Duskvol

[duskvol]

“Play like you’re driving a stolen car”

[duskvol]

Beneath the streets of Duskvol, there is another city. The spiderweb of canals stretches far below the stones above, winding through miles of pitch-dark tunnels. There are trolleys and trams that run there too, and walkways and secret passages and smuggling runs. There are mushroom cultivation corridors, and whole communities who spend much of their lives without seeing the sky. There are access and maintenance tunnels, sewers and steam-vents, strange machines and the vast arterial network of electroplasmic wiring. There are places where old buildings were simply paved over and used as foundations for the new. Many people have doors in their basements, crawlspaces in their walls, stairs that lead down, down, down...

If you go far enough, you may come to the old mines, and the caverns from which they tore coal and iron and precious stones. And some say that somewhere down there are the ruins of the ancient city upon which Duskvol was built, before the Cataclysm. Perhaps it holds the secrets of ancient sorceries, perhaps only horrors. Of the few who claim to have ventured that far, most can report nothing but gibbering madness.

[duskvol]

Duskvol is a rainy city. Storms often sweep in from across the Void Sea, and when there isn’t a downpour, there’s usually a drizzle. When there isn’t a drizzle, there’s a mist. On the rare clear nights, it’s generally windy, or cold, or both. Fog, too, rolls in whenever the shattered sun crests or falls over the horizon, framing the brief moments of relative brightness with the “Blind Hour”, in which the streets are cloaked in roiling clouds. And when it blends with the fumes from the plasmic refineries, almost no-one braves the streets. Yet all this, irritating though many find it, is also the very life of the city. The water of the canals is, for the most part, decidedly non-potable. The water that falls from the sky, however, mostly is. Rainwater catchments and moisture traps provide the majority of the drinking water used by the city. These fill large cisterns and gravity-fed pipes that supply many of the buildings. People often have their own rain-catchers too, or tap into pipes illicitly. And of course, some enterprising souls have taken to selling water by the bottle from both rickety roadside carts and obscenely overpriced establishments hawking “tonic hydration decanters, imbued with medicinal minerals”. At least one notorious shop includes various “therapeutic essences” in its water, but since they’re based in Brightstone, the Bluecoats take their bribes and look the other way.

[duskvol]

Healing is hard.

Some say that before the Calamity, there was sorcery which could heal the most horrific wounds in moments, without pain or even so much as a scar. We do not live in that world. There are tools, techniques, and even sorceries of healing, to be sure. But they are neither quick, nor painless, nor clean. And even the best don’t always work quite as planned. There are experimental electroplasmic therapies that are both offered to the wealthy and tested upon the unlucky, but most would be very lucky indeed if they were seen by a half-decent sawbones without either waiting for weeks or paying the kind of rates that drive people to knock on the doors of loan sharks. Some rely on home remedies and back-alley healers. Some take their chances signing up for medical experiments, or as demonstration subjects for the students at Charterhall Academy, hoping they don’t end up as a cadaver for the next class to practice on.

And as for you? Well, there’s a special brand of physicker that ends up ministering to the criminal underworld. They tend to know their trade intimately, and encounter all kinds of interesting wounds in the course of their careers. But sometimes they’re the sort who got expelled from the Academy for, say, performing forbidden experiments on human subjects...

[duskvol]

The ships of the Leviathan Hunters are enormous. Nearly floating cities themselves. Huge, hulking mountains of metal, crewed by hundreds of hands, they dwarf the cargo vessels and even the piled-up buildings of the docks.

They are nothing. Toys flung into the waves. They call themselves “hunters”, but to the Leviathans they are barely more than mosquitos, hoping desperately to siphon off a little blood before they are noticed. They may call those paltry creatures that they manage to bring back to port “leviathans”, but in truth they are the other parasites and scavengers that swarm around them. Though even these can easily drag a ship down into the crushing abyss. Not a soul alive knows the true shape of the Leviathans, only those few fragments that approach the surface.

But it is not the Leviathans that hunters truly fear. It is the sea itself. The abyss. The stars in the Deep. It swallows minds as surely and pitilessly as it does ships, and not a few sailors have returned from their voyages without ever really coming home.  

[duskvol]

The Ghost field is all around you. Invisible to most eyes, its subtle power infuses everything. It is what allows ghosts and spirits to affect the world, what makes them more than insubstantial echoes of life. And it can be harnessed.

Anyone can attune to this spectral energy, but those with special training or talent are able to do so more easily, precisely, and powerfully. These days, however, you need not be a Whisper to tap into the energy of the Beyond! Thanks to ingenious inventions powered by electroplasm (harvested by the intrepid Leviathan hunters), the Empire has unlocked the ability to channel the ghost field through technological devices.

Now, electroplasmic energy lights up the streets and homes of Duskvol and powers the lightning towers that keep the horrors at bay. Some mad or brilliant tinkerer has even begun producing pictures that move! Granted, the occasional screaming, distorted face shows up unexpectedly on the screen, and at least one audience has vanished without a trace, but such is the price of progress.

