimately there is no proof of its existence, but the blind masons have spoken of the farthest point their ocularum ever took them, a hellscape at once alien and familiar. They speak in hushed tones to eachother of the visions, snatched glimpses of a great and yellow eye. Often it was this sight that hurled them screaming back into our reality, their sculpting complete.

Street Encounters 4

1	Trio of drunken masons, giggling and stumbling over eachother, they've turned the cobbles to slick wet meat, horrified citizens scream and flee and trip facedown in the offal road.
2	Pair of curious masons, inspecting the hawker stalls along the sidewalk, muttering of an incursion somewhere, the vendor furthest from them grows nervous.
3	Lone mason feeling her way along an invisible line as if it were a wall, ah-ha she smirks, found you, and begins to dance a merry jig, invites you to join her, it'll stop last month's murders, put the Reverend Mother back on her throne.
4	Bravos and dandies taunting a mason who turns this way and that, they've taken his hat, they don't see the approaching castrati or sense the impending bloodbath.
5	Masons in strange garb, crystal spikes in their eyes, marching with a purpose, clearing the way with syllables of power.
6	Mason dragging her dead comrade, calling for help, it's too late for them both, a flash of knife claws and razor teeth and she is eviscerated,  her dying words: its skull, its skull, please.
7	Castrati cadre leader arguing with a mason trio, they demand protection, he demands they get out of his way and let him get the slave-train to his Dominatrix or she'll have his hide.
8	A beast, a wrong thing, a monster, walking down the street in company of two masons, they notice nothing amiss, not even when it snatches up a bystander and devours him whole.
9	Grim-faced mason, smeared with blood, one arm gone, stalking an unseen foe. He holds charms in a white-knuckle grip and hums a tune in low tones, tells you to help her find the bastard or clear the street at once.
10	Sounds of a scuffle around the corner, muted cries and elvish swears, turn and see a castrati with blade hilt-deep in a mason's gut, more lie dead around, his fellows watch grimly, they turn to regard you with cruel smiles.

The City that Devours Itself

Shoutouts to my good friend and fellow roleplayer Astra, who helped me with the tables and provided constant support in the making of this post.

Maybe this strikes you as pretentious crap - it kind of strikes me that way, but it serves a purpose. The Inquisition campaign I've run for over a year is highly classicist; cosmology has slowly accreted into a set of knowns and rules that I've pigeon-holed myself into operating inside of. And so I long for something very different; a world that can be shaped and reshaped as best fits the adventure, rather than having to find the adventures that fit the world. Neither is wrong, but one is what I want right now. So without further ado...

Phuoc Quan

The Nature of Ouroboros

One should not go about trying to make sense of things. Let the blind masons and perhaps the Reverend Mother Echo Minor worry after such temporal matters. For those who are caught inside the interstices of "reality" in dreamlike Ouroboros, thought of theory amounts to little.

What is known is that sometime during Ouroboros' existence - whether it be distant past or impending future - a great shattering occurred. The city exploded into a thousand thousand iterations of itself, and they were scattered across timelines and universes. All these cities exist, though not simultaneous in space or time, and that should isolate them from another?

Except things keep slipping in through the cracks.

Most of the time they are from other Ouroboroses that are like ours, just a few meters or minutes away, always there but never quite here. Usually these are merchants with a miracle cure we've yet to develop, or refugees with a horrible plague we happen to be immune to. Sometimes they are conquering armies, and that is when Dominatrix Botfly proves herself a hero, if a bastard as well.

But sometimes they are other things, wrong things, things from Ouroboroses very unlike our own.

One might pass through an alley they have walked all their life to find themselves on a dark and unknown boulevard. Night has fallen, the lamps are unlit, and something howls to challenge a moon which should not be. And nowhere is the sign of the Queen.

Some Incursions

They are/were/will be many. These are but a few notables.

