Flamepunk: Services and Living Costs
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Contents
Overview of Services and Living Costs[edit]
Items and services are divided into type, then presented with the following stat block:
Name of Item/Service[edit]
- Price
- Encumbrance Mobility Penalty
Description.
Special Game Rules:
Accomodation[edit]
Unless they're a survival nuts or outcasts, people live in the cities. The wilderness environment is hazardous partly because of wild beasts and manifested demons, but mostly because of increasingly long winters and the dangers of toxin clouds and acidstorms. Nothing edible grows outside of the carefully cultivated (and well guarded) crop farms, and the safest and best place to be is in the big cities where the Church and the Guild have promised to look after you.
Smaller settlements do exist - such as mining camps and military watchforts - but the dangers of living in such places is great, and such habitats tend to be temporary, kept in place until a job is done, and staffed solely by professionals.
The following properties represent five properties in a typical city, with proce to rent and to own listed separately.
Outskirt Slum[edit]
- Price to Buy: 5 Dragons (to buy raw materials, can just scavenge instead)
- Price to Rent: Not applicable.
The outskirts are where you go when you've dropped out of society and don't have a single gold Lizard to your name. Because the slums lie outside the Protection Perimeter of the city, the Guilds and the Church just aren't interested in your safety and well being. If demons or outlaws attack, the best you can hope for is a response from the local Hadar, but the Hadar are generally more concerned with exploiting you rather than protecting you.
Disease is rife through the Outskirts, as is starvation. The prime motivation of most Outskirters is to get into the city proper. The Guild won't let you sleep on the city streets, so the only way in is to get enough money to buy a city property. The best way to do that? Well that's the hard bit...
Smoketown Shack[edit]
- Price to Buy: 120 Dragons
- Price to Rent: 2 Dragons per week.
Smoketown is the lowest point of the city proper, both economically and topographically. While some light smoke tends to blow out of the city with the wind, a lot of the smoke (especially that from industry and from vehicles) pools towards the bottom of the city. Here it stains everything with its sooty colour, and contaminates everything with its smell.
Where the pollution pools, is Smoketown, and this is where the poor live. The thing is, there's a lot of smoke and there's a lot of poor, so generally Smoketown makes up the largest parts of most cities. In fact, in most cities, Smoketown encompasses the majority of markets, of industrial complexes, of residential zones and of services. Many people will live and die in the smoke, and will never want to (or be able to afford to) leave.
It's not much, but it's yours.
Hillside House[edit]
- Price to Buy: 8000 to 20,000 Dragons
- Price to Rent: 16 to 40 Dragons per week.
If you have a decent job (and we're talking upper echelons here, not the factory floor worker) you might be able to afford a place on the Hillside. The Hillside is up out of the pooling smoke, so naturally the land prices are higher and the people are richer. Its a nice neighbourhood, and Guild-employed security forces make sure it stays that way.
Nobody really works in Hillside - they either move upstream or downstream when they commute to work - but its a decent place to live, where children can grow up without having to join a gang, and where the Hadar don't knock on your door unless you've invited them to a meet-the-neighbours barbecue.
Life is good, if you have a little money.
Spire Apartment[edit]
- Price to Buy: 8000 to 20,000 Dragons
- Price to Rent: 16 to 40 Dragons per week.
A Spire is a massive single-building habitat, constructed through a combination of industrial engineering, arcane science and slogwork from mulebloods and golems. Spires aren't found in every city, but the largest cities may house as many as a dozen of them. A spire can be anything from a dozen to several hundred stories tall, and tends to dominate the landscape around it.
Living in a Spire Apartment is considerably more cramped that a Hillside house, despite similar rental and purchase prices, but offers a lot more security against the outside world. Indeed, many Spires are closed communities, avoiding interaction with the rest of the city.
As always, levels of wealth vary in the Spire, with penthouse suites on a comparable cost to Skypalace Suites, and low levels affordable for fairly low level workers. There are no poor people in a Spire though - to keep crime and social problems down, a Spire will simply eject any who have the bad luck to become destitute, and not let them in again till they can meet rent.
