River Quarter
The River Quarter began as a road linking the wharves on the Selintan with the market in front of the Black Gate, when only the Old City was walled. The road became lined with warehouses and businesses, and it was redirected several times until it was quite crooked (much like the people of this quarter, say some). This old road survives today as parts of the Strip and Horseshoe Road. A section of the River Quarter was lost when the Foreign Quarter was created, but the two blend well together along Horseshoe Road.
Greyhawk's wharves bring products and people from all corners of the Flanaess and beyond. Nowhere is this garish combination of cultures and influences more apparent than in the city’s River Quarter, a boisterous district of taverns, brothels, and gambling dens just inside the Cargo Gate to the Wharf District. Here lifelong sailors, smugglers, and dockmen mix with river-gypsies, slumming nobles, brazen students, and adventurers to create a community of extremes, worldly in knowledge and experience but poor in coin and character.
By day, the River Quarter swarms with laborers hauling cargo from distant markets to the artisans and bazaars of the Free City. Cargo Street, running roughly parallel to the Nobles’ Wall, sees the greatest traffic in the district, and one must walk with care through the muddy streets to avoid being trampled by horse and wagon. Most of the structures along the city’s west wall serve as warehouses for merchant houses and local market barons, and might hold any number of treasures. At night the life of the district flows to a notorious avenue of vice and delights called the Strip, where a wise man goes armed if at all.
Crime is greater here than in any other part of the New City, but most of it involves pickpocketing, burglary, mugging drunks, extortion, protection rackets, cargo theft, or smuggling. Actual murder is less common than most people think. Business is concluded without a lot of troubling questions being asked. Rivermen, thugs, mercenaries, thieves, poor adventurers, and wanted men are often seen here, along with foreigners and legitimate merchants of the lower middle doss. Restaurants, taverns, inns, bawdy houses, gambling dens, and the like are common. As this quarter is one of the major trade arteries for Greyhawk, its excesses are overlooked to a great extent, though rich folk come here only with bodyguards.
This most riotous district is centered around the great curving avenue known as the Strip. With its taverns, brothels, gambling dens, and worse, the Strip at night is a cacophony of noises, a shadowland of flickering torches and blazing lamps. And always, day and night, it teems with drunks and toughs, rivermen and cityfolk. Always there are many who fight at any implied slight, and never are there enough patrols of the City Watch to keep the peace and even then they might arrive wounded or more interested in bribes than prosecution.
Type
Neighbourhood
Location under
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