First appearance: Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG · watch it on YouTube
Dämmerung is a grim world of iron, dirt and endless twilight at the very edge of The Void. It is torn by a long war between living peoples and an army of constructs. In Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG, three agents of The Dread Fortress were sent there to chase a darkness that felt troublingly like The Shadow King. What they found was a front line, a desperate alliance, and a mind of war that threatens to spill out across the Void.
Description
Dämmerung lies in the far southeastern region of the Void. One portal-maker summed up the location as “like all the way on the edge. That’s gross.” His notes describe its weather in three words: “Constant Dusk, Overcast.” It is always dusk there, under a sky that never clears. Opening a way there took a heap of iron and dirt. He asked for “a lot of iron dirt.”
Where the party landed, Dämmerung was a battlefield. The front line divides two sides. The constructs fly banners marked with gears and build brutalist structures, while the living march under lavender and silver, or carmine and orange. Away from the trenches the world is surprisingly beautiful. There is open greenery and there are mountains, and further on, tall factory pipes rise from a large city framed against the peaks. Tunnels also run beneath the surface. The peoples of The Underdark fled up to the surface, and one of the world’s defenders speaks of protecting “the last of the Damaranians above and those below.”
Key places on Dämmerung include the Last City, Dämmerung Prime and the Planar Gate. Magic there is unreliable too. As Triss put it, “Magic wanes and waxes… it is unnatural.”
History
Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG
Dämmerung first came to the Dread Fortress’s attention through a seer named Stolas. When he asked whether they were familiar with the Shadow King, Grimnar answered, “Of course we are. But he’s dead. The Arbiter killed him,” referring to The Arbiter. Stolas’s divinations said otherwise: the Shadow King’s power was accumulating. The Void Domain had been mobilized, and squads were sent out to stamp out the threat while it might still be “in its infancy.” Stolas’s readings pointed to Dämmerung, “a rather bleak looking world,” where a growing darkness felt “very synonymous with the Shadow King’s.”
A portal-maker named Zzhitopp sent Grimnar, Nehebka and Muffy on their way. His map of the Void is a circle of movable beads, because the Void is always shifting and realms drop out of it “all the time.” He piled iron and dirt at a gate, chanted the world’s memorized coordinates, and stirred the burning materials into a red light. The portal opened with a great breath of air. “Well, Zzhitopp, you did it again, you bastard. Another beautiful portal.” He sent them off with a cheerful reminder: “Remember Dämmerung is overcast and it’s like always dusk there… Have fun, don’t die.”
Their arrival was suitably dramatic:
“The sky cracks open with a thunderous proclamation, and three stars plummet to the plane of Dämmerung below.”
The three landed unharmed, and a sigil of the Grandmaster burned into the earth beneath them before fading away. They had no time to admire it. All around them were shouted orders, the clash of metal, cracks of lightning and explosions. Someone was yelling “retreat, pull back, pull back, get everybody out of here,” and somewhere nearby, someone screamed for help as a life faded out.
Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL
Among the defenders, the party learned how bad things had become. The war had lasted about ten years. Grimnar wondered why no one had heard of it, and Nehebka asked dryly, “Are we to know about every ground conflict…?” The living had only called for help once The Warmind turned on them. By then, as Triss explained, “The Warmind seemingly casts an umbrella over Dämmerung,” intercepting and twisting any messages that tried to get out.
The party also heard that two others had arrived a day or two earlier. They claimed to be “some sort of advanced scouting party” but said nothing of the Dread Fortress. Stolas had told the trio that only they were bound for Dämmerung. A second team wasn’t standard practice, though it wasn’t impossible either. The trio also took stock of an ally named Gund, and Nehebka offered an ominous prophecy about him: “He is the single piece of sand that will break the hourglass… his actions shall be the ultimate downfall of Dämmerung.”
Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead
By now “five strangers” had appeared before one of the alliance’s defenders, each offering salvation from the nightmare loosed on Dämmerung. She and the alliance were all that stood between the Warmind, the Last City and the Planar Gate. She went to bed “terrified of the possibility of hope,” a tear on her cheek, thinking, “maybe, just maybe.”
The Physician laid out the stakes. If the alliance failed, the Warmind would march on the Last City and Dämmerung Prime, reach the Planar Gate, and spread across the Void. He admitted he was “so curious to see what the response would be” from the Dread Fortress, though he called it “a curiosity that I do not wish to see fulfilled. More of a nightmare.” Trissavin had no doubts about what the defenders would do: “We will fight. We will fight to our last breath. No matter the cost.”
The party then set out with Trissavin, Gund, the Physician, Grim and their retinues aboard an organic, insectile creature-vehicle that ran on tracks. It carried them far from the trenches, across green country and mountains and past the factory city. Then it dove into an underground tunnel and sped on for an hour of “horrific silence.”
Notable Figures
- Grimnar: A servant of the Dread Fortress sent to Dämmerung.
- Nehebka: Part of the Dread Fortress trio and the first through the portal.
- Muffy: The third member of the trio.
- The Warmind: The power whose shadow hangs over the whole world.
- The Physician: An ally who fears, and is perhaps a little curious about, what happens if the Warmind wins.
- Grim: Rode with the alliance on the journey away from the front.