Skypalace Suite[edit]
- Price to Buy: 60,000 to 200,000 Dragons
- Price to Rent: 120 to 400 Dragons per week.
Skypalaces are a rarity - there are at present only three of them in the sky at present, with two belonging to Guild Conglomerates, and the other being the Holy City of the Church of Flame. A Skypalace is nothing less than a flying city, often with a population in excess of three or four thousand, all living in roomy luxurious sky-suites, and all far above the cares of the grounded world below.
Few of the larger breeds of demons fly, and few outlaws can afford to get skybound, so Skypalaces tend to be amongst the safest places to live in the world. They can even travel from place to place, albeit no faster than a horse's canter, so will tend to be in the most pleasant locations.
For the most part, the Skypalaces spend their time over major cities, usually spending two to three years in one location at a time. Their sheer size means that they will often block out what little sunlight there is, but the Skypalace directors are usually considerate enough to cast their shadow over Smoketown rather than the Hills or Spires.
Skypalace Manor[edit]
- Price to Buy: 8,000,000 to 30,000,000 Dragons
- Price to Rent: Not Applicable.
For the sickeningly rich only, each Skypalace will have a small number Skypalace Manors (usually one to three, never more than six). These Manors are luxury villas taking up large swathes of skybound real estate, and to live in one is a sure sign that you are one of the movers and shakers in the world.
Dream on, Burner, dream on...
Food and Water[edit]
Food and water is cheap, as long as you don't mind the taste. Quality food and water, on the other hand, is extremely expensive and a luxury that only the most privelged in society can afford.
Nutrient Broth[edit]
- Price: 1 Dragon per five days of food.
Nutrient broth is made of a stew of organic matter - mostly rehydrated and mashed flamecap stalks, but also reclaimed and (hopefully) decontaminated organic waste material. It is as much industrial run-off as it is actual food, but it is the main foodstuff of the masses.
The Guild markets nutrient broth under a variety of attractive tradenames, such as "Vitality Soup", "Dragon Stew" and "Subsub", flavouring and colouring and spicing the stuff to make it more attractive, or sometimes reprocessing and repackaging as curds, wheys or milks. There's no disguising the truth of the matter though - you can live off it, but it tastes like shit.
In the long term, those who subsist off just Nutrient Broth are likely to develop calcium and vitamin deficiencies, but most of the poor don't have the life expectancy for this to show beyond bad skin and yellow teeth.
Grain products and Vegetables[edit]
- Price: 1 Dragon per day of food.
The next level up is rice, bread, root vegetables and the occasional green. The "upper lower class" will make a point of serving up vegetables when they are trying to show off, and trying to splash out on vegetables at least once a week.
This makes a big difference to health, reducing depression if nothing else.
Anymeat[edit]
- Price: 1 Dragon per mealsworth.
Anymeat is so named because it could be any meat in there. You can make out the strings of flesh and the bones, but don't ask the butcher where he got it from, because he won't be inclined to tell you. Mostly it's rats, the meatier bits of roaches, any unfortunate street animal that's too slow to get away, frogs, and if you're really really lucky - bird.
Nonetheless, its not bad for you, and it tastes good if you don't think too hard about it. Eat your anymeat, and you'll grow up big and strong.
Meat and other delicacies[edit]
- Price: 5+ Dragons per mealsworth.
Then you have the foodstuffs of the rich, which are precious for their rarity and for the fact that you know exactly what is on your plate. Beef, mutton and pork all fall into this category, as do the occasional luxuries such as cakes and desserts. There is actually an entire Guild that specialises in high cuisine, though 99% of the population will never encounter their work. The finest culinary creations can fetch upwards of 1000 Dragons per meal - a sum of money that an ordinary farm worker could live off for a lifetime.
Fuel[edit]
The driving force behind world society is elemental fire, and this elemental fire comes in many forms. For example, Pyros is pure soul-flame, found in all living things and Pyroephemera is the stuff of Flamespace, without any solidity or substance save for pure heat if taken out of its native environment.
