A network of silt-built platforms and canal-networks controlled by the Tidal Councils. The water never freezes but always smells of copper and regret. Floods occur on a predictable schedule that nobody follows correctly.

Once a military stronghold of the Aureate Dominion, now a half-excavated tomb. The upper ruins are scavenged clean; the lower levels contain the things that killed the original inhabitants, which is to say, things that are still hungry.

A merchant town built into a mountain's exposed vein of crystalline ore. The stone glows faintly at night. Trade here is conducted in ledgers written in disappearing ink; disputes are settled by whoever controls the ledgers.

A honeycomb of caverns famous for its phosphorescent fungi gardens and the echo-songs they produce. The fungal colonies are intelligent (or appear to be). Harvesting them angers them in ways difficult to predict.

A grimy port where merchant ships dock above the skeletal remains of three older harbor cities, now ocean-floor archaeology. The rust never stops accumulating. Smuggling is the primary economy, with legitimate trade as cover story.

A flatland where nothing grows but white grass and the sun cracks stone. Ancient battle monuments mark where various civilizations have slaughtered each other to inconclusion. The ground remembers violence.

A city built as a punishment. Criminals are exiled here with basic supplies and told to establish civilization. Violence, corruption, and entrepreneurial desperation run rampant. The walls keep people in as much as danger out.

Located within Crab-Tooth Ridge, this is where the Cogsworth Consortium builds devices of dubious necessity using ore and magic in unstable combination. Explosions happen with such frequency that disasters have their own filing system.

Puerto costero donde opera la Rust Syndicate. Ubicado a tres calles de los muelles orientales. Olor permanente de sal y herrumbre.

Taberna esquinera ubicada dos calles al este de los muelles de Rust Harbor. Fue destruida durante el enfrentamiento entre Thrain y Captain Voss. Tenía capacidad para aproximadamente 43 clientes.

Sitio de un contrato minero fallido que originó la deuda de tres años entre Thrain y Captain Meredith Voss. Detalles específicos desconocidos.

Merchant oligarchs controlling the Silt Marches through rotating leadership positions and arcane ledger-keeping. They traffic in water rights, information, and occasionally human organs. They believe chaos can be quantified and therefore controlled.

A ghost-faction of aristocrats from before Kethrand's Folly collapsed. They still send expeditions into the ruins believing their lost treasury remains intact. Half-feral, obsessed with genealogy and bloodright, they view commoners as practical resource vectors.

Magitech engineers and alchemists building increasingly lethal devices they describe as 'tools for civilization.' They're wrong about what civilization means. They pay well and ask few questions, which attracts exactly the wrong clientele.

Smugglers, pirates, and salvage operations controlling Rust Harbor's actual economy through violence and theatrical sabotage. They've weaponized bureaucracy as much as cutlasses. Every legitimate merchant pays protection fees disguised as shipping insurance.

An archaeological death-cult obsessed with recovering artifacts from the Boneyard Fields and Kethrand's Folly, believing ancient civilizations possessed knowledge that will resurrect them (literally or spiritually). They're partially correct, which is why they're dangerous.

A criminal-political organization that treats the Prison-Town as both kingdom and laboratory. They conduct social experiments on the population to understand power structures. Results are published in underground journals that read like horror fiction.

Organización criminal/mercante con operaciones en Rust Harbor. Emplea guardaespaldas y mantiene presencia armada en establecimientos locales. Aparentemente involucrada en contratos mineros.

Worship of the Abyss as a sentient entity that remembers everything. Followers believe the Abyss observes humanity through cave systems and deep water. Priests practice ritual forgetting—deliberately destroying records—to prevent the Abyss from learning secrets. They claim this is mercy. The Church operates shrines in every major cave system and maintains neutrality to all factions by threatening to tunnel beneath their holdings.

Religious veneration of the device-state: a belief that reality is fundamentally mechanical and divinity exists in understanding the machinery. Adherents are often engineers and natural philosophers. They view suffering as improper operation requiring calibration. Extremely compatible with the Cogsworth Consortium. They perform rites involving the construction of increasingly complex machines as prayer.

