Paridon Gazetteer

[William Blackmoor]

As I said i would like changes to Timor. Roman-like ruins would be quite cool. But i believe the marikith to be the sole force down there as the queen constantly lays eggs, doesn't she? They're Paridons subterrans.
(see London's urban myths)

I would suggest, that the Dark Powers kept parts of Paridon's Underground they "liked". Like cementaries with access to catacombs (similare to those of Paris) or ancient dungeons of castles.

[Jasper]

I love the idea of making Timor into Ravenlofts version of Neverwhere.

Picture this:

Ever so often when a person of the world above is lost to the world due to madness, loneliness or just falling though societies cracks the mists bring them here- to the under city. A labyrinth of tunnels and forgotten rooms, all now the domain of the lost. In return for placing the displaced here the mists demand only one thing- they can never return to the life they knew. All of those who join the ranks of the lost find themselves completely ignored by those of the world above, as if they were invisible or even ghosts. Those survive do so by stealing what they can from the streets and by forming crude mockeries of the society above. The “lord’ of the under city himself is a mad priest who takes court in a massive underground cathedral build out of bones stolen from the cities catacombs. **. He dispenses his twisted justice out to the masses while proclaiming he gets all his edicts from a mysterious “Queen of the screaming shadows”.

As the domain is born of fear and loss many of the under dwellers have come to believe the darkness beyond is filled with personifications of all their fears. They believe the darkness is populated by the “Screaming shadows”, horrid monsters that call out and entice victims with promises of returning to their old lives.


** Note to self- write entry about Catacombs under Paridon

[Jester of the FoS]

Even in the original domain the marikith had to compete for territory. They fough a gangwar of sorts with the above-ground dopplegangers. Only now, after the move to beneath a larger city, there is conflict below.
Or perhaps the marikith have lost territory over time.

Having it marikith-only reminds me for Verbrek. The ignored Core domain with few campaigns set there. It's not the base for a campaign, it's a pit stop between adventures. Timor is reduced to a Dungeon mag length "kill the Lord" land -a place less interesting than the islands in the Seas- and there are enough of those already.

[William Blackmoor]

In fact, playing up the fact that the marikiths' robotic lack of genuine loyalty or affection really, really infuriates the Queen -- who might even haul off and slaughter a bunch of her hunter-drones every once in a while (thus depleting their numbers a bit), while they just stand there stupidly and take it; yet more galling proof that their obedience is instinctive, not heartfelt -- would help emphasize how she's been denied her dream of being legitimately revered and honored, in the way her mother was ... while avoiding the trap of having her seem too much like Jacqueline Renier's ideal pen pal.

Good idea. As she dreamd of being the glorious queen in her mother's stead, it must be more than humiliating, to be now reduced to the powerful but in no way glorious "broodmachine" of antlike creatures, who don't love or fear her. Infact she is more a servant to the marikith than they are to her.

@Jasper: Sounds to much like the Dark Delvers secret society to me.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

FWIW, I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of the "Neverwhere"-inspired RPG, UnderWorld, at GenCon 2000. It's long OOP except as a download and the actual game-mechanics bite, but the underlying flavor and style of the product's pure gold, so far as that distinctive subgenera of fantasy is concerned. So if anyone's a real fanatic about Gaiman-style 'subway fantasy', you can download the game for ten bucks at:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=3700

Not to say it's particularly "Ravenloft", by any means. It's just way cool.

[Undead Cabbage]

I think we should definately add a society of Calibans living in Timor. Paridon streets demi-humans as highly intelligent animals. In a realm where pets are used for food, demi-humans are not going to be allowed to use any of Paridon's food or shelter resources. All Calibans would likely try and find solace somewhere else, perhaps with this society living underground.

I also envision that Timor will sometimes take physical likeness to the streets of Paridon, albeit in twisted and multilated ways. This can be a constant means of torture of the Marikith Queen.

In some ways, Sodo and the Marikith Queen are similar characters. Both crave social interaction, and both dream of a lavish lifestyle under a kingdom that both fears and loathes them. Sodo technically is a high ranking doppleganger, but due to his ESP he knows how much the other dopplegangers hate him. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, the dopplegangers would only be using him to act as Bloody Jack and for the Fang of the Nosferatu. Sodo knows this, just like how the Marikith Queen knows that her minions do not actually love or fear her. Both are looking for affection from their own kind to no avail.

