Districts of the Wicked City 7: The River

It curves through the city in a great lazy meander, its waters discoloured by coal dust, its surface dotted with floating refuse. Here and there the chemical run-off from some adventurous serpent-folk laboratory creates shining puddles of oily, iridescent colour that spread across the water, to the delight of the shrieking children who splash and paddle in its shallows at low tide. Throughout the harvest seasons it is choked with fleets of barges, carrying confiscated wheat, barley and chickpeas from the surrounding fields and villages to feed the teeming and ravenous mouths of the city's people. For the rest of the year traffic upon the river is dominated by the skimming rowboats which carry passengers back and forth along its banks, evading the perpetual gridlock of the city's roads and bridges. There are still a few fishermen who ply their trade in its waters, but the fish in the river have grown scarce and strange in recent decades, and the fishing boats grow fewer every year. 

Shadman Malik bridge, Samarkand. (Built 1502 - this photo is from 1871.)

Shamans who commune with the spirit of the river upriver of the city say that he appears to them as a fine young man, proud and strong and straight-bodied, full of stories of the lands he has passed through and the hills he has made green. Those who commune with him downriver of the city find him terribly changed: an old man, haggard and shaking, wheedling and demanding, forgetful and irrational and vindictive. (Within the city, of course, the spirit will not appear at all.) Beyond the edge of the city's farmlands the river winds down into the desert, depleted by a thousand irrigation channels, and is lost in a maze of sediment-choked wadis. It does not reappear again. 

The riverfolk of the Wicked City are a breed unto themselves, a hardy race of scavengers who live among the mud and damp of the city's ruinous riverbanks. They make their homes among the leaning buildings that hang over the water at alarming angles, straining against their subsiding foundations, slowly losing their decades-long battle with gravity. They work on the wharves when work is to be had, caulking hulls, weaving ropes and nets, loading and unloading cargoes, and carrying passengers from bank to bank in agile little boats with sails like swift red wings. When work grows slack they take to salvage, digging amidst the muck in search of coals dropped from barges, or diving down into the basements of flooded buildings in search of something worth the taking. They swim like eels and stink of river-mud. A lifetime at the oars covers their bodies with braids of muscle, but the river's pollutants eat into their lungs and stomachs, and they usually die young. 

Turkmen boatmen, 1863.

Everything ends up in the river in the end. Toxic sludge from serpent-man drug-labs. The rusting hulks of crashed scrap-racers. The regalia of fallen noble houses, hurled into the water by their despairing heirs as the triumph of the Wicked King became inevitable. Mutilated statues from the king's statue network, their stone eyes gouged out to prevent them from witnessing who it was that toppled them into the river. The bodies of unfortunates murdered by the city's gangs, weighted down with rocks and thrown from the wharves at midnight, the river their only grave. Every riverman has stories about times they found more down there than they bargained for. Huge river-snakes swimming in from the Rubble. Flooded sinkholes leading down into the Maze. Sealed caskets of antique silver. Bullet-riddled corpses with bricks in their pockets, their faces still covered by the unmistakable death masks of the Secret Police. 

Most mysterious of all are the vast flooded spaces that extend beneath the temples and palaces that once lined the river in what are now the ruined districts. They may be little more than heaps of rubble on the surface, but the riverfolk swear that beneath them lie immense vaulted chambers, storerooms and basements and dungeons filled with river water, their treasures and secrets hidden beneath darkness and slime. Some of the most daring river scavengers are already in negotiations with the Scrap Mechanics. They want to hire digging tools and diving suits. They want to tear their way into the flooded vaults and drag their contents back into the light. 

One of them even hired a shaman from the steppes to ask the Downriver Spirit if he knew what was in them. The spirit claimed to have forgotten. But there was a crafty and desperate look in his demented eyes that suggested he may not have been telling the entire truth.

City of Spires part 1: Theory vs. Practise

There's a city over the mountains. The people call it the City of Spires.

In the days of your great-grandparents it was rich and proud and prosperous. Traders thronged its streets. Coloured lamps flared in every window. Gold poured through the silk-gloved hands of its laughing lords.

In the days of your grandparents the caravans from the west stopped coming. The roads were all closed, and could not be reopened. The city's markets fell silent. 

In the days of your parents the spires started to crumble. The wealthy fled. The poor whispered of strange sights in the twilight. People said that the city was under a curse.

In the days of your youth, war came to the city. Faction rose against faction, house against house. The palaces burned. At last a great iron serpent tore its way out of the earth and destroyed all before it until only its masters remained, preening self-crowned kings of a city of ruins.

Yesterday the local lord rode into your village with a retinue of mounted soldiers. He said that your hovels were equally offensive to the eyes and to the nostrils, and had furthermore produced no tax revenue worth collecting for the last nine years, so he was going to knock the whole place down and turn it into a game reserve instead.

Where shall we go?' the people asked him. And he shrugged and gestured down the road that leads to the City of Spires.

 

As I mentioned in my last post, for the last year I've been running a (modified) B/X campaign called 'City of Spires'. We're currently thirty-something sessions in, with something like a hundred hours of total actual play behind us. It is not yet a campaign on the same scale as my previous 'Team Tsathogga' game, which ran for seventy-odd sessions over the course of three years: but it still represents a pretty considerable amount of gaming, and I'm very happy with the way it's run so far.

'City of Spires' was my attempt to put my ATWC material to use in an actual game, and as such it's prompted me to think about the differences between writing setting material and actually using it. When I started this blog, back in 2015, I was between gaming groups, and I wasn't really writing for anyone except myself: in fact, if I'm honest with myself, the reason I wrote about a campaign setting was because I wasn't getting the chance to run one. As a result, I wrote my early ATWC material without ever having to confront the key question: 'nice idea, but how exactly can I use it in this week's game?'  This isn't any kind of repudiation - I don't think any of the stuff I've written for the setting over the years is unusable - but it is an explanation for why what I initially wrote and what I ended up running ultimately turned out to be two quite different things.

When the 'Team Tsathogga' campaign finally ended due to some of the players moving away, the remaining players and I agreed that we should start a new campaign at level 0, in some other region of the same campaign world. I saw this as a chance to finally use my ATWC material, but I immediately faced several problems:

1. Some of my players had read the blog, meaning that they'd know all about the setting (including lots of things they really shouldn't know) right from the start.
2. ATWC assumes an animist cosmology with little or no standard D&D magic. But the world of Team Tsathogga, which the new campaign was going to be set in, was already established to be a science fantasy setting with standard D&D magic all over the place. 
3. ATWC is a fairly high-concept setting, and requires a high level of player buy-in. But I knew that some of the players would be new to gaming, and didn't want to shove them into the deep end any more than I had to. 
4. It's just too fucking big.

