To the west along the algae choked canals is Upper Aigu with its white-plaster townhouses, botanical gardens, endless fêtes, and gossip rags. North, along the slum lined train tracks, to Trema with its sprawl of rail yards, abattoirs, chemical sheds, cock fights and night-time homicides. South, the sandy beach and rock-piled piers give way to busy Cedilla with its wharves, dry-docks, warehouses, sailors pubs, and never-ending riots.
Councils ~
Being those of notability
The Society of Whisperers : regulate gossip, publishing, real-estate, and thief-taking.
The Goodly Fellowship of Poissonnières : regulate fishmongery, finance, marketplaces, and public displays of religion.
The Rooftop Republic : regulate students, criminals, street-sweepers, and abandoned properties.
Routes ~
The Green Canal :
- Slow, turgid, choked with violently colored algae and laden barges. Travel takes twice as long as normal but is quite scenic.
- The footpaths are faster but plagued by muggers, beggars, and artists.
The Tramway :
- Heralded by the menacing clamor of bells and yapping of pursuing dogs. Pedestrians best jump out of the way. Costs 1s to board. Fare-evaders earn the enmity of the Trolley-men's Union and its plainclothes enforcers.
- Every trip there's a 2 in 6 chance of an accident holding up traffic. Riders must wait or precede on foot.
Encounters ~
1-4: d8 Anti-Pelagic Militiamen - Armed with muskets and sabres, prominent badges.
1 : Tromping about singing rousing songs.
2 : Scrawling hateful anti-pelagic slogans on a wall.
3 : Hassling someone they think looks a bit too inhuman.
4 : Engaged in a running gunfight with an imaginary enemy to everyone else's distress.
5-8: d6 Ice Deliverymen - Burly, becheckered, lugging blocks of ice.
5: Chasing after something scampering, waving their ice-hooks.
6: Standing in a doorway, seducing a housewife.
7: Moving something mysterious, wrapped up in a tarp, from a house to their wagon.
8: Nearly coming to blows with some carters over a traffic jam.
9-11: d12 Latter-Day Abzuists - Chanting, swaying, costumes of kelp and driftwood, paper-mâché masks.
9: Fomenting a procession in the streets, some kind of festival.
10: Preaching to a disinterested crowd about the perfidious influence of solid land.
11: Fleeing from 2d6 angry Anti-Pelagic Militiamen.
12-14: d6 Caffeine-Addled Thugs - 3hp. Dex 15. Knives & cudgels (d6), chic outfits, stink of roast beans.
12: Smashing up a shopfront while passersby avert their eyes.
13: Squatting round a corpse, riffling through its pockets.
14: Heckling passersby from their seats outside a cafe; looking to start a fight.
15-16 : 1d4 Thief-Takers - 4hp. Truncheons (d6), rattles, plain-clothes, forbidden to speak above a whisper.
15: In hot pursuit of a petty thief.
16: Trying to extract the details of a crime from a reluctant citizen.
18-19 : Forlorn Puppeteer - Fit-up, clever hands.
18: Standing on a street corned, ignored but for a solitary child.
19: Arguing with a penniless actor about the finer points of theatre.
20: The Gullwise Man - Strange, sooty, wears a gullfeather in his derby hat.
20: Perched atop a pole, pier, or chimney, communing with the gulls who see all.
Locations ~
The Old Sea-Fort
A little island connected to the borough by a spit of mud at low tide. Crumbling pillboxes and rusting artillery sit among the tussocks of pale grass. Giant concrete listening-phones plunge into the surf. Nowadays the Anti-Pelagic Militia occupies the fort. Paranoid humanists, they strut about with ear-phone hats on and muskets at ready, listening for signs of an invasion from the depths. Picnickers like to row out to the island on sunny days in spite of the scowling militiamen.
- Captain Obadiah Marmot : A fat, whiskered man buried under layered oilskins. Speaks with a phlegmatic cough and suffers from hydrophobia so intense he is able to walk on water.
- Rumored to be the outcast scion of a shipping magnate.
- Incorruptibly dedicated to the Anti-Pelagic cause.
- Distrustful of anyone who looks sufficiently non-human.
Blanchard-Cope Pasteboard Factory
Once a residential terrace; windows have been bricked up and tin roofed sheds and pulp vats now fill the backyards. Gulls endlessly circle overhead. One stubborn holdout, an aging retiree, lives on the top floor of one of the converted houses.
- Blanchard & Cope : Nearly identical, dressed in dull suits. Their business has been plagued by an infestation of little pasteboard creatures, grown out of various abandoned scraps. The creatures are getting more intelligent. Some workers have seen little pasteboard men committing acts of sabotage. The partners are desperate to eliminate the menace and have hired legions of so far unsuccessful exterminators.
