Beached Gods
Setting notes for an upcoming game of His Majesty the Worm
It is not uncommon for gods to die. Where their blood spills, rivers spring. Their marrow soaks the earth, seeding it with metals. A god’s heart will beget an entire forest from the stone and soil. In such a way is a world made.
And magic too: a fallen god composts into mana. Where their flesh lays and rots, all the wonders and terrors of the fey take root and sprout.
This is normal. An ecosystem borne of a divine whalefall.
But here beneath the City, something sleeps and dreams powerful dreams, whorls and eddies of dreamstuff carving new beaches and banks at the edge of reality.
Here, under the earth, on unfamiliar shores of reality, a shoal of young gods is beached. Already some are rotting. And for the others, the scavengers and the carrion-eaters are coming. Demons, un-things, other gods, and worst - wizards.
The city beneath the city
In a generation, caverns have grown beneath the City. Stalactites have swiftly formed into columns, then colonnades. Paved streets have unfurled themselves; empty homes and shopfronts have proliferated.
The city above has cast a shadow at its feet, perhaps the only city that could be as large, as strange, as magnificent as itself.
Those who have walked the streets of the city below swear it is familiar, somehow. As if recognised from childhood, from a book, from a fantasy.
And it, too, is populated. All manner of creatures walk its roads and byways, skittering, skulking, leering from the hollows.
As above, so below
The denizens of the deep are not just mindless. Outcasts from sun and society have found their ways here and hold court among the misshapen.
Rulers below have a strange connection with those above. Not long following the appearance of the undercity, strange sigils began to appear upon the bodies of certain prominent citizens. Rulers both above and below are linked by the sigils. They sidestep causality, their fates intertwined - should one perish above, their twin below shall perish also.
The dreamer
At the centre of the undercity lies His Majesty the Worm, dreaming his dreams. He, the ourobouros, is the linker of fates. A prophecy states that his door will not open save by one who makes a rapprochement with their dark twin.