Martira Bay

The Docks: Where barnacle-ridden ships drift in without crews, and the gulls have long since left. Fog swallows the wharves. Whispers claim things come out of the sea—not men, but things that wear men.

Fogdown: The poorest part of the city, riddled with tenements, soot-stained churches, and opium crypts. People disappear here nightly. The constables won’t investigate, but the killers do.

High Martira: A district of wealth and revelry, where the city’s elite pretend the Mists are nothing more than weather. Behind the façades of manors and opera houses, cults and covens perform blood rites, and the nobility wager souls at invisible auctions.

The Cathedral Quarter: Centered around a great half-burned cathedral whose bells no longer ring. Some claim the bells toll on their own—only to warn of the next killing.

The fog has birthed a strange pantheon of killers whose legend and horror grow daily. Some say they are manifestations of the city's soul, while others claim they are merely humans twisted by Martira Bay’s indifference.

• The Midnight Slasher: Strikes only at the witching hour. Victims show no signs of struggle, only perfect, bloodless incisions. Some whisper he moves through reflections.
• The Spider: Leaves victims suspended in impossible webwork, their limbs arranged in precise artistic configurations. Police have arrested the same “man” twice—each time, a different person with identical memories.
• The Weeping Woman: A cloaked figure seen crying in doorways before disappearances. Survivors (rare as they are) say she sings lullabies in a voice that scrapes the soul.

Martira Bay is best known for its fog—thick, silvery-grey, and ever-present—curling through avenues and alleyways even at midday. Footsteps echo too long, voices vanish into the mist, and every shadow seems to breathe when unobserved.

In this city, death walks freely.

• Serial killers stalk the streets, drawn by unknown compulsions or perhaps the city’s own quiet hunger. Authorities speak in hushed tones of the Midnight Slasher, who leaves behind barely a trace; the Spider, who weaves intricate body-art with their victims; and the Weeping Woman, a figure seen before disappearances, never after.
• Corruption and apathy infect the constabulary, many of whom have been quietly bought off—or replaced—by the very criminals they claim to pursue.
• Nobles, merchants, and mad poets continue to thrive amid the decay, holding masquerades and salons where blood is spilled as art, and conspiracies spin from rumor to reality with alarming ease.

Though much of Darkon crumbles inward, Martira Bay persists. It thrives not in spite of, but because of its horrors. The people have grown used to it—too used to it. Some even worship the Mists, believing the city is favored, preserved from Darkon’s decay for some unknowable purpose.

But something worse is coming.

• The fog has begun whispering names.
• The killers are coordinating.
• A single candle burns above the cathedral, even though no one lit it.
• And from the sea, shapes move beneath the waves—shapes with too many eyes, too many thoughts.

Martira Bay is a city of Gothic urban horror. Its horror lies not in monsters, but in the banality of evil—how cruelty becomes custom, how despair becomes the civic religion. The people do not fight back against the city’s decay; they dress it in velvet and call it home.

The streets teem with:

• Masked balls that end in ritual sacrifice.
• Back-alley doctors who remove more than wounds.
• Street prophets preaching doom in rhyming canticles.
• Painters who use blood, composers who only write requiems, and playwrights whose works cause madness when performed.