Tanare
The City of Ghosts, Home of the Grim Reaper and the only bastion in the lands of the dead: Purgatory. City of Ghosts, Tanare. Home of Tarmign, the Phantom Coachman, though he is out, it seems, and the city is falling apart and becoming more chaotic in his absence.
Battlemaps set in this location
The Forsaken Steps
The eternal prison of The Echo of Ras’Gilthune. The chains on the fallen king of elves grow weaker as the continued, unexplained disappearance of the Phantom Coachman wreaks havoc on the city of the dead. His divine power that holds the city together is slowly fading with his absence. Cracks in its foundation let more and more dangerous souls leak in and out. More thinnings occur in between purgatory and the world of the living, and greater phantomstorms erupt as the gates are berated daily by the endlessly growing flocks of lost souls wandering in from the Endless Dark.
In this weakened state, the dark remains of the soul of ultimate evil, held captive in the city by the Coachman, threaten to escape. His most loyal minion, the Ghost King Spite, has already seized control of the city, awaiting the release of his master.
The Hallowed
The halls of the Hallowed, the skeletal army of angry dead, prepare eternally for the time when the veil that separates life and death falls, so that they may bring about the extinction of all living things in all of Crudilex. They wait in endless anticipation of the day when the Dark Star swallows Crudilex into Purgatory.
Frigid Gale
Sky pirates and aeronauts are generally mortal enemies, but the few things they agree on should be heeded by all who climb to the clouds. Among the many superstitions, one stands above all others: that in the dark skies over Crudilex is a horrible, cursed vessel. An ash-black skiff hull rests on the bones of an arcwhale, its damned crew of phantoms killing and butchering any ship that comes into their line of fire. They cannot be felled with blade or gun.
The legends tell of a cutlass of green phantom steel, forged in the lands of the dead and smuggled back to the living. “Wake,” they say it is named. Whoever wields this cutlass commands the ship of lost souls. This power over death is yours while you live, but once your time comes, your everafter belongs to the Phantom Airship: the Frigid Gale.
The Lamplighters
The eastern tiered structures are lined with phantom lanterns and filled with ghosts clad in hooded cloaks, carrying gas lamp-lighting staffs. The buildings are a confusing mess of structures, almost none with doors, the phantoms simply fading through the walls or appearing where they will themselves to be, hardly moving at all.
These ghosts are fiercely loyal to the Phantom Coachman, doing everything they can to restore the worlds of life and death to balance. These ghosts are the Lamplighters, granted special permissions to traverse out into the world of the living by the Protector of the Veil, with the express purpose of undoing damage done at that very boundary.
Thinnings in the veil between life and death can cause ruptures and even phantomstorms, as huge amounts of ghosts pour through, seeking escape from the oblivion of
Purgatory. When this happens, the damage can be catastrophic if not restored quickly. That is the task of the Lamplighters: passing back into the world of the living and closing the door, then finding their way back to Purgatory once stranded on the other side. There are some secret locations that open with a consistent frequency for just a few minutes each night to let them back through. All Lamplighters know where they are but must keep them hidden at all costs to prevent mortals from entering Purgatory.
Wicker in the Walls
The foul lair of the Wickereye, an oni spirit who collects souls, bartering and trading power with the living and staking claim to their immortal everafter. When the bill comes due, and those who reaped the benefits of its power die, their spirits are summoned here to its tent in Tanare. There, they are forced into its cabal, passing between life and death to perform tasks at the command of their new eternal master.
The Wickereye itself is a strange, satyr-like creature with a large fanned wooden mask. Its body and clothing appear handmade, almost as if it is a life-sized doll constructed from sticks and twigs. It is worshiped by its cult of followers for its odd magical powers and is inhabited by the spirit of the creature known as the Wickerye. Its matted animal fur is braided with twine that dangles from its body, hung with hundreds of talismans, each one representing a spirit under its control.
Coachman Effigy
At the center of Tanare there is a statue, titanic beyond measuring, reaching up into the ever-present darkness of Purgatory. It depicts the Phantom Coachman mounted astride his ghostly horse, Justice, lifting with skeletal hand his lantern. The single great light source that illuminates all of Tanare.
Within the light of the lantern, the soulrot that withers the dead into the nothingness of the realm is halted. Outside, the darkness erodes souls until they lose everything of themselves, forgetting who or what they are, until eventually they are nothing more than fog floating on the ground. Their essence is stripped away and returned to the flowing ley lines to empower the world of the living.
This is the natural order, the darkness that must exist for life to endure. But beneath the watchful eye of the Phantom Coachman, here in Tanare, some powerful souls are given the opportunity to remain. Either through kindness or imprisonment, their essence can never return to the living world in any way.
The Epitaph
The Epitaph is a towering white obelisk etched with layers of complex, tiny designs of such incredibly intricate detail at such minuscule size it is completely illegible.
It is the third Cenotaph archive, and home of the Fossors. A Cenotaph culture that has taken pacts with the Phantom Coachman and utilizes the memories of the dead to feed their growing archive, called “The Epitaph.” Fossors are masters of forbidden, dangerous, and occult knowledge, dark magics and existential horrors known only to those who have already experienced their final moments.
Cracks in the Ramparts
Fissures in the walls that keep lost souls from entering Tanare are becoming more and more common as the city’s master is gone.
