Actual Play Prep : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall
I have the suspicion that we’re going to revert to not-so-tropical Duskwall, since I’m getting a sense of cold feet from my players, but here is a collated description of Ashamoil from KJBishop’s The Etched City in case it might interest anyone else to look into it :
” It’s a decadent, corrupt city-state in the heart of the jungle, with 19th century technology and a colonial twist.
Built along a straight stretch of deep, slow river running east and west through granite hills towards the sea, it fills some twenty miles of jungle almost exactly halfway between the mountains and an immense cataract.
Its architecture is a cross between gothic victorian and indian architecture climbing in tiers of walled terraces up steep hillsides, with thousands of boats crowding the waters at the bottom and riverside houses with front stairs plunging right into the river.
In the hour after sunrise and sunset, the water along the quay fills with hungry saurians and at those times, small boats keep out to the middle of the river and carts stay away from the banks.
Seven bridges and the seven days of the week are named after seven traitors to the empire, their deeds erased from history so that only their names remained after their execution.
Three hours riding east along the river brings you to the verge of the city and a new extension of it, which in the short span of its existence has earned the name of Little Hell, where slaughteryards, tanneries, knackers and glue makers ply their trade.
The climate is hot, there’s jungle just outside the walls, and crocodiles swim up the river and eat you if you aren’t careful. People bring in pythons to clean up beetles. Most of the characters are dark-skinned, and a northerner’s pallor marks him as a foreigner.
An endless war among small nation in the wild territories along the river, not far from the city, keep a steady supply of defeated and captured people coming into the city’s slave markets.
It has slums. It has lower-class characters. It has dangerous, nasty gangs. It has factories powered by child labor. It has slavery and opposition to slavery. It has crime lords fighting things out with guns, swords, and cavalry charges. It has blood and guts and sex and death. “