The Grey Cities

Here is the small version of Karls map.
See below the cut for my original images.

Like a frayed coat named for its tarnished gold buttons, or like a map so paled by time that the only name it carries is that of the weights used to pin it against the gathering wind, the land bears the Cities name. The cities, the land, and the culture of that land, all are referred to as-one:

The Grey Cities.

The final fortress of civilised humanity. The last spark of Esh, slumbering in Uud.

The continent, (or one half of the paired sub-continent of Blackwater), runs roughly two and half thousand miles from Declension to the western coast. From many-walled Yga to the cold, uncertain border with the north, it reaches two to three thousand miles. The Waste frets and ebbs, pressing in, then falling back, gnawing at the borders of the land. The Cities total area varies according to the age, and the fortunes of man.

The rivers run east-west, to an almost unnatural degree. This may be due to deliberate engineering in the distant past, or Diadem-age reality shifts.  The greatest rivers run from the Realities, through the Blackriver plain, past the Cities, and seep into the sea of ash on the western coast.  Some spill out into the Waste.  A few loop back in, watched, guarded and carefully patrolled. Their cold, black water gives the realm its name and the soot-coloured sediment carried all the way from the Realities is claimed to contain some of the stern magic of the Mountains with it. Yggsrathaals Children find it vile.

There are hundreds, perhaps a thousand Grey Cities. Though before the Great Theistic war, there were many more. The oldest and the greatest are Galdor, Vocht, Declension and Yga. Nearly as well-known are Eimyrja, Hulfr, Morewen, Cinerium, Sintel, Sceadweald, Kaal, Foign, Wraeth of the Ruins and Glaem.

Each is unique, but a few things unify them all. All are based around a sacred megastructure, almost all are built on, or by rivers or some other fresh-water source, and almost all are centred in a pool of exploitable arable land. As well as this, many cities carry, somewhere close, or even surrounding them, a near-ungoverned borderland; the Zomia.

Though their climate and geography vary hugely, the power and influence of each city can be measured by its shadow. Like a weight pressing into a blanket, each carries with it a radius of power, spreading into its hinterland, centred on its secret core and the forgotten rituals performed there by the Emperors of Reality.

So, we measure from the outside in, coming closer to the centre, and the secret of the city with each move.

But we begin at the point furthest from the cities core;

THE MARGINS

At the height of its power, in the dark times before the Tolerance and the Treaty of Birch Falls, the Waste sent tendrils into Cities. Mists rose, even in the centre, and a capillary of ash and cold grey cloud crept through the land, surrounding cities and cutting them off. This was an age of isolation and war, the borders of reality crashed inward, Yga was nearly lost and Theistic violence nearly claimed all.

Since then, reality has reclaimed much. But far from all. Many cities fell, lost to the Waste and carried away.

These are the Margins; any land which is not safe from the advancing Waste.

We could call all of Blackwater marginal, since almost all of it is in danger, but in practice, the margins are places on the northern or southern borders, facing the Sea of Ashes to the West or some of the Blackriver Plain to the east.

Here, things are liveable, for now.

Here the shadow of the cities casts the desperate, brave, or utterly mad. The losers of wars, criminals, despised cults and religious groups, deranged idealists, brave watchers of the Waste-bound paths, barbarians, wanderers, nomads, and, of course, heroes.

The margins lie on the borders of Blackwater itself, but a little closer, and within the body of the continent itself, are the Zomia

THE ZOMIA

The Zomia of the Grey Cities are defined not by their geography, (although that plays a role), but by their relation to state power.

A Zomia is a bubble of uncontrol within a cities sphere of power. They may rule in theory, their flag or blazon may fly, they may collect 'tribute', and other cities may consider it within their range of influence, but tax collectors don't leave their fortress at night, or at all, and soldiers patrol in groups, if they are even present. The Zomia is a kind of mirror to the city, an anti-self that holds it in equipoise.  On one side; order, hierarchy, power and control, and on the other; wildness, anarchy, danger and, sometimes, terror. It is a place in which it is very, very hard for a Grey City Government to get what it wants.

