The Mole

The individual known as "The Mole" is possibly unique in the history of the Hole; he's a prisoner who hasn't been processed.

The Mole was a phenomenally successful housebreaker before his capture. He targeted only the wealthiest marks and specialized in fine jewelry. He had a good reason for taking items of small size and high value; he's a midget (or a halfling, or any other suitably short campaign denizen), only two and a half feet tall.

Always resourceful, the Mole had almost gotten free of his chains when the wind from the Hole picked him up, The buffeting winds tore the chains away from him, and he was unrestrained when he got stuck to the bottom of the Hole. Frightened by the looks of the guards, he snuck up over the side and hid in the garden.

Since that time, he's led a perilous life - sneaking into the garden for food, dodging into the dark tunnels to hide from guards, and sleeping inside the Tower itself! He's found a fairly quick and discrete route to the top of the tower (he can climb faster than he can run) where he's made a little "nest" under the eaves.

In his explorations of the Tower, he's found the magic spring that supplies the entire prison, and some of the more canny convicts know that if approached by the Mole, they may be able to trade knowledge for water.

Currently the Mole is trying to find where the items taken from new prisoners are stored -- he's heard rumors about some magic talisman that one prisoner swore would make escape easy. He's also seen the Warden's daughter, and is considering making contact with her.

King Bonebreaker

He's a bad, bad man. Imprisoned for rape, murder and cannibalism, he broke three nooses and a rack before his captors learned the Hole was approaching.

A true giant among men, completely hairless and covered with scars, Bonebreaker is the ruler (uncontested, so far) of the Avenue. Anyone who fails to address him as royalty is forcefully reacquainted with the "Bonebreaker" portion of his title.

King Bonebreaker has been known to bet all his meals for a week to anyone who can best him in single combat - but if he wins, he doesn't want the loser's meals. Instead, he asks that the loser let Bonebreaker bite off one of his fingers.

King Bonebreaker has an escape plan. He's managed to obtain a sharpened piece of metal, which he keeps hidden on his person at all times. (This is one reason he's got an edge in single combat.) He's planning a riot in the garden. His goal is to capture and subdue several guards, breaking their arms and legs in the process. Then, he'll carefully cut off their eyelids and use their blazing glares to burn down the doors into the Tower and kill the Warden.

He'd better hurry; in two more months, the Warden will have turned him into a guard, and then he'll never think of rebelling again.

Peregrine

She's a middle aged woman who was pretty once and will be again if she can escape the Hole and get back to regular food. She was a sorceress in her home land. Never convicted of any crime, she was betrayed by politics, poisoned and sent up to the Hole through guile and treachery.

Without access to her library and sorcerous equipment, her power is greatly decreased -- but not entirely gone. Any who've threatened her have learned that she can put a horrible black fire in her hands that burns as hot as the Warden's gaze. More than one prisoner has thick scars in the shape of hand prints from peregrine.

She has also retained a sorcerous intuition - and she knows what's really happening to the prisoners in the Hole. She keeps careful track of how much prisoners can remember about their pasts -- and spends a great deal of effort trying to protect her own soul from the Warden.

In return for her protection from the more violent prisoners, a one armed thief has taught her how to pick the locks on the cells and grates. She is planning to try to jump off the side during the next storm, but she'll be open to other escape plans if they're proposed.

The Master

On very rare, dreaded occasions, the Warden will emerge from the Tower. This is not a good thing; usually the Warden is roused only by serious trouble such as a riot or the unavenged murder of a guard.

The Warden appears as a broad-shouldered, seven-foot tall man dressed in black armor. The Warden has no head but a pillar of flame. Like the guards, the Warden can project a burning gaze; but the Warden's gaze does twice as much damage. Furthermore, the Warden can control gravity even on the Top of the Hole. Inmates who defy him are often simply flung up into the sky and then dropped to their doom, or even impaled on the top of the tower.

Secrets can be kept from the Warden -- he doesn't read minds or have spells to compel truth. However, if he wants to find something out from the inmates, he'll often starve them all for days until someone cracks. He's not above torture or the murder of random inmates until compliance is achieved. A battle of wills between the Warden and a particularly tough convict can be a very bloody one.

Inside the Tower, it's another story. Most of the time, when concealed within, the Warden does not look like a seven-foot tall, flame headed man; she's actually a rather petite and plain woman, except for her hair, which is a lovely natural blonde.

Of course, all things are relative; she looks plain until you find out she's over seven hundred years old. Since her face is unwrinkled and her body shows no signs of age past maturity, she's really in pretty good shape.

The Warden (whose name is Moon Frost) used to look much older, before she learned how to steal life from those who drank from a certain magical spring. For every year she stole, she could reduce her own age by almost eight months.

Unfortunately, the practical aspects of life stealing became problematical; she could only steal about a year each day, and it didn't take long for her victims to realize that something was wrong. After a narrow escape, she decided to search for a more subtle way to regain (and then keep) her youth.

Prisoners seemed to offer a good source of years that would never be missed, so she established herself as the royal jailer for the regime current at the time (now long gone). That, too, worked for a while; but then she made a disturbing discovery.

Apparently she was unable to consume part of someone's life without getting a part of their personality and experiences as well. Up to this point, she'd been eating the next year of a given prisoner's life aging him a year in the process. Obviously she couldn't take any years from farther down the line; what if he died before that? (She was not about to take any chances with eating a death by mistake. No way.) However, the next-years of prisoners were almost uniformly grim, unpleasant and desperate. Se found herself becoming unhappy, paranoid, anxious, and emotionally exhausted.

Obviously eating years wasn't such a great deal if she could only get bad ones. That's when she had her inspiration; why take the years at the end when the ones at the beginning were probably much more pleasant?

That's what she now does; when a prisoner arrives, she eats the first year of their life. Most prisoners don't notice; after all, who remembers infancy? But the longer a prisoner stays, the more likely he is to realize that he can no longer remember important parts of his childhood. This is because they've been eaten by the Warden.

This raises the question of what happens to a human soul when its childhood is chewed away. The answer is this; the soul becomes less joyful, less open and less trusting. At the same time it becomes more suspicious, more irritable and more callous towards others. That's why the older prisoners, in addition to looking more weary and haggard, are more malicious and cruel. They've lost their childhoods.

Once they're completely burnt out, the Warden makes them into guards. By that time, they rarely remember or care about anything other than life in the Hole. (Sometimes prisoners are pretty ancient-looking by the time they're ready to be guards, but she can steal a few months here and there to fix them up and it doesn't matter if those years are taken from the ends of prisoners' lives, leaving the tasty childhood for her.)

A couple of old prisoners have managed to avoid this fate, because at some point in their lives they suffered terribly at a young age (making those years distasteful to the sorceress) but were later redeemed and cared for, providing some sort of redemption.

Hole in the Sky A Generic Fantasy Setting

Introduction
Welcome To Your Death
Dwellers in the Hole
Escape from the Inevitable