Magipunk:Setting:Atathorn
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Atathorn is a large port city, situated on the west coast at the mouth of the Rhume river. It's the intellectual and political center of the kingdom.
This page is currently a thumbnail sketch of some aesthetic stuff, with more detail hopefully to come.
Contents
The Temple District[edit]
The old temple-district is now home to the Church-Mills.
The first impression of entering the temple-district is a cloying sweet scent -- traces of innumerable sticks of incense burnt in the mills. Hard on the heels of the smell is a constant, high-pitched jingling underlying all the normal city sounds -- the sound of hundreds of thousands of power-tokens being picked up, put down, charged, tested, loaded into crates, and transported. Beneath the tinkling of the power tokens is a subsonic hum from the power of the mana being generated.
The streets of the Temple District are broad and jammed with the carts that constantly bring in uncharged tokens and leave with charged ones. At every corner and alley lies a derelict -- the former workers of the Church-Mills, rendered empty shells by years of constant Passion use, tend to congregate here, and they are too insensate to be bullied away by the Church guards. As long as they don't get under the cart-wheels, they're usually ignored, and usually harmless.
The architecture is old, massive stone temples now rising out of shanty-towns of newer, more hurriedly constructed wooden annexes built to house the ever-increasing administrative and worship needs of the old temples.
The Elvish Quarter[edit]
The Elvish Quarter constantly grows, swelling like a tumor out of its bounds, hemmed in only by the constant vigilance of its neighbors. This is not metaphor: the Elvish Quarter is alive, and its growth is literal.
At the edge of the Elvish Quarter, you can still make out buildings of traditional human mortar-and-wood construction, but covered in vines, roots, and various bushes. As you continue further in, the buildings become less and less distinct, replaced by strange, organic growths that run into one another. The Elvish Quarter is not stately or beautiful -- it's a literal urban jungle.
The smell of the Elvish Quarter is one of churned earth, night-soil, and over-rampant growth -- rich, fetid, and with a constant tinge of decay. It's eerily silent -- the Elves don't seem to see much need to talk to one another, and there's no heavy industry here. Streets are winding, narrow, and unnamed.
There's a constant population of Elvish and Goblin children here, mostly naked and untended, who stand silent sentinal over any visitors.
The Royal Palace[edit]
At the center of the city sits the Royal Palace, an anachronism of stone and now-obsolete curtain walls and guard-towers. The towers of the palace overlook the city and its people, but the main part of the palace is invisible behind tall walls, shut off from the common people.
The biggest gate to the outer wall is the famous Dragon Gate, a living symbol of the now-waning Royal power.
The Dragon Gate[edit]
The paradigmatic example of the unbelievable power of the modern age is the Dragon Gate, a one-of-a-kind wonder of the Royal Palace. It was erected a mere decade ago, and it took three years to make.
The Dragon Gate is the main (north) entrance to the curtain wall surrounding the Royal Palace. It looks out onto the parade-ground where formal-but-public ceremonies take place. At first glance, the Dragon Gate appears to be a tall, reinforced-wooden gate that's straddled and towered over by an immobile dragon, shaded by its wings.
And that's exactly what it is.
The dragon was captured alive through the use of titanic magics, and through even more extravagant use of magic, is kept alive but paralyzed to this day. Then the curtain wall was torn down and built back up around the dragon, encasing its lower body in stone. A small fortune in power tokens are used daily to keep the dragon alive, vital, but immobile; teams of specially trained sorcerors work in shifts to maintain the spells. It is an incredible symbol of the wealth and power of the Royal family, even in these days of rising Alliance power.
The Dragon Gate is sometimes caused to move, usually just thrusting its wings forward to provide an umbrella over the Parade Square when it's raining on a ceremony, but in an occaisional demonstration of Kingly Might, the dragon is caused to bow its long serpentine neck to the ground, and the king steps onto its enormous face, and is lifted into the air to give his speech. And, once a year, on the anniversary-night of the Royal Coronation, the dragon lifts its head to the sky and exhales a great stream of fire that lights the city like day for five minutes. This is both a spectacle that must be seen to be believed, and an implicit warning to enemies of the Throne that, should it ever become necessary, that fire might be directed elsewhere...
