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--- zeitgeist:places:flint [2022/04/13 19:46] – [Central] neyrick
+++ zeitgeist:places:flint [2025/05/21 21:07] (current) – external edit 127.0.0.1
@@ Line 99: / Line 99: @@
 ==== Central ====
 The oldest and most developed district of Flint is
 home to its main government structures, including
 the city council, superior court, police headquarters, and the offices of various civil functionaries
-like tax collectors. Grand party halls, ornate druid-
+like tax collectors. Grand party halls, ornate druidic garden temples, and parks filled with monuments
-ic garden temples, and parks filled with monuments
 to old wars provide recreation and entertainment
 for the city’s nobility and prospering middle class,
 while the Orange Street commodities market and
 the prestigious Pardwight University are the dual
-hearts of Flint’s economic and academic cultures.\\
+hearts of Flint’s economic and academic cultures.
-The district mayor Oncala Putnam recently approved construction of a grand subrail station to
+The district mayor Oncala Putnam recently approved construction of a grand subrail station to serve\\
-serve as the hub of a city-wide transportation network. Currently the Central district is often clogged with traffic from the surface rail station, since the
+as the hub of a city-wide transportation network.
-proposed tunnel through Humble Hill in the Nettles, meant to provide an easier route to the factories
+Currently the Central district is often clogged
+with traffic from the surface rail station, since the
+proposed tunnel through Humble Hill in the Nettles,
+meant to provide an easier route to the factories
 of Parity Lake, has been dogged by sabotage from
-elements opposed to the industrialization of Risur.\\
+elements opposed to the industrialization of Risur.
 Just off the coast in Flint Bay, the city governor’s
-mansion occupies what was once an island fortress. For the past 400 years Roland Stanfield has,
+mansion occupies what was once an island fortress.
-through various incarnations and with only rare disruption, served as city governor, earning near
+For the past 400 years Roland Stanfield has, through
-universal respect for his wisdom and leadership.\\
+various incarnations and with only rare disruption,
-Perhaps most importantly for the PCs, Central district is home to the local headquarters of the
+served as city governor, earning near universal
-Royal Homeland Constabulary, headed by Lady Inspectress Margaret Saxby. Extensive details of
+respect for his wisdom and leadership.
-the local branch are presented below, in the Royal Homeland Constabulary section.
+Perhaps most importantly for the PCs, Central
+district is home to the local headquarters of the
+Royal Homeland Constabulary, headed by Lady
+Inspectress Margaret Saxby. Extensive details of
+the local branch are presented below, in the Royal
+Homeland Constabulary section.
 <WRAP relinfobox>
 <WRAP relinfoboxtitle>Navras Opera House</WRAP>
-Flint’s oldest surviving building is the Navras
+Flint’s oldest surviving building is the Navras\\
-Opera House in the central district. Navras,
+Opera House in the central district. Navras, an\\
-an eladrin who fled Elfaivar after the Great
+eladrin who fled Elfaivar after the Great Malice,\\
-Malice, designed the opera house and laid the
+designed the opera house and laid the cornerstone\\
-cornerstone with a brick he had brought from his
+with a brick he had brought from his homeland.\\
-homeland. He spent nearly two hundred years
+He spent nearly two hundred years personally\\
-personally overseeing its construction, and was
+overseeing its construction, and was aided by\\
-aided by no less than eight Risuri kings. When
+no less than eight Risuri kings. When he completed\\
-he completed the building, incongruously huge
+the building, incongruously huge for what was at\\
-for what was at the time just a small river fort
+the time just a small river fort city, Navras gave\\
-city, Navras gave the first performance by sing-
+the first performance by singing the dirge of\\
-ing the dirge of Vekesh. As the audience cheered
+Vekesh. As the audience cheered and wept at his\\
-and wept at his performance, he walked off the
+performance, he walked off the stage and\\
-stage and disappeared forever.\\
+disappeared forever.\\
-The acoustic design of the performance hall
+The acoustic design of the performance hall\\
-somehow captures magical power from song,
+somehow captures magical power from song,\\
-or from the emotional reactions of the audi-
+or from the emotional reactions of the audience.\\
-ence. Impresarios who coordinate performance
+Impresarios who coordinate performance almost\\
-almost always hire spellcasting bards to harness
+always hire spellcasting bards to harness this\\
-this energy and craft a magic item as a me-
+energy and craft a magic item as a memento of\\
-mento of the show. In the three hundred years
+the show. In the three hundred years since the\\
-since the Navras Opera House opened, most of
+Navras Opera House opened, most of these items\\
-these items have found their ways into private
+have found their ways into private collections,\\
-collections, but a rare few have become famous,
+but a rare few have become famous, such as the\\
-such as the Hurricane Violin, which commemo-
+Hurricane Violin, which commemorated the Fable\\
-rated the Fable of Seaquen and later banished
+of Seaquen and later banished a sea monster\\
-a sea monster that threatened Flint Harbor in
+that threatened Flint Harbor in 417 a.o.v.