Scattered death-cults worshipping entropy and the eventual heat-death of the world. They believe acceleration toward this end is noble. While not suicidal (yet), they view destruction and decay as spiritual disciplines. They recruit heavily from plague-struck areas and Ashwick Prison-Town. Their theology is internally consistent and terrifying.

Nomadic shamanic tradition that believes sound—particularly songs and the vibrations they produce—maintains structural integrity of reality. They're partially correct. They oppose written language as a violation of sacred sound and thus have no central doctrine. Every Oath-Singer's beliefs are idiosyncratic and subject to change. This flexibility keeps them alive but irrelevant.

Comprise approximately 60% of civilized populations. Extremely adaptable, prone to self-destruction, and absolutely convinced their current ideology is the final truth. They fill every role and often fail spectacularly. Their lifespans make them excellent for quick profits and terrible for long-term planning.

Expert engineers and catastrophically bad decision-makers. Constitutionally incapable of admitting error; instead, they reframe disasters as 'unexpected research findings.' Thrain Splitbeard is representative. They dominate mountain territories and underground trade but infight relentlessly over genealogy and beard-tradition disputes that outsiders cannot distinguish from actual war.

Natural documentarians and historians with compulsive note-taking. They reach adulthood around 40 years old and live to approximately 280, making them perfect for observing civilizational collapse across multiple centuries. Zik Tinkersprocket is atypical only in his willingness to stay with disaster-prone companions. Most gnomes practice scholarly detachment.

Humanoids partially consumed and partially merged with fungal colonies from the Vermillion Galleries. They're not quite alive in traditional sense, sustained by the fungal networks that replaced portions of their biology. Some say they're enlightened; others say they're slowly dying. The distinction matters less than it should. They possess strange collective memory and exist in permanent negotiation with the fungi controlling their bodies.

Humans who underwent magical transformation becoming semi-incorporeal. They don't reproduce and retain individual personalities but exist in a permanent state of philosophical detachment. They're not undead; they're simply absent from normal existence in ways that make them excellent spies and terrible soldiers. The transformation is technically irreversible but most Ascended eventually choose dissolution.

Magic exists as a material substance called Essence, derived from corpses, crystalline ore, fermented emotions, and occasionally songs. Practitioners call themselves Essentists. Magic is transactional—casting requires payment in Essence, and the payment is rarely proportional to the effect. Side effects are guaranteed. Channeling magic through sentient beings (humans, dwarves, etc.) causes psychological fragmentation; instead, mages construct Conduits (external focusing objects) ranging from crude to elaborate. The process is slow, expensive, and frequently fails catastrophically.

Zik Tinkersprocket encountered Thrain Splitbeard seven years ago during the Ashwick Uprising when the dwarf's catastrophic military strategy (attacking a fortified position by digging directly upward into it, causing the fort's collapse but also the death of his entire battalion) created an opportunity for scholarly documentation. Zik, then researching 'Failure Patterns in Mountainous Warfare,' found Thrain's refusal to accept responsibility for the disaster intellectually fascinating. Thrain, meanwhile, viewed Zik's documentation as validation and began viewing the gnome as a 'Official Chronicler of Tactical Innovation.' They've traveled together since, with Zik pursuing increasingly desperate academic grants to fund expeditions that inevitably involve Thrain making a catastrophically self-assured decision that nearly kills them both. Zik documents it all. Thrain remains convinced his strategy was sound and the universe simply operates incorrectly. Their partnership persists through habit, mutual dysfunction, and Zik's inability to abandon research subjects mid-project—even when the subject is actively trying to march them into dangerous situations.

The official economy runs on Copper Marks minted by failed regional governments, creating massive inflation. Real wealth is measured in Essence, salvage permits, water rights, and favors. Every transaction involves two ledgers: one showing what actually happened, one for taxation purposes. Trade caravans move constantly between regions because staying in one place risks total financial collapse. Barter is technically illegal but practically mandatory. A successful transaction requires understanding three overlapping economic systems simultaneously.