That last one was the real reality check moment. I'd spent years sketching out the ATWC setting, and the assumed campaign arc that went with it - go to the city, bounce around interacting with its various factions, make occasional trips into the outside world in source of resources or allies, and ultimately stage a coup or revolution, storm the King's Tower, and confront whatever lurked in the throne room of the Wicked King. What I hadn't confronted was the sheer logistics of it all. I'd given the city something like forty different factions: just meeting everyone could easily be a year's play. Its government was a massive, deeply entrenched tyranny, and while I'd deliberately designed it to be riddled with weaknesses, assembling a revolution capable of overthrowing it would still require immense amounts of investigation, organisation and diplomacy. Vast, complicated social worlds are great fun to write about, but can easily be a nightmare to GM. How many sessions would it take to play out a 'proper' ATWC campaign, with the PCs starting as complete outsiders and ending up as revolutionary masterminds capable of bringing down the Wicked King? Fifty? A hundred? More?

'Sorry - which faction are you guys from, again?'

So when I came to write City of Spires, I essentially did so by running a 'Condensation in Action' job on my own setting. My key principle was: 'like ATWC, but smaller'. 

The family resemblance is still very strong. It's still set in a ruinous city on a fantasy Silk Road somewhere beyond the eastern borders of fantasy Persia. There's still a tyranny, and the PCs are still trying to overthrow it, and the focus of the game is still on gathering networks of allies from among the city's strange and desperate inhabitants. But the city is physically smaller, and the population is much lower, and the government is just gangsterism writ large rather than the totalitarian nightmare of the Wicked City. Everything's a lot more ruined, in line with the principles I laid out here that the more thoroughly wrecked a setting is, the easier it is for PCs to exert real agency within it. There are fewer factions, and they're smaller, and most of them only have 1-3 significant NPCs each. As a result, after 'just' thirty-odd sessions, the PCs have been able to explore most of the city, meet most of the factions, and assemble plans and forces for an upcoming coup that just might actually work. 

I've reused many parts of the original ATWC setting, albeit in modified forms. Versions of the Cobweb, the Blue Necropolis, the clockworkers, the snake men, the merchant houses, the street gangs, the Rubble, and the Streets have all appeared in City of Spires. But they all shrank. The Cobweb shrank to a single tower. The clockwork armies shrank to a single huge automaton. The merchant houses shrank to a single merchant and his household. The Hortlaks of the Blue Necropolis shrank to a single undead princess. And so on. Over and over again, I looked at something that could potentially take a whole campaign to do justice to, and decided instead to condense it into something that could be dealt with in a single session. 

I should be clear, here, that I'm not saying that every campaign needs to do this, or that sprawl and vastness is always a problem for games. In a pre-plotted 'adventure path' campaign, it doesn't matter how big or complicated the setting is, because the plot will always ensure that the PCs interact with exactly the right parts of it to bring their story to a satisfying and level-appropriate conclusion. At the other extreme, in a totally wide-open sandbox, it doesn't matter that the PCs may only have scratched the surface of the world around them by the campaign's end: the story is just whatever happened to happen, and that's OK. But if you actually want your PCs to gain a decent level of knowledge of and mastery over their sandbox environment over the course of the game, then it's important to tailor its scale to the likely length of the campaign, and to be realistic about how quickly complexity starts to snowball as the number of interconnected factions grows. If I was starting this one over again, I'd put in less rather than more, at least to begin with. (Did the city really need six noble houses?) It's much easier to add things into a sandbox than it is to take things out.

Next post: the city as hexcrawl!

Evil, be thou my good: the cult of the Wicked King

Decades have passed since anyone anyone last saw him, and yet his face is everywhere. His statues loom on every corner. His tower blocks out the sun. His soldiers plunder you. His ministers lie to you. His secret police spy on you. His tyranny is in the air and the earth and the water. It hovers, unseen, between person and person, ruining and infecting everything, withholding you even from those whom you most yearn to love. It poisons you and it sickens you, reducing you to a mockery of the person you could have been. It deforms your personality. It withers up you soul. It breaks your heart.

He has not been officially deified. In the city's gilded temples, hireling priests offer up thanks to heaven each morning and evening for being allowed to live under a ruler so wise, so holy, so enlightened - but while they pray for him, for his health and his longevity and the continuation of his rule, they do not pray to him. Officially, he is no more and no less than the very best of mortal kings.

He has not been officially deified - but people pray to him anyway, just as one might pray to any other evil spirit of the land. Spare me, they whisper, before they sleep. Spare me just one more night. Spare my parents. Spare my children. Take my neighbours, if you must take someone. I will make you a bargain. I will make you an offering. I will be loud in my praise of your wisdom. I will burn sweet incense at your statue's foot. I will inform on the old woman for her seditious gossip at sundown. Only spare me, O king, O destroyer. Only spare me yet another day.

In the streets, superstitions about the Wicked King grow like weeds, and the people regard his agents less as members of mortal institutions than as a race of folk devils to be evaded through luck and guile. If you eat while standing in the shadow of his tower, they say, the secret police will come for you within a fortnight. Scatter rice from a third-story window and the wrath of the King will be averted. Whisper the name of your worst enemy three times while facing the tower at midnight, and the secret police will come and take them away - unless they've hung a polished brass mirror on their door, in which case they'll come for you instead. Faced with the apparently random predations of the city's government, such petty rituals help the people to feel that they wield at least some measure of control over their own destiny. And who is to say that there is not some truth behind some of them? No-one, after all, really knows what it is that watches the city through the eyes of the king's statue network, or upon what principle his minions decide which luckless souls will be dragged away, wailing, into the night.

So the people pray to the king. They make offerings to him. Some of them even maintain sad little shrines to him in the darkened corners of their homes. But a few go further. In the dark of the night, they slink out and abase themselves before his statues. They croon songs of worship into their cold ears of stone. They sprinkle the dust around their feet with the warm blood of sacrifices. They join the cult of the Wicked King.

The cult has existed for decades, now, ever since the people of the city began to grope around for some explanation of what had happened to them. In its most popular form, it teaches that the king is a kind of prophet, whose actions must be understood as coded or symbolic teachings. His power and immortality are signs of his semi-divine nature. His destruction of the city's name, his withdrawal from the sight of the people, and his refusal to proclaim his own divine status are understood as acts of negative mysticism, designed to encode the truth that real power and identity are to be found not in the outward world of appearances, but in some secret and numinous realm beyond them, hidden as the king himself is hidden, immortal as he is immortal. Some cultists think that his cruelty is a sign that the moral law is a lie, too. Others believe that he is punishing the city for its sins. Others still maintain that the body is the soul's prison, and that unleashing a gang of masked murderers to brutalise his people is the king's rather roundabout way of teaching them not to place too much value on physical things.

