So my first game involving the Planarch Codex went rather swimmingly, we started off with the Indigo Galleon intro adventure but by the time our group sorted out the situation with the dread captain Hobart, the octopus-men and the Imperial soldiers I was left with nothing much to do with the abandoned dwarven mine part of the adventure, but they still knew it existed and wanted to investigate anyway… time to drop in Dis!
So rather than the escapee pirates the adventure originally calls for, they find the place filled with the curious inhabitants of the Ravenous City, a diverse bunch indeed and much more fun to describe than regular old pirates. A pair of sibling elf/shoggoth hybrids were particularly noteworthy. Fortunately, the party paladin had taken as part of his quest to investigate the mine the power to transcend language and after a few bloody misunderstandings were able to ascertain that the people of Dis were not actively hostile, despite their monstrous countenances. Rather they were just in the process of looting the abandoned mine before it was fully consumed by Dis and became part of the Sultana’s realm and subject to her laws (of which prohibition against looting is one).
As the villagers they had just saved from almost certain poultry, nay, calimari, still used the mine as a shelter when the octopus-folk got irate, the party was needless to say a bit put out at the idea of it being swallowed off the map by a hellish multiplanar urban organism and set out to bring their complaint before the Sultana. So, after perusing the impromtu mining/looting/thrift store operation that the Dissians had opened up (and joining in on the action themselves, getting into a few fights for claim-jumping, most of which ended in fisticuffs rather than blades), they sallied forth through the portal at the very bottom of the complex and met with one of the Sultana’s mysterious Road Wardens who agreed to carry their petition and would meet them in three days to be brought before the Sultana to make their case.
I have to say, I absolutely love the Planarch Codex and Dis in particular, I’ve been throwing in bits of everything from Perdido Street Station to Imajica and Planescape: Torment and it all works, the world building is going swimmingly and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next. This DW game has been the best game I’ve ever GM’d by a country mile, both I and the players are having a blast with it.
I was having a crappy day, then I read this, and now everything seems better.
This is splendid.
Of course there are Dissian thrift stores operating in the wake of the first-wave looters. Consider that idea stolen!
“swallowed off the map”?
So you’d take the mine off the map after it was consumed by Dis?
Personally, I’d leave the mine and just change the name. It’s not “The Abandoned Mine” anymore, it’s “Dis” now.
Dylan Boates Interesting idea, how would that work? Would it become a permanent portal to Dis or does the city exist more as a dispersed network of places rather than a single confluence? I was picturing the places Dis consumed vanishing as if they had never been, but I’m open to more interesting suggestions. 🙂
How it would work is probably complicated and extraplanar, but I think you get the general idea.
I think Dis’ downtown area is probably tightly interconnected, but the newly consumed outskirts probably let you walk between Dis and the plane being consumed with ease. It would probably be impossible to accurately map the spatial relationships between the city being consumed and Dis though.
I like the idea that the initial steps of a Dissian invasion is a boon for planar travel. Now that you can walk from City X to Dis in a few minutes, it’s pretty easy to get to any other plane that Dis touches! Of course, it means that your plane is doomed now. I think that captures how Sigil (which inspired Dis, right?) was a hub for interplanar travel, but with a darker aspect to it.
In the Planarch Codex, it says that when Dis consumes a place, it essentially becomes a new location in Dis, with planes turning into new parishes over time. Of course, not everybody believes the crazy shit that’s written in the Planarch Codex!
Does being in Dis mean a place can’t also be somewhere else?