The Ruin

The ghost of all cities and broken into sections with battling factions. The streets team with the empty traces of Yesterdays - echoes of crowds and events. Lost Po, shadows, and creatures. The echos of war, invasion and pillage, of fires and flood, pestilence and famine It is divided into Necropoli reflecting conditions and commonalities of all cities ever in the world, reflected in this one place that is all of them. The Harbor. Rat'sRun slum, High Town. Low town.

Geography

The Guilds hold the Burning market. The ghostly Echo of every burning city and neighborhood.
Ghenid Bands hunt the Old Ruin, the lost and forgotten cities tumbled and over grown. They sometimes raid other parts
Imperials control High Market where they have the Soul Fire Lighthouse and the lenses that they can focus over their districts. The Imperials are always hunting for ghosts to feed the fires.
The Harbor: a bay of the drowned, sunken and ruined ships and full of rot and decay.  It is a long line of shore between the Ruin Necropoli and the Dark Sea and is every coastal town, every harbor, every flooded town or village lost to tidal waves and subsidence. Beyond the Harbor wall and beacon fire is the Dark Sea.  Pirates, navies, fisherfolk, and smugglers.

Localized Phenomena

The Factions: The Dead have been around a long time. They used to have kingdoms, empires, dominions. They liked them. They also have plenty of rivals - traditional enemies, personal rivals, opposing parties and the Deathlords.

• There have always been the Rebels / Independents / Scavengers. They are still here. Not really on anyone's side but running small safe spots and tiny domains. Also slavers, Reapers, heratics and lone adventurer types who brave the Wastes and may have a hidden safe spot.
• The Imperials: Beholden to their Triumverate that controls the Soul-Fire Lighthouse and lanterns of sunlight that damage Oblivion creatures and immobilize ghosts. Priests of the Empire, Centurians and troops.
• The other lost dead Kingdoms: The Dragon Legions. The Kingdom of Ata. The Suns of Humanity. Principality. Hilamyath. The Warbands of Olia. Golam free cities. Incara's town.
• The Guilds: The Guilds control secrets of the Rune powers. You petition a Guilder to give you a rune. Maybe you swear eternal loyalty and service to learn the secrets.
• The Deathlords: Each is unique. Each has holds and a fortress. Most control a narrow pillar of stone and bone with a stairway that climbs to the Umbra.

1. Neghenu, the Grandmother. Demon-Queen Mother of Ghenids. The entire race for tens of thousands of years all dedicated and Chained to their Goddess. The tribes battle between themselves for spoils and glory, but unify against all others. They draw on sacrifices and chained souls as slaves. They get small streams of offerings from the living and their afterlives of feast, revelry, orgy and battle and pretty much reduced to battle. Tribes and bands wander everywhere seeking new slaves for ectoplasmic feasts and other uses.
2. Beast of War: Deathlord - made of fused bodies, billowing, flowing, emerging and engulfed. Appears as a cloaked shadow composed of a fractal of figures, tentacles- claws- jaws flick out. Red glowing points as eyes in several heads.
3. The memory of trees. 4 faces representing seasons. Grinding sound as a face turns to face forward (or body twists to match the face). Rules the only persistent ghostly forest.
4. Scribe of the lost. Archivist of Yesterday. Bonepicker. Deathlord aligned to Mermalin. Collects lore and secrets. All white. Swarming small tentacles instead of legs from a pillar body, glowing eyes of turquoise. floating in a cowl, skeletal arms and long boney fingers. sound of shuffled paper. whispered sotto voice
5. Behemoth. The Giant. The devourer. A huge rotting corpse the size of a city, and in fact covered with structures and tunnels unto the fetid body. Crawls across the underworld and burrows into the dark soil. Servant Drones (skeletons, Bone crawler (centipede of skeletons) crawl over and do bidding of Behemoth. Devours souls - defecates Drones and soulstone.
6. Veil of Tears: feminine voice - draped in robes and veils, no face or body.

There are at least a dozen more....go look elsewhere if you REALLY want to know about them.

The fine nuances of the Dead.
Your Gods are gone. They are beings of Light that dwell in the Deep reaches of the Astral plane. The only Gods who have sway in this realm are the Gods of the Dead. The Undead and Dead are normal - the living may be barred and repelled. Healing with life energy doesn't work, but causes greater hunger in ghosts. The Temples and Shrines are to the Gods of the Dead and Death. Mermalin of the The Followers of the Book of Raervan, traditions of the Dreaming Tree or Worrozhi in The Order of Heaven.  They preach their unique messages of destruction and Oblivion, of surrender to Lethe and forgetting or to the all consuming Abyss that promises the end of death, rebirth and of the self, or fighting to remain unique and distinct, precious and perfect as you are forever. The Priests all share with the forgotten, pitiful ghosts.

Your Magic is weak or absent. The life energy of Essence is gone from you and only tiny trickles are available to Ghosts who don't have descendants and family to make offerings at your tomb or family shrine. Even these only gain twice the trickle. The Dragon Lines of magic course through the living world. Your Black Magics and Blood magics have nothing to work upon...there are none of the Dark magic lines and no living blood. You don't have access to the higher planes nor the Magical energies to carry out the great magics, much less even the memorized rotes. You are far from the spirits that are reflecting or reflections from the world, buried deep under the ground. Only necromancers and those who surrender to the Abyss...or the great Deathlords have access to essence. Then there are the secret arts of the Ghost Guilds inscribing runes into ghostly flesh.


You are a ghost fettered to a few things and places or persons in the living world or perhaps the Underworld. Bound by the strength of the Passion that keeps you as a Restless Ghost instead of letting go to drift away to the river or the Abyss. You have a few Trappings. You are plagued by your Urges that must be fed for you to retain your clarity and rational mind. You must have someone say your name, you must have a sensation of touch, hear a a certain kind of sound, you must have a taste of something fresh, or something of home and your life. So many Urges different ghosts have, and need to feed. As you lose that clarity of mind your appearance decays... so many ghosts wear Masks to hide their decay. Death marks appear, they become skeletal husks, the chains of their passions manifest on the body... In the Underworld you are free to find your own way- just avoid the slavers and soul carvers, or the Vanishers. You don't want to be shaped into the Aether stone burning away. Or hammered and shaped, burned and twisted into Soulsteel weapons and devices...screaming and trapped inside. Beware the warring Bands - human and Ghenid and the armies and fortifications of the Demon Deathlords - ancient Ghosts, Ghosts of Dead Gods, the odd unholy powerful Necromancer. The Wraiths and Specters of Oblivion. The other primordial terrors and forgotten ghosts of things from the first ages of the world. The good news? You're dead and "dying" only renders you insensable and unconscious in your own little pocket of Nether. Want to materialize? Focus the will and give up a bit of your clarity to generate the body. The bad news is that lost ectoplasm is lost memories- lost skills and expertise, loss of places, faces and events. You might forget your Passions. You can regain some from devouring ectoplasm of others.