Aetrimonde

Following on from its mentions in my previous post, today I’m going into detail about the “antechamber to the afterlife,” the Underworld. This is another of the alternate planes of existence that overlaps Aetrimonde; for more details on Aetrimonde’s cosmology, see this other previous post.

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Aetrimondean cosmologists often treat Faerie and the Underworld as related planes. Like Faerie, the Underworld is relatively easy to reach, it has fractal topology in place of geometry, and it is hypothesized to be a genius loci that enforces a form of narrative causality. Adventurers who take this as an indication that the Underworld can be approached in the same way as Faerie rapidly learn their mistake, or die, for the Underworld is a far less forgiving plane to visit: it is a dreadful plane of existence, in the sense that everything about it seems purpose-built to inspire dread.

Planar crossings to the Underworld arise in places associated with terror, madness, and death, such as graveyards, insane asylums, and the sites of massacres. They are relatively stable, only vanishing if the nature of their surroundings is altered to remove the source of dread, but generally unmarked. It is possible to stray into one accidentally, but given that they occur in unsettling places, it is difficult to do so ignorantly.

Terrain and Conditions

This contrast between Faerie and the Underworld is immediately apparent just from surface appearances: where Faerie is rife with dramatic landmarks, scenic vistas, and quaint villages, the Underworld can only be described as bleak and dreary. The plane has a day and night cycle, but its days are consistently overcast and gloomy, with a side of fog and drizzling rain, punctuated with ominous thunderstorms. There is no sun during the days, merely an omnipresent grey illumination. What plant life exists is pale and stunted, and the waters are stagnant, brackish, and tainted.

It is possible, if only barely, for mortals to eke out an existence in the Underworld. The immediate problem faced by those optimistic mortals intending to settle the Underworld is growing food and finding clean water for sustenance, but beyond that obstacle lurks a subtler one: mortals simply were not made to live in a place like the Underworld, and it inevitably wears on them psychologically. While it might be fine to visit, the lack of sunlight, the perpetual gloom, and the absence of green growing things all combine to drive mortals to ennui, followed by madness, in the long-term.

Inhabitants

The Underworld has three kinds of inhabitants, who appear completely unrelated to each other, and largely ignore each other.

Shades and the River of Souls

First, there are the shades of the dead: when a mortal dies, the important parts of their soul¹ transmigrate into the Underworld, becoming a shade. Shades appear as a silvery, translucent reflection of how the living person saw themselves in life: typically younger than they were when they died, and in possession of personal effects that they were attached to, like favorite articles of clothing, weapons, and so on.

While they remember who they were in life, shades are almost completely passive and apathetic, perhaps not even self-aware: left to their own devices, shades wander listlessly but persistently through the Underworld towards a fixed point that draws them all. The crowds of shades grow denser as they approach this destination, and their silvery, shimmery appearance can cause a procession of shades to be mistaken for a stream or river from a distance. The processions of shades are thus collectively called the River of Souls, and they serve as a kind of landmark.

It isn’t known what lies at the end of the River of Souls, although the Pantheonic faith, for one, would say that it leads to the true afterlife. There is a point where all the River’s known tributaries have joined together, but the River continues far beyond that point. Many explorers have tried to follow the River in search of answers to their theological and cosmological questions, but there is a danger in this: as shades proceed along the river, they feel the call of whatever lies at its end. Follow it too far, and even living mortals will hear this call…and join the procession. Successive expeditions, using ever more sophisticated protective wards, have managed to follow the procession further and further over the years, but pushing the envelope of what is possible is risky, and many of these expeditions never return.

Resurrecting the dead–not raising them as undead, but truly returning a dead person to life–invariably requires retrieving their shade. The Pantheonic sects known to perform resurrections (on rare occasions and for only the gravest of reasons) have ways of doing this without actually paying a visit to the Underworld. Vitalists–the scientists, alchemists and magicians aiming to replicate the temples’ closely held secrets–are generally forced to enter the Underworld, dowse out the desired shade (or just pick one at random, sometimes), and magically bind and contain it for transport back to the material world and installation in a new body. Indeed, vitalism is in enough demand that there is a small industry in undertaking such tasks, for a sizeable fee…

The Gravelords and their Courts

The second group of the Underworld’s inhabitants are the Gravelords and their courts. Each Gravelord is a being of great magical power, with some capacity to pull shades from the River of Souls and grant them a degree of awareness and self-direction. This allows the Gravelords to create their own personalized afterlives, filled with whatever shades they find worthy of expending their magic on.

The various Gravelords prefer different traits in shades and induct them into their courts for different purposes. Some are warlords, with ambitions to conquer the Underworld and even the material world, and they pick out shades of great warriors and soldiers. Others are collectors or scavengers, who seek out the shades of famous and powerful people in order to learn the secrets they took to their graves, or just to have interesting company. And some (largely of mortal origins) have simply decided that they weren’t done living, and continue to live it up in the Underworld in the company of any shades who feel the same.

