Cliffside Cemetery

The value of land and sheer population density in Baldur's Gate means only the wealthiest patriars can afford to bury their dead within the city, interring them in catacombs beneath the city's temples or in family crypts on their own grounds. For everyone else, there's the ignoble Shrine of the Suffering or the scattering of cemeteries outside the city. The largest of the latter is Cliffside Cemetery, located in the Tumbledown neighborhood and employing many local residents as gravediggers, stonemasons, morticians, and professional mourners.
Long ago, the graveyard was an empty estate owned by the mercantile Szarr family, with only a few family crypts near the cliffs. When a business rival murdered the entire family in their beds, no one was eager to move into their former manor, and the city decided to turn the estate into a single massive graveyard that acts as the primary repository for the city's dead.
The graveyard itself is a maze of crypts and monuments, its organization nearly impossible for outsiders to discern as the multi-chamber ossuaries of rich merchants and pirate lords loom over the simple plaques and rotting wooden holy symbols of the poor. Natural cavern systems have been expanded and shored up to create extensive crypts, yet over generations maps have been lost or poorly updated, and it's not uncommon for a gravedigger to find themselves striking the wood of a coffin where no coffin should be, or tumbling through into a forgotten stretch of tunnel. Rampant grave robbery by brigands and necromancy-obsessed followers of Myrkul only increases the chaos, as bodies get exhumed and reburied wherever it's convenient. Most significantly, a major landslide decades ago dropped a large portion of the cemetery's cliff into the river below, causing the remaining bone-houses and markers to shift and lean, while also exposing numerous crypts and tomb-tunnels to the air, prompting a fresh rush of grave robbing. Though Baldurians rarely bury their dead with valuables anymore, and many of the easier pickings have been taken, it's common wisdom that some of the greatest treasures of past centuries still lie entombed with their heroes, their headstones wiped anonymously clean by wind and rain.
Watching over all of this is the powerful Gravemakers crew. Far more than simply caretakers and laborers, the Gravemakers guard the dead—and Tumbledown —from threats. With so much death concentrated in one spot, undead are a constant problem. Skeletons and revenants regularly claw spontaneously out of their graves, while ghouls and ghasts burrow into crypts and catacombs, drawn by the scent of decaying flesh. Wights hide in their tombs by day, while ghosts and wraiths terrorize unsuspecting mortals. Putting down such threats before they can prey on citizens is the Gravemakers' primary job, and though rightfully proud of their prowess, their leader Leone Wen, a lawful good female human knight and servant of Torm, is always looking for fresh recruits or contractors to join them in their crusade. The crew operates out of the half-burned old Szarr Mansion in the cemetery's center, its moldering halls reputedly still infested by the ghosts of the murdered Szarrs—though stories remain split as to whether the ghosts prey on the Gravemakers or aid them in their duty.

Type

Cemetery

Parent Location

Tumbledown