Blackmouth Unveiled
Information on this page is available to awakened characters. It is otherwise to be considered OOC information.
Broken History
Before the Colonials
Founding of the Concilium of Arches
The Great Fire and the Rebirth
Upheaval and Detente
Modern Mysteries
Strangeness on the Broken City
The City of Arches
The Broken City
Blackmouth is a broken city. Other supernaturals and even Sleepers can feel something is wrong about the city, though most put it down to economic depression, the cold north Atlantic climate or the odd architecture. The Awakened feel it more keenly, the city’s broken geomancy pressing on their Peripheral Mage Sight in a thousand subtle ways. The most common forms these take are odd synaesthetic sensations or faint kinesthetic disturbances that pass as swiftly as they arrive, but some mages experience stranger sensations or find that they linger longer than most.
Deeper analysis by Focussed Sight and Unveiling spells reveals a world that is somehow cracked. The city’s leylines are so tangled and broken that the world seems to have cracked around them, bleeding curdled resonances and conceptual fragments through hair-thin cracks like spiderwebs from edges and corners throughout the city. The effect is most prominent where the leylines should be, but the cracks may be found anywhere and do not always remain in the same location.
The synaesthetic disturbances to mage Sight are stronger and more common near these cracks and other phenomena may also occur, often in the form of sleep disturbances, hallucinations, intrusive thoughts and emotional instability. Disruptions in the boundaries between worlds can also occur around these cracks, creating verges and irises where spirits, ghosts or other stranger entities may more easily slip through into the world or an unfortunate Sleeper may wander into an otherworld.
There have been many theories about these cracks since they were first discovered in the wake of the collapse of the Rebirth, but none have proven conclusive. Arguments over what the cracks are and how to deal with them were among the multitude of causes for the Upheavals of the 19th century, and they continue to be a Mystery worthy of obsession. The currently prevailing theory is that they are scabs where the Tapestry is healing from the wounds wrought by the Rebirth, not inherently dangerous but may act as a weak point where infection may penetrate the Fallen World from Outside.