Gatetowns - Outlands

Download a copy of A Players Primer to the Outlands, and be sure to get the sound tracks.

Hopeless

A city, as a melancholy Prime once put it, where wonder went out of the minds of men; a grey city rearing to smoky skies, with tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or Spring's beauty. A city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned.

“I don't remember what the sun looks like, or spring.”

“This place has gone to shit, and so have we.”

The population of 20,000 here has an easy time of finding their way around, at least. The city is one huge spiral with but one entrance. The spiral ends in a deep pit in the center of a courtyard filled with a thick, black, tar-like ooze which is the gate to the Gray Waste. It’s patrolled constantly by seven beholders (some say observers or spectators) absolutely loyal to the town’s High Cardinal, Thingol the Mocking. On the gate's other side is the barren Wasteland, close enough to the Blood War front to feel uneasy but not close enough to feel excited.

Some find the entrance to the city itself more disturbing: A screaming face carved in red stone, its eyes blank and blind, red tears cut by erosion running down its cheeks. The red of the face's blood is the last color a body will see as she descends into the gloom.

The people of Hopeless are walking sorrow. Most drifted into town having nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. The poor sods have barely the energy to be nasty. There's no chance of anything getting any better, not here, not anywhere else, so why bother? The nearness of the Waste steals their passions away.

The waste wears on the locals in other ways, too. They acquire a greyish pallor after but a few weeks, and their eyes are hurt by bright colours. In fact, the closer to the center of the town you go, the more bright colours become illegal. It's best to avoid them unless you want to lose them.

"Whattaya got against gray, berk?"

“On Wednesday the last of my pets died. The fragile creature, all bone and wishes, gave a tiny whimper and crumpled, becoming mere scraps and dross, its skull grinning at me like a solstice toy.”

“The walls, once so colorful, had gone gray. The blackness comes; it rises. It rises from the bottom of the well and someday it will engulf us all.”

Hopeless has no beginning; they say it was the beginning and Hope came only afterwards, briefly, before it left the Land forever, its ascension a time of celebration and glory for the lordly guardinals but bitter for those left behind. It has all the characteristics of a once-proud town since fallen into decay, its prosperous businesses closed, the orphanage turned into a place for executions, its fields stricken with famine, but it seems to have been created from the beginning as a channel for evil, its profane sigils and downward spiralling slope a perfect conduit. Even the inns are sad: the Defenestrated Paladin, the Open Tomb, the Tower of Bone pathetically named after a realm of death that no longer exists. It only gets worse the further down the spiral you go. But look closer: there's an organic feel that makes it clear that the burg was created by no physical hands. Still, the inhabitants are painfully human, and githzerai, and bariaur and tiefling as well. They live, breed, and die, every generation sure it will see the town's final slide into ultimate gloom, and each generation somehow discovering an inner endurance.

It is as if an impasse has been reached between the Glooms and the humanity of the city's occupants. Everything has been taken from them, but they find a way to live.The best of them are the Chapterhouse of the Sisterhood, a group of do-gooders of both sexes who wear robes of the lightest gray hue. The worst is High Cardinal Thingol (female human (prime) wizard 16). With her chains and iron wolf-mask she looks as much construct as human, and acts like it too. They say she sold her humanity (and, some suggest, her spellcasting ability) to dark powers in exchange for the loyalty of her beholders and the spirit to rule.

“You’re worthless, all of you. You’re parasites who’ve forgotten how to be productive, who live off my good will and generosity. No wonder this town’s lost its soul to the Glooms. You deserve nothing more. Do I need to execute another dozen of you or will you finish the tasks I‘m the only one thoughtful enough to assign?”

The Hopeless speak softly and numbly, as if inflection is physically painful. Their faces are drawn and wan, their mouths tight and grim.

City-in-the-Center is, perhaps, the node from which the Gray Waste was built, the thing that unites the three layers in despair, preventing them from drifting to their related planes of the Beastlands, Ysgard, and Arborea.

Hopeless thinks of City-in-the-Center as a sort of big sister, and a bully who takes its stuff and kicks sand in its face. City-in-the Center is always more prosperous, more successful, and more alive than Hopeless, and its agents are the ones who constantly try to debase Hopeless' population, corrupting their spirits until there's nothing left. If Hopeless were to slide, it would become nothing more than one of City-in-the-Center's endless series of outlying suburbs. Some of the Hopeless kind of wish that would happen. They envy City-in-the-Center's success.

[the opening quote is from Lovecraft, by the way; his unfinished story "Azathoth"]