The Wonders of Arlia

Coghaven

Quick facts

Type: Gnome city in The Underdark · Rulers (former): the Machine, fronted by Chancellor Fenwick Ansible · Resistance: Black Parade · Status: Freed by The FAM and the Black Parade (C2 Session 80)

Coghaven is a gnome manufacturing city buried in The Underdark. For decades it was run by a machine its founders built, and its gnomes were worked as slave labor to build goods for Arlia’s biggest companies. It is also where Wilbur Crushmore learned who his birth father was.

Overview

A statue in the city honors the five founders who dreamed up the Engine That Provides. Officially, Coghaven manufactures goods for the largest companies in Arlia, including Capsule Corp, KrawlMart and the Velvet Truffle Company. Its trade manifest also lists Shmamazon. From a balcony above the factory floor, visitors see cheerful gnome workers assembling everything imaginable.

Visitors are met at the gate by a small orb and a liaison, and are given mandatory bracelets that bar them from restricted areas such as the main forge.

The city has several districts that came up during the party’s visit:

  • The Rotunda, the seat of the council and the Chancellor’s office. A portrait in the office hid a vault with a retinal scanner and a staircase down.
  • Manufacturing, where hundreds of thousands of gnomes labored.
  • Packaging, Shipping & Logistics, the heavily guarded hub everything leaving the city passed through. It held a hidden bay with three teleportation circles that shipped straight to warehouses in West City, the Kingdom of Penne, and a KrawlMart distribution center in Udon Heights in the Ramen Empire.
  • The forge, a sweltering lava foundry worked by a single hammering automaton. Shutting it off drains the lava and reveals entrances to a sublevel, which the lava protects from bore worms.
  • The research station below the forge, where Dr. Wheelo kept his vats.

The truth of the city

According to the Black Parade, the founders built a machine to help with daily life and kept handing it more responsibility until it controlled everything. A few gnomes at the top lived comfortably as long as they kept up the charade, led by Chancellor Fenwick Ansible. Nearly every other gnome was taken into forced labor, except those paid or blackmailed into line. The Machine also controlled the only routes from the city to the surface.

Dissent was punished hard. The Black Parade takes its name from the darkest day in Coghaven’s history, the first public executions of gnomes convicted of treason for crimes as small as printing pamphlets.

Every time the resistance gained ground, the machine adapted and invented something new. About a month and a half before the party arrived, it found a new energy source to power its security forces, buried deep in the mountain. That source was Cabba, held in a stasis vat and drained of his ki. The vats held other prisoners too, including Masha, a mermaid, and Elara Sunshadow. The lab’s own scientist admitted that the VTC had supplied “power sources” as Coghaven developed ways to harvest living beings to run its machines.

Coghaven also made the shrinking Detention Orbs the VTC uses on prisoners. They carry the Coghaven cog and run on a timer.

History

First sighting (C2)

On the way to North City, The Whisper led Wilbur to a plateau overlooking a distant glowing city of gnomes who were held there against their will by their government. There Wilbur found a soot-covered metal flower that set off visions of his father and of a childhood in a city engulfed by fire, ending with a directive to be a “Savior of the Broken, the Beaten and the Damned.”

The party’s visit

After the Cell Games the party returned through the Underdark and approached the city from the same ridge. Wiz Tillywig gave them the tour. Wilbur told her he might have been born there and handed her one of his metal flowers, not knowing the flower was the resistance’s emblem. Security droids gathered almost at once. The Black Parade pulled the party out through a secret passage in the factory wall, warned in time by a spy of their own. They told Wilbur that he was the son of Goric, who they believed had died in a raid on the forge, and that Gen Way was his aunt.

Ellery tied the timeline of the new power source to Cabba’s disappearance and pushed to move at once. The next day the Black Parade staged a distraction across the district while the party slipped into the Rotunda. Escher robbed the Chancellor’s office, Ellery threw Wilbur’s smoke device into the council chamber, and the party forced the vault open using Ansible’s own eye. Wilbur stuffed the one-legged Chancellor into his bag of holding, where he died.

Below the vault they met Otto, who led them to the forge. Kip shut the forge down, the lava drained, and the party went down into Dr. Wheelo’s research station. They freed Masha, fought and killed Wheelo, and Cabba broke out of his vat to save Ellery.

With Wheelo dead, every droid in the city powered down mid-task. Wheelo had taken personal control of the whole city and stretched himself too thin. The cost was high. At the site of the Black Parade’s distraction, Bram Briar, Rya Toran, Mekel Way and Franco Yero lay dead, and Gen Way was the only survivor of that team.

Independence

Wilbur gathered the gnomes and declared it their independence day, telling them they were no longer slaves and should rebuild Coghaven into the greatest gnome city in the world, because the Black Parade carries on. Gen shoved him aside to tell the crowd that this idiot and his friends had taken advantage of a distraction that cost the Black Parade nearly all of their lives, then went to bed. The city celebrated anyway as the news spread through every hive. Wilbur gave 500 gold toward rebuilding, and the party left through the teleportation circle to Udon Heights.

Notable details

  • The Gnoloo came to Bay 4 to collect a crate of volatile green and purple crystals bound for The Mistress. See The Gnoloo.
  • The party claimed the CabbAutomaton, Wheelo’s mechanical copy of Cabba, for themselves.
  • Wheelo’s assistant, Dr. Kochin, was sealed in the pod that had held Cabba.
  • The shriveled gnome in the vat labeled “expired” was Goric, Wilbur’s father. He had been captured on that raid, taken to the forge, and ended up in Dr. Wheelo’s vats.

Appears in

See also: Coghaven People

Note: Elara Sunshadow, the lost member of Bran’s Old Adventuring Party, was one of those rescued from the vats (Session 79, Session 83).

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