This was one of four necropoli I wrote for The Book of Oblivion (Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition). Sadly, all four were cut for lack of space. That may have been my final freelance work in the World of Darkness… closing the cycle, in a way, since my first work was also for Wraith. Anyway. Here ya go.

Of the four, this is my favorite (admittedly by a narrow margin). This is one of those compelling little bits of Wraith lore that just bubbled up from nowhere good in my head. I chose the location as a too-subtle nod to Jericho, Kansas.

Under a leaden sky, the West Kansas Shadowlands stretch beyond sight. No Sunless Sea kisses this shore; the Great Plains Tempest is an unending swath of tinder-dry grass and mold-blackened grain. Maelstroms here are horizon-to-horizon scythes of dust in the hands of angry Rocky Mountain winds, tornadoes that moan out the Labyrinth’s hunger, or cold wildfires devouring all before them. Every working of humanity reflected in the Underworld is tiny, exposed, isolated, vulnerable beneath the perpetual clouds.

When wraiths speak of Necropoli, they speak of the world’s great cities. But people die in small towns, too. Oakley is archetypal of the rural Necropoli that dot the Hierarchy’s map (when it bothers to put them on the map), a tight-knit and tradition-bound collection of wraiths watching over their mortal legacies and families.

Oakley holds 2,000 living residents, a number that’s held steady for more than a half-century. It sits at the junction of three counties, and 90% of their land is agricultural, making it the local economic and social hub. Where the Quick gather, so do the dead, and the Fick Fossil and History Museum and City Library in Bertrand Park is the occasionally-beating heart of Oakley’s wraithly scene (though Enfants prefer the less-formal atmosphere of Don’s Rainbow Drive-In). The Fick is the town’s nominal Citadel, though it’s neither well-reinforced nor defensible; most wraiths prefer to hunker down in residential storm cellars when the weather turns.

Theoretically, Oakley is a Hierarchy Necropolis. In practice, the only local wraiths who take Hierarchy citizenship seriously are the grizzled “Anakerns” of the governing triumverate: Ora Spellmeyer (d. 1884, complications from a bullet acquired in the War Between the States), Benito Escarrá (d. 1925, drunkenly fell into Gove County’s first self-propelled combine harvester), and Lilac Atteberry (d. 1908, married beneath her station to a husband who poisoned her to inherit her family’s ranch). They hold Citadel meetings on the first Monday night of every month, enforcing Robert’s Rules of Order with a formality that Stygia’s most punctilious parliamentary popinjay could not surpass. No military garrison exists, but the artifact air raid siren atop Logan County Hospital can summon the militia from thirty miles around, and there’s no shortage of relic hunting rifles and wraiths who grew up putting meat on the table with them.

Outside these rusty mechanisms of empire, wraithly existence is a matter of individual interests. The Dictum Mortuum is a dead letter – indeed, many ghosts here don’t actually know what it is, only that the Anakerns pound their fists on it when someone does something they don’t like. Restless think nothing of reaching across the Shroud to counsel their mortal descendants, keep the family farm in the black, or discourage the wrong sort of visitors from staying. This isn’t to say that hauntings are overt; wailing, chain-dragging materializations are Just Not Done. Proper Midwestern Protestant sensibilities require subtlety and discretion. Feuds can stretch on for generations, though, and the smaller the stakes, the more vicious the tactics.

On the mortal side of the equation, this cultural heritage means families simply don’t talk about the ghost in the old farmhouse to outsiders, and even their private conversations are oblique. Consequently, few residents and exactly zero outsiders realize the full extent of local ghostly influence. The second sight runs in the Logan County MacDaniels family, probably from their Wazhazhe (Osage) werelynx blood, but they just nod knowingly and respectfully when they pass a ghost on the street. Dr. Susanna Hogarth is the new minister at Oakley Wesleyan Church, and with the aid of two predecessors who haunt her parsonage, she’s counseling several families through trouble with ghosts who can’t adapt to modern times. The kids in the high school history club have been close to the truth for about a decade, but the most dangerously perceptive seniors always get convenient full-ride scholarships to out-of-state colleges.

