City of the Dead

The City of the Dead is no drab cemetery. It is a great park of grassy hills, tended flower beds, artfully placed clusters of trees and bushes, beautiful sculptures, astounding architecture, and gravel paths that wend intriguingly through it all. Long ago, Waterdavians largely abandoned the practice of burying their dead, instead entombing them in mausoleums. For centuries, the major mausoleums here have each been connected to an extra-dimensional space where the dead are taken, mourned, and interred.
Those who can afford it memorialize the departed with sculptures, making the City of the Dead an open-air museum that features some of the most stunning, haunting, mournful, and downright eerie statues ever crafted in marble or bronze. Nobles and wealthy merchants have competed to erect the grandest markers for their dead, leading to a wide variety of styles and concepts created by artists at the height of their skills.
One of the cemetery’s most impressive attractions is the Warriors’ Monument. This intricate, sixty-foot-high sculpture depicts a circle of women and men striking down trolls, orcs, hobgoblins, bugbears, and barbarians, all of which are falling backward and outward around the warriors. Above all of them, a flying griffon rider spears a skeletal knight whose breastplate bears the symbol of Myrkul, god of the dead. But this statue is also a fountain, and the wounds on these combatants gush water! Don’t try to imagine it — just go see it. And see it as Waterdavians do: pack a midday feast, have a picnic, and then take a stroll through the beauty of the place.

Type

Neighbourhood

Location under

City of Waterdeep