Editing Magipunk:Organizations (section)

== The Spinners Alliance ==

=== General ===

Unlike the Glassmakers Alliance and the Roget Alliance, the Spinners were not founded in Atathorn. Rather, they come from the more southern province of Bessia, a largely rural region famed for its textile production.  The provincial capitol of Bessia, Erdestern, lagged only slightly behind Atathorn in changing to adapt to the modern age.

Some forty years ago, a merchant whose trade was bringing fabric from Bessia to Atathorn saw the changes that the Glassmakers and the Rogets were making in Atathorn, and copied that template back in his home province.  A less sophisticated environment allowed the fledgling Spinners Alliance to survive initial misteps, and it rapidly grew to become the dominant force in Bessia.  Now it has turned its organizational attention to the huge markets of Atathorn, and the great city's ports (Bessia is land-locked), and it has turned its massive resources to establishing a foothold in Atathorn.

The Spinners Alliance are very much the newcomers to Atathorn.  Only in the last decade have they had significant interests in the city, and both the Roget Alliance and the Glassmakers Alliance are fighting the Spinners tooth and nail to keep them out.  However, thus far, the Spinners have accomplished fitful growth, to the point where even Atathorn's native two Alliances have to grudgingly agree that the Spinners are here to stay.  Still, they have less than half the market share that the Glassmakers do.

The Spinners are controlled by a complex, shifting oligarchy back in Bessia, but in Atathorn, the entire organization is under the ruthless control of one man: Sir Zustin Estman.  Estman is the son of a tradesman-cum-baron back in Bessia, and is himself primarily a businessman.  He's a workaholic who inspires devotion from his subordinates, and he has thus far prevented significant infighting among the Spinners.  Estman's downfall is that he tries to take too much work for himself, and whenever he doesn't pay personal attention to a portion of the Spinners' business, it tends to founder, as he's not good at finding competent subordinates and allowing them to work in their own ways.

The Spinners are concentrated in the soft-goods businesses, and both lower and upper classes alike often buy groceries and clothing exclusively from the Spinners.  The symbol of the Spinners is a spider on a web of multi-colored thread.

=== The Spiders ===

The small guard force maintained by the Spinners are mostly used to guard caravans and stores, as the Spinners don't have large factories in Atathorn proper.  The Spiders, named for the Spinners insignia, enjoy a reputation of being mildly less brutal than the other Alliance guard forces, but also of being clueless yokels from out in the sticks.  This reputation was better-earned a few years back -- recently, the Spiders have been recruiting more heavily from within Atathorn, with the result of becoming more like the Gold Guard or the Eagles.

The Spiders use a blue tabard enchanted with high-quality (Obsolesence 1 or 2) protective spells and, in the city, clubs with low-quality (Obsolesence 3-4) stun spells.  On the road guarding caravans, still a significant part of the Spiders duty, they tend to use un-enchanted crossbows, and those are available for duty in the city which warrants it.  Unlike other Alliances, the Spinners don't crack down heavily on their enforcers using non-standard weapons, so a minority of Spiders carry personal gear of a non-standard sort -- generally a more deadly backup weapon to offset the ineffective duty clubs.  Spiders carry a single power token each, and are given reasonable leeway for using them.