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talenlee · 12 days ago

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The Widening Gyre (Blades in the Dark Setting)

I’ve been running a Blades in the Dark game for about a year. But I didn’t want to run it in London and I instead wanted to talk about Australia and our Victorian history and things that were closer to my bones. To aid that, I made up a world.

Below the fold is twelve thousand plus words of me talking about a made up fantasy country modelled on Australia’s history for playing in Blades in the Dark. It has no mechanical information, just world information, and discusses ways to regard factions and history.

I cannot make it clear enough that below this fold there is a very large post and you may not find it interesting.

Ready?

Okay.

Introduction

The World and Peoples of Gyre

Forms of Factions

Districts of Gyre

There’s More

The History of Gyre, Told in Eight Governors

Faiths and Magic: The Miasma and the Sea

Cops Are A Ladder

Appenhelm

Centrum Tertiary

Copperquay

Districts Three (aka the Splay)

Eltham

Hundenrum Pass (aka The Hound’s Cradle)

Locke’s Quay

South Rocaphen (aka Rocaphen)

St Biscuiton’s Provided (aka The Cannery)

The Chantry

The Majestic

The Westery (aka The Westery)

Westcrook Abbeys

Wickstand

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Landmarks

Gangs And Factions

Introduction

The Widening Gyre is a Blades in the Dark campaign setting. Players take on familiar gang archetypes, but rather than scraping by in a city of perpetual night — modelled on a fantastical, British-inflected metropolis — Gyre casts them adrift at the edge of an empire that knows only how to extract.

Inspired by Australian history and shaped by perspectives from the global south, Gyre explores what it means to be both beneficiary and victim of empire. Built with convict labour, slave labour, and corporate abuse, the city stands atop crimes too vast for names, held in uneasy stasis by a community told the past is settled — because the guns have stopped firing.

The empire of Pentaragon doesn’t rule with grace. It flattens Gyre to fit its vision, wielding politeness like a cudgel and civility as camouflage. Cruelty here comes wrapped in softness — layered in etiquette, ritual, and red tape. The city teems with feuding powers, each ready to step over bodies to reach their version of order.

Gyre is a city where you can buy Ghost Insurance, but never a house. It shears the world’s wool, but shirts arrive by steamer. It boasts about ending slavery — and wants you to never mind the truth of how it ended, history deafened by the thunder of a warship to make it happen.

The World and Peoples of Gyre

This is a brief guide to the major nations that relate to Gyre, and the terms used for cultural backgrounds player characters can have.

Gyre is a coastal city-state clinging to the southern edge of Gyresend — called Djoddurra by its first peoples — the largest island in the Rustgold Archipelago, astride the Rusted Sea. Founded during the Grand Expanse, when Pentaragon carved its colonies from stolen shores, Gyre now churns out steel, wool, crops, and food for the empire’s hungry heart. In return, it imports machines, weapons, garments and almost anything that can be made out of those raw materials they export. There’s no consensus demonym for its people, since the island considers itself an extension of Actotum, though locals may be called Gyreish, and those born with uncanny, animistic traits are simply Bushweird.

Actotum, capital of the Pentaragon Empire, looms far to the north on Eidolon — a soot-stained island of gaslight trams, whale-oil engines, and architectural bravado. Its king sits on a throne of gold in a palace of platinum and has never even seen a poor person, his towers built high enough to never have to look down at the smog settled over the city. Actotum is the empire made manifest: machines thrum, proprietry is used to punish, and all the bread is made with the grinding of bones.

The island of Eidolon itself is a patchwork of nations under imperial thumb. Bannockburn to the north mines coal and drinks deep. Skellig lies west across the land-bridge, its stolen farmland the empire’s cradle. Tryk, a once-revered island of whale shamans, had its culture extinguished and its language extinguished in all but the most niche families. Deepclover, to the southwest, is starved by design to keep its hands cheap. Together they are Eideal, or Donners in the streets — but most prefer their roots: Bannair, Skellig, Thrun, or Meillion.

South of the empire’s gaze sprawls Muthira, a vast and varied continent, cosmopolitan and windswept, where horses carry more than people — they carry stories. Once the empire traded with coastal people for slaves, Muthira remains marked by chains, even after Emancipation. In Gyre, its people of a thousand different histories are all lumped together and called Muthirans, or Freesouls, among ruder terms.

Across the sea lie the Golden Colonies of Columbia — ten provinces masquerading as one, now risen in war over an empire’s broken promise to end slavery. Columbia claims it wants independence, but its hunger is familiar: it wants to keep its slaves, and has spent sixty years fighting the legal requirements of Emancipation until it all came to a head in this current war. After all, why should they not enjoy the same advantages as the Pentaragon empire? The steel and ships of Gyre now feed this fire. Columbians, to their enemies, are simply Rebellists.

Farther north sits Igutorsh, a frozen span once tapped for haunted whale-blood — before Gyre’s rise made it obsolete. Now, its peoples, the Torshic (or Tuskers, whispered low), draw inwards, and they are not a friendly land to the Pentaragon empire. If you see them in Gyre, they are a long way from home.

