The Shadowlands

The Shadowlands, also known as the Underworld, Limbo or Purgatory, is the Shadow Realm of Earth.  It is the stillborn twin of the lands of the living, home to those wraiths and shades who, through an inability to let go of the emotional fetters of their mortal existence, are unable to pass through to the next world.

To those in the Shadowlands, the living world is visible as a decaying shadow of its true self: buildings appear rotted and condemned, roads cracked and pitted, all things seen as if through the eyes of death.  Mortals can also be seen but as pale, translucent forms - much as mortals perceive shades on those rare occasions the sight is reversed.  The Shadowlands is a place born of intense emotion and feeling, so the more emotion a place inspired in the living lands, the more concretely it appears.  Some buildings long lost in the mortal realm still exist in the Shadowlands, memories draped like cobwebs over the newer constructions that stand in their place.

The Veil between this Umbral realm and the lands of the Quick is strongest in places like lecture halls and laboratories, and weakest in cemeteries and 'haunted houses'.  The latter are created by strong, dark emotions, which eat away at the Veil and allow wraiths access to the mortal realm.

Between the cities of the dead, where in the living lands one finds the oceans, one finds in the Underworld the eternal storm called the Tempest.  A few 'ghost ships' are able to navigate this endless maelstrom, but to most the Tempest is a place of swirling devastation and rage.  It is the raw fury of the Shadowlands given form: fragments of memory fall in an endless rain, while the shrieking of the wind is the howls of all those souls who leave only pain as relics of their existence.

The greatest of the cities of the dead is Stygia, the City of Sorrows.  It is a place built of fallen citadels from the full breadth of history, where houses from Victorian England stand next to ancient temples of Greece and relics of the Somme are carried by spectres who fought at Carthage.  Stygia travels from location to location at the whim of its dark ruler, from the sands of Egypt to the battlefields of Bosnia; wherever there is need of guidance and order for the recently deceased.  

At the centre of the City of Sorrows is the Tower, once the greatest building of ancient Babel, yet in the Underworld even more massive and imposing.  Within those mighty walls can be found the Hierarchy, those potent wraiths who rule their kin as they seek an end to their chains of emotion, and over them all stands Charon himself, the Lord of the Dead.

Charon has had many names and titles over the centuries: Anubis, Hades, the Ferryman; some even call him Azrael, Archangel of Death and Guardian of the Restless Dead.  What is known is that he is an entity beyond any concerns save his duty to his subjects, his power immeasurable, his thoughts incomprehensible to any lesser being.

Recently, however, all this has changed.  A spate of spectral activity and sightings in the mortal realm led the Parallax Club to the Shadowlands.  There they found the shades of Stygia being gathered into an immense army of the dead and the forms of their commanders touched with tendrils of darkness and evil.

It later emerged that the Hierarchy themselves had begun these preparations, those great lords of the Underworld having been corrupted by an outside force.  That force was revealed to be the Black Abbot, himself only recently killed by John Henry, but there was even worse still to come.

Charon himself had been corrupted, the Deathlord brought low by the machinations of The Black Taminou.  With a being of Charon's power under the control of the Wyrm, there is cause for great fear in both the lands of the living and the dead.