Sotholo
Ah, Sotholo, now that’s a pit of misery and blue blight if ever there was one, sitting right there, sulking over that gargantuan sinkhole that goes straight down to the chaotic maelstrom of Vorganund, the 52nd layer of the Abyss, so it does.
Imagine a place perpetually in the grasp of an eerie twilight, where the sky is a perpetual bruise of storm clouds? The air there, it’s thick with the stench of despair and the ever-present aroma of that infamous blue dye they make here, a scent mingling between putrid and floral, sticking to everything it touches.
Run by gnoll slavers, and a nasty lot at that, relentless and cruel, they are. Wandering the rubble and ruin with a predatory grace, always sniffing about for fresh meat to sell. Governed by the thralls of Yeenoghu, who are an unforgiving bunch, with no ounce of mercy in ’em. With their sharp-eyed gaze and wild, frenzied manner, they’re ever ready to pounce and capture the poor sods wandering in this part of Pazunia.
The slave pens, a real sight they are. A sea of blue-dyed flesh, crammed into cages stacked high as a house. You’ve got the lowest of the low there, a woeful parade of lesser tanar’ri marked for the battlefield. Manes with their pitiful, whimpering demeanours, dretches with slack-jaws and vacant eyes, and those lumbering rutterkins with their brutish forms and dull wits, all herded together like cattle, awaiting their inevitable fate. They’re blue because of the woad dye that the gnolls brew here, made from scrub plants that grow in the overhang of the pit. Once added to the food of the slaves, it marks their skin or shells alike, and helps the gnolls to spot runaways.
And it’s a sight for sure cutter, when those blue demons charge in a battlefield, a flood of azure rage pouring forth. Though, in a twisted way, the sight has its own chaotic beauty, a blue canvas of violence paintin’ the battlefield with strokes of wild abandon.
But the town itself, it’s a sorry sight, a place where joy goes to die, y’know? Ruins and ramshackle buildin’s teeterin’ on the brink, overlookin’ that maw of a sinkhole that seems to swallow all light and hope. The terrain, a harsh mistress of jagged rocks and that peculiar scrub, vibrant and almost glowing, the source of that infamous blue dye, contrasting sharply with the desolate surroundings.
Canonical Source: Demonomicon [4e] p49 (short description), expanded by Jon Winter-Holt, mimir.net
