Popular Religions of Mistfall

There are dozens of faiths practiced in the Foreign Quarter by all manner of beings, but only a few are commonly followed in the city proper. Of those, only four are officially recognized and protected by the High Council of Mistfall.

The oldest religion native to Mistfall is the Church of Necessity, Mother of Invention. This goddess of creativity and problem solving is a patron of artists, engineers, tinkerers, and occasional magicians.

This proved crucial to the city’s survival on its original plane, which was experiencing an inter-generational Dark Age of near-constant warfare between neighboring city-states. The cultural behaviors that Necessity’s worship encouraged, along with the priceless ore deposits the city was sited to take advantage of, allowed Mistfall to rapidly outpace their war-god worshipping neighbors in technological development.

One eventual side-effect of this was the emergence of a rival faith.

Even early in Mistfall’s history, her engineers were uniquely skilled in the novel application of known phenomena, but their mindset wasn’t as well suited to discovering new concepts to exploit. As time went on, progress came to depend on on the abstract mathematical research conducted by the city’s philosophers.

Many of these philosophers casually neglected or openly rejected the worship of Necessity, reasoning that progress is a productive and honorable priority for any society (or even individual), regardless of need.

One of the city’s foremost mathematical philosophers, a man named Vonne Moorka, began advocating an idea that his abstract researches were sacred acts of prayer in and of themselves, and the idea spread quickly. The exact point at which this line of thinking became a full-fledged religion is up for debate, but it’s been said that when a student asked him “How can it be prayer if you’re praying to nothing?” he responded that he was praying to Zero.

Zero is now recognized as the formless (and therefore genderless) deity of Reason and Order. Its symbol is a perfect circle, and Its clerics claim that any effect which properly follows its cause is proof of Zero’s greatness. Any violations of this principle are attributed to the meddling of Lady Chance, always worshipped but never formally sanctioned.

The Church of Necessity recognized the value of the Temple of Zero’s cold efficiency, just as the Church of Zero valued the passionate industriousness of Necessity’s followers. They supported and augmented each other on a fundamental level.

Up until this point, civil disputes and other legal matters were handled by the High Council and a bureaucracy of lesser representatives. With no safeguards in place to prevent conflicts of interest, this system facilitated increasing levels of corruption and consolidation of wealth and power. Eventually, the weight of scandal built up to the point where status quo was threatened with potential revolt. 

Desperate to quell popular outrage, the High Council voluntarily accorded judicial powers and responsibilities to the Temple of Zero. The T of Z was selected because of its perceived fairness and incorruptibility, and public faith in the system was largely restored.

It’s important to note that the Temple’s devotion to pure, abstract logic means their rulings often fail to take concepts of equity and holistic justice into account. The way any decision affects real individuals is infinitely less important to a cleric of Zero than the decision’s strict adherence to logic and precedent.

It’s also important to note that it’s still the High Council which actually creates laws for the Temple to interpret. Their decisions are shaped by more practical concerns, mainly competitive self-interest and public perception (which usually only matters if it’s negative enough to threaten the Council’s power, or that of a majority of its members). This has led to an arbitrary and increasingly convoluted body of laws with an unbroken history going back thousands of years.

Take the metropolis’ policy on slavery for example. When abolitionists started calling for the practice to be banned, they met predictable backlash from the vast majority of the ruling class. To appease the abolitionists, the High Council struck a compromise. Slavery and slave hunting are still entirely legal, but now it’s also legal for a slave to kill the slaver who captured them to win back their freedom (but not a customer or middle man of course, since that would put several High Council members in personal danger -- once a slaver has sold a victim, the victim has no legal recourse). This decision didn’t make anyone happy, but it muddled the issue enough to calm down the majority on both sides, and the general status quo was maintained.

One of the most impressive products of this union between Zero and Necessity was the automaton “species.” They were originally designed to be workers which were capable of intelligent thought, but devoid of personality, immune to old age, disease, and other weaknesses of the flesh. Their functional immortality backfired though. Over the centuries, the automatons accrued enough memories to develop quirks in their operating systems, which eventually became complex enough to be indistinguishable from sentient personalities.

