Lower Ward

This ward got its name from the many portals to the Lower that’re found here. The Lower Ward’s the source of most of the foul industrial smogs that sometimes choke the city, brownish-yellow blankets of stinging sulphurous gas that cling to the air and linger as a stench in clothes for days afterward. Too long outside in the Lower Ward and cutters’ throats get raw and their eyes teary.

The Great Foundry is the center of the ward. All around it huddle lightless warehouses, smoky mills, ringing forges, and a host of other small workshops. Most of the city’s craftsmen are concentrated in this district.

Black Sails
The Black Sails tavern stands in the shadow of the Armory, the Doomguard headquarters, at the end of a dark alley between a pair of armorworks. The blackened bowsprit of an ancient galleon juts out over the figurehead. Soot has stained the sails’ canvas black. Inside, dark rafters loom over about a dozen curtained alcoves that conceal the furnishings of the tavern’s dim common room. Several stained and notched tables stand in the room’s center, where groups of sullen crafters gather to drink quietly.

The Bones of the Night
The Bones of the Night is a font of knowledge, where thieves, wizards, and knights of the cross-trade come to learn from the dead. It is a cavern complex among the catacombs near the Ditch in the foulest-smelling region of the prodigiously odorous Lower Ward. The entrance is a gaping hole that fills an entire firegutted building; a ladder with rungs of bone leads down into the obsidian darkness.

The salon is richly decorated with the grave goods of a hundred thousand wealthy deaders: plush chairs, thick layers of tapestries, and burial shrouds. For those that seek the dead's wisdom, the Master of Bones takes a fee and consults with his library of thousands of skulls. Factols, master thieves, mummies, and the master of the stonemasons’ guild compose but a fraction of his collection; the king of the rag-pickers, a sane slaad, and a true tanar’ri are also prizes on his shelves.

Ditch
The Ditch is Sigil's only large body of water: a foul and reeking morass where corpses (partial and otherwise) seem to sprout overnight. Its waters are corrosive, and most bodies become unrecognizable within hours of being dumped - a virtue as far as most Cagers are concerned, but a devilish problem when the locals call for the Harmonium to sort out who's been put in the deadbook.

Golden Bell
Standing hard by the Temple of the Abyss, the Golden Bell is a pawnshop for the poor and the desperate. The Bell carries weapons, armor, kitchen goods, tack and harness, jewelry, supposed spell keys, holy and unholy symbols, maps, and more. A few are magical or at least of superior workmanship.

The Bell is also famous as the home of a fence named Marisha the Fox, an alu-fiend whose left leg was crippled years ago, forcing her into semi-retirement.

Great Foundly
This is the headquarters of the Godsmen. The foundry’s a dirty, sprawling complex of workshops, warehouses, storage yards, and furnaces. The Godsmen work it nonstop. By day it belches smoke and steam, and by night the district’s lit by its fires. The products of the foundry, petty metal goods needed by everyone throughout Sigil and beyond, are the Godsmen’s major source of jink.

The streets around the foundry are a jumbled weave of workshops and worker’s taverns. They’re not luxurious or particularly clean; when a cutter’s been at the forge all day, he tracks in a lot of grime. Drinking and dealing are both serious business.

Green Mill
This leafy sanctuary is half tavern, half safe house; it caters to the most powerful prime elves, those who seek the glories of Arborea, Alfheim, and the Beastlands. Humans, half-elves, bariaur, and primes are tolerated, but fully sylvan customers are given preference. The mill is painted a bright yellow-green in contrast to the sootdarkened walls of the buildings all around it, and it’s scrubbed each week to keep it that way. In its large central courtyard grow the largest trees - perhaps the only trees - of Sigil.

Hands of Time
This amazing shop is a little piece of Mechanus brought somehow complete to the heart of Sigil. Entire sections of it rotate and move and gyrate, with sliding floor sections, crude (and open) elevating platforms, and doors that open and shut by invisible hands. It even has its own clocktower and eternal lamppost.

The Hands of Time is home to the Timekeepers, a collaboration of like-minded aasimon, modrons, and prime gnomes and dwarves, all devoted to making better compasses, steam toys, music boxes, humanoid automata, timekeeping, devices, arcano-mechanical songbirds, mechanical hammers and bellows, spell driven engines for drills and ore carts, and other obscure but durable technologies.

Harbinger House
Not well known, even to the touts, Harbinger House is a madhouse overseen by the Believers of the Source. Sigil has more than its share of barmies, driven mad by the powers, fiends, and contradictions of the planes. Most of them are allowed to wander the streets without interference, but the dabus and sometimes the Harmonium bring the real troublemakers here to be gently confined. The Godsmen themselves do not go out and search for barmies; they only care for those that are brought to them.

The head of Harbinger House is Housemaster Bereth, appointed by Ambar, factol of the Believers of the Source. A new Housemaster is appointed only on the death of the previous officeholder.

Shattered Temple
Once a temple to Aoskar, the Shattered Temple is now the faction headquarters of the Athar. The Shattered Temple stands at the heart of a zone of destruction several blocks across. The Athar only repaired what little they had to in order to make the temple useable, preferring the broken look of the place. (They are the Lost, after all.) The area’s been a ruin for a long time, as anyone who knows anything about Sigil can testify, but there’s no clear hint as to what caused it.

Packed at the outer edges of the ruin are a whole host of shops and inns catering to the Lost and their visitors. These form a ring of gaudy nightlife around the ruin. Over the years, the reputation of the area’s grown enough to attract even wealthy lords looking for a little low-life fun.

Society of the Luminiferous Aether
A gentleman’s club for working mages, the Society was once in The Lady’s Ward, but has drifted into the Lower Ward with the passing of years. The drift may be because the Society’s members have accepted more and more commissions from the smithies and fewer and fewer from the high-ups of the city, who want too much privacy.

The sign over the single entrance - a basement-level door - reads simply “Lumen.” Only members of the club and their guests are allowed in; others are turned away by Gamnesto the Vile, the senior doorman.

Styx Oarsman
Nobody gets inside without knowing the password, which tends to change from day to day. (‘Course the one password that never changes is “jink,” as in garnish the bouncer’s palm, berk.) Once inside, a body knows for sure this’s a fiendish watering hole. The common room’s dark - not just romantically dim, but outright dark. The glimmer of a single candle illuminates the taps. Voices whisper to each other in the blackness. Cold, dry, snakelike skin brushes a cutter’s side. Eyes flash with their own light.

The Oarsman’s a bolt-hole for many a cross-trader giving the Law the laugh who’s willing to trade some of his swag (and maybe a bit of blood) for a place safe from the Harmonium and less dangerous than the Hive.

Ubiquitous Wayfarer
Some say the Ubiquitous Wayfarer is in The Lady’s Ward, some say it’s in the Clerk’s Ward, but all agree that it contains many, many portals to other planes. Its portals lead to the planes of the Great Ring, not to the gate-towns of the Outlands.

Unlike all other taverns of the Cage (except the World Serpent) the Ubiquitous Wayfarer has permanent portals for some of its entrances, so as not to inconvenience anyone in another part of the city.

Notable People

 * Lothar the Old: The Master of Bones
 * Tattershade: King of the Rats
 * Marisha the Fox: "Retired" fence
 * Pincher the Exile: Pawn shop owner
 * Crookshanks: Bouncer
 * Saddam Hasan Ibn Arvalas: Guildmaster of the Timekeepers
 * Housemaster Bereth: Head of Harbinger House
 * Gamnesto the Vile: Doorman of the Society of the Luminiferous Aether
 * Zegonz Vlaric: Proprietor of the Styx Oarsman