This post concerns itself with specific landmarks in Evernight. A lot of them are “coterminous” with Neverwinter landmarks, occupying the corresponding location in space and having the exact same boundaries.

Black Mound

The district of Black Mound is named that because of the hill that dominates it. It’s coterminous with the Protector’s Enclave in Neverwinter. The houses and manors here are larger than in the rest of Evernight, but just as dilapidated. Undead are not known for their tidiness.

Most of the city’s relevant landmarks are here.

House of Screams

Located in the same spot as Neverwinter’s Hall of Justice, the House of Screams is the oldest manor in the city and the closest thing Evernight has to a courthouse or city hall.

The Tribunal holds court in the upper levels. When it’s time to adjudicate a dispute, they slam iron portcullises over all exits until the session is done, because as mentioned in the previous post the ghouls eat the losers. They do find vampires to be a particular pain in the neck to deal with, as they can transform into mist and fly through the grates.

The House’s wide open cellar works as an arena where citizens can work out their problems without getting the Tribunal involved. There’s usually some bored ghouls, wights and vampires hanging around hoping to watch a fight or three, and they will gladly act as witnesses to confirm that the few rules of engagement were obeyed by both parties.

Temple of Filth

Coterminous with the House of Knowledge in Neverweinter, the Temple of Filth used to be dedicated to Bhaal and Myrkul, ancient gods of murder and death who died during the switch-over from AD&D 1e to AD&D 2e. Now it’s dedicated to Orcus and Dorensain.

All of the temple’s decorations, including its altar and holy symbols, are built from corpses and corpse bits. No special care is taken to preserve these bits. They’re just replaced with new ones when they rot away. Ewwww.

The undead of Evernight sometimes ask the priests here to resolve their disputes, because they tend to demand services from both parties instead of eating one of them like the Tribunal does. The temple’s chief priest is Ursuntos, whose stats are those of an Adept of Orcus (Level 6 Controller, from the MM3). He has a bunch of ghoul and vampire underlings, and his political power in the city is second only to the Tribunal’s.

The grounds of the Temple are considered both defiled and necrotic ground as per the DMG2. Very cursed, but surprisingly not quite as cursed as the Dread Ring, which has additional effects on top of that.

Pool of Daylight

Deep within the temple, behind a bunch of locked doors, traps and magical darkness areas, is a literal pool of radiance (is this a name drop?) that shines as bright as the world’s mid-day sun. Any undead entering its chamber suffers terrible pain, and touching the pool can actually destroy the weaker among them. This is here as the ultimate security measure, for the pool is said to hide an artifact at its bottom that works as a weapon of mass destruction against undead. The Temple doesn’t want anyone else getting a hold of this.

Good thing living PCs don’t need to fear the light, huh? This could be just the thing to use against those pesky Thayans and Shadovar.

The Graveyard

Evernight’s Graveyard occupies the same area as the pauper section of Neverwinter’s own graveyard. Despite the name, and despite being absolutely filled with crypts and tombs and graves, from the point of view of the city’s ghouls this place is a restaurant.

You see, when an Evernight ghoul catches a living “tourist”, they don’t eat right away. Instead, they take the paralyzed victim to a place called Lamantha’s Mortuary, where the resident necromancer will inject them with longer-term paralytics. Then the ghoul arranges for a “funeral procession” for the still-living victim, who is buried alive in the Graveyard. Only after the victim has died and “ripened” a bit does the ghoul crack open the coffin and eat.

Corpse Market

Coterminous with the “rich” section of Neverdeath in the world, this is exactly what it says on the tin. A market where undead merchants sell meals to undead customers who are too busy to catch their own. From preserved blood for vampires to assorted corpse bits for ghouls to necromantic supplies, you can find all of that here for affordable prices.

This is also the place to go if you want to hire undead labor. Renting a zombie laborer costs 10gp per day and requires leaving a chunk of your flesh as collateral. The chunk is alchemically preserved, so it stays fresh and can be reattached later. While it’s missing, you lose a healing surge.

You might also be able to hire undead guides for about 100gp per day. Some of these guides might be able to smell specific “flavors” of death from a long distance away, so they might be useful to an Uthgardt Barbarian who wants to find their tribe’s missing thunderbeast skeleton, or to PCs looking for Gauntlgrym. Undead guides charge a premium for going into particularly dangerous places, refuse to fight for their clients and might in fact run away if a fight breaks out. Other than that, though, they’re reliable as long as they’re getting paid.

A creepy old man known as the Resurrectionist wanders the Market every day, looking for a piece of someone specific he wishes to bring back to life. He never finds the right one, so he keeps coming back to continue searching. He’s been at this long enough that most standard resurrection magic wouldn’t work any more, but the man guarantees he can bring anyone back no matter how long it’s been.

There’s a fenced off area here that contains warehouses and some of the merchant’s residences. While anyone can walk through the market, unauthorized people caught in this area are assumed to be prowling thieves and are killed on sight.

Dark Creeper Enclave

This large manor close to the Graveyard is the Netherese consulate on Evernight. The Netherese pay a family of Dark Ones, the Glumguts, to mind the place. They don’t have any official authority - their job is to maintain the house, serve any actual dignitaries in the rare occasions they stay here, and receive any packages dropped off at the embassy.

