Duskmourn

Duskmourn
[[File:{{#setmainimage:Duskmourn.jpg}}|250px]]
Information
First seen	Duskmourn: House of Horror
Last seen	Duskmourn: House of Horror
Status	Unknown

For the set, see Duskmourn: House of Horror.

Duskmourn is a plane of the Multiverse inspired by horror media from the 1980s to the 2020s. It is introduced in Duskmourn: House of Horror in 2024.

Description

Duskmourn is a more modern looking world, including electronica like television sets, mechanical devices like chainsaws and 80's style fashion like sneakers. The entire story of Duskmourn occurs in a giant endless haunted mansion filled with horrors. The House is no ordinary building; it's a living, plane-spanning entity that thrives on the fear of its inhabitants. The rooms are constantly shifting. Sometimes there seem to be outside environments, but there is always a door or window leading to the next room. Everywhere appear the moths that are the symbol of Valgavoth.

History

Duskmourn, its former name now long forgotten, was once an advanced plane, both magically and technologically, that had started to become aware of the larger Multiverse. It was composed of three parts: a physical realm and two immaterial realms inhabited by spirits and demons respectively. However, the demon Valgavoth, who was imprisoned in a house within the physical realm, expanded the barriers of the House and swallowed the entire plane in a period of chaos known as the Ascension, folding the demon realm into the physical and pushing the spirit realm to the edges of the plane's boundaries with the Blind Eternities.

Before the Omenpath Era, Valgavoth spent a great amount of energy opening doors to other planes to capture unsuspecting victims, but now the process is much easier.

Locations

The physical realm makes up the vast majority of the plane. The demon realm, formerly a separate realm within the plane, has been folded into the physical realm, while the spirit realm exists separately on the fringes of the plane's space.

• The House. Once an ordinary dwelling possibly owned by the Vendrell family, it now encompasses the entire plane. Ruled by the demon Valgavoth, his consciousness has imbued the House with a base level of sentience and awareness of everyone inside. Though it is infinite, eternal, and all-encompassing on the plane, it is composed of five nebulous and ever-changing zones that each contain a series of "rooms," though they often bear little resemblance to normal rooms.
  • The Mistmoors (): Rooms in this zone are typically characterized by white stone architecture, billowing drapes, drifts of windblown sand, and flat gray skies with no visible sun. Vast, unsettling, and unnerving, this region is pervaded with silence.
    • The Valley of Serenity, a series of pastureland rooms that stretch across the Mistmoors and the Balemurk. At first glance, the valley seems peaceful and idyllic, but in truth it contains the Cult of Valgavoth's village.
  • The Floodpits (): Rooms in this zone tend to feature water in some form — liquid, solid, or gas — as well as water stains and wall-spanning banks of staticky screens. The Floodpits is home to the most physics-defying environments of the House, full of surreal passages and impossible architectural juxtapositions. The House Institute maintains a permanent base in a series of disused operating rooms in this region.
  • The Balemurk (): This dimly lit, ominous zone is filled with jagged crevasses and rotted floorboards dominate, along with septic marshes and withered flora. In its depths lies the basement of the original dwelling that was the House. A tunnel in the basement composed of Valgavoth's shed bodies leads to the Below.
    • The Below: A lightless underground chamber where Valgavoth resides, and from where he extends his tendrils throughout the rest of the House. Its location is the only fixed point in the plane, and it is rumored that the only true exit to the House exists within, though no one has ever ventured there and returned to confirm it.
    • The Valley of Serenity (Continued)
  • The Boilerbilges (): This zone is characterized by the most overtly treacherous terrain in the House, full of precipitous drops, jagged architecture, and belching flames. It is prone to violent, destructive events, like earthquakes and fire twisters, making it the most difficult to survive in.
    • The razor mazes, a series of elaborate death-trap rooms and torture chambers that serves as razorkin territory. In these areas, the House's geography has been modified to be even more convoluted.
  • The Hauntwoods (): The zone where the line between inside and outside is most blurred, as hand-shaped trees, venomous or carnivorous plants, thorny vines and brambles, and other vegetation invade rooms and even act as support beams for ceilings.

