Monday, December 5, 2016

Incarnate Zones, Purple Worm Trains, Law and Disorder

INCARNATE ZONES

There are magical regions scattered throughout Umberwell called Incarnate Zones where reality itself goes wrong—areas of planar breach where magic is behaves strangely or the veil between worlds grows thin and allows outsiders to enter the material plane. At the heart of every Incarnate Zone is a Delphic Hole—a black void of negation that has desires and must be fed.

PURPLE WORM TRAINS

You may wish to ride one of the city's purple worm trains—each a massive invertebrate annelid shaped by powerful transmutations and animated by necromantic magic—if you've a need to travel across the city, especially if you want to travel from one of the city-state’s islands to another via the city’s undersea tunnels. Umberwell's worm trains are owned and operated by Wyrmwyck Industries, a corporation of questionable motives that is tolerated because they keep their fares cheap enough for the common citizen to afford. 

LAW AND DISORDER

Due to a culture the prizes parish sovereignty above metropolitan cohesion, Umberwell has no official city-wide police force. A number of independent thief-takers, borough watchmen, and phrenological detectives (those who detect crime by studying features and head-shapes) operate as law-for-hire. The truly desperate turn to the members of Blind Justice—though they do not see, they sense crime and purge it with great violence. The most dangerous criminals in Umberwell are incarcerated in the supposedly inescapable Bleakbone Gaol in Rendchurch.