Something occured and those in the grand city went mad. Was it a curse, a prophecy, a spell gone wrong, or a magik item opened? Nobody allegedly knows. The city guard on the city walls, saw the madness and were apparently not touched. They tried to keep the crazy ones inside, by blocking the gates and sealing the entrances to the large city wall. The region’s leader, eventually sent the Army there to reinforce the city guards, to hold the mad ones in. Since the mad men are incredibly strong and immune to pain, if they escape it would be a plague upon the land. There is still hope that someday they could be restored (perhaps a royal heir or a royal household was in the city). Perhaps they are nearly immortal. The city guards who occasionally decend into the city to drop supplies and stop fires believe that to be true.

Now it is a small town, with its own walls, that rings the old grand city. Over the years, the army and guards, have created a town that supports them. They think themselves immune to the madness, yet their proximity to them, means they are only slightly odd… perhaps becoming mad. The crazed watch over the mad. A running joke is that someday, someone will man their walls to hold them in.

My group had to locate the hidden entrance to an abandoned Gnomish city.  They searched for two days before they found what they thought was the entrance.  It was the entrance…., to Kiddieland, the Gnomish equivalent of a modern funhouse for children.  Evil, nasty super-gremlins had infested the place and had warped much of the magic there to terrorize suckers, er, characters who found the way in.