There’s no shipyard on the map of Duskwall and I don’t remember any mention of it in the city section.
Is this an oversight or is this intentional? Has it been purposely left to individual play groups to decide? Or does it mean that leviathan hunters only get repaired in this city but not built there? If so, where do they get built?
Or have I missed something relevant in the text?
In previous versions of the game, I always imagined the leviathan hunters as being from elsewhere. They only pulled up to the docks to trade or for shore leave.
Well, ships are said to launch on Commission Day, which makes it seem like some ships are commissioned in Doskvol. I’m guessing smaller ships, though, which could be built in warehouses in/near the docks.
Leviathan Hunters get training, refitting, and repairs in Whitecrown, which has a substantial amount of unaccounted and open space, so maybe there’s something there. There’s also the Academy there that trains the captains.
I think it makes sense for this to be a continent-spanning enterprise of industry, oppression, and technological advancement. Leviathan Blood is processed in Lockport. The wealth of two of the great families of U’Duasha come from a fleet that operates out of Doskvol, so many other powerful noble families from across the empire do the same. The Skovlan War was fought over the cost of refining blood and who could/how it would be taxed. This is already an international machine of oppression.
I think it would make sense for the Emperor to have commissioned the first ships out of some other port, probably wherever warships were already being commissioned, and the wealthy families from around the empire to have paid to build more as the profits of controlling Leviathan Blood power became clear. It requires massive resource commitments to create ships the size of aircraft carriers (I have this question about the raillines too. How did they get that much iron!?), and require huge amounts of oppressed labor to staff. The resources to create them were already controlled by the powerful, so they became tools of oppression equally. All that screams the political and social oppression the Empire seems designed to propagate.
It seems odd to me that any significant labour would happen in Whitecrown. Construction and repairs are done by the proletariat, and probably large numbers of them when we’re talking about leviathan hunters. It seems like the entire point of Whitecrown is to be an island of wealth designed specifically to keep the underclasses out.
Coalridge looks like the most likely spot in my mind, but the book seems to suggest they just make the parts there.
While I agree about labor in Whitecrown, generally, it’s also the most secure place in Doskvol. It and the rail station house the garrison. The bridge is guarded and a great way to ensure carts are inspected. Your engineers and the nobles, being the ones you care about, don’t even need quarters since they live there.
Only the most beaten down and loyal are going to serve long term on Leviathan Hunters. They’re too expensive to risk mutiny, sabotage, or terrorism. There are docks around Whitecrown where you can bring in proletariat workers for the day and never let them leave the guarded gate spaces.
Also, this makes the underlying plot with the Grinders more interesting. Getting a ship cool enough means infiltrating Whitecrown and dealing with the garrison rather than dealing with some dockers and blue coats.
That said, what would be cool? Maybe another district, or use one of those deserted islands as a maintenance site? Or maybe a lost district they had the facilities but it’s too difficult to take back?
Oh, I wasn’t even thinking about a heist at all, actually! I went looking for a shipyard because I was thinking about the size of the deaf community in Duskwall, and had to reconsider if the city was not supposed to build whole leviathan hunters.
Okay, you got me: That heavily-policed commute to Whitecrown is actually an interesting game situation. My initial idea is that it would a bad idea for the city’s elites, but on the other hand, if ships aren’t being built year-round, the start of a new one gives top manufacturers an opportunity to pillage workers from other metalshops all throughout the city and really fuck over low- and mid-tier industrialists, while at the same time giving the military an excuse to dig around in peoples’ personal business.
Because leviathan hunters are so important, top engineers would scour them after proles do all the shitwork, right, so I don’t think sabotage would have an effect on the final product, but it could definitely slow down timetables, for ships that are needed by a specific deadline. Perhaps the shipyards in other cities (like the capital?) have their own control methods–outright slavery, slightly-more-comfortable proles, patriotic propaganda, etc–and the ones with a real tight deadline are the ones built in Whitecrown? “We need a new ship to hunt the beast Malaxridar, and we need it by harvest season. We have no other choice. The Dusk will have to pay for it.”
