Pathfinder 1E [Let's Read] Nidal, Land of Shadows

[Tristissima]

Dauphenal Vineyard was founded in the Northern Plains during Shadowbreak by a disgraced scion of a Chelish noble house. We get another fun, immersive detail: Dauphenal grows a varietal of grape known as alvarno, which is probably not fantastical but a reference to alvarinho (a.k.a., albariño). On Earth, alvarinho is mostly grown in Portugal and Galicia, Spain. On Golarion, we are told, it was at the time popular in Cheliax but largely unknown in Nidal.

For the most part, Avistani nations are written in a nice balance when it comes to comparing them to European countries. None can be described well as “fantasy Germany” or “pseudo-Norway” or “faux Andorra”. And yet, many resonate strongly enough with European countries to give players an easy path to figuring out their cultures. Varisia is vaguely Greece if it was populated by the Rom. Taldor is kinda Byzantine. Brevoy is kinda Russian. Nirmathas calls up images of Robin Hood. There two Frances: Galt in an unending revolution and Nidal itself I have often described as France by way of Conan and Hellraiser.

Cheliax, arguably, is in the sweetest spot in this balancing act. It obviously draws on southern Europe,but people have a hard time identifying if it’s Spanish or Italian. This detail of the wine grape tells me that viticulturally Cheliax resembles Spain more than it does Italy. And it’s specific enough that it doesn’t negate the bits of Chelish culture that feel Italian while still flashing out the image of Chelish culture in my head. Well done, Lianne!

Anyway, Dauphenal was an immediate success, showcasing a light but surprisingly nuanced white wine made from the alvarino grapes. Crisp and herbal, Dauphenal wine looks a bit like liquid moonstone, shining gray in the glass, and has notes of pear and lemongrass. This kind of detail is lovely, but I find myself sad that I don’t know the flavor profile of any other Avistani wine. It’s the kind of detail that shines most when it can be compared to other similar details. I want to know how Dauphenal gray (as I call it in my head) matches to, say, a Brevish icewine. This wine maintained the founders family for generations...until they decided to back someone other than House Thrune in the Chelish Civil War. In the aftermath, the Umbral Court took control of the vineyard, causing the quality of the wine to worsen.

The Court’s solution was to bring a Chelish-trained vigneron to operate it. Ylise of the Pale Sun, a NE female druid 3/enchanter 2, graduated from the famous Nidalese universityin Elith Lorin and has managed to restore the vineyard to its former prestige.

Edammera of the Dusk Hall performed his research in a steel-doored tower that has been abandoned for centuries. I remember noting that the timeline didn’t explain why Mesandroth Fiendlorn’s exploits resulted in a tower called Edammera’s Folly. Well, we learn now ~ Edammera was on Mesandroth’s assistants.

The afore-mentioned Elith Lorin is a beautiful 1500-person town on the Usk River, made even more beautiful by Meletir of Nisroch’s statue “The Fountain of Shelyn’s Lament.” I do wish I know what it depicted exactly; I have an idea but only a vague one. After the Everwar, Chelish investors also helped make the city uncommonly gorgeous as they built limestone buildings ringing that marketplace, as well as the ornate Bridge of Vainglory over the river.

Almost all Nidalese trade passes through Elith Lorin ~ Atterani ranchers drive livestock there, the southern plains bring their produce there, and both then flow out west to Nisroch or east to Pangolais. Its port is very busy. Occupying Chelish dignitaries’s mansions have been reborn as offices for state officials and the clerks and legates in their employ. Of course, the west is unruly and all that trade makes Elith Lorin the headquarters for Nisrochite spies and Pangolaise inquisitors, who also make their offices in these buildings. The Eye of Pangolais, a former church dedicated to Aroden, overlooks the town from a northern hill, wreathed rumors of this kind of thing.

What the town is known for across Nidal, however is the School of the Pale Sun on the other side of town. It’s not Pangolais’s Dusk Hall, but it is still a prestigious school for Nidalese diplomats and agents abroad, particularly shadowcallers, choosing its students by means of divination spells. Pangolais and Ridwan provide most of those students. It relies on Chelish faculty to counteract the effects of Nidal’s isolation. Nidalese instructors like Headmistress Virexia of Pangolais (LE human bard (archivist) 7) mostly just make sure there are no traitors among the students while they teach the sneaky and treacherous ways to work for their country.

Helthir of the Midnight Citadel, a LE male human inquisitor 5 (but of what domain or inquisition???), rules the town. He’s filled with devotion to Zon-Kuthon and blood from an old Pangolais family. Most of what he does is to contain Nisroch’s chaos by means of informers and an utter lack of respect for privacy. Only the fetchling ghetto is safe from his reach, but they are just as suspicious as Helthir.

 

[Tristissima]

The Fields of Pain’s Forgetting grow a wide variety of narcotic and hallucinogenic plants, most of which commit the Nidalese sin of dulling or negating pain. All are addictive. Mushrooms are mentioned (of the luminous sort) and poppies (specifically white ones), too, but the most notable among them is flayleaf, a muscle relaxant and analgesic that increases suggestibility and can be made into a very hallucinogenic drink called Riddleport tea. As that suggests, flayleaf is mostly associated with Varisia.

The Umbral Court, who operates the fields by means of the grumpy and jaded Mistress Cultivator Preali Dhat (N fetchling alchemist 4/druid 2 whose anger stems from not being in the Court), loves to mix these drugs with poisonous substances to help them find weakling infidels who try to avoid Zon-Kuthon’s teachings. I imagine these poisons cause particularly spectacular deaths and Umbral agents across the realm have been trained to listen for sudden outbreaks of such deaths, allowing them to locate the users and dealers of these drugs.

I kinda like that Nidal has a War on Painkillers like this. It’s a neat little extrapolation from their premise. I also like Preali Dhat ~ her alignment is a welcome break from the waves of evil and could provide for quite interesting interactions with PCs, and her class combination is both unusual and appropriate.

