There is – by certain unreliable and maddening accounts, and now by your own dreadful experience – a town on the eastern seaboard of the southern continent. It is not any maps when you were growing up, and noone of your acquaintance ever admitted coming from that place until you found yourself living within its eerie confines. It is a town of windowless cyclopean skyscrapers, of crumbling baroque buildings and ruins that, impossibly, predate human habitation in this part of the world; it is also a crowded town of roaring industry, beset by organized crime and political corruption. At times, you can see remnants of familiar small villages that have grown together into this monstrous conurbation.
You know that some in the town government are in the thrall of – or in league with – evil forces. You know better than to go out at night, when the clouds roll in from the sea and shapes move in the sky. You know there are occasional, unpredictable streets, which come and go according to some unearthly schedule; that strange black ships dock at the ports to trade with the squat, ugly denizens of that neighborhood. You know, too, that not all of your neighbors are sane – or human.
The PCs find themselves living in a dreadful, sinister town, a sprawling settlement called Tower Valley. Is it a dream? A horrific hallucination? A divine imposition or intrusion into our reality? Or are their own memories and intuitions of the town’s wrongness themselves a sign of unreliability and incipient madness? Do the PCs simply try to survive in the town, or do they have loftier goals: to escape this accursed place, to seek the truth behind the black towers, or to bring down the sinister rulers of the town?
How Did They Get There?
Escape: The player character yearns to escape the town that consumes and stifles him/her. Somewhere beyond these awful prison walls is a better place, a place where they can be free of the nightmares that haunt them. They know that it won’t be easy, and that the way out must be both circuitous and perilous. The PC embraces danger – if the town’s putting obstacles and monsters in their path, that just means they're on the right trail.
Tower Valley is large, prosperous town of twenty-two thousand sprawled out on a slightly rolling plain drenched in spring sunlight; a deep, secluded, and steep-sided valley rimmed by high mountains and carpeted with thick green ground cover and moss-tufted rock. The town is surrounded by thick forests and a range of mountains shaped like a natural coliseum, the slopes and cliffs of the granite peaks covered with towering pines and redwoods stretching down around the foothills all the way to the main highway.
Mixed in among the vintage buildings—yet strangely congruous with them—is a smattering of black structures, slablike and impersonal fortresses that resemble space-age bunkers. Some of these obelisks have no visible entrances, and their lower stories are sheathed in smaller buildings that crowd up against the basalt cliffs. Other fortresses have doorways leading in, but the steps up to these huge doors are oddly shaped, and seem designed for inhabitants of an entirely different size and shape to the humans who make what homes they can in the alien structures. These towers can be found throughout the town, but are most common in ______ and _____ Fields.' These structures are, apparently, ancient – some of the earliest photographs and paintings of the town show them rising above the streets. Many are windowless and doorless, or have no accessible openings on their lower levels. Others have what might be entrances, but they are strangely proportioned, built to an inhuman scale. These accessible towers have been colonized by humans, turned into housing blocks or factories or warehouses. In parts of the town, structures have been built around the bases of the towers, hiding them at street level so a traveler can pass by without having to contemplate the cryptic structures. The people of Tower Valley do not look up, and quicken their pace whenever they must cross the shadows of the towers.
The towers are offensively mysterious. They loom over the town of Tower Valley, ancient and cyclopean. They should not exist. They do. The authorities build false fronts around the lower sections of the towers. At street level, the building looks just like a skyscraper. Pull away at the facade, punch through the plaster walls, or just look up, and you’ll see the black tower, indifferent to the human infestation dwelling within.
Gigantic alien skyscrapers make for cheap real estate in the city, but few people want to live in these weird structures. The strange geometries, the bone-chilling cold of the bare stone, the wind whistling through the hollow-eyed windows, the groaning subsonic communication running through your spine, the dreams...
Only the Afflicted willingly live here. Other towers are used for storage, or even retail – shoppers can fend off cosmic dread through feverish consumerism.
Early in the campaign, GMs should use the towers mainly as an interesting backdrop. Have sorcerers living alone in titanic skyscrapers, have witnesses commit suicide by hurling themselves from the heights. If the players ask to investigate the towers, have all the leads end up bringing them to insane archaeologists, and murderous architects, driven mad by their obsession with the towers. Investigating the towers is precisely as illuminating as dashing your skull against their stone walls, and elects just as many answers.
Later in the game, the towers may be a clue to the nature of the city. If Tower Valley genuinely exists in the waking world, then what does that imply about the towers? Do they predate the tower – and if so, are they mentioned in ancient legends? Are there records from the first settlers, describing the discovery of strange black towers? Or are the towers a reaction to the town?
The PCs gaze in admiration at the nearly windowless obelisks that hover over the smaller, quaint shops and houses, like guardians watching out for their children.
Though the town is located right on the coast, the constant presence of buildings on either side of the road gives it a sheltered quality.
Tower Valley is an occupied town, a town beholden to greater powers. In Tower Valley, Celes' influence is just beneath the surface. Its taint is everywhere; the town is foul with corruption. People will have to willfully blind themselves to avoid acknowledging the presence of its evil in their midst.
And then there is the masked town, the dangers hidden more cleverly than a lurking thief. Like the darting gazes of Tower Valley's large population of feral cats, things haunt every corner of the town.
Outside the town, though, no-one has heard of Tower Valley, or if they have, they cannot quite recall where. A cousin went there once, perhaps. It’s a name that shows up on old train timetables, or in the diaries of madmen.
Characters are aware of the rest of the world, making references to places like London and Roma. Officially, they are told that it is somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the southern continent, but none of the maps in town can confirm this.
