Beware the many dangers of the Undersigil! "Vargouille" illustration for @Wizards_DnD's Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse. (Hardcore fans might recognize someone familiar 😉)

AD: Emi Tanji

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Descent Into Avernus Do you enjoy Lets Plays? Would you like to explore the story behind game modules without actually having to play through them? Or maybe you don't have a consistent D&D group, but you still want a chance to experience the twists and turns of established in-universe stories. As a special bonus, even the lowest subscription tier can enjoy a serialized fic based on the popular D&D 5e Module "Descent Into Avernus", updated 2x monthly. Read a sample below!

(Refuge, Undersigil)

The deep, bass pounding of the drums shook the walls and floor. Ceiling too, if the intermittent rain of mortar was any indication. It rattled Hyx's organs, demanded his heart take on the beat, which was exactly how he liked it. The orcs in The Well were doing something really interesting with carefully pitched industrial grinding noises they made with rusted machine parts, chanting in dissonant harmony with the groaning cry of the war horn their tattooed tanarukk lead was blowing.

 The other patrons seemed to like it as much as he did, crashing their bodies together on the cracked, silt-stained dance floor and crowding around the bar, a collection of salvage lashed together with hemp cord and nails, propped against a stack of re-used barrels. The drinks were swill, clouded with sediment, but they flowed fast and free, and they were strong enough to ignore the taste most of the time. Hyx was good with the trade - no one in The Refuge would expect better - but he wasn't a noob. He was alternating. The thirst that propelled him from the crowd, weaving between bodies in the wild strobe of colored magical light, demanded water.

Fiends were immune or resistant to a lot of things that hurt mortals, but suffering for one's excesses was half the purpose of hell, so hangovers weren't on the list.

The water was warm and the dented tin mug made it taste metallic, but it was clean enough. He guzzled it and considered stepping outside for a piss, extracting himself from the bar crowd and shifting toward the entrance so he could puff his feathers and get some air on his skin. As a result, he was standing in easy view when a three-tailed celestial fox demon with long, white hair pushed past the crowd at the door. Hyx ground his teeth on a sigh and made a token effort to look for an escape route, but he wasn't fast enough.

Siblings were another form of suffering fiends were allowed, nay, encouraged to experience.

Xien strode in his direction, eyes burning white in the darkness between strobes. His expression was anger, exasperation, concern... different colors highlighted different emotions. It would have been fascinating if Hyx hadn't been busy bracing for impact.

He opened with, "It's 2am," and Hyx scoffed because he never understood why normies bothered pointing that out to people like him. If he was out partying until 2am, it was clearly because he didn't give two shits.

"I know," he shouted over the music, favoring his brother with a toothy smile. "You're just in time -  party just hit its stride!"

Exasperation took center stage. Xien knew when he was being annoying on purpose. "We have an early check-out."

"I'll sleep on the trip."

"You'll be hungover and puking on the trip," Xien shot back. "Come back to the inn and get it out of your system so I don't have to smell it all day."

Hyx grinned. "You're not going to fix it? Disrespectful. Am I not your favorite anymore?" He hooked an arm around Xien-di's neck and bonked their horns together clumsily, swaying a little. "Didi, breaking my heart. Respect your elders."

"Gege," Xien said as patiently as he could while shouting to be heard, "Don't just assume I'll restore you if you get excessively fucked up. That kind of spell takes effort, actually. Magic isn’t free."

"Of course it's not." He rolled his eyes and walked Xien over to a wall near the exit where it was a little easier to hear. "So what do you want?"

"You've had fun, you've gotten drunk, probably high. It's a good night, right?” Xien was clearly doing his best to sound reasonable. “So wrap it up, come back to the inn now, and when you start feeling like shit I'll restore you... as long as you go to bed, STAY in bed, and let ME sleep until you actually need help."

"You bargain like a fucking devil," Hyx sighed, but he couldn't help a lopsided smile.

"I bargain like I have two older brothers," Xien tossed back. "Agreed?"

