ah. fresh meat.
welcome to outpost. my name is pavel, and i can tell by the type of weapons and armor they gave you that you are a lifer. your padded armor looks barely more than hay-filled pillow sacks, and those swords … my god. i’ve forged better swords with the heat from my farts. well, come in, come in, if you don’t mind having a seat over there grug here will remove your neck collars. but before we do, a little bit of a warning: outpost has been around for as long as i know. i’m a lifer too, and i took over outpost from an old genasi named dyswin after he died. if you haven’t seen already i’m not with all my appendages, so it’s easier for me to run this community than go out fighting anymore. outpost is here to acclimate newbies into the churning depths, so any questions you have, ask me or princess lillycup in the bar. yes that’s her name, don’t make fun of it or she’ll rip your head off. anyway, the warning. we’re here to help you, right? once we take those collars off, if you have any magical or divine affinity you’ll be able to use it. outpost may be heavily fortified and we have plenty of people ready to fight for us, but we’re still just an outpost, nothing more, nothing less, so if you come at us guns blazing, you’ll be destroying the only sane place in the whole depths, trust me. that’s the warning. don’t do that.
sound good? good. grug, get the collars.
outpost isn’t a city. we have temporary housing for those who need a break but sooner or later you’ll have to leave. everyone who lives her permanently volunteers their time. i’m the overseer of outpost and make sure everything runs smoothly. we have a bar, like i said, hospice for the injured, a free-for-all weapons and armor room that you can pick through for something proper to fight with, toilets with running water (which is probably the most interesting thing in the whole damn depths), and even a crude messaging system if you want to get word out to friends or family on the surface. the longer you’re supposed to be in the depths, the more accommodating we are, but you still have to prove your worth before we’ll help you out. that’s just how it works; a lot of people get killed off down here, and we don’t offer much sympathy for them. it’s the ones who can fight that we want to keep alive.
we are allied with a couple of settlements further down in the depths, but those ones are more like pit stops than anything else. you’ll find the first couple of levels are where most everyone lives, since a lot of people aren’t here for very long. you steal a mint and you get a day or two, you know what i mean? the farther down you go, the more you’re likely to see lifers hanging about. lowest anyone’s gotten is the 52nd level, and when they came back they were certifiably insane and missing half of their face, so we can’t even verify if it’s true or not. all i know is, the weird shit lives down there. here for the first few levels it’s almost like a community, but once you hit the underdark … well, it’s every man for himself.
if you have any other questions, feel free to ask now, because in a moment we’re going to kick you out so you can prove your worth. that’s the churning depths way of life.