Of course, there are sometimes uses for removing the touch of the Midnight Lord, and so the Fields’ primary beneficiaries are churches, cathedrals, and the wonderfully termed “independent houses of torture.” Pragmatism wins out every time.

Leading through the Minspin Mountains to Molthune, Ghorvaul’s Crossing is home to an ancient bit of tribal revenge. Enemies of the main Nidalese tribes, the Ehrotai tribe refused to seek refuge with Zon-Kuthon after Earthfall. Their spiritworkers committed ritual suicide, hoping to preserve the mory of their people by becoming ghosts.

Instead, they rose as a multi-limbed monstrosity known as a charnel colossus (CR 19), that did retain their memories and traditions. So that’s nice, at least.

Shadowcallers trade sacrifices for questions. The sacrifices have their bodies and minds incorporated into the Speakers of the Ehrotai, as the colossus is named. Usually, it’s one person per question, but if the Speakers can learn a lot from the person, they might allow more. Giving yourself over to the Speakers is well-known amongst the jaded members of the Kuthite faith as a way to both end their ennui and to have, at least, a novel kind of suffering accompany your death.

The Speakers of the Ehrotai are a wonderful way to keep the Kellid history of Nidal present. It fits right in with the themes and ways of the culture while still allowing for a relationship with PCs other than “kill it!” and provides a nice element for any deep-immersion role-player to include in their character’s backstory. How did their ancestors relate to the Ehrotai 10,000 years ago? This could also provide backstories for ancient Nidalese magic items untouched by the Midnight Lord, which might also prompt involvement with the Speakers, who won’t say anything (such as a command word) without a sacrifice. What are your good-aligned Desnan and Milanite PCs gonna do in that case? How deep is their dedication to revolution? Or just think of what it might mean for the Molthuni, if they ever manage to get it together to invade Nidal? An invasion of Nidal seems like the one story I might tell involving Molthune, which is largely pretty bland in my limited reading of that realm.

Caustic, poisonous crimson smoke that will slay any living creature in minutes and blackened stone walls herald the rich deposits of gems in the Godsblood Crevasse, which cuts through the hissing wastes southeast of Ridwan known as the Weeping Fields. Wow, that’s a region that really calls forth the purple prose and heavy metal imagery, isn’t it? Specifically, the crevasse holds pigeon’s-blood rubies, and its stores (mined by alchemically-petrified skeletons) have seemed inexhaustible for centuries. Surely, it’s a gift from the Midnight Lord! The rubies are the only colored gemstones considered in good taste by Nidalese fashonistas.

Grenda of Elith Lorin, a LE female graveknight fighter 9 and member of the Umbral Court, oversees the bony miners. I bet Preali Dhat hates her for being on the Court. She gets her skeletons, officially speaking, from Kuthites who have sold their labor after death. However, the smoke wears away at them, even through their alchemical processing, and so her overseers are less than strict about their methods of replacing them.

A curiously cold basin of water surrounded by frost blighted plants sits near the outlet of the Usk Lake to the Usk River. Despite the local’s dismissal of fisherfolk stories about seeing ice deep below the surface, this basin hosts a qallupilluk by the name of Kialuk. The qallupillk is based on an Inuit creature, the qalupalik. She’d fought with her sisters over a stolen child and was exiled, travelling south (presumably from the Crown of the World or damn near) til she came here. Several crates of liquid ice stolen from an unlikely Kuthite caravan made her hovel at least livable and intimidated the merrows, scrags, and other monsters of the lake. She is now a petty queen living in fear of running out of the very limited resource that allows her to live and maintain her power. This fear drives her to command her servants to travel Nidalese rivers in search of a replacement, preferably a permanent one.

Kialuk is nice ~ she connects Nidal (somewhat randomly) to the outer world and feels pleasingly like the kind of kids’ TV villainess common to the many cartoons and shows I watched as a child. I simply cannot help but imagine Rita Repulsa’s voice bubbling out from Kialuk’s mouth. Aristotelian ideas of dramatic conversion want me to tie her into Alkaiva of the Uskwood’s winter wolf, but my interest in immersion and mythopoeia would want to resist that as being unrealistic.

 

[Tristissima]

Tiny content warning: there’s a bit of gruesomeness in the very last sentence that might be difficult. Please take care of yourselves.




There’s a fortress in the southern Mindspins that seems made of shadows and probably houses velstracs performing strange rituals. It’s called the Hall to Broken Dream and will be detailed later in the book.

Chelish diplomat Perevill Hesperix made his home in a rather Gothic manor between Ridwan and the Umbral Basin. Much like the Chelish family that founded Dauphenal Vineyard, Perevill’s family lost all claim on the manor when they lost their lives for backing a House other than Thrune in the Chelish Civil War. Its new owners, the Umbral Court, ignored it until an agent of theirs named Celefin of Pangolais, a LE female half-elf wizard 15, bought it 30 years ago. Her vocal support of the Belevais Doctrine has convinced the undead contingent on the Umbral Court to block her ascension. Once Celefin realized this, she withdrew and retired here in disgust.

Celefin has become a scholar of anti-undead warfare, even publishing on the subject under a false name and corresponding with foreign worshippers of Pharasma and even Sarenrae. Her careful adherence to Nidalese law, shows of (probably honest) loyalty, and powerbase have protected her so far. But there are definitely people on the Court itching to punish her.

The House of Lies is one of my favoritestest locations in Nidal. In the northwestern Uskwood overlooking the Usk River, it hosts a quintennial competition of untruths in which the greatest liars, braggarts, and con artists compete. It’s a carryover from the cultural openness of the Shadowbreak and will be detailed later.

Icebow Bridge is the home of the Library Without Light, where the texts brought by Azlanti and Thassilonian refugees fleeing Earthfall 10,000 years ago brought into Nidal. To this day, they are not organized but randomly stores on the Library Without Light’s shelves. Written in a hundred languages (most long-dead), the library contains an almost unimaginable amount of all manner of knowledge from a world that, simply put, no longer exists ~ the rituals, genealogies, naturalists’ notes, and even the maps are unrecognizable today. Nonetheless, people come from all over Avistan (and probably Garund, Casmaron, and even Tian Xia, I would imagine) to study these texts. Anyone can petition Master Librarian Hale Craggox, a NE human investigator 4/wizard 2 to study here among his many acolytes and apprentices. Of course, the folk of the Library are filled out with at least one member of the Umbral Court and three or four of their agents. It’s considered a very prestigious assignment.

