Carceri
, the forever prison.Tartarus, the Red Prison, the Great Cage, the Hollow Plane, Il Carceri. Built of lies both soothing and violent, secrets preserved and broken, words raped and left without meaning, it was broken from the Mountain of Stories before the Titans' Clash and left to eternally eat itself like a serpent with its tail in its mouth, an infinite circle surrounding nothing. It seems, superficially, to be the most gentle of the planes of evil, but nothing can be trusted here. Even betrayal itself will be betrayed on this plane, for here all plans strive to reveal themselves before their fruition.
Carceri can be as savage as the Beastlands, as evil as Gehenna, as conniving and cruel as its sky is wide. It's the plane of chaos repressed, where anger moves like a slow capricious liquid, a plane of death and disease without order, of betrayal, obscenity, stories whose endings thwart their beginnings, rats fighting to the death over a rat carcass, and evil hidden within evil, all of it looking for a way out.
In Carceri, everyone's looking for a way out, and betrayal is the best way to do it. Betrayal is movement, food, and life itself. Most importantly, betrayal is escape.
Has there ever been a cage as sure as Carceri? It holds the titans, primal powers of reality left to rot, separate from the existence they spawned. Older powers are there too, banished paradigms that never had a chance to bloom, imprisoned on the plane before the titans were ever conceived. More prisoners join the boiling sea of treachery; the ghosts of cross-traders and knights of the post, things too untamed for either Law or Chaos to accept, begetting evil begetting evil begetting evil begetting evil in the plane's endless succession of circular forms, endlessly turning on itself in the eternal quest for escape.
Betrayal is strength. Strength is freedom. Freedom and strength are forms of betrayal. The only way to get out is to turn the loop into a spiral. The banished must become stronger than the banisher, nearly impossible on a plane where every plan is eaten by the last, where the flood of lies and revelations buries all within a malific airy sea, and where betrayal is betrayed till all dissolves into the emptiness of its heart.
What can the titans do to trump the great betrayal of the Olympians so long ago? Where can they find their strength, where can anyone find purchase in the slippery ground of Carceri, cut off from all sources beyond by walls of their own making? There are whispers of those who've done it: Pagne Cacolyn, who rode on the failure of a wide-ranging yugoloth plot to destroy a Harmonium officer on Arcadia; Deck Liverpatch, who launched a conspiracy of astral seekers to frame a half-nalfeshnee tyrant in the Abyss. The master translator One-tooth salvaged the half-coherent sputterings of the dying birds (who pecked one another nearly to death) to the satisfaction of a serpent queen, an event that won Liverpatch his liberty.
Kern Pon rebuilt her sabataged ship from sawdust into something no one in her homeland had ever seen. Then there was Caspirin the Redeemer, who united a fallen gate town for one day, using virtue to cheat the Red Prison of a piece of itself. Such a thing doesn't -- can't -- happen very often. Each time is legend, because it requires belief enough to tear away the plane's oily strands in proportion to the crime that bound them. To destroy any part of a universe's system of desire lines is no small feat.
Visitors and travellers who (foolishly) enter the Red Prison of their own free will can exit it with difficulty, but the path is treacherous. They must be constantly on their guard for those who would cut off their escape, for this would be banishment, and the cycle of imprisonment and betrayal would begin. For the banished, the Styx has no outlet -- it loops through Carceri's orbs with no beginning and end. For the banished, no ordinary portal key will suffice.
Look and Feel
Carceri has six layers, six hollow shells, one within the other like layers of an onion or a cross-trader's mind. Each layer is made up of orbs, spherical worlds that turn on themselves at every point. Orb after orb, glowing in the eternal night like red eyes or volcanic seeds shining without heat, a hellish light filling the plane, dulling the conscience and sharpening the wits.
The Road of Organs
(Site)
Hearsay.
The way to ascension is on the backs of your victims, or at least someone's victims.Description. The largest known suspension bridge on the planes, a seemingly endless highway made of bound intestines. It is said to have been made from the guts of a race of titans by vengeful gods.
Special Features.
It stinks, for one. The reason bashers use this dubious highway is its convenience. It links over twelve orbs together, and extends beyond into the Carceri's lower layers, where it links several orbs there, and ends in the Abyss, where demon worms feast on the regenerating entrails and tanar'ri hosts use it as their entry into the endless frays of their blood red war with the baatezu.The City of Sacrilege
(Town)
Character.
The powers are evil. They will betray all of your devotion and reward you with eternal damnation. They deserve a little damnation of their own.Ruler.
