# STORY HOOKS

When bringing Golden City into play, the GM may use the following points to enrich the story by introducing artifacts, Villains, discoveries, and rewards.

## The Celestial Gardens

These magnificent vertical gardens climb up into the sky. Vibrant and gargantuan flowers of unusual colors, meandering vines, and other plants with incomprehensible genetics embellish streets and walls, but hidden within are the sad truths of a lost civilization. There isn’t even a drop of water. What is the secret of these plants’ vitality? Why does flora look so different in this place?

- ### The Unliving

  These mannequin-like creatures have been deprived of humanity. With pale and expressionless features, they aimlessly wander through streets and alleyways. Who are these creatures? For what purpose were they created?

- ### A Cruel Experiment

  Forced to wander eternally, a hybrid similar to a shapeless chimera slowly walks every path of the gardens. They have no defined shape, looking more like a heterogeneous mass of animal limbs. Their eyes look almost human and show sadness and resignation. If the PCs try to speak to them, a human head and torso rise from beneath the skin. The hybrid isn’t evil and fights only in self-defense (their attacks are unpredictable and their Affinities change every turn). What is the true nature of this experiment? Which animals made up their amorphous body?

- ### A Harsh Reality

  Paintings and frescoes decorate the gardens’ inner walls. Studying them for a while, Player Characters may discover a terrible truth about this experimental greenhouse: it was the theater of macabre and obsessive experimentation. Here, a now forgotten culture manipulated life itself and molded nature and humanity according to a very detailed plan. Who were they? What was their ultimate goal, and what interrupted their plan? Which of campaign’s main antagonists made such an obsession their own, to the point of trying to complete the work of these merciless visionaries?

## Not All That Glitters Is Gold

The glow of the Golden City shines beyond the clouds. Thousands of luminous particles shimmer among the ruins, residuum of the essences that have returned to the stream of souls. And yet, the heart of the city is grim and dark. The secret of its civilization must remain buried and no living being should ever set foot in the Golden City.