The Dabus: Sigil’s Silent Stewards
Player Primer for Our West Marches Campaign
If the Lady of Pain is the untouchable presence that preserves Sigil, then the dabus are the hands that keep the city functioning. They float through the streets like quiet custodians of reality—repairing, adjusting, pruning, and maintaining the delicate machinery of the City of Doors. You will see them constantly in Sigil, yet most mortals never learn more than a handful of truths about what they are.
What the Dabus Are
Dabus look vaguely humanoid: elongated faces, curling horns, goatlike features, slender frames. They hover a few inches off the ground, drifting more than walking. Their eyes reflect no emotion, and their expressions rarely change.
They are not fiends, celestials, fey, or constructs. They are simply dabus, a species unique to Sigil, as much a part of the city as its shifting streets.
How They Communicate
Dabus do not speak. Instead, they converse through rebuses—floating pictorial symbols that appear around their heads. These images combine into meaning, more like dream-language than simple icons. Interpreting a dabus’s meaning requires patience and often context.
This rebus-speech is one of the clearest signs that the dabus are somehow linked to the Lady of Pain herself.
What They Do in Sigil
Dabus serve as caretakers, laborers, repairers, and gardeners—though “gardening” in Sigil often means trimming reality more than hedges.
Their responsibilities include:
- Mending damaged streets or buildings
- Adjusting the alignment of portals
- Maintaining the strange, hidden mechanisms that keep Sigil stable
- Ensuring the city doesn’t spiral into planar chaos
- Carrying out unspoken directives from the Lady of Pain
Their presence is constant but never intrusive. The dabus flow around crowds, hover through markets, and slip down alleys, always working but never interfering with mortal business unless necessary.
Their Relationship to the Lady of Pain
The dabus are the closest thing Sigil has to the Lady’s voice—though they never claim the role. Most residents believe:
- The dabus act as the Lady’s extensions
- Their work reflects her mood
- Their distress signals her displeasure
- Their silence means all is well
Some scholars theorize the dabus are manifestations of the city itself, or fragments of the Lady’s consciousness, or a species enslaved to her will long before Sigil existed. None of these theories are safe to say aloud.
What matters is simple:
Disturbing a dabus is often treated the same as disturbing the Lady herself.
How the Dabus Affect Our Campaign
For our West Marches structure, the dabus fill several key roles:
- They maintain the portals that send you on missions
- They ensure the City of Doors remains navigable and stable
- They help regulate the flow of multiversal travelers
- They silently mark when something in Sigil—and therefore our campaign world—is out of alignment
Occasionally, a dabus may appear at a mission briefing, floating a sequence of rebus-glyphs that must be interpreted by Sigil’s bureaucrats before adventurers can act. They are never the quest-givers directly, but their presence means the city itself has taken notice.
Why Players Should Care
The dabus are a barometer for the health of Sigil and the multiverse:
- A calm, busy dabus workforce means the portals are stable.
- Agitated or frantic dabus indicate planar disruptions.
- A dabus delivering a message means a problem is serious enough for the city to intervene.
For your characters, the dabus are both mysterious guides and silent warnings. They are the ever-present reminder that Sigil is alive, watched, and finely balanced—and that your role in stabilizing fractured worlds is woven into the very nature of the city.
In short:
The dabus are Sigil’s quiet, floating caretakers—enigmatic servants of the Lady of Pain, custodians of every portal you rely on, and a living symbol of the city’s stability.
