Spire Sessions 2: Ashford Street Asylum

[CW: ableism, unreality, slight body horror (text only).]

"They want us to be that which we cannot be. We are only happy to oblige." --chicken-scratch found etched on the wall of room #D27, since removed. Room was unoccupied at the time.

Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth; Dave McKean

The crumbling hostile architecture of Ashford Street Asylum is located in the uptown of Ivory Row, the area owned by Lady Theryn Thorns-on-Silk. Upon buying the land, Lady Theryn ordered the building demolished. She visited the place exactly once, retracted that order, and has never returned since.

Created by an aelfir looking to do good (a rarity nowadays), the Asylum now stands as a testament to petty cruelty. Though it now houses any number of patients declared violently mentally ill--usually wrongfully so--it was built with a much more specific goal in mind. That goal? Treating the maladies inflicted upon the people of Spire by the Heart itself. From lapsed Deep Apiarists to flickering zoetrope Blood-witches, Ashford Street Asylum seeks to do the impossible by curing those afflicted by unreality itself.

On paper, that is. In reality, Ashford Street Asylum is one of the most inhospitable locations in Spire. From sadistic staff to reality-distorting hauntings, it is a dark house built on dark earth.

Welcome to the Ashford Street Asylum. Do try to enjoy your stay.

The Facade of Normal

Darbians photography

The Ashford Asylum pretends to be a place of order to barely disguise its rampant chaos. To that end, the first of the building's three floors is a wide open gathering place.

The hospital's dining hall, which serves food most drow can barely call edible, is located here, as is the so-called "sun room." It's an ironic name: the place is so far from any windows that the only thing its glass roofing lets in is pitiful magelight. Name aside, the sun room is the common area for patients to convene in and take some leisure time, playing small board games and the like. It is structured as a large hexagon, with the famous lodestone (see section "Twice Cursed") directly in the middle.

The Founder, Dr. Sunlight-on-Snow, has required that the sun room remain open to any and all visitors; more progressive administrators after his time have tried to change the rule, but it's included in the fine legalese print of the place's deed. They say that around half of the people who visit the sun room end up as patients themselves, by design.

Behind these two spacious areas is the staff nurse, where patients are given medication and nursed back to health in the event of sickness or injury.

Beyond the Veil

The second and third floors of Ashford are reserved for the offices of the staff and the cells of the patients, respectively. The public has seldom seen them. This is a good thing.

The patients live in squalor, their cells left unclean for months at a time. Many of the rooms are windowless and remain locked during late hours, leaving some to die in their rooms, clawing at the walls for help. They are allowed mere hours of relatively-free movement a day, which can change on a whim depending on concerns from the staff.

The staff rooms--both offices and sleeping quarters--are a little better, but they are still cluttered nightmares. Infamously, several orderlies and one doctor have become lost in the labyrinth of yellowed paper that is the records room and have never been seen again.

Twice Cursed

House of Leaves

Ashford has been cursed by blood magic since shortly after its founding. The first patient admitted, a blood-witch, was kept docile through constant phlebotomy and kept alive through an early form of undying treatment. The rationale of the doctors of the time was that in removing the blood from the witch's body, so too would they drain the sentient disease festering within.

And it did work. Over time, the blood-witch was reduced to a catatonic haze--she died peacefully right there in her cell bed, in fact--but the disease was not. In the basement, where bloodletting and leeching are conducted, the blood coagulated, seeped into the very foundations of the place. The whole building, then, is very alive and very fucking pissed off.

Not helping matters is the large centerpiece of the Ashford Asylum's sun room, a "lodestone" retrieved from the Heart by the Founder's personal exploration team. The innocuous piece of jagged bedrock is meant to stand as a testament to the hospital's tenacity, how it saw the challenge the tear in reality posed and met it time and again.

Instead, it acts as a magnet for the energies that flow through the Vermissian from the Heart. The two curses constantly intermingle their effects, and the place is quite haunted. The basement, where most invasive treatments are still conducted, remains the area most prone to bouts of weirdness, but the records room, sun room, offices, and cells are hardly free.

Weirdnesses in Ashford

• Many patients over many years have reported feeling the presence of "tall men" in their rooms at night. They cannot see them, but describe feelings of being watched.
• On one occasion, an orderly delved into the records room and found a cabinet full of patient files describing all of the staff doctors. This was chalked up to an instance of the Vermissian leaking into the building; nothing to worry about.
• A recently-admitted patient hailing from Perch claims to have a Small God of Flavor bound to one of the dining hall's communal spoons. Sometimes, when one drinks the soup there, it is almost tolerable.
• Every year, on the birthday of the First Patient, the sun room lets in actual sunlight for several minutes. Patients describe it as the most refreshing thing they've ever felt.
• A remarkably common instance of shared psychosis happens upon the patients occasionally in the form of "Cloth Eggs." Every once in a while, someone will spend months gathering up discarded belongings in the hospital and one night form it around themselves as cocoons. When pried open, the cocoons are empty. Sometimes, friends and family of these patients report being observed by people who look remarkably like the patients in their prime.
• Most Deep Apiarists admitted to the hospital are required to have their wax organ facsimiles re-replaced with real flesh-and-blood versions or else risk discharge. The new organs are usually harvested from the morgue, but every now and then folk in the neighborhood will pitch in and donate a liver or two.
• The Ashford Street Asylum's staff want you to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is no fourth floor of the building. Ignore the sensationalist rumors. Please.
• Census findings indicate that as many as 40 percent of released patients end up delving into the Heart within a year of their discharges.

