Sigil, City of Doors
One of the most important sites on the Outer Planes, Sigil (also known as the Cage or the City of Doors) is the largest center of commerce and most popular nexus of planar travel in the known multiverse. Its age and origins are unknown, as are the means of its existence, but its nature as a crossroads of all realms across existence ensures it holds a key role in planar society, and the Lady of Pain ensures it will remain free and neutral, at no risk of capture by any person or organization of any sort.
Sigil is located at the top of the Spire, the infinitely-tall pillar in the center of the Outlands. Despite this fact, magic functions for the most part completely normally, with the anti-magic properties of the Outlands holding no sway over it. It occupies the inner surface of a ring or torus of approximately five miles in diameter, with gravity pointing outwards and allowing people within to walk about somewhat normally. Despite its size, however, the city is extremely crowded, with the total number occupying it at any one time far greater than the permanent population.
The Sigilian Calendar consists of nine months, each corresponding with the nine alignments, and are named for powerful members of each exemplar race of the Outer Planes. In addition, each month has an official faction. Some factions take their assignments seriously, planning city-wide events and celebrations during their time. Others could care less.
Demographics
37% human, 12% tiefling, 9% half-elf, 6% aasimar, 5% githzerai, 3% bariaur, 2% genasi, 1% halfling, 25% other
Government
The official ruler of the city is the Lady of Pain, the mysterious being that watches over the city and ensures its protection and defense. She is served by a retinue of dabus, strange creatures of which little is known that are only found within Sigil, and it is through these beings that the edicts of the Lady are communicated. The relationship between the Lady and the dabus is unknown, much as most facts about the Lady.
Districts
The ring is divided into 6 wards, connected in the following order:
The sewers and various underground areas are known as Undersigil.
Guilds and Factions
History
Much of the early history of Sigil is murky, long since lost to time. It is commonly thought that the tanar'ri were the first to discover the city during the second fiendish Age of Exploration, when the tanar'ri and baatezu swarmed out throughout the multiverse seeking means to best one another in the Blood War. Though both kinds' histories say there were repeated major attempts on both sides to take the city from the Lady (who already resided there when it was found) by force soon after its discovery, these attempts went utterly nowhere, and were eventually abandoned for the most part; ever since, the Blood War has touched the city only indirectly, but for the occasional skirmish that spills over into the Sigilian streets.
After this, there are few records of Sigil, merely legends from the long-since-past days. The most prominent of these legends is the tale of the mage who nearly deposed the Lady from her rule of the city some tens of thousands of years ago. A massive magical battle is said to take place in the streets of Sigil, so strong that there were no witnesses. As the story goes, the Lady wasn't seen for weeks following the battle, leading some to have concluded he may have been successful. Eventually, though, the Lady returned, and it was revealed that the mage had been cast into Agathion, imprisoned within a soul crystal for the audacity to challenge the rule of the Lady; her preferred punishment in those days, before the time of the Mazes.
The next major recorded event is a related legend, that of the wizard Shekelor who sought to find this unnamed mage and use his power to unseat the Lady himself. He went missing for months as he searched Pandemonium for the crystal containing the wizard's essence. When he finally returned, it was through a portal in the center of the Great Bazaar. Shouting a single sentence — the specifics of which vary from telling to telling — he then burst into flames, leaving nothing but a thin ash behind on the street.
Solid facts do not begin to be recorded until approximately a millennium before the present day; not coincidentally, about when the Guvners were first founded in Sigil. It is known that prior to about a thousand years ago, it was not factions but rather guilds that were the major political and governmental driving force in the city. Around this time, however, the time of the factions began to rise, and the draw of belief over industry slowly pushed the guilds out of prominence. They had not yet taken power, as splintered as they were, but the split loyalties did much to sow unrest within the city.
Approximately 630 years ago, the infighting between factions reached its peak. Somewhere between 49 and 52 factions are recorded to have existed at this time, and their fighting, both direct and indirect, finally reached the point of entirely disrupting life within the city. In response, the Lady made her decree, limiting the number of factions within the city to a maximum of 15 on penalty of death. This event is known nowadays as the Great Upheaval, and was ironically the key in cementing the factions as the major political force in the city.