But these are rationalisations, and the true reasons that people are drawn to the cult of the Wicked King are the reasons that people are always drawn to power. Ambition: if I sacrifice enough to the king then he is sure to bring about my promotion. Desperation: if I pray hard enough to the king then maybe the secret police will bring my sister back. Justification: I'm not just a cruel and selfish person! I'm following the secret teachings of the king! And, perhaps most commonly of all, sheer exhausted frustration. Faced with the endless opacity of the city's government bureaucracy, the transparent injustice of its laws, the arbitrary depredations of its security services, and the spiritual inadequacy of its state religion, it it understandable that many people become desperate for even the illusion of having a hotline to the top.

The cult of the Wicked King is something of a wild card in ATWC. It's extremely disorganised and decentralised: a shifting web of solitary practitioners, semi-formal congregations, and splinter groups following individual teachers and interpreters of its makeshift theology. Doctrines vary widely from one cult member to the next: all that they really have in common is the belief that the Wicked King really does want his people to worship him and will reward them for it, despite the claims of the Ministry of Religion to the contrary. (Indeed, some of them see the Ministry of Religion as an actively malevolent force, keeping the truth from the people for evil reasons of their own.) They exist in something of a legal limbo, discouraged but not technically illegal: and the secret police, in particular, tend to regard the cult's activities with something resembling indulgence, a fact which discourages the other branches of the city's government from attempting to crack down on them too harshly.

The informal patron of the cult is Alisher the Just, the current Minister of the Heavens, who is himself a secret cultist of the Wicked King. Leading teachers of the cult's esoteric doctrines sometimes find themselves summoned for discreet meetings with the minister, who believes that proper worship of the king will help accelerate his personal advancement, and doesn't care how many human sacrifices he has to preside over in order to bring this about. PCs who oppose the Wicked King could easily find themselves targeted by vigilante cultists eager to win his favour by defeating them. But crafty PCs might also be able to turn the cult's beliefs to their own advantage, especially as it includes many people who would be willing to risk their lives for a chance to meet the king face to face.

To see who leads the local cultists, roll 1d20:

1. Broken-hearted old man furtively burning offerings in front of a statue at midnight in the hope of getting his children back.
2. Psychotic serial killer using the 'need' to offer human sacrifices to the king as an excuse for murders he would totally have carried out anyway. 
3. Ambitious young member of a local merchant house, who attributes his recent run of good fortune in business to the favour of the Wicked King. 
4. Anxious band of low-level bureaucrats praying for promotions and the horrible deaths of their managers. 
5. Wild-eyed conspiracy theorist determined to reveal the truths that the Ministry of Religion is deliberately concealing.
6. Ageing debauchee who has seized upon the doctrines of the cult as 'proof' that nothing is true and everything is permitted. 
7. Opium-addled visionary so lost in speculation that he has managed to convince himself (and his followers) that right is wrong, freedom is slavery, and war is peace.
8. Loyal retainer from one of the Cobweb families, trying to win the favour of the king for his masters, and bring down his wrath upon their rivals.
9. Small-time gangster who regards the cult and its practises purely as a form of practical street magic, and is entirely indifferent to their spiritual or political content.
10. Eccentric clockworker convinced that the city's government is deliberately refusing to recognise the value of her inventions, and that the king would acknowledge her genius at once if only she could get his attention.
11. Twitchy teenage street kid. Her adventurous older brother set out years ago on a do-or-die mission to discover what was really at the top of the king's tower. She still hopes against hope that he made it, and is now living some kind of life of splendour with the Wicked King himself. 
12. Profoundly damaged Murder Harlot who joined the cult semi-ironically years ago, and has long since lost track of which parts of its doctrine she does or doesn't 'really' believe.
13. Secret revolutionary who infiltrated the cult on behalf of the Red Brotherhood and ended up rising to become its local leader.
14. Semi-secret neighbourhood congregation who believe that regular worship of the king helps to avert the attentions of the secret police.
15. Member of a Labyrinth Doctrine mystery cult, who regards the Wicked King as an ascended and enlightened figure, and creeps up out of the Maze by night to participate in his worship.
16. Self-proclaimed prophet, deranged but charismatic, who sees the king's face in her nightly nightmare-visions and now seeks to share her incoherent revelations with the world.
17. Steel Aspirant convinced that only the Wicked King knows where the Cogwheel Sage is really hiding.
18. Fantatical ascetic, consumed with self-hatred, who insists that the king's tyranny constitutes a form of divine collective punishment upon a city that richly deserves it.
19. Master mason who has spent his entire working life maintaining and repairing the statue network, and is now convinced that the statues are whispering to him when no-one else is looking.
20. Air Corps gyrocopter pilot who has flown close to the top of the King's Tower on several occasions, and is convinced that she heard someone in there screaming for help. She has concluded that the king is being held prisoner by his own government, and is plotting a daring rescue mission, for which she is certain that the grateful king will reward her lavishly.

Glimpses of the Wicked City: the art of the Silk Road

Art plays a major role in how we visualise other cultures. Our view of ancient Greece is heavily shaped by all those white marble statues: we'd probably think of it very differently if their paintings had survived as well. Ancient Egypt is monumental sculptures and paintings in tombs. Medieval Europe is stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, and woodcuts. Victorian Britain is pre-Raphaelite paintings and sepia-tint photographs. And so on.

For most of us, if the Silk Road looks like anything at all, it's probably a nineteenth-century Orientalist painting: something by Rosati, perhaps, or Delacroix. But while some Orientalist paintings depict their subjects with skill and sympathy, an awful lot of them are just excuses for tiresomely repetitive 'naked slave-girl' scenes, and even the ones that aren't usually emphasise the qualities of the 'Orient' that their painters went out looking for: sex, passion, luxury, exoticism, and violence. They give little sense of how these people understood their own world, as people with their own lives to lead, rather than as part of the backdrop to someone else's adventure tourism - and besides, for my purposes, their period is out by roughly two hundred years.

Rosati, 'A Game of Backgammon'. If you want the slave-girl paintings you can google them yourself.

Probably the greatest representative art tradition to emerge from late medieval / early modern Central Asia was Timurid painting, especially in the form developed by the miniaturists of Herat in Afghanistan. It's a style which combined Persian and Chinese elements to depict blue-and-gold worlds of staggering beauty, which really have to be seen to be believed. (Online reproductions do them no justice at all.) Here are some examples from the reigns of the Timurid and Safavid shahs:

Now, Timurid art is wonderful - but it's very much a product of the earlier part of the early modern period, and its fascination with the sages and heroes of the past means that it tends to look back earlier still. For a sense of what Asiatic Islamic civilisation looked and felt like once modernity started to take hold - and of what life in the Silk Road kingdoms might have looked like if they hadn't been in terminal decline by the late 1600s - I look instead to seventeenth-century Ottoman and Safavid miniature paintings, especially the Rålamb Costume Book (1650s) and the works of Reza Abbasi (1565 - 1635) and Abdulcelil Levni (?-1732). Here are some figures from the Rålamb Costume Book:

These last two are executioners. The first one carries an impaling stake. The second carries a garotting cord.

