The Iron Cities
The Sprawl
The Iron Cities are a giant urban perimeter outside the Garden. Pressed up against the heavily guarded walls surrounding the Garden, it is organized into dozens of districts. Each district is run by the Iron Barons, a band of desperate nobles and upjumped merchants trying to work their way back into the favor of the Imperial courts through overproduction. Each district specializes in some kind of export, such as steelworking or quicksilver processing, while needing massive imports from the wastes. Trains and airships with large cargos of raw materials are sorted at massive transport depots and stations. What isn’t sold inwards to the center of the Valta Empire is often shipped outwards to the Wastes or the Sea of Crisis.
The Boilerworks
The Iron Cities are as busy above ground as they are below. Complex networks of tunnels, sewers, and water mains lace through each district to provide water and liquid refuse to the dozens of factories in each district. It is also a common place for gangs and other organized criminals to flee or hide. Stockpiles of weapons, bodies, and worse dangers inhabit the dark underbelly of the Iron Cities. Boilerworkers, kitted with special close range weapons, are trained both to repair ruptures in the pipes down there as well as fight off giant rats, bandits, or insane derelicts.
The Dirty Masses
Poverty is everywhere in the Iron Cities, with a few high end luxury blocks reserved for visiting Garden nobility. While most of the population works the lines in factories or hauls goods from transport depots, a fair number turn to crime. Gangs run rampant in the Iron Cities and turf is heavily fought over, with constabulary having to avoid the more dangerous blocks. Abandoned factories are retrofitted to build weapons and refine gunpowder and smugglers run illegal goods through the emptier sections of the Boilerworks. Worker riots are not uncommon and are quelled with private security bolstered by city constables paid by the ruling baron. While prisoners are treated differently from district to district, there is mainly a dungeon that is used to hold murderers and debtors alike.
Buying your Ticket out of here
For all its misery, most people in the Iron Cities cannot leave. A ticket to ride out of there is costly, easily a year’s wage, if someone will even offer you passage, fearing you’re a criminal. Stowaways on trains or airships are often dealt with lethally, and walking out of the Iron Cities only leads you to the wastes, where there is no place within a hundred miles beyond the city limits. Travel to the Garden is heavily restricted and if you make it past the guards on the wall, there is no guarantee the Queen’s Warden’s won’t pick you up. Folks of the Iron Cities are trapped and often beaten into passivity or lawlessness.
Grey Sun
With all the refining and quicksilver production, the factories churn enough smoke to blot out most of the sun. A fine layer of soot covers everything and everyone in the Iron Cities. Pale skin is common place as overcast is as bright as it usually gets there. Lamps are generally lit in the more active parts of each district to account for this.
Hooks
- Strange sounds are heard deep in the boilerworks under Tin Street. Already two boilerworkers have gone missing.
- A local gang was massacred and people are afraid of who or what will take their place.
- A train arrives into the depot, infected with a terrible plague from the wastes. The entire district is quarrantined.
- An Airship is impounded with tons of contraband. A local gang needs you to take the cargo.
- An abandoned factory that burned down with all of its workers trapped inside is suddenly operational again at night.
Themes - Urban Adventure, Gaslight Low Fantasy, Organized Crime, Bleak themes, Urban Occult