[David Johnston2]

All right, I think I've got enough to start integrating a bit.

1. The Cursed Town

This is a small town that used to play host to about 3000 citizens. It had some very old-fashioned ideas about witchcraft and to their great misfortune found a real one. Shortly afterward a gloomy forest with tall trees that cast permanent shade sprang up out of nowhere to encircle the town. Most of the adults in town disappeared, transformed into other things. There are only two inhabited structures left in town, a house containing about 20 survivors, mostly younger children and the town high school. At night though, the monsters of the forest who used to be citizens of the town come back to wander its streets.

The Cursed High School
The High School is a place of safety but also suffering. Everyone inside has memory problems of varying degrees of severity. The teachers teach the same lessons over and over again or occasionally give tests few can remember the answers for. Baffled students wander the halls trying to remember their schedule, the location and combination of their locker, and you'll frequently see naked or nearly naked students in class because they forgot to dress in the makeshift dormitory where they now seem. This is rarely commented on.

2. The Cursed Forest
Among the creatures that now inhabit what used to be farmland around the town are Large humpbacked hairless predator.
Flying creatures like bits of animate darkness and falcon-like talons that rake you as they zip past.
What looks at first like a giant snake with a body nearly as a wide as that of a human being, but as it slides forward without wiggling, you see that its central body is bloated like a limbless diplodocus.
Two twin boys with reptilian scales and eyes and sharp carnivorous teeth, each absently clutching evangelical pamphets denouncing practitioners of magic. They claim that the giant monster was their elder brother.
Almost normal-seeming women until they grow their claws and attempt to disembowel prey.

All of them are averse to sunlight and can be exorcised by very bright magical light.

3. The City of Ego

South of the Cursed Forest there's a highway which leads to the City of Ego. It used to have a lot of traffic on it but the appearance of the Forest turned it into a dead end. Now apart from some farmers going into and out of Ego, it's mostly deserted. There are few abandoned vehicles on side of the highway but they were abandoned for a reason. If someone gets into one and tries to start it up, it starts easily but will turn out to have steering or braking problems.

The City of Ego itself is large and vaguely science fictional. Bizarre living tank/scorpions, "scorpitanks" and genetically engineered dragons patrol for invaders, while little robots crawl along exterior walls cleaning them of dirt and graffiti, although recently the infamous Naked Anarchy has developed a kind of spray paint that messes them up when they try to clean it. Naked Anarchy, a faceless nude woman, seems to appear out of nowhere to commit her acts of antigovernment graffitti and vandalism against the ruling council. She may have a point, since elections in Ego seem to be a hollow sham but better not to look too closely into that. The Men in Red, White and Blue come for those who "know too much" and for some reason only their targets ever look in the right direction to see them. Worse there's the Pursuer a demonic relic of the invasion of Hell that Ego fought off a while ago. Used to hunt down and kill enemies of Ego's rulers, it is impervious to bullets and blades, instantly healing injuries.

Ego is quite a pretty city. What looks like cherry trees are common in the parks and yards of the city, and their fruit is edible as long as you don't eat the pits, which are highly lethal, consuming the flesh of those who swallow them to produce a new "tree" in a matter of seconds. This is one of the few things that kill a Pursuer without resorting to heavy weapons. Ego has a number of interesting buildings that include the Transparent Dormitory, a building with invisible walls and floors which houses many of the students at Ego University, and a beautiful round pale grey stone prison.

Most of the predatory monsters of the world are successfully kept out of Ego (apart from the ones that actually work for the city administration) although a few dozen citizens are lost every year to a kind of creature that mimics sleeping bags. But there's a different kind of predatory monster in the city, one of the former inhabitants of Cursed to take the form of a black land-dwelling octopus. Despite her bizarre form, she can still speak and think more or less normally and she has become some kind of ruthless business genius, building a fortune that makes her one of the richest "people" in the city. She owns and operates out of the tallest skyscraper there one which somehow becomes a baffling maze of corridors and stairwells for those people who enter without an appointment. Farther out toward the edge of the city from these landmarks though, there's a suburb with a peculiar feature. Anyone who crosses the border of it will find that the clothes they wear or try to wear mysteriously vanish, enforcing the local home-owner's association mandatory nudism rule. (Ego's climate is controlled so it never gets very cold).

Another local point of notice is Updraft Hill, a hill that causes objects on it to become strangely buoyant. They will float in the air for hours, gradually losing buoyancy until they land. One can frequently see fliers drifting in the sky in the evening, even though it can be a bit dangerous since they have little control over where they drift and land. Lastly there's the North Bridge, which connects the highway that formerly led to Cursed to Ego, crossing over one of the tributary rivers flowing into the Lethe.

4. The River Lethe

Lethe is the major source of water and commerce for Ego. Many different rivers flow down from the north and west to come together near Ego, combining into a huge river similar to the Mississippi. From there it continues to flow south east down to Doolittle, a smaller city chiefly notable for being over half comprised of intelligent animals and for being center of cross oceanic travel on the east coast. Along the way the slow moving barges that carry the cargo back and forth must deal with the River Pirates, who patrol the river in galleys armed with gatling guns and extract tribute from the barges to let them pass with their cargo.

5. Newcago

Ego's second biggest trade route heads southwest to the citystate of Newcago. Where Ego is advanced, prosperous, and usually quite secure but a bit authoritarian, Newcago is considerably more primitive, roughly mid-twentieth century and under constant threat from outside forces and internal stresses. To the south are the neobarbs who dress like Mad Max bad guys and regularly attack to try to take control of Newcago's power plant ;an array of crystalline pillars that somehow absorb, convert and store solar power into electricity. To the east the turtle-bugs swarm and encroach on the farmland there sometimes advancing on the city limits. To the south west lies the Hellmouth, a volcano from which demons sometimes come. Meanwhile to the northwest, lies the kingdom of Alraune, one of the most expansionistic polities on the continent. So far they've been occupied elsewhere, but their agents search Newcago for the last heir to the throne and probably would have already found him except that he's been disguised very effectively as a girl while his followers wait for him to grow up enough.

Other points of interest in Newcago, is the pizza place that somehow controls the minds of its employees, Darktown, a maze of narrow streets that normal people avoid,