Most famous in recent memory was the Night of Seventy Seven Houses, when delegates from no less than seven other Ouroboroses arrived amid great confusion to an important council vote. Remarkably, all had arrived to address the same issue, but their methods of addressing the epidemic of lotus eaters varied wildly (this is why dancing in pleasure houses has been criminalized and the lotus eaters themselves have gained a permanent council seat). Equally remarkable were the level heads of the house representatives, leading to a uniquely bloodless incursion. Surely none will forget the dauntless rhetoric of Reverend Mother Pazuzu Juvenile, though all have forgotten whether she has ever existed in our Ouroboros. Either way, she and her house are here to stay.

Perhaps the most bloody incursion in recorded history was the Battle of the Nine Day Noon, where the sun's progress halted at its zenith and remained there for more than a week. This coincided with the spontaneous appearance of an invading castrati army with unrecognizable heraldry in the Plaza of Green Glass. This deadly force seized most of the city before Dominatrix Botfly was able to reassert control. How she accomplished this has been forgotten, but it is remembered that her house rose to great prominence after this tragedy.

And maybe strangest of all was the unnoticed invasion of identical dopplegangers of every man, woman, child, and dog in the city. Not only was this a large scale incursion, but more curious was that none of these dopplegangers seemed to have any memories or notion of which Ouroboros they had come from. Most of them were put down by the castrati, but they couldn't have gotten all of them.

Max Strasser

Street Encounters 3

1	They look like you, but lifeless and bloody and torn and entirely nude. A small crowd has gathered, but none of them seem to notice you; neither do the castrati cordoning off the area.
2	A creeping man pushes a cart of bodies, he is not an undertaker, he beseeches onlookers in a creaking voice to tell him where more of the fruit may be found. Why do the bodies writhe so?
3	A woman walking ahead of you freezes and drops her vase, screams, then turns and walks somberly into an alleyway, vanishing into thin air as she crosses some invisible border.
4	Boys handing out broadsheets, proclaiming the end of a war, you are named as saviors of the city, "the king" will honor you at a great festival on the next new moon.
5	An inviting melancholy flute tune, always just around the corner, you want so badly to follow it, any moment now your body will take off running to chase down the sound.
6	A beggar squats at the mouth of a storm drain, but they have no alms cup, their form hidden beneath a formless robe, look closely and you can see their tongue flick out, scenting the air.
7	The last eight corners you've turned lead you back to here, but every time there are less people in the street.
8	Troglodytes seize the street in a storm of bloodshed, taking hostages of the lame, sacrificing the beautiful, doing battle with the castrati coming down the lane.
9	A wrong turn leads you down a broad deserted boulevard you've never seen, the way back is lost, two moons hang over head but the sky is empty of stars, nothing moves in this quiet place.
10	You turn left into nightmare. Bleeding eyes peer from the soft skin of every building, and inhuman shapes skulk quickly into the darkness to await your moment of weakness. Who can say how long this terrible night will last.

The Question of the Queen

There is a doubt nagging at the mind of every citizen: where did the Queen come from?

Is hers an ancient bloodline of this world, as she claims, or is it from some Other Ouroboros?

Could she be from an enemy iteration, planted to bring us down from within? Are her decrees all designed to soften us for a killing blow?

Or is the Queen a memory of our Ouroboros as it was, and not as it is? Has she faded from reality into legend? Here are the Queen's men, but when was her last public appearance?

Shintaro Kago

Dreams in the Elf House

While the Queen is a renowned figure, the true rulers of Ouroboros are the Elf Houses, and the rulers of the Elf Houses have always been their women.

Like this...

...but dressed like this.

Gender in the Elf House

If you are a woman, life is decadent and dangerous.

If you are a man, it's either a total fuck-and-murder fest, or the dull life of a soldier.

Let's break that down a little.

Elf Women...

...do not speak: the subtleties of their body language convey all.

...are taught a thousand subtle arts over their long lives: chief among them are poisoning, dagger-fighting, spellcraft, and conspiracy.

...give birth to great clutches of eggs, though usually only one child survives the hatching (when two survive they are called twins, feared and respected, but that's another article). Those with children are Matrons, some of whom grow quite immense.

...are supervised by the Reverend Mother, who oversees the bloodlines and controls who breeds with who.

...are pretty much all Ladies in Waiting (meaning that they're waiting to strike down the Reverend Mother with poisoned needles).