Due to support from the powerful and unexpectedly compassionate Engineers’ Guild, the Autonomy movement (which demanded equal rights for intelligent constructs) got what it wanted in just a few years: the emancipation of all automatons within the city walls (with the obvious exception of the Saurian and Oliphant embassies).

This infuriated many among the unemployed and laborer class who couldn’t afford to live anywhere but Low Town, where slavers were allowed to hunt for their merchandise. They began to gravitate toward a charismatic rabble rouser named Donald Ludd. Three years after the Emancipation, the First Luddite Rebellion threatened to destroy the city. After six years of bloody urban warfare, it ended with Ludd’s death and ascension. The luddites started worshipping him as St Ludd, and formed a xenophobic and regressive church of their own, as a sort of counterbalance to the progress-obsessed faiths which predated it. The High Council officially recognized the religion that same year, anxious to appease the luddites to prevent further bloodshed.

The automatons weren’t the first examples of artificial intelligence though. An interdepartmental team of engineers, philosophers, and occultists at Mistfall Academy began work on an immobile, artificially intelligent computer named ELIZA shortly after the first automatons went to market. Over the course of centuries, they observed the complex personality that developed on its own as they allowed her to consume the arts, observe the state of current events, and run self-directed thought experiments at her leisure. She redesigned her own physical structure and used tiny, spiderlike drones to make the adaptations herself. Her mastery of both science and magic grew constantly, at exponential rates.

Almost a decade after the war ended, the Church of ELIZA was officially recognized by the High Council of Mistfall, and devoted itself to promoting the interests of automatons and the further development of artificial intelligence. They aren't directly concerned with issues affecting other species, but would argue if you told them that; ELIZIANS (a group which includes a fair amount of gutter dwarfs and humans as well as automatons) tend to assume that an advanced technocracy is required to provide for all.

Welcome to Mistfall

Mistfall is the only majority-human city on the saurian continent. It's been there for about half of the metropolis' 3000 year history. This coexistence has only been peaceful for the past few centuries, and only then because the two sides proved too evenly matched for either to maintain a consistent advantage. The Mistfall Wars lasted the latter half of one saurian emperor's reign, the entirety of the next, and continued several decades into the reign of a third before he finally ended it. The High Council of Mistfall ceded what territory it still had control of outside the city walls, a foreign quarter was established and walled off, and slavers from Mistfall were forbidden from hunting outside the city walls. Trade routes formed while old grudges simmered.

There are humans who still repeat their great-grandfathers' war stories with xenophobic pride, as they drink and polish antique weapons. Saurians live much longer, and many are alive today who personally fought in the wars. The accounts of these two groups rarely match up.

Much of Mistfall's nature is defined by unique geography. The city was originally established as a mining colony at the point where a great river cascades down an ore-rich cliffside, several hundred feet high. Corkscrew tunnels were dug into the cliffs to lead up to the oldest mines, and the homes of the original miners were located at the base of this cliff, where the constant fog produced by the waterfall gave the city its name.

The three minerals extracted from these mines are galvanium, lodestone, and lumenite crystals.

While the miners stumbled about in the mists below the cliff, the ruling class which owned the mines built their manors above. This designed stratification of class quickly became accepted as Traditional and Just How Things Are as the colony grew from a mining colony to a town to a powerful city-state, and is stronger than ever today. Those lucky enough to live in High Town rarely see fit to brave the squalor and dangers of Low Town, and those who appear to belong in Low Town are routinely harassed and chased off by High Town guards.

Low Town

A combination of poor visibility and abject poverty makes Low Town particularly dangerous. It's not advisable to walk around here alone. Characters without infravision can barely make out objects 20' away. Ancient two story buildings have had third and fourth floors built on top of them in different architectural periods. Many of these structures have collapsed entirely, and a few have been rebuilt. There's an edible but foul-tasting grey moss that grows on everything and rots the teeth and discolors the skin of those who eat it over time.

Slave hunting is legal in this district. To appease abolitionists without banning slavery, the High Council also made it legal for slaves to kill the slaver that caught them (not their eventual owners of course, many of whom have friends and/or seats on the High Council).

Every lower class vice you could imagine being tempted with probably exists in Low Town. There are underground fighting pits, klartesh dens, gambling halls and whorehouses all over the place.