He snorted and tugged one of A-Xien’s fluffy ears. "The little princess of Seven Springs Mountain doesn't get to talk. You should have grown up at Broken Stone, THEN you could bitch about siblings." But he extended his hand with an air of great affront, prepared to trade a few more hours of fun for a get-out-of-hangover-free card.

Then the floor dropped out from under them.

x-x-x

You see, once upon a time, there was a cistern.

In the beginning, there wasn't anything very remarkable about it. It was built of stone and rusting metal, a reservoir for rainwater and run-off from the streets above. It was dark and quiet and alone, except for the ever-growing collection of trash it accumulated as the water ebbed and flowed through it. A peaceful, forgotten place that caused no problems and earned no accolades. Well-behaved cisterns seldom make history.

One day, a creature came to dwell in its collected waters. Slimy and seditious, with grasping tentacles and rings of saw-like teeth, it nestled into the darkness under the streets and made its home there. It attracted no attention and bothered no one, because its focus was elsewhere - an entirely different world, far from the floating city that contained it, a true planet with mountains and seas and a molten core that spun it around its sun. In that world, the creature had enemies and it lusted for their destruction, plotting daily, weaving spells and wearing down the barriers between itself and its prize. After many years of effort, it made a tunnel that would allow it to prey on the people it hungered for and retreat back to its nest from any resistance, escaping across the worlds, across the planes, where no one would reach it. It thought itself very clever for this.

Unfortunately, monstrous behavior indicates the presence of a monster, and the presence of a monster attracts adventurers. The greatest plague in all the realms, relentlessly nosey do-gooders, incapable of minding their own business... the whole phenomenon of adventuring parties is roundly condemned by would-be tyrants everywhere. And sometimes they are versed in magic, though the creature would have considered them clumsy as children compared to itself, limited in their minds, incapable of even rudimentary telepathy and limited to communicating via disgusting sounds they made with their actual MOUTHS. They hammered at the Weave like a child hammers at a toy lute, but they hit the right notes and the creature found itself cut off from its retreat.

All its plans collapsed quickly after that.

But even as its cartilaginous mouth with its rings of serrated teeth was mounted, hung in the halls of its killers as a trophy, the tunnel remained. With no living creature to maintain it, it anchored itself to those teeth, yawning wide enough to swallow a man whole. Then it went to sleep.

Time passed.

The forgotten cistern was truly forgotten. The waterworks of the floating city changed: new cisterns were dug and old, crumbling ones closed off. All paths leading to our subject were closed, and over time the water drained away and left only the refuse.

Decades later, someone exploring the depths of the floating city broke through a crumbling wall and found a vast space full of gently-rotting trash. Then another wall was broken through, and another, as the desperate dwellers in the dark searched for the resources to prolong their miserable lives. The former cistern became a place where the poor and suffering gathered. They dug for valuables, traded them, and eventually dumped their own trash so the next seeker could rifle through it.

The large, round hole in the ceiling didn't concern any of them. No one had reason to explore it, and even if they had, the tunnel was sleeping.

Because it was hidden and secure, the cistern became a place to trade not only garbage, but also information. Soon there was a goblin spit-roasting rats for barter. Then an enterprising wight began rolling barrels of his hobby wine down on alternate days and making deals for a stiff drink.

They called it Refuse at first, painting the letters over the entrances in used whitewash. Then, after a raid on Undersigil, someone messily painted over the 's' with a mismatched 'g' and it became Refuge. Availability of food and alcohol expanded. Locals gathered to make music together in street-corner bands, attracting others. Regular vendors pooled resources to have magic lights installed. Foot traffic swelled. Refuge became a place, not just to find things, but to lose them - inhibitions, memories, responsibilities, cares. It was elysium. As long as you kept the peace, nobody cared who you were. Living refuse, drifting into the cistern and settling in to stay.

Still, the tunnel slept.

Worlds away, there was a catastrophe. 

