The Perrenian Necrohol

The Perrenian Necrohol

The Necrohol is considered initially to be a relief from the raw caverns and other cave formations of the Gyre. Spelunking is a required skill for the Gyre, but no longer required after entering the Necrohol. The area is made of what appears to be semi-finished stone. The blocks are simply massive, with single stones being a dozen or more feet on each side. The zone maintains a general height of about thirty feet, with regularly placed pillars supporting the roof. These are also made of single cyclopean-scaled stones.

Layout

The best way to meta-layout the Necrohol is to copy the general feel of a massive shopping mall, with the corridors being wide, the ceilings soaring, and laid out in some geometric pattern, making triangles or squares.

Entrances

There are multiple access points to the Necrohol, a third should connect back to the Gyre, meaning that there is more than one path through the Gyre to access to Necrohol. The second third should access the next (as yet unwritten) section of the dungeon. The final third can have random access, being dead ends, lead out into single encounter cul-de-sacs, or hidden areas as the DM enjoys.

'Regular Storefront'

The Necrohol is lined on both sides with 'buildings' where only the front protrudes from the wall. It all has a feeling of abandonment, antiquity, and an absolute disregard for placement. The halls are neat and square but the buildings are smashed together, the stone sometimes flowing into new shapes,  and sometimes just being broken piles of rubble. On a meta-level, this is where the dungeon core keeps its building templates and records, as it can reach up into Terrasquestone and rearrange buildings and streets. When something is removed, it gets wedged into the Necrohol, which over time has changed size according to this, or it is absorbed back into ambient dungeon mana. In the past, when the city contracted, the Necrohol grew to great size, and when the city grew, the Necrohol started to thin out.

Residences are common, though none are dull. The houses found are unique in their architecture, having odd windows, curious layouts, and ornate decoration. They are left in a dilapidated state, but remain solid. Tall houses might exist on a lower floor, but their roof and any associated gabling, balconies, cupolas, or towers might smash through the floor of the current floor, leaving PCs to walk across a roof heaped with rubble.

Taverns, inns, brothels, and flop houses are very well represented and are flamboyant in their design. The Moulin Rouge (the red mill), and clubs like the Cabaret de L'Enfer (Hell Cabaret) where guests had to enter through a gaping demon's mouth are almost mundane in their excess.

Craft shops are also present in numbers. These tend to be a bit more mundane in their design, as they were working and commercial spaces, but their purpose is often easy to pick out. Statues and statuary are common around them, though generally toppled, overgrown with nitre, or defaced with graffiti.

A genizah is a section of a Jewish cemetery or synagogue where religious texts, worn out by use, are stored. In the Necrohol, these are the remains of libraries, archives, and depositories that have gone missing. These are very popularly sought out by adventurers because they almost always have something valuable in them, especially old books, grimoires, and scrolls. Vast amounts of lost information are contained in the Necrohol, and some entire expeditions have been chartered to find these places and loot them of everything that can be recovered.

Public bath houses are rare, and ironically, still have water and working facilities.

A feminisary is a shop that caters solely to the interests and sundry goods required by women. They are rare in the Necrohol, and most are easily overlooked as nothing more than the ruins of lingerie dispensaries, ignoring the routine use of medical/hygiene supplies, apothecary and herbalist supplies, and the other side of what being a woman entails. (it is the Victoria's Secret store, with the attached Pink boutique, but with a pharmacy counter/section. Women's business.

'The Department Stores'

Sometimes a noble family would do something to offend the sensibilities of the dungeon, or happenstance would see their line end. Rather than repurpose the old estate, or let fights break out over real estate, the Dungeon would just absorb the entire manor/palace/small castle directly into the Necrohol, for safekeeping, Later it might refurbish the building, change it up a bit, and put it back somewhere else in the city, when it might be useful. Thus, there are entire massive buildings that sit almost as the cornerstones of the Necrohol.

'The Food Court'

If there was a place to avoid in the Necrohol, this is it. The ceiling is far away and there is a continual rain that comes from above, splashing into a deep fountain/well in the center. Far above there is a devouring deep and this is where it dumps. There is a regular rain of falling debris, organic waste, and a variety of corpses. The dead bodies are less common, but draw a lot of attention. The Necrohol is inhabited, but there are no gardens, no ranches, and the only source of protein is the irregular appearance of a corpse or two.

'Restrooms and Guest Facilities'

These areas are rare, concealed, and hard to find. They are also safe places for adventurers to rest without fear of being found and attacked by anything other than other adventurers.

Residents

The Necrohol is, unfortunately, not uninhabited.

Ghouls and Ghasts make up the main population, being semi-undead humans, wights, and demi-humans. They live a twilight half-existence of hunger, madness, and lethargy. As semi-undead they can go weeks without eating, spending much of this time hibernating until something warm and noisy comes by and then they wake up. Then, they can glut themselves on flesh equal to a quarter of their body mass. Three to five ghouls can consume an entire living being in minutes. Most are congregated around the Devouring Deep waterfall, waiting for the heavy smack of a fresh body. They can also be found almost anywhere in the Necrohol, as a sated ghoul or ghast will wander away from the falls to find a place to sleep off their meal. The shops and homes lining the Necrohol are lousy with these miscreant creatures.

Otyughs are found on the bottommost level of the Necrohol, where pools and piles of organic waste and filth settle. This area is hideous in it's reek, and the otyughs might be bottom feeders, but given a chance for fresh bloody meals, they will attack.

While not sentient or mobile, the bottom and lower levels of the necrohol, where the organic waste settles, are infested with differing levels of fungal infestation, with the most common being large sphere-shaped masses heaped in corners and around the edges of pools. None of these are edible to humans without major treatment and cooking (think soak in lye, boil in ammonia, etc) and almost all are dangerous to highly deadly. 

Watch where you step, the Necrohol also has an infestation problem. Namely, slimes, oozes, and jellies. While slow, they are a slow-moving cleaning system for the Necrohol, whereas the fungus, otyughs, and ghouls are faster-moving cleaners. Any ghoul or ghast that wanders too far might be roused to find an ooze dissolving it, and a wounded otyugh can find itself the dinner of a gelatinous cube that cornered it.

Vermin, the necrohol has bats, rats, and spiders.

Enjoy your stay.

History

The Perrenian Necrohol was named by the first adventurer/surveyor who reached it, and more importantly, returned alive. Stonebrooke Perrin was a career Dungeon Warden and Dungeon Ranger and had explored a number of extant dungeons before she turned her attention to the newly discovered Gyre. It took her and her team six tries before they were able to pass through the Gyre proper and break into the Necrohol. Across these expeditions, she lost fifteen members of her team, and it is worth noting, that non-guild members lost in the attempts were not recorded and counted among the lost, and it is estimated that possibly as many as sixty commoners lost their lives in the Gyre. After breaching the Necrohol, Perren would make several more trips there before being lost in the final mission. Her last team had found a passage that led into a new section of the Gyre and after passing through, they were never seen again. This ended a twenty-year campaign Stonebrooke had mounted against the Dungeon.

This was approximately 800 years prior, before Terrasquestone was set as a major independent city-state.

That's the official line. The Necrohol has always been there.

This is a fabrication, as the Dungeon Core can carry out alterations and calibrations that also affect people living in the borders of its influence. The Necrohol is only a few hundred years old, and didn't come into being until after Terrasquestone became a major city. The area prior to this was a series of dry caverns that were more passable than the Gyre's raw cavern systems. No one really knows or remembers because the Core carried out a series of calibrations so no one knows that the Necrohol is relatively young.