Soon after the Upheaval, many citizens began declaring their independence from the factions altogether by declaring membership in the Free League, the organization that has long claimed the status of being outside the factions entirely. At its peak, the Indeps counted membership of over one million bodies, including nearly a third of the population of Sigil at the time. However, over the next 50 years a sickness of some sort ravaged the faction, cutting its members to a mere 20,000 in what is still the worst and longest-standing epidemic Sigil has ever seen.
Seen by many as an ill omen, the remaining citizens of Sigil cemented their relationships with the factions. With the number of such organizations having been culled, the factions quickly grew in power, using their increasing influence to force their members to withdraw from the city's guilds under claims of avoiding similar split loyalties as caused the original problems. Within a century and a half, even the Planewalker's Guild, once the most prominent organization in the city if not the entire Upper Planes, had dropped to almost nothing and disbanded from Sigil. By this point, the factions were well-situated and had claimed the city's day-to-day duties for themselves.
Some 300 years ago, the next major shake-up to the factions occurred following an Anarchist plot against the Mercykillers, culminating in the assassination of the Mercykillers' factol. This even quickly spread into a war that pulled in nearly every faction in the city, ending in the destruction of three altogether, the largest blow to the factions since the Great Upheaval. This event left a power vacuum that was quickly filled by the arrival of the Harmonium, and the reconstitution of the Ochlocrats into the Xaositects, and the return of the Athar.
Geography
Natural Resources
By far the most famous property of Sigil is its imperviousness to any sort of magical entrance or exit. No forms of teleportation, summoning, or planar transit spells will allow a person to enter Sigil from without or exit it from within, even that of the gods. The only way to enter the city at all is to do so through a portal, which can form within any bounded space in the city. Teleportation and summoning within the city, however, still functions fine; one can summon a creature from elsewhere within the city, or can teleport from one location in the city or another.
Portals within Sigil can link to any location, even within the Ethereal or Inner Planes. Occasionally such portals can even manifest from one location in Sigil to another, though cross-Sigil portals are very rare. Portals may be either fixed — always linking to the same two points — or shifting — one or both endpoints changes over time. Some shifting portals follow a regular pattern between two or more locations, but others change unpredictably. In addition, some portals are freely usable, while others require some sort of "key". This key can take any form; an object, an action, even a thought.
Learning the secret (if any) behind the portals of Sigil is one of the major pursuits of many Guvners, and that faction holds the largest known collection of portal-related data, with record books going back centuries on known portals in the Cage. Though they have most Sigilian portals recorded, there are still only a few general facts discovered to be true of all portals.
1. Only the Lady can open a portal, or permanently close one. A portal can be temporarily closed by certain spells, or by the destruction of its bounded space, but such portals reopen upon the removal of the spell or the reconstruction of the bounded space. The Lady does seem to open portals for the sake of the citizens, as marked by the numerous organizations and businesses that carry multiple useful portals within their walls.
2. Shifting portals with cycles can have periods ranging from seconds to decades. Some portals thought by most to be fixed have in fact been recorded as merely having extremely long cycles. Others thought to be randomly shifting have been found to in fact simply have extremely complicated cycles, though others have been fairly well established as being truly random.
3. Portals cannot be used by any beings with any amount of divinity. Those merely invested with divine power, such as powerful priests or proxies, can use portals without problem, but gods and goddesses of any strength cannot. It is thought that this is a direct application of the Lady's control over Sigil, but such beliefs are still unconfirmed.
Maps
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Sigil, City of Doors
The largest planar metropolis in the Planes, and one of the most important cities in all of the multiverse, is located in an impossible location: at the top of the Infinite Spire in the center of the Outlands.
Type
Metropolis
Population
650,000
Included Locations
Owner/Ruler
Additional Rulers/Owners
Owning Organization
Characters in Location
Related Reports (Primary)
Related Materials
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