Here are some by Abbasi:

And here are some by Levni:

Janissaries at a banquet. There's always one guy who can't keep his hat on...

I love the expression on this one. 'It says olive prices are down again. Fuck.'

The other visual source I keep coming back to is the sixteenth-century Tyrkervaerk of Melchior Lorck. Like the nineteenth-century Orientalists, Lorck's engravings show the Ottoman dominions through European eyes, but his perspective is completely different from theirs. The Orientalists painted from a position of assumed cultural superiority, safe in the knowledge that while the Islamic world might be excitingly dangerous to the individual traveller, it no longer posed any meaningful threat to European dominance. But Lorck's drawings of the armies of Suleiman the Magnificent reflect the strength and terror of the Ottoman Empire at its height, when it was an aggressively expansionistic imperial power which had demonstrated itself to be entirely capable of kicking the shit out of the forces of European Christendom. Here are some examples:

Lorck's Tyrkervaerk engravings are an important part of the way in which I imagine the Wicked City itself: a world dominated by strong, cruel, violent men and the weary, hollow-eyed despots who command them, full of militaristic pomp and spectacle, strong lines, sharp angles, and plumed soldiers marching through the streets in splendid uniforms while veiled figures with downcast eyes scurry into corners to avoid them.

The world of the Rålamb Costume Book is the world of the oasis kingdoms beyond, all bright colours and gorgeous fabrics and matter-of-fact violence. The world of Levni and Abbasi is the world of the rich and powerful, the merchant princes of the Great Road: a world of strong coffee and extravagant fashions, elegant youths in perfumed gardens, falconers and dancing girls, and people who really, really don't want to talk to you about exactly where all their custom-made guns and fancy clockwork machinery is coming from.

And outside that, in the steppes and the deserts and the mountains, is the blue-and-gold world of the miniaturists of Herat: a world of flowers and water, rocks and monsters, vast and strange and old and dangerous and very, very beautiful.

The taiga looks like Evenki folk art and Gennady Pavlishin illustrations.

I guess the gods and spirits of the steppe look like figures from Mongolian thangkas?

Fuck, this post is long enough already. I'm just going to hit 'publish' and have done with it.

Wheels within wheels: clockworkers and scrap mechanics of the Wicked City

Compared to its state a century ago, when it stood at the zenith of its prosperity, the Wicked City is a shadow of its former glory. Its streets lie in ruins. Its population has fallen dramatically. Its farmlands are turning to desert. Its state religion has become a hollow farce. But one segment of the city's economy which has not declined are its clockworking industries: and in this area, at least, the city retains its world-leading status, just as surely as it did before it lost its name.

Before the rise of the Wicked King, the city became preeminent in clockworking because its coal mines made it cheap to build and power metal automata, and because its position at the hub of the Great Road made it easy for its merchant dynasties to attract the most talented mechanics from both the eastern and western empires, sure that they would be able to find markets for their wares. Since then, the city has retained its edge largely because of the enthusiasm with which its government has invested in clockwork technology, ensuring that the clockworking guilds have never lacked for patronage. The government's willingness to tolerate the excesses of the Steel Aspirants has made the city a major centre for the cult of the Cogwheel Sage, and the low price of coal means that it still has a substantial community of Brass Folk: after all, they can 'eat' there more cheaply than they can anywhere else.

The innumerable automata upon which the city's economy depends are manufactured partly by the Brass Folk, and partly by the old clockworking guilds, many of whose constituent families pride themselves upon having been clockworkers for three or four generations. Their guildsmen are a fussy and elitist bunch, much preoccupied with family trees and certificates of mastery, and deeply disdainful of interlopers and outsiders. It is their workshops which produce the heavy, ornate, slightly oppressive-looking clockwork machinery for which the Wicked City is famous the world over: it is their sons and daughters who maintain the gyrocopters of the Air Corps, and serve as mechanics in the King's Own Armoured Brigade. Their business practises are slow and obfuscatory, and the Ministry of Technology would like to dispense with them entirely; but no matter how much the minister might dream of uniformity and standardisation, clockworking remains iredeemably artisanal in nature. It is precise, fiddly, and technically demanding work, of a kind that favours obsessives and virtuosos: every workshop has its own house style, and every master teaches their own distinctive tricks and methods to their apprentices. Attempts by the Ministry to train whole regiments of slave-mechanics to a uniform standard have met with very limited success.

In most parts of the world, the expensive tools, materials, and training required to create clockwork automata ensures the craft is practised only by licensed masters and their apprentices: but modern clockworking has been practised in the Wicked City for over a century, now, on a scale which has made the maintenance of true monopolies impossible. Tools get stolen. Supposedly 'secret' methods get taught to curious friends or lovers. Mistreated apprentices run away and take their knowledge with them. Knowledge-hungry slum-kids catch stray clockwork songbirds in nets, and spend endless hours painstakingly taking them apart to see what makes them tick. As a result, alongside its official clockworking schools, the Wicked City has become home to a vigorous 'street clockwork' tradition characterised by ingenious use of improvised materials. For every 'legitimate' clockworker family operating out of a licensed workshop, there is at least one unlicensed scrap mechanic working in a hidden basement, cobbling together devices out of whatever salvaged fragments come to hand: and the asymmetrical kitbashed products of their labours can be often be glimpsed scurrying over the rooftops of the Wicked City, catching the evening sunlight with a dull glint of tarnished brass.

The unofficial symbol of the scrap mechanics is the cogworm. Little more than an adjustable tube of gears with a crank at each end, the cogworm allows power to be leeched from one machine to another: the user simply attaches the worm to moving machinery in such a way that the machinery turn the crank at one end of the tube, and then attaches the crank at the other end to the machine which requires winding, thus turning its key and winding its mainspring. Most scrap mechanics have, by dint of long practise, become extraordinarily dexterous in the use of cogworms: leave them alone with a large automaton for even a couple of minutes and it will end up with cogworms dangling off every part of it, like a horse that's just emerged from a leech-infested bog, each of them feeding power to some whirring contraption hanging from the other end. Many street automata actually incorporate cogworms into their bodies, which emerge like lashing metal tentacles to opportunistically siphon energy from any exposed machinery that may happen to be nearby. When draining power from other people's machines isn't an option, the scrap mechanics use homemade windmills or waterwheels, instead. Actually paying for coal is a last resort.