As I’ve said before, I simply adore the idea that Nidal hosts more ancient knowledge than any other nation in Avistan, as it gives PCs a reason to go there while disincentivizing a righteous murder spree against the evil pain-lovers. Pitting taste and possibly alignment against advancement of goals is a classic conflict. It’s nice to see the investigator get some play here, too. It’s one of my (too many >.< ) favorite classes in Pathfinder 1st edition and is art of a larger trend in Paizo’s game design that I really enjoy. It’s something that attracted me to Exalted, as well (squeezed in between squeeing at the glorious intersection of shounen anime and classical epics) They’ve often done a simply brilliant job of writing classes, archetypes, monsters/race, and the like that reference unexpected inspirations ~ the investigator being essentially Sherlock Holmes, which is one of the least D&D things I can think of, but also stuff like the magical child archetype of the vigilante ~ and then find ways to integrate it into the setting and expand their conceptual space. I’ve used the investigator, for example, to represent a 17th/18th-century style naturalist before. It also lets you bash together disparate ideas in a way that’s very D&D and yet feels organic and appropriate to the setting. One of these days I’ll play that caecilia magical girl vigilante character, which is to say: what if Ursula from The Little Mermaid became Sailor Moon in D&D? Poor unfortunate souls, indeed…

The scarred monks of Nidal train at the millennia-old Irogath Monastery, literally carved into the side of the Mindspin Mountains. A knotted maze of monastically bare chambers whose doors can be in any of the six directions (yes, including up and down) twists among itself with only stone benches unadorned with cushions for reading and others for sleeping. Unexpectedly and delightfully, its noted that the monks eat delicious food, but that the torture comes in the infinitesimal nature of their portions. I love that detail, and it fits in with a lot of my understanding as an aspiring polytheist nun of how monastic devotions work, at least outside of a Catholic context. It’s not about rejecting pleasure or the world, but maximizing one’s ability to delight in it. Of course, for Kuthites enjoying the pain and discomfort is more of the focus than the old canard, “A mundane person can drink as many kegs of ale as they like and stay stone sober, but a magician can get drunk off the mere sight of a glass of water.” But I think there’s not much difference between the two, and that’s a large part of why I love Nidal. For extra sadism, snowmelt flows through some of the rooms, channeled into beautiful kinetic sculptures. Oddly, these sculptures also make heavy use of the light effects of the water (presumably, glints and rainbows).

Merinda the Striped (such a good name), a LE human monk (scarred monk) 8, is the Mistress of the monaster, and she is said to be able to see one’s devotion to the Midnight Lord or any of the heresies against him with steady eye contact. Rumors ascribe any number of tortures and horrors to the inner chambers, including the lovely image of previous monastic hopefuls, maimed yet living, serving the ordeal by taking out their agony and envy on newer contenders. None know successful aspirants receive for enduring these tortures, save for a brand of a spiked chain on their back and access to the scarred monk archetype from Horror Realms. Said archetype replaces high jump, wholeness of body, abundant step, and empty body with the monk’s choice of several “mortifications”. My favorite are doll face, in which the monk removes their face and from then on can steal porcelain doll versions of corpse’s faces for intimidation and can shift the doll to look like people’s loved ones, and tongueless master, which allows monks who wear their own tongues on a necklace to steal people’s voices with a punch in order to be able to speak with that person’s voice (they can’t speak usually).

 

[dave2008]

Impressive work and thanks for posting. I have no idea what/where Nidal is, but I am sure I could figure it out from reading your posts!

 

[Tristissima]

Impressive work and thanks for posting. I have no idea what/where Nidal is, but I am sure I could figure it out from reading your posts!

Nidal is a country on the continent of Avistan on the planet of Golarion, which is the setting of Paizo's Pathfinder game. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about it!

But first! The next, very belated installment!

Kayalhi, as you might be able to tell from the name, is a town full of fetchlings who view visiting humans with wariness. It’s peaceful and as prosperous as someplace described as “hardscrabble” can be. Despite their lack of piety, and moreover their disinterest in making a show of what devotion they do have, the Umbral Court tends to leave the 175 residents of the village alone. You can send your thanks and support to Chancellor Zelvith, a LN female fetchling mesmerist 4 (yay! Occult classes!) who does make a show of things and generally don the gladhanding performance work necessary to appease the Court. She also runs a network of anonymous foreign spies, trading what they have learned for Kayalhi’s unmolested existence. Her age is catching up to her, though, so she has a need for a successor to this work.

In a lovely little detail, we are told of Kayalhi’s fame and how that fame has inspired the creation of inconspicuous taverns and gathering places called “the local kayalhi” where fetchling culture and cuisine allows them to relax, gossip, support each other both financially and socially, and hold special events like weddings, new-baby celebrations, parties of all kinds, and memorial services. It’s an early version of a community center, and it sounds weirdly cozy for Nidal and for its gray-skinned oppressed minority. Next time I’m running a game in Nidal, I will have to ensure that there is, at minimum, one scene set in the local kayalhi!

A Desnan cult used an occult ritual known as veil structure to hide away a secret lodge in the Uskwood where they stored many treasures and a library of Kuthite vulnerabilities. They were tracked down and destroyed or forced to go into hiding. With no initiates who could see it, the lodge was lost. The druids set up some monstrous defenses where they thought it might be, mostly a nest of deathwebs (CR 6 undead spiders from the third Bestiary) and struck it from their record books. Of course, now even the druids have forgotten it ever existed, leaving only a few scattered writings and a single memory in the Cathedral of Embodied Wisdom to be found by revolutionary PCs, which is a rather nice hook for a very interesting Leverage-or-Shadowrun-style heist.