The City of Sacrilege is a theocracy of a sort, ruled by a council of gautierre "priests." These clergy are schooled in the ancient gautierre doctrine of hate and betrayal. Direct descendents of the priests revered by the guatierres' Outlandish ancestors, the priests of today gain no spells. Their only purpose is to ensure that their people never, ever forget their past. The City of Sacriledge is one way for them to do this. The council ensures that all visitors to the city adhere to their ancient religious laws and that all the shrines are properly defiled every day. It's important to note that most gautierre priests are not Athar: they don't doubt the powers are gods; that doesn't mean they like them. It's much more emotional that way.Behind the Throne.
Grandfather Wordbreaker (Planar/Male/Gautierre/Priest 8/CE) is the most influential of the council, an influence he won after his legendary destruction of a shrine to Apomps in his youth. The sheer audacity of this move and the fact that he somehow got away with it (the gehreleths to this day have not found out who the culprit was) ensured that he would be idolized for life.Unfortunately, this act has become a great burden for the cleric. He has done nothing since then nearly as worthy as praise, and he constantly labors under the thought that he is a fraud and a has-been, causing him to doubt his every decision. He continues to rule, but his insecurity shows, and some of the younger gautierre have begun to agree with their elder's secret nightmares.
Description.
The gautierre City of Sacrilege is a very unusual holy city dedicated to the defamation of every power the fierce nomads have ever heard of. The greatest crime possible is to treat a god with respect, or to put its shrine out of its misery.Militia.
Fantical gautierre warriors patrol the town, accompanied by a priest constantly barking out orders. In ordinary situations, these orders are ignored as the warriors spend most of their time hurling spears about, shouting, and guarding the places of entertainment very, very closely. When an outsider makes trouble, however, they are ready and eager to attack.Services. This is a great place to get icons of a wide variety of divinities, if you don't mind 'em stained, broken, and written on. This is a good place to sell them, too if you don't act like you like them. Gautierre mercenaries are available, too, for a price.
Current Chant. A furious army lead by clergymen from the Prime (isn't it always the Prime?) are making preparations for an assault through what their legends call the Veil of Ribs deep within a mountain's heart. The leader of the expedition, one Bishop Ingraine (Pr/Male human/P 8/LN) had a vision in which he saw an icon of his goddess defiled in a city of red dust. Ambitious, hoping to prove himself in a country that badly needed a war to unify it, nothing would do for the Bishop but to avenge this insult personally, with large numbers, and his vision showed him how to do it.. It seems that their patron earth goddess imprisoned an evil demigod of war and disease in the dawn time and the Veil of Ribs was the bars to his cage. He's only just found the Veil, and managed to borrow and steal enough power to project a vision into the willing heart of an ambitious priest. Whether or not the army reaches Sacrilege, the world they left should become a very different place. Freed demigods tend to make it so...
Othrys
A proxy of Hesta is in charge of playing the factions in tartarus off each other, heightening betrayal through betrayal and preventing any alliance from enabling the titans' freedom.
A Revolutionary League cell [describe] is attempting to help the titans rise up against their Olympian jailers.
They call themselves the Luddites. They're led by a dwarven tiefling named Olmik and a satyr (from the Pain of the World) named Percis.
The proxy has taken the form of an attractive young woman garbed in the style of an ancient goddess. She is the lover of the Good Shepherd.
GD is a revolutionary from Ancient Rome. Now he's a warlord in Carceri with no interest in revolutionaries at all.
Pretty Proxy has convinced him that the anarchists are a threat to his reign, and so he is sending a night hag with a black shawl to declare war.
The anarchists use black shawls to communicate amongst themselves. PP knows this.
Alright, the PCs get their laundry mixed up with that of a stout widow woman (with a giant son), including a black shawl.
A night hag is also involved, and possibly a chain. Maybe the shawl is chained to the nighthag somehow?
noble anarchists threatened by fiendlord -> Darkon-> Ur-Titans' Alice in Wonderland
Queen of HeartsKnave of HeartsWhore of Heart---> cups
(Tartarus),Escort a widow's shawl secretly to a relative.
tunnels, skies, Seas, pits
The leader of the anarchists is called The Warlord of the Air. He has secretly been having his dangerous rabble construct great zeppelins under the watchful eyes of expatriate engineers. They intend to defeat the fiendlord.
Seek the Gate of Fate , the place of testing in Carceri, to destroy it before your foes use it to escape. from the Red Prison. It is believed to be in the Swamp of
Gnats , filled with bloodsucking parasites and insect-demons and guarded by white apes, mutated human slaves of the gehreleths.
