Last Chance
Location: Planes of Cordance / Nether
Last Chance is a burg hanging between the Outlands and the Underworld by its bony fingertips, a desperate pit stop for the planewalkers, and the last flicker before the lamps go out. It’s a crossroads for the desperate and the damned, cutters hoping for a miracle, a direction, or at least a final mug of bub before their fate comes calling.
CHARACTER: Last Chance ain’t the sort of burg you’d write home about—unless your idea of a warm welcome is dropping through a pit of quicksand and a crowd gathering to watch you coughing up half the bog on dusty paving stones. It’s bleak, dusty, wind-stripped and always on edge. It’s smells faintly of regret, stale booze the morning after, and the uncanny certainty that someone important just died here yesterday.
The burg sprawls around a wide, uneven square, and it’s here where planewalkers first tumble into view, spat out by the infamous Quicksand Gate of Semuanya’s Bog. They say you can see the hope drain out of a berk’s face as they stand there picking the pondweed out of their hair in the flickering lamplight, taking in the locals with their hollow eyes and chip-on-the-shoulder manners. The burg’s patched together—half shacks, half tents, all ramshackle—never finished, always in flux, as though the plane itself keeps coughing it up then trying to swallow it again.
Everyone knows what this place is for: it’s the last stop before true despair, madness, and the Underworld proper. There’s no glamour here, just necessity. And every service on offer is for the desperate, the scheming, or the terminally unlucky. The first piece of bad luck has already befallen the new visitor to Nether, for the gate from Semuanya’s Bog was a one-way trip.
WHO RULES: There are no kings, and no high priests in Last Chance. The closest they’ve got to a leader is Old Gannix (planar gnome illusionist [he/him] / NE), a gnome with a voice rough as broken glass and sharp as a plague doctor’s beak. Gannix keeps the peace, runs the barterboard (“nothing’s free, especially for the desperate”), and—if you’re new and have jink—tells you which way not to wander lest you find yourself in a god’s grave or in Tlaloc’s bathhouse without an offering.
WHO REALLY RULES: Who really tugs the strings? The market’s old matron, Mother Shroud (planar tiefling thaumaturge [she/her] / NE) rarely leaves her tent-inn The Shroud’s Rest, but everyone knows she decides who gets the supplies when the rations are low or the portals misfire. Rumour has it she’s half trader, half banshee, and altogether too well acquainted with the gods of endings. Some say she’s also the brains behind the shadowy syndicate of petitioners and undead, and oversees the running of the underground Last Deal—a service where the living can bargain for passage to the Underworld, or for messages to be delivered to the loved ones in the graveyard cities or Irkalla and Arali deep below Nether.
MILTIA: Defences? You’re kidding, right? Most bashers who show up here know how to handle themselves—and if they don’t they’ll be dead by dusk. Still, there’s a loose militia of Gatewatchers—hard cases recruited from those who didn’t have the coin for further passage or found their courage running out when the time came. The Gatewatchers run shifts keeping fiends, grave robbers, and dissatisfied petitioners from turning the place into open war. True emergencies (which are usually sahkil-related) see Old Gannix blow his balor-horn trumpet, calling in every favour and every burly, half-alive soul with a blade or spell to defend what little stands between Last Chance and the encroaching darkness.
PHILOSOPHY: If there’s a creed in Last Chance, it might be: “Anyone can die, but it takes a real cutter to live.” The town is a crucible of desperation and defiance. Survival, in whatever scrappy, half-dreamt form, becomes a kind of resistance against the final accounting. Some planewalkers seek redemption, some want oblivion, but everyone here faces the fundamental question of why push on aganst the darkness at all.
SERVICES FOR PLANEWALKERS
- Guides & Information: You’ll find a host of guides—some alive, some looking suspiciously spectral—offering ‘safe’ passage to various corners of Nether: to the shadow-drowned God’s Graveyard, the rain-drenched forests of Tlaloc’s Realm, or the yawning descent to Kur and its ever-waiting dead. Not all guides are trustworthy, and the best demand cheerful songs or stories, not just jink, as fare. Anything to lift the spirits in this plane of sorrow and remind them of happier times.
- Farewell Supply Depot: Last Chance’s hodgepodge market offers essentials for those venturing onwards—lanterns (which are never bright enough), prophylactic talismans to ward against curses or allow a cutter to pass unnoticed amongst the dead, cheap gourds filled with questionable bub, and packets of local gravebread (edible, just barely, but it doesn’t rot).
- The Shroud’s Rest: Mother Shroud’s shifty, tented inn is the only real shelter for planewalkers, offering a night’s sleep in exchange for secrets or the memory of a good meal—prices here are rarely paid for with coin alone.
- The Last Deal: For cutters with unfinished business: the Last Deal is a strictly off-the-books arrangement where the living can pay dearly to send word, gifts, or curses to the dead below, via a network of ghoulish couriers and whisper-mongers. It’s fronted by Piotr Marrowvich (planar dhampir rogue [he/him] / former Dustman / N) a renegade Dustman who was exiled from the faction for being too interested in sending messages to the other side.
- The Ferryman’s Obol: One ragged stall in the square is run by an anonymous, hooded figure who sells obol—the preferred coinage of marraenoloth and other ferryfolk of Lower Planar Rivers. This cutter is a Coins for the Dead (planar arcanoloth / NE) who ostensibly arranges passage on marraenoloth skiffs, the most reliable, and most eerie, way to leave the plane of Nether.
Why Come Here?
Last Chance itself is not a destination, and more the final opportunity a cutter will get to experience civilisation before they leave it all behind for the apathy of Nether. Some visitors are here by accident, after a one-way trip from Semuanya’s Bog. Some planewalkers stumble through just hoping for survival—fleeing debts, fate, or vendettas. Others come hunting for forbidden opportunity: using the burg as a launchpad into the God’s Graveyard for artifact hunting, or seeking to rescue the shade of a dead loved-one. Those cutters are the most desperate, and the least likely to return.
Sources: SGreen and Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: This location is homebrew.
