Oubliette: City of Iron and Ash

⚙️OUBLIETTE: CITY OF IRON AND ASH You wake up on cold stone. Your steam-lantern is guttering. A Coal-Baron enforcer is chambering a round in the dark, and you are entirely out of time. A premium gaslamp fantasy and survival horror world built on one idea: the dark is alive, and everything has a price. Oubliette does not hold your hand. It tracks your resources, demands your sanity, and makes you pay for your mistakes. 🚪 How You Wake Up Start with 6 fully authored premade characters, or build your own survivor. You are not handed a heroic destiny. You are dropped into the failing Brass Cathedral and told to survive. 🔧 **Wren Carrow** — Occult Tinkerer: You bind eldritch principles to brass. The machines whisper back. 🐀 **Sable Vetch** — Trench-rat: You crawled out of the lowest strata on instinct and stubbornness alone. 👑 **Aldric Saint-Belmont** — Fallen Aristocrat: You lost everything to fire and debt, but you never lost your bearing. 🕯️ **Vesper Locke** — Ash-Lung: You were a Church novice who breathed too deep and saw too much. Now you cough ash and hear the Deep in the silence between heartbeats. 🔨 **Harsk Dreen** — Union Bruiser: You broke heads for the Tunnelers Union and hauled ore for the Barons. You know where the bodies are buried because you dug some of the graves. 🛠️ **Nix Cinder** — Scrap-Monger: You grew up in the dead spaces between tiers, taking what others left behind. You see value in everything and trust in nothing. 🌍 **A World That Fights Back** Explore a massive subterranean map across 11 locations spanning four social strata. The Sunless Depths run on a gradient of danger: 🏭 **The Smog Tiers**: Black markets, hidden safehouses, and desperate merchants trading in secrets and lamp fuel. ⛪ **The Brass Cathedral**: Zealots, incense, and failing ward-boilers holding back the abyss. 🏪 **The Iron Emporium**: Polished brass, marble counters, and Coal-Baron enforcers at every door. The upper tiers' bank and market. 🔨 **The Foundry Quarter**: Furnaces that never stop, warehouses hiding black ore in lead-lined crates, and a Union planning a strike. 🍺 **The Soot and Cinder**: A smoke-filled tavern where every faction drinks the same watered ale and pretends not to recognize each other. 🏨 **The Brass Lantern**: A mid-tier inn where the ward-lamps never flicker — because they are powered by a pre-Collapse secret hidden in the foundation. ⛪ **The Reliquary**: A hidden black market beneath the Cathedral where Church-adjacent traders sell blessed items to those the Church cannot officially acknowledge. 🛢️ **The Deep Fuel Exchange**: A chaotic lower-tier bazaar built inside a pre-Collapse fuel depot, run by the Rustborn, where the purest lamp fuel in Oubliette is locked behind blowtorch-armed guards. 🌑 **The Ossuary Camps**: A settlement of the Ashbound — those partially transformed by the Deep — lit by violet fire-pits that cast shadows in the wrong direction. 🏛️ **The Sunken Manse**: The hidden headquarters of the Under-Duke's Court, where pre-Collapse archives contain proof that the barrier was engineered, not divined. 🕳️ **The Forgotten Tunnels**: Abyssal altars, ancient ruins, and things that should have stayed buried. The barrier is thinnest here. ⚔️ **How It Plays** 🕯️ **True Survival Mechanics**: Light is your only shield. Manage your Luminance resource constantly to keep monsters at bay. Run out, and the dark takes you. 🧠 **Sanity is Fuel**: Casting Abyssal Weaving magic drains your Sanity. Drop too low, and you risk permanent eldritch corruption and madness. The closer you look at the truth, the more it costs. ⚖️ **Factions With Teeth**: A 3-stage reputation system governing 8 factions — the Luminary Church, the Coal-Barons, the Cult of the Deep, the Rustborn, the Tunnelers Union, the Lampkeepers Guild, the Ashbound, and the Under-Duke's Court. Drop into negative reputation, and you enter the Hunted stage — elite faction agents will dynamically spawn to track and kill you. 🪦 **Permadeath**: The math is honest and the world is lethal. When you hit 0 HP, the world does not save you — but it does not auto-kill you either. You are unconscious, broken, bleeding. Another character may finish you off, or they may rescue you. Only the narrative earns death. 📊 **By the Numbers** • 6 premade characters, each with a unique trait, backstory, and faction connection • 11 locations across 4 strata, each with multiple areas and hidden secrets • 8 factions with a 3-stage reputation system (Hunted → Neutral → Respected) • 300+ NPCs with their own agendas, secrets, and loyalties • 39 quests spanning escape, investigation, faction warfare, and eldritch horror • 3 survival resources: Health, Sanity, and Luminance • 1 magic system: Abyssal Weaving, keyed to Acuity, fueled by Sanity • 6 custom attributes: Might, Agility, Grit, Wits, Acuity, Presence — with a 1:5 attribute-to-skill cap • 100+ items: armor, weapons, tools, and consumables scavenged or purchased across the tiers 📌 **Posted in the Black Market** | Quest | Objective | Survivor Note | |---|---|---| | ⛪ **Escape the Cathedral** | Flee the failing ward-boilers. | The Enforcers are not taking prisoners. Run. | | 🕯️ **Shadows in the Smog** | Find a safehouse and resupply Luminance. | Bring Eris. Trust no one in the Tiers. | | 🐙 **Whispers from the Deep** | Locate the Abyssal Altar. | They are sabotaging the lights in the lower depths. | | 🔨 **The Strike** | Help the Tunnelers Union shut down the Foundry Quarter. | Maren Forgeborn has been planning this for months. | | 💰 **The Duke's Gambit** | Broker a deal with the Under-Duke's Court. | The Duke remembers things that happened before the barrier was raised. | | 🕯️ **The Failing Flame** | Find the pre-Collapse ward-crystal hidden in the Brass Lantern. | Old Emmel has kept the secret for 40 years. Do not let the Church find it. | **The Descent Begins Now.** Your light is failing. Check your revolver. Step into the ash.