The Coins
Much of Absalom’s mercantile activity takes place in this sprawling hive of crowded streets and teeming markets. From dawn to dusk, hawkers tout their wares to streetwise customers, haggling in a hundred languages amid bleating livestock, performing musicians, and the grind of wagon wheels on cobblestones. The city’s largest market, the Grand Bazaar, is said to contain nearly any object a buyer could ever want, provided they take the considerable time to search through the plaza’s hundreds of brightly flagged stalls and semipermanent shops to find it. By night, many of the district’s seedier neighborhoods become havens of violent crime, as pickpockets and thieves from the Puddles and the Docks wander north in search of heavy purses.
One of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the Coins was once one of its most lucrative: an elevated stone platform known as Misery Row, the center of Absalom’s now-outlawed slave trade. Today, the neighborhood is the center of a run-down slum avoided by the district’s famously corrupt watch (known cynically as the Token Guard). The squalid chambers within the raised causeway, formerly known as the Slave Pits of Absalom, are today inhabited by some of the city’s most desperate and depraved criminals.
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