A couple more ways I'd like to make the realms reflect their Darklords:

Ambition. Sodo himself is a very ambitious character: he wanted to be the leader of the doppleganger clan. It may very well be that Sodo dreamed of building the Zheresian empire into something even greater than it was. And yet, the Zheresian empire has now crumbled, much like how Sodos plan to dominate the dopplegangers has crumbled. I'd also like to paint this in the middleclassmen of Paridon, who dream of one day obtaining control of the city over the nobility that currently rule it.

For the Marikith queen, the twisting of something beautiful. The Marikith queen twisted herself for the purposes of overthrowing her mother. She now deeply regrets this twisting, and is cursed to see reminders of her transition all around her. The sewers of Timor are slowly, but surely being manipulated by her prescence into a vile reflection of her nature. The Marikiths around her are respresentations of what she has become. Every time a human being is transformed into a Marikith, this is a respresentation of the Queens eternal mistake.

[Nathan of the FoS]

Wow. Thirty-five posts in about twelve hours--that's impressive.

Since discussion seems to have turned largely to Timor, I reckon I might as well throw my two cents in.

I agree that Timor would be much more fun jazzed up, and that having Paridon and Timor reflect each other is an important idea. What we really need, I think, is an explanation for why these two domains have been put together as they have. The Dark Powers obviously see some common element in the two, and, by extension, in the Marikith Queen and Sodo.

I'm not sure that this ties into that idea, but I came up with a couple of ideas I on the Marikith Queen's curse that I thought I'd put out there for comment:

Suppose that the Marikith Queen is still emotionally and instictually a human. On the one hand, well, duh. On the other hand, how would you feel trapped in the bowels of a sewer, surrounded by insectile monsters? Now, imagine that these monsters are actually your children--but they're also almost mechanical, more like your fingers than they are independent beings. It seems to me that the Marikith Queen might well be revolted by and even afraid of her children (not to mention her own current state). Secret of the Knife affirms that there were hordes of marikith in the sewers, and we have to take that as fact--but it may not always be so. Perhaps in her desperate need to get control of the Fang, the Queen birthed hundreds of children--but, having failed to get what she wanted, she had all but a few kill each other.

In this scenario the Hive Queen has an interesting balancing act. On the one hand, her power is mostly in the fact that she can give birth to so many servants who serve her absolutely (whether literally or by the twisting of the Mists). On the other hand, the giving birth to them, and their presence around her, is abhorrent to her. Perhaps under ordinary circumstances she allows relatively few marikith to survive--only when she has some great purpose that demands an all-out effort does she steel herself to surround herself with her hated children.

On another psychological level, perhaps this reflects the Queen's relationship with her own mother. She might have felt that her mother hated or despised her and resolved to be a better mother to her own children--only to be given children not even a mother could love.

[Pamela]

Holy cow...I'm still trying to catch up with all these posts but this is something I'd written concerning the relationship between Paridon and Sodo:

Every land is a reflection of its darklord. Paridon is certainly a doppelganger, stealing much of its identity from Victorian London and the nineteenth century. This has been its strength and its curse. Readers are quickly able to recognize it but it is hard to know its true identity, so heavily is it camouflaged by association.

Paridon is a realm where a genteel veneer hides its thirst for blood and horror. The Newsbill decries violence while quickly sharing gory details, lapped up by its readers. The cultural belief in the divinity of mankind has left little compassion for non-humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, as well as the insidious belief that some humans are more evolved than others. The most common form of this belief is seen in the hunt for wealth, where even the working poor and the middle class believe that the unemployed destitute are lazy and somehow deserving of their situation.

With the loss of its fields and surrounding lands, Paridon has been forced to focus on the city’s natural strengths: trade, crafts, and scientific knowledge. The number of merchants, exporters, craftsmen and scholars are continually increasing and with them, the influence of the middle class. The government is run by an aristocratic council but these gentlemen are beginning to pass laws to appease and keep quiescent this new-monied group of upstarts. Sodo’s inherent ambition, the cause of his curse, is once again beginning to reshape the nation.

Despite the class divide, Zherisians have a healthy willingness to challenge authority. Council members are available to hear their complaints; whether they are listened to is of course another matter. Newspapers make political decisions known and can voice their disapproval. The Council itself, solely composed by aristocrats, is nonetheless voted for by their peers, and subject to reelection every five years.

There is still great respect for the law. The weeks of chaos that followed the Great Upheaval revealed not only its necessity but its aid as citizens faced riots, vandalism and theft. The city watch is perhaps the most accepted in all the Land of Mists, as they protect the streets and citizens from doppelgangers and things which slip from the sewers. Lawyers are able and willing to challenge laws by pointing to legal precedents.