Inhabitants

• Humans are the original inhabitants of Duskmourn. Trapped within the mansion that now encompasses their former plane, they seek to survive the evil mustered by Valgavoth.
• Elves are seen among the survivors, though whether they originate on Duskmourn or from another plane is unknown.
• Cellarspawn, manifestations of Valgavoth's daydreams. When a cellarspawn catches a survivor, it overwhelms the person with pure terror until their mind collapses or their heart bursts. The resulting harvest is a dense, delicious morsel of terror that's considered a delicacy by cellarspawn. People harvested this way are reduced to spindrells, stripped-down psychic remnants of the victim that retain only a base level of consciousness, steeped permanently in terror. It's almost impossible to outmaneuver a cellarspawn or defeat it in open combat. The only way to escape is to evade it long enough that it loses interest in you. Cellarspawn have practically no sense of perseverance or memory, so if a survivor can avoid drawing its attention for long enough, eventually it will drift away on its own.
• Nightmares are born from the fears of survivors.
• Glimmers are the embodiments of survivors' hopes, dreams, and positive qualities. They are among the few benevolent forces existing in the House.
• Spirits known as glitch ghosts originate from what's left of the House's exterior. Coming through cracks in the walls, mirrors, and other such surfaces, their form become glitchy, being frozen with the same feelings they had at the moment of their death.
• Demons were common on the plane before Valgavoth's Ascension, but afterward, he hunted his brethren down one by one. Those that remain are weakened and fragmented, surviving only to plot their vengeance against Valgavoth.
• Aberrant Beasts known as beasties live throughout the House, providing protection to survivors in exchange for care and loyalty. They used to be household pets before the ascension.
• Gremlins are chaotic beings who delight in mischief and practical pranks. They indiscriminately antagonize both survivors and other denizens of the House.

Factions

Cult of Valgavoth

The Cult of Valgavoth is a cabal of worshippers dedicated to promoting the glory of Valgavoth. According to the cult, Valgavoth's fear-eating is a blessing: by devouring your fear, he can cleanse you of that fear and grant you protection from it. True paradise will only exist when Valgavoth has devoured all fear in existence, creating a world where all are safe. They call this the Gift of the Threshold.

To achieve this paradise, cult members enter cocoons that grow from the walls of their altar room, allowing Valgavoth to feed from them directly. This ritual is known as the Rite of the Threshold. Cultists who display undue fear or weakness of faith can be assigned extra time in the Rite. Some cultists have given so much of themselves to Valgavoth this way that they've drifted out of touch with human emotions, becoming little more than empty husks, hollowed out of anything but a desire to serve.

The cult views itself as steward of the House, responsible for maintaining it and ensuring its smooth running. Attendants make up the bulk of the cult's members and are tasked with basic maintenance. They patch up cracks in the walls, exterminate pests, and repair architectural damage. Strictors enforce the cult's rules and schedule its rituals. Cocooniers are keepers of the cult's rites and beliefs, in charge of the actual running of all rituals. The cult is led by the seneschal. He is the only person in the House who communicates directly with Valgavoth, and the only one who knows the path to Valgavoth's lair in the Below. The Imagora is the seneschal's inner circle of hand-picked advisors. They are charged with carrying out secret assignments that even the rest of the cult can't know about, sometimes occasionally even culling other cultists.

The cult prefers to avoid outright violence, but they aren't against wielding brute force if it's needed to keep a survivor from fleeing. Coercion and deception are the cult's preferred methods of gaining membership out of survivors. Outwardly, the cult presents an appearance of welcome and safety. Many a survivor who stumbles upon their village is lured in by the promise of clean beds, safety, and friendly faces. It isn't until the survivor has been lulled into complacency that the cult then reveals their true face and presents the survivor a choice: join of your own free will, or be forced to.

Razorkin

Razorkin are former survivors who now hunt the remaining survivors for their amusement. They thrive on pain and suffering, deriving pleasure from subjecting their victims to elaborate, punishing maze-traps or inventing new ways of keeping victims alive and in constant agony. When they can't find survivors to torture, they will turn on each other, or themselves, to satisfy their cravings. Though razorkin don't function as a cohesive group, most of them will listen to the directives of the Lord of Pain.

Once a razorkin has a victim in its sights, it will hunt them relentlessly. The only real way to fight back is to attempt to overpower and kill them instead — though they are known to come back even from death.

Survivors

Survivors are the last remnants of those who existed before the House swallowed up their homes. Smart, tough, and resourceful, most remaining survivors survived by adopting a nomadic lifestyle. However, their numbers are constantly dwindling as the House picks them off one by one. The occasional influxes of newcomers help bolster the survivors' numbers temporarily, but most newcomers meet with swift ends unless they're smart enough to adapt to their new surroundings in time or get lucky enough to get picked up by a group of veteran survivors.

Out of necessity, survivors have grown adept at improvising weapons, tools, and other devices from scraps around the House.

Though survivors tend to be disorganized, a few larger, organized groups exist:

• The House Institute is dedicated to investigating, analyzing, and recording the supernatural events of the House. Their goal is to find a way to end the House by finding its ultimate weakness. They maintain a permanent base in a series of disused operating rooms in the Floodpits, where they dissect and analyze any creatures they find.
• The Benefactors are a group of tough, resilient nomads who are the most knowledgeable about the House's geography. They frequently leave caches of supplies and materials around, marked for any other survivors who might need them.
• The Doorblades is a small band of ruthless survivors who execute assassinations of monsters of the House. They frequently collaborate with the House Institute, making use of the Institute's knowledge to guide their strikes. In exchange, they supply monster corpses and live specimens for the institute's experiments. Casualties among the Doorblades are high, but so are their kills.

Planeswalker visitors

• Aminatou
• Kaito Shizuki
• Niko Aris

Non-planeswalker visitors

• Nashi
• The Wanderer
• Tyvar Kell
• Zimone Wola