The scrap mechanics have found all kinds of niches for themselves within the city's grey economy, cobbling together everything from primitive washing machines for laundresses to clockwork messenger birds for gangsters. They employ gangs of street kids to gather scrap metal for them from the city's dumps, and make occasional excursions out into the countryside to loot rusted machinery from the city's old pumping stations - a practise which often brings them into conflict with the pig-men who now infest the abandoned irrigation tunnels. They are fiercely proud of their inventiveness and originality, and delight in competition, constantly facing off against one another in various contests of clockworking skill - everything from simple races in which the fastest automaton wins, to tournaments between chess-playing clockwork robots, to grand events in which whole teams of clockworkers will labour for months to assemble clockwork war machines which are then pitted against one another in battle. The city's gangsters often come to bet on these events, and the drink and drugs flow freely - a quality which has given them a near-legendary reputation among the apprentices of the legitimate clockworkers, many of whom secretly dream of sneaking away from their masters and becoming champion scrap mechanics in the slums, instead. In most cases these dreams lead them no further than occasionally creeping out to spend a night illicitly watching a clockwork street race, but every veteran guildsman can tell stories of promising but unruly apprentices who sneaked out one night and simply never returned, choosing lives of precarious outlaw glamour over the security of wealth and status that might otherwise have been theirs.

To find out what the local clockworker's guild is up to, roll 1d10:

1. Working on a big order of clockwork machinery for the mines or irrigation works.
2. Working on a big order of clockwork wargear for the military.
3. Working on a big order of yagas for one of the merchant houses.
4. Working on a small but highly-demanding order of clockwork toys and animals for one of the Cobweb families.
5. Manufacturing clockwork luxuries (pocket watches, wind-up songbirds, etc) for export by the merchant houses. 
6. Manufacturing a unit of clockwork soldiers for export to some far-off warzone.
7. Carrying out arcane debates about their guild's rules, degrees, traditions, and regulations.
8. Brainstorming how to best edit their family trees to make their collective pedigree look more impressive without the forgery being spotted by their rivals.
9. Moaning about how no-one has any respect for real tradition and craftsmanship any more, and how apprentices these days would all rather sneak off to watch pit fights between robot gladiators than put in a good, honest day's labour polishing their master's brasswork.
10. Planning elaborate security measures to prevent power from being siphoned from their machines by the cogworms of those damn scrap mechanics.

To find out what the local scrap mechanics are up to, roll 1d10:

1. Carrying out small-scale clockworking jobs for local businesses and residents, using scavenged tools and materials. 
2. Carrying out a large-scale clockworking job for a merchant house that's too cheap (or in too much of a hurry) to get one of the legitimate clockworker's guilds to do it instead.
3. Building clockwork traps, alarm systems, and kitbashed guardian automata to sell to local businesses. (50% chance these have built-in flaws that the scrap mechanics will subsequently sell to a local gang.)
4. Building clockwork traps for a local gang, to help them fortify a section of the streets to which they have laid claim.
5. Planning an expedition out into the farmlands to loot an abandoned pumping station for parts. Everyone is discussing what kind of clockwork devices they should bring with them to deal with the pig-men they are likely to find there, and how best to avoid the Man With Stones For Eyes on their way out of the city.
6. Discussing the pros and cons of throwing in their lot with the Steel Aspirants, and whether or not the unquestionable coolness of having guns for arms is really worth having to take orders from a disembodied brain inside a battle tank.
7. Building automata for an upcoming street race. (Roll 1d4 to determine type: 1 = automata with feet, 2 = automata with wheels, 3 = automata with wings, 4 = automata with human drivers.) All the competitors are hidden away in their respective workshops, tinkering away on their latest secret projects, each convinced that this time they've got a great idea which is certain to win the race. Bets are being taken, and the local gangsters will pay for inside information about who's building what.
8. Practising for a nocturnal wingride (an aerial race in which all competitors use clockwork wings). Most competitors build their own wings, less because it's an actual rule than because otherwise pilot and mechanic just blame each other every time anything goes wrong. The tendency of the Wicked City's streets to rearrange themselves by night makes the sport a dangerous one, and the most successful wingriders are fearless daredevils adored by the children of the streets.  
9. Working on clockwork brains for their chess-automata, in preparation for an upcoming tournament. Advice from human chessmasters is suddenly in high demand. The automata themselves can look like anything provided they wear a metal fez, and fanciful designs abound: chess-playing dragons, insects, cats, etc. Absolutely no hidden dwarves permitted. 
10. Gathered in teams, building freakish robot gladiators for an upcoming arena fight. There are only a few of these events each year, and they are widely attended by locals, gangsters, and even members of the Cobweb Families. As the event approaches, excitement reaches fever pitch, and rival teams becoming increasingly willing to pay over the odds for that one weapon or component which might allow them to secure a surprise victory...

(EDIT: The Scrap Mechanics and the Clockworker Guilds have now been added to my post on liberating the Wicked City.)

The Language of the Fans: Ruby Fan Murder Harlots revisited

The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, oh my chevalier!

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'The Windhover'

'If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.' - Isadora Duncan.

On the face of it, it seems bizarre that a bunch of dancers with complicated fans should have risen to become major players in the criminal ecology of the Wicked City. Anyone with a gun or a dagger or a rope can be a murderer, and anyone with a body can be a prostitute, yet to become a Ruby Fan Murder Harlot requires exceptional natural athleticism and years of ruthlessly demanding training in a balletic art form that almost no-one even understands how to interpret any more, all so that they can graduate to a life of running brothels or cutting people up with bladed fans. It all seems so excessive. Wouldn't it be simpler just to recruit a bunch of ruthless kids with knives and forget about all the fancy dancing?

Such questions, while understandable, get the situation entirely backwards. Hard though it may be for their victims to believe, the arts of the Murder Harlots are not cultivated to assist them in the execution of their crimes. Instead, their criminal endeavours exist primarily so that they can safeguard the continuation of their art.

This is their secret: that for all their nihilistic bravado, the Murder Harlots really care about the art form of which they are the Wicked City's last remaining practitioners. No-one who wasn't genuinely in love with the expressive possibilities of dance and motion would ever put up with their gruelling training regimen, or the years of practise needed to mould a human body into something that makes the most extraordinary acrobatic feats look effortless, leaping and spinning through the air as though gravity was merely a suggestion. In their own slightly crazy way, the Murder Harlots are actually much more purely committed to their art than the Jewelled Fan Dancers from which they inherited their traditions. For the Jewelled Fan Dancers, their dances were valuable because they were understood to embody and communicate all kinds of high-minded philosophical and spiritual ideals about Order and Balance and Harmony and Self-Control. For the Murder Harlots, the dance is just the dance. It doesn't mean anything, or at least not anything so paltry that it can be put into words. It means itself. The clean and perfectly-executed snap of the body through space contains its own meanings and its own rewards. 