Marsh Beach
A plethora of painted fishing boats pulled ashore on rubbish strewn sand. Eroded piers crowded with nets and baskets of fish, clams, lobsters, eurypterids, and mutated scallops. Once a marsh and garbage dump, here the sea laps at the cities-edge. Many of the fishermen attend the Church of the Latter-Day Abzu, a newer star cult located in a rickety, clapboard, algae covered warehouse cum church perched on stilts over the water. Hostilities abound with the Anti-Pelagic Militia.
- Ptolemy Bosch : An old salt, grizzled and bearded, perpetually dressed in heavy oilskins. He is chief of the fishermen by dint of seniority. A cynic to the core, he dislikes the current "fad" (as he puts it) for the church. Increasingly his leadership is questioned. Passes information to Maynard Runt about catches before they're officially announced.
- High Priestess Lowbile : Buried underneath layers of ceremonial vestments, an ornate bronze mask hides fluttering gills. Is counting down the days till the stars align and her god rises from the deep to drown the world in a deluge. Happy to chat about over tea.
Lord Rochefort's Museum
A sagging old townhouse built atop a bridge straddling the green canal like a bowlegged man. For a 5s fee entreats may view Lord Rochefort's collection of rusting armour, dusty pottery, and strange taxidermied animals, as well as consult his extensive (if eclectic) library. On Tuesdays the Society of Whisperers (one of the boroughs leading councils) meets here for tea and business.
Brewer Row
- Lord "Jackie" Rochefort : A man with a wispy grey beard tucked inside his smoking jacket and a sword-cane close at hand, stomping about in old cavalry boots. He easily works himself into a frenzy on the topics of: ancient civilizations, the youth, military endeavors, breeds of cheese.
- Hires enterprising youngsters to hunt down artifacts.
- Ties to certain members of the Juniper Syndicate. Old friends.
- Caretaker of the Tattle-beast, a little bat-like creature which absorbs the thoughts of everyone in the radius of the neighborhood and whispers them to its owner.
- The Society of Whisperers is comprised of the boroughs well-to-do who concern themselves with collecting all gossip and rumours and keeping abreast of goings-on. Exclusive, you must own property to join their ranks. Wishes to remove the Tattle-beast from the aging Rochefort's care.
Brewer Row
The muck-stained canal bank was once lined with distilleries, now picturesque cafes and coffeehouses squat in the shuttered buildings, each packed with artists, students, and petite-bourgeois types from dawn to dusk. One distillery has been completely leveled and replaced with an eerily silent construction site, but an advertisement plastered fence blocks any view of what's being built.
- The Musketeers of Brewer Row, a cutthroat gang of dilettante young thugs hopped up on caffeine, reign under the row's placid surface; extorting shopkeepers, smuggling rare blends, fighting for turf with the Juniper Syndicate. Nothing is too base for them.
- Blackjack Teeva : A flamboyant, charming young art student and captain of the Musketeers. She shares a flat with Hogarth Van Tripe.
- Harbors a hatred for lamp-lighters, she is still searching for one among their number who burnt down her family home.
Speculative Fish Exchange
A green painted wrought-iron arcade with a nautical motif. Between the stalls selling fish and bivalves are huge chalk and ticker boards around which cluster screaming mobs of brokers, traders, and fishmongers haggling over stocks. Built atop the exchange's roof among the gulls and pigeons is the shop of the boroughs most notorious fence.
- Maynard Runt : A plucky young orphan in a newly tailored suit and grease-stained flatcap who has risen from oyster-shucker to wealthiest fish-futures broker in the entire borough, with plans to rise yet higher still.
- Attended by "Mother & Father," two sluggish bodyguards (strong, snub-pistols).
- Looking to branch out of fish-futures and into other investments.
- Rumoured to keep valuable stock certificates in his old flatcap (a memento of his days as an urchin).
The Symposium
The grand bathhouse has long been shuttered but its upper stories have been taken over by the "Rooftop Republic," a commune of starving artists, chimney-sweeps, and criminals who inhabit the boroughs many garrets and attics. A few knocked out walls and presto, a squat, forum, theater, and art expo all in one. In the lower stories among the old tile-work and furnaces, it is said there's a leaky steam-tunnel that connects to the Underground.
- Hogarth Van Tripe : President-elect of the republic, an easily bullied, harmless dope who spends more time fussing over his cravat than getting anything done.
- Keeps getting re-elected because he'll do whatever everyone tells him to.