As it happens, the creature that had once resided in the cistern died not far from a tavern called Two Black Antlers, and its jaw was now displayed there amidst the remains of a dozen other monsters as an adventuring trophy. That tavern and its surroundings were being pulled across planar boundaries. Spikes were driven deep into the earth, chains rattling from Faerun to Avernus, reeling and ratcheting an entire city down to Hell. Dragged with it, the tunnel awoke screaming in the language of time and space and magic. It twisted, tearing, shrieking as the delicate threads of sympathy began to snap. But in the moment before it shattered forever, the tunnel opened and a portal bloomed between that old, crumbling cistern and a tavern sinking into Avernus. The ancient mortar gave - floors, ceiling, and walls all shattered. Screaming patrons and debris spun through the hole between worlds as if the dead aboleth itself exhaled them into Avernus, a last predatory act.

Then the portal shattered. The connection between planes dissolved into the nothingness between, and the place where the cistern had been was deathly quiet.

Casualty reports would change continually over the next few weeks as investigators in Faerun tried to tally the number of missing from the once-resplendent city of Elturel. Eventually the figure would crest 15,000.

The 73 victims from Undersigil went unmarked. No one even knew to look for them.

Like the rain trickling down the culverts of Sigil, they had disappeared into the dark.

Factions of Sigil

I’ve been noodling around character options from Sigil and the Outlands (sidenote: I didn’t even hear of this book until it had been out a couple weeks), just out of curiosity. I do like Sigil as a setting, but I just like big fantastic urban settings, and Sigil is an excellent example. I especially like the Hive and Lower Wards and Undersigil, but this will hardly surprise anyone.

I’m browsing the factions of Sigil. The whole defined-by-philosophy is an interesting angle, even if it does feel a little bit Hogwarts-House-y as a player option. But, you know. People like categorising themselves, and I’m likely no exception. So no harm to browse the options, and with that in mind …

I like the Bleakers. Instinctive knee-jerk favourite. First choice of faction, Bleak Cabal. Life has no meaning, so make your own, and generally try to be nice about it. (Yes, I am primarily a cleric player, what about it?). The Bleakers as an organisation offer sanctuary and respite and food and healing for planar maladies or for people who’ve just seen/been through the horrors, and I like them. There’s no grand cause, no greater meaning, so you might as well just help people. Also their home base is in the Hive Ward, which does not detract.

As someone who plays a lot of clerics, and also someone who likes cosmic horror, the Athar are also interesting. The gods are charlatans, because they’re too comprehensible to really be the powers behind something as vast and complicated as the multiverse. Clerics are actually drawing power from unknowable sources, and the deities we know are just taking the credit. That’s … toothy. I could do some stuff with the Defiers, for sure.

The Seekers are also … I mean. Archetypes I like, let’s count them down? It’s funny that the Mind’s Eye and the Bleak Cabal are opposed, but I do enjoy them both. Seekers want to expand their minds and power by constantly seeking and experiencing and learning. Also they make tools for the city, so they pull in the smith archetype, the mad scientist, the iconoclast. Also, becoming a god is a perfectly acceptable goal for a Seeker, as divinity might be one of the steps to your inner truth that you unlock.

The Dusters are … complicated for me. Initially I do quite like them? They have a fair amount in common with the Bleakers, and I also love the undertaker thing, the carers for the dead. That they believe that the multiverse is already an afterlife is fascinating and fun. But the progression, already dead to undead to true death, is where I lose the faction a little bit. Wanting to experience all the facets of death until finally finding true death probably isn’t a character motivation I’d go for myself. I would work for them, but I wouldn’t join them.

I could also noodle around with the Fraternity of Order and the Doomguard. The Fraternity’s rigid legalising isn’t something I’m interested in, but their search for underlying truth via categorisation is, and could make an interesting lawful knowledge seeker. The Doomguard’s cyclical understanding of creation and destruction, what goes up must come down again, plus their access to the smith archetype again, and their bone-and-rust-and-scars aesthetic are all interesting. I could have fun with a Sinker too, I think.