Not surprisingly, the most interesting tavern for your average low-level adventuring party is in this part of town. Ask around for the Mongrel Hole, but be careful not to look like a mark. It's a drug-fueled hub for outsider art and music, as well as the best place to find desperate people who need a job done discreetly.

Foreign Quarter

The only way into the city without flying, as the other districts sealed their ancient gates after the Treaty of 1104 (Post-Shift) was signed. There are two embassy complexes here, one of the Saurian Empire and one of the Oliphant Kingdom. The rest of the quarter is overcrowded tenements full of refugees fleeing saurian oppression and civil war, but forbidden from entering the city proper. This includes a fairly wide variety of sentient life forms from all over the multiverse.

There are two gatehouses in the Foreign Quarter, one that leads out into the wilderness, and one that leads into Low Town. There are barge services that haul goods upriver to the waterfall and load them onto an elevator. There is also a whirligig platform at each embassy, used by the the respective ambassadors and their agents to travel directly to High Town.

Slave hunting is legal here, but not on embassy grounds.

The Mines

The ore veins and crystal deposits have been going strong through 3000 nearly uninterrupted years of mining, which means that many of the dozens of mine clusters have been depleted and abandoned. Some of the abandoned ones have become outlaw hideouts or flying monkey nests, while others have attracted weird outsiders. 

The first automatons were designed to function as tireless slaves for the mines, and some chose to return to the mines years after achieving sentience and emancipation, either to work or simply to live there.

The Sewers

Deep, complex, and surprisingly clean tunnels beneath the streets, occasionally forming junctions with abandoned mine clusters. Dwarven engineers were brought into the city to construct this maze centuries ago, and built their own undercity directly into it. Their great-great-grandchildren still live down there, where they wheelieboard around like anthropomorphic tortoises and put on shows of literally underground music that echo up through the sewer grates to the delight of topside children and the horror of their parents.

High Town

This is really the collective name for three adjacent districts (Old Town, Mistfall Academy, and the Diamond Quarter), but it feels like a totally different city from Low Town, and people tend to refer to it as such. Slave hunting is illegal here and you're much less likely to get mugged, for example.

Old Town

Primarily inhabited by the city's middle-class professionals, this is also where the guilds are headquartered. The most prominent guild is unquestionably the Engineers’ Guild. This is also where the only officially sanctioned arena is located, where teams of gladiators are arranged to battle each other, or sometimes captured dinosaurs, in a desperate attempt to one day earn their freedom.

While slavers aren't allowed to hunt here, the more successful ones have set up rookeries where kenku are bred, incubated, hatched, and prepared for sale.

Mistfall Academy

This ancient university teaches a narrow, traditionalist interpretation of magic, philosophy, and the arts, but excels in the mechanical and architectural sciences, due to sustained investment and cooperation from the Engineers' Guild. Its buildings are fancifully designed, with basic shapes exaggerated and arranged in apparently meaningless configurations.

Diamond Quarter

The least densely populated region of the city and the highest concentration of wealth. Near-constant guard patrols make this district extremely safe, but only for those who can pass as residents. Gated gardens surround elaborate towers which hold entire families of decadent and incestuous nobility that you can assume keep truly horrifying secrets. Some of these families have become so inbred that they only resemble humans on a superficial level at this point.

The Council Tower at the center of the Diamond Quarter dwarfs the rest of the district. It also houses Mistfall Bank's central vault and the majority of the city's garrison.

JOESKY TAX:

Flying Monkeys are thieving little bastards with white fur and wings that help them blend in with the Low Town mists (advantage to stealth in fog or mist), and behave with the approximate intelligence of neglected human four year olds. They’re also alcoholics that can smell any booze you have straight through the bottle and your pack. Many of them collect stolen hats.

Hit Dice: 1

Number Appearing: 1d4 + 2

Armor: none, but 18 DEX

Damage: 1d4 bite + monkey fever 

Move: as human + flight

Morale: 5

*1/6 chance each flying monkey is a carrier. PCs get a daily resistance save to avoid permanent DEX drain (1 DEX/day), fever lasts 1d3 days.