Watch out for a one-eyed, arthritic
old man and Gyase the Deathless, a dwarven dembion of immense age, a lichlike creature with mezzoloth features. Then
travel in the Climbs of Loathing in the realm of the giants,
where the high priest of Freedom will feed the key to
the dragon Ladon. Wield it against a warped
old crone, a night hag who has long been the dragon's lover.
The secret library of the gehreleths.
(Site)
Hearsay.
Made of iron and triangular in shape, this is a storehouse for the shators' poetry and lore. What do they use it for? They're compulsive; they collect for its own sake. They barely know what they're doing themselves, the stupid beasts.Ruler. A shator named Genizeus with a fallen noctral familiar called Gomengod. Genizeus is a graying winged corpse of a shator, like a melting shrub with feet. He speaks to Gomengod constantly, asking it its opinions on every little matter.
Behind the throne.
Behind the throne rule the books themselves, which contain the souls of shators long dead, or perhaps the souls of the corpses they're made from. Do they guard their rulers, their prisoners, or themselves? Love is in the air any way.Description
Weren't you listening? Made of iron and triangular in shape!Militia
Gehreleths! Duh. Maybe undead. Maybe all undead are controlled by the gehreleths.Services
Books. Fresh water. A fountain of blasphemy. Fine art. Magical paintings. Living statues. An ear to the shators and their conspiracies.Current chant
Phirblas liberating the words, becoming corrupted and imprisoned in the books themselves. Other phirblas coming to rescue them and also becoming corrupted. So it goes.
Rule of Darks
(Realm)
Character.
Secrets always contain secrets.Power. Power lies in the laws of nature, and the entities that personify aspects of them. The present themes of the multiverse (including the Rule of Threes, Unity of Rings, and Center of All) aren't the first. Earlier truisms, lost to the multiverse at large, hold on in Carcerated realms, banished by the newer orders along with the titans and Apomps. In these realms, if nowhere else, the old laws hold sway.
Unity of Pentacles
Events always pass through five major points and five minor ones before returning to the beginning. Unity of Pentacles has ten cities, accordingly, and a complicated trade route. Each city has ten rulers. Each ruler has ten fingers and ten toes.
Titans = Ancient wrongs, fallen ideas and natural forces. Forces imprisoned from the rest of reality (ancient, supressed paradigms)
Rule of Mass:
Mass creates gravity. Bigger things are heavier. Bigger orbs are more attractive to other bodies. There are high-gravity and low-gravity creatures.
Titans = Ancient wrongs, fallen ideas and natural forces. Forces imprisoned from the rest of reality (ancient, supressed paradigms)
The Pain of the World
(gaea says "Ow")
Positive energy warring with more positive energy. Airships with propellers. An endless chasm filled with tentacular white light fighting tentacular blue light. The nymphs, treants, and the spirits of the unborn tearing each other apart with their teeth and fingers. Parties of adventurers searching for the spirits that will, when combined, allow their faction to triumph. Gates to the Inner Planes and the Prime, so that creatures from all over the multiverse can quest here. An inverted Grail that holds spirits of appropriate resonance.
Hole in the Sky
- (Agathys); horrors pour out. The source of the Pain of the World's troubles. The original aborted children of Gaea, before the titans. Cities on the edge of the sky. Towns.Obscene Bunny
Bulimia: styx realm of eating disorders in Othrys. Exiled pain, betrayed body, lying image.
Skeleton: Eating realm of flesh disorders. The skeleton is the bones of the orb, lying anorexic and exposed.
Nerull's carceric realms:
The Crypt (othrys)
:The Crypt is Nerull's most cosmopolitan throne, filled with fawning demodands, liches and ghouls, and pet ultraloths with their minions. And borribles. The River Styx runs through here. Only Nerull and a few of his elite servants are free to come and go.
The Sarcophagus (cathrys) betrays the first realm. Where the Crypt was cosmopolitan and full of trade, the Sarcophagus contains an elite few who pull the strings in both realms. They have amazing power.
The Casket (minethys) betrays the Sarcophagus, showing that the elite aren't so elite at all, since the Casket contains many, many others of the same nature. The Styx runs through here as well.
The Funeral Mask (colothys) is the headquarters for a plot to kill all the inhabitants of the Casket so that those of the Sarcophagus may reign supreme under the leadership of the Funeral Mask's assassins.
The Wrappings (porphatys) plot against Carceri itself, planning to blow it open and return it to Pluton, under Nerull's reign.
