Hinterlands: Welcome to Garroteburg!

 In ages long past, the veil between this world and whatever myriad phantasmal realms beyond was rent asunder! Some blame the arcane hubris of the decadent human nobility which was said to come to this world from the stars in eons past, bringing with them their alien slaves. Some blame the whimsy of capricious gods. Some blame Craig, but, as much as we all hate and detest Craig as emblematic of all the things wrong with this world, it seems unlikely that he is responsible. 

Whoever bears the fault, the Hinterlands were born! There the weird and macabre energies from beyond have shaped the land and unleashed a veritable plague of magic unto the world. To call it infested by magic, would not be too much a stretch. Magic runs amok! Things that should not be sentient are made so, sometimes in alarming numbers! Places and items take on powers and strange affectations: some wondrous and some sinister! 

There is great danger here and great chance for profit! The magical relics of humanity's glorious past lay in wait in ruins for some adventurer to come plundering! The eldritch things from beyond bring with them their own treasures and secrets to behold if you can get past their countless slathering jaws! 

So enters Garroteburg, the last port and vestige of the normalcy and order of the Commonwealth. It is a towering city, built up from behind mighty walls over numberless generations. It is a dense place only slightly less dangerous than the lands beyond but certainly just as affected by the Weird. Here have come the exiles, the adventurers, and the weirdos from all corners to plunder the riches of what lies beyond, in addition to those who already lived on these shores and have found themselves in service to the titanic fortress-city!

By Ian Miller

The Folk of Garroteburg:

This is not a comprehensive list. Such a list may not be possible or desirable. Indeed I wanted to talk about a few of the more obvious dwellers in Garroteburg and leave the rest for discovery. It may not be possible because Garroteburg is as diverse and complex as the Hinterlands itself. The two are mirrors of each other or tangled in each other like knotted yarn, and the city is the largest most convoluted knot. A person exploring Garroteburg will inevitably find some reason to brave the lands beyond, and those braving the lands beyond will most certainly find some reason to return to Garroteburg. Nonetheless, a few of the strange inhabitants of the city will make themselves readily apparent to those that visit our fair burg, and these I shall reveal to you.

Gremdlings:

Gremdlings, sometimes called Eastern Box Gnomes, are small, dense creatures with abnormally thin and long many-jointed arms and fingers. They are all approximately box-shaped besides their bulbous noses, in fact, it would not all be unusual to see them folded up and stacked on top of each other to create quite an imposing wall! They are usually gray or green colored with stony skin. They have small, almost vestigial legs with large flappy feet with toes of impressive strength, all capable of folding up beneath themselves if needed. 

They are crafty and dextrous creatures, exceptionally suited to climbing, digging, building, and repairing. They can swing themselves aloft by their arms with little difficulty and reach into narrow spaces easily. Thus, they are the labor backbone of Garroteburg, acting as chimney sweeps, mechanics, factory workers, lamplighters, toymakers, scribes, accountants, anything concerned more with things than with people is their forte, although fighting or moving heavy objects is sometimes beyond their abilities.

In Garroteburg, they tend to live in warrens which they build up like hives out of things they have collected. Gremdlings are very fond of collecting things and do not like to part with them under any circumstances. A Gremdling without his collection is no Gremdling at all. Outside of collecting things, they are creatures with many hobbies which they can do while saying nothing to their friends and family even though they are in the same room, which is quite common among Gremdling households. Family time is usually, just "sit in the same room and all work on your different projects in silence" time. The greatest sign of affection among Gremdlings is to give you something special that they have found or made rather than putting it into their collection, and it is a greater sign still to part with something they have already added to their collection. If you enter a Gremdling's home, you will likely have to stoop at the least and crawl at the most, minding to touch nothing!

Bricabracs:

Every once in a while, some wild bolt of magical energy hits the window of some poor old woman's house and a man-shaped thing is given life whose hand is her favorite flowerpot. Poor Mrs. McGullycutty. Bricabracs are not golems. They were not purposely given life, instead, something went wrong with a spell or a bolt of magic just rises out of the Hinterlands and hits a pile of garbage, a wall, some Gremdling's collection of sea-shells, and boom! a creature is born, amalgamating into the rough shape of a person from whatever is nearby. They awaken a blank slate, and as per the Spontaneous Sentience Act of 1632, they must help repair or repay any damages done as a consequence of their sudden inexplicable existence. This means that an innocent and impressionable Bricabrac's first and likely only job is building, fixing, or hard physical labor. They are usually well suited to this as hardy and strong piles of animate matter. 