A Zomia can take many forms. In almost every case, the land is sparsely populated, unsuited for agriculture and very difficult to navigate.

In the very centre of the Cities lie great forests of gnarled black wood, spreading for hundreds of miles over cracked and fractured land.  Wreath of the Ruins is surrounded by the Kataferz, the Midnight Wood whose trees grow so densely they block out the sun and whose brambles, nettles, poisoned vines and seeping willows press endlessly at the edges of Wreaths settled lands.

Vocht has The Vochtweald, a high plain of near-bare limestone Karst, visible even from the towers of the city itself, but never entirely subjected to its rule. Here sinkholes open beneath the traveller, the rocks form bizarre labyrinths.  Caves and strange passages are everywhere, tiny villages eke out survival on small patches of rare fertile soil.  The Maroons of the Vochtweald, made up of escaped members of Vochts servile and criminal classes, rule here, if anyone does, from caves and fissures and secret adobe settlements high in the Weald.

Yga has the Swamps of the Moon; mile upon mile of reeds, waterways, buzzing flies, rotting ruins and mad tribes.  The pearly waters hum, even at night, with the spiralling flies and the croaking of the Ghoul Toads.

And swamps are common in the Grey Cities, where the Black Rivers slow and overrun low lands.

Though all are different and each unique, the Zomia all play a similar role. They are refuges, places of rebellion, criminality and escape. Whomever is unwelcome in the city can flee to a place where the laws of the city run thin and power becomes a simple matter of the strength of your arm and the brightness of your smile. A harsh law, but less harsh for many than life in the city.

Though the Zomia, the Margins and even the City itself can be thought of as a place for adventure, the same cannot be said for the next ring.

(Though it may be simply the kind of adventure that differs).

THE SAFE AND SILENT LANDS

Not truly safe, but often silent. The City must feed, and here are fertile lands which satisfy that hunger. Each city sends out a spiderweb of farms, plantations, villages and cultivators, a halo of worked fields, managed growth, herding and gathering. In the south and west many cities occupy shallow river valleys crammed with intensive rice production. These huge concentrations of food are engines of cultural, economic and military power.

During the fall of Esh, Blackwater was the final destination for refugees from all the worlds and climes of the Diadem. They brought their crops with them and Blackwater has a diversity of food and useful animals greater than any biome of modern earth, a mad bricolage of plants and cultivation which has found a rough equilibrium over the millennia. As the altitude, soil or climate shifts, every crop imaginable is brought to seed.

These are the true treasures of the Grey Cities, the cause and prize of most of their wars. Food gets you soldiers, soldiers get you land, land gets you food. The Zomia and the Margins rarely face the threat of organised war, and few armies ever penetrate a Cities defences to overthrow another’s government. It is these places which face the action and consequence of war. When armies march, they do so up and down rivers, through villages, over fields.

Even in peace, here in the weird arable lands, every village has a secret. Only a mile off the main road you might find an isolated place settled a thousand, or five thousand years ago. Some villages and market towns have griped under the cities as long as they have existed, some were even here before the cities, before the great flood of population the endless cultures of Esh swamped their lands and changed everything forever.

These places are caked in their own strange rituals, fetishes, festivals, conspiracies, cults, bribes, banditry, inbred families, local ways, micro-cultures, social dramas, hidden structures of power,

and brutal generational feuds over the placement of a garden wall.

The city sucks in talent, youth, beauty, craft, intelligence and anyone who can't fit in. What is left, in the safe and silent lands, is often the opposite, the husk of these qualities, and the more quiet, strange, changeless and conservative such places get, the more so they wish to be.

But now we approach the true heart, the city itself. And rising in the distance we see something larger, and stranger than any city seen on earth, the Megastructure.

THE MEGASTRUCTURE

Every Grey City is built on, in, under and around, a sacred Megastructure. These are cyclopean, half-buried in the earth, taller than any tower, their geometry labyrinthine, non-Euclidian. Each is unique.  No two megastructures are the same. The Grey Cities are like termite hives on top of modern art.

