Editing Magipunk:Organizations (section)

= Crime =

Crime is prevalent in the slums of Atathorn, and always has been, but organized crime has no history in the city, and is consequentially in its infancy.  There is no equivalent to a monolothic "Mob" or "Thieves' Guild" in Atathorn -- but there are a hundred gang-bosses with dreams of true power.

The fragmentary nature of criminality in Atathorn means that sweeping statements about organized crime are difficult to make, but a few commonalities stand out.  Because of the inefficiency of the various police forces of Atathorn, protection rackets are ludicrously easy to set up.  The Alliances are, of course, far too powerful to go in for such things, but any business beneath their scale is nearly guaranteed to be paying protection money to at least one, if not many, gangs.  Indeed, many citizens of Atathorn use the protection scheme as a kind of dividing line between truly organized crime, and a bunch of criminals who happen to hang out together.

Because of the very popularity of the protection racket, a surprisingly large number of gangs do, in fact, provide rudimentary protection along with their extortion, though such protection is generally limited to guarding their turf against rival gangs.  However, some significant percentage of the time, if a gang is running a wholely ineffective racket, they will find that their "clients" can find different patrons who are willing to fight for a larger piece of the pie.

Besides protection services, the major sources of moneys for organized crime are prostitution and drugs.  However, while Atathorn technically has laws against both vices, they are so laxly enforced that criminal enterprises run into a great deal of competition from more legitimate vendors in both arenas.  Indeed, the customers of such services often can not tell whether they're purchasing from a gang that also runs protection rackets or from an honest, hard-working dealer.

Counterfeiting schemes -- counterfeiting both currency and power tokens -- had a surge of popularity a few years ago, but the Alliances cracked down hard on such activities, fearing that that sort of economically disruptive crime could be a serious challenge to their own dominance over the city, and now counterfeiting is a fraught, unprofitable crime.

A distressing number of gangs have turned to "death-slavery," or "blood-slavery," as the crime has recently become known.  There is a flourishing and grossly illegal community of necromancers deep in Atathorn's underworld, and they are willing to pay a premium for still-living bodies, whom they kill to provide themselves with both cheaper power than the Church-Mills can give, and undead servants.  Necromancy and death-slavery is one of very few crimes which can still shock the conscience of morally jaded Atathorn, but ever harsher laws have not been able to prevent the slow growth of this practice, and there are persistant rumors that necromancers have influence within every power block in the city, from the Watch to the Alliances to the Royals.

The penalty for killing a person with the intent to draw mana from their body, or for animating the dead, or for aiding or abetting a necromancer, is unceremonious death.

Normal slavery is an unprofitable activity in Atathorn for the most part -- local law forbids slavery, and the trade routes to countries which do allow it are too long to be of great interest to the small gangs which control the slums of the city.

== Examples ==

The following are a few examples of the scores of gangs which populate Atathorn's slums.  (Or, rather, they will be when I get around to writing them).

----

[[Magipunk:Main_Page|Back to Magipunk index]]