A slightly domed 25-foot-diameter crystal window overlooks Nisroch Bay from the cliffs above it, the result of a Chelish magical defense during the Everwar against a random portal to the Shadow Plane. It’s called the Moonless Mirror and it attracted the attention of Yisaothai the Oil-Tongued, a dark naga with the shadow lord template (CR 10, in total, with appreciation from me for combining elements of two different books). I seriously love the name Yisaothai, bringing together a very Kellid Mongolian sound with some serious and not-boring serpentine sibilants (I’m looking at you, Faerun). Yisaothai now rules a fiefdom on the Shadow side of the portal and continuously works to convince mortals to break the mirror blocking the portal. A young fisherman by the name of Wyldon, a lowly N human expert 1, is his most promising possibility, as he is susceptible to promises of wealth and the affections of the :local beauty” he has a crush on. Of course, erosion is wearing the cliff that holds the mirror away, so Wyldon better get on it if he wants help from the other side with his problems.

A nice small story with pretty large consequences, that is. Far larger consequences than just Yisaothai’s Challenge Rating would indicate; recall, please, that they rule an entire fiefdom. I approve. We need more such things, to force murderhobo and heroic PCs alike to recognize the everyday struggles of the common people.

Also near Nisroch, though hidden by very specifically planted black-leaved trees is a fortified quay called Nightbinder’s Wharf, which sees shadowcallers and other Nidalese agents (including druids with shadowy or powerful companions on paid commissions by the Umbral Court, the rich, or even foreign dignitaries, mostly Chelish) leave for foreign service. Tight secrecy is kept by the Court with the disappearance of both spies and the occasional random wanderer. I assume this is another call out to Liane’s two Nidalese novels.

Speaking of “gloomy, salt-stained” Nisroch (why not “salty, gloom-stained”? More poets need to write these things Though its other name, the Maw of Shadow, is kinda cute if awkwardly worded; it’ll be Shadow’s Maw in my game) is noted as the most joyless and forbidding of cities. Its status as the primary port for foreigners is blamed for this depressing state, though the text notes that this is an intentional effort by the Umbral Court to discourage long-term, meddling visitors. Thus, the city is very quickly established as Nidal’s own domestic noir setting. This is only cemented by mention that the Usk River sharply divides the beautiful villas of the well-to-do from the poor hovels. It’s detailed in Cities of Golarion, so this is all we’re told.

The Ombrefell stretches its branches between the Atteran Ranches and the Uskwood. This is where the Xoskerik shadow giants have made their home alongside forest drakes, malevolent fey, and a few Uskwood druids. Other entries from the gazetteer can be found here: Soth-Silir, the Fields of Pain’s Forgetting which I’ve already discussed, and the Viridian Forge.

Orolo’s Quay has almost forgotten its days as a bustling seaport, coastal Varisia’s settlement having stolen its business, leaving the Chelish fortress here to crumble among the gulls and smugglers. Speaking of, I simply adore the last name of the smuggler leader, Brovos Gulltongue, a CN male Varisian half-orc brawler 6 and pirate who was forced to flee into superficial devotions to Zon-Kuthon as a way to escape the enemies he’d made from Riddleport to Magnimar. Sadly, he has named his gang simply “the Gulls” and will beat you for mocking its drabness. They tend to take food and liquor in and take drugs and oddities out, but occasionally they smuggle people if Brovos thinks it won’t be a risk to his perch in the nigh abandoned city. Fancying himself a hero of the people, he mostly does this for runaway slaves and needy old folk, though pretty ladies can flatter the ill-mannered rogue into helping them. Gifts of good stories or live fish and swigs of Riddleport scorpion rum also work. Googling “scorpion rum” mostly just turns up things about a Buffalo wing restaurant.

A colony of incutilises (incutiles? However you pluralize it, they’re brain-like CR 2 nautiluses with CR 8 lords) has joined the Gulls in the harbor, occasionally kidnapping them or their cargo of people to use as zombies. No one has noticed against the background level of disappearances among the outlaws.

 

[Tristissima]

Ah, Pangolais! The city which hides away even from Nidal’s dimmed sun beneath the black leaves of the Uskwood! Where every sound’s reverberations are swallowed by those leaves til they whisper and that whisper can almost be heard above the hush! Glittering in a thousand grays, interrupted only by streets like captured moons glowing dimmed while the cathedrals watch with their rose-shaped eyes and academies glower miserly over the ancient laments of those whom Earthfall saved.

I imagine that some overwrought Edgar Allen Poe look-alike among the Nidalese here has written of this city like that. It does sound romantically beautiful. Here, explorations into the Dark Tapestry and the Shadow Plane which would be the defining pursuit of any other town pale in comparison to the Cathedral of Exquisite Agony, Zon-Kuthon’s greatest temple. It’s described in Inner Sea Temples, so at least it doesn’t distract from the gothic dream home that is Pangolais.

Elegance rules the day ~ night? ~ no, day ~ right? ~ anyway . . . ~ in Pangolais, where Kuthite bladed harps drift weavingly among the fragrance of moonflowers in the cafes where vampires and caligni chat and chuckle among those races who could handle the sun if they ever saw it.

We’re given a statblock for Pangolais, and it’s pretty much what you would expect, honestly. In a vast improvement over its mother-game, Pathfinder has finely tuned its city statblocks to convey useful information (rules can be found in the GameMastery Guide). For example, the third line down (after the name of the city, its completely unshocking alignment, and its general size category) tells me that bribery attempts, Bluff checks against guards and officials, and Stealth checks outside will all get a +3 bonus, as will (coincidentally) Diplomacy checks to gather information and Knowledge checks when researching in libraries. That’s rather a lower Lore rating (the latter bonus) then I would have guessed, considering Nidal’s unique stores of texts twice as old as Earthly civilization. I’d probably play that as the Nidalese keeping quite a stringent grip on this national treasure of theirs, as well as a myriad very specific specializations among its sages that makes finding the exact thing you’re looking for harder to find than it would seem at first.