The Glass Mills[edit]
Not much glass is produced in the Glass Mills -- this district of the city is so named because it's controlled by the Glassmakers Alliance, not for any literal description of its industry. A large manufacturing area towards the outskirts of the city, it's characterized by large, featureless, shoddily built wooden buildings -- generally, alternating dormitory-style housing and mills. The smells here are of burning wood or coal, the sounds are of iron and lead being hammered, of nails being put into wood, and there's a crackling electrical feeling of magic being discharged. The roads are broad but poorly maintained, abused as they are by heavily loaded carts bringing in raw materials to be worked by assembly lines of workers using specialized spells and old-fashioned brute force.
During the day, the Glass Mills feel oddly abandoned, despite their high population -- everyone works in the mills except for the youngest children, the oldest grandparents, and the heavily pregnant or deathly ill. Bands of Gold Guards wander through the streets and beat any itinerants or vagrants who dare to loiter in the area.
At night, the Glass Mills are a bit more lively -- though the work of the mills is demanding, the young and hardy will party -- but most of the workers go to more entertaining parts of the city to have fun.
There are other, smaller industrial sections of towns that are broadly similar to the Glass Mills -- only the insignias on the Alliance guards and Alliance buildings change.
The Slums[edit]
The Alliances try to control their workers in Alliance-owned dormitory housing, but there are always people who do not work for the Alliances, or who are willing to buck the trend. The poorer parts of town that are not heavily Alliance-controlled tend to have narrow, winding streets, lilting, poorly-constructed buildings, and a much more lively feel than the industrial sectors.
The Slums are mostly residential, but the street-fronts often have a number of small businesses in them -- grocery and soft-goods stores, bars and taverns, and the omnipresent barber's (who buy blood from those who are so down on their luck as to need to sell it) and tattoo parlors.
The derelict population is high, tending towards drunks and druggies or gangs of unwanted goblin children. In the evening, they're joined by gangs of teenagers and young adults, muggers, and rapists. Elves are practically unknown in these parts of town, unless they're out slumming for human mates, but such goblins as manage to survive to adulthood are common, and often fiercely critical of elves and those goblins who have gone to live in the Elvish Quarter.
Crime is endemic to the slums, patrolled as they are by the underfunded City Watch instead of the various Alliance guards. Small organized crime gangs are increasingly finding that protection rackets are profitable.
Uptown[edit]
On the south-and-west part of the hills on the eastern side of town, Uptown is both literally physically higher than most of the city, and the residence of the rich and powerful.
Uptown is a sharp visual contrast with the rest of Atathorn. It's mostly well-constructed stone buildings, with relatively broad straight streets under good repair. Vagrants and derelicts are non-existant, chased off by either the Alliance enforcers that are detached to specific residences of important people within the various organizations, and the City Watch who make a token effort to show their presence here in the most influential parts of town.
Elegant stone townhouses and fancy salons are the order of the day in Uptown -- there's no industry to be had here, and precious little commerce.
Dockside[edit]
The area around the docks is a the battlegrounds between the Alliance sections of town and the Slums, having much of the character of each. Alliance presence is heavy, taking delivery of shipments of raw materials through the docks and providing the ships with their outbound cargoes of finished goods, and each Alliance controls several well-patrolled warehouses on the docks. Gold Guards, Eagles, and Spiders are all well in evidence.
But ships crews, tavern-workers, prostitutes, and all the other support industries of the shipping industry are generally too small and too variable for the Alliances to control, and so there's a large dose of the less-than-regimented life down at the Dockside as well. Criminal activity -- mostly gangs comprised of dock-workers -- is also high, as is participation in the New Cults. The end result is that one block may look like the dullest section of the Glass Mills, while the next shares the most lively characteristics of the Slums.