Notable Current Staff

• Alden Weather-the-Torrential-Storm, who has acted as Administrator for the past forty years. He has been given the undying treatment, meaning he will remain in charge forever until he chooses to leave. He is a deeply unpleasant man whose methods of treatment are outdated at best, actively hateful at worst. Despite this, he appears to still genuinely care for several patients.
• Professor Bodyr Elsin, a revolutionary human doctor attempting to cure their boredom by taking up a doctoral position at Ashford. He is currently pioneering a new method of treatment derived from galvanics which has attracted no small measure of controversy from the administration. You can't argue with the results--no, wait, yes you can.
• Decker and Radke, two orderlies seldom seen apart from one another. Several years ago, they found the hive of the Vyskant and were added to their ranks. They try to give private goodbyes to every patient possible when they are released.
• Nadia Ota, a long-suffering drow psychiatrist who many of the patients describe as one of the sole rays of hope in Ashford. Her younger sister, a Greymanor investigator, has ties to the Ministry and she doesn't seem to mind.
• Travers, a drow therapist who is, by virtue of being the only doctor on-site licensed to perform them, stuck with doing autopsies on deceased patients. He is hopelessly addicted to possession and subscribes to traditionalist mask-always-on rules in order to hide the ectoplasm constantly leaking from his tear ducts.

Notable Patients, Past and Present

• Letty, the previous timekeeper of the Lecture Hall at the University of Divine Magic. She is a genius artist who is obfuscating instability in order to act as a spy for the Ministry, reporting the goings-on in Ashford.
• Longtooth, an aelfir under the delusion that they are a gnoll. In spite of their unkempt appearance, they are surprisingly personal and, some say, empathetic. Even Weather-the-Torrential-Storm likes them. Seriously.
• The Man in D13, name unknown, was the second patient admitted after he stumbled into the place disheveled, having emerged from the nearby Vermissian station. He has never removed his strange, polygonal mask and knows deeply personal information about every staff member and patient that has ever come and gone from Ashford.
• Daria Blacksun, an aelfir Deep Apiarist and retired Heart adventurer who committed herself. She escaped weeks ago (to see if she could) and is now a member of the organization known as the Parliament of Pain. The entire south wall of her cell has been irreparably defaced with tally marks denoting how many times she had sex while admitted there.
• Polycephalous Jones, a two-headed fish gutterkin who constantly swears it was a personal assistant to the Huntress within the Heart before being captured and admitted by explorers in an act of pure malice. Polycephalous Jones lies all the time; it is being truthful about this one thing.
• Kit Rendell, a teenage drow whose parents were a drow from the Spire and their doppelganger from the un-Spire. Parts of his body regularly flicker in and out of existence, which seems to have no ill effects on his health. Nevertheless, he is usually quarantined in his cell, only let out for special occasions.
• Jendra Balt, a high-ranking member of the Order of the Crimson Vigil apprehended by the Eclipse Paladins during the most recent Day of Red Ash. She has been lobotomized—this has not halted her resolve.
• Lara, an Azurite priest who created a needle-toothed child in one particularly bad delve into the Heart. At night, the child emerges and returns to that hole in everything to give Lara's luck to its mysterious master. She will do anything to get rid of it.
• An anonymous patient whose name was taken by the Mansion was admitted years ago for murder. During their time at Ashford, they displayed considerable improvement and were discharged after one year. A week later, the reign of the Candlegate Killer began.

GM Notes and The Golden Rule

Okay, hi, kayfabe over, Jodi the GM here. I felt that keeping this entry in the same pseudo-in-universe style of the lore in the official Spire books was the best way to describe Ashford Street Asylum, but I have to stop that now to get one damn thing across:

The staff are the antagonists, not the patients. The patients are never the villains.

That is rule number one, with a fucking bullet. I am mentally ill and autistic and did not make this setting so you could play mental illnesses and disabilities for horror in your campaign. Quite the opposite: Spire is all about fighting oppression, and I wanted to give people an outlet to explore the ways healthcare institutions have engaged in ableism because it's a real-world system of oppression that Spire leaves unexplored as-is. The patients at Ashford are meant to be played as sympathetic, neutral or helpful to the party, while all but one of the staff members I have provided here are actively hostile to them. 

Furthermore, if you are neurotypical, I strongly recommend consulting with neurodivergent people before setting a game or mission in Ashford. To quote Mark Z. Danielewski, this is not for you. It's an outlet for people like myself to explore the ways society wrongs us and, if you're a good GM, provide us some measure of catharsis in the form of helping the patients escape and/or burning the place down.

I designed Ashford Street Asylum to be a setting ripe with horror--none of that horror should come from the patients. I truly hope you honor that.

It's been my pleasure to welcome you to Ashford--I hope I've created a dynamic new setting that deconstructs and reclaims tropes associated with the haunted asylum for people like me in a tabletop setting! Next time, I'll be throwing around ideas for a new villain or homebrewing my first extra advance. We'll see.