Crime is kept relatively low here, giving only a +1 bonus to Sense Motive checks to avoid being bluffed and Sleight of Hand checks to pick pockets. This is a weirdness in Pathfinder’s rules, actually ~ these bonuses seem at odds. Crime +1 means that not much crime happens in Pangolais, enough to be a worry (it’s not negative, after all) but not a big worry. Why does that make pickpocketing easier while also making it harder to bluff people? Surely the first represents people being suspicious while the second represents them letting down their guard?

Checks to make money get a +2 bonus, reflecting the wealth of the large city. Again, lower than I might have expected for such an important place, but it makes sense in a society so driven by patronage. People don’t necessarily go shopping in such cultures, they have their usual providers from whom they always purchase whatever particular good or service that person produces. Personal relationships are very important here, which is something I do which this book stressed more. The strictness of Nidalese law can result in a whopping +6 bonus to Intimidate checks (if you invoke the threat of the law to force friendliness), Diplomacy checks against government officials, or Diplomacy checks made to call on the city guard. On the other hand, Diplomacy checks to alter the attitude of non-governmental officials get a +4 bonus due to the town’s cosmopolitan openness to unusual visitors. Disguise checks, as well.

A list of qualities follow, letting us know that the city is both academic and insular (the latter of which increases Law slightly and decreases Crime, but weirdly has no effect on Society, which reflects the society’s openness to the new and unusual), as well as three new qualities described right here in the stat block. Religiously intolerant is the same as racially intolerant from the GameMastery Guide, only it forces non-Kuthites rather than any particular race to pay half-again for everything and to get harassed in various ways. It seems that its dominance by the cruel and literally dark faith of Zon-Kuthon DOES effect the city’s Society rating negatively, as well as upping its Law rating and greatly increasing its Danger. As the seat of Zon-Kuthon’s worship, its Corruption is increased, as is the maximum spellcasting available here (by a whole two levels, which stacks with the benefit from the academic quality, maxing out the available spellcasting at 9th-level spells).

That Danger rating I mentioned? It’s a whopping 30, which is intended as an addition to percentile CR-ranked encounter tables. Using the samples given in the GameMastery Guide, this means that in many urban environments, nothing easier than a CR 3 will show up randomly.

Pangolais has 18,900 people in it. That’s on the lower side of Rome’s size in 1300, and just about 1100 people smaller than Cahokia was a century earlier (on the bottom range of possible sizes for Cahokia at the time) or Paris was three centuries earlier. Of those, 11,000 are humans (about 58%, almost 3 in 5 people), 3500 are caligni (18.5%, a little more than 1 in 6 people), 2400 are fetchlings/kayal (12.7% or about 1 in 8), and 2000 are members of various other races (a tiny bit more than 1 in 10). This is certainly a very integrated city!

Most of the NPCs described in this statblock will be discussed later, but I’m gonna guess that the Hierarch of the Cathedral, a LE male vampire (of what race originally? Grrr!) cleric of the Midnight Lord 13 named Chartaigne, is described in Inner Sea Temples, because the statblock is his only mention.

Finally, the statblock informs us that it’s fairly easy to find mundane items of a value up to 8000 g, which is rather impressive considering that any given shopkeeper can only afford to pay about 6 times that for anything the party has to sell. Magical items, on the other hand, well . . . n average, you’ll find 10 (anywhere from 4 to 16) minor items, 7 or 8 medium items (3-12), and 5 major items (2-8) for sale here. That’s quite the magic shop! It’s probably 3 or 4, to be honest.

 

[Tristissima]

Pangolais, as stated, is a city of sophisticated, gracious pain, pain savored in all of its details and transmogrifications over time and the beauty it allows and the beauty of it. This is not the place where tortured screams rip the gloom, but instead where the exquisite food of the bistro is accompanied by a chain-dancer hanging from the ceiling from hooks in their skin as their spiked chain rhythmically undulates around them, directed by deft and tiny motions of their hands. Pangolaise jewelry and glasswork is renowned across Avistan for its quality.

Though the city’s beauty might be a quiet monochrome and its sophistication jaded, nonetheless those two qualities mark anyone’s impression of the place. Well, anyone rich, that is. Like any good center of elegance, Pangolais has some serious class differences, which are exacerbated by Zon-Kuthon’s claiming of the Nidalese people. I’ve complained throughout this thread of the cartoonish sordidness of Nidal’s EVULness, but this is a good place and a good use for that over-the-topness, as it is an interweaving of a fantastic evil (the Hellraiser-like religion of Nidal) with one that is all too realistic (the horrors of institutional classism, which is a topic close to my li’l ol’ couch-homeless heart and nearer to my formerly street-homeless sweeties). The grandiosity of the combination makes much more sense than the just “I did it for the evulz” that has shown up earlier.

Pangolais, when seen with poor eyes, is full of predators without even the trap-hiding illusion of refuge. And you are the prey. Servants are essentially slaves, with the loss of their tongue as a common punishment and silver sculptures above the market squares artfully adorned with their silent, agonized bodies. No law claims them but the bare whims of their masters. Who, mind you, worship cruelty.

The Black Triune is rumored to live in Pangolais, but are rarely seen outside of the most major religious ceremonies. High Mistress Feylanthe of the Shadowmoor, a LE half-elf cleric 5/wizard 5/mystic theurge 3 who is obviously a member of the Umbral Court, instead finds herself dealing with most of the city’s governance. She’s a glorious goth girl whose black-and-white hair, grand gray gowns, and raven-feather capes being described as lovely and severe. Her life and personality are strictly compartmentalized, with a dispassionate discipline when it comes to Pangolais’s administration and a libidinous excess that, the book says, has earned her the enmity of the families that grieve her lovers. Her position and great societal power protects her yet.

Limris Kiritane, a LN fetchling/kayal expert 3 runs a shop selling the fashion accessories she constructs from the bits of velstrac skin and bone that the totally-not-Cenobites litter around them as they seek the enlightenment of pain and transcendence of their form. Hooked into flesh with pierced rings, her jewelry adorns a loyal and eager clientele of pious fashionistas, even extending across the border into Cheliax. She even works with a network of mage-merchants to fulfill requests for magical versions of her wares. Limris’s work has gotten popular enough that some of her biggest fans look down at the hoi polloi who pierce their pieces into the outer layers of their clothing instead of directly into their flesh as intended. Reasoning that this amounts to blasphemous disrespect to the velstracs’ gifts and possibly the Midnight Lord himself, many of these fanatics steal pieces they could not otherwise afford from Limris’s less reverent but wealthier patrons.

