Baldur's Mouth

Patronized by all levels of society, Baldur's Mouth is the city's primary news service and gossip rag. Utilizing a small army of lantern bearers, the Mouth spreads news both by selling broadsheets on street corners and by shouting summaries of top stories at passersby. From the slums of the Outer City to the finest manor house sitting rooms, the Mouth is where Baldurians go to be informed, incited, and pleasantly scandalized. While some of the news—such as word of new laws passed by the Council of Four or official election results—is handed down directly by the government, most comes from freelance journalists, and official pronouncements often sit side by side with scathing editorials or unflattering political cartoons of those same officials.
Ettvard Needle, a chaotic good male Human commoner, runs the operation from a surprisingly modest converted warehouse in Heapside. The son of an established Lower City tailor, he had always rankled at the way Lower City residents were treated by haughty patriars, and started Baldur's Mouth as a way to empower the city's poor via what he saw as the greatest weapon of social change: information. In the beginning, he simply paid local lantern bearers to shout his stories of upper-crust injustices, but as enthusiasm for the practice built and more people began bringing him information, he began writing the stories down for his distributors—teaching many of them to read in the process—and then selling the notes directly. Today, Needle prints his broadsheets by the cartload, aided by mechanical scribes purchased from the Hall of Wonders and funded by advertisements from merchants across the city.
Though beholden to advertisers and tacitly sanctioned by the city government, the Mouth has never lost its populist bent. Needle carefully ensures that the paper is useful enough to the government that it's never in their interest to shut it down, yet devotes the rest of the paper to news the government might prefer hushed up, from aristocratic scandal and evidence of corruption to straight talk about various threats to the city, always with a healthy dose of anti-elite rhetoric. His editorials have a particular soft spot for his friend Rilsa Rael, the Guild kingpin of Little Calimshan. While Needle loathes The Guild, he sees in Rilsa's egalitarian tendencies the potential for a hero of the people, and naively hopes she'll transform the Guild from a predatory criminal organization into a community police force serving the city's downtrodden.
Baldur's Mouth is a prime source of opportunity for adventurers in the city, as Needle is always looking to hire daring "investigative reporters" willing to investigate rumors of strange happenings or procure proof of corruption by the city's elite. Even just reading the broadsheet can present adventure opportunities via advertisements recruiting mercenaries, half-substantiated reports of monster attacks ignored by The Flaming Fist, and more. And of course, should adventurers succeed or fail in some high-profile venture, they might just find caricatures of themselves and stories of their exploits in the Mouth's latest edition.

Parent Location

Heapside