To the south lies the continent known dismissively as the Warring States — a fractured theatre of noble houses, shifting alliances, and rewritten histories. From Gyre, it barely registers. Yet every Stater (or Tawny, if you’re feeling rude) swears their land is the cradle of civilisation, and expects you to agree.

The Borsippan Provinces are the empire’s largest and most populous holding — dwarfing even Columbia and Gyre. Sprawled across the Cyrusic region, which claims more than half the world’s people, Borsippa is rich in silk, spice, and human resources that the Empire doesn’t care about too much if they can’t extract money from them. Imperial control here is tenuous at best; distance and diversity make for brittle chains. It was Borsippa’s weight that helped force the Emancipation — the empire, faced with a slave uprising in Gyre, risked wider revolt in Borsippa if it crushed the unrest, and gambled on peace instead. People from the Cyrusic world often carry regional names ending in -desh, though few make their way to Gyre’s docks.

Scattered across the empire are the Aleyn, a stateless diaspora driven from the Cyrusic lands by an ancient cataclysm. Most outside the Aleyn know very little about them, and what they know is usually told from the church, which speaks of them as the original people that opened the Three Gates that God keeps closed. Their presence is often misunderstood, and too often unwelcome.

Finally, the Xalawa are the first people of Djoddurra. Their name, meaning Tallship People, marks those whose ancestors stood on the soil when the empire’s ships arrived — and the slaughter began. Generations of erasure have left their cultures fractured but not broken. Storytelling, lineage, and memory bind them, and many local names come from their tongue. It’s also from them the word migulu comes: sometimes translated as “soulless,” sometimes “those white folk,” always spoken with purpose.

The History of Gyre, Told in Eight Governors

Jac “Dancer” Dampiere — The Pirate Who Dreamed

Before Gyre was a colony, it was a crossroads — and Jac Dampiere was its first self-styled governor. A biracial pirate, Dampiere helped found a port in the remote island, not with imperial mandate but with charisma and cunning, even forming an alliance with the Xalawa natives of the island. He built a trade network that thrived on freedom and fluid loyalties, a system too wild for the empire’s taste. Eventually the time came to make the Eidolon holdout a proper colony, and Dampiere was graduated from pirate to explorer, offered either a noble title, or a dance at the end of a rope.

When the decision came to turn Gyre into a slave colony, Dampiere was diminished in history. It is only recently that Dampiere has been represented in art of the governors, to try and resuscitate the history of the founding.

Ront Eltham — Oppressions’ Architect

Where Dampiere saw opportunity, Ront Eltham saw order. The empire’s first “proper” governor, Eltham arrived with chains and blueprints. He built the prisons, the mines, the labor camps — the machinery of colonial exploitation. A man of conviction and cruelty, Eltham believed he was civilizing the land. He died in office, proud of the scars he left behind. His name now adorns the richest district in Gyre, a bitter irony for those who remember the cost.

Fedder Oisin — The Silent Lash

Oisin followed Eltham, but left no monuments. A forgettable figure, remembered only for the lash he carried and the silence he enforced. His rule was a pause — a breath held between tyrannies — and history barely bothers to speak his name. He’s particularly noteworthy for having done very little writing of his own, where most governors left volumes of text behind in the form of letters and minutes to meetings. Traditionally it’s held that Oisin’s rule is when the first slavetaker business and prison guards were formed into police stations.

Willy Harcourt — The Sinking Captain

Harcourt was a naval man, rewarded with governorship as if Gyre were just another ship to command. He believed discipline and hierarchy would tame the city. But Gyre is no vessel — it leaks, it resists, it mutinies. Harcourt failed to break the unions, failed to impose order, and failed to understand the land he ruled. His tenure is remembered as a slow-motion wreck. Particularly, many of the union battles happened under Harcourt.

Gris Huntrum — The Finest Tyrant

Born in Pentaragon but raised in Gyre, Huntrum was the first governor with local roots. He understood the city’s rhythms — and used them to consolidate power. He transformed the Governor’s Estate into the Majestic, a fortress of opulence and control. But his legacy was not built to last; the laws he built to control the union pushed them to work together, the plantations he established to enrich his people helped foment revolution, and even the Majestic was shelled during the Copperpalm Uprising to need rebuilding. Huntrum’s rule was a turning point — the moment Gyre’s elite began to look inward, and downward, with fear. Huntrum was renowned for increasing and conslidating police power to try and prevent slave uprisings and the growing cooperation with the slaves and Xalawa natives.

Lote Knight — The Catalyst of Rebellion

Lote Knight was a man of failures, a storied career full of new positions, new opportunities, and absolutely disastrous failures at each one: he was a failed explorer, a failed colonial administrator, and a failed suppressor of rebellion. His exploration expeditions found islands that were already discovered. His first colonial settlement mutinied against him and sent him back to Actotum in his personal schooner. Then, he was sent to Gyre. Within eighteen months, he ignited the Copperpalm Uprising — a two-year period of local rule where the former slaves of the Plantations took the Majestic as their own fortress. Knight was sent out of Gyre on a mail boat, and once in Actotum, was promoted sideways into a naval command, and eventually fought in the defense of Columbia, before being convinced to join the Columbian side, followed by a traitor’s hanging.