The orphans and children of Pangolais were once housed and taught religion in a three-story building owned by one Satriel Bezin. Until his apostasy was discovered and he was “broken in the public square.” Oops. Lights have begun to float in the abandoned building’s upper windows, accompanied by the groaning of chains and weak cries, presumably of the orphans and beggars who’ve been disappearing in the neighborhood. A lampadarius velstrac (the name comes from the slave who carried lamps before ancient Roman consuls, which became a role in the Christian church) who calls himself Mordain lives here now.

Mordain struggles with the qlippoth-blighted appendage he recently grafted to his body, the qlippoth being nigh-Lovecraftian horrors who resent demons for gentrifying their natural home of the Abyss. The ability of this appendage to corrupt the velstrac is literally called “sin consumption.” He knows that he is losing his mind, both in terms of sanity and in terms of brainpower, but he doesn’t know why. Only the desperate and continual grafting he performs allows him to remain himself in the face of this blight. His victims are beginning to move up the socioeconomic ladder, prompting community leaders to ask themselves if the Umbral Court will consider the velstrac or them to be the problem, should they seek help.

Many millennia ago, when Nidal’s allegiance to pain was new, the velstrac gifted unto the new realm memory chains. These artifacts recorded the experience of being tortured so that it could be enjoyed by others. The Nidalese quickly built the wonderfully-named Cathedral of Embodied Wisdom to hold them, achieving its obsidian-to-ivory ombré façade by making its walls out of bones lashed together with spiked steel chain. After ten millennia, the ones at the bottom have begun to look like dark stones. Inside, the walls are lined with shelves made of human skulls, held together by spiked chains snaking in and out of their eye sockets. Its geometric regularity has a sterile, eerie beauty. This is intentional, meant to communicate that no individual experience of suffering is nonessential to the whole history and society of Nidal.

Upon these shelves are innumerable implements of torture in sich variety that most sadists’ mind would be greatly expanded just by their mere sight. It is, after all, the result of thousands of years of sadistic inventiveness and spiteful rivalry. The culminating goal of many a Nidalese’s life is to suffer uniquely enough for the experience to be recorded in these chains.

Of course, many other memories lurk in these chains among all the torture, including:

• The location of an original copy of Secrets of the Dreaming Dark
• Forgotten Runelord rites
• The passphrase into the tomb of Sarkorin warlord of Uhorik the Witch-Painted
• Much lore of ancient Thassilon and Azlant, and maybe even of the aboleths

One popular conspiracy theory is that all of these secrets are not held in the chains by accident, but rather to serve as lures for souls who might resist their teachings. After all, you can’t experience the collection if you don’t add something new and unique to it.

 

[Tristissima]

Pangolais’s main temple is a contender for the title of main Kuthite temple across the Inner Sea. Called the Cathedral of Exquisite Agony and built of marble and steel in the grandest Brutalist fashion, it resembles nothing so much as a plague-hallucination of a monster in a spiked carapace. We are directed to Inner Sea Temples for more details.

This grand city is haunted by a city watch called the Chainguard, and they are headquartered in a building known creatively as the Chainhouse. Three stories tall, ths urban fortress squats near the Cathedral of Exquisite Agony. This is where Captain Irciele of Ridwan commands the day-to-day operations of the Chainguard. Interestingly enough, Captain Irciele is no true believer of her people’s national faith, merely a “pragmatist with no use for extremism or pretension” who uses the title of Captain instead of her official title, Commander of Chains, Guardian of Shade, and Exalted Keeper of the Midnight Lord’s Silenced Agonies.

Beneath the Chainhouse hides a dungeon of its own for witnesses who aren’t cooperating and those in protective custody. Instead of being kept here, actual criminals are sent to the Cathedral of Exquisite Agony if their torture is considered to have a chance of yielding information or to the public squares if the torture is merely to entertain the populace. Captain Irciele doesn’t really trust the latter, however, and so will sometimes keep them in her own custody until her own investigation is complete, considering it her duty to enforce the law with fairness and dispassion, despite the cruelties of Nidalese law generally privileging the powerful.

OK, so this hits upon a bit of a bugaboo for me in world creation, though there’s a bit of tension within it. I am not one to argue, as some do, that D&D-style or Tolkien-style fantasy worlds need to try to hew as closely as possible to the actual development of societies in Earth’s history. Where is the fantasy in that, for one? Sure, it can be fun sometimes, and really test one’s mythopoetic abilities, but it is by no means a universal good. On the other hand, ignoring the reality that everything that exists has a specific and at least semi-intentional origin point with a context weakens the power of one’s mythopoetic narrative, strains immersionism, cuts off creative possibilities, and runs the risk of accidentally furthering oppression in your work.

I like Captain Irciele. A lot. She feels very much like a young adult cartoon character in a good way ~ the stern and seemingly evil apparent opponent who turns out to be both a good person and an ally to the main character. On the other hand, she could easily be an Inspector Javert and still fit the description. Which, crucially, means you can tell very different stories about her and then tell other stories explaining how the two parts fit together, resulting in a complex and nuanced character. Her existence furthermore opens up a whole realm of noir-ish possibilities for stories set in Pangolais, which was unexpected in such a genteel and cultured faux-Paris. Putting these two elements together, I am reminded of several of the episodes (called “affairs”) of Man From U.N.C.L.E. Frankly, I never expected that show (which should have been subtitled “Getting naughty word Past the Censors”), but the thought that I could pull on it for inspiration in Nidal, where I can also shunt the story off to “What if Susan Cooper wrote The Prisoner”ville makes me REALLY happy!

