The Sewermen's and Streetcleaners' Union

Granted its charter following an outbreak of plague in the Foreign Quarter that rapidly spread, despite quarantine, to the River Quarter via the sewers, the Sewermen's and Streetcleaners' Union was originally a civic body funded directly from city coffers, and charged with keeping the streets free of trash and the sewers unblocked and intact.

When the funding of such a mammoth operation became too much of a strain on city resources, the Directorship sold the streetcleaning franchise directly to the union. In turn, the union divided the city into manageable areas to be supervised by the union's Master Streetcleaners. Each Master Streetcleaner is responsible for collecting the union's streetcleaning fee from householders and businesses within his or her area, paying 10% directly into union coffers with the remainder going toward paying expenses such as the understreetcleaners' wages, apprentices' board and lodging, and lining the Master's purse. Sewer work is still directly funded from city coffers.

The Sewermen's and Streetcleaners' Union maintains a monopoly on its services. That is easy to enforce with regard to its sewer work since the rest of the citizenry is quite happy to let the union members get on with the Job, and freelance sewer cleariing isn't high on most people's lists of ambitions. From time to time, the inhabitants of some streets object to paying the street cleaners and band together to clear the streets themselves. The streetcleaners have a simple remedy to cure this independent action-arranging for several wagonloads of putrescent offal (supplied through the courtesy of the Guild of Leatherworkers, Tanners, Smiths, and Stablers) to be accidentally dumped in the street at dusk. By morning, the residents are normally only too happy to pay the guild fee to have the stuff removed.

The union has no hall, but maintains an office in the Civic Depot (location T23). It's present membership totals 400, with 150 fully qualified union members (at least two years experience) and 250 apprentices. (The union employs propor tionately far more apprentices than other guilds, so that the trainees can do most of the dirty work.) The union's work force is further augmented in High Summer (when the health risk is the greatest) by convicts from the city workhouses and work gangs from the Laborers' Union.

The union also includes a special group within its membership known commonly as the Sewer Rats. This is a division of the Sewermen's and Streetcleaners' Union which is made up of the shortest, meanest, and toughest dwarves and gnomes to be found in the Free City of Greyhawk. Generally numbering no more than twenty, the Sewer Rats are the union's special task force charged with the upkeep and repair of the more inaccessible parts of the sewer system. They are actively discouraged from being too exploratory in their forays, since several people in positions of power (notably thieves) don't want their secret ways into and out of the sewer system discovered by nosy, prying dwarves.

The Sewer Rats are all fighters between 2nd and 5th level with Strength and Constitution scores of 16 or greater, and are outfitted with leather armor, hammers, small picks, and axes. They are a rough, tough, and hard-living bunch and normally congregate at the Barge Inn tavern in the River Quarter. They are none too fastidious in their personal hygiene and are always accompanied by the unmistakable odor of the longest neglected sewers.

Guildmaster Imre Petrosian purchases zombies from Old Mother Grubb's for use in sewer work (see Chapter 5). The use of zombies is common knowledge in the Sewermen 's division of the union, but has so far remained a secret from the Directorship and the general populace.