For vehicles and machinery a different sort of fire is is needed. Industrial Pyros, or Animapyros is a bright clear-burning blue flame that can be used to turn wheels with kinetic force, drive pistons or even raise airships into the sky. Animapyros is inherently transient though, burning for only a few seconds before it extinguishes, albeit with a great intensity of energy release that makes it the only flame of choice for industrial purposes.
To utilise Animapyros it is therefore necessary to generate it on demand. Happily this is easily achieved, by igniting one of the four fuel substances.
Note that a "jar" of fuel is a cylindrical metal cannister approximately one and a half feet in length, with a diameter of about six inches.
Crystalline Pyros Fuel / Stonefuel[edit]
- Price: 5 Dragons per jar.
- Encumbrance: 1 per jar. Mobility penalty: 1 per 3 jars.
- Industrial Pyros generation: 1 per jar
Stonefuel accounts for about 40% of society's fuel supply, and is characterised by a slow burn (one jar lasting an hour when burned in an oil lamp) and a relatively low energy output. It is thick, black and viscous, with a tendency to stain materials and to stick to the skin. Stonefuel is often used for powering lamps and heating devices, but tends to be too low-grade to work as vehicular fuel.
Stonefuel is mined from the many shaft mines around the countryside, as well as from quarries where seams are nearer the surface. Mining is backbreaking work, but provides steady income for a good portion of the peasant population. The stonefuel itself is normally found in the form of large black crystals, but these need to be refined and reduced before being usable.
Mycotic Pyros Fuel / Harvestfuel[edit]
- Price: 7 Dragons per jar.
- Encumbrance: 1 per jar. Mobility penalty: 1 per 3 jars.
- Industrial Pyros generation: 3 per jar
Harvestfuel accounts for about 30% of society's fuel supply, is a clear yellow in appearance, and burns faster and hotter than Stonefuel. Harvestfuel is usually used for powering simple vehicles and industrial machinery. It lacks the refinement and potency, however, to be used for high performance vehicles or for airship motors.
Harvestfuel is refined from the cap and hood of a particular mushroom called the "Flamecap". Flamecap plantations stretch across large swathes of countryside, and happily need to seem little in the way of nurturing save for damp conditions and a little residual heat. Flamecap grows faster with more heat, however, so more and large scale intensive farms often use arcane flameglobes to warm the crop. Flamecap is the most grown crop in most nations of the world, ahead even of rice and wheat.
Sanguine Pyros Fuel / Bloodfuel[edit]
- Price: 21 Dragons per jar.
- Encumbrance: 1 per jar. Mobility penalty: 1 per 3 jars.
- Industrial Pyros generation: 10 per jar
Bloodfuel is the highest quality fuel, refined from the remains of manifested daemons and elementals. It tends to be produced in small-scale summoning laboratories, where elementals can be summoned, summarily slain, and then reduced to their base matter. As its name suggest bloodfuel is a slick crimson fluid, akin to true blood in appearance save that it does not clot.
High performance and military vehicles usually utilise bloodfuel, and such is the speed of the fuel's burn that bloodfuel consumption accounts for 20% of the world's total fuel consumption, despite the fact that it is so much more expensive, and used by only a small percentage of the population.
Corporeal Pyros Fuel / Wastefuel[edit]
- Price: 4 Dragons per jar.
- Encumbrance: 1 per jar. Mobility penalty: 1 per 3 jars.
- Industrial Pyros generation: 1 per jar
Wastefuel is the lowest quality fuel, and is made by releasing the inherent residual pyros in the body of dead animals and humans. Church Crematoriums produce the largest proportion of wastefuel supply, though sometimes inedible or diseased animals will also be reduced.
Wastefuel is as good as Stonefuel for most purposes, and accounts for 20% of the global fuel consumption. Its drawback is mostly cosmetic - the fuel is brown, and smells like old meat, and burns with thick clouds of pungent smoke. For the poor, of course, these are discomforts that must be tolerated for the sake of fuel price savings.