However, this kind of policing, with a focus on investigation and crime-solving is a very new phenomenon that did not exist in the Middle Ages, where any investigation that occurred happened in the court where the peasants were pleading their case before their lord. It was certainly not dispassionate, but highly bent towards the disposition of that lord. This is what lies behind a lot of those imprecations in chivalric codes and the like to develop justice as an individual noble ~ because if you were unjust, so was your court.

Doing a little bit of quick Wiki research so I could quote the right timeframe for its development, I note that this kind of forensics has roots way back in antiquity and even in the 13th century, so I myself may have been imagining an ahistorical distinction in the process of arguing against them >.< Nonetheless, forensic science as we know it has its origins in the 18th century as part of the explosion of Enlightenment ideas. Taking that into account can deeply enrich one’s depiction of Captain Irciele. The Enlightenment seems to be represented on Golarion primarily by Galt and Andoran, which means that other Chelish splinter-states can be seen as encoding Enlightenment ideas as well, though significantly less so. That adds Molthune and Nirmathas to the list.

In my Nidal, Irciele has an interest in Andoren philosophy and has read some of the Galtan philosophy that undergirds it. Though not a particularly zealous Kuthite, she still is a worshiper of the Midnight Lord and a believer in the ethics encoded in Nidalese law and functioning. Its cruelty is appropriate, when it is called for. She seeks to weld Andoren emphasis on logic and evidence with Galtan ideals of fairness, each equal in front of the law. It’s a hard row to hoe, and no doubt much of her sternness and plain-spoken nature is due to the stress she faces from trying to unite these two ideas.

More D&D needs to involve this kind of sweeping sociocultural change embodied into its characters, monsters, and plot, in my not-so-humble opinion. All the greatest literature has something like it, after all ~ Romeo and Juliet’s famous palmer’s speech can be read as an exploration of the shifting role of carnality in courtly gender relations, for instance.

Dusk Hall is a narrow building of looming points and gothic architecture. Its smoky glass hides one of Pangolais’s magical schools that teaches Nidalese children both arcane and divine magicks so that they might serve the nation and its Sadomasochistic Lord in the greater world beyond Nidal’s borders. It’s another shout out to the author’s two novels set in Nidal. I still need to read these.

 

[Tristissima]

Yay! We get an explicit mention of Nidalese foreign policy and diplomacy, as we are told that the Jadwiga witches who rule Irrisen have found some devotion for Zon-Kuthon among their ranks and so maintain an embassy in the “fairy tale mansion” (I naughty word you not, that’s right out of the text) in Pangolais. Called the Frostfell Manor ~ just what exactly is everyone’s obsession with compound names involving “-fell”? It mostly just sounds stupid to my ears and I hate it, but “Frostfell” does sound better than “Shadowfell” ~ its walls emit a constant twinkle from the frost that magically swirls around it at all times. Within, the Irriseni diplomats enjoy more luxury than is the usual Nidalese wont.

As an old-school World of Darkness fanqueer dating all the way back to my high school days in the mid- to late-90s (I graduated in 2000), I have always enjoyed the various splat’s stereotypes and opinions of the other splats in their books. It’s a thing more D&D-fantasy gazetteers would do well to include amongst the nations, I daresay. I mean, do you know what Amnians generally think of Rashemi, or Solamnics of the Qualinesti, or people from the Duchy of Tenh think of Perrenlanders? Thankfully, I do have an idea of how the Kellid Nidalese generally view the Ulfen Irriseni: the winter witches seem ruled by greed and absent of discipline.

Okay, I may have misspoke when I called it an embassy. That’s rather a bit of an exaggeration; there is no alliance between Irrisen and Nidal. Those who come and stay in Frostfell Manor are individual Irriseni who have taken to the ways of the Midnight Lord, not official envoys, and the Umbral Court often takes advantage of their luxury-motivated isolation to spy on them in hopes of furthering their cause against a nation that they have little regard for.

I do think there might be some interesting stuff that could be done with an Irriseni Kuthite, but it doesn’t grip me with new ideas the way something like a Brevish dueling school exploring the uses of accepting pain joyfully would. Still, it does a good amount to broaden the field for Kuthite, Nidalese, witch, and Irriseni characters, so I’m happy for its inclusion. Also, political maneuverings inside Frostfell Manor could be hella fun.

The Gold Manticore Fount holds a secret brightness, a secret hope amongst the bleak wracking of Nidalese society, within it, and I greatly respect that it is not focused on balming pain or the Desnan revolution against the Umbral Court (and again: what of the Gozrehn revolution, huh?). By focusing it on the classism of Nidalese society and the naughty word position it puts the poor and disenfranchised in, it feels much more naturally emergent from Nidal’s situation on the ground. I firmly believe that fantasy worlds should be built to be seen from within, and this happy secret of a fountain marked by three hidden golden spikes amongst a ruff of steel spikes upon a manticore carved of obsidian, is certainly built to be seen from within.

Of course, the reason wishes whispered into the manticore’s ear on the first night of the new moon tend to come true is a gold dragon named Astarathian. So there’s that.

This lovely bit of epic solution for mundane problem lives most of the time as a greengrocer near the Gold Manticore Fount. For everyone who wonders why good creatures exist in D&D, this is why. This is the single best use of a gold dragon I have ever seen. (I’m looking at you, Dragonlance.)

The Chronicles in Tooth and Bone are an incredibly well-named collection of pre-Earthfall knowledge kept in Pangolais’s Hall of the Chronicles. Their grisly material (that name is not a metaphor) and stone-chiseled font are a result of survivors not stopping to grab parchment as they fled for their lives from the after-effects of a giant meteor slamming into the planet. Of course, ten millennia after their writing, the Chronicles’ worth is not merely in the events they record, but the lost languages they record them in, the physical things they record them upon, and the tiny religious details ~ especially funerary details ~ that crop up in those descriptions. An army of archivists unceasingly work with the Chronicles, translating them and writing commentaries and keeping ancient knowledge alive. I will repeat myself: I love that Nidal has these archives. It gives good parties a wonderful reason to need to come into the realm and not indiscriminately murder a culture that seems strange to them without trying to understand it.