It isn’t known who the first Gravelords were; when the first mortals entered the Underworld to explore, the Gravelords of their time described predecessors from whom they had inherited, won, or usurped their positions. Among the minority current Gravelords whose origins are actually known are some shades who inherited the position and a source of power from older Gravelords, several formerly mortal necromancers, an ancient vampire, an extraordinarily powerful ghoul, and a dragon who hoards the shades of the wealthy and powerful. But most Gravelords hide their origins, and some of them are difficult even to describe: among the stranger Gravelords are a female giantess who calls herself a “dead muse,” a living shadow, and a collectively intelligent swarm of locusts.

Monsters

Finally, the Underworld also contains what can only be called monsters. Many of them are undead, or at least resemble undead (ghouls may have originated from the Underworld, although it’s not clear). Others, which explorers of the Underworld have taken to calling “slashers,” resemble mortals, of the most sadistically violent and violently insane persuasions. And some are simply animalistic: great savage wolves, bloodsucking giant bats, and maneating spiders are in abundance throughout the Underworld. These different varieties have one trait in common: they are seemingly designed to inspire dread and terror in mortal visitors.

The Underworld’s monsters utterly ignore the shades of the dead in the River of Souls, and while they are known to attack the courts of the Gravelords, they appear only to do so when no actual mortals are nearby. And when mortals are nearby, they know it: these monsters have an uncanny ability to pick up on a mortal presence and home in on it. The only saving grace to be had is that they apparently don’t aim to kill interloping mortals as much as horrify and psychologically torment them: Underworld monsters have been observed to toy with their prey, picking off the members of an expedition one by one over days rather than wiping them out in one confrontation, even when it appears that would be trivial for them. They are even known to purposefully leave survivors, though never without a few psychological scars in addition to the physical ones.

The Genius Mori Hypothesis

Like Faerie, the Underworld is hypothesized to have, or be, a genius loci. This would likely be a popular hypothesis just based on the behavior of its monsters, but what really clinches it is the nature of its fractal topography. Faerie’s fractal topography is relatively firm and settled: new ways through Faerie are discovered all the time, but always in ways that make it at least plausible that they were just previously overlooked–and once discovered, they seldom close.

Not so in the Underworld. New connections open up all the time around mortals visiting the Underworld, and often in places that they could not possibly have been beforehand. A cave system will turn out to have one cavern full of hundreds of zombies, which somehow went undetected for weeks before they abruptly burst out in the middle of the night; an abandoned manor will turn out to have a secret passage, allowing a slasher to make it inside, even after an expedition spent hours searching and fortifying it. Even worse, connections that mortals are counting on will close, generally at the worst possible moment. A small creek will flood and turn into a morass just in time to trap a bunch of mortals fleeing from some horrible monster, or a mountain pass will suffer an avalanche and trap them with dwindling food supplies.

Both behaviors are extensions of a truism coined by the earliest explorers of the Underworld: no matter how bad it seems, it’ll always get worse. The Underworld’s narrative causality (and genius loci, if it has one) isn’t concerned with telling a tale of heroism and nobility: it will settle for a tragedy, if that’s all it can get, but ultimately, it wants to tell a horror story. Events unfold in the Underworld in a manner calculated to traumatize mortals: they will be made to witness steadily escalating scenes of horror and make ever more terrible decisions, until either they snap under the pressure, or give up and flee. Either outcome serves the interests of the Underworld, which seems to desire that mortals view it with reverent dread.

Plot Hooks

You can always use denizens of the Underworld as enemies in an encounter, but the slow-burn, dread-based nature of the Underworld lends itself better to longer-term usage, such as adventures or entire campaigns that revolve around it.

Adventure Hooks

• A bedraggled, half-crazed adventurer bursts into the inn where the PCs are staying, raving incoherently about the “creature” following them. Upon questioning, the few lucid answers they can give suggest that the adventurer narrowly survived a doomed expedition to the Underworld…and that something else came back with them…
• The PCs have recently lost an ally (a fellow PC or a close NPC ally), and have decided to have them resurrected by a vitalist, despite the risks. This, of course, necessitates a trip to the Underworld to dowse out their shade before it gets too far down the River of Souls.
• A representative of a Gravelord makes one of the PCs an offer: in exchange for riches or a favor now, the Gravelord demands their service after their death. Of course, the Gravelords are often impatient, and this offer carries no guarantee of a natural death…

Campaign Hooks

• One of the Gravelords has become ascendant, and is assembling an army of shades, undead, slashers, and other denizens of the Underworld to invade the mortal plane. It is up to the PCs to organize a defense and ultimately overthrow this Gravelord.
• For an unusual campaign, the PCs begin the game as shades in the service of a Gravelord (or are killed in a hopeless battle early in the campaign and fished from the River of Souls), and must earn their freedom and resolve their unfinished mortal business. For added fun, the nature of shades can allow the PCs to “respawn” when killed.

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1. The Intellectus, housing memory, knowledge, and skills, and the Spiritus, housing beliefs, morals, and ethics. The Animus, or life-force, which houses instinct and motivation, is left behind and is often what animates undead. ↩︎