Glasstown: Introduction

 My current GURPS Game is Glasstown, a six-guns and sorcery megadungeon campaign. Here's the overview.

It was the twilight of a fallen age.

Our ancestors once fled a great catastrophe and lost their homeland, to bravely settle a new world. After the Golden Age of peace and expansion came the Splintering, a long and bloody civil war. Now, all of the cities of man are independent states, each as venal and petty as the others, holding to an uneasy peace.

In the midst of this chaos, on the western border with the Eternal Frontier, from the mysterious depths of Lake Arcane, there arose a city of ruins, vast and ancient. Within its cyclopean walls of un-mortared obsidian awaited untold peril and riches unimagined for any that might dare it.

The wealthy barons of commerce and industry weren’t about to allow the wealth of the Black City to fall to the others and they just about sent everyone to war all over again until they fetched up on a compromise. They went and got themselves incorporated, with equal shares in the brand-new Lake Arcane Assay and Outfitters Company. Then, near as overnight on that wild shore, they raised themselves up a boomtown. If you were brave, foolish or desperate enough to plumb that hard dark heart of horrors, there was only one place you wanted to be. You headed to Glasstown!

The New World

Ancient History

Once humans dwelled on another world, on the island kingdom of Doomed Lantis. This civilization was advanced well beyond all others. They had mastered orichalcum and the secrets of thaumaturgy. They were ruled with wisdom and strength by their philosopher kings, who in secret were not human at all, but the serpent-folk.  

It is said that in their arrogance they angered the old gods, and the island sank beneath the waves never to be seen again. Most perished, but a handful, rewarded for their piety or for their foresight escaped. The violence of this punishment was so severe that those who tried to merely sail away also drowned. Those that survived fled not on the material waves, but into the astral seas of the Pearl Bright Ocean.

Adrift between worlds, they arrived at new land, a faerie world suspended within the astral plane. Ashore they discovered a strange place with inconstant time and elastic distance, populated by strange creatures, spirits, and natives. Unable to survive on the mainland, the refugees used their magic to raise islands out of water, islands stabilized in rings of iron ores.  

Over time their colonies flourished, and their knowledge grew. Eventually they were able to colonize the mainland, first in Cape Ferrox and then further north along the coast.

As they expanded north they encountered other colonists: the diminutive tommyknockers in their huge cavernous legged cities, lumbering in the forests. They also discovered the mysterious mountain city of Chaurnauth and it’s enigmatic flesh-masters.

Those that stayed with the ships continued to ply the astral plane, and were transformed by the strange energies and dilated time becoming the lascari. Small populations of immigrants from all manner of alien worlds beyond the Pearl Bright Ocean often returned with lascari ships, to settle permanently. Some lascari, too, returned bearing the creed of the Black Pharaoh into their towering monasteries of the Shadowright mountains. This new faith eventually supplanted the old gods of Doomed Lantis throughout the colonies.

The Splintering

Peace between the colonies could not last for forever. When war came it was fought with weapons that raged through space and time, making any notions of beginnings, endings, causes and resolutions muddled and inconstant. In the end the cities of man were left as feuding isolated city states forever marked by the war.

Ever since shifting alliances, indecisive skirmishes and competition have kept this status quo. If there can be said to have been any winners it was the robber barons and captains of industry that both profited on the conflict and in the uneasy peace that followed.

Time and Space on The Frontier

When the colonists first came to the new world, they found a land in which time and space were subjective and mutable. Expeditions to the mainland could return after months had passed on the refugee fleet, and report that they merely spend one day ashore. Or they could leave and suddenly return, aged decades with tales of harrowing adventure.

Behind barriers of iron both land and clock are much more stable and predictable. The expansion of railroads has allowed settlement to finally be established on the mainland and spread Westward. For those braving the frontier things are less firm, and settlers are disconnected from the steady beat of time in the cities of the east, at least until the railroad comes.

In play this can mean that expeditions into the city can become out of sync with time in Glasstown. Within the Black City itself, places can be found eerily preserved in the distant past. Time and distance are subjective and subject to observer effects, and discontinuities may occur beyond your immediate perceptible environment.

The Cult of the Black Pharoh

The gods of Old ‘Lantis were never present in the New World the way they were in the old, and the faith faded over time with only the paths of thaumaturgy and the private snake cults of the old houses left as relics. The old religion was replaced by a new one, brought across the Pearl Bright Ocean by lascari pilgrims.

This creed teaches that in the old world, when the city of Jerusalem was besieged by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, the Kushite Pharaoh Taharqa came to their defense. As a fellow monotheist, Taharqa taught that Atem-Ra was the same as the God of the Jews and therefore they were of the same faith, and he came to defend the holy city against the forces of Apep-the-Serpent-who-Never-Dies. In the fighting Taharqa was slain. For three days the armies of Judah and Egypt fought desperately to hold the city. On the third day, miraculously the Pharaoh was resurrected, and brought knowledge and weapons from Atem God that turned the battle. In his second life the Pharaoh took the name Nyarlathotep and ruled for 1,000 years, expanding his empire to encompass the entire world and his faith to beyond it.

While the core of the faith was always the mountain fortress monasteries of the lascari cenobites, the most prevalent sect is the charismatic evangelical Church of the Starry Wisdom which originated in Gilead but has spread to all corners of the settled world.