A Loamy Winding Road
The road winding through the forested bog is quiet, no blood reflecting off its old pavement stones today. Perhaps this is due to fog, perhaps not. Attacks are unheard of on this road, though wagons and carts break down enough, due in equal parts to large cracks in the well-worn road and the bog's generous mire. At all hours of the day wolves can be heard howling and barking though they never stray and are never seen within a bowshot of the road. They know better.
Eventually, smoke will be smelled drifting down the valley, if the wind is right and soon enough seen, dozens of smokestacks above a squat sprawling tumor. The mass seems to cling to the banks of a slow-moving river, more a bog attempting to escape the valley than river, thick with smelling mud and small fish. In the summer it vomits forth midges and mosquitos which are unbearable and bite often and, in the winter, so too does the air.
The malignant city on the banks is long but neither deep nor tall. The soft loam makes for poor basements and foundations, though thieves and honest men alike try, buildings sunk and built atop again, old bricks cannibalized faster than the muck can steal them. The sewer system, simple, is more akin to geologic strata, layers upon sinking layer.
Here and there canals crisscross through the roads, more like the veins in an insect's wings than the imagined blueprints of any surveyor. Holy symbols, in the form of bells, books and singing bowls, hang from their bridges in great trellises, some so far down as to disappear into the water, allowing Spanish moss and duckweed to meet. Gutters, pipes and spouts of all sizes and ages drain into them from all directions. There is no separation between bog and city, as by slopes and degrees, the city slides into the wilderness, geography blurring.
The people here, called Ventoos, in the city called Ventus, are tan and leathery of skin and move quickly about their business, skittering and then stopping suddenly tense, like tiger beetles. So too like beetles are their bodies, short and barrel chested, though their legs are lean, barring on sticklike and their veins, very obvious even in the very healthy. Nine in ten in Ventus have varicose veins. The average height is six inches short than the next nearest city over the old, shorn down mountains. These are defense mechanisms.
City of One Thousand Priests
Typical folk dress in modest, muted colors and garb with many layers, even in summer, which can be quickly thrown off if need be. Only women are permitted to wear red. In sharp contrast, are the priests who are often brightly colored, extravagantly so, with veils over their faces and bells on their wrists and ankles. Priests live here like flowers live in florist shops; ubiquitous, brightly colored and transient. Priests are always welcomed in Ventus.
Strange customs abound here, but so do they abound everywhere. Newcomers and strangers are greeted with worthless coins and baubles, bags of sand or grain and watched ponderously while they gifts are examined. Gift giving, especially of religious tokens, is the norm and a steady economy has been built around the production and aggressive sale of crosses, wooden saints, miniature carvings of temples and impressive woodcuts of religious paintings. These hawkers have even earned a name, which translates more or less to noisy priests. The people pay no mind, as they are aggressively religious themselves, yet hardly assertive in their stances on the divine. Conversion is common, pantheons limber and syncretization second nature. While conservatives exist, especially amongst those of the oldest denominations, Ventoos seem more concerned that you are religious in any capacity, irrespective of what religion you follow. Many a visitor wrongly assumes this is due to tolerance.
Churches adorn every street corner in the Beating City, delis and cobblers and others serving dual functions as shrines, a god nestled in every doorway. The tallest buildings are always either cathedrals or crematoriums. Traditional burial is contentious; the right to return to the earth is central to many Ventus belief structures. It is outlawed by the Ventus Guard. Many a bloody riot has erupted over the right of a well-respected elder or precious child's secret burial in the loamy forests. As such, the choices are choke the river with corpses, or the air with the smoke of the dead.
City of One Thousand Coups
The people of Ventus also are known to walk barefoot during the day and wear thick slippers, heavy wool socks or even ordinary boots to bed at night. The poorest are known to simply wear boots at all times and the richest own several pairs of thick woolen socks, often adorned with bells. Celebrations in Ventus are almost never private but held in special public places, typically under large gazebos or temple spaces dedicated to such events. Close friends may not even know where the other lives.
Stranger still is the physiology of Ventoos. Diseases of the blood, almost exclusively inherited, are incredibly common. One in three with a lineage back further than three generations, or about one in ten otherwise have sickle cell anemia, the curving of red blood cells. Also common are variants of anemia, especially iron- and B12-anemias. Thrombocytosis, an excessive number of platelets in the blood, is also common, blood quick to clot. Interestingly, cancers of the blood (lymphoma, leukemia etc.) are no more common than anywhere else in the world. Families often track these diseases, which they attribute to the blessings of various saints, and count as familial things. The sight of an old man stopping to massage his arms or legs is a common sight in Ventus.