I’m not interested in the Mercykillers, Hands of Havoc, the Fated, or the Transcendent Order. I like that the Society of Sensation exists, but I wouldn’t be part of it. And the Harmonium is … complicated. I feel like it’s a faction where there’s a lot of decent people in it, people that I’d individually like, but ‘peace through might’ as an overriding philosophy is just not one I enjoy.

But. Kneejerk first instincts? Bleaker Life Cleric, Athar Goolock, possibly Fraternity Knowledge Cleric or Doomguard Barbarian.

While we’re in Sigil, though, some random locations and NPCs that I just enjoy:

All of the Hive Ward, I’m greatly enjoying the Hive Ward, but the Grease Pit is just fantastic casual worldbuilding, this fun little alley full of incredibly questionable planar street food. You’ve got a roadkill eatery run by aarakocra, a seafood eatery where you catch your own fish out of an aquatic demiplane, a myconic-operated fungal sandwich shop that sells psychoactive foodstuffs, and a sweet shop run by a faerie dragon and an imp that advertise concoctions ‘sweet enough to rot a lich’s teeth’, among other things. The art has demonic rotisserie shops, yetis selling ice cream, and a mind flayer selling something fried onna stick. It’s fantastic.

All of the Lower Ward also, but Bones of the Night, the cavern library complex of skulls collected by one old dude who uses necromancy (speak with dead) to gain access to their combined knowledge, is definitely a stand-out location. Also the Ditch, Sigil’s one body of water, a horrifying ‘reeking morass’ of corrosive and polluted water and slime (and bodies that have been melted smooth by it), that occasionally runs sweet and clear when a portal opens up and dumps water from a celestial river into it, and everybody in the district bolts down for wash day when this happens.

The Planar Energy Cooperative in the Market Ward is really cool? Founded by archmages from worlds that blew up or were otherwise destroyed due to destructive magic, they run a massive multiversal divination set up to monitor for other worlds that are about to blow themselves up too, and try to siphon magic out of worlds about to go up to stave off destruction. Like. There’s a lot you could do with that, as a concept.

And then Undersigil, all of Undersigil, but the Loop is fantastic. The loop is a closed, circular loop of tunnel that’s only accessed via portal, and if a portal dumps you in here, you can’t get out. And it’s a bit loose from reality, so as you’re running around it in a panic trying to get out, you might see your own back running around a bend ahead of you. It also bends time, so while you were lost in there for ten minutes, you could come out ten thousand years in the future. Or past. Or just sixteen days late. There are also Undersigil factions that know how to navigate it, and use it to telefrag pursuers by running into it, making sure they’re followed, and then running out again and leaving their enemies stuck. Fantastic. Excellent little bit of a thing to stick into your city.

Undersigil also has a hive mind of cranium rats called the Us or the Many-as-One, which is rapidly developing into a neural network that rivals the intellect of a god. So there’s also that. Heh.

I haven’t gotten too far into the Outlands and the Gate Towns yet, but I do like the idea that they’re constantly at risk of being devoured by the planes they’re connected to, so you have to do something ideologically opposed to that plane to keep them in the Outlands. I’m not generally fond of the alignment-based cosmology of D&D, but I do like the idea of people or even an organisation going around being evil in good aligned towns and lawful in chaotic ones not out of any necessary belief in evil or law or good or chaos, but out of pure pragmatism to keep your hometown from being flushed down the planar toilet because it got too extremely one thing or the other. That’d be a great job for a party: your organisation’s whole deal is to be a light in darkness, a dark temptation among virtue, a bastion of law amongst chaos, or a liberating flare amid rigidity, all as required when required, for no ideological reason beyond the physical preservation of your realm.

This is definitely an interesting book.