[Pamela]

I pictured Paridon as a very Social Egoist society. Everyone is self serving in Paridon. Even its prime religion is centered around self perfection.

This is a good point, Cabby. That whole mentality about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is also taken into the religious domain. “Be all that you can be” to borrow a famous slogan...

An odd thought which crossed my mind was that Sodo’s curse has been recreated on a grand scale by the Great Upheaval. The destruction of the surrounding land is a mirror of Sodo’s murder of the Elders. He and his city becomes the centre of their own universe. Then the city itself becomes a microcosm of that dilemma: the middle class begins to rise in power, happy to lord it over the poor but wanting more say in the government, if not its eventual control. Power is now being measured by material success rather than lineage. So despite the shrinking, the curse is already repeating itself, on an increasingly smaller but no less important scale.

The ideas on Timor and the Marikith Queen are simply amazing.

[William Blackmoor]

I had some ideas concerning Timor's other inhabitants:

a) herded creatures: some ants herd lice (? those little insects that eat leaves) to milk them. Why shouldn't the marikith do something similare? there could be pockets of herded rats, giant centipedes or even humans (original inhabitants of Timor city, who might already have changed to strange albinos or even caliban) ?
Maybe they even cultivate some (dangerous) plants?

b) undetected beings: undead might go below the marikith's 'radar' as long as the queen does'nt tell them what to look for. Slimes and oozes might also fall into this category

c) to powerful to take out: for example a mage or lich might be left alone after he stomped a hundred marikith

d) half-changed: The poison of the marikith might not have the same effect on all creatures, creating half-marikith creatures (imagine a half-marikith-alligator or kobolds )

e) immune : some creatures might be immune to the poison at all like natural lycantrophes (wererats, drow werespiders) or other shapeshifters (another reason the dopp's and the marikith doesn't get along?). The suggested caliban of these sewers might be already to twisted to change.

f) symbiosis: certain creatures might have found a way to get along with the marikith queen for whatever reason (like a coven of drow werespiders who worship her as an avatar of the spiderqueen. Maybe they are spared because of their beliefs, maybe it's because they have black skin and red eyes too and marikith hunters are to dumb to tell the difference? Notice what i already inclueded in my games sewers )

g) hunter's hunted: maybe there is a natural predator for marikith too?

h) the deep spawn: would a deep spawn (from the Forgotten Realms) be a boon (unlimited supply of cloned food) or a bane(unlimited supply of cloned adversaries) to the marikith ? It's a monster that fit's well with both Paridon and Timor i think.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

How about an entire subterranean neighborhood that's still populated ... by geists? Sort of a "Brigadoon"-style community, where the incorporeal spirits of the original Timorese still act out ordinary pseudo-lives? It'd be different from Ravenloft's existing all-undead communities in that these geists -- unlike the Slain or Scourged -- won't even look like undead until you try to touch them, and could even be moderately friendly to the living so long as they're not abused; unfortunately, anyone who accepts their hospitality, and shelter from the marikith threat, is at risk of joining their "community" permanently, as they all vanish at sunrise each day. And who in Timor -- or foggy Paridon for that matter -- can be absolutely sure just when the sun's coming up?

For that matter, perhaps ghosts from Paridon have been migrating down into Timor, just as the marikith have made their own probes into the surface city. Surely, when the post-Upheaval food shortage set in, the historic cemetaries of Paridon were one of the first areas of potential cropland to be commandeered and cultivated; displaced spirits and other undead who lacked the power to contest such a mass eviction of the dead could've escaped into the depths, irate over being rendered "homeless". It's yet another way to blur the boundary-lines between these two realms, having Paridon's displaced ghosts haunting Timor, and it'd foster a "Neverwhere"-flavored theme of Timor-3E as well, if indeed that's what we're aiming for.

[Mortavius]

I feel that it's important that we don't gloss over Timor as some very earlier posts suggested. These writings are supposed to be the definitive works on the different domains, and it's important that we give each a complete once over. Personally, I don't see any reason why the Timor section should be shorter than the Paridon section; they're both domains in the same cluster.

One thing to remember about Timor: the flavor of that domain is Fear. Timor exemplifies the unknown. Dark lightless sewers where alien creatures go about alien designs. Bringing Timor closer and closer to a human society ruins that, makes it recognizable and subject to classification. What humans can categorize and classify, they don't fear as much.