It says a very great deal about the cultural state of the Wicked City that the only way the Ruby Fan dancers have been able to survive as an institution is by reinventing themselves as high-class courtesans and contract killers; but then again, if their art didn't have the side-effect of making them potentially appealing as sexual partners and hired assassins, it probably wouldn't have survived at all, or at least not in anything resembling its original sophistication. The other fine arts within the city are in a sad condition: poetry has been censored into oblivion for all purposes other than propaganda, architecture is now used chiefly to create ever-more vulgar and ostentatious monuments for the rich and powerful, and aside from the bawdy folk-songs of the very poor, music is now chiefly heard accompanying the liturgy of the city's corrupt and oppressive state religion. Under such conditions, genuine creativity finds few outlets. On balance, the Ruby Fan gang have probably done better than most.

They perform for themselves, mostly. They'll take paid engagements if the price is right, but among the city's elite, the knowledge to truly appreciate their artistry was lost when the Wicked King purged the old aristocracy; when they're hired now, it's usually by some lecherous bureaucrat who wants them to 'send a bunch of good-looking boys to do one of those twirly dances', or something similarly crass. Or they will put on public shows for paying audiences, trading on some combination of the athleticisim, obscenity, and black humour for which they are famous; morbid pornographic farces which also happen to involve an awful lot of backflips. The audience usually thinks that the most important scene is the one where the main performer jumps up and down a lot and then pretends to have sex with a camel. Only the dancers are likely to recognise that the real heart of the show, the point of it, comes in some seemingly incidental fan-fluttering passage whose sheer virtuousic complexity will not even be noticed, let alone understood, by anyone other than themselves.

It takes seven years to master the Language of the Fans; a language which, they say, contains more subtlety of nuance and vigour of expression than any spoken tongue. You think they do that just so they can pass each other secret messages in crowded rooms?

Among some of the Ruby Fan Murder Harlots, the nihilistic amorality for which the gang is famous verges on antinomian mysticism. Words are lies; categories are traps; moral judgements are laughable oversimplifications which should be held up to ridicule at every opportunity. The divisions between good and evil, sacred and profane, are meaningless: there is only action, and every action is purely and radiantly itself, and the only true meaning is that which inheres in the action perfectly executed, the curve of the arm through its arc, the smooth slice of hand or fan or blade through air or flesh. They wouldn't use those words, though. They'd say: 'The world's fucked, and you might as well laugh at it. But that's no excuse for not appreciating really good footwork.'

It would be easy, and dangerous, to romanticise the Murder Harlots. To focus on their outlaw glamour, and forget their causal cruelty: the weeping boys and girls exploited by their brothels, the innocent victims hacked down by their hired assassins, the unfortunate visitors to the city dragged off by the Secret Police after being tricked into making seditious statements for their amusement, the passers-by subjected to random bladed-fan-based mutilation just because a nearby Murder Harlot happened to be bored that afternoon. Many of them are very deeply damaged people, not least because of the gang's frankly abusive training methods; and their collective culture tolerates and encourages the expression of this damage in highly destructive ways, ensuring that they retain their reputation as mad, bad, and dangerous to know. They just also happen to encourage its expression through some rather wonderful fan-dancing. 

PCs whose first contact with the Murder Harlots comes through encounters with their victims are likely to write them off as depraved and irredeemable. A lot of them probably are. But any perceptive PC who gets a chance to witness one of their private performances, full of expressive motion and yearning gestures and eloquent, fluttering fans 'speaking' faster than the untrained eye can follow, may glimpse another part of the truth: that their violence and callousness exists mostly as a protective carapace, and that for at least some of them the things they dance aren't just the things they can't express in words, but the things that they don't dare to, even to each other. Even to themselves.

Help me.

Love me.

Fix me.

Forgive me.

So the question it comes down to is this: how well can you interpret the Language of the Fans?

You say you want a revolution: liberating the Wicked City

The Wicked City exists so that the PCs can make it better. It's not Mordor. You don't need the One Ring. You don't even need the Armies of the Free Peoples. It's one fucking city. Your PCs can manage that, right?

If they can, though, it'll have to be because they've found a better way of doing it than tracking down the guy in charge and stabbing him to death. The Wicked King is not a load-bearing boss, and the cruelty of the Wicked City could easily carry right on without him, with the vast majority of the city's inhabitants not even having any way of knowing he was dead. (In fact, he might well have been dead for years...) It's just about conceivable that a sufficiently diplomatic party could achieve large-scale social reform almost without bloodshed, but it's much more likely that if change is going to come, you're going to have to fight for it.

You're going to need a revolution.

Fall of the Bastille, 1789.

So here are some notes on the city's various factions, and the roles that they might play in one. The Secret Police will definitely fight for the Wicked King, and the Red Brotherhood will definitely fight against him, but absolutely everyone else is up for grabs. If you can establish the right connections with the right people, there's no reason that most or all of the city's armies shouldn't end up fighting against its government rather than for it...

(NB: For ease of comparing the relative power of different factions, each has been assigned a Strength rating, where Strength 1 is roughly equivalent to a hundred well-equipped soldiers with good morale. Given that revolutions tend to be extremely chaotic affairs, however, it is entirely possible that individual factions may end up punching far above or below their weight, based on the specific circumstances involved!)

Faction	Strength	Default loyalty to the regime
The Secret Police	10+	Fanatically loyal
The First Brigade	7	Strongly loyal
The Clankers	8 (16 in battlefield conditions)	Moderately loyal
The Air Corps	3 (10 against massed enemies with no cover)	Moderately loyal
The King’s Men	5 per brigade, to a maximum of 50.	Weakly loyal.
The Clockwork Soldiers	5 per warehouse, to a maximum of 30.	Fanatically loyal unless reprogrammed.
Earthshaker	4 (8 in battlefield conditions)	Fanatically loyal unless reprogrammed.
The Thirteen Ministries	1 per ministry, to a maximum of 13.	Strongly loyal.
The Cobweb Families	1 per six families, to a maximum of 15.	Moderately loyal.
The Merchant Houses	6	Neutral.
The Clockworker Guilds	2	Moderately loyal.
The Way of Light	1	Weakly loyal.
The Serpent-Folk	4	Neutral.
The Mindblade Orders	6	Netural.
The Golden Ones	3	Neutral.
The Brass Men	10	Neutral.
The People of the Streets	1 per community, to a maximum of 50.	Weakly rebellious.
The Foundry Slaves	6	Strongly rebellious.
The Canal Slaves	8 (10 with diggers)	Strongly rebellious.
The Mine Slaves	5	Strongly rebellious.
The Farm-Folk	1 per community, to a maximum of 60.	Weakly rebellious.
The People of the Rubble	3 (6 within the Rubble)	Strongly rebellious.
The Red Brotherhood	4	Fanatically rebellious.
The Murder Harlots	3	Neutral.
The Street Gangs	6	Weakly rebellious.
The Scrap Mechanics	2	Weakly rebellious.
The Steel Aspirants	3	Neutral.
The Blue Necropolis Cults	1	Strongly rebellious.
The Labyrinth Schools	1	Neutral.
The Shining Ones	1	Neutral.
The Hinterland Bandits	2	Neutral.
The Pig-Men	6	Neutral.
The Clockwork Confederacy	1 (4 in tunnels or sieges)	Fanatically rebellious unless reprogrammed.