Because Oakley’s wraiths have been haunting the city and surrounding plains for so long, they’ve become very, very good at it. Any Hierarchy official worth his mask would have zombie kittens if he saw the practices that have become ubiquitous here. Every Restless is adept in at least one or two Arcanoi that violate the Shroud. Moreover, several arts unique to the region enable wraiths to possess animals, affect plants and weather, and inhabit buildings or tracts of land. Practitioners don’t realize how rare these talents are or how much attention they would attract if word got out.

Outsiders arriving in Oakley find a gracious, if reserved, welcome, provided they don’t bring trouble with them. A lack of local Fetters means few strangers settle down here (most recently the Alchemists who moved into the old grain silos on the north side to experiment with the Underworld ergot that grows on the local Tempest-wheat). Should the Hierarchy take an unkind interest in Oakley, it would find surprisingly aggressive resistance, not least from the Anakerns who won’t take kindly to big-Necropolis bureaucrats telling them how to run their town.

This was one of four necropoli I wrote for The Book of Oblivion (Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition). Sadly, all four were cut for lack of space. That may have been my final freelance work in the World of Darkness… closing the cycle, in a way, since my first work was also for Wraith. Anyway. Here ya go.

Sailors have always taken music to the sea and brought it back from their travels. Ashore, countless songs memorialize those mariners who the ocean has claimed. But no songs were written for the Piper Alpha oil production platform when it ignited the North Sea in 1988, claiming 167 lives to become the world’s deadliest offshore petroleum disaster.

Piper Alpha’s charred, twisted remains manifested in the Tempest within days. It became a familiar landmark to wraiths putting out from Aberdeen and Bergen, but an ill omen. Ghost ships sailing too close to the platform came under Spectre assault or encountered choking black clouds spitting forth burning rain. Scottish and Norwegian authorities launched several missions to cleanse the site, finally succeeding with Swedish Doomslayer aid in 1994. The Emerald Legion installed a caretaker garrison to ensure the site didn’t become re-infested, whereupon everyone promptly forgot about the problem. The Oslo necromancer incursion of 1998 forced the Legion to recall its troops, after which Piper Alpha lay vacant.

In 2000, Copenhagen Hierarchs exiled goth-rock Chanteur Ragnhild Vinter and her Circle for fomenting anti-Imperial sentiment. The Renegades responded by stealing an Anacreon’s yacht and fleeing into the North Sea, intent on establishing a pirate radio station through which they could continue screaming defiance. Unfortunately, none were sailors, and they headed straight into the teeth of a savage winter Maelstrom. Fortunately, the wind drove them into Piper Alpha before accumulated blood ice capsized their vessel. Finding the platform deserted yet still sufficiently solid to offer shelter, they claimed it as their own and put out the call for like-minded wraiths.

Today, the rechristened Piper Omega is a haven for several hundred Renegade performers and counter-culture Chanteurs and Masquers from across Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. Vinter’s troupe, Gaslight Ritual, runs the makeshift citadel as a commune and performance venue. Residents earn space through Renegade cred or Guild vouchsafing, but they keep it through performance. Monthly on the night of the new moon, the platform lowers its boarding ladders for any wraith brave enough to make the journey and pay the admission fee for a live variety show unlike any other. The main stage stands exposed and flame-lit under the ever-burning gas flare, now fueled on Pathos distilled from Piper Alpha memorials. Between performances, a Rube Goldberg assembly of broadcast equipment fulfills Vinter’s dream of pirate radio broadcasts, reaching relic receivers across northwest Europe with an eclectic mix of entertainment and agitprop.

Piper Omega still stands above the North Sea where its Skinlands prototype went down. Around its legs rests a patchwork accrual of ghost vessels. The largest are semi-permanent components of the Citadel, moored by soulsteel chains. A few small, swift boats are armed for self-defense (or piracy; no one looks closely). Residents are largely self-policing under a well-armed version of Wheaton’s Law, frequent creative differences notwithstanding.

