Castorhage
Castorhage is both city and nation. While the city-state includes colonies throughout the known Lost Lands and the Between, in truth Castorhage is the city-state. It is a city of excess, deceit, lies, and desperation in which any object can be found, any item acquired, and any sin committed. Each of the districts of Castorhage is as large, or larger, than all but the greatest of cities in the Lost Lands, and each has its own flavor, its own twist on the Blight that consumes and, really, becomes this whole place.
This is merely a taste of the rot, decay, and opulence that is the Blight. The following brief description of the districts in Castorhage are just a quick glance, a sideways look from the corner of one’s eye, and ill-equipped to encompass the true majesty, and horror, of the Blight.
The Capitol
Seventeen centuries of labor and the lives of more than 10,000 workers brought to life the dreams of hundreds of architects, politicians, and kings in the form of the Capitol. A thousand buildings crushed into one, it rises as a single building imposing itself upon the entire city. This is the home of Queen Alice, the royal family, the crown justices, and the 13 justices who assist them. Servants of all types serve here, as do countless clerks and other officials. Deceit, lies, and betrayal command here, as they do throughout the city, but here they are unequalled, existing on a scale only the most twisted mind could encompass.The Artists’ Quarter
At the heart of the city, the Artist’s Quarter provides home to artists practicing a thousand different forms of performing and traditional arts. The district is fractured with artists gathering by disciplines, with streets of puppet-makers running to alleys of glassblowers stretching toward courtyards of paint makers. Lurking in the shadows here are the fetch, whose vampire elders are drawn to the waking nightlife, the Triads of the Xha’en and Gtsang immigrants, and the rebels and anarchists. Between these powerful groups and the various artists struggling for fame and glory, the Artists’ Quarter is a hotbed of anarchy, intrigue, plots, blackmail, and deceit.The Barnacles and Great Dock
Built upon various levels of tunnels that link in turn to the outer buildings, this large island town is a dizzying stack of buildings rising from the ocean. Hundreds of buildings are variously tied, nailed, or bolted to the precarious cliff faces hovering over jagged rocks below. Tunnels weave through the rock, and a vast array of bridges links to a wall of warehouses, buildings, cranes, and ferries that serve ships docked here.BookTown
Tall buildings and towers linked by bridges, gangplanks, rope bridges, and ladders create echoing canyons that smell of old books and ink. BookTown is a repository for tomes and grimoires of all types, maps, arcana and all manner of written works. Merchants, wizards, and even creatures from distant planes find their way here in search of knowledge. BookTown is home to the Seminary, home to the greatest universities and academies clinging to the foot of the Capitol. Knowledge has its price, and in Castorhage, almost everyone is willing to pay that price, particularly those in power. The Seminary is a center of experimentation where the first breach into the Between occurred and where the first alchymic undead were raised, and now provides a home for countless other horrific, dangerous experiments. While the Seminary has its own special type of fame, the most hated parish in the city lies in BookTown. The City of Golems found here is home to an area of cottage universities and charnel houses providing alchemists and physikers free range, and an endless supply of bodies, to experiment upon.Festival and the Great Fayre
Festival is a huge timber pier in the Lyme River built around a squat gray hill. Ruled by the Rat Queen, this is a metropolis of wererats and hidden lycanthropy. Rising some 200 feet through steep streets called the Skew to the Great Fayre at the summit, Festival is a shamble of buildings built upon buildings, groaning and threatening to collapse at any moment. Half of Festival is covered with the Crimson Lantern, the town’s prostitution district where the darkest of excesses can be enjoyed.The Great Lyme River (Sister Lyme)
The foul waters of Sister Lyme cut through the heart of the city, keeping at bay the districts behind its docks and warehouses, yet somehow touching upon them all with its fetid stain. It is a place of false islands, smuggling, piracy, murder, and any who wish to cloak their deeds in shadowy darkness. Somehow there is life here; sough-eels and slop-sharks are just a few of the many creatures hungrily watching those above. A fall into these tainted waters is a sure death sentence. Adding to the river’s dark stench is the Bilges, the answer to the city’s sewer problem. Nicknamed both “Stinktown” and the “City of Perfume,” the Bilges is about the lowest a person can find themselves in the city. All of the unwanted rubbish of the city comes here to die and decay in one of the islands of waste. The decay creates a stench unlike any other, a concentrated form of rot that causes the islands of refuse to shift, move, and seemingly change form with a life of their own. The Gyre also finds home in the river, a town of flotsam and jetsam that should not hold together, yet somehow does. Its ability to support a settlement complete with buildings, boardwalk streets, and piers is unbelievable. It is one more of the impossible wonders of Sister Lyme that is both interesting and yet disturbing to behold.The Hollow and Broken Hills
