Help with city locations!

[Wik]

Bertram's Toys: A two-storied house in the market district, this unassuming building is the home of a family of toymakers. Bertram is a carpenter and specializes in making affordable wooden toys, while his wife Annia is a seamstress who makes some of the finest dolls in the land. Their daughter Kessi was sent to an arcane college, though she grew bored with academia and returned to the toy store to add a little "magic" to her parents' creations.

Most of the toys are simple (few cost more than a single silver piece), though the toymakers also cater to wealthier patrons, making ceramic-faced dolls and convoled wooden rocking horses. Kessi has enchanted dolls with magic mouth to speak limited phrases, and uses other spells to enhance toys for their noble clients.

Kessi has also been interested in creating a doll that is essentially a golem - able to intelligently interact with it's child charge, and even protect a child in danger. Unfortunately, the early versions of these dolls are too protective - they react too swiftly to a child's emotional responses, and get violent as a response. This has resulted in several maimed family members who provoked a child's tears often with a simple refusal.

 

[diaglo]

Dingos ate my baby.

packs of wild dogs run rampant thru much of the city's poorer quarters. they battle with the beggars, rats, and other less fortunates for the scraps.

the city has a team of rat catchers who have been assigned the duty of thinning the packs of dogs after a more wealthy family lost a child while slumming it.

if a beggar dies in the traps no one in the upper crust will care.

insert werecanine as pack leader.

 

[diaglo]

what do all cities have:
a red light distict
connected to a bar/tavern crawl
with nearby restaurants
and then places to sleep it off

hospitals, gaols, and fire stations to handle the mess of all of the above.

 

[Ydars]

I notice that we still don't have anything on the Imperial University yet. Can you give us some idea of what you are after Morrus as I have a few ideas but they might not fit?

We could do the whole "arcane University as a grown up Hogwarts" but that seems a bit hackneyed to me.

I was thinking of a University that is now used to suppress and re-write history rather than discover truth. A dark place that is now feared and used as a de-facto religious prison. It might also be a place where artefacts are collected together to get them out of the hands of the "unworthy". I don't only mean magical artefacts but also books that give a true account of history and religious matters as well of recent wars and perhaps the tainted bloodlines of the Emperors and or Leska herself. I don't know much about Inquisitor Leska but she doesn't sound like a paragon of niceness, so this is where the idea came from.

It would be the headquarters of Leska's secret police and the place where anyone who "disappears" ends up.

 

[Ydars]

Try this one out; The former Imperial Herbarium is situated close the city walls nearest the lake. This largish stretch of ornate and formal gardens has recently become completely over-run by an extremely invasive and fast growing species of poisonous ivy-like plant, brought by a plant collector on a recent trip to the northern mountains.

The entire gardens are now festooned with the stuff and it grows so fast (up to 1 m per day) that it has strangled several trees and anyone trying to cut it down has been either seriously affected by poisonous pollen or else burnt by the juice of the torn plant. Insects also seem extremely attracted to the bruised plant with the result that large colonies of bees have taken up residence in the herbarium.

The really nasty thing about this ivy is the way it seems to attack buildings, using very fast growing rootlets, the plant bores into even the hardest stone or brick and has already grown up one side of the main herbarium building whilst also attacking the city wall itself.

So far this plant is confined to the herbarium but it is only a matter of time before it escapes the walled garden and gets out into the city. (note; it already has by growing down into the sewers; a great plot hook for DMs to have sudden building collapses ot the wall undermined for a military type problem.

 

[taliesin15]

The Bazaar--typical open air bazaar, hundreds of tents set up in a central plaza with vendors of all sorts

Street Vendors--one thing every City needs is a host of traveling, mobile vendors of all sorts of things, especially food items, and on the latter you can really go crazy "Dragon Stew" (really Giant Lizard flesh), "Shank Steak Burritos" (nobody realizes that the "beef" inside actually comes from slain packmules), and "Squab Shooters" (deep fried pigeon, similar to chicken nuggets; the City is overrun with thousands of pigeons that the tourists annoyingly feed and dote on, while all the locals refer to them as rats with wings).

