The Nightside

The Nightside is one of the additions to the revised Krevborna setting book that I'm most proud of. The idea of a dream-like realm of aestheticized horror has its appeal as a point of contrast from Krevborna's more standard Gothic atmosphere. Inspired by things like Thomas De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and films like Jean Rollin's Fascination and Jim Henson's Labyrinth, the Nightside offers a change of pace where you can explore the thin boundary between the real and the unreal.

The Nightside

Among other more mundane intoxicants, Veil’s sordid drug dens peddle midnight bell, a greenish-gold, magically enhanced opium that allows the user to travel to the Nightside—a phantasmagorical dream of Veil as it was in better times. 

    • When midnight bell is smoked in Veil, one’s mind leaves their body behind as an inert and insensible husk in the "real" world as their spirit is clothed in new flesh to wander and explore what the town’s residents call the Nightside. 

    • The Nightside is an endless aesthetic dream; in the Nightside’s version of Veil, it is always the height of wondrous night, the stars emit their luster in the darkened sky, the city is lit by thousands of paper lanterns, and the shining outline of the Shadow Moon presides over all. 

    • Where the real Veil is a land of poverty and deprivation, the Nightside is a world of glamour, decadent pleasures, and thrill-seeking.

    • Nothing is ordinary in the Nightside—everyone is beautiful, fashionable, and stylish. 

    • Sebastian Lee, an androgynous dandy never seen without his ornate cigarette holder, a foppish hat, and his crystalline walking stick, is the undisputed king of the Nightside’s electrifying nightlife. 

    • “Sebastian Lee” is a guise adopted by the Goblin King of the Unseelie fey.

    • Nightmarish monsters are born from the hazy smoke of burning midnight bell, which hangs in the air as a persistent miasma always fraying the edges of reality. 

    • The Nightside is entrapping; nothing but a yawning void exists beyond the forest that encircles the Nightside’s dream-like fantasy.

    • Smoking midnight bell is a vice known colloquially as “tolling the bell.”

    • Those who partake of midnight bell always eventually awaken from the Nightside’s lurid fantasia and must seek enough coin for another dose if they wish to return.

    • Few can resist the allure and mystique of Veil’s illusory echo, and those who try are wracked with the pains of withdrawal. 

    • If a mortal expires within the dream of the Nightside, their body also dies amid the squalor of its “real” iteration.