The City Under the Stairs is in a section of the subterranean realm known as the Hollow. This entire layer is owned by the Spicers Guild, one of the twelve megacorps that own the world. The City Under the Stairs has always been isolated and strange, and being owned by outside influences has been causing stresses there on the populace for the last several hundred years.

The stair in the title is a sealed off pillar that goes from the layer above the Hollow to the layer below. The Stair citizens have never been inside it, and indeed, they did not know it was possible before the last few hundred years. They could tell it was a stair from the outside, but they could not see people on it. They called it the Stieg, which is also the name for the ruling body of their city. It's actually a stair built by dwarves (which they call Alkor Stair) to get through the Hollow, a layer of the subterra the dwarves find unbearable for its wide open spaces.

Until the Spicers conquered the City some 700 years ago, the city had never been conquered nor opened itself to outsiders (it didn't even have a gate in its walls until shortly after conquest).

Recently, in the last few months, a new source of energy has been discovered there. To be honest, it was known by the Stiegers (the name the Stair citizens have for themselves) since as far back as they can remember. It's always been present in the small quarry inside the north wall of the city. But until the last few months, no one from outside had ever noticed it before. Previously, the energy--in the past, just a form of light, really, that glimmered in the abandoned quarry--had been ignored by the Stiegers except to warn people not to go near it. It is volatile and tends to petrify people.

So anyway, the Spicers sent in experts to see what it was, and they determined it was something entirely unknown on Shem, in science or esoterica or both. They brought in machinery, researchers, and more, and a flood of outsiders hit the city. In the past 700 years, slowly but surely, /tourists/ have been visiting under strict Spicer control, but now it's a free for all, and the Stiegers hate it.

The Stieg, the local government, is now fully under Spicer sway, however. What's worse, all the mining and quarrying has caused the energy's volatile nature to go rampant, and "leaks" occur, sending waves of liquid, gas, and other forms of this energy made manifest and flowing through the city. Mostly, people are either sublimated or petrified by it, but sometimes, very strange things happen. Three empaths caught in an invisible wave of it have been sharing emotional experiences ever since, for instance, Two explorers seem to be unable to move or stop without the other doing the same. And a shaman and an oneironaut seem to have the same dreams every night now.

SO WHAT WOULD I PLAY?

The game is going to be about Stiegers and a few allies upset by the Spicers' presence who have taken it upon themselves, in violation of the law, to do their own tests on the "new" energy. Their goal would be two-fold: (1) to steal some and (2) to run a test.

Players could be members of the group or people that have been hired to help with the raid or test. The group is made up mostly of Stieger citizens, who come in many different races, mostly subterranean ones. There are old Stieger families (more subterranean races) and newer ones made up of people who moved in in the last 700 years (can be any race). There are explorers, who are really just tourists, but who have become involved in local politics. And there are disaffected Spicer employees. The latter two can be any race as well.

You can make up as much or as little as you would like about your character before the game, and we will use the Improv Prompt system to build as we go along.

A few fun things:

1. Anyone who plays a Stieger will be allowed a "local culture karma," wherein they dictate a quirk of Stieger behavior unique to the citizens.

2. Anyone who plays an explorer will be allowed a "outside perspective karma," which is the same thing, but it dictates the behavior of any Stieger character(s)--declaring a unique aspect of Stieger culture that the explorer would find bizarre.

3. Anyone playing a Spicer employee will be allowed an "inside knowledge karma," which allows them to dictate a fact about the Spicer Guild that will help in the mission.