Ideas:
dam the Styx
Free the abortions
Conquer everything in the name of Order (diabolic allies)
The Chains of Darkon (agathys) beneath the Necromanteion has the corpse of Nerull's father bound. If Carceri was gone, Darkon would be free, so the Wrappings are a lie.
art bosch giger il carceri
Out of sight, out of Mind.
The Hen: a lizard thing with wings sitting on an orb. The lizard thing ate its children, but refuses to believe it. It's transferring its motherly feelings toward the orb. What if it hatches?
Blocked subconscious. Orb = head, thought.The Eye: an orb that looks back at you. Innner Knowing; The Bars; big iron pillars, connecting orbs of Othrys; Carceri: The Land of Unfolding Darks; Cannonball: what else can we do with an orb?
Exiled batallions, secret war.
Carceri: successive layers in the inner self.
Greek darks:
1.Gigantes. Whirl!2. Hectonchire3. Titans5. Uranus -- hiding out.6. Erebus -- hidden by Gaeaherself.Sara's Carceri:1.Water Land2. Faeries3. Giant faeries, humpty dumpty4. Wonderland5. Yellow Slug. Mr. Gone1. I am Zeus5. I hate Mommy6. Mommy hates me.
Julie's Carceri1. Leopard Queen2. Isz horde.5. Field of bones6. Inner corruptionCity on the Edge there.
The Shattered Orb:
(Site)
Description: An orb of Carceri lies split open like an egg. What could cause this destruction?
Worldbreaker -- the adamant axe of the gods. Worldbreaker was used to sever Mount Olympus from Mount Othrys and trap the titans there for all eternity. For fear of its power, it was then hidden away in the furthest place the gods knew -- Carceri.
Worldbreaker was hidden in a box fit to hold the worlds' ills deep beneath the ice of Agathys. As the Fates willed it, a kelubar happened to fall through a mysterious crack in the ice and found the axe. Delighted, as a kelubar will be, with the prospect of a magical item, the kelubar crawled out and wielded it at the first opportunity.
Now, after causing a considerable amount of havoc early on, the kelubar strides the plane like a proud god. Without any need for support from Apomps, the kelubar has gone so far as to shatter its own iron triangle and run unfettered. Now, without its knowledge, three factions are after the creature. The Olympians desire to have the axe hidden away again. The gehreleths wish to punish the renegade. The Doomguard is avidly looking for the axe, dreaming of the destruction they could cause.
Severence
(town)
Character.
As if all of a hydra's heads were ganging up on its tail, the outward forms you show to others have been set free. They're coming for you.Ruler. The yagnoloth Lakerus, a sadistic bastard known for cutting pieces off his enemies, controls the most powerful faction in the city. Lakerus has fallen on hard times of late; his arm has been replaced by a mechanical thing created from greensteel and a living limb cut from a retriever. Half of his head has been replaced by an enormous obsidian eye from the City of Glass and Vine.
Behind the throne.
The supremacy of the yugoloth overlords was challenged several decades ago by a slave uprising. By means of an artifact called the Five-Armed Prism (crafted by the eladrin known as Dancing Lord) the slaves managed to cut away what the city's populacewas from how it was perceived. Ruling suddenly became much more difficult as the yugoloths were confronted by doubles representing what they meant to their slaves. After many cycles, the city has stablized into uneasy balance between the competing factions. The slave have been able to scratch out a bit of status for themselves by playing their multiple masters off of each other. Another advantage they have is the assistance of the servile toadies the yugoloths saw in them. They can't be trusted, but they can be bossed around by anyone, including their more dynamic doubles.Description.
A city divided between the yugoloths and their human slaves, between signifier and signified, what is and the endless hunter reflections of meaning. Severence is a port city on the Styx and receives and benefits from trade throughout the Lower Planes, although most do not stay long for fear that the many faces they wear will try and kill them.Severence is in Carceri.
Militia.
Severence is patrolled by mezzoloths, slaves not being trusted with weapons. The problem is, each major rival for the throne has his own army (each army consisting of up to 30 groups of three). It's fortunate that mezzoloths don't have much personality, or there'd be more. There are about half as many dergholoths, and about twelve piscoloths running the various armies. There were once more, but those aspects whose troops didn't duplicate with them were executed.Spymaster Targa was nicknamed the Many even before the Severing because of her masterful use of disguise in keeping order within the city. Though created a nycoloth, she managed to convince the populace that she was (variously) an arcane, a tiefling, an imp, a shator, a babau, a human revolutionary , and a slaad. Rooting out trouble and manipulating the various leaders and upstarts was child's play for this sly cutter, and promotion seemed assured.