[duskvol]

Duskvol is a city of canals. They are its veins, its arteries. They run from the void sea, through a labyrinth of filtering sluices meant to strain away the nightmares infesting the water beyond the walls. And yet, in the murk of the canals, strange things swim, and only the very desperate even think of drinking from them.

Unless you live in Brightstone. Then, drink away! Their water even smells nice.

[duskvol]

Everything has its cost.

The city of Duskvol is unjust. As in our world, those with wealth hoard power, and those with power hoard wealth. The rest fight for their scraps, perhaps hoping to claw their way out of the hell of poverty, or to simply survive another day. Many toil their entire lives to give their children even the hint of a hope of a better future. Most know the game is rigged, but few do anything about it.

And you? What will you do?

When you play Blades in the Dark, it’s pretty likely that you will get what you want. Your characters are competent, and you have tools at your disposal that can let you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Not to mention the fact that almost anything can (at least in theory) be accomplished through the use of sorcery. But the question is always: what price will you pay? What are you willing to sacrifice? How far will you go, to get what you want?

[duskvol]

All Cops are Bastards.

In Duskvol, as in our world, there are a members of the Bluecoats who are genuinely trying to do what they perceive to be the “right thing”. But each and every one of them is part of a system which is deeply corrupt and whose primary purpose is to serve and protect the interests of those powerful and wealthy enough to pull their strings. This tends to include systematically oppressing, terrorizing, and extorting those too poor and weak to defend themselves, as well as the ruthless suppression of any whispers of revolution.

For all intents and purposes, the Bluecoats essentially function as a particularly large, well-connected, and brutal gang. This also means that other gangs with enough resources can pay them off or otherwise induce them to turn a blind eye. But even if they tip their caps to you in the street, never forget...

All Cops are Bastards.

[duskvol]

Duskvol is a very vertical sort of city. Teetering heaps of architecture, connected by a cobwebbing of bridges, rails, raised roads, ladders, ducts, pipes, wires, cobblestones, catwalks, scaffolds, improvised elevators and, beneath it all, the canals. In the wealthier districts, the buildings are stacked and assembled with something resembling a plan. But the city grows and grows, and with the protective boundary of the lightning towers constraining its expansion, there is nowhere to build but up. Or down...

[duskvol]

Goats are everywhere in Duskvol. They have been bred and trained as the primary mount and means of transportation, since the city is extremely vertical and goats are notoriously sure-footed climbers. Many are also kept as pets, and their milk and cheese is consumed by nearly everyone. Of course, even this kind of “domestication” is only a relative term when it comes to goats. There is a substantial wild population roaming the city as well, who recognize neither laws, nor gods, nor masters. The degree of general mischief and ambient chaos they create has led many to half-jokingly refer to them as the “goat gang”.

[duskvol]

Duskvol is a haunted place. Ghosts and malevolent spirits are as much a fact of life as the eels in the canals. The lightning towers keep the worst of them at bay, out in the cataclysmic wastelands beyond the city. When people find themselves alone on a shadowed street, they clutch spirit-bane charms to their chests, and whisper whatever scraps of ritual and superstition they know. Sometimes, it even works.

And of course, there are the Spirit Wardens, who contain the worst outbreaks and oversee the vigilant disposal of corpses in alchemical crucibles before they can metastasize into angry wraiths. But some slip through. Something always slips through.

Sometimes they are even allowed to slip through, for though ghosts can be exceedingly dangerous, they are powerful tools for those with the will, resources, and ruthlessness to use them. And in Duskvol, such people are not in short supply.

[duskvol]

Mosses, mushrooms, and lichens thrive in Duskvol. Mushrooms especially are a staple of nearly everyone’s diet, and (in tandem with alchemical processes) are used to make countless items: paper, construction beams, medicinal tonics, even beer. Those not native to the city tend to either love or despise the strange, earthy taste of mushroom beer. But love it or hate it, no-one can argue against the efficiency with which it renders a man incapable of coherent speech. 

[duskvol]

The shattered sun rises dark over Duskvol, a splintered shadow blotting out the stars, its once mighty light now visible only as a dim glow that can sometimes be seen seeping out from the cracks in its face, like blood from a wound.

Its embers smoulder on the horizon at dusk and dawn, but the moon at midnight gives more light than what remains of the sun at midday. When the moon is low, or hiding her face, the people of the city rely mostly on firelight and electroplasmic bulbs, on the many lamps that light the streets and those they carry with them, and (in the darkest places) on occasional clumps of luminescent fungi. The wealthiest can even afford the use of radiant energy, which mimics sunlight, like the shining trees that allow the rice-pits of Barrowcleft to grow.

Glowing eels may also sometimes be seen swimming in the canals. Some folks whisper that they’re a result of electroplasmic experiments and ought to be avoided. That doesn’t stop those less cautious or more desperate from eating them, though.