It's important that we remember that Timor had an existance before Paridon. It had it's own city, inhabitants, and some very interesting rules about Fear. In the original Timor, the nature of a human being could dictate whether they transformed into a Doppleganger or Marikith. Fear, bullying, etc. was a large part of that domain, and that shouldn't be lost just because Timor has joined with Paridon. I'm not saying the rules should stay the same, just that we shouldn't throw away all that material.

From what I recall of Shadow of the Knife, all the encounters with the Marikith focused on fear as well, portraying them as indistinct creatures lurking in the blackness, stealing people without being seen.

[Tobias Blackburn]

I feel that it's important that we don't gloss over Timor as some very earlier posts suggested. These writings are supposed to be the definitive works on the different domains, and it's important that we give each a complete once over. Personally, I don't see any reason why the Timor section should be shorter than the Paridon section; they're both domains in the same cluster.

One thing to remember about Timor: the flavor of that domain is Fear. Timor exemplifies the unknown. Dark lightless sewers where alien creatures go about alien designs. Bringing Timor closer and closer to a human society ruins that, makes it recognizable and subject to classification. What humans can categorize and classify, they don't fear as much.

It's important that we remember that Timor had an existance before Paridon. It had it's own city, inhabitants, and some very interesting rules about Fear. In the original Timor, the nature of a human being could dictate whether they transformed into a Doppleganger or Marikith. Fear, bullying, etc. was a large part of that domain, and that shouldn't be lost just because Timor has joined with Paridon. I'm not saying the rules should stay the same, just that we shouldn't throw away all that material.

From what I recall of Shadow of the Knife, all the encounters with the Marikith focused on fear as well, portraying them as indistinct creatures lurking in the blackness, stealing people without being seen.

I agree, but bringing in new stuff won't make it completely known.

The easiest thing to do is to "segment" Timor. Create several types of environments that are scattered throughout the domain. Kinda like the following:

The Sewers: These are the remaiments of the sewers of Paridon. They retain their old system, for the most part, but have odd twists and turns not recorded on maps, and dead ends that seem to come out of no where. There are even rumors that these tunnels move by themselves, trying to prevent those that have entered from escaping. Unlike the old sewers of Paridon these go further down and seem to go on forever. Anyone who seeks to enter or leave Timor must navigate the sewers.

The Darkened Tunnels: These are rough stone caverns dug out by water and inhuman hands. They are hot, humid and filled with detrius that drips down from above. This makes up the largest portion of Timor and are filled with huge caverns and thin crawlspaces. The other areas of Timor are found within the tunnels.

The Hive: The Marilkith Hive is the home of the Hideous Queen and her brood. The Hive takes up the lowest points of Timor and rises up to fill areas of the Darkened Tunnels. These areas have a more organic look to them and it is rare to find any creatures other than the Marilkith there. (By the way, we need to think up a few more Marilkits. We've got hunters and Queens. We should probably have workers and handmaidens). The area that the Hive takes up varies, depending on the marilkith population (this takes into account the Queens rages where she kills off most of the Hive and then makes more when she feels the need).

The Sunken Ruins: Found scattered in caverns around the Darkened Tunnels are the remains of a large metropolios. These pieces are all that remain of the city of Timor before it's destruction during the Grand Conjunction (when the Marilkith Queen used the ensuing chaos to destroy the doppelgangers above and absorb the city into her Hive). These ruins can vary from single houses that were buried in cave-ins to entire city blocks left all but untouched, bearing only signs of the final rush that ended the city's existance and and it's time underground. There are rumors of a massive catherdral, peopled with the spirits of it's worshippers, and a marketplace with a fountain that provides one of the few sources of clean water in the domain. The borders of these ruins seem to just disappear into the stone walls that surround them, and there is no rhyme or reason to their placement. An old shop could easily be found mere feet away from a cavern that holds a the remains of a nobleman's home. Intrepid explores have been able to bring back artifacts from these areas, bringing the history of Timor to the light. The poor souls (often mad and deformed) who leave Paridon for the lightless world below usually find home in these ruins, living on the fungus and seeing by the thin glow of luminesent lichen.

The ruins are based (loosely) on the Undercity in the computer game Thief: The Dark Project. I also figure that it makes sense that the Queen would have used the Grand Conjuction to take over her old city only to have it ripped from her grasp.

In order to incorporate the Queen's vanity and desire to be human, there should probably be an area in her nest made up to look like the bedroom of royalty. There are books, combs, dolls, even dresses, shoes and a huge luxurious bed, all gathered from the world above and the ruins below. There are, of course, no mirrors or shiny surfaces. The Queen goes there to "feel human" for a while, but everything is rotting and filthy.

[Jester of the FoS]

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