While most Governors’ first names are regarded well, it’s worth noting you’ll probably never meet someone named Lote in Gyre.

Vittner Paul — The Iron Return

Then came Vittner Paul. Sent from Actotum with the full force of the navy, Paul arrived with carrots and sticks. On the one hand, he came with lawyers and bankers to do full legal recognition and infusion of cash and contracts for the colony, and the full legal rule of Emancipation. He came with the permission and resources to establish a mint, a central bank, social infrastructure, regulations and the redistribution of land and resources to freed slaves. He also brought these things at the helm of a destroyer that shelled the city, so thoroughly that several parts of the city still have buried unexploded shells in them. This is known as the Reconsolidation or the Restructuring.

The rich hate Paul for destroying enormous amounts of wealth; he freed slaves, he gave unions freedom to meet and permission to negotiate, and required convict labor teams be paid. He instituted huge public works projects, including plumbing and sewage, and even built flop areas. Plantations were handed over wholesale to the slaves that had built them, and even the largest and most valuable one was given to its community wholesale and even given freedom to be its own police district, which is now the Westery. The poor hate him because again, he shelled everything, and many of his public works projects were about destroying the power of unions to provide the same services.

A bureaucrat with a boot, Paul is remembered as a bastard’s bastard — efficient, brutal, and universally despised. He rebuilt the Majestic, rewrote the laws, and rewrote his own history.

Killdeer Maquisdeux — The Steward of Decline

Now, Gyre is ruled by Killdeer Maquisdeux. Rhetorically, he positions himself as the gentle hand to steady a tumultuous land during a difficult time. Actually, Maquisdeux governs not to build, but to manage what he sees as the slow decay of empire. With the Columbian colony falling and the Cyrusics growing discontented with the Actotum rule, he sees the Empire as slowly crumbling, and therefore this city is a sinking ship. Unable to abandon it, he instead intends to spend as much time in the dining hall enjoying himself as possible. The man is invested in the hedonism that is deeply aware that the end is not a question of if, but when. As long as he can balance the books and pay for the demands of Actotum, the only project he cares much for is the ongoing indulgence of his hobbies and tastes.

Faiths and Magic: The Miasma and the Sea

The dominant faith across Gyre and much of the empire is the Church of the Three Gates—a devout, doctrinal reshaping of older Aleyn beliefs. It teaches that all unnatural forces in the world—magic, madness, unreason—emerge from a corruptive veil known as The Miasma. Miasma is a catch-all: a name given to anything that doesn’t fit tidy imperial logic. Visions, hauntings, inexplicable luck, or bodies that change shape—Miasma all. The Church claims to contain it. The ghosts that people Gyre? While the Church recognises that spirits are real, any spirit that lasts more than a few moments is clearly an impression in the Miasma of the dead person, and should be dealt with quickly.

To that end, the Church fields Medicants, robed administrators who “manage contagion” wherever Miasma is suspected. In practice, this means targeting medicine-makers, spirit-workers, and shamans—especially those tied to Xalawa and other indigenous traditions. Containment can mean quarantine. It can also mean napalm. Purgigants, great flamethrowers carried in brass and iron tanks strapped to the back of the Medicants, are sometimes used to burn out “sites of contamination,” whether they be shrines or whole homes.

Where faith fractures, cults bloom. Some are just zealots who turn Church dogma into purge and prophecy. Others reinterpret the Three Gates entirely—remaking it with different saints, symbols, and sins. Still others reject the Church outright and tap into stranger dreams, older gods, and powers the empire never catalogued.

Magic in Gyre isn’t an abstract system of rules—it’s something the world does when no one’s looking. It reveals itself in four distinct ways:

Sea magic wells up from the Rusted Sea and swims in nightmares. It births mutant, leviathanic demon-whales—creatures of muscle, voidlight, and unrelenting hate. Not unknowable, like something Lovecraft might conjure—just furious. An elemental spite given form.

Soil magic is the domain of the Xalawa, bound to land, body, and tradition. It grows through ritual, shapeshifting, healing, and sympathetic bonds. It is quiet, persistent, and deeply rooted—even after generations of assault. Since people are superstitious about the Xalawa’s ability to do these things, they hide their craft from everyone.

Stone magic lies buried beneath the city and seabed: ancient, cryptic, and hungry. This is the magic of long-dead civilisations or things that were never alive in the first place. It obeys no pattern and speaks in accidents—gravity failing in one room, or shadows moving on their own. Stone magic ritualists often know only one great thing, and that secret breaks them.

Church magic denies it is magic at all. It cloaks itself in reason, logic, and light. It operates quietly—chance bending just so, a bureaucrat spared by unexplainable luck, an addict suddenly clean. It abhors spectacle. If anything strange happens, it claims it didn’t. Many of its practitioners don’t think there’s any magic to it at all – just miracles given to those who trust in what holds the three gates closed.

Then, of course, there’s the category of the Bushweird. People in Gyre, who were born in Gyre, have a chance of being born with some animalian traits, like the ears or eyes of an animