This is the response you should expect if you ask the right questions in the wrong places around Loaerth City. A reference to the various doors scattered in the dark alleys of Loaerth, to “exit” means to cease existing, at least for a little while. You leave the general safety of the Watch, the normality of street life, and enter a world of extremes and strange dichotomies. Behind the Black Door (or Doors, depending on who you ask), your pleasures find their outlet, your vices are satiated and your worst fears are realized. And that is just you; everyone within it affects the way the World Behind appears and expresses itself. What you find around a corner one day is no guarantee you will find it again the next. Your favorite brothel disappears one day, only to turn up a mile down the road, its original space now occupied by a slave market for the most gorgeous creatures imaginable.
The first question anyone asks when they first walk Behind is how the place came to be. Unlike most things, the history of the spaces behind the Black Door is well known to those who have lived here all their lives. It is an oral tradition maintained to near-perfect accuracy despite half a millennium between the World Behind’s creation and the present. The story is one most do not believe, but one that all who live already outside the “exit” accept on faith. When Eurig Talfrun rent the Feywyrd from the Known World and stripped magic from mankind’s grubby hands, he created the Veil, an impenetrable barrier between the world of the Spirit and the world of Materiality. The World Behind exists within that Veil, even after its rending in recent years. In those early years, the elves did everything they could to pierce back into the Known World and reclaim their lost holdings. Some experiments were darker than others, and the World Behind is the darkest of them. An elven hex mage wanted not to cut through but dig beneath the Veil. He half-succeeded, but the Veil was far thicker than he envisioned. For a century and a half he clawed at the strange ether dividing the worlds, using the souls of recently dead elves as cutting tools. He reached what might be termed the center of the Veil when it began repairing itself from the outside in.
Trapped between realities, the unfortunate mage would have simply gone mad if not for the now-trapped elven souls with him. As recompense for their misuse, the angry spirits tore the mage apart and stopped the Veil’s repair process with his essence, creating a small pocket between the Feywyrd and the Known World. Using themselves as support structure—for oblivion not spent in the Void is not something wished on any being—the souls went into eternal torpor, where they remained for two thousand years.
When Captain MacTaverick unknowingly pierced the Veil, this pocket dimension remained. In the time between the Helfay and 543, the creatures that came into being within the Veil had found what would become the World Behind and made it their home. Altered over the years by the sleeping souls of the elves, these creatures took on humanoid forms and through this connection learned the general idea of how the place came to be. With the return of magic to the Known World, it was only a matter of time before someone noticed the strange disturbance resting under Loaerth City and found a way through to it.
It was a blacklisted hex magician who broke through first, and after making what amounted to a peaceful (if scream-filled) agreement with the occupants, he opened Loaerth City’s largest black market. Things started small, but the exotic nature of both the space and its unknown nature allowed for much more freedom in merchandise selection. Word spread at a moderate pace within the seediest elements of the City’s underbelly, and as of 550 AH, getting Behind the Black Door is still on a need to know basis. The scope of the World Behind, however, far outpaces its current clientele. Able to accommodate upwards of twenty to thirty thousand humans or elves at a time, the most it has ever had within is around eight hundred. Of these eight hundred, several individuals may as well be ten thousand laypersons for the power they wield. The draw for these influential people is not only the pleasure and strangeness to be had, but the uniqueness of the items to be bartered, bought and sold. You find nothing ordinary here.
For all anyone knows, the last vestige of a god’s human lifetime might rest forgotten on a shelf in someone’s back room.
Edited by Shaun Welch
This I like a lot. It will give us GMs and creators lots of ideas to throw out against our players as well as a level of intrigue. I am curious what Hex is all about, as well as what the interior of the Black Room is supposed to look like. I already have ideas, just curious what Canon will be.
Next statement is that when I read it the first time it was Exit out the Back Door, which fits in also, so nice play on words.
This alone makes me want to get the final product.
Glad you like it. You’ll see more of the Black in the future, though perhaps not in a way you’d expect (that’s a good thing, trust me!). As for appearances, the World Behind is like that Prison in that it is constantly shifting, but not because of some alien intelligence or what have you. Instead, the whims, desires and and perversions and those who walk its dark byways shape what it looks like. And who’s to say? Perhaps it looks completely different to two people standing side by side, staring at the same building, wanting for the same luxurious sin.