Post-Industrial Fantasy - Cardeem and the Hepatic Isles

[O Senhor Leetz]

Well, time to get back on that CBG horse now that my summer has wound to an end.

Cardeem: The malaric, duckweed choked canals. The sweaty, smokey Quistown, adorned with electric lights of blue, red, and yellow, almond-eyed fey dripping through the narrow alleys and stalls. The resplendent, faded glory of St. Horace's Square, walled-in by buzzing cafes serving coffee, gin, quince wine, and Po-Mo™ sodas with street-wizards performing small prestidigitations of fire and sparks. The soggy ghetto of Blacktide, the location of one of the few remaining enclaves of the Gill-Men - the Maramari - where dank gambling and soonsa dens host the best bands south of Portosh and hide the best pick-pockets south of nowhere. From the greed-fueled docks to the red-light hotels of Carnation Street, Cardeem is a city of a thousand faces, forged by a thousand different hands through a thousand different years.

First raised in the early Spear Years by Ugo the Boastful on the marshy mouth of the Mander River, it was built island by island by hand, building the city sea-floor up with dirt, stone, and bones. It quickly came into its own, and, resting on the cusp between the Northlands and the Occident, thrived as a port-of-call for merchants, pirates, smugglers, and slavers. This liquid society also gave all manner of avante guard artists, poets, musicians, and arcanists a relatively safe place to call home. Cardish poets are world-renowned and its gin valued in any bar worth its salt - in fact, the gin was specially designed to mix perfectly with quinine tonic, which, it is said, helps fight of the malaria that plagues the city in the hot, steamy summers.

Later in the nascent years of the Steam Age, the Great Quis Fleet arrived from across the Babbling Sea armed with blackpowder weapons yet unseen in the Northlands, and claimed the city for nearly 200 years before the St. Jasper's Day Uprising dethroned them and threw them back into the sea. But throughout its history, Cardeem has always served as one of the most important ports in the Known World, linking the Occident, the Far South, and the Northlands together through the common sin of greed. Merchants in silken junks hail from Old Quis, cautiously selling fey-jade, charybdic tea, and the parts of animals unknown. Perpetually quarantined barges from the nearby Hepatic Isles bring the exceedingly addictive and incredibly pleasurable soonsa powder along with malaria, vulgar red-rot, and sleeping sickness. The maritime Mozi, misunderstood and nomadic men, haul the corpses and carapaces of sea-beasts with their gaily painted ships into port to be butchered and sold. Emissaries and diplomats from the empires of the Occident bring threats of war and offers of annexation to the as-of-yet independent lords and ladies of the city.

In the most recent years, Cardeem has managed to both adsorb the new - electric lights are common throughout the whole city, telegraph stations are plenty, silent-cinemas flourish, the harbor is choked with all manner of metallic, modern vessels - it has managed to retain a romantic antiquity - there are no railways within the city, automobiles are prohibited due to their weight and the narrow streets, and flighty modern fashion and culture has yet to overtake centuries-old Cardish fiddle and cymbal bands - indeed, the Gallant Gallows are renowned across the Occident and the Northlands as one, if not the, best troupe in the Known World - and the omnipresent black overcoat, colorful, almost garish, Quis-inspired scarves, knee-length britches, and leather sandals that have become the city's signature garb.

Cardeem has a long, if somewhat undervalued, magical tradition. Often glanced over in the histories of the magical by such arcane traditions as the Academies of the Magpie Sea, the Vos-Valan Mystics, and the quasi-monastic magi of Oa, Cardish magic is most often the domain of plaza-bound fire-breathers, lithe fey-dancers, and bacchanalian bards. However, in addition to the common and vulgar magic practiced on the streets and canals of Cardeem, several illustrious organizations and schools exist as well. The diviners of the Three-Fold Eye, descended from an old Quisanese fortune-cult, are highly sought after by anyone looking for advice on the future and answers from the past despite their steady decline in quality and quantity over the last century. The Exoteric Academy of Cardeem is a fairly recent addition. A publicly funded college, the Academy is a fairly progressive institute that not only seeks to reconcile many of the conflicting theories between arcanists and modernists, but seeks to unite them in a theory known as ritualistic modernity. While many Cardish see the Academy as a boon to city, especially considering its low-cost of attendance, it has plenty of detractors within all facets of society.

Cardeem has been called the City of a Thousand Faces and the Manic Lady, but, as one shrewd observer of history once noted, for a city to last so long and in such continuity, the soul beneath the myriad faces must be strong indeed.

The Hepatic Isles: The Isles and soonsa, they exist because of each other. Without soonsa, that delicate, pepper-scented powder so popular in the metropolises of the Northlands and the Occident, the Isles would remain as they have been for nearly all their history - sweltering, vine-covered rocks, sticking out of the milk-blue sea like moss-covered fangs. And without the Isles, soonsa would have remained in the far, dark corners of the Orient. Over the years, several shrewd and most likely strung-out merchants attempted to bring the soonsa plant back to the Northlands and the Occident in hopes of being able to cultivate it. The plant refused to grow anywhere except the Hepatic Isles, perhaps some of the most inhospitable and deadly strings of islands anywhere.

Only one "settlement" exists in the Hepatic Isles, the dingy and dangerous Sad King's Town. A dozen wooden shacks, perched upon pylons and linked by dubious plank-ways and docks, its only purpose is to transfer raw soonsa from isle to vessel and take care of the "needs" of the short-lived plantation workers - most of Sad King's Town consists of bars and brothels. However, there are innumerable small coves and bays that hide smuggling operations intent on avoiding the hefty tax imposed upon the Isles commodity.

Not much of note is readily visible upon any of the thirty-odd isles that make up the close-knit archipelago, but there are some rumors, mostly from plantation workers on the verge of death, wailing in agony as some tropical disease, of archaic and alien ruins deep in the jungles and ferns that hold, as one would expect, great treasure and magics of terrible power.  

[Ghostman]

Not bad. The city would make a nice backdrop for some detective stories.