-a.o.v
 </WRAP>
+{{:zeitgeist:places:flint_central.jpg?direct&400|}}
 === Subrail Construction ===
@@ Line 194: / Line 200: @@
 from collaborating with at least three gangs which
 operated out of the forest, but a new player in the
-area has somehow managed to get the gangs to call off their attacks.
+area has somehow managed to get the gangs to call off their attacks.\\
+Somewhere in the high misty mountains hides
+Hana “Gale” Soliogn, an eladrin who fled to Risur
+after she escaped the rich Danoran family who had
+kept her as a trophy for over a century. Upon leaving
+the dead magic zone of Danor, Soliogn discovered
+an exceedingly rare talent for innately controlling
+winds and weather, which earned her the name Gale.\\
+She enjoyed a brief celebrity upon arriving in
+Flint a year ago, but almost immediately withdrew
+into the wilderness and began recruiting followers
+among those opposed to the influx of industry. Law
+enforcement officials believe she’s trying to punish
+Danor by proxy, and in the past several months
+hundreds of acts of sabotage on factories and
+steamships have been linked to her. In one incident,
+Gale was caught in the act of trying to assassinate a
+sleeping industrialist, but she managed to fly away
+and avoid capture.
+==== The Nettles ====
+A small spur of the mountains of the Cloudwood
+cuts into the heart of Flint, and for most of the
+city’s history these hills were home to druidic rituals, or simply let romantics witness wondrous vistas
+of the beaches from on high. Their traditional
+name came from an old commander of the Flint
+fort, who saw them as a thorny barrier against attack from the north.\\
+But then in 346 a.o.v. a coven of witches took residence upon a jagged mountain at the range’s edge,
+which ever since has been called Cauldron Hill. For
+decades they terrorized the city, sending goblins
+and specters to abduct people for sacrificial rites,
+then hiding in the veil between this world and the
+Bleak Gate whenever any tried to assault them.\\
+Eventually the witches were defeated when King
+Lorcan allied with a Crisillyiri godhand and led
+an assault during a lunar eclipse. Ever since, the
+peak of Cauldron Hill has been rife with haunting and spirit activity, and one of the key tasks of
+the district mayor has been to keep daring fools
+from ascending the mountain and coming down
+possessed.\\
+The greatest achievement of the previous district
+mayor was constructing a highway across Humble
+Hill to make travel across the city easier, but in
+the past few decades the district, even the base of
+Cauldron Hill itself, have grown thick with slum
+housing, as more and more people flock to Flint
+hoping to find work in the factories. The broad
+switchbacks of the highway are cluttered with
+shacks, often with two or three families sharing
+the same building. Poorly crafted houses cling to
+the sides of slopes, and they have become a nightmare for local police to patrol, giving a whole new
+connotation to the name “The Nettles.”\\
+Current district mayor Reed Macbannin has been unable to
+halt the new arrivals, and he hasn’t been helped by the common
+prejudice that the factory workers are prone to crime, laziness, and
+general mayhem. Despite this, he has managed to earn passing
+respect from the people of his district; few are trusted with the
+stewardship of Cauldron Hill, and he has leveraged his office to get
+city tax money for the poorest of the poor.
+==== North Shore ====
+<WRAP relinfobox>
+<WRAP relinfoboxtitle>Traversing Flint</WRAP>
+Flint is a sprawling city, and often the party’s investigations will\\
+take them across it and back in the course of a single day. If you\\
+use carriages, as the genteel almost always do, it takes roughly\\
+half an hour to move from the heart of one district to the heart of\\
+an adjacent one. Walking doubles this time.\\
+Crossing Flint’s harbor or reaching one of The Ayres is usually\\
+an hour-long affair by sailboat, or half an hour if you know a\\
+friendly steamboat captain. Moving through the maze of rookeries\\
+in the Nettles can take hours, and it’s always faster to just\\
+go around than go over. Few paved roads lead to the Cloudwood,\\
+which makes carriages unsuitable, and one could spend hours or\\
+days roaming the mountains to the east or bayous to the west.\\
+The few completed subrail stations in Central District do\\
+provide fairly swift transport, on par with a carriage while being\\
+cheaper and able to carry more people. Once the full subrail\\
+network is completed, it should be possible to move between Central\\
+district and either Bosum Strand or Stray River in as few as ten\\
+minutes. And if ever the route under the Nettles can overcome\\
+sabotage, it could shave nearly an hour off the time it takes to go\\
+around the troublesome hills.
