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Lore and Backstory: A empty hulking city stands in a bay. The city is a terrifying eerie site for other residents who have begun moving into the area. Scattered across the land are the remains of some ancient magi-tech civilization, but this city appears to have been the ancient peoples largest, even the capital or hub. All the roads left over from this great civilization lead into the city.
Characters are tasked by colonists to and curious alchemists, engineers and wizards to plumb the great hulking city for clues as the how much of the technology worked and can be used.
The city itself still glows with lights at night, and every six hours a terrible howling sound seems to rise up from the cities heart and across its endless well laid out streets. From a distance it appears a recent earthquake may have damaged some of the city as a bridge crossing the narrow mouth of the bay has since largely collapsed. Every day steam billows from the point where the city seems to meet the sea and odd lights and smoldering smoke rises from various intersections of the city. Keeping it in a perpetual haze, and enveloping the bay with an odd miasma that can make some people Ill (The source of various Fortitude saves).
The Nitty Gritty: The city is a massive mega-dungeon type area, one where players can explore sections and building complexes finding various aspects of the city from its local emergency power plant, the foundry, living quarters, hospital, temples and administration centers. Beneath the city burns a the stores of alchemical substances used by the ancients that cause the ground the crack in places and burst forth poison gas and smoke. Various parts of the city have ground that causes the players feat to have fire damage and they have to move quickly or their shoes could catch fire or melt.
Crawling in the city are such foes as ghosts of previous residents, undead, Living Spells, and various aberrations and Constructs built by the city builders. Also of interest is that electricity still flows around on an emergency basis causing a an alert siren to sound every six hours which causes some of the mindless undead to emerge and wander the streets before retreating after the siren ends.
GOAL: The goals vary, in that campaign it was simply to find out how the city worked. What caused the fumes and possibly to put out the subterranean fires that made the bay area uninhabitable and the city dangerous. Also to steal ancient texts and alchemical and magical texts to understand how the ancients built the place. Side quests included finding out what got rid of the ancients in the first place.