I would imagine it’s done in the docks
Johnstone Metzger Regarding sabotage: A leviathan hunter must cost an unbelievable fortune to build. Even Strangford isn’t going to be financing them alone, he’s going to have investors. Sabotaging leviathan hunter construction at the right point wouldn’t just be a matter of delaying its construction or missing a deadline, it could easily sink the entire project and ruin the primary backer.
Mike Hoyer I imagine that the wastage involved in deep-sixing the construction of a leviathan hunter part-way through would have far greater knock-on effects in the world of Blades than it would in real life, given the state of the world. Cities in our world don’t get eaten by angry ghosts if their economies collapse! So I’d think that a project in financial ruins would be picked up very quickly by someone else eager to get a partially-completed ship for a bargain price.
While sabotage would make for a cool score, we’re talking ships that are meant to bleed bathyscapic monstrosities that are both immortal and invincible. They’re not fragile, and ruining one with a single blow strains believability, unless we’re talking a very special piece of arcane machinery run by highly-trained, highly-loyal, high-ranking whispers or something (and what a score that would be).
A sustained and relentless campaign of low-level sabotage, on the other hand–you’re absolutely right. That could drive costs up enough to put the primary backer in a situation bad enough that their rivals move in to finish the job and seize control of the project. When it’s cheaper to ruin someone who has half a ship than it is to build half a ship…
…it’s time to hire some scoundrels who don’t mind getting their hands dirty.
Johnstone Metzger Yes, I was thinking less about actually preventing a hunter from being built and more about destroying a human being (for fun and profit). Although bear in mind there’s a grounded leviathan hunter in Crow’s Foot that no one saw fit to properly salvage.
I think, when it comes to the actual sabotage itself… I imagine leviathan hunters might be built like our larger aircraft carriers, built as individual sections that are then lowered in to place in a massive drydock and welded together. I would either attack the cranes themselves, to engineer a failure at the most possibly destructive (and maybe deadly) time, or plant a bomb at one of the seam points and blow it when only half the welding work has been done. Or if they’re building on a floating dock then obviously just sink that.
Of course if they’re that big whatever powers them must be volatile as hell, too, and probably the most expensive single piece.
If you wanted something more subtle the best place for sabotage is probably in the design stage. Swap out a trusted blueprint with a cunning forgery that includes subtle but ultimately fatal flaws. Or corrupt the suppliers or builders to use lower quality steel and pocket the difference, but now I guess I’m getting into “How to rip people off with a leviathan hunter” rather than how to sabotage somebody else’s.
But sorry the original question was where they build them in the first place. It would require a massive dry dock to build such a ship (you’d want to float out something that size, not try to launch it from land) and you’re right that the map doesn’t really offer an obvious location for one.
If I were to add one, however, I’d probably put it in the inlet near the lighthouse in Whitecrown. Or anywhere along the Whitecrown side of the channel. Labour and materials could be brought in by boat rather than road to minimize the bother to Whitecrown’s residents, while allowing them to keep a close eye on the workings of ships they most likely own to begin with.
I can also imagine massive floating drydocks letting work happen right out in the middle of North Hook Channel. Entire construction fleets to provide the massive cranes and material shipments needed for such a huge project.
Hmm, yeah. Ship workers in, house them in barracks, pay them out for a month at a time, treat it like an oil rig. Maybe use foreign workers, too. When their contract is up, you drop them off in from of the right entertainment district in town, the locals fleece them, two days later they’re signing up for another month. Rinse and repeat until you’ve got your ship and recouped half your wage expenses in kickbacks. It’s a good scam when it’s done right.
Using the inlet would also explain why the left-most estate belongs to the spirit wardens–they’re probably the last people who would care about declining property values while there’s an active construction project next door. Infiltrating the construction site so you can break into that estate would make a good score, too.
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