City of Blood
The City of Blood once was a bustling and relatively safe town of middling size nestled in the eastern valley slopes of the Broken Spine Mountains. But that changed at the Battle of Black Snow, a ferocious and lengthy campaign between the Empires of Silk and Spice and the Realm a few hundred years ago. It's unclear who won the battle, as the town was destroyed by the Realm to deny the Empire any slaves or supplies, but never repopulated, suggesting that perhaps the population didn't just temporarily escape but were put to the sword or captured as slaves. The name of the town was lost, though snippets of town signs and monuments remain in the city giving various answers to the question of which town it even was. Now it is simply the city of blood, a haunt of dangerous and violent raiders.
The Church of Aot the Sun God, a god also of justice and a particularly inflexible code of ethics, took it upon itself to try to reclaim the town from the wildlings and vermin that had infested it after the war, once the strength and influence of the Empires of Silk and Spice were broken in the region. The contingent of holy paladins they sent over made great strides at first, but soon found themselves surrounded and without allies in the ruins. Now several generations have passed, and in addition to a fanatical hyper-conservative version of their faith, and rampant inbreeding, Aot's Salvation gives no quarter and has no real interest in saving the town or anyone else in it, preferring to burn the whole thing down and let Aot sort it out in the afterlife. Their ambitions of cleaning by immolation are tempered only by their relatively small numbers, and by the many birth defects attributed to having originally come to the city 60 years before with only two women in the contingent of 19 holy knights. Clearly their mission has gone somewhat awry from its original intent.
What order there is in the town is there based on threat of force, either from Aot's Salvation or by the relatively more moderate, though still bloodthirsty and cruel confederation of gangs called the Ravagers. This fairly decentralized group is led by a triad of mutated ogres - Sabian, an ogre with a disproportionately huge head and childlike body, is their leader, and he is supported by his henchmen Gordo, a foul oversized specimen with a second regrowth of hard, dead skin over his normal flesh; and Thromp, a hare-lipped, snot-faced, droopy-eyed, deformed Ogre compared to whom the other two are as pretty as temple courtesans. The Ravagers have a kill order against Aot's Salvation, and the zealots would love nothing more than to burn down the tavern where the Ravagers are based, but simply getting the calories needed for survival is a top priority for both groups and an uneasy truce prevails.
Threatening that truce from time to time is a gang of kenku called the Raven Collective, allied to neither faction and always up to something.
Other citizens of note include Fremont, who is an awakened cat inside a skeleton; the Cultists of Borem of the Lake of Boiling Mud who are seeking some kind of ancient artifact or weapon in the town, and have proven to be a difficult foe for Aot's Salvation as fire has little if any effect on them; and the Dream of Ildeban, evidently some kind of magical floating turnip with human eyes and a very unpleasant disposition.
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