Citizens cling to the Megastructure. They pile palaces, fortifications, hospitals, schools, apartments and tenements upon it, they ring it with ghettos, weave highways and plazas under, over and around it.

They climb it, hang from it, string bridges like necklaces and cable cars like pendants. Ropeways runways ratways, houses facing near-vertical stairs.

The Megastructures *are* the Grey Cities in some ways. Many have an abstract of their megastructure as their emblem.

But they are forgotten things. Not because they are not obvious, but because they have always been there; stained with millennia of wear and alteration, built on, covered over, (but never broken into), marked, adapted and ignored. Sacred and inviolate yes, (reach out to touch one for luck or swear 'by the structure' to confirm an oath), but also irrelevant. They are changeless, eternal, they never directly affect anyone’s life, any more than the sky or a distant mountain might do so. They never do anything. And so they fade into the background of culture and life like the statues of the heroes of another age.

And at the centre of each structure, even more hidden in plain view, even more forgotten through remembering, is its secret heart, the Forbidden City.

THE SECRET HEART

"The Palace of the Emperor", "The Temple of Reality", "The Castle of the Hierophant", "The Labyrinth of Truth".

Always at the centre, always hidden. Near-forgotten, sensed but not seen.  Vast, sprawling, as old as memory, melted in the soup of time, caked over with ritual, a City within the City.

The Grey Cities are governed by various Councils, Tyrants, Bureaucracies, Parliaments, Senates, Stewards and Seneschals. But though they govern, they do not Rule. Theirs is not the face upon the coins. Each city has an Emperor, a High Priest, one of the Ancient Lines of Aeth, the Holy Few, the Pure, the Saviours, the Optimates of Esh.

It is their face upon the coins, their symbol worked into the flag. Sometimes their name *is* the cities name, or one much like it. The ruler of Yga is simply called "Yga", the city was named for their family line. The city is governed in their name. The council bears their seal. Their title has faded into the bubbling froth of time for so long it has become an imprecation or the emphasis to a curse.

These lines, these families, are older than memory. They reach into myth. They built the city, or designed it, or ordered it designed. They brought Humanity here.

The stories differ. Myths and legends, history and fact, merge into one another.

At one point there may have been more, but plague has ravaged the Aeth population of Blackwater in the past, and those few who remain descend from its survivors. It seemed then that the lines of some Hierophants might go extinct. And some did, sacred clerics broke their way into silent apartments to find nothing but bodies and flies. And those cities quickly died.

None have been seen for millennia. They are too pure, too sacred, too holy and too vulnerable to be allowed contact with the dangerous and sickening air and the low corrupted people of Uud.

Every few centuries a great artist is allowed to see the silhouette of the Protector cast against the finest silk, or see their face in the reflection of a reflection, (and even getting this close requires years of testing, fasting, checking, meditation and prayer). They draw the Sacred Profile and this is used to update the coinage and official seals, regalia and state propaganda.

This is as close as anyone from the outside gets.

Those in the Grey Cities rarely see the stars but they would recognise the feeling of the stars. Something distant, cold, eternal, unchangeable. So constant and immutable that it fades from active memory. Symbolic of 'the way things are'. Not the picture, but the frame.

These are the Emperors of Reality, the Saviours of Humanity.

The palaces have grown over time, like everything in the Cities. Wings, walls, complexes, sub-palaces, theatres, hidden towers and ritual mazes. Thaumaturgic observatories and memorial tombs. Frozen planar gates, kitchens, servant-caste micro-towns, lost oubliettes, armouries, empty training halls, chapels and cathedrals. Secret ways, menageries, aviaries, libraries, swimming baths, aquariums, dancing halls, orchestral pits, surgical theatres, libraries, waiting rooms, ontological generators, meta-cybernetic psycho-conductive control spaces, entropic dampers and toilets. All empty, or nearly empty now. Traversed at fixed intervals by masked paladins, cleaned and maintained or quietly mothballed, shuttered off and left to moulder.