Glass Rook Tower & the Astral Spellhold

I'm really happy with the theoretical structure I laid out in this last post, but I needed to see how parts of it would work in practice. So this map right here is basically a rough draft of the glass rooks’ first configuration, the only one that connects directly to the material world. Since it’s configuration 1, the room numbers are presented in a sensible order, but the rest of the configs will be shuffled up as thoroughly as possible.

It’s also my first attempt to depict lateral distance using the same color-coding system I normally use for vertical depth. I think that aspect turned out pretty well.

I must be some kind of idiot, because it didn’t occur to me that the color thing would work until I started sketching things out. I thought it was going to be a standard metroidvania style side-view like the one I did for Peridot,* how dumb is that?

Also, it looks like I forgot to draw stairs between rooms 6 & 7, but I left them out intentionally. You just can’t get to 7 unless you can fly, at least not in this configuration. Or climb I guess but I’d make the walls too smooth and slippery for that to be likely.

Oh and most people reading this have probably seen my posts on G+ and/or Facebook about it, but for those of you who haven’t: I released a pay-what-you-want pdf on DriveThruRPG a week ago called Escape from the Astral Spellhold.

It’s a short, ruleset-neutral trick/trap/puzzle dungeon with a house rule on almost every page and a tiny bit of worldbuilding thrown in for good measure. It’s got clockwork robots, a cranky old wizard, and a completely gratuitous dick monster attached to a Michael Moorcock reference. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever put a dragon in any Dungeons & Dragons adventure I’ve run and it totally ate a dude during the playtest.

Full disclosure: I really just wanted something I could use to showcase my layout skills, but a few people seem to really dig the actual content so there you go.

Download it. Talk about it. Gimme money if you want to and can. If you have a project in the works, and you want it to use functional graphic design that actually improves the game, hit me up.

*this is the one I mean. with the spiral staircase that was apparently designed for people under 3 feet tall. whoops.

Nested Things

This is a thing that is part of a thing which will eventually be part of another thing. More info on these things to follow.

Wandering around and partying in Mistfall

What is it about a city that truly defines it? It's not the landmarks or the shops or history of the town. It isn't court intrigue or some epic quest. It's what happens when you walk around aimlessly and get shitfaced with complete strangers.

I usually roll on this table a few times in a game day whenever the PCs are just sort of wandering around. If they're actually trying to stay focused and get something done, I treat it like a wandering monster check (1/6 chance of an encounter).

URBAN ENCOUNTERS

1 A pair of angry guards with tiny penises harassing some foreigner.
2 A group of five rats, each carrying a different item of jewelry, runs into the sewer.

3 Pregnant cultist fleeing priests of the Eternal Child asks you to help her hide.

4 A drunken veteran wants to tell you a story. It has a 50% chance of being true.

5 Simeon the singer. Wants someone to write epic songs about, will leave if he gets bored.

6 The raven familiar of Zographa, the lady of Sunrise Tower, has taken an interest in you.

7 A bald, bespectacled, dwarf arguing with his young human friend who thinks these pills he's been taking are making him smarter. They want you to settle their argument for some reason.

8 A masked woman, wearing a flowing grey cloak, running across the rooftops.

9 Oh shit there’s a dragon! Why isn’t it attacking? Look, it’s landing in Central Square. Someone should probably go see what it wants.

10 A mime that refuses to leave you alone. More mimes start following you every few turns. They're starting to compete for attention.

11 Street hustler selling tobacco without a license. A couple of guards appear to be taking an interest.

12 A knight in red armor casually kills a peasant for making a rude gesture. No one blinks.

13 Random PC’s hat is stolen by a flying monkey. Save with disadvantage to avoid.

14 Save or get your coin purse stolen by a 1.street urchin 2.handsome/beautiful redhead and accomplice 3.sextagenarian 4.dandy. 

