Year 193, Age of Discord. The Old Empire has been sundered. Petty colonial fiefs have endured centuries of infighting and fight over the fields of mud and broken stone like wild dogs, eking out a pitiful existence in a monstrous and insane land that calls every moment for their destruction and insanity. The One True Temple is weak and morally depraved, villages and hamlets are depopulated, and violence reigns supreme. History has entered into the final years before the end of the world.
But if there is a vibrant spot in these forbidding southern colonies, it is the free city-state of Tøtenwäld. The First and Last Rest. Queen of the Dead Woods. City of Life and Death. Explorers and merchants and swordwhores from the Old Kingdoms ply the colonies with their various trades, but they all come through here first. Old architecture and fortified stone hangs over colonist shanty-towns and faery-kin ghettoes. Emissaries of the One True Faith administer to the shiftless masses, taking coin and confession. Fog as thick as milk creeps up the broken basalt shore from Devilfish Bay, muffling all sound. Shapes move in the dark, and no one hears the screams.
History does not record who actually build the city, and none are left alive who remember, though the Empire and the Temple claim it was founded by Imperial Etruscans only 200 years prior, though a look through the chronicles and architecture would claim a much older founding. The Inquisition has a tendency to quiet any dissention to the official histories, however. What is clear is that Mannish peoples and Fairfolk from across the Great Sea have been landing for centuries, and yet the exotic, gibbering wilderness is still untamed beyond the city walls.
Welcome to the Old Town. Welcome to Tøtenwäld.
No comments:
Post a Comment