One bizarre facet of Tower Valley is strange mixture of futuristic and old technology. Those who can afford it drive automobiles that never need fueling; even if they move like insects, and one can hear scuttling beneath the hoods and their exhaust smells like meat.
Every house is equipped with a radio and even more bizarrely television. The streets have electric glass bulbs instead of gaslight.
The rest of the Imperium will never see such tech, and yet here it is taken for granted to the inhabitants.
Very few of the inhabitants ever travel beyond the valley's boundaries. Another strange aspect of the settlement is the notable lack of children.
In Tower Valley, steering clear of strange phenomena is a critical survival mechanism. People who regularly chase shadowy beings or investigate strange noises die or disappear. Even the powers that be usually prefer to remain hidden, and many of them are not above abducting or killing witnesses to keep it that way.
It’s impolite in Tower Valley to ask too many questions about or show too much interest in... odd things. It’s simply rude to discuss such things. You don’t mention the howling and chanting that disturbed everyone’s sleep last night. You don’t ask questions when the newspaper boy vanishes. You avert your eyes from the strange graffiti on the wall, and the thing that you saw in the alleyway last night was a dog. A dog, damn it! Most people in Tower Valley resent discussion of strange things because it breaks their carefully-crafted illusions. Most people want to believe that they’re not trapped in a hellish alien city, and if your questions make it harder for them to maintain this illusion, then they blame you for their suffering. If you don’t discuss the topic, the topic is less likely to reach tentacles down from the clouds, snatch you up, and devour you whole.
Rumor Mill:
1% Food had been scarce in the town of late. Even the price of turnips has soared so much that people no longer feed shavings to the pigs. But no expense was spared for the countless public work projects. City officials say it will bring new prosperity to the town, but lately they have been proven wrong every time they open their mouths.
2% There have been phantom sightings of a 'second sun' in the skies over Tower Valley.
Carnival and Dance
Occasionally the urge for fancy-dress descends on the town, and a carnival is held. The elaborately scripted invitations are received by special delivery. Some citizens might get to choose their costume, although the PCs might not.
Even those who discount most accounts of unusual events know better than to go out at night. All cities are wilder and stranger at night, but parts of Tower Valley are actively dangerous. Other parts, meanwhile, seem to only exist at night; look out of certain windows by night, and you shall see a very different streetscape to the one visible by daylight. Bright electric lights seem to keep this strangeness at bay; those unable to keep the darkness from their door huddle and pray that they will not be taken in the night.
When the purple haze of dusk comes and birds of a softer nature take flight across the domes and steeples of the town's churches, it was then that the unknown forces exert themselves more freely. Winged beings roost in the shadows of belfries briefly lit by their radium glances. They skulk about on rooftop corners shrouded by trees and the flutter of owls looking for prey. They hide among the gargoyles and statues of angels that are scattered all about, lingering on corners and standing guard in well-kept gardens.
The rustle of their wings are often mistaken for whispered chants in ancient houses of worship that echo with the stench of idolatry.
Tower Valley Encounters at Night:
1% A massive owl, its feathers as white as a ghost, perches imperiously in the skeletal branches of an ancient, gnarled oak tree. The tree, stripped of its leaves by the harsh winter, stands as a stark silhouette against the moonlit sky. The owl's eyes, twin pools of liquid gold, fixate unblinkingly on the party of Investigators below. The owl's presence is eerily silent, its aura almost ethereal. Its gaze is penetrating, almost as if it sees beyond the physical forms of the Investigators, peering into their very souls. In the light of the moon the Investigators suddenly and truly appreciate the enormous size and sheer beauty and strength of the majestic wings, the regal bent of its head, its proud breast. They appreciate the awesome power and unbroken will that emanates from it in a darkness deeper than the night. The air around it seems to ripple with an unseen energy, adding an otherworldly quality to the creature. Then, without a sound, the owl spreads its expansive wings, each feather outlined in the silvery moonlight. It takes flight, disappearing into the night with an uncanny silence that leaves the air feeling charged, the echo of its presence lingering like a half-remembered dream. Is this spectral owl an omen, its appearance a harbinger of events yet to unfold? Could it be a shape-shifted monster, its true form hidden beneath the guise of an innocent creature? Perhaps it's a concealed surveillance device, its unblinking eyes recording the Investigators' every move for some unseen observer. Or is it just an ordinary owl, its ghostly appearance a trick of the moonlight?
2% The players pass the entrance of an alleyway at night, down which are what appear to be a number of homeless people standing huddled around a scrap fire, perhaps in a metal drum, over which something looks to being cooked. There are oddities with the scene, though. The flames have a sickly greenish-yellow tinge to them, what is being cooked looks quite substantial, suggesting either a large animal or part of one, and the homeless people around it are standing in a peculiar way, hunched over in what would surely be a most uncomfortable manner.
Moonlit Monument:
A statue of the town founder stands on a plinth in a small square. Archaeology notes that the plinth is much older and far more weathered than the statue it bears; it puts the Investigator in mind of ruins from the ancient world. In the moonlight, the statue appears to undergo a strange transformation.
"There have always been rituals in our town, sacrifices to ripen the wheat, sacrifices to make the fruit trees abundant, sacrifices so that the midwives would bring more boys than girls. You should know that. Your family was involved in all of them."
Isolated Farm:
The Owls:
"My arrogance likes to believe it is the Old Serpent himself. I have encountered those possessed of demons. And I have, on occasion, even wrestled with some of the darkest angels imaginable. But I cannot say with certainty that I have ever personally encountered the Horned Cherub, though I owe him nearly two millenniums of vengeance."