Family members like to supplement their income with the occasional spot of burglary or robbery, though they are careful to restrict their activities to the living (who can do less about it). They also only target Thayans if they can get one of them alone, to avoid reprisals.

This is a proper gothic family too: their patriarch Blackclaw, a dark stalker (level 10 lurker), rules them through fear. The only ones who have the courage to defy him are his young cousins Thrax and Vinnia, and his son Blackcut. The trio believes they’re protected by Blackcut’s relation to his father, and free to do whatever they want. The truth is Blackclaw simply doesn’t know most of what they’ve been up to, and will be livid when he finds out. Their shenanigans have actually been quite detrimental to the family’s duties.

Thayan Outpost

The Thayans are based out of a warehouse near one of the city’s haunted piers in the Black Mound. They have a permanent garrison here commanded by Katrice Ansar (stats as a human hexer from the MM2, Level 7 Controller). She’s convinced they are being watched by Shadovar spies besides the obvious dark creepers, but has yet to find them.

Near the warehouse, in an abandoned neighborhood, is an iron gate that acts as a “dusk crevice” linked to Neverdeath cemetery. It’s guarded around the clock by a unit that includes undead loyal to the Thayans.

Locations Outside Black Mound

There are only three of these described here.

Lamantha’s Mortuary

Mentioned above in the Graveyard description, this is run by a living human necromancer named Lamantha who works as a mortician and taxidermist.

One of her main jobs is preparing mortal victims for burial in the Graveyard, which she does by injecting them with long-term paralytic drugs and dressing them up. She can also disguise undead so they look like living people through wardrobe and makeup adjustments, and she can turn bodies or bits of bodies into trophies and tools (or sporting equipment, as the book makes sure to mention).

Since she provides valuable services, the rulers of Evernight gave Lamantha citizenship and allow her conduct her research in peace. Only the necromancer herself knows its precise nature - it’s something to do with observing the nature of growth and change among undead. Maybe she’s a necro-sociologist?

Despite being completely amoral and quite unhinged, Lamantha is happy to receive living visitors and get the latest gossip from the middle world. PCs who are polite to her might be able to use the mortuary as a safe place to rest for a couple of days, though she will become impatient with them if they overstay their welcome.

The Demon Pit

Coterminous with Neverwinter’s Chasm, this opened up at the same time, though it did not disrupt “life” in the cursed undead city nearly as much as it did on the living one. Like in Neverwinter, the average civilian does not know why this rift opened up, nor what’s down there.

Evernight’s inhabitants call their rift the Demon Pit because rumor has it that it goes all the way down to Dorensain’s kingdom in the Abyss. No one tried to explore it, but they sometimes throw living mortals into the Pit as sacrifices to Orcus and Dorensain. That’s more of a folk ritual than established Temple practice, mind you.

Like the Temple of Filth, this area counts as both defiled and necrotic ground, and is still not as cursed as the Dread Ring.

Castle Nowhere

Coterminous with Castle Never. It looks much more intact and much creepier than its worldly counterpart, and not even the most ancient of Evernight’s undead citizens can tell when it was built. Like a few other places we’ve seen in previous posts, Castle Nowhere only exists sometimes, vanishing and appearing in a ten-day cycle.

No one in Evernight knows much about what goes on inside the castle. They avoid going in because, get this, they think it’s haunted. This is hilarious, but it also makes you wonder what kind of haunting would scare an undead city.

Some of the legends about the place say that if you’re inside the castle when it vanishes, you don’t come back when it does. Others say that the ghosts inside it feed on the hunger of others. This means they can cause the living to starve to death, but they can also cause a ghoul or vampire to become trapped in a state of eternal starvation and use them as permanent food sources. A fate worse than a second death!

There’s a box here with a power you can add to any incorporeal undead creature to make it into a ghost of Castle Nowhere. Consume is a melee attack vs. AC that removes the target from play and inflicts 10 ongoing damage (save ends both). The target reappears adjacent to the monster when they make their save.

Living creatures reduced to 0 HP by this reappear normally and become immune to the power for the rest of the encounter. They make death saves and can be healed as normal. Undead reduced to 0 HP do not die, and remain trapped until willingly released by the ghost, or until the ghost is destroyed.

Impressions

That’s a proper creepy city, yes indeed. There’s more than enough material to fuel a whole horror-themed campaign, though I suspect most typical groups who are focused on other stories wouldn’t want to linger here too long.

Still, there are good reasons to visit the place. That artifact hidden in the Pool of Radiance would be extremely useful to wreck the Thayans, for example, and if the PCs want to follow the Shadowfell Road to their home base they would also need to start at the Thayan outpost in Evernight.

Castle Nowhere would make an awesome dungeon, but as written there’s barely any reason for PCs to enter the place. Perhaps they could use it to lure and trap a powerful undead foe like Valindra, or maybe the quickest way to access the Tomb of the Nine is by entering Castle Nowhere and crossing to the world through a dusk crevice.