Frustrated as all her carefully created identities were stolen by living facades ignorant of her plans, she tried to create new personas only to have them become real, seperate entities as fast as she killed them.
Furious now, Targa finds most of her time hiding in the shadows and killing random passerby, grateful that almost no one knew of her real persona (even Atrophus, since she was appointed by the ultraloths). What sh e doesn't know is that even now the murders she commits in her silent rage is creating a rival serial killer, one even more silent, and more invisible than Target herself.
It's ironic that the human Jacquie, (Female human thief 14) who was a brilliant revolutionary when she was actually Targa, has grown even better since then. The current Jacquie is the primary leader of the human resistance, and it's beginning to look as if she might win. Even the most overblown exaggerations of her prowness have so far been evaded, allowing the rebel leader to continue her work with relative efficiency.
One aspect of Jacquie that hasn't changed since she stopped being a nycoloth spy is her dislike for Paul, the mastermind who found the Prism. The original Paul has been dead for some time now, replaced by one more amicable to Jacquie's schemes.
Services.
The rewards of having the perfect alibi are tempting enough that many brave the city's violence and unrest to collect aspects of themselves. If it weren't for the duplicates' murderous dispositions, even more would. Due to the trouble Severence is having with its organization,Current Chant. Farrow, a shadowelf from Sigil, has been making inquiries about Severence, believing that it might help him with a problem he has.
bridge of worlds
(site)
Heresay.
Upon a time Heriel was quickly slainat the Bridge of Worlds (in Carceri) by a huge
goblin (actually something else), in defiance. Avenge it. We
will pay your expenses.
Appearance.
The bridge of worlds is an expanse of sculpted stone bridging two orbs.Special features. The bridge is very old, and fragile. The weight of more than six humans will cause the bridge to begin to crack. Heriel was an astral deva who ran afoul of local gehreleths.
The Dark: There are six bridges, one for each of Carceri's Dantean layers. Each one replays the battle between Heriel and the gehreleths in a different way.
The first bridge contains a community of gehreleth tieflings, with a sprinkling of aasimon blood.
The second bridge is ruled by a mighty shator who has imprisoned a deva in a book of poetry. Some phirblas are trying to steal the book.
The third bridge is a place of competing bridge engineers, each trying to sabotage the works of the other. One is a fallen deva.
The fourth bridge has broken. A faint glow filters from the void.
The fifth bridge has several feuding cities built on it. One of the cities is populated by undead and ruled by Heriel. The others have strange creatures like achaierai and vaati and goblins and whatever else. The gehreleths are Heriel's cronies, and tend to be smarter than she is.
The sixth bridge has Heriel's corpse and the corpse of the gehreleths encased in ice.
Carceric marble quarries
Description.
The marble is, of course, red-veined and is shipped through a nearby portal into Sigil. It's mined by slaves working off their debt to the Mercykillers. Many of the slaves have escaped and are organizing armies in the nearby hills. Some have joined the mines of Uranus, a rival quarry with black stone. Others are killing those slaves who won't escape fast enough. A few have managed to smuggle themselves back to Sigil in the marble as elemental beings, ghosts in the stone. One is being sculpted into a humanoid form (she was a slaad). Soon she will be free.The gate key to the quarry is a mephit's wing.
Services.
Marble, slaves, freedom fighters, anarchists.Realm of Tartarachus (Cathrys)
Tartarachus was once a cervidal in Elysium, as innocent as anything. It happened, however, that rumors reached the Hero's Rest that a rogue baernaloth named Apomps had created a race of evil creatures. Tartarachus would have none of it, and decided to go to Carceri himself and tell Apomps what he thought of it.
The journey was long and arduous for a young cervidal at the dawn of history, and by the time he got to the Red Prision Tartarachus' innocence was quite gone. He had become hard, even brutal; he had betrayed any ideal he once had. He still resembled a cervidal outwardly, but his hide was now a deep red, glowing with hideous multicolored light. He was still determined to reach Apomps, though, and when he finally reached the sphere of Agathys Apomps was there to greet him.
"What did you want to ask me?" hissed Apomps in its triple voice.
"I hear you've made a race of great and terrible evil," Tartarachus began.
"Yes, I have," said Apomps. "What of it?"
"Um," Tartarachus thought hard, but try as he might he couldn't remember why this was important. Then he had it: "Can you teach me?"
Apomps could, and did. Before long Tartarachus had a race of his own: a race of twisted cervidal-like creatures that he called tartaruchians. The tartaruchians were made to herd petitioners back to their master; unlike him, they can escape the plane.