A world that is a vast and sprawling city of tangled streets and crooked houses, Guignol is watched over by Void powers that delight in subtly pushing creatures toward dark revelations and lingering despair. Home to haunted occult scribes, strange cults, and sinister animated puppets and mannikins, Guignol has no sun or day, only gray twilight and moonlit darkness full of uncannily shifting stars.
Behind the crumbling walls of the world-city lie vast crypts, reeking abbatoirs, brutal asylums, peculiar libraries, and secret garrets where abominations meet to further their incomprehensible agendas. While Guignol has neighborhoods (The Veiled Heights, Norburgh, The College of Gloam, Downbarrow, Neithertown), the maze of its streets shifts and defies conventional geometry, and an obscure alley or cul-de-sac might open onto a distant district – or elsewhere in the Labyrinth altogether.
The inhabitants of Guignol are a diversity of strangeness, from monkish scholars to charismatic fiends to unsettling constructs with unknowable motives. In its streets, carnival troupes put on garish theatrical shows and cruel masques that hint at devotion to awful divinities. Its abbey-like academic halls house students of obscure heresies, practitioners and researchers of Void magic, and voidspawned aberrations eager to pass on their dreadful knowledge. And the dead linger in the city’s shadows: mad ghosts, sorcerer-wraiths, and revenants doomed to stalk forever beneath its lurching eaves.
Despite its dangers, many seekers of occult knowledge have found reasons to come to Guignol, though some of them end up staying longer than they intended. Visitors might make a pact with an eldritch patron hidden in an obscure tome, attend a conservatory to learn forbidden arts, or seek debased enlightenment in its cosmic sewers; some have claimed to discover doors to wondrous and phantasmagorical worlds unknown elsewhere in the Labyrinth. Those who come to the sunless city looking for hidden knowledge inevitably find it – though the price for such awful wisdom may well be more than expected.