Dungeon travelers 2 walkthrough tower of piertan

Special: Sets Lore Skill to 100, allowing the NPC to Identify all items in his or her inventory for a short period of time.įound in several places and bought from all Magical Items merchants.įound in the Civic Festhall and in Curst Prison, bought from Magical Items merchants. Special: +50% Resistance to Fire, +25% Resistance to Magical Fire.įound in the Alley of Dangerous Angles, can be bought from all Magical Items merchants. Used to open the portal on the 1st floor of the Mortuary.įound in the Mortuary and in Curst Prison, bought from magical items merchants throughout the game. Specials: Heals 3 Hit Points, increases Regeneration – which means that you will slowly heal over the next several rounds.įound in the Mortuary or in the Dead Nations, can be bought from Magical Items merchants. Invokes the spell "Adder's Kiss" which poisons the target.Ĭan be bought from all Magical Items merchants.īought from several Magical Items merchants These are magical items that can be used to cast spells or heal creatures.īought from Merchants, gained from Sybil for sneaking out of the Tenement of Thugs, found in Undersigil. A few of the items can also be found in the Traitor's Gate Tavern in Curst.īought from Quell in the Private Sensorium.īought from Quell in the Civic Festhall or found in the Traitor's Gate Tavern in Curst.īought from Quell in the Private Sensorium, found in the Traitor's Gate Tavern in Curst. You can buy these items from Quell in the Private Sensorium in the Civic Festhall. Given to you by Ravel in her maze if you ask her about Marta the Seamstress.ĭropped by Strahan Runeshadow in the Mausoleum, bought from Aalek in the Lower Ward Market.īought from Aalek in the Lower Ward Market, found in the Warehouse in Carceri.īought from Aalek in the Lower Ward Market or from Vrischika in the Curiosity Shoppe. Usable only by Fighters and living creatures. Special: Immunity to Panic, +1 to Strength. Memorize 1 additional Priest Spell per level 1-6.īought from the Curiosity Shoppe in Clerk's Ward, found in Curst Prison.Nameless One, Dak'kon, Annah, Fall-From-Grace, Ignus, and Vhailor can wear one bracelet each.ĭropped by the Greater Glabrezu in Undersigil in Act 9. These are items that can be worn around a wrist. Special: Increases Regeneration (will slowly heal Fall-From-Grace). Memorize 2 Additional 2nd Level Priest Spells.Memorize 3 Additional 1st Level Priest Spells.Other NPCs come with their own Armor, or they can use magical items to improve their Armor Class.Īvailable from the Tailor Shop in Clerk's Ward. The only armor in the game are bodices and jerkins for Annah and Fall-From-Grace, available from the Tailor Shop in Clerk's Ward. Miscellaneous items that don't fit any other category.This list describes important items in the game.

Touts Guide to Undersigil

Touts Guide to Undersigil Why not add one more? I could add a post for the underground of each Ward, but that seemed excessive. Visit Gutterdown, The Sweeps and the Goblin Market but maybe give Rat Town and the Underhive a miss. #ttrpg #dnd #planescape

Mind your head there sirrah, you have to really duck under that arch. I promise that’s the last of them, and the smell of whatever-that-was back there will probably wash out.Now, Undersigil. There’s plenty of ‘under’ to a city this big, and everything below the streets is technically Undersigil. I’ve brought you to this bit, because it’s clearly the best. I think we’re somewhere under the Clerk’s…

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Undersigil Aisling finished! Aisling is a teen witch from the Surface, who recently fell into the Underground. Her story will be told in my upcoming comic: Mystic Monsters. That stick thing that she's riding os called a staff-board. Its a staff that uses magic to move, allowing its rider to stand onto it and basically surf on air.

Vault Builders (Planescape)

When the Emerald Spire first came out, the vault builders didn't grab my attention. Sure, they were bug-like elementals from the Plane of Earth, but they didn't feel like they had substance to them. In short, they lacked purpose other than as a plot mechanic to justify the superdungeon. Suffice to say, Vault of the Onyx Citadel has rectified that issue.