The palaces have eaten their rulers and the lines of the Hierarchs have shrunk inside them like a desiccated nut shrinking in its shell. They are sealed off from the world they struggle to preserve - they know little of it and it knows little of them.  Caked over with ritual, bands of process, laws - layers of rentier Brahmins; whole families and sub-castes whose only purpose is to be slightly more pure than the next ring out, and to transmit a message or communique to the slightly more-pure ring closer in.

Here at the forgotten centre the High Aeth, the Sustainers of Reality, perform their sacred rituals of control, holding back entropy, energising the great machine to force back the Waste, to keep reality Real.

By their Great Working is Yggsrathaal frustrated and Humanity preserved.7

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Aaand, the Kickstarter has literally only a day left so if you want a mini at (imho) better-than-heroforge levels of rendering and design, then here you go....

So, this is on of four parts of the opening continent for Uud.


The Mountains of Reality
The Waste
and the Blackriver Plain (coming up at some point).

The brief or intentions of this world, and of these particular parts of it, are interesting to consider.

So Uud, refers to the entirety of the imagined cosmos, (probably including the Steampunk and Sci-Fi bits once we actually get them going), but this is the first, original and most central part of Uud - Blackwater.

So what is Blackwater?

Essentially its an alternate version of the 5E players handbook inferred setting.

So, the Foundry is set up to create minis for D&D players. This means we start with the most common desired archetypes. That's essentially set by 5E and Critical Role. So all the most common races and classes need somewhere to hang out together.

It's D&D-land, essentially. And its divided up into places based on the kind of adventures you would usually have in D&D-land, and the inferred power-structures, markets, governments, societies etc, that those adventures would require.

The Grey Cities - First this is for urban adventures, or adventures where there is some kind of state organisation you are interacting with. It's a moasic of state power and ungoverned and marginal places so you can go to an easily-accessible wilderness. If you remember my old posts about Strange Grains, I'm sure James C Scott would be pleased to know I'm making good use of his 'zomia' concept'.

The Cities also has stuff like technology, a big, racially and culturally cosmopolitan complex population, and the essentially cosmopolitan 21stC/psuedo-historic cultural values you find largely in games and some television.

The Mountains of Reality - This is much more wildernessy, and much more Feudal. If you want an adventure with Knights and/or Druids in it, here you go. It also has super-mountains and a lighter population density with much more seperate and isolated 'points of light'. A lower tech level too.

The Blackriver Plain - Here is your 'Border Princes' classic D&D, endless frontier 'points of light' setting where the PCs can go and essentially encounter no state power except their own. Where their remorseless rise to power can be accompanied by an equal sense of control over the environment.

And The Waste - this is the True Other, which, in D&D terms means essentially that you need to be level eight or something to go there. The Waste essentially defines the edges of Reality, at least until the DM wants you to go visit somewhere else or you get strong enough to fuck it up.

Because.. in classic OSR/D&D logic, the thing that separates you via challenge is also the thing that connects you.

If Blackwater is essentially a kind of shadow-D&D-land, things start to get stranger and more interesting after that, because the kinds of models people usually go to a 3D printing service for are actually the kinds of models where demand isn't big enough to support a plastic-injection-moulded mass production run.

So, the way the world is meant to be arranged is that we can keep adding continents. Let me see if I can dig out my initial concept;



"BIG PLATES

This is a basic concept for how 'continents' are arranged on Uud, and what that world actually is.

The central idea is that Yggsrathaal feeding on the reality of Uud has messed things up much, much more than most of its inhabitants expect.

So what we have is not quite a planet, but something like a series of continent-sized planes, each drifting on a sea of strange cosmic ash, with grey Waste in-between.

This means that each continent can have very slightly different rules for how it works. For instance, I'm imagining for the continent of Animal-people some kind of archipelago of giant mountains riding the backs of huge turtles who swim through the ash, with a kind of Wu-Shu style to it.

Each plane (or plate really) would have to have its own reason for being 'indigestable' to Yggsrathaal, Blackwater has the rituals of the Holy Aeth in the cities and the Mountains of Reality, so other places would need to have their own particular reasons.

For their arrangement, I'm imagining something like a medieval Mappa Mundi. One of those maps with the entirety of the known world squeezed and warped around Jerusalem, everything is there, it’s just wrapped oddly around one central point.

