Campaign Notes Part 2

WHERE MIGHT THE PARTY DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THE PATHS INTO THE GREAT GHOUL MARKET????

ONE: A scuffle in the streets by the university! Two fucking ancient bastards croak and swing at each other with trembling arthritic hands! They are Historians, and these sorts of displays are all-too-common: The Wall of Mist that occludes the past makes archeology a desperately, wincingly sloppy affair. A crowd of hooting students gathers, upperclassmen taking bets.

Here we have a Folklorist of the Close Analysis School in a rage against a Phenomonologist of the Flexible Paradigm. What do they disagree on? Everything, but specifically the ultimate fate of the Kingdoms of the Dead (known only via half-legible copper tablets dredged up from the murky depths of Lago de Kloeken and a strata of compressed marrow/court finery extracted from the surrounding region), the circumstances of their fall, even their geographical placement!

The Folklorist, Hasbint Drennoti, holds that the Kingdoms were dragged beneath the earth by ravens after a lengthy succession crisis (the first of its kind, after the King, Hasbint shouts, “did the first Double Death”), eventually becoming one of the Benign Hells. The Phenomonologist, Kontrast McPoffin, holds that the Kingdoms were obliterated by a vengeful meteor after the Prince launched a curse-engine into space to impress a girl.

Speaking to the Folklorist will reveal more information about the Hells and their occasional contact with the surface. Speaking to Kontrast will be boring and confusing, but will still mention his rival's theories dismissively. The winner of the fight will collapse into a nearby dumpster and fall asleep on a bed of needles and coffee filters.

TWO: Deep within Eigengrau University's library! A book on the Hells explains that, sometimes, beneath a particularly dense concentration of souls, a Hell may extend a questing pseudopod upward from below and graze the underground underbelly of basements and sewers; and that if the enterprising urban explorer ventures deep enough into the stinky depths, they may find a tunnel newly dug, marked upon the roof with an iron ring, or a wooden staircase fresh and clean in the wall of rock, and through these uncanny passages one may pass into the liminal space between the layers of the earth, the Streets Beneath, and from there to any other place within the underworld - but beware! The trip is fraught with danger and hardship, terror and anguish! OOOoooOOOoooOOO!

Zones of The Streets Beneath:

Lit ONLY SOMETIMES by otherworldly orbs or blue fire lanterns, the sickly glow of dreams, there is no earthly way of knowing.

The main road is paved (poorly) with good intentions, snakes through, sometimes is lost; beetle pulled troikas with skeleton nobles, ghoulish backpackers (human jerky, GOLP (good old long pig)), flickering street lights which hop about on chicken legs, flee or curl darkly when startled, eat bugs and rocks.

Upside-down castle hovering above a crater lake of ooze lit from within by stolen moons chained to the bottom like sea mines, giant bats hanging off belfries, love bright sweet things -

             A princess asleep in the basement-attic gently holding a glowing lavender moon, HER CHILD: she fell in love with a passing comet and when he departed on his long orbit, as comets must, she fell into a terrible sadness and with her, her kingdom. Her cries so moved the earth that it opened up and embraced her, pulling her castle down and placing the princess into a slumber. If you take the moon she will sigh and crumble to pale dust, but the comet will return, and he will be looking for his child...

              Guarded by the noble ghosts of her knights, all of whom love her deeply, find their skeletons crumpled inside their platemail and pierce them with their own glaives to dispel the ghosts, maddening chunks of starlight originally given by the comet to his mate as gifts, now roam the inverted halls, they blind and terrify.

The River of Bones also is here snaking through, maybe you'll see the ferry, Huck-Fin steamships chugging (zombie dogs power the waterwheels, motivated by big cartoon steak on a stick), translucent drowned riverfolk in chitin canoes, all on their way to the market, huge corpulent merchants sailing their well-laden barges.

The katamari of lost things, now stuck in a ditch as it sometimes is, little child katamari circling nervously the mother as it tries to heave itself over, forgotten desiccated ape tribe/funginids (fungus is always welcome in the underworld, part of an old deal)/fossil knights compete for resources aboard the rolling trove while it is still.

Dusty dusty desert, easily lost in the storms, gray dust in your teeth and eyes and ass, lost souls travelling in circles. A sandy whirlpool that leads down into one of the real Hells, dire vultures try to fly on featherless wings, stalagmites burst through the dust, smaller ones hide beneath a millimeter of the stuff, razor sharp, meditating damned cross-legged on tall poles on their last step of atonement before reincarnation. Perhaps you will see one open their eyes and rise into the dark roof, sublimating into pure white light. Beetlejuice sandworms?

The Crossroads, a massive rusted draw bridge of sinew and keratin arcs over the river, sometimes rises to let boats past, organic groaning as the ragged barely-flesh caretakers urge the organ-bridge on by poking sensitive bits, going into "the booth" (brainstem zone) and yanking on the medulla oblongata, competing toll-takers before the bridge and after, along the road, along the shore of the river offering fording vessels, gold is pointless down here, all want increasingly bizarre and precious things - memories, senses, names, beliefs and convictions, etc.

Swamplands of the bug warlocks, primordial mosquitos piloting enchanted amber mechsuits through the eons, immortal but trapped, weird bug magic involving blood and time, sucks your blood out from a distance and puts weird diseases in it and shoots it back into you, confused and angry, if you somehow show them evidence of their tiny, much-reduced modern day ancestors they will fall to their knees and weep weird mosquito tears.