The Choking City

Hidden roughly ten leagues north-east of Mistlake, the Choking City is a vast necropolis buried deep beneath the low, granite peaks of the Cairn Hills. Discovered little more than a decade ago by miners excavating stone for nearby Fort Gellner, the site is closely guarded by a large contingent of Greyhawk Militia, bolstered by several powerful priests and mages.
The Choking City (its original name is long since lost) is hewn from the hard granite of the hills and comprises a maze of narrow passages, dwellings and large pillared halls and temples – a veritable underground metropolis over a mile in length. This labyrinth is reached via a wide (and obviously man-made) passage that descends steeply from a seemingly innocuous cairn set at the head of a low, wide valley. Nicknamed “The Dark Processional” by some wag in the militia, the passage is the only known way of reaching the city below.
All organic material has long since rotted away; thus, no records or contemporary accounts of the city survive. However, the city’s inhabitants linger yet, after a fashion. Scattered randomly throughout the city are a multitude of lifelike stone statues, set in natural everyday poses. Men stand frozen in conversation; women bend over what may have been fire pits; children lie curled in small stone bed niches, never again to wake. At some moment in the distant past, the city’s entire population seems to have been petrified in an instant as they went about their normal daily routine.
A few of these statues have been brought out of the stygian darkness to be studied in more detail, but exposure to sunlight causes them to take on the texture of old papyrus before rapidly crumbling to dust. Rumours swirl around the streets of Greyhawk that a few of these statues have been transported at the dead of night in heavily guarded, sealed wagons to the University of Magical Arts for further experimentation. The dust of disintegrating statues is extremely hazardous. Those inhaling it are rapidly stricken with a terrible fungal rotting disease very similar to mummy rot. This malady is almost invariably fatal, with its victims suffering a terrible, agonising death.