Elf Men...

...are mostly kept at home in a communal harem for the house. They spend their time vying for their mistresses' favor and poisoning their competition.

...are sometimes chemically (or magically) sterilized to become Castrati, the grim private armies of their house.

...are ruled by a female Dominatrix (commander of the castrati) and Consort (minder of the harem, only woman to be sterilized).

...can be declared women and given all the privileges of a lady in waiting. This happens for many reasons: military valor, political alliances, managing the bloodlines, etc.

Houses of the Elves

The House of Salt and Honey: Theirs are the pleasure houses and vice dens, and their Reverend Mother Farniece is the only living thing in the city that has ties with the mysterious entities known as bees, from which the mutagenic and geriatric substance we call honey is derived. This monopoly, if it can be maintained, has secured stability for this house until the end times.
The House of Blood and Milk: Their Dominatrix, Botfly, leads her great armies of castrati plundering into the other Ouroboroses and defends this iteration from incursion by these alternate cities. It is by her will that the cosmic predators called ourselves do not slaughter us and take our children for meat-slaves.
The House of Stone and Silence: They own the blind masons, responsible for preserving and protecting the architecture of the city from its constant restructuring. This grants the house power over time and space unrivalled by any other force in Ouroboros (save perhaps Uncle Moth). However no one really likes them, as they are universally grim and changeless over the long and imaginary eons.

Street Encounters 2

1	Train of castrati-guarded slaves taken from last month's battle with the enemy.
2	Spider-riding ladies in waiting, out slumming, positively intoxicated by your absolutely horrific aesthetic. Peddlers swarm them, isn't it charming?
3	Warm-smiled matrons with little superfluous arms, they ride in silk-and-silver palanquins, guarded by huge formation of castrati. Crowds cheer.
4	Elf woman from a fallen house duels a lady in waiting over the heart of a human (interpret that literally if you want, but you don't have to).
5	Wandering troop of disbanded castrati, drunk and looking for trouble.
6	Silk bridge over a sludgy canal of sunken gondolas, escaped harem men crawl out from underneath and try to extort an exorbitant toll (they'll also accept escape from the city).
7	A sinister lady in waiting greets the worst of you with your most heinous crime.
8	A sobbing, broken castrati abandoned by his patrol mates, a green recruit from the pillowy abyss of the harem.
9	Crane-riding elf children, some have fallen off their mounts, the others mock them as they weep on the cobblestones.
10	Castrati slavers, heavily armed, waiting to take you.

Takato Yamamoto

I could do this all day.

What is Ouroboros

As my 5th edition Inquisition campaign comes to a close after a solid year and a half, it's time to look for the Next Hot Thing.

For me, that's an OSR campaign.

It's been a little while since I've run this style of game (maybe two years) but I already have some ideas percolating for this campaign.

Without further ado, here's everything I know about the City that Devours Itself, Ouroboros.

Pablo Genovés

Playing in the City

The city continually re-imagines and reinterprets its inhabitants, just as it devours and regurgitates itself again and again.

At the beginning of each session, you can re-roll one ability score. You must use the new result. You don't have to roll of course, but come on...

Street Encounters 1

Roll up one of these every time the players travel more than a few blocks.

1	Silent woman, making herself known telepathically (though you don’t immediately realize this), offers you a place to rest and a warm meal, her house seems abandoned, she will devour you all, rests after each killing.
2	Hawker of cursed and brittle swords, d10 in stock now, but put in a request and he may have what you want next time (the cursed version of course).
3	Things posing as humans, most of them passable, trying to lure you near the open sewer with a “business proposition” though they don’t quite know what that is.
4	Archery contest with women from a far land, nearly unbeatable, they sucker you into putting down serious money, may have to cheat your way out.
5	Living saints, pale and bright, determined to silence you for seeing them beat a beggar to death and feast on his brain matter.
6	Blind masons traipsing about town are taking turns at ever-escalating feats of vandalism and outright destruction, and they both want your help overcoming the other.
7	Roadwork leads you through an alley, once past a blind turn you see its bricked up, little claws are reaching out of every crack to pull you into the seams between stones, their tiny voices beg you, they are so hungry.
8	Defamed alchemist, desperate to restart career, is giving away one random potion for each potion you buy, the random ones are untested and mutagenic.
9	Night falls suddenly and the shadow men make themselves known, threatening you without words, stalking you, waiting for the moment to steal your last breath.
10	A great parade of lunatics and celebrants, masked and painted, many will ask you to join and make outlandish promises to encourage this, they’re being herded out of the city by the Queen’s men, never to be allowed back inside.