Inside the city is a traitor who watches for cracks in the walls of Tanare. Outside, an omen reader watches for phantomstorms to form. When both occur at the same time, graverobbers, living beings entering into the lands of the dead, sneak through to find souls and smuggle them out of the city before the Fossor Cenotaphs can find the cracks and seal or guard them.
Crumbling Crypts
The first and lowest quarter of the City of Ghosts, the Crumbling Crypts are a harbor for phantoms whose souls are too weak to manifest as anything more than motes of fog. Little to no vestiges of who they were in life remain, their essence eroded by soulrot. These pathetic spirits would simply continue to fade until they eventually became one with the low fog of Purgatory, if not for them being handpicked by the Coachman and deposited here in Tanare, where the pressure of Purgatory is weakest, preserving them.
Some of these weaker spirits have been anchored to objects, allowing them to linger longer by permitting themselves into the item. Much of the time it is a statue or a tombstone, which is why the Crumbling Crypts are littered with them. These haunted bits of carved stone can be very useful in the world of the living. In great enough quantities, haunted materials can cause a thinning to occur.
Sirogoth, the Entombed Dragon
In the southeastern corner of the city is a gigantic marble grave, as big as a building with a giant carved slab. This is the tomb of Sirogoth.
Sworn into the Hallowed, the great skeletal dragon Sirogoth is enshrined in its giant, locked sarcophagus until it is called upon to end the world, its furnace breath sending plumes of white smoke up through silver chimneys like church censers. The dragon itself is a giant zombie-skeleton beast with bone wings and a skull head. Though its body is decayed and its wings are completely gone, it is still somehow able to fly and breathe blue-black fire.
The great dragon has no love for the Hallowed to whom its destiny is sworn. In fact, it is a benevolent creature, harboring no significant ill will for mortals. Sirogoth has escaped the tomb on many occasions, and the locks and chains that hold it now are bound to fail eventually.
Saint Luilliana's Chantry
Text Talking about this location, Two paragrahps that inspire and provAn awakened church with arms made of bones and coffins that patrol the outer walls of Tanare, keeping graverobbers out. It was first constructed with hammer and nail, built piece by piece by hand without an ounce of magic by the Coachman himself. It was intended as the resting place for Luilliana, his living love.
However, as a follower of Ahdieah, her spirit never reaches Purgatory. It reincarnates before it ever truly dies, and so the chantry waited for her, as did the Rider, never able to truly be together again.
The emotion the chantry evokes in the Rider when he sees it has become so painful, he wished internally that it would simply get up and leave his city, and so it did. Animating and crawling to the outside walls, it was offered some semblance of monstrous awareness by the simple tragedy of its existence.
River Styx
So many souls fill Purgatory that it has no room left for them. The realm of the dead is bursting at the seams, with ghosts slowly losing their senses. Enormous wells of power are overflowing with essence, as there are no afterlives to arrive to, save for one. Tanare. The only place the dead can persist after death. While lucid, before the darkness erodes them completely, countless billions of spirits pound on the gates as the darkness eats away at them, their energies falling and sinking down to the mote below. The pits beneath the monument ramparts of Tanare have become overwhelmingly full with fleeting spirits dying and drifting in the River Styx.
Hovim's Bridge
The crossing between Purgatory and Tanare, where the dead must go to enter the city, or so it once was. When the world beyond existed, few ever wished to go to Tanare, preferring a glorious afterlife spent in the company of their chosen divine. Now that no such afterlife exists, their only options are oblivion or Tanare. And so, billions of ghosts line up hoping for a chance to enter, pounding upon the gates of the dead as they slowly and invariably wither away.
The Gates of Death
The city's gigantic black gates, conjured by divine intent, can be opened only by the Phantom Coachman or one of his reapers. They are topped with a series of arches made from skygiant bones and wishdrake ivory. In the land of the dead, there is no map, no navigation in the normal sense. You are drawn through endless fog to places that hold significance to you, haunting them and passing between the moments of your life that were important, like watching the home of your history from outside a window.
Tanare, however, is not a place you intend to go to. It is a place you are brought, summoned by one within its walls to find its gates. There is no approach to the city that is “behind.” No matter what direction you head, you always end up at the front gate.
The Gates of Death are a wonder to behold, terrifying and inspiring. They are not something of the world of the living or remotely physically possible. But in the lands of the dead, where all things are emotional and metaphorical, the massive locked doors send a clear message: invite only.
Fossor Bastion
Along the outer wall is a dark castle of greenish-teal stone. The only structure besides the Gate of the Damned that connects to the monument ramparts of Tanare. This is the bastion by which the Fossor Cenotaph keep watch over the dead below the wall.
These Cenotaph look distinct from those who populate the world of the living, larger, with rounder bodies and tombstone-like heads with writing where a face would be. The tops branch outward in the usual halo crown of the Cenotaph. They walk slowly along the walls, wielding huge stone shovel-halberds.
In exchange for the gathering of knowledge from the wizened damned collected in Tanare by the Phantom
Coachman, the Fossor have sworn to guard the walls of the city. They utilize what is collected in the archive to keep the endless torrent of souls pounding upon the locked Gates of the Dead from breaching the city. They are generally successful, but as the Rider is away, their task becomes more and more difficult, cracks form in the ramparts, and disallowed souls sneak through.