Sigil: The City of Doors

The Bleak Cabal (Bleakers, Madmen)




The Bleak Cabal, its members known as Bleakers or Madmen, believe there is no inherent meaning in the multiverse, so we need to look within to find whatever meaning we give to it. Some members abandon all hope of meaning, while others who find inner meaning to fight the madness which plagues them. They include “bleaknik” poets, grim warriors, moody mages and priests, nihilists, and those who’ve been exposed to the winds of Pandemonium. In Sigil they are based in an insane asylum called the Gatehouse, while on the planes they have their headquarters in a town called the Madhouse on Pandemonium.

Philosophy: The multiverse is without meaning.
Plane of Influence: Pandemonium.
Headquarters:The Gatehouse, an insane asylum.
Allies: The Doomguard, Dustmen, Revolutionary League and the Xaositects.
Enemies:The Fraternity of Order, the Harmonium and the Mercykillers.

Restrictions:
Lawful characters can't join.

Rising in the Ranks:
Most members volunteer at a poorhouse, orphanage or the Gatehouse.
A lot of members are wizards and scholars.
To become a factotum, you must serve for six months in the Gatehouse watching over inmates.

Factol Lhar: Chaotic neutral half-orc, who was himself an orphan. He may be succumbing to The Grim Retreat

New Spells: Factotums get special spells found here. Only Bleakers may add these spells to their spell lists.

Lore:

• The Grim Retreat: Many Bleakers get this illness, which leads to madness and death. This process eventually takes down every factol of the Bleak Cabal.

Background

• Skill Proficiencies: Insight, Medicine
• Tool Proficiency: Herbalism kit, cook's utensils
  Equipment: Herbalism kit, healer’s kit, manacles, a set of common clothes with a faction badge sewn into them, and a belt pouch containing 5 gp.
• Feature: Nameless. As a Bleaker, you’ve given up your last name, seeing family ties as meaningless. You are welcome to stay in the Mad Bleaker wing of the Gatehouse in the Hive Ward, and you are also welcome to work at a particular soup kitchen somewhere in the Hive
  or in one of the Gatehouse wings (though you aren’t paid for this). Additionally, you know of a portal, and the key for that portal, that leads to the town of The Madhouse in Pandemonium, where you are also welcome.
• Suggested Characteristics: Bleakers can be dour and most are more than a little insane, but the best of them are charitable and generous, finding that alleviating the suffering is a lot more useful than looking for a point to it.
• Bleaker Membership: Members of the Cabal are surprisingly diverse, but they share one common theme: any devotion to a cause greater than one's own life is seen as entirely pointless, so classes that revere distant concepts or entities are very unusual. The Bleakers enjoy plenty of hardened sellswords (half-mad berserker barbarians, fighters inured to violence, cold-blooded assassins), and some dangerous and unpredictable spell-slingers (wild sorcerers who have lost touch with reality, madness-inducing enchanters, illusionists who view life as fleeting as illusions). There aren't many paladins, clerics, druids, bards, or monks among the Cabal, as those classes tend to be focused on certain “higher callings” that render most Bleakers unsuitable for their roles. Still, the occasional paladin of Devotion might swear himself to anonymously help others, and a certain group of entertainers known as the Bleakniks might someday give rise to a true (and truly awful) bardic College.

Renown Bleaker Restriction: You have indefinite madness (see DMG), which manifests as an additional character flaw. At the end of each day you must roll a d20, and on a 1 you succumb to a deep depression which lasts for 24 hours. During this depression, if you take any other actions besides resting, you cannot gain Inspiration until you atone or prove yourself to your faction’s cause (or lack thereof!).
Madness Immunity: You are immune to madness-inducing spells and effects, such as confusion, crown of madness, feeblemind, Otto’s irresistible dance, Tasha’s hideous laughter, the gaze of an umber hulk, or the winds of Pandemonium.
Undecipherable Mind: You always have advantage on saving throws against mind reading effects, such as detect thoughts. In addition, you can spend Inspiration to mask yourself from detect thoughts and similar forms of mind-reading for one minute (as if your Intelligence were 3 or lower).
Psychic Resistance. You gain resistance to psychic damage.
Absorb Madness. You may remove madness from a creature by touching them in an undisturbed meditation that lasts for 6 hours; at the end of this, their madness is cured and you take a level of exhaustion or suffer short-term madness as described in the DMG (your choice).