Armoury

The Armoury

Location: Sigil / Lady’s and Lower Ward border

This massive fortress-forge is the Doomguard’s faction headquarters. It occupies an entire city block, straddling the border between The Lady’s and Lower Wards of Sigil. The building is an ominous hulk of gray stone that rises some 24 stories into the smoggy skies of the Cage. It has even fewer windows than the Prison. The entire exterior of the Armoury, with the strange exception of the square towers that are located at each corner of the building, is covered by an uncontrolled tangle of razorvine. The building’s height is doubled by a series of flying metal buttresses that serve mainly to provide protection for an open shaft that plunges straight through the centre of the entire structure. A tremendous blast of heat and light fills this shaft at all hours of the day and night. This comes from the huge weapons forge that occupies the heart of the first floor of the Armoury. 

This floor is the only one open to the public. But since this is the faction’s headquarters, the Doomguard won’t just let any basher in off the street. First, the prospective visitor is subjected to a harsh security check, and then he must pass through an anti-magic barrier just in case the searchers miss anything. Once past the guards, the visitor is finally free to enter an exhibition hall that is open 24 hours a day. This multistory room takes up the front quarter of the building, allowing the Doomguard to display samples of all the weapons that are sold or made by the faction. Just beyond this hall is a pair of offices, one for buying weapons and the other for selling them. The remaining space on the ground floor is taken up by the workshops where the various weapons are built. In addition to the main forge in the centre of the building there are four secondary forges, one located in each of the corner towers. Customers are allowed to visit these rooms, provided their desire and purse are large enough, but they must be accompanied by a faction member at all times. 

The remaining 23 floors of the Armoury are restricted to factioneers only. They house treasuries, barracks, meeting rooms, practice halls, and storerooms of weapons not available to the public. These chambers are arranged in a confusing pattern resembling a maze. Part of this is simply due the centuries of use by the Entropy Rats; many floors have been gutted and occasionally rebuilt to suit the natures of the various fractions as they have alternately gained and lost influence in the faction. But this style of floor plan is primarily the result of deliberate actions from the Doomguard; they have resisted any obvious or orderly lay out of the rooms so as to foil the efforts of invaders or spies. In general, the higher up in the Armoury a factioneer has their quarters, the greater their rank and the more influence they have in the affairs of the Doomguard. The topmost floor contains only quarters and offices for the Factol and the Doomlords (although some of these suites are used as guest rooms since four Doomlords live in the faction’s strongholds on the Negative Quasi-Elemental planes). As the faction’s headquarters, the Armoury is the busiest and most heavily populated of all its strongholds. The building can house in excess of 15,000 troops, but only a fraction is present at any given time. 

The Armoury, much like the faction itself, has its own share of secrets. The most obvious of these concerns the four corner towers and their lack of razorvine. Since the Doomguard believe in the decay of all things, it’s fairly certain that the faction isn’t trimming the plant—especially since they let it grow unhindered over the rest of their headquarters. No one outside of the faction, as well as all of the namers and factotums, has figured the real reason for this discrepancy. There is no razorvine on the towers because even this relentless plant can’t grow in two places at the same time. Somehow, each tower exists as part of both the Armoury in Sigil and one of the faction’s elemental strongholds at the same time. The ground floor entrance to each structure is actually a portal to its respective citadel that is activated by a Doomguard symbol held face up in an open hand. 

Only the Doomlords and the Factol know the other major secret of the Armoury, and even they don’t know the full dark of it. Beneath the central forge, deep under the foundations of the building, lies a chamber built entirely from bones. A ring of pillars made of skulls supports a vaulted ceiling built from thighbones. The walls are also made from skeletal remains. It is within this ossuary that the Factol and the Doomlords meet to discuss and decide faction policy. Since the Doomguard did not build the Armoury, the faction’s high-ups don’t know who constructed this chamber. On the few occasions when they have asked the dabus about this room, the Lady’s caretakers were even more enigmatic and vague than usual. However, despite these mysterious origins, the leaders of the faction have managed to discover one thing about this chamber of bones – it can be used to cast a powerful variant of speak with dead. In order to so, the target’s bones must be incorporated into the structure of the room. The high-ups have put this ability to good use by placing the skeletons of past factols in the walls and pillars, thus allowing them to consult with past leaders of the faction about particularly difficult issues that the current leadership of the Doomguard is unable to solve on its own. 

Source: Ken Lipka