Tree-lined avenues and parks, cliffs, inlets and temples and places of worship fill the splintered land here. Miracles happen among the temples, grottoes, and altars. Sanctuary, home of the master of the church in Castorhage, stands here, as do various vast holes that have come to replace some of the churches that were once here before. Powerful clerics, bishops, archbishops and holy fathers rule this part of the city, but don’t be fooled, their lust for power and propensity for intrigue and duplicity runs as high as anywhere else in the city.The Jumble
Known as the Cat’s Cradle, the Madness, the Maze, the City of Thieves, and a few less-kind names, the Jumble is a vast, confusing maze of streets rising upward and outward in a vague, pale mockery of the Capitol itself. It is a place to get lost or to seek a richer life, a home to a variety of thieves and villains, as well as those simply trying to escape something. The Jumble has its own markets and laws. Vigilantes walk the streets at night, but foul things still easily find a home here. Claiming to be the greatest market in the world, the Bazaar sits beside and within the Jumble. It is a thousand streets filled with countless shops, stalls, markets, and traders, where, purportedly, anything can be found. The air here is tainted with desperation as voices call out the goods they are selling and arguments can be heard echoing through the maze of buildings.The Sinks
The Sinks provide a sign of Castorhage’s future. The city itself is built on clay and silt deposits, the ever-increasing weight of building upon building crushing those at the bottom into the ground. The Sinks began as the brainchild of King Branner. Planned as a new town for artisans, it was cursed from the beginning. Even as “Branner’s Folly” was being built, it was sinking into the soft ground. What remains today is a twisted wreckage of leaning walls, broken battlements, and haunting arched bridges over canals that range between a few feet deep and seemingly bottomless. The Sinks are disturbing for visitors, the view inducing fits of vertigo and dizziness, but the disowned nobility making their homes here think of it as an elite domain. This is a home for true exiles, those who have committed crimes beyond what is normal in the rest of Castorhage.The Asylum
Only in Castorhage would there be an area larger than most cities dedicated to nothing more than hiding the less-fortunate. This walled off area of the city has its own laws and even its own currency. The walls and buildings are secured such that there is only one single huge doorway in or out. The inmates here are left to rot; once cast into the Asylum, no one ever leaves.Toiltown (East Ending)
Whether one calls it the East, East Ending, or the State of Sweat, Toiltown is hated by everyone, even the overseers and managers who run the endless manufactories and sweatshops, workhouses, and underground mills. The lowest castes of the city live here amid the dizzying array of unnamed streets and slums. Life is cheap here. East Ending has an unenviable history of murder, there being several every night. Beneath even this dark surface lies a darker trade in slavery, and worse, because anything can be bought here. Hanging from East Ending near the Great Docks is Boattown. While there are other boattowns throughout the Blight, this fixed group of piers, riverboats, and planks carries the name like a banner. Halfling families control this, the nastiest of boattowns, where fisherman rub shoulders with briny and murder costs but a few coins, if that.Town Bridge
Town Bridge takes advantage of curious laws that do not recognize the bridge as part of the city. Lodgings and traders on the bridge escape taxation. As a result, Town Bridge is a mass of trade and humanity crushed into the space between the Great East Bridge Gate and the Royal West Bridge Gate. Shacks can be lashed onto the side of a building or simply hung out over the edge of the bridge itself. Buildings here stretch upward and outward over the Lyme River.Underneath
The Underneath is everything below the city, and it is vast and deep. Made up of caves, fissures, and ancient buildings that have sunk beneath the ground, the Underneath touches every part of the city, and, in truth, threatens it with the possibility of collapse. Streets and buildings have been known to disappear into massive sinkholes as the caves and openings below lose their integrity and fall in themselves. The city just fills in and builds over these holes, as progress must be made.People
Castorhage is a clearinghouse for the unwanted, a stopping point for travelers, and a waypoint for wanderers. The Blight taints everyone living here over time until they become a part of the city in a way no other city bleeds into its people. Humans of every type found in the Lost Lands reside here, as do dwarves, elves, halflings, and all the other races. They are joined by coprophagi (roach people), briny, ratfolk, mongrelfolk, all manner of undead, dragons (though they usually hide their form), night slugs, swyne, tabaxi and many others who call the Blight home. If an intelligent creature exists on this or any other plane, it most likely can be found somewhere in Castorhage. City Stats
Castorhage
Owning Organization
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