If there's one thing that Paizo has demonstrated they have mastered over the years, it's playing the long game, and welding story arcs together. When we finally learn more about the xiomorns, the race the vault builders are one-half of; it turns out that they have literary precedents in the works of H.P. Lovecraft of all things. In Paizo’s universe, the xiomorns are the race that the Yithians are going to mind swap and take over in the future. The xiomorns know this through oracles. For millennia, they have been obsessively creating new life all over the planes in an attempt to avert their destiny at the appendages of the Great Race. Now, the vault builders have spades of motivation, as well as context for their role in the wider multiverse.

When transplanting the vault builders to Planescape, I would make their home plane the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral. Mineral doesn't have much in the way of inhabitants already, and thematically they match one another since all xiomorns can slowly crystallize their enemies. This placement also leaves the Dao and/or Shaitans in control of the Plane of Earth.

Of course, it would be negligent not to mention how vault builders can act as walking plot hooks. If you want to set an adventure on a plane that is inhospitable, you can always set it inside one of the vaults that a vault builder created. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest that the vault builders would've worked to find a way to make these chambers more hospitable to mortal life. Once you start doing that, you can always play with lots of different types of precursor race tropes, which are always fun. That said, do not take off a vault builder in a vault it created, as they are unkillable inside them.

The most exotic of the vault builder's creations is located on the Demiplane of Time. The aptly named Vault of Time grew around a temporal anomaly, added by the master chronologist xiomorn, Zatsus the Determined. Because of its unique origins, the chronology of the Vault of Time is warped. Everyone enters the vault at the exact same temporal moment, when Zatsus first entered their creation. Time continues to pass at the same relative rate for each person regardless of whether they are inside or outside the vault, so come back to the vault after being away for two years, and two years will have passed for you on the inside. This temporal blending allows one to meet figures from both the past and the future and, if one is lucky, to learn chronomancy from Zatsus the Determined theirself.  

A lone vault builder, Zkta'in, can found in Sigil or more precisely in UnderSigil. Zkta'in acts as an information broker, buying and selling bits of obscure and strange lore. Zkta'in also posts bounties on Yithians and their body parts, hoping to gain insights into the bodies they currently inhabit. Zkta'in pays anyone who fulfils these contracts not in gold, but in magical items grown from the very bones of Sigil herself.

Earth elementals of all stripes have conferred for the last 100 years at Amberbrand Grot on the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral and the xiomorn are no exception. Represented by Negotiator Dalsk, the xiomorn continually seek allies against the Great Race of Yith and other ancient terrors that make even the most elder of elementals shudder. So far, the century-long moot has produced few takers, but Negotiator Dalsk didn't earn their name for nothing. Dalsk is finally willing to bring out their bargaining chip to sweeten the pot: the use of a pristine vault seed.

Notes: Amberbrand Grot was originally from the book, Planes of Power. As originally written it was located  on the Plane of Earth, but I've moved it to Mineral becuase it is so appropriate for Mineral.

The Dark Eras 2 Kickstarter continues! With 14.5 days remaining, $43,319 have been raised, which funds the project, and $1,681 remain until the Pirates Era gets added to the main book. There are going to be fewer eras in Dark Eras 2, but here's the catch.  We have confirmation that each era will be longer than in the original book. I'm estimating that Dark Eras 2 will be between 400-600 pages long

Undersigil Aisling preview!

Here's my skele-boys in my au, Undersigil, or Sigiltale! Sans is more quiet at first, but once you get to know him, he's got tricks, laughs, and skele-puns! He's terrific at spellcasting and creating magic circles, but he cant really use any haldheld weapon besides a staff. Papyrus is flashier, (yet practical) than the original. But, he trains every day with his sword and is one of the best swordfighters, yet cant get a hang of spellcasting tougher spells. He is also a bit more bossy, but still loves his older brother.... and, well, he still isnt in the royal guard, but Sans is always there to help him with spells.

Oh shizzle im late!!!! Well, this is for the skeletons go in the closet. Sigiltale/undersigil alphys