Notable residents include The Voice of the Flame (Renegade Alchemists who run the radio station and keep the platform intact), Näkki (the Finnish Underworld’s premiere shamanic punk band), the infamous ex-Legion of Fate political strategist-turned-information broker known as Icebreaker, and smuggler and arms dealer Søren Amundsen. Ragnhild Vinter herself still heads Gaslight Ritual, which makes her the commune’s de facto leader, though she eschews formal titles. Gaslight Ritual fell away from performing several years ago as the demands of administering the Necropolis grew; lately, they’ve been trying to spread the load among Voice of the Flame and other affiliated groups. Rumor has it that they may soon return to the stage alongside up-and-coming maker/dance troupe Tolerance Stack, bringing forth a new work about which little is known beyond its title: Dance of the Broken-Winged Crane.

This was one of four necropoli I wrote for The Book of Oblivion (Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition). Sadly, all four were cut for lack of space. That may have been my final freelance work in the World of Darkness… closing the cycle, in a way, since my first work was also for Wraith. Anyway. Here ya go.

In its heyday, Route 66 was a peerless transportation artery, running from Chicago to Santa Monica. Threaded through Joplin, Tulsa, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles, it showed American motorists a vibrant cross-section of the Midwest and Southwest until the interstate highway system supplanted it in the 1950s and ’60s. Without federal maintenance funds, Route 66 withered, subsumed by state roads or vanishing entirely.

In the Underworld, derelict highways may resurface as byways or ghost roads. Not so for Route 66. Sometime in the early 1970s, its entire 2,448 miles manifested in the Shadowlands. Wraiths in Riverton, Kansas were the first to report that even as Maelstrom tornadoes ravaged the surrounding region, the highway was untouched. In mid-1976, an Anemographer/Ghostrider expedition out of California met a band of Legion of Paupers explorers from Illinois at the highway’s Adrian, Texas midpoint. The Empire’s Bureau of Trade soon proclaimed that Route 66 appeared to be a safe and stable route through the American Underworld.

What troubled early explorers remains a concern today: Route 66 defies all conventional wisdom on Shadowlands geography. Although plenty of blood soaked into its asphalt, it never approached the body count of deadlier highways like Interstate 95 or Camino a Los Yungas. The Artificers and the Harbingers would like to claim credit, but there’s no evidence that Route 66 is a cultivated byway or an unprecedented working of Inhabit. The popular and comforting theory is that its modern status is a result of its cultural iconicity, a rare example of a non-living construct accruing Memoriam. A less benevolent explanation is that popular culture has imbued Route 66 with a myth-driven form of quasi-sentience. No one wants to hear the fringe belief that the “highway” is really a charmingly useful and friendly-faced manifestation of some Labyrinthine elder horror.

Route 66 earned recognition as a Necropolis, albeit a very long and narrow one, by virtue of its permanent population. In most places, its protection from Maelstroms extends five to ten yards from the asphalt. This so-called Black Ribbon Citadel is home to perhaps a thousand wraiths, many of whom form small Circles to offer travelers’ services. Most such groups have colonized the ghost towns that crumbled along the route after the interstates diverted travel and commerce. Other citizens include the Night Mail (ghost truckers and bus drivers who serve connected conventional Necropoli), Wings for Wheels (a Chanteur troupe famous for its repertoire of travel-themed songs), and Detroit West (a large nomadic Circle immersed obsessively in the imagery and culture around classic muscle cars and drag racing).

The Hierarchy’s hand rests lightly upon Route 66. The Legion of Paupers first re-mapped the highway’s full length and was quick to lay claim to authority here, but its duties are largely ceremonial. The ghost road needs no maintenance; indeed, it rejects all attempts to patch its cracks and potholes. With the population so widely-distributed, there’s little call for bureaucracy. Under the command of Anacreon Robert “Pony Bob” Haslam, the Legion’s 7th Cavalry Squadron provides what law enforcement is needed here. The 7th, more commonly known as the Black Ribbon Patrol, spends most of its time assisting travelers and investigating the occasional mysterious disappearance or reappearance.