Having praised Astarthian and his focus away from the obvious adventure fare, we come to the Moth and Flame tavern, which is named for its elaborate floor shows supplemented with many illusory effects. One dancer represents a Desnan moth who is drawn to a velstrac-in-disguise’s flame until finally she is chained and tormented and apparently roasted to a cinder. The illusions and the grace of the dancers bring throngs of customers to the tavern to feast.

It’s also a clever way for Theanor of Nisroch, the tavern-owner, to explain away the collection of real Desnan sacred paraphernalia weighing down the tavern’s walls and tables. Together with Lephalia Silvermoth, a CG female human bard 3, Theanor operates the center of Desnan planning and fraternity in Pangolais. It’s not the tavern; that just serves (presumably) as rallying flag and a recruitment office. The two nonetheless relay messages, arrange supply drops, and occasionall smuggle other butterfly-worshipping freedom fighters into or out of Pangolais.

 

[Tristissima]

Furthering Nidal’s theme of collecting long-lost knowledge, Pangolais features an entire district dedicated to recreating an image of what Azlant might have been like before the aboleth dropped a meteor on it. Called “New Calignos” as it is a haven for the caligno, it lies a good third of a mile down a road from the outskirts of Pangolais. Honestly, that distance from the city might be a good argument to call New Calignos more ghetto than haven.

New Calignos looks nothing like the stately, delicate Pangolais proper. The architecture here is given to swooping curves and ornate tiles. The noir monochrome of Pangolais is interrupted here as sprays of star-of-Azlant burst from window boxes and plinthes, white petal-tips surrounding brlliant purple hearts. Their subtle scent plays peek-a-boo with the nose, hiding beneath and around the smell of little leaf-shaped cakes filled with torani nut paste and decorated with (no doubt candied) star-of-Azlant flowers and the savory steamed dumplings called duvai that grandmothers cook for their grandchildren on their namedays. The child gets one duvai for each year of their life.

I am an absolute sucker for culinary details from fantasy worlds. Chalk it up to my Italian and Alabaman ancestors, and maybe reading too much Tolkien when I was young. I do wish we’d gotten some idea of the various fillings and spices of the duvai, beyond every grandmother’s recipe being unique, but I adore the detail of their number. Now I want to play a gluttonous caligni who has continued this nameday feast tradition into their adulthood, tucking into a meal of two and a half dozen duvai at some point in the campaign as their partymembers look on in awe.

The taste of the torani nut is also a mystery, absent of description. This sent me on a bit of an internet dive, trying to construct an idea of what it tastes like. Based on the Torani brand of drink additives and a random reference to “torani” being an Indonesian word for “flying fish”, I have decided that it is oily and exceptionally high in sugar, choline, lecithin, and L-carnitine (the last three are responsible for the body producing trimethylamine, which is the chemical responsible for the “fishy” smell). Pistachio has the highest sugar content of any nut, so start from a slightly sweeter pistachio as your base and then give it the oiliness of a peanut and a fresh umami reminiscent of a soybean. That is how I imagine torani nut tasting!

Though caligni scholars (which perhaps might be the occupation of that dark glutton I just described) delve endlessly into ancient records for new scraps of understanding what Azlant was like of old, the antediluvian empire stretched over multiple continents, and it is almost certain that the piecemeal nature of the available sources, even in Nidal, have resulted in a blend of disparate Azlanti cultural elements, inclusion of mis-identified practices from other cultures, and flat-out inventions built on a flimsy scaffolding of vague allusions. This hardly matters, though, as the myth of caligni culture being a recreation of Azlant has more importance in giving a society of orphans the feeling that they have a history and a past and an ancestry. Even more vital than that is the simple comfort of having a unified culture with touchstones that most caligni share.

Orochel House plays host to most non-Nidalese who come visiting Pangolais, offering the benefit of the ever-present subtle spying that any foreigner can expect in this dimmed land. It’s a manor, but with the same dark stone and gray glass as the rest of the city. There’s a difficulty with the very atmospheric shades-of-gray Nidalese aesthetic evident here. With the pressure of word limits in most of these entries, the descriptions of the buildings too often seem to be an exercise in creative repetition. The visual I imagine of Pangolais is dramatic and wonderful, but it doesn’t translate too well into text.

Orochel House’s prices are noteworthy for not being noteworthy in either direction. Neither cheap nor expensive, its accommodations and staff all seem to be just a little bit higher-quality than the cost would lead one to expect. This, plus its reputation as the foreigners’ inn and the Umbral Court encouraging other innkeepers to charge foreigners extra or require particularly gory Kuthite devotions from foreigners who want to rent a room when they’re not just outright refusing foreign money, is what keeps it full of its homogenously heterogeneous clientele.

Pangolais is known for its particular glass-making technique, which uses the ashes of the Uskwood’s black-leaved trees to get a gray tint that splits light into a complexly mottled pattern of dense shadows as it passes through. This shadowglass is quite valuable to collectors and those making magic items involving shadows and illusions, going for 50-500+ gp (which would have the cultural weight ~ not equivalent value or buying power ~ of approximately $10,000-$250,000 or more). The majority of the world’s shadowglass is produced in the riverside workshop known as the Shadeglass Foundry in Pangolais.

The final location in Pangolais is the Shrine of Convocations, where twice a year the Umbral Court issues its proclamations, preside over disputes, elevate new members, and hear reports from agents foreign, domestic, and academic. As the only times when the Court is in session in its entirety, they also spend much of their time in discussion about the nation’s direction in the next half-year. The Black Triune is present as well, implacably silent the way only people 10,000 years old can until the rare occasion that something grave enough for them to take control comes up.

We are told that the Court’s discussions always have a clear response (no split decisions) because they are under a divine mandate to set aside all their scheming and other interests to come to a decision in Nidal’s best interests. Cuz, y’know, that always works.

A member of the Court that doesn’t attend the convocation is killed by order of the Black Triune, so one of the most common ways for people to eliminate their rivals on the Court is to covertly prevent their arrival in Pangolais at the appointed time.