The Intro

You stand atop the Hive's tallest tower “The Heaven's Reach”, and look out over the city's boundaries to the horizon.

A world where there are known to be anomalies, miniature tornadoes, black holes, and randomly appearing figures that seem to be impenetrable and frozen in time: it is an unstable plane. Wizards have a strange place in this world, as if they are another race, their magical powers allowing them status, they are feared and honored at the same time. Every time an arcane spell is cast, there is a chance of an anomaly occurring. For this reason churches often advocate anti-magic, as if their prayer, lacking in arcane lineage, is not considered magic.

It is an unstable plane, in the way that time and space do not act adhesively, easily tearing apart, as if physical constants are not constant. If you climb to the highest building and look out upon the earthy wastelands surrounding the Hive City of Guilds you see vast stretches of wet dull soil. Grass does not grow easily in this soil, instead meadows of bright red roses compliment the large red sun that waxes as it crosses the sky from north to east each day. Most days are cool, even when the sun is blazing, and there are not often clouds. Clouds are a bad omen, leading quickly to violent black storms. Because of the great open land, you can easily see the main roads from the top of your tower, as they snake out to smaller medieval towns, and into crevices where the earth has cracked and swallowed whatever used to be residing on top.

Some of these huge cracks in the soil glow a fluorescent purple, and small specs can be made out, those that are presumed to be the fabled 'floaters' that seem to come from the purple light. They are no threat, as they do not stray from their cracks, but those who have approached the floaters have never returned to tell a tale. It is presumed these cracks are the strongest anomalies.

The Hive City is purely made of stone and mortar, the accumulation of Castle built on collapsed castle, upon castle. Each generation and layer of rooms are salvaged by the lower class peasants, rebuilt into hundreds of hallways and rooms until the city is much like one large castle. There is no machinery, and there is very little magic – engineers are unknown, and magicians have been partitioned out of the city into their own bounds, because of the effect they have on the environment around them – a bit like a factory district being separated from living quarters, the wizards have their own quadrant of the city literally separated by a river-bound moat.

Highways run through the city, horse and cart creating deep ruts in the stone as they clobber back and forth through the stone tunnels that lead to the heart of the city. You will find many peasants have not seen the light of day, the colour of the red sun since they are too poor to pay for a trip to the outside, and it is too far to walk. Many citizens suffer from some kind of lung disease caused by the smoke of the of torches burning to keep the dark tunnels and rooms (read: buildings) light. As such, the deeper you climb into the city, the dirtier and hotter it becomes, until the very center is used as the blacksmith's furnaces and the city's sewers, manned by the Warforged and Golems – few living creatures can stand the constant overbearing heat.

The sewers are simply an integrated system among the clusters of homes and shops. Food has an economy of it's own: flagged in from the wizard's district by thousands of familiars, each with their shop-front at the boarder of the Wizard's district, each taking care of the financial transactions for the wizards as they cart food into the city for profit. It goes the other way, too, where dealers of raw materials sell to the familiars. As such, many wizards make a living in the food industry, magicking fruit, wine and bread. Many men cannot stand to deal with speaking cats and rats and pseudo-dragons, and no one dares cross or kill a familiar animal, for fear that a wizard come after them.

Those rare magic users that do not so boringly fuel the food economy are usually dangerous types, their minds set on a higher tier of achievement, studying the nature of the plane they live in, or simply furthering their own knowledge of magic – they are known to be destined for great deeds, good or evil not withstanding.

Crime is not a problem in the city, as crime is regulated by a 'guild'. It seems there is a guild for everything. Any unsanctioned happenings are dealt with, but you are sure that there are many unknown and unregistered groups.

There is another city that the hive castle trades with for raw materials. They seem a lot more normal, but what do you know about normal? The hive is all you have known. You can see it far in the distance, about where the horizon slides off. It has farms, with rich green grass, and the buildings are separate, and keep low to the ground, though, the area it takes up seems much larger than your city.