Canaletto

The Old City

Buried beneath the Mad Queen's Palace, buried by time and earth and historical revisionism, is the Old City, called in contemporary annals the Nameless City, called by its modern populace the City of Ghouls.

In the years between the great flood and the rise of Rome, there ruled an empire unparalleled. They were called the Assyrians, and their armies marched from the Sea of Monsters in the west to the Wall of Heaven in the east, and their fleets brought ruin to the Children of the Sun beyond the Boiling Waters, and their palaces were buttressed with the skulls of their enemies, and their streets were lined with the shattered statues of enemy gods, and they were great and terrible.

But no earthly power is enough for man, whose avarice is infinite. The Assyrians desired the power of the gods. They craved, above all, power over Death.

It was then that the Black Goddess came to them, as she came to the Romans before their fall, and as it is whispered she comes to us now. She came with a book of secret truths, hidden from man by the gods, those jealous guardians. From this book, the Assyrians learned and mastered a hundred sorceries. Chief among these magicks was that most highly sought by the kings: the secret to eternal life.

Of course there were wars and schisms, for few would abide the destruction of the natural order, an affront to the gods themselves. But many of the Black Goddess' followers survived, and she commanded them to build a great city beneath the sea cliffs of a place where certain eldritch stars shone on starless nights.

They built a city of the dead.

For a time, the king of this city reigned above all others. His armies were inexhaustible, the enemy dead swelled his ranks, he grew ever stronger while his enemies could only weaken. But this army of the hungry dead would never stop its march, so bottomless was its hunger. The dead, beyond the king's control now, bled their former kinsmen dry until the Assyrian empire, built on the bones and severed heads of the conquered, was itself ground into dust.

They made a wasteland, and called it peace.

And so there remained one city of the Assyrians, sole relic of a fading broken dream.

But the people of this city had long ago disavowed the gods, and now divine vengeance fell like the sword of Damocles upon them. The earth was scorched and salted, the seas emptied of fish, the rains would not come, disease struck the people. Everywhere was famine and sickness. The people were terrified, surely judgement was upon them and they had been found wanting. And in fear, the king turned back to the Black Goddess. And she told him of the Hidden Ones.

Before man, before earth, before the gods, there had always Been. The gods did not come from nowhere. All things had come from the roiling chaos of Before, and in this nowhere, there were hidden beings older than ancient. It was they who wielded true power. It was they who would save the city, not gods or men.

But such things come at a price.

Great temples were built and sacrifices made; hecatombs slaughtered and their blood drained into the maws of statues whose thirst could never be slaked, children cast into the open arms of flaming hundred-tendriled idols.

And the Black Goddess, pleased at the frenzied orgy of worship, touched the king with Death. "You will never thirst or hunger again. Illness will pass you by." She smiled a terrible smile. "You will grow fat from death".

Time passed and the prophecy proved true: the king felt no hunger, no thirst, and the plagues that stalked his city spared him. He knew he must act quickly to save his people. He begged the Black Goddess to minister her blessing upon the people, promised her anything, anything. She smiled again, and said no sacrifices would be needed. One by one, in the temples of the Hidden Ones, the Black Goddess blessed every man, woman, and child with Death.

And though the plague died away, and the people rejoiced, their praises to the king fell on deaf ears. Something was amiss. He could feel it. The pains and needs of life had been relieved, and yet a great hunger was growing in him. No food would satisfy it. No wine would drown it.

It was a hunger for the dead.

Horror mounted in him as he presided over the burial of those who refused the Black Goddess' gift. He could not keep his eyes from the bodies. They seemed to call to him.

