Moussillon has an evil reputation. `The City of the Damned' some call it, and for those that live within its crumbling walls the title must seem an apt one Here a once thriving and prosperous city has fallen to the ravages of nature, or perhaps to those unnatural powers that delight in decay and pestilence. Originally the city was not much different from others in Bretonnia, but a series of earthquakes some 50-odd years ago reduced even the houses of the rich to crumbling ruins. Worse still, it was discovered shortly afterwards that the whole area was slowly sinking, and now a miasma of despair hangs over the city, a stinking cloud of pestilence that makes it one of the most unhealthy places to live in the entire world.

The aura of doom is all-pervading, so that even the finery of the lords and ladies is ragged, dirty and irreparable. Yet those that live here care little for the fate that has befallen their city - they have grown used to its squalor and have adapted to it. They stalk the quagmire streets like zombies, soulless and unseeing. In markets they haggle for rotten fruit, at the quaysides they hail ships whose crews look with horror upon the corrupt city, and whose masters hurry along to the coast. Few travel willingly to this city, and those that do prefer to leave as soon as they can. Here, alone in the Old World, the evil of mutation openly walks the streets; inhuman chants to the Chaotic Gods rise unstifled into the sickening air.