- Shares a flat with Blackjack Teeva.
- Younger brother of Howard Van Tripe.
- Deazel : A scurrilous man in a filthy top-hat with all the airs of a showman and manners of a thug. He collects a 10s toll per head of anyone who wants to use "his" door to the Underground.
- Utterly mercenary, a coward, but one who will plot revenge.
- A silver whistle hangs around his neck, if threatened Deazel will blow on it, summoning 1d6+1 quicksilver warriors to his aid.
- The Fantastic Phantasmo : A masked second-story man and part-time tout, he knows every inch of the boroughs rooftops and the many inhabitants thereof. Conducts himself like a prize-winning spaniel.
Gleam Alley
A snaking alleyway lined with old brick tenements now disappearing beneath the facades of piled up gin-palaces, all a-glitter with mirrors, lamps, and flashy advertising. The bright lights distract from the drunks, violent brawls, and omnipresent smell of vomit.... ITS ALSO ... ?
- Gleam Alley is controlled by the shadowy Juniper Syndicate who have consolidated most of the borough's pubs and gin joints under their control. Those operating without cutting in the syndicate tend to vanish and turn up day's later with completely different personalities, all too willing to fork over a portion of profits. A gang-war simmers with the Musketeers of Coffee Row, whose addictive brews threaten to undercut the syndicate's monopoly on vice.
Onion Gate
A sullen lump of ancient masonry decorated with carven alliums; lonely remnant of the city's walls. Traffic congeals around either end, channeled down the narrow street. During revolts its a favorite place to build a barricade, the rest of the time it is plagued with newsboys and costermongers hawking their wares to omnibuses full of visiting suburbanites and soldiers on leave. Several newspapers and print-shops keep their offices nearby, including the Diacritical Gazette who operate out of an ancient house perched right above the gate itself.
- The Brother (& Sister) Hood of Criers, Couriers and Newsies is an ad-hoc union run by the rather vicious children who compromise the majority of its allied professions. Ostensibly democratic, in practice the personal gang of various young demagogues. They hold sway over most of the boroughs urchins and are adepts in the arts of slander, public announcement, and quick getaways.
The Postal Branch
A decaying old theater cum post office. Carriages full of mail-sacks and rushing messengers crowd the street out. Inside long backed-up queues stake out the front desk and rollerskating interns rush mail trolleys to sorting stations. The sub-basement is home to pawnshop that's still selling off the remnants of the old theater's costume and props.
- The Patented Automatic Sorting Engine : An immense and complicated machine of pneumatic tubes and turning gears that was installed to deal with manpower shortages, after the postmaster mysterious died the Engine started issuing orders and now practically runs the place.
- Howard Van Tripe : Deputy postmaster, a nervous fidgety man, who has come to hate letters and machinery. Every rattle of a pneumatic tube presages the arrival of another of the Engine's dictates. Would love to dismantle it but fears retribution. Brother of Hogarth Van Tripe.
The Old Botanical Gardens
Overshadowed for some years now by the New Botanical Gardens in Upper Aigu; the grounds have grown tangled and wild. Frequented only by drunks, neer'do'wells, puppeteers, and actors. The old saurian statues have been torn down and buried and the shabby old limestone caves, once an attraction have faded from relevance, frequented only by smugglers moving contraband liquor and fine beef through the Underground. Each month more illegally built housing encroaches on the edges of the gardens.
Gibson Icehouse Firm
- The Poor Fellow Thespians have long been without a theater and haunt the gardens, putting on ad-hoc productions for local families and sleeping under bridges. They are cunning and embittered.
- Do-Good-Upon-The-World Martha : The garden's sole remaining groundskeeper. Wild haired, she roams the park with a shotgun, sledgehammer, shovel, and satchel of crude bombs; waging a guerilla war on squatters and illegal developers. A sort of boogeyman for the neighborhood.
Gibson Icehouse Firm
Formerly a minor prince's palace, the baroque wings and annexes have been converted into a massive refrigerated warehouse complex. A stream of barges unload ice ferried in from Deep Country onto the canal-side docks every hour of the day. The cellars are vast and rumours abound of strange things stored on ice down there. The firm employs hundreds of deliverymen in their distinctive black-checkered livery.
- Old Man Gibson : Has a taste for the Weird and pays well for odd items brought out of Deep Country and the Underground. Has a one sided rivalry with Rochefort who he views as an un-discerning hack.
- Sally Gibson : The old man's daughter, a businesswoman to the core, she disapproves of her father's hobbies and has been maneuvering for years to get him declared senile so she can take over the company.
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