Street of the Gods--based partly on Fritz Leiber, partly on Monty Python's Life of Brian, here you have dozens of temples, shrines, cathedrals and a vast central plaza where hucksters, mad men, inspired holy men, and everything in between stand on soap boxes and preach some sort of gospel or other. Several could be particularly revolting to most of the rest--say a preacher of the gospel of Cthulhu and Hastur, perhaps attended by acolytes wearing papier mache masks of the Elder Gods, maybe even engaged in a sort of erotic & gruesome simblance of ritual blood-letting and sacrifice.

 

[Derren]

The plankpullers

The plankpullers are the cities name for the inhabitants of a slum district near the shore outside of the city wall. The district itself is unnamed and only referenced as "where the plankpullers live".

The name comes from that in in the past when the habour wasn't as secured as it is now it often happened that a ship ripped loose in bad weather and stranded on that beach where it was quickly deconstructed by the inhabitants of that district for raw material and fuel for their fires. Often they started this work even during the storm so that by the time the owner of the ship noticed that it was missing it already wasn't seaworthy anymore.

Today the habour is secure enough so that ships don't rip free during bad weather. Still the inhabitants kept the name, partially because many of them often perform menial tasks at the local wharf.

 

[Morrus]

Thanks, guys! Mapping is now underway! UI'll post the map (with locations!) here when it's done. I'll be using a lot of these suggestions!

 

[Ydars]

Threadcromancy!

For anyone who hasn't seen it, Morrus has posted the completed map of Ragos here (post 59).

http://www.enworld.org/forum/e-n-publishing/246587-pre-order-your-war-burning-sky-campaign-saga-hardcover-now-save-25-full-price-3.html

It looks like a good number of our ideas made the final cut (I think I can see one of Wik's at least (Bloated corpse is loc 14 I think), and a couple of mine are also apparent). Can't tell much more from the map but you can bet many more of our ideas made it into the location write up. Well done fellow EN Worlders!

Maybe Morrus could tell us which locations he used in the end?

 

[Morrus]

Threadcromancy!

For anyone who hasn't seen it, Morrus has posted the completed map of Ragos here (post 59).

http://www.enworld.org/forum/e-n-publishing/246587-pre-order-your-war-burning-sky-campaign-saga-hardcover-now-save-25-full-price-3.html

It looks like a good number of our ideas made the final cut (I think I can see one of Wik's at least (Bloated corpse is loc 14 I think), and a couple of mine are also apparent). Can't tell much more from the map but you can bet many more of our ideas made it into the location write up. Well done fellow EN Worlders!

Maybe Morrus could tell us which locations he used in the end?

You got the most, Ydars. In fact, given the number of yours I used, I feel it's appropriate you get a credit in the book under "Additional Text" or somesuch. How would you prefer to be credited?

1. Oprhan's Hope
2. Feuding Brothers
3. The Asylum
4. Wiseman Brewery*
5. Maze of Pain
6. Stinksquare
7. The Grates
8. Red Rocks/Tower of Warning
9. [As yet unnamed Circus Maximus analog]
10. Imperial Barracks
11. Bertram's Toys
12. Grand Aviary
13. Lihorn's Transport Office
14. The Floating Corpse
15. Syfoam's Shell
16. Mercian's Walk
17. Street of the Gods
18. Imperial University
19. Great Library/Magister's Tower
20. Bureau of Justice
21. Landward Palace
22. Hands of Judgement
23. Statue's Corner
24. The Donjon
25. The City in Miniature
26. Imperial Stables
27. The Confectory
28. Coaltongue Ampitheatre
29. Forest of Swords
30. Lighthouse of Seven Faces
31. Monument Island**
32. Imperial Palace**

Other areas (named but not numbered) include The Runnel, Field of War, River of Ice, Victory Gate, Gorgon's Gate, Gallowgate, The Hundreds.


*Detailed in one of the bonus adventures, Old Fashioned Way.
** Detailed in The Beating of the Aquiline Heart.