Psion said:
That sounds a might bit farcical, though it has potential if you play down the humorous juxtapositions and play up the potentials. I picture barges crewed by devils, bound for the nether planes with their cargoes of damned souls.
Another concept I am thinking of is a city where the world ash Ygdrassil dips its roots into the river of worlds. A bayou-like landscape where tendriled roots descend from the sky, mini villages and docks coalesce where the roots touch the water, and dwellings of the wealthy carved into the roots overhead, along the worm-burrowed passages that lead off to other planes.
So... New Orleans and an Elven tree city meet Sigil, eh?
I think the Venice canals angle is too good to pass up, personally. At least part of the city should be stone and earth in addition to the Ygdrassil root areas. The canals are a way to get around, but also an attempt to use the River of Worlds, Oceanus, etc. to create stable, man-made passages through the universe. How successful this was is open to interpretation.
Perhaps it began as the palaces of the wealthy and extravagant, along with their personal waterways (the better to avoid the planar riff-raff, don't ya know), but over the eons has become something else. A slum would be obvious. Perhaps it's now mainly the temples of assorted gods, tithed away over time, or inherited from the estates of degenerate nobles hoping to buy their way to the Heavens (sort of how the Church inherited land from childless nobles in Europe, but excessively seedy and corrupt).
I'm envisioning catacombs under the churches of an otherwordly nature. Perhaps the catacombs themselves are part of the Nexus. Things get interesting when one of the canals that carries water from the River of Worlds floods a section of these catacombs. What effect does this water have when it simultaneously touches dozens (or hundreds) of planar gates? Or maybe the catacombs have their Nexus-y powers
because they are flooded with the mingled waters of Oceanus, Styx, etc.
Now I'm picturing that scene in the catacomb/sewers of Venice in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and thinking "repopulate that place with cranium rats and abominations." The catacombs of the Church of <insert God of Paladins here>, loaded with holy relics and the tombs of the just and mighty, but overrun with planar vermin and worse.
Good times.
