Below are two locations in Chancel: the studio of my players' most-hated villain and a not-so-subtle commentary on the carceral state.
Gray Lily Studios
Chancel is home to Gray Lily Studios, the atelier and gallery of Pietra Sangino—one of the most famous painters in Krevborna.
• Gray Lily Studios is patronized by nobles, rich merchants, and powerful members of the clergy. Having one’s portrait painted by Pietra Sangino is guaranteed to be worth the extravagant cost when balanced against the social capital to be gained from being noted as one of her subjects.
• Sangino has pioneered arcane methods of using her art as a medium for magic. When she paints a person known to her, she doesn’t just capture their likeness—she also captures a bit of their free will and binds it to her will.
• Sangino can also create any monster by painting it on one of her specially prepared canvases. When the painting is finished, the creature springs forth from the canvas and obeys her commands.
Kholograt Prison
Koholograt Prison is an imposing edifice of gray stone surrounded by a tall walls topped with iron spikes and shards of broken glass.
• Within the prison, the inmates are subjected to corporal punishment, torture, and hard labor as a rehabilitating regime supposedly intended to reform them.
• Grigori Trask, the prison’s warden, lends prison laborers to farmsteads, plantations, and former feudal fiefdoms for a small fee, but the prisoners he brings them are strangely silent, tireless, and require remarkably little sustenance.
• The unspeakable truth is that the laborers Grigori sends are already deceased—he is a stern, unfeeling necromancer reanimating the corpses of the prisoners who die behind Kholograt’s grim walls. Even in death, they must work off their supposed debt to society.