The Armed Forces 

The Secret Police: The ultimate loyalists of the city's government. They worship the Wicked King as a divinity and will fight to the death in his name. (Besides, if they surrendered, they'd just be lynched by the population.) Numbers unknown, but at least five hundred, well trained and equipped and extremely highly motivated. Strength: at least 10, and possibly much more. (No-one knows how many undercover agents they have, after all...)

The First Brigade: The cream of the city's army, and the ones most likely to actually put up a decent fight in defence of its government. Five hundred strong, and mostly composed of Blood Men. Could potentially be bought off for the right price, and will surrender if obviously outmatched. Strength: 7.

The Clankers: The city's mechanised infantry brigade has access to exceptional military technology - mecha, tanks, steam knights - but much of it is of limited value in urban warfare. If they actually manage to deploy out on a field somewhere then their guns could mow down a whole army before you managed to take them down. Sabotage might be a good idea - one disloyal engineer can sabotage a lot of machines - and given their dependence upon technology, their morale would plummet if they were forced to fight without it. Strength: 8, or 16 if deployed in battlefield conditions.

The Air Corps: Airships and gyrocopters can drop bombs and missiles, but urban warfare means that everyone has access to lots of cover, so their main value would probably be as scouts and transports. If deployed against an army out in the open, they could bomb it to pieces with impunity. Strength: 3, or 10 if deployed against large numbers of enemies with inadequate cover.

The King's Men: The city's main army consists of ten thousand-man brigades, but it's horribly corrupt and most of its members have no interest in risking their lives unless they really have to. Their morale is high in battles that they're obviously going to win, but will simply disintegrate in the face of determined opposition. Two or three brigades will usually be out pacifying the countryside around the Wicked City at any given time. Strength: 5 per brigade, or 50 if the whole army gets involved en masse.

The Clockwork Soldiers: The Ministry of Technology maintains six huge warehouses full of clockwork soldiers, waiting to be wound up in case the city ever comes under attack. A sufficiently sudden uprising could probably achieve its objectives (and/or blow up the warehouses) before most of them could be activated. A sufficiently well-prepared uprising wouldn't even start until rebel engineers had sneaked in and reprogrammed all the clockwork soldiers to fight against the city's government rather than for it. Strength: 5 per warehouse-full, or 30 in total.

Earthshaker: This giant clockwork dragon eats so much coal that the city's government won't even think of activating it unless they believe a threat is really serious, and even with all its coal-powered autowinders spinning at full speed it will take several hours for its mainspring to get wound up enough for it to stumble into action, but when it gets going it's a potential army-killer. Imagine a clockwork Godzilla covered in bronze armour plating and you'll understand why you don't want to end up fighting it. If your infiltrators only reprogram one clockwork robot, make it this one. Strength: 4, or 8 if it's deployed out in the open where it can stomp enemy armies beneath its giant metal feet.

The Rich and Powerful

The Thirteen Ministries: Collectively, the Thirteen Ministers command over a thousand guards, assassins, burly servants with clubs, and general-purpose legbreakers who are personally loyal to them, most of whom are very well equipped. (The Ministers take their personal security extremely seriously.) Most of the Ministers would probably respond to the outbreak of a revolution by barricading themselves inside their offices and waiting for the shooting to stop, but a rebellion which managed to enlist some of them as allies - perhaps by offering them places in the new government - could make use of their soldiers as well. Strength: 1 per ministry.

The Cobweb Families: If the hundred scheming families of the Cobweb could be persuaded to put aside their differences and pool their guards and servants into a single army, its power would be impressive: many families are rich, vain, or paranoid enough to see to it that their guards are excellently equipped, and generations spent isolated in the miniature world of the Cobweb has induced a near-fanatical loyalty in many of their minions. The trick would be in persuading them all to work together. Strength: 1 per six families, to maximum of 15.

The Merchant Houses: Individually insignificant, the merchant houses collectively employ enough bodyguards, caravan guards, and miscellaneous mercenaries to form a considerable fighting force. Unless their assistance has been actively secured in advance, though, their priority is likely to just be protecting their own estates. Strength: 6.

The Clockworker Guilds: Most of the city's legitimate clockworkers depend heavily on government contracts for their prosperity, and have strong family ties to the Air Corps and the Clankers, so they'll probably side with the regime unless it's obviously going to lose. The guildsmen themselves would be worse than useless on the battlefield, but they collectively have access to an impressive number of clockwork weapons, guard beasts, and automata. Strength: 2.

The Way of Light: The priests of the state religion are a cowardly and demoralised bunch, likely to hide themselves inside their temples at the first sign of trouble. If their faith in the Full Moon Sage could be rekindled they might be persuaded to join a revolution, but they are likely to be valuable more because of the gold they can provide than because of the (frankly unimpressive) force they could gather on the battlefield. Strength: 1.

The Serpent-Folk: There are only a few thousand serpent-folk in the Wicked City, and they are not warriors; but their community is tightly knit, and if called upon to fight for (or against) a rebellion they would do so as a disciplined and well-organised force. Their mastery of healing, drugs, and poisoning would make them assets to any force which employed them. Strength: 4.

The Mindblade Orders: If the city's half-dozen Mindblade orders were all to call their members together, they could collectively muster several hundred mentally unstable but battle-trained psychics. Wherever they go, expect lots of poltergeist activity and exploding heads. Strength: 6.

The Golden Ones: Skilled in healing and beloved by the people, the Golden Ones would be an asset to any rebellion as healers and leaders. They don't technically lead the cult of the Sage of Gold - all the highest-ranking priests are serpent folk - but it's the Golden Ones whom the faithful actually listen to, and if they joined a revolt then the followers of the Sage would flock to it, regardless of what the official temple hierarchy had to say. Strength: 3.