For us, our central point could be Blackwater ('classic' D&D land), or perhaps the city of Phosphorfall, which we don't yet know much about but may be a lynchpin for some mysterious reason.

Then orbiting or drifting nearby, maybe an antipole to it, could be our Animal Plate, and then further our small-being/fae plate.

A big advantage to this is that if we need to invent a new continent, with entirely new things on it, say a monster continent or an orc-world, we can just create is, "Hey, there's a new continent heaving out of the mists, here you go"

THEY MOVE

These continents move around a little, like a process of continental drift. But faster.

The people on them generally do not know they are moving.

In 'real' terms, this means that people in say, Blackwater, might be looking out into the Waste or the ocean one day and see a dim land approaching. not very quickly, maybe at the rate of a quarter mile a day, but then they slowly crash into each other and then you are having an 'event' adventure about what happens when these two cultures meet.

It may be that, because reality between them is weakened, adventurers, or others crossing between them and forming linkages, causes them to actually move closer to each other, as if pulled together by webs.

If this is the case, then adventurers crossing the wastes and exploring the plates might actually slowly draw them towards each other, 're-uniting' Uud.

AN WORLD OF PIECES

My hope is that this lets us give D&D players and DMs what they think they want, (solid, highly coherent 'worlds' with particular aesthetics and histories), while still leaving uud as a whole a highly-interpretable space.

A key element here, is that there is no absolute 'official' configuration of Uud.

We would have a map, but as our developing policy seems to be becoming, all  maps of Uud are also maps from inside the world of Uud, they capture particular moments in time. So this map might capture Uud as it was when a particular mage saw the whole thing, but things might have moved on since then, or they might have been wrong to begin with.

The continents act essentially as playing-pieces. People playing in Uud, or imagining themselves there, can 'pick up' the continents and move them around like jigsaw parts. They can put two places they are interested in right next to each other so they have to interact.

Every groups personal Uud can be different. If they want to places to interact or to be easy to access, they can just put them together, if they want to ignore one they can leave it out. If they only want to play in one particular aesthetic or context they can just play in that continent or plane.BIG PLATES

This is a basic concept for how 'continents' are arranged on Uud, and what that world actually is.

The central idea is that Yggsrathaal feeding on the reality of Uud has messed things up much, much more than most of its inhabitants expect.

So what we have is not quite a planet, but something like a series of continent-sized planes, each drifting on a sea of strange cosmic ash, with grey Waste in-between.

This means that each continent can have very slightly different rules for how it works. For instance, I'm imagining for the continent of Animal-people some kind of archipelago of giant mountains riding the backs of huge turtles who swim through the ash, with a kind of Wu-Shu style to it.

Each plane (or plate really) would have to have its own reason for being 'indigestable' to Yggsrathaal, Blackwater has the rituals of the Holy Aeth in the cities and the Mountains of Reality, so other places would need to have their own particular reasons.

For their arrangement, I'm imagining something like a medieval Mappa Mundi. One of those maps with the entirety of the known world squeezed and warped around Jerusalem, everything is there, it’s just wrapped oddly around one central point.

For us, our central point could be Blackwater ('classic' D&D land), or perhaps the city of Phosphorfall, which we don't yet know much about but may be a lynchpin for some mysterious reason.

Then orbiting or drifting nearby, maybe an antipole to it, could be our Animal Plate, and then further our small-being/fae plate.

A big advantage to this is that if we need to invent a new continent, with entirely new things on it, say a monster continent or an orc-world, we can just create is, "Hey, there's a new continent heaving out of the mists, here you go"

..................................................

So the next continents or fragments of reality to be addressed (probably though race descriptions, but we'll see), are for tiny wierd fey like Gnomes, Sprites etc, and for all the D&D animal people, like Tabazi, Kenku etc.

So the next fragments of Uud will be a kind of interconnected marginal Fey realm and a kind of crazed pseudo-Daoist Animal-People continent.

Then, maaaaybe, we get to do some of the Teratarchies, like Undeadland or OrcWorld.