The Slab Settlement in Nostvary | World Anvil

The Slab

The slab is what happens when everyone ignores the Builders Guild and does what they want. With no respect for daylight or their neighbours, people started building on top of each other, burying homes under other homes and then adding rooms and roofs where they felt like it. The result is a mess of life so tangled that it defies any attempt to demolish it and swallows up any map maker foolish enough to pull out a tape measure.   Only the foolhardy enter and only the lucky escape.   In recent years enterprising souls have taken to leading small groups on tours of the slab. The authorities have banned the practice but as with all other government decrees it is ignored. When one of the tour guides, a Grom Stonehead, was approached by a local paper following up on reports of lost tourists the dwarf gave this reply;
'I'm only paid to take them in. If they want to leave they've got to buy another ticket. If some of them decide to find their own way out, that's up to them. You want a sausage?'
Grom Stonehead slab tour guide, brewer's mate, tax collector, all round good dwarf.

Demographics

Anyone that lacks two pennies to rub together. Predominately humans but also a sizeable group of dwarves. If any marsh elves live in the slab it has gone unreported.

Tourism

A favourite haunt of necromancers and trainee doctors. Tours of the slab are available, just make sure to purchase a return ticket since it's more expensive to buy one once you're completely lost and surrounded by a pack of ravenous rats.

Architecture

The inhabitants build their homes out of the ruins of others, supplementing the rotting timbers with anything they can steal or salvage from the river as such it is a jumble of angles with windows and doors opening onto each other and passageways that go nowhere.
It's forgotten to time and buried under several yards of detritus but there was a village on the site before the slab came into existence. One such building is a temple said to be over a thousand years old and dedicated to a god no longer worshiped. Generrations of slab dwellers have left it untouched, choosing to build their homes up and around it so that now the temple sits within a manmade cavern. Protected from the rain and the harsh glare of the sun the temple looks as it did when it was first built and the insides have been left as they were the day the last worshipper closed the door for no one dares go inside, for they can all hear the whispers coming from within.


Cover image: by DALL-E-3

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