The Brass Folk: The thousand-odd Brass Folk who call the Wicked City home are potentially a very powerful force, as there are effectively no noncombatants among them, and their powerful metal bodies mean that they have little need for weapons, and none at all for armour. Their impressive clockworking skills also mean that, if mobilised, they could potentially unleash all kinds of clockwork beasts and traps upon their foes. Strength: 10.

The Poor and Desperate

The People of the Streets: The ruinous streets of the Wicked City are home to hundreds of thousands of people, divided into dozens of tiny enclaves. The people are beaten-down and dispirited, and only have access to improvised weaponry; but there are a lot of them, and if raised en masse they could shake the city to its foundations. Strength: 1 per community, to a maximum of 50.

The Foundry Slaves: If freed from their chains, the toiling thousands who work in the city's foundries would be very eager to strike back against their hated masters. Many of them are in no condition to fight, but the able-bodied among them would be very highly motivated, and many of them understand the workings of the machines they have been chained to much better than they let on. Strength: 6.

The Farm-Folk: The farm-folk of the Wicked City's hinterlands substantially outnumber the inhabitants of the city itself; but they are scattered, malnourished, and demoralised. Even if they could be rallied, they would be armed only with farming tools, and it would take weeks for all the individual peasant bands to be gathered together into a single force, making them vulnerable to being crushed piecemeal by the city's armies. Strength: 1 per community, to a potential (but unlikely) maximum of 60.

The Canal Slaves: The work gangs of sweating slaves who dig the city's irrigation channels are, on average, healthier than those who work in its furnaces or mines; and if liberated from their chain gangs, they'd be delighted to sharpen the edges of their shovels and start digging holes in their former owners, instead. Strength: 8, or 10 if they also get their hands on the giant clockwork diggers and can turn them to some military purpose.

The Mine Slaves: If the multitudes who labour in the city's coal mines were freed from their bondage, they would eagerly seize any chance to avenge themselves for their years of living burial in the tunnels. Many are in very poor physical condition, but their skill in digging holes in things could be very useful in any kind of siege. Strength: 5. 

The Red Brotherhood: Although relatively small in numbers, the Red Brotherhood have the enormous advantage that they've been planning for this for decades. They have no intention of throwing their lives away in a hopeless revolt, but if they think an unfolding rebellion actually has a decent chance of success then they can transform from a network of seemingly-ordinary people into a formidably-organised revolutionary militia within hours, arming themselves from hidden stashes and rallying together in key locations under the command of long-hidden leaders who have spent years hiding in the tunnels of the Maze, waiting for just such a day to come. Strength: 4.

The People of the Rubble: Expert hunters and street-fighters armed with hilariously deadly poisoned arrows, the People of the Rubble are well-equipped to punch above their weight in any clash that breaks out within the Wicked City. They would be especially dangerous if they were engaged on their home turf, where they would be able to use their networks of traps and knowledge of the Rubble's unstable terrain to their own advantage. Strength: 3 (6 if fighting within the Rubble itself.)

Oddballs and Outcasts

The Murder Harlots: There may only be a few hundred of them in the city, but they're absolutely fearless in battle, and their athleticism and reckless disregard for their own safety would make them superb commandos. They're not exactly idealistic, but their nihilism is such that they might join a rebellion simply because it offers a chance for some violence and excitement. Strength: 3.

The Street Gangs: If the thousand-odd gangsters and criminals who plague the Wicked City were ever assembled into a single army, then... they'd probably immediately start fighting each other over old gang rivalries and who was wearing the most fashionable turban. But if you could somehow get past all that, you'd be left with an ill-disciplined but enthusiastic force of urban irregulars with considerable knowledge of street fighting and an impressive capacity for violence. Strength: 6.

The Scrap Mechanics: While they lack the resources of the Clockworker Guilds, the Scrap Mechanics are much more capable of using their skills under pressure, and would make much better battlefield mechanics than their workshop-bound competitors. If they gathered together all their wingriders, racing automata, and robot gladiators they'd be able to form a motley but effective force of skirmishers and scouts. Strength: 2.

The Steel Aspirants: The Aspirants are not numerous, but if they could be enticed from their foundry-temples they would make excellent shock troopers. Even the lower-level aspirants, whose bodies are still mostly flesh, have enough metal plating to be natural heavy infantry; their elders, who now resemble monstrous armoured crabs or scorpions more than anything human, could be absolute terrors on the battlefield. Strength: 3.

The Blue Necropolis Cults: Given that they're already strongly committed to changing the city for the better, the various murder-cults of the Blue Necropolis could be valuable revolutionaries if they could only be persuaded that organised political action, rather than blood sacrifice to horrible undead monsters claiming to be their ancestors, was the best path to national salvation. There aren't that many of them, but they are pretty hardened to killing people. Strength: 1.

The Labyrinth Schools: The various remaining followers of the Labyrinth Doctrines who hide in the remote tunnels of the Maze mostly just want to be left alone, to pursue their paths towards what they believe to be spiritual enlightenment. If they could somehow be mobilised they could be potentially useful as guides through the Maze, which they know better than anyone - they built it, after all - but decades of ascetic meditation in total darkness has left them badly unprepared for actual battlefield deployment. (Besides, they'd worry it might retard their spiritual progress.) Strength: 1

The Shining Ones: This bunch of shivering, hyperactive drug addicts don't usually have much of an interest in politics, but their shared visions of the Sage of Gold could potentially be played upon to herd them into rebellion in the name of a sacred struggle. (The assistance of the Golden Ones would make this much easier.) They're too unhealthy to be much use in a straight fight, but their hypercharged metabolisms make them excellent scouts, messengers, and watchmen. Strength: 1.

The Hinterland Bandits: The hinterlands of the Wicked City are infested with bandit gangs, who live by robbery, scavenging, and extortion. They compete with one another over loot, and scatter whenever the city's armies pass through, but a sufficiently plausible revolutionary might be able to unite them all with the promise of rich enough plunder. Strength: 2.

The Pig-Men: Both the tunnels beneath the city and the underground aqueducts outside it are infested with pig-men, who wandered into them from some unknown underworld years ago. They're too stupid to understand the city's politics, and wouldn't care who ruled it even if the situation could be explained to them, but if they could somehow be bribed or tricked into rising up their numbers, strength, and savagery could make them a powerful (if hard to control) military asset. Strength: 6.

The Clockwork Confederacy: This crew of eccentric reprogrammed mining robots have very little understanding of the world outside the abandoned mine tunnels they inhabit, but they are adamant foes of all forms of slavery and would eagerly align themselves with any rebellion which promised both to liberate the city's slaves and to upgrade its automata into consciousness. They'd be of limited value in a straight fight, but very valuable in tunnel-fighting or siege warfare. Strength: 1 (4 in tunnels or sieges).