<Tangent. Here the four humors is the correct paradigm of human health. When you are born and under what stars and in what season affect the balance of blood, phlegm and black and yellow bile in your body and in turn affect your personality.>
Ventoos are stereotyped to being quick about their business to point of rudeness, early to bed and late to rise, and very slow to friendship. These are not necessarily untrue, but foreigners are often surprised that someone from Ventus has considered them a friend for sometime without them knowing. They are busy, private people, nearly always in motion. Only at noon, during the hottest part of the day, due they seem to relax.
Perhaps the only ones unwelcome in Ventus make up its oldest faction, the Ventus Guard. Originally tasked with protecting the city's king, they are mistrusted, often hated, blamed for most of the city's problems and accused of taking bribes and seizing power of those they swear to protect. Many of these accusations are not untrue: One of the cities nicknames is "The City of One-Thousand Coups". The city's current king is far from the first to have been member of the notorious guard and far from the first to have public revolts put down with lethal force.
The pulse of the city is stop and start. Lethargic yet strained. It beats, like a living thing.
All of this is of course, due to the vampire epidemic.
A Group of Vampire is Called a Plague
The city of Ventus is infested with them, dozens of varieties from giant intelligent vampire bats to twisted spinal fluid drinking cuttlefish-men. Most every color and stripe of vampire can be found in Ventus, crawling through its sewers, jumping from roof to roof and flying above its citizens heads at night. Its boggy woods are a den of bloodsuckers fighting each other for territory, prey and blood. Intelligent vampires plot within (and without) the city scheming for power and food. This is all as intended.
Ventus has always had a relationship with blood. It does a great deal of butchering more so than its neighbors. Its bog and loam make growing crops nearly impossible aside from its rice. However, its goats, ducks and other sturdy livestock do wonderfully, and great beasts dredged up from its river can take days to be drained of blood. Each district processes its own animals, so almost nowhere in the city does blood does not flow into its water. This is one reason why vampires may be drawn to it. They're densest in the forests and this is due to the city's namesake.
Ventricalus was a conqueror. His Acerulean armies carved deeper into the heart of new Vakehana faster and with more bloodshed than any of the legions of the Empire. And when he conquered the city of Ventus after a month long siege, he renamed it in his own honor. He stopped in the city because he found Pulmus. The local god of the valley, he was a feared one, ruthless but necessary one, his sacrifices thrown into the forest and prayers were for him and his children to stay away. He was a hungry god, a stalking one, one of awful virility and fertility and one after Ventricalus' own heart. He became obsessed with Pulmus and worshipped him with a frightening intensity. Pulmus rewarded his human sacrifices of defeated foes. He brought an empire's worth of bloodshed to a god who had spent their limited divinity feasting on only sickly, lamed goats. And like an invasive species, his children bred out of control.
Eventually to protect his city, the conqueror made a deal with the children of Pulmus. Protect it from attack and have your pick of the litter. Each year Ventricalus sends four people to the town square where they were anointed, ritually scarred and their throats slit.
Pulmus' requirements were simple, one of each: one lively, one innocent, one sickly and one willing.
The Ventus Guard was formed after the second revolt over the pact.
And yet, as they do, the city moved on. The pact kept roads safe, and cattle spared. Sieges and war never touched the city again and vampires stayed away, for a time. Though Ventricalus would be killed in a final bloody revolt, his pact lives on. The Pact is the Pact, enforced ruthlessly within and without the city. And it is the Ventus Guard who now patrol the streets at night, rounding up the four victims each year and putting down any vampires who enter the city. It is a thankless job, one they're very good at.
~~~
A Vampyre
#1 Feral Man-Bat
HD 2/ AC Leather/ Damage 1d6
Curse a bat with the blood of human, whose body rejected the vampire's kiss. Or curse a human with the blood of a bat summoned by a vampire. The end result is the same, something horrid lacking the grace of the bat and the humanity of a man. It skitters around on all fours though it longs to stand, while it cranes its head bite a heel hanging from a bed. Its creator inevitably rebukes it and it searches to fill the void with a brood of its own, more maligned than it. The touch of its progenitor is more than it can handle.
WANTS: To sneak into your home and lick the blood from your feet, to breed
NEEDS: To return food to its brood, to remember humanity it never had
AVOIDS: Fire (its skin like pitch), those that created it
DESTROYED: By the touch of the holy symbol of Pulmus
This will be the setting for my 101 Vampyres posting I'll be doing. I intend eventually to run it as a city crawl campaign. I want to run it as a vampire of the week game with the players as members of the Ventus Guard, the elite vampire killing faction of the city. Each session they'll have to investigate crime scenes, do legwork and battle vampires and bureaucrats alike to determine what kind of vamp did the murder. One of my friends more cleverly referred to it as Vampire CSI. I figured a campaign solely within a city should have enough personality to enjoy being in for at least a dozen sessions.
