SLAVE QUARTER

Social Class: Lower.

Power Center: Never.

Buildings: Overseer’s station, poor services (5%), poor residences (93%).

Description: No other part of any city is as devoted to human suffering as the slave quarter. Surrounded by tenements and cheap lodging, the center of the slave quarter contains pens or cells, and a platform from which slavers display their wares. (In cities where slavery is illegal, this district might instead be underground, or within a closed structure in a red-light or slum district.) On casual observation, this looks just like any other impoverished district. Only a closer examination discerns the occasional noble or noble’s servant, or the cartloads of prisoners or war captives being readied for sale. The normal sounds of the hard-working poor are punctuated by occasional cries of pain or despair.

Plot Hook: A clan of doppelgangers has taken human form and arranged to be sold into slavery. After they take up roles as slaves within the households of the city’s rich and powerful, the doppelgangers plan to take the place of those nobles, instantly and irrevocably cementing their power within the community.