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Blackhawk (City of)

Page history last edited by Chris Creel 11 years, 10 months ago

BLACKHAWK, City Of

 

Known as the Zircon of the Mercenary Coast, the City of Blackhawk is a sprawling, ramshackle mishmash of architectural styles that reflect the chaotic history the city, heaped high over a complex maze of sewers, caverns, burrows, lairs, catacombs, and hellmouths.  The city is well-known for its graft and corruption, the enormous number of improbable brotherhoods, secret societies, guilds, cabals, and political action committees, and is notorious for its tumultuous political culture. 

At any given time, two to six competing and combative rulers (anarcho-capitalist gladiators, hell-doxy cabals, bloodthirsty Klengon bureaucrats, mad sorcerers, Colossus-grade RoboDroids, cool insidious vegetable intelligences, slavering multi-planar entities, fictitious holographic glad-handers, psychopathic pirate clown sodalities, and so on) vie for dominion over the teeming metropolis; the identity of the actual ruler (the Chancellor) is often a matter of opinion.  Followers of each faction often wear distinctive symbols (e.g., mismatched boots, loincloths worn on the outside, prosthetic foreheads on their real foreheads) and street violence is a given.

The city's massive underworld (in all senses of the word) draws an enormous quantity of would-be dungeon divers in search of treasure, magic, employment, and thrills. Contrary to Blackhawk's tireless public relations cult, the majority of such adventures end tragically. (For this reason, the funeral industry is such a major part of Blackhawk's economy that The Guild of Morticians, Embalmers, Cremators, Organleggers, Gastromorts, Sepulturalists, and Necrosculptors receives a hefty fee for every resurrection performed in the city). There are enough successes, however, to keep the city's taverns, brothels, pawnbrokers, ring fingerers, crystal scryers, armor polishers, droidskinners, and potion-slingers in business.   In addition, many of the freebooters of the Mercenary Coast sponsor representatives in Blackhawk.

(In the years since the collapse of the sector's power grid, an increasing surge of technological items and hitherto-unknown creatures such as Astrowraiths have been pouring out of the dungeons, in a quantity far exceeding the number of such items being carried into the dungeons. Speculations on a hitherto-undiscovered hyperdimensional portal or the presence of an ancient, buried starship have as yet remained unsubstantiated.)

Besides the Dungeons of Blackhawk, two other Blackhawk institutions have gained notoriety far and wide. The Grand Library of Morgendorgen  was founded by one of the city's former rulers, with the aim of housing the greatest accumulation of knowledge in the world. Its collection of magical librams, tomes, holo-crystals, codices, folios, atlases, 8-tracks, maps, lexicons, viz-tapes, monographs, almanacs, and every other form of recorded knowledge is indeed impressive, but most recent Chief Librarians have been more concerned with quantity over quality. Thus, every available pigeon-hole has been stuffed full of collections of lizard-man erotica, memoirs of the many loves of the Iron Dwarf King's Executive Hash Slinger, advertising brochures from the Limb Traders, etc.

Also notorious, simply known as The Casino, behind its neon-lit and gold-plated exterior is a neon-plated, gold-lit interior.  No one native to Blackhawk may gamble within (a regulation which was ramrodded into law by the Brotherhood of Document Forgers and Disguise Merchants).  Gamers may partake of food, beverages, and narcotics free of charge.  Many valuables, tangible and intangible, are wagered within; gamblers risk their gold, eyeballs, fingers, spouses, children, gonads, years of their lives, their freedom, their immortal souls, and even more for another turn of the Octagon of Fortune. 

Famous denizens of Blackhawk:

 

 

--Fordor the Prefect, “The Wayfarer’s Guide to the Medieval Rim”

 

Comments (2)

Guy Hoyle said

at 3:16 pm on Jan 27, 2011

Guy Hoyle said

at 6:23 pm on Jan 27, 2011

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