The City
"The place is listed in the Inspired Travelers Gazette as:
. . . a hive of commercial activity. A cultural and mercantile hub upon which the trade of the known kingdoms all depend. It is the center of the merchant world, an ancient but forward thinking pseudo-industrial city that has many engaging and valuable points of interest for the historian and popularist alike.
This must be code for:
. . . a cesspool of criminal activity. A stone and mortar monument to mercantile insanity that people should avoid like the purple plague. It is run by ferociously factional guilds and political bodies whose value of life is aptly mirrored by the street level thugs who will put your head on a spike for breathing the wrong air."
Grevious Bodily Litter
Westside: The heavy industry precinct of the City, Westside is littered with factories and sweatshops from the Upper Limits down to the Lower, pumping out material as arkane as magikhars and as insignificant as cocktail umbrellas; it's all there. Also of note are the industrial docks facing Hightown.
Eastside: The most affluant of the effluent, Eastsiders think they're almost in Hightown... The further east you go the nastier it gets. The housing projects in Queens house some of the nastiest denizens of the City (hey, they gotta live somewhere!). Knaves is less volatile but with plenty of potential, plenty of smugglers and pirate-types that frequent Toadshead Cove.
Lowtown: Lowtown's a chiefly residential area in the north, with lines upon lines of faceless houses made cheap for the sleep. The further south you get the higher the buildings grow and the more business orientated they get. Most real City business, l egit or otherwise, goes down in Lowtown. Once you get Stripside - the couple of blocks just to the north of the Strip, you're into some real heavy territory, everything can get bought or sold or rented there. "Lowtowners themselves have a particular kind of walk, a sort of half crouch with their head tilted down, but their eyes up and wary. You don’t catch a Lowtowner off guard. They got ‘wary’ by the steel capped bootful."
The Strip: The two streets running along the Bulwark on the Lowtown side contain the most happening and with-it entertainment joints in the City. They got casinos, wine bars, strip clubs...everything, all under flashing magilights. The place is so lit up that on some nights you can see it from Itsnotallbad.
Hightown: "Hightown - where the High Rollers Roll in the Big Bikkies Bowl. The place of pace where all the crested guilds hang and rub elbows with the other . . . rich dudes. If you aren’t nobility, a visiting diplomat, or a crested guildsman, you can’t even get in to look around." Those buildings still amaze me, they just cut through the sky! This is the place where all the big business hangs out and the Guilds of the Bodies Politic meet and try to fhark up all our lives. But when they wanna have fun, they go Stripside...
South Scene Island: The residence of the Lord-Liege Mayor of the City, and where the Citied Council meets. They got no real power - the Guilds own them all - so it's hardly worth even talking about, but it's there, so I had to mention it.
The Soup: "The color of the Soup varied, but on that day, if I’m not mistaken, the "water" was an orange-green, like moldy fruit. The smell was so bad you could see it." All the industrial and magidustrial waste from Westside flows into the Soup. It can get real funky real quick...
The Upwerdd River: This river is pretty clean (by City standards) and runs for hundreds of miles north into the mountains.
Dark Fin Bay: The reason the City came to be where it is. History lesson: "Only twelve hundred years ago, this place was just a fishing village, where four or five families stopped to ply the waters in their reed boats for Dark Fin (a delicious piece of aquatic life (I’m told). Tender with a light buttery tang). But the fish are long gone. The only life that could possibly make it in the Soup now would have to come from a different dimension, and would probably be more interested in tasting the buttery tang of . . . whoever’s closest."
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