Alavation is a minimalist's nightmare, a sprawling mountain of gothic architecture that reason and purpose have long-since abandoned. It is a rat king in city form. Gothic cathedrals growing out of bigger gothic cathedrals, wrought-iron fences with eight kinds of filigree going straight up walls, thoroughfare-sized stairwells that go up into nothing, tenement houses hanging upside down from bridges passing over streets so deep that sun never hits them. Engineering ranges from senseless and surreal to utterly impossible. Buildings are bigger or smaller on the inside than the outside. People who live there swear that the inner city changes constantly, and though nobody has ever seen a building move, maps consistently fail to capture the true nature of the place. There are some places in the city that are *almost* laid out logically, but they are pockets of dense, winding streets in a sea of greater madness.
1d12: What's this street like?
1. You hear the bustle of a crowd before you round the corner, but when you turn, there is nothing there except for still, silent houses. The smell of baking bread still hangs in the air.
2. Tall, tight-packed tenements that seem wrong, somehow. On closer inspection, the doorframes and windowframes EITHER stand uniformly empty OR are nonexistent.
3. A street on an incline that rises and eventually intersects a raised district above, like a rendering error.
4. A vast open space, sparsely crisscrossed with various walkways. Bridges a dozen stories above block out the sky.
5. A street runs into a cathedral spire rising up out of the street, about four feet off center. The spire is decorated with images of roughly a thousand unique statues, each 8 inches high.
6. Building exteriors are normal, but the interiors are an impassable scramble of stairs and windows and doorways.
7. Freshly dynamited rubble, full of workers hauling away chunks of marble statuary. Smoke still hangs in the air, and the foreman's shouted orders ring through the empty streets.
8. A dead end. You turn around, and there is a wall immediately behind you. There is no way out, except for one dark house with the door ajar.
9.
10. The buildings in this area have no floors, some are even missing walls. Sporadic furniture hangs in the air where it would have been until it is touched, at which point it clatters to the ground. Occaisionally a floor can be found, but displaced several feet in a given direction. The copper piping is consistently as it should be.
11. Building materials are confused: walls made of flagstones, plastered brick streets, mortar made of dry wood paste, window panes made of thin marble panels. A door made of hundreds of tiny doors.
12. About twelve feet of stairs, standing upright in the street, leading to empty air. A wall. A house, sticking out of another house at a 67 degree angle. Things become abstract, separated from their context until it is reduced to raw architectural noise.
Perhaps it is the influence of the equally bizarre Emerald Sea that has poisoned an otherwise normal place, or perhaps it is generations of building on top of ruins that are themselves built on top of ruins (and so on, and so on) that has driven the place mad, or perhaps the power of the Planeswar kicked the sense out of the city. Ondolis had once hoped to clean it up, make it into a metropolis rivaling Hallovitz, mold the labyrinth of cobblestone and flying buttresses into the capitol of the eastern empire, but the ghost-city proved too twisted to inhabit as-is. The first two colonies failed within weeks, one bled into nonexistence as its citizens vanished down alleys that seemed to appear overnight and the other simply gone, supply ships unable to even find the site where it once stood.
The men and women who planned the third colony looked over the records of the other two and decided that what had been missing was dynamite. The inhabited part of Alavation now sits in a bed of pulverized rubble, a two mile cul-de-sac where a fairly normal (if large) town has grown. It remains the seat of Ondolian power on the Sea, where the military is based and where the governor lives. Most of Alavation's money comes from selling worked stone to other cities on the Sea (where, of course, it cannot be mined). Dozens of workers march every morning to the edge of Old Alavation and begin the process of knocking down a nonsense abbey or ripping the bricks out of a side street that runs into a wall at a 60 degree angle. Much of this stone goes south, to help build the Imperial Highway. Other, braver souls venture deep into the heart of the city, searching strange homes for the fine furniture or even food they sometimes contain. At midday, they start hauling the work they've done down the the winding docks, on the other side of New Alavation. Work day ends at six, sharp.
Everybody knows not to be in the old city at night.
Regardless of its madness, Alavation represents the single most complete window into the pre-Planeswar world we have. All the architecture matches what can be surmised from other ruins, but a thousand years newer. And when you dig far enough down, through the mutant houses, sometimes you can find pockets of real ruins - sometimes even whole streets preserved, Pompei-like, under a layer of aberrant stone above. And under those, there are the Godtombs.
Every God had a shrine in Alavation, once upon a time. Nobody knows why for certain, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands of shrines down there. The many-armed gods of the desert, the looming dieties of the frozen north, the mother-gods of the plains, before the Planeswar, all of these and more were apparently worshipped in Alavation, and to conduct that worship was built the greatest temple there ever was or ever would be. A vast underground complex with thousands of wings and rooms,
gilded halls telling the god's stories and how they were related, complete with wings for worship, study, and living. It may well have been the largest building ever created by mortal hands. But that was a thousand years ago, and before the conflicts leading up to the Planeswar. All that we know about the Godtombs is surmised by historians brave enough to study the ruined halls. Every day, courageous men or women delve into the maze halls and stained glass. Some return with tales of enormous mosaics and still-burning torches, some return with golden idols and jeweled offerings to long-gone gods. But some return deeply changed, and many do not return at all.
If someone needed to know something about the old world, though, the Godtombs are the best place to look. Just get in and get out - it's weird down there.
1d10: What's down this temple hall?
1. Thirteen mummies, still in robes and prayer beads, kneeling in a circle around a tiny dead bonsai. Two fresh bandit corpses lie in the opposite corners of the room, their bodies twisted and broken but without any obvious wounds.
2. Everything in this room is painted red, except for the golden statue of a crouching woman with three eyes. Prayer flags hang in moth-eaten tatters.
3. Several bandits/explorers (it's a fine line) are smashing the heads off a line of marble statues, drunk on well-aged communion wine. They encourage the PCs to join them.
4. A huge vaulted cathedral all underground. The torches meant to light the stained glass windows have long since rotted away, and the gold detailing in the walls has been pried out already, but any carpenter worth his salt could tell you that the pews are made of a very rare, valuable wood. They're like 800lbs each, though.
5. Rooms gutted by fire. Among the charred, ancient remains there are seashells, smashed urns, and the skeleton of some strange cetacean thing. Fin-shaped mosaic tiles lay in shattered piles. In one of the surviving bowls atop an altar, there appears to be a fossilized human shit.
6. A barricade made of pews, overrun by dry vines and scored by deep gouges. The wood is cracked as if some huge clawed animal leapt the barrier. Dry blood and shards of bone. The shrine beyond is desecrated utterly.
7. A shrine to a God of civilization (bricks and model buildings, a statue of a built man wielding a hammer, frescoes of townsfolk and city gates) that has ironically become the nest of all those spiders that have been harassing you.
8. A group of scholars conducting a study on an apparently untouched room. They won't let you in, but you can see inside... Boy, there's a lot of gold in there. And these scholars don't actually seem too scholarly.
9. A highly decorated stage, covered in statues enacting some holy scene. If you speak or try to come up onstage, the statues all turn to look at you.
10. A huge vaulted room with grass and a single oak tree, bathed in the moonlight that trickles through the stained glass ceiling. But you are hundreds of feet below ground, and you've been on the floor above - whatever is on the outside of that glass, it isn't the moon.
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