This was one of four necropoli I wrote for The Book of Oblivion (Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition). Sadly, all four were cut for lack of space. That may have been my final freelance work in the World of Darkness… closing the cycle, in a way, since my first work was also for Wraith. Anyway. Here ya go.

Alas! Alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come.

Once, Baghdad was the mightiest Necropolis in the Mantaqat Khayal, the Middle Eastern Shadowlands. 250 leagues from Mecca, it was far enough from the source of the Keening that the perpetual sand-Maelstrom engulfing the region was sometimes passable. Here, ghosts of the Abbasid Caliphate traded relics and lore with Ottoman Restless and the British Empire’s wraiths. Beholden to no Dark Kingdom, a council of ancient merchant princes opened Baghdad’s gates to anyone who didn’t disrupt business. Even Oblivion’s saner scions were welcome as long as they behaved.

On April 2, 2003, as American troops approached, an unprecedented Maelstrom broke over Baghdad. The city had endured countless prior sieges and sacks, but none televised before the eyes of all the world’s Quick. As bombs fell on the living city, soulsteel hail and shark-toothed lightning battered the Underworld. Wraiths caught in the storm succumbed to their Shadows’ basest urges, falling upon one another in a frenzy of mutual annihilation.

Trust died in Baghdad that night. In the storm’s aftermath, remaining wraiths learned the hard way that Arcanoi no longer reliably identified Spectres or the Shadowridden. For a Necropolitan culture whose overriding ethos was the sanctity of deals and contracts, this was a deathblow.

Then the war’s dead began to arrive in the Underworld, and they showed no interest in ceasing their war. American troops and their Coalition allies spurned a millennium of traditional hospitality and coexistence in pursuit of their Iraqi adversaries while Oblivion gleefully infiltrated all sides to further the conflict. The Shadowlands shook to the renascent detonations of relic IEDs. An ambush lurked around every corner; a nihil glimmered at the bottom of every bomb crater.

In the Skinlands, scavengers followed on the soldiers’ heels. The sack of Baghdad’s wealth was nothing compared to the feeding frenzy for its knowledge. The city’s museums and libraries held countless arcane relics and keys to forbidden history. Supernatural beings from every corner of the world collided while rushing to stake claims amidst the chaos. Battles spilled into the Shadowlands as sorcerers and shapeshifters maneuvered through every accessible plane of existence. For every priceless artifact destroyed while saving it, wraiths fought to ensure it re-formed across the Shroud and in their hands.

The battle for Baghdad’s lore burned itself out within a season, giving way to a simmering asymmetrical war. Across the Shroud, the Middle East’s traditional denizens regrouped and drove out most foreign intruders in a brutal years-long campaign. Among the dead, the Grim Legion and Penitent Legion attempted to establish a peacekeeping presence as a precursor to long-denied Imperial expansion, but found themselves drawn into the conflict too.

Today, Baghdad is a city of wraiths trapped by Fetters, the resurgent perpetual Maelstrom, or their own Passions and Shadows, all amidst a war without end. The major factions, as best they can be defined, are Stygian forces seeking to claim a city long denied them; an alliance of outsider Mantaqat Khayal inhabitants with a similar agenda; newly-dead Coalition and Ba’ath Loyalist troops and politicians who can’t let go of their respective sides of the Quick’s war; and pre-war Baghdadis who want everyone else to stop destroying their homes. Beneath it all, Oblivion bargains, manipulates, and carries out false-flag attacks to stoke the conflict, and its agents still can’t be identified until they act.

Leaked reports from the Legions have brought belated Doomslayer attention. They’ve enjoyed some success recruiting here when they’ve been able to point out the real enemy. Their primary mission, however, has been intelligence-gathering, and what they’ve learned may have ramifications across the Underworld. The Shadow-Eaten have been watching and learning from mortal combatants, and now they’re versed in the skills of terrorist and special operator alike. They’re smart and patient in ways the Void hasn’t allowed until now, and they’re willing to play long games. If this spreads beyond Baghdad, the struggle against Oblivion will change forever.