The Creep hasn’t always been the (relatively) safe place it is today.

Because the Creep is officially outside the City of Otraxis, guild statutes prevent the City Watch from enforcing Otraxin law within the former Perellian Mining Complex. Moreover, scrying into the complex is impossible thanks to the legendary orb that Thane Arred reinstalled when the Creep was first founded.

Although the City Watch is all-but powerless to operate inside the Creep, the Duke’s standing army is not. The very same guild statutes that deny the City Watch jurisdiction  mean that those within the Creep are subject to common law rather than Otraxin law, and that gives the Duke the right of conquest over the tunnels, regardless of the convoluted legal entities set up by Arred to manage their ownership.

In practice, however, the subjugation of the denizens of the Creep has always been both politically and economically unviable, and the Duke is only rarely motivated–usually by the Miners’ Guild–to muster the banners in order to flush the Creep out.

This lack of law enforcement once made the Creep a particularly attractive place for those who sought to operate outside Otraxin law, from merchants of questionable character who merely wished to escape the city’s punishing duties on some imported goods, to hardened criminals who needed a place to lie low or a base from which to run their operations. It was typically a simple matter to find out ahead of time when the army was coming, and either hide or decamp temporarily.

The sequence of events that changed all that involved the entity that became known as the Shadow of the Creep.

Roughly fifteen years ago, Creepers started dying. There had always been accidents, and in the particularly lawless depths of the Creep murders were not entirely uncommon, but this was an entirely different order of magnitude. It started with the death of Martha Tabram, whose body was discovered with more than thirty stab wounds. Over the following days, more victims were found, and although the Shadow’s first victim was a woman, the killer was largely indiscriminate in the killings that followed, with victims ranging from a 75-year-old woman to a seven-year-old boy. As the days stretched into weeks, and the Shadow had still not been brought to justice, the killings became progressively more brutal. The killer began removing organs from victims, and mutilating the corpses–sometimes beyond hope of normal means of identification.

The Creep was in uproar. The Duke was considering sending the army in to clear the place out once and for all. The citizens of Otraxis proper were terrified that once the killer tired of the Creep, he or she (or it) would come after them next. In the Creep, neighbour accused neighbour and total anarchy was dangerously close; the entire community teetered on a knife edge.

Then, the killings simply stopped. Speculation since then has suggested that the killer simply moved on or tired of his ‘game’. Or perhaps he was finally killed by one of his or her victims who fought back.

Whatever the case, the Creep slowly settled back to some form of normality, and as a direct consequence of the killings, the Creepers formed their own volunteer law enforcement agency, albeit one that operates on a different set of laws to the city of Otraxis itself.

One thing remains on everyone’s minds, though, and that is the prospect that the Shadow may one day return to the Creep, and begin the killings anew.