+</WRAP>
+The sun rises through the mists of Cloudwood, banishing the night
+with pale purple clouds dashed by the golden gleam of dawn. Fresh
+sea breezes sweep the gloomy haze of soot away from pristine
+beaches, letting clear daylight fall upon gently crashing waves. The
+day wanes, and the sky explodes with crimson and vermilion as the
+sun sets behind the twin peaks of Great Horned Mountain. Night
+drapes a starry curtain across the world, and still the waves gently
+lap upon the North Shore.\\
+Home to the most beautiful urban beaches in all of Lanjyr,
+Flint’s North Shore district prides itself on its appearance, despite
+being so close to the polluted Parity Lake. Demand for beachside
+property has pushed out all but the wealthiest land-owners, those
+who can afford to hire druids to pray for favorable winds to keep the
+smoke at bay, and armies of cleaning crews to scrub their walls and
+streets when the druids fail.\\
+Of course with wealth comes corruption and temptation. Young
+girls end up dead in alleys. Criminals stage daring robberies of
+villas protected by curses. Destitute nobles, dragged down from
+their towers by the machinations of rivals, stumble from nighttime
+streets into strangely-scented shops they’d never seen before and
+find offers they cannot refuse.\\
+The district mayor, Aaron Choir, unabashedly serves the inter-
+ests of the wealthy, and he is currently petitioning to build a wall
+between North Shore and Parity Lake to keep out “undesirables.”
+Likewise, police violently deter the occasional protest that crops
+up outside the Danoran consulate, which sits a few blocks inland
+from the shore. Mayor Choir is careful, of course, not to appear too
+friendly with the unpopular Danorans, no matter how much they
+pay him in kick-backs.
+==== Parity Lake ====
+When Flint first began building factories, this inland lake, fed by
+run-off from the Nettles, was chosen by Governor Stanfield. A massive construction project widened and deepened a natural river that
+ran from the lake to the Bosum Strand harbor, providing easy transit
+of manufactured goods out of — and coal or heating oil into — the
+district. Homes of fishermen on the lake were demolished, while
+new flophouses and stacked tenements were erected for the waves of
+people who came from around the country seeking work in the new
+factories. Wealth poured into the city’s coffers, and into the pockets
+of those canny enough to lease their land here, rather than sell it.\\
+During the Fourth Yerasol War seven years ago, factories in Par-
+ity Lake mass-produced firearms, cannons, and other weapons, and
+a lumber mill transformed logs from the Cloudwood into components for shipyards in Bosum Strand. New factories sprang up to
+create armor for men and ships, and soon even steam engines were
+being churned out to retrofit Risur’s fleet.\\
+The war effort transformed Parity Lake from a booming collective of new businesses to a crowded, foul-smelling, soot-choked
+warren, over-crowded with the children of now second-generation
+factory workers, surrounding a pool that every day more resembles
+sludge than water. The police manage to keep crime down through
+heavy-handed measures; the district’s mayor Rosa Gohins has pub-
+licly stated that the safety and stability of the factories are more
+important than the moral of the factory workers.\\
+In the past few months a spate of fires have struck around the district, which authorities suspect to be arson, possibly tied to the fey
+terrorist known as Gale (see The Cloudwood, above). The fires have
+precisely targeted individual homes and businesses related to local
+industrialists, but despite their minimal collateral damage, people
+in the district fear an inferno if one goes out of control.\\
+More dreaded, however, is a killer known as the Ragman, who
+is said to stalk dark alleys near the canals and drag young men into
+the sewers. He has been tied to at least six disappearances in the
+past year, but so far law enforcement have taken few steps to catch
+him. Strange occult symbols scrawled on the undersides of bridges
+that cross the canal have provoked suspicions that the Ragman
+might be retribution from the long dead witches of Cauldron Hill.\\
+Those with more level heads tend to see the Ragman story as a
+cover for the murders committed by the local guild of thieves, led by
+strongman Lorcan Kell. Kell’s guild is best known for high-profile
+abductions and ransoms, while their more mundane crimes often
+go unreported since three journalists were found decapitated and
+holding their heads on the bridges over the Stanfield Canal. Many
+locals allege that the police know perfectly well where to find Kell
+himself, but are either too corrupt or too scared to go after him.
