The buildings lean over this alley blocking out all daylight making this feel more like a tunnel than an alley. The darkness hides the details of the furtive, shufflings, scufflings, and scaly scrapings that come just inside the mouth of the passage. Any light brought into this stretch of alleyway is always dimmer than it should be, barely illuminating more than a yard around you. Once entered, there is no way out but through. It’s said this alleyway exists in every neighborhood…or at least the rumor of it does.
Within Pitch Alley is, supposedly, a passage to another world. Scholars, the curious, the less than sane, and the over-bold are the typical types to seek out Pitch Alley and attempt to plumb its depths.
Why is this dangerous?
- Pitch Alley does exist in nearly every neighborhood or, more specifically, it CAN exist – It just needs to be called via an occult ritual that varies in complexity and reliability from neighborhood to neighborhood
- The space called forth can contain:
- An elder Brain Gorger that has come from Beyond into Avalon
- A shoggoth’s lair
- The lost book of Urgon the Wise, said to have been lost within Pitch Alley along with Urgon’s last student, Malachi. The student’s condition is, of course, not only quite mad, but also deathlessly vigilant against theft
- A direct link to the Mind of Erlig
- A horrible, pulsing flesh lined passage that eventually digests the minds of anything that lingers too long, casting the newly insane being into the streets
- A direct outlet into the throne room inside Forbidden City
- Protect the supplicant summoner from danger, depositing them just outside a local tavern with enough coin to buy dinner
Uses in your Game
- You can give the PCs the ritual to summon pitch alley. It is a way to circumvent problems but it can always go terribly wrong at some point. You can represent this by rolling a d6 every time Pitch Alley is summoned. If the d6 comes up as a 1 then you decide what bad place Pitch Alley takes the characters. I wouldn’t use it to kill them outright the first time but give some consequences and make it obvious this magic isn’t safe or healthy for the characters. You can even increase the number where something bad happens each time Pitch Alley is used until something bad happens and it resets.
- An evil cult can use Pitch Alley for their own schemes as a way to get around the city. It makes it hard to track them and eventually the PCs will need to traverse the maddening and physically dangerous space that is Pitch Alley to deal with the cult.
- Use Pitch Alley as the crux of a scenario. The alley appeared in your neighborhood for some unknown reason and starts out being creepy, then some people disappear, then things start coming out of it. Someone needs to deal with Pitch Alley before things get worse, be that closing down the magic that’s summoned the alley here or going inside and finding a way to make the Alley go away. There’s an adventure hook for your games.