Much like the real world which is teeming with dark and forbidding places ranging from wintery Scandinavian woods to dark primal jungles filled with roaring noise and bizarre creatures, the world of Everbane has many of its own dark and forbidding places.
The Esoteric Order of Black Night have their city of Ghulbaad, the witch city, where the dark, ominously green lit streets are awash with blood and the air itself stinks of death and dark magic. They say that those ever benighted streets are walked by more than mere cultists, it is a place of convergence where savage Mind Plague Bearers will roam the streets barely kept in check. Vampyrs are known to mill and amble through the throngs of the mad and the damned. There are even those who suggest that there have even been werewolves seen in that city and in numbers, a terrifying prospect for all. We got the inspiration for this city’s name if nothing else from Tolkien’s Legendarium, specifically the dark cities of Middle Earth such as Angmar, Dol-Guldur and Barad Dur. The city’s internal workings and aesthetic was inspired more by texts such as Dante’s Inferno or the Pandemonium of Milton’s classic Paradise Lost.
To the south east, in the great woodland where can be found Sloisa there is the colossal stone basin, like unto an immense Amphitheatre carved by the hands of the titans themselves, known by all around as the Cauldron. All have heard of it and few have seen it, fewer still have seen those who dwell there for it is thought that the Cauldron is the gathering place for werewolves when they resist their nature as solitary animals and gather in numbers to breed. Yet some say that the wolves are capable of darker acts and scheme and plot and connive in the Cauldron, much to the dismay of those who put stock in such rumors. This location was inspired partly by the sights of great quarries and mining pits where at night one can be filled with a palpable sense of unease but also in part by the movie Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and the great wolf pit shown in a climactic point of the film.
There is a great crater, known as The Last Stand, where the titans destroyed each other and plunged the world into eternal winter and while not a wholly bad place it can be a center of great darkness due to the raging currents of unstable magical energies. Here anything could happen, in that forbidden place, magic works on all things for good or ill.
Likewise there is the Great Rift to the north east, similar to the Last Stand the place seems to have a consciousness all its own and can disrupt all around it with its instable magical atmosphere where once again any inadvertent act of either dark or light magic could occur.
Even the old cities, once tall, proud and beautiful are now dark and violent places. The empty streets once filled with life and trade are changed to grey and hazy haunts where the shuffling undead victims of the Soul Plague endless mill around crumbled and abandoned streets.
Will you brave these dark and forbidden places on your journey through the frozen wastes of Everbane?
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