Communes, Traveler Guilds, the Rise of City-States, the Inquisition

"Punishment does not take place primarily for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good, in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit."—Directorium Inquisitorum (1578)

A Historical Lie

On November 22, 1963, in a place called Dallas, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald tried to assassinate the president of the United States, a man known as JFK. Oswald missed his target, killing instead JFK's beautiful wife, a former debutante named Jackie. JFK went on to win reelection by a landslide, becoming the most popular president in U.S. history, and in the summer of 1965 he inadvertently caused a thermonuclear war that wiped out three-quarters of all life on the planet. Megadeath was no longer just some far-fetched idea in a RAND Corporation position paper.

On the day the fail-deadly Perimetr system rained Soviet bombs down on North America, the number-one song on the radio was "Help!" by the Beatles. The first image of Mars from the Mariner probe graced the cover of Time magazine. Bonanza was the most popular show on TV.

In the historical annals of the Darkmanse, there never was a JFK, or a band called the Beatles, or a place called Dallas, or even a continent of North America. There is only one historical truth—the redeeming truth of the Darkmanse. Any terrestrial who believes otherwise is complicit in a historical lie, and is therefore a heretic.

Roadside Shrines

As it is written: In the beginning, God created Megadeath. For thousands of years after that Supreme Mystery and Its Cleansing Grace, the populations of the continent remained largely nomadic, wanderers of the waste land, cast out into the wilderness so that their faith might be tested and they might find their way back to God.

The penitential aspect of this stage in the historical development of the Darkmanse civilization is memorialized to this day by the Pilgrim Road, a marvel of engineering that spans the continent nearly to the Western Sea. This is the "straight road" leading back to the Noble Sanctuary, and it is a religious obligation for the deceased to travel at least a mile of its cobbled way on their final journey out of this world of sorrows.

Each year during the Lenten or "long days" of springtime, it is customary for the faithful to walk portions of the road as an act of religious devotion and a reminder of their mortality, for it is the same route that they will someday follow in their burial clothes. It is said that such acts, if performed with a glad heart, earn a person special favors in heaven. Beliefs like these, however, have come under scrutiny now that the Greening has come and the heresy of the multiverse—to say little of the trafficking in forbidden history—has infected the minds of the people, causing some to stray, so to speak, from the holy road back to godhead.

Traditionally, every terrestrial should be interred in the Darkmanse upon their death, but now even this, the most important sacrament in a person's life, is being questioned. The city-states beyond the mountains on the Western Sea—called Ultramontanists by the Synarch's tribunals—were the first to forego the costly journey east and instead conduct sky burials, a funerary practice suitable to the mountains, in which the mortal remains are placed on slabs on the high mountain slopes to be consumed by scavenger birds and the elements. To the theologians of the Darkmanse, this wayward practice is what is known as the Ultramontanist Heresy, and it has spread to other city-states.

The wealthy are interred in the Darkmanse just like the poor, but while the poor are laid to rest in humble niches in the walls, wealthy families can afford more lavish mausoleums and family shrines inside the catacombs. The most prominent families also memorialize themselves by having grand shrines built in their names along the Pilgrim Road, where travelers may go in to light candles or give alms (the monies are ostensibly for the poor and indigent, but everyone suspects that they end up in the coffers of the priesthood). But as the heresies of the multiverse seem to multiply with each new generation, many of these family temples have fallen into disrepair, their monumental facades overgrown by the wild and strange vegetation of the Greening.

Among the planetouched and their terrestrial sympathizers, this lush and peculiar abundance of flora is sometimes referred to as "feywild growth."

Commune and Guild

The communes developed out the harsh and violent realities of nomadic life on the continent. People began to organize themselves into collectives, swearing allegiances of mutual defense and becoming citizens under an array of different forms of governance. To facilitate trade in this emerging new social order of walled towns, guilds arose comprised of clans that still adhered to the old nomadic ways, becoming what are known as the traveler guilds. The Seven Caravans People are one such guild. They defend the established trade routes on the continent and hold a monopoly on the exchange of goods.

The largest and most powerful of the communes grew into city-states, some governed by noble houses, others observing a civic culture of self-governance. It is worth noting that the Darkmanse island is technically one city-state among many. But it is also the cultic heart of the Darkmanse religion, and for centuries was able to project is power and authority across much of the world.

The actual borders of the Darkmanse city-state extend to the mainland. The mainland territories of the city-state are known as the marchlands. Before the Greening, religious authorities had no need to defend these territories, because the authority of the Holy City was absolute, accepted without question. Today, a militant religious order has been formed that has taken for themselves the name of the Black Watch, and which is garrisoned in an old citadel some twelve miles to the northwest of the charnel grounds.

The Black Watch draws some of its fighters from the terrestrial population, but most of its members are magic users and magical races from the multiverse who, impelled by various motives, have pledged fealty to the Synarch. The Black Watch name originates from an ancient epithet in a dialect of the drow: Luchd-amhairc dorcha, "dark watchers."

The Watchers guard the approach from the Pilgrim Road and patrol the marchlands east of the island. Soldiers of the order also travel the continent as defenders of the faith.

It has been remarked that the Darkmanse has deemed magic to be an affront to the maker and a violation of his divine laws, yet the Synarch uses magic to fight the enemies of religion. As one can imagine, his theologians have been working overtime to write encyclicals that explain away this rather glaring theological contradiction. From the smokescreen of arcane ecclesiastical legalese, a deceptively simple argument has emerged: the Synarch in his supreme authority as pontifex determines what is true and what is not, and he has empowered his tribunals to enforce his truth, even if it means allying with magic for the greater good of the people and their religion.

Grand Inquisitor

Now that the Greening has come, the interpretation of history propagated by the scholars of the Darkmanse is fraying at its seams. The very existence of a tiefling or a magic-wielding cleric is hard to explain away with theological sophistries.

Some city-states, like the Ultramontanists on the Western Sea, embrace the Greening and the astonishing truth of the multiverse, a truth they say is undeniable. Others cleave fanatically to the traditional faith of the Darkmanse, which has issued a host of edicts effectively declaring the planetouched to be freakish aberrations of the divine will that must be eradicated from the world at all costs.

In the view of the Darkmanse and the so-called Faithful Cities, any terrestrial who sympathizes with or harbors the planetouched is an outlaw and heretic. Such people risk punishment or death at the hands of the Black Watch and the inquisitors of the roaming tribunals that the Synarch has dispatched throughout the land.

The Inquisition has begun. There is fighting among the city-states. Great pyres burn in the public squares of the Faithful Cities, their flames fed with the writhing bodies of planetouched and their terrestrial sympathizers. But there are those city-states and communes where a magical creature or freethinking terrestrial may find sanctuary.

As for the roads, they are jealously guarded by the traveler guilds, who are loyal only to themselves. The guilds have been known to play one city off another, but safe passage with a clan may be had at a price.