Some Bricabracs, often those partially composed of books, find themselves occupied with the grand mystery of their sentience and the philosophical quandaries that it poses. Shelflamp, was one of the great poets and philosophers of the Garroteburg cannon, musing on his existence as a creature made out of a lamp and a... and a shelf. He writes in his 1701 book Of Shelves, Lamps, and Creatures Spontaneously Birthed of the Two: "And what is a creature who is not made of a singular thing, one matter which he calls himself? I, who am both a shelf, a lamp, and the books arranged on that shelf, have no singular matter which I call myself, thus is there no me? Upon what grounds is my existence based? The evidence of my Being is obvious, yet no physical constant unites my substance but the most basic one. No "I" exists but the concept "I". Whether we know it or not this is true for us all. Mere matter does not make us up but blood and bone and gristle are all united by some concept of identity beyond the purely physical and this is what we call a soul! I am proof of this, I who am a shelf and a lamp and some books and some bits of wall..."

Wicks:

Wicks are small in stature with large dark almond-shaped eyes, pale skin, wide pointed ears, and a little tail that emerges from their head ending in a sort of bulb capable of producing light. When human explorers first arrived, the Wicks were some of the first to greet them, and the humans mistakenly thought that they were all children. They kept asking the Wicks: "Where are the adults?" A question the Wicks had no ability to understand.

You see, Wicks are all children and they are all grown. Wicks are entirely timeless and immortal. They can be killed but never age. Allowed to continue as they are, the Wicks will outlast us all, a fact that they never bring up as it never really occurs to them as a matter of importance. They all bear a kind of childish innocence, skittishness, and curiosity. They are enraptured by new things and utterly desperate to please any and all people they meet.

They are empathic creatures, psychically susceptible to the feelings of others to an almost pathological degree. They are also each a member of a psychic network through which they can communicate to each other in complex and nearly instant ways across distances so log as enough Wicks are in between to facilitate the call. This transference causes the bulbs on their heads to flicker. The bulb also glows with steady undulation when they dream. Their psychic network is the cause of their eagerness to please. Though humans cannot become apart of the network outside extraordinary circumstances, our feelings can. We pollute their psychic ecosystem with aggressive emotions. They learned quickly that the quickest way to stop this was to keep us happy.

Thus, the Wicks populate all levels of the service industry in Garroteburg. They are salesmen, waiters, tailors, barbers, and servants of the nobility. Their psychic network allows them to organize themselves to superb degrees in the execution of their tasks. Their physical weakness and lack of constitution leave them little good for any hard labor, but their youthful beauty does make them good as models or even as the art pieces themselves: singing in choirs, synchronized swimming, elaborate dances. They also make good librarians, scholars, and executive assistants due to their deep curiosity and quick ability to gather information through the network.

Messenger Wicks will sit in booths or Talk Boxes scattered about Garroteburg, taking a fee to instantly transmit messages to where they can be most easily sent.

Cats:

There are a lot of cats in Garroteburg and while there is no law per se against the mistreatment of cats, it is a very rare occurrence here. Everyone knows the cats listen. No secret conversations happen in the presence of a cat. Everyone knows that the casts report to someone or something else. It is said that thieves and scoundrels can expect the help of cats in times of trouble, but their help always comes with a price: a nicely written letter in the whiskered mouth of an approaching feline signed by the Queen of Cats.

Rats, Bureaucrats, and Nobility:

Rats? There are no rats in Garroteburg. No skittering rats lurking in forgotten places and rotting houses. No rats filling the shadows of rotting places like dark and hungry amalgams of flashing scarlet eyes and bright, nibbling teeth. They certainly don't have faces like horrifically aged men or furtive hands with all too long, clawed fingers. They certainly don't get bigger as you go down. They certainly don't hide under hats, their claws digging into scalps like a puppet's strings, hiding behind human faces with yellow teeth and cruel smiles. There are no rats in Garroteburg.

Bureaucrats though? We all know they exist and groan. Who can rule the great towering mess of a city like Garroteburg? Who can impose order on all its many different hidden nooks and crannies? Well nobody, but that doesn't stop these bland, apathetic, and utterly infuriating people from trying. The nobility long left their duties of governance to those below them, quite literally, building their towers higher and higher into the sky, leaving behind once luxurious halls to be taken over by literal middle-men and any who follow them

The nobility themselves, as I have said, have taken to the sky. Their towers climb higher and higher with no signs of stopping, constantly fed from all the profits of the city below, funneling upwards through the bureaucracy to fund their endless ascent. What profane and decadent activities do they get up to? What strange and macabre fads must develop like cancers when magic is readily available and any hint of the reality of want is long behind them? You might find out if you attempt the ascent.

Conclusion:

That is all for now, my darlings. I think I shall write to you again soon, perhaps I shall tell you of what kind of people might find themselves in such a place as this? Those fallen from grace who take the plunge into strangeness rather than risk death or destitution? Perhaps, I shall tell you of the Stranger's Burrough where no one knows your name. Or maybe I shall tell you of the the Great Furnace and of those incandescent salamanders whose strange flames warm the whole city against the chill of the night and sea. Or shall we speak of the world beyond, that land twisted beyond recognition by the strange energies pouring out from the wound in the flesh of the world? Perhaps, perhaps, my dearest. Perhaps...