Sunday, March 16, 2014

Denstyx, The Great Fortress

        Upon the banks of a churning river so polluted as to be corrosive, the Shoeless Lord Pasramat brought his vast hordes of starving refugees, lost nobility, rejected prophets, and losing armies of the war against the Eighteen Lights. Despair wracked their faces as the blighted lands were shown to be their resting place. They clamored to their Lord to save them, in wrath threw rocks, rotted fruit, the corpses of their newborns.
And led by divine visions, driven by encroaching illness, Pasramat led the masses to the riverbanks, and brought a bowl of the toxic river sludge to his lips— only to spit it out as crystal-clear water. Whatever his kiss touched was purified, brought back to health and perfection. So emboldened the masses drank freely and found deeper faith in their shrunken, dying Shoeless Lord. His commands to quarry great blocks of stone from the earth were met with mass enthusiasm, and so great walls and feast-halls, winding avenues, floors upon floors, buildings upon buildings flew up to comprise what is now Denstyx, a vast city-state.
The lands around grew prosperous, and harrying bandit tribespeople of the wastes were brought to civilization or stripped of goods and executed. From once-wretched desolation came frequent trade caravans and emissaries from lands conquered by the Eighteen Lights, offering goods and alliances. But Pasramat was not so convinced, and from his divan ordered walls thickened, gates quietly sealed, farmland brought inside, strange oil-powered mechanisms from exotic Fossaban imported and set in the subterranean sewers—all for the safety of Denstyx, so that they may never be made refugees again.
But when Pasramat came quietly to his deathbed, only inward issues pressed on the populace: the Fossaban devices brought in only a quarter amount of clean water the Lord’s kiss once did, and the city-state had been built too large to support itself properly. In the midst of deliberations, Pasramat clutched his gut, let out a final cry, and vomited the most foul, contaminated fluids known to time. All present died soon after of vast infections, and their corpses fell to liquid rot soon after. The upper palaces were sealed off, filed with the cries and pleadings of the servants as they too become naught but stinking, contaminated sludge. Overzealous looters or curious guardsmen soon coaxed the poisons out before their timely deaths, and entire wards of the city-state ran red. 
        Huge, crude plague-walls of reserve stone and river-clay came up to seal away safer wards and neighborhoods—but to little avail. The wise fled downwards and upwards, to highest towers and lowest sub-basements; the foolish remained in the open, or even dove over the walls into the river, soon to be dissolved.

Now Denstyx faces no ruler, a water shortage, a chaotic population, and a plague washing through each and every crumbling corner of the labyrinthine Fortress—and no one can get out. 


Denstyxi Liquid Plague

Infection DC- 20 (Inhalation), 35 (Liquid Contact)
Incubation - 1-2 Days
Damage - 2D6 Str damage (Save v. Poison twice), or Death 

If both rolls v. Poison are failed, then the character infected will quickly liquify from the inside out, expelling liquid from all orifices in a pool about ten feet in diameter.

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