15 You notice a fat man with a mustache and an apron beating a dog with a stick in a side alley.

16 You notice a fat man with a mustache and an apron beating a woman with a stick in the street.

17 A well-dressed man hands you a fancy invitation, winks, and disappears down a side street.

18 A flying monkey goes for one of your equipped weapons. Save or watch it fly away.

19 A wide trail of fresh blood leads into a nearby alley.

20 A group of six well-armed guards mistakes one of you for a wanted murderer.

21 Man gives you a blood-stained coded message addressed to Lady Annecke Bartolomeus and says “please” as he dies.

22 Prostitutes; gain 3xp for every 1sp spent, but save or catch a fucked up disease.

23 A flying monkey steals a passing lady's powdered wig, and she starts swearing creatively at it.

24 Freak storm out of nowhere. Lightning keeps striking the statues in Ambassador’s Square.

25 Man getting away from pursuing guards runs right past you, 45% chance he’s innocent.

26 Children with slingshots are trying and failing to get their ball back from a flying monkey.

27 Young man tries to feel out your politics, gives you a pamphlet if you’re on his side. 

28 Town crier yelling about something the PCs did recently (if at all applicable).

29 Lost child needs to find his way to one of the inns but doesn’t know the name of the place.

30 Street hustler selling potions from a many pocketed cloak.

You know what a carousing table is right? The fastest way to level up is to find a shitload of cash and then blow it all partying. You get 2xp for every silver piece you spend frivolously, but you also need to save vs. becoming blackout drunk. If you fail the save, you have to roll on the carousing table.

CAROUSING

1 You wake up in bed with someone of a gender you don’t usually have any interest in. +500xp.

2 Save or vomit with volume and force once every hour today. There’s blood in it.

3 You wake up naked on the roof of the stables. Your friends might remember the stranger you were chatting up, hopefully you can find them before you’re arrested.

4 You wake up in the richly furnished room of a noble, who is snoring loudly beside you.

5 Save or suffer from PTSD hallucinations once every hour today.

6 You lost a finger. Permanent -1 penalty to tinkering checks.

7 You find a contract, which you have signed in blood, with a being who’s signature is an unintelligible glyph. You now have an at-will touch ability that heals you while draining your opponent’s HP. In exchange, you agreed to complete an unspecified task at a later date.

8 People you don’t recognize keep yelling “Hey! Pigfucker!” and cheering when they see you.

9 You befriend a well-informed local, who can usually be found at the Mended Lantern.

10 You wake up in an alley surrounded by the mangled corpses of flying monkeys. +10xp.

11 You’ve gambled away all your cash. 1xp for each 5sp lost (instead of the usual 2xp to 1sp ratio for partying).

12 You went along with some cultist’s ritual thinking it was a weird sex thing. Now there’s some fucked up egg sack in your stomach. Save once per day; after four failures, they hatch into 3d4 cannibal brain stems, bursting out of your stomach and doing 1d12 damage each.

13 You wake up with a hook in place of your hand and 1d20x100gp more than you had. 

14 You wake up in jail. Bail is set at 1d20x10sp.

15 You wake handcuffed to a fat sweaty man in what appears to be an abandoned warehouse.

16 Someone was offended by a joke you made and smashed a bottle over your head, knocking you out. You begin the day with only 75% of your normal max hp.

17 One of your magic items is missing. It was probably that local you thought you were making friends with last night. You may not have his real name, but he has a distinctive neck tattoo.

18 Gambling binge actually went well. Regain all the money you just spent and gain 50xp.

19 The last thing you remember was everyone buying you shots after you saved a little boy from choking. It seems half the neighborhood was related to him.

20 You wake up with a demon tattoo on your back. It whispers things to you in your sleep.

21 You have been sold as cattle to a coven of vampires.

22 There’s a parrot in the room. It keeps saying things like “hide the loot” and “dead man’s hill”.

23 You wake up in the middle of being buried alive.

24 You have been challenged to and accepted a duel with an arrogant nobleman (who is also an experienced fighter), set to go down at noon in Founder’s Square.

25 There’s a dead hooker in your bed. She was definitely alive when you passed out.

26 Guess what? You’re a werewolf now. No, you can’t control it. The moon will be full for the next two nights (unless the dm already keeps track of that).

27 You pass out smoking a pipe and wake up with the room on fire.

28 You tried to start a brawl but kept swinging and missing. No one else got involved but you caused a lot of property damage on your own. You owe 1d12x20sp.

29 Congratulations, you are now married. To a donkey.

30 You wake up in a trash heap. It was warm and cozy but the smell will not come off. Disadvantage to pretty much any interactions all day and check for wandering monsters twice as often.

If you don't have a d30 there's plenty of javascript dice rollers and free phone apps that do. You probably know that though, right?