DOMAINS

The first consideration when building a haven is what domains you’ll attach to it. It will have the Haven domain as a matter of necessity (otherwise it isn’t really a haven to begin with), but consider what other domains will influence the haven and pick one or two to give it some flavour. Below are some examples of how each domain might influence a haven.

CURSED: The pub basement has a huge and hungry mouth growing out of the wall, and local kids sneak in and dare one another to stick their hands in it; the Hounds here have made a moat of something which looks (and smells) like stomach acid, with cilia writhing under its surface; there’s a large heartsblood enclave within the settlement, and travelling cleavers often visit to pay their respects.

DESOLATE: A forgotten civilization used this platform to extract something vital from the earth, and now trackless blasted wastes surround it; the settlement is pinned to the walls of a chasm and the people shelter in caves, trying to ignore the rumblings in the dark below; this place used to be a temple, but generations of pilgrims hungry for souvenirs have scraped all the iconography from the walls.

OCCULT: The haven is a school, of sorts – students come here if they want to learn real magic, and some even survive the process; at the centre of the settlement is a shifting brass and iron plinth of enormous complexity which attracts meditative occultists; the haven is an ongoing, centuries-long magic ritual, and few of the inhabitants are sure of its purpose.

RELIGION: Exiled from the Temple of the Moon Beneath, this splinter group (The Dominion of the Sunken Sun) offers succour to travellers along with reams of promotional material; they say an angel of Charnel, blood-caked and glorious, bathes in the waters here and heals the sick; a maddening place where loud bells are rung multiple times a day (and without discernible warning) to celebrate the majesty of a god they can only name through music.

TECHNOLOGY: The haven walks unsteadily on many creaking legs to wherever the council of Engineers (a gnoll, two humans and a ghost) decides it needs to be; the Vermissian Collective built a thinking-engine here out of carefully harvested consciousnesses, and feed it questions like an oracle; the valves and switches at the centre of this haven allow control of the environment and shape of the settlement, but three rival sects with different editions of the user manual are vying for control.

WARREN: Tradition dictates that the church should be demolished every twenty years and a new one built on its ruins, and now the sub-basements extend over a hundred feet under the earth; standing up to your full height is bad luck round these parts, so the bent-backed inhabitants build their ceilings low for good fortune; this place is a working mine where teams of excavators chip away at rocks to extract winged, humanoid fossils.

WILD: The houses are built on stilts to keep them out of stinking water that fizzes with luminescent insects; everyone has at least one heartsblood pet and fewer than the recommended number of fingers; huge and flightless megacorvids croak and lunge around the place in search of food or a sleeping spot, and the inhabitants view them as sacred creatures.