Gaslight Outcasts

 

Outcasts & Outlands : The Shunned of the Gaslight World

The Shunned of the Continent of Anhedonia exist in wretched destitution, cast out from the flickering glow of civilisation into the mire of the Outlands. 

Their dwellings - haphazard hovels of mud-brick, rotting wood, sodden rags, and packed filth - barely keep the endless damp and green slime at bay. They scrabble in the mud for Bloodleeches, though the creatures feast upon them as often as they are eaten. Some leeches swell larger than a man, capable of swallowing one whole, and whispered tales among the Shunned speak of Leviathans of the Bog, great writhing horrors that consume entire hamlets in the dead of night. Certainly, there are villages that vanish without a trace, their remnants sucked into the abyssal sludge.

Beyond the choking mist and skeletal trees, beyond the endless drizzle that turns all to ruin, there is but one true city on the continent. Around it, small towns and their satellite villages cling to the edges of necessity, forming where resources dictate their survival: mining settlements gouged into the iron-toothed mountains, logging camps at the fringes of the labyrinthine Maze-Wood, salt-crusted port towns where the sea is both bounty and executioner, and sprawling plantations where pale, sickly crops grow in defiance of the land’s slow rot.

But between these islands of industry lies the Outlands - a grey, forgotten expanse where the Shunned fade into the mire, swallowed by the fog, the leeches, and the ever-hungry dark.