5th District: Gouldel
The Necropolis
The oldest district and the first city established in what was once called Everspring. Known today as the Necropolis of Gouldel, it is the birthplace of undeath in the world of Crudilex. Built like a crypt for the titanic bones of the dead god, Ras, who was slain by his own Exalt and the very liches he created to bring about the end of all life. The city grew like an infection, festering atop the corpse of the fallen god of death feeding on the lingering power housed within them.
Battlemaps set in this location
Ghost Town
In the world of Crudilex, thinnings can occur between the realms of living and dead, generally centered in places where objects from purgatory are placed or curses are abundant. When a thinning grows big enough, it can become a phantom storm, a rift opening up and countless confused, half-aware ghosts pour through, forming in a sheet spectral of fog large as a mountain.
Most of these ghosts have soul-rotted nearly to the point of losing all elements of themselves from life, their consciousness withered away by time in the darkness. However, some few ghosts remember life, potent powerful spirits who escape purgatory before it damages who they are. And here in Gouldel, one can find an entire town of them.
Ghost Town is made up of Tanare refugees who are on the run, hiding from the reaper. In no hurry to return to the overcrowded afterlife, they have established a place for themselves in the necropolis of Gouldel.
The Rot Garden
After the creation of the season of Blight, the world was introduced to a new breed of plantlife. Undead or rotgrown plants. Generally treated like weeds or unwanted foul-smelling waste, the undead citizens of Gouldel felt a unique kinship to the new species and began an entire new school of horticulture, studying and identifying these unique plants. The Rot Garden is the premier place of research into the relationship between undeath and nature, and it has a large park filled with nothing but Blight seasonal varietals that glow and fester in a sickly kind of beauty.
Doghouse
Hanging over the side of the cliffs above the necropolis is a small cluster of buildings surrounding a central pub. Slowly, the area around this pub where the Dogs Syndicate hung out at got worse and worse until the shops closed and the locals moved. The empty, vacant buildings were gutted and stripped down. Walls knocked down between the buildings extended them into the pub until it filled the entire block like one giant frankensteined patchwork of structures. Called “Doghouse,” the pub became the go-to spot for low-level criminals to hang around, find work, and lie low. Bluecoats know to stay well away from their territory.
This “hideout” of The Dogs syndicate is locally famous. The group is not known for their subtlety or tact, the dogs put their criminal activities right out in the open and challenge anyone to come try and stop them.
Red Altar
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White Wall
The gigantic arm bones of the dead god whose fetal corpse is squeezed into the innermost circle of Gouldel. White Wall separates the innermost courtyard at the base of the skull from the outer, and is hollowed out with a thousand windows and a long inner hall like a chapel, whose altar plinth ends where the wrist meets the hand.
White Wall is the gathering center for those who worship the god of death and pool their faith to give what peace they can to the tireless dead seeking an afterlife in purgatory. They mourn billions as one would mourn a close family member, dedicating their entire lives to their woe so that a small portion of those lost might feel at ease.
The Bones of Ras’
The fallen body of the evil god of death, slain in early ages and replaced by its Exalt. The ascension of a new Ras brought about the birth of Gouldel and the natural morality of death. The ten reapers were created to collect the souls of the dead and guide them to their afterlives. And the first undead awoke.
The titanic bones of the original Ras remained and, like sea life to a dying whale, the city grew around its body. The bones became sacred structures, and the skull the alabaster palace of the first lich-lord of Gouldel.
Procoline Concord
windows depicting the long and complex history of the city-turned-district of Gouldel. The flying buttresses, sculpted of black marble, are inlaid with bones of those whose service as a Null has come to an end, an honor among the believers of the mission of the city. Its ornate pinnacles are protected by gargantuan gargoyles, servitors carved of Wakestone, prepared to animate and defend Gouldel whenever there is need, with wings as vast as any airship’s sail and claws long enough to spear the same from the sky.
The vast skyscraper-sized citadel rests burrowed into the cliffside behind the bones of Ras and serves as the chambers for the Court of Gouldel. Headed by the Enigmatic Enchanter, the council is primarily made up of skeleton bureaucrats and eons-old liches born of the first Ras thousands of years past. They spend their eternity dedicating themselves to maintaining the Null servitors who uphold the daily tasks and duties of operating the necropolis, as well as advising and voting in matters under the rulership of the Enchanter.
The building itself is part mausoleum, part tomb, and part urban mega-structure, with hundred-foot-tall stained glass
The Alabaster Gate
Sculpted of bleach-white bone of titanic proportions, the district gate of Gouldel is far older than the city of Grand Nostridan. Once the location of a long and bloody battle between Prossporo and Gouldel, the gate was the last unbreakable line of defense for the necropolis.
Today, it is left open in reminder of the pact that turned the six cities into districts, and the long memory of the dead. Not letting the new generations forget that Gouldel did not submit, but broke the will of its rivals. That the truce stands only as long as the respect for the dead remains.
Shadow’s Hostel
The dark gazebo-like structure marks the center of the Greyfield, the largest burial site in all of Crudilex. Shadow’s Hostel gets its name from the umbral demons who congregate there, captured by the powers of the district’s master, the Enchanter, and forced to do his bidding. The dark specters weave in and out of the metal lattices of the structure and glower down at the mortals who walk below with their pinprick lights of eyes, unable to unleash the violence and malice they so eagerly desire because of the wards that keep them imprisoned here.
The Drowned Catacombs
The city of Grand Nostridan has no graveyard. The dead of the megacity are all brought to the necropolis. Miles and miles of graves fill its walled streets, all its mausoleums descending into a network of seemingly endless passageways filled with bodies and bones. The catacombs below Gouldel are so unbelievably vast they continue downward and connect with the ancient ruins of flooded Undrum’Kal and its own network of forgotten tombs. The catacombs continue to endlessly expand below the ground as mindless Nulls are put to work by the high-lord lich to ensure there is never a lack of final rests in the district of bones.
The 500-mile city has no shortage of need for places for the dead. A steady supply of corpses keeps Gouldel happy and its Null servants occupied.