It was then he knew what the Black Goddess had done. Before he could glut himself upon the corpses of his people, he ordered his tower sealed and sunk with him inside it.

Soon this same hunger gripped the people, but few chose the king's path, even in the face of such monstrosity. In the space of a week the city turned upon itself, the mausoleums were broken open, the graveyards excavated, the great tombs of the royal family looted for their lifeless plunder.

And so rose the Ghoul Kings, great and gluttonous, partite masters of this City of Ghouls. Deathless aeons and the devouring of the dead has made them monstrous, twisted creatures, and the "people" are little better - ragged beasts who bear only the trappings of civilization, noble necrophages, preying upon their past and eachother.

Anything to live.

This whole take on the undead is inspired by the wonderful ghouls detailed here.

The Queen's Madness

As old as it is, this one has spoilers for my campaign. My players best get out before they ruin things for themselves.

The old ones do not sleep or die, though to mortal eyes they do both. Their minds  dwell on higher planes, and for long aeons their bodies in the physical realm may seem to sleep. Indeed these bodies can, through great destructive power, be destroyed. But even the final annihilation of their body is not the death of the mind.

Her whole life, the Queen lived in a man’s world. Never anything more than a party favor, a festival attraction, a bargaining chip. Until she married the Prince. That was her first taste of real power. She could make anyone do anything, save the royal family. The Prince and his father always towered over her. When the Prince’s father died and she first took the title of Queen, her power grew. So did her desire to see no man command her. Some say she poisoned the Prince. All that’s known is that he died, and she was so beloved that the people demanded she continue to reign in his stead. And so she has. For a time, she enjoyed peace, finally ruling over her life as a man might. But with true Queendom came responsibility to foreign powers and with that came new ways of subjugation by men. This new way was the Church, whose God is a man, whose high clerics are men. The Church had attached itself to her land like a parasite, and in the tenth year of her reign it sucked its prey dry. The Church wanted to become the official religion of her realm, and the people wanted it too. The Queen accepted, as she must, lest she be deposed by chain and pyre. But she was not going to surrender power to these men with their holy water and their God. Through her Mathematician, she found a way to contact the old ones, and they instructed her how to become like them. She will bear a child, herself, into the world. The birth will kill her, but her consciousness will be reborn into her child. Even now she is undergoing the ritual. The madness gripping her city and the phantasms of her that seem to walk the palace are manifestations of this deep disturbance of the natural order. The Queen doesn’t care. Now, surely, no man will hold power over her.

The madness of the maids is a symptom of the Queen’s coming ascension beyond the reach of men. This energy has infected them with uprising, and now they would do as their Queen does (without knowing it, thinking her the symbol they rebel against rather than rally around) and ascend beyond their station. They would become royalty, no longer servants.

The wing occupied by the Mathematician has succumbed to the chaos of higher realities. The architecture has rearranged around non-Euclidean geometries and impossible space. To walk there is to warp. Nothing there is natural. The Archbishop Artemis has become trapped here, trapped and twisted. Things are coming through from the other side, but who knows what is what.

Below the palace dwells the Nurse, and with her all the failed experiments that led to the triumph of the Queen’s rebirth. The space is right but the denizens are horrific, and it is the reality, not unreality, of the gruesome experiments here that makes them truly horrible.

Below even this, buried under the palace’s foundation, are the ruins of the old city. Here the last dynasty, who communed personally with the old ones, dwelt and still dwell. For they have transcended death in their own way, not quite living and not quite undead, a cannibal society of ghouls and vampires. It is here, in the holiest shrine, that the Queen is being reborn. Here the bodies of the slain become possessed by lingering quantum spirits of the old ones, corpses fashioned into shoggoth-hulks of dead matter.

This was the earliest iteration of lore for my Inquisition campaign. "The old ones," vague as they were, were replaced by a more Biblical (but not too Biblical) Dragon, a product of Lucifer's war against God that finds itself chained outside the cosmos, sealed behind the angel-portal Lilith and awaiting the day it is unleashed upon the quaking Earth...