+==== Pine Island ====
+Though the ground of most of Flint’s coast is rocky and hilly, the
+western coast of the bay has a strange sprawling bayou surrounding
+dozens of short granite hill-islands. Pine Island takes its name from
+the aquatic pine trees that anchor the bits of dry land throughout
+the bayou, though the hills are mostly grassy ranchland. Not as well
+known or developed as the bustling east coast, this district nevertheless plays a significant role in the city’s business.\\
+While Bosum Strand handles industrial and textile trade, Pine
+Island services hundreds of plantations in its soggy lowlands and
+small ranches in its western hills. The main docks on Flint Bay
+are practically a floating city of wooden bridges and stone anchors,
+which has slowly grown away from the silt of the bayou to better
+serve deep-water merchant ships. Further inland, complicated
+streets, connected by ferries and bridges, weave between islands
+ranging from the size of a single house to a small neighborhood.\\
+Criminals ply the waters of the bayous in shallow boats, often
+parking ships of smuggled drugs, magic, or women just off shore,
+then taking circuitous routes through the flooded forests in order to
+bypass dock authorities. While most dock-side businesses are legitimate, deeper in the bayou you can find gambling houses, brothels,
+and fey pepper dens. Pacts with local fey who are angry with the
+spinning gears on the other side of the bay help these criminal establishments hide from law enforcement, all for the low price of just
+a few newborns a year.\\
+Farther west, where there are no longer even occasional hills,
+the Battalion academy trains elite soldiers and martial scientists in
+the ways of war, with an emphasis on wilderness survival and the
+best techniques of intimidation against an occupying force. The district’s mayor, Roger Pepper, is a graduate. Many of the Battalion’s
+teachers served in the Yerasol Wars and various skirmishes, and
+the common fishermen of Pine Island say some of them brought
+back strange spirits from those distant islands. Recent folk tales
+tell of pale fish-scaled men who steal fowl and livestock each month
+during the neap tide.
+==== Stray River ====
+The cluster of businesses and homes where Stray River empties into
+the bay is the closest thing to a typical Risuri city one can find
+in Flint. The Stray River district has well-tended streets, quaint
+two-story brick houses, and enjoys easy prosperity as the place most
+visitors to the city stay. The district is also home of some of the oldest mills in Risur, powered by small canals that loop off the main
+river to avoid disrupting water traffic.\\
+One strange attraction of the district is the Penny Pyre. Originally it was a small blackened pit, where a mage’s accident caused
+copper to burn as easily as wood, but last far longer. When the
+effect persisted, it became a fixture of the district’s festivals. Various copper sculptures are designed by the districts artisans and
+placed atop the pit to burn over the course of hours or days. On
+normal occasions, people will occasionally toss a spare copper coin
+into the pyre for good luck. The royal mint has tried to end the
+practice, but the district’s mayor, Chrystine Robinson, defends
+the tradition, saying more coins are simply lost in the dirt than
+tossed in the pyre.
+==== The Ayres ====
+North of the city lie a clear island chain and several satellite islands.
+Many of these are merely rocky sandbars with a few trees, but a
+few larger islands serve as remote villas for the city’s wealthiest.
+Nobles hold many family estates here, though one island is owned
+by a man new to his money: Guy Goodson, who swindled his initial
+wealth from a dozen naïve villages, and invested early in Flint’s industrial boom. Today he owns dozens of factories in Parity Lake,
+and regularly dines with his noble neighbors, who delight in the
+small steamboat he uses to visit them.\\
+Since technically The Ayres is considered part of North Shore, it
+does not have its own district mayor. In practice, law and govern-
+ment officials never bothers the nobles on their islands unless an
+equally wealthy or powerful individual lodges a complaint.
+===== The Military =====
+The Battalion school of war in the bayous of Pine Island trains
+hundreds of future officers every year, and works in connection
+with various district forts throughout the city, as well as naval bases
+on an island near the mouth of Flint Harbor. Flint still remembers
+a few naval skirmishes that threatened shipping eight years ago,
+and so the military maintains a constant watch for possible threats.
+Normally, though, they will not respond unless a district mayor or
+the city governor himself calls on them.\\
+While few individual soldiers have magical training, the military
+has acquired over the years a wide variety of enchanted weapons
+and defenses. Perhaps foremost among these, every soldier sta-
+tioned in The Nettles district fort is given an amulet to ward them
+against supernatural influence, should they be called upon to face
+a reawakening of the eldritch horrors that reigned over Cauldron
+Hill during the time of the witches.\\
+The local commander of Flint land forces is Colonel Greg Mas-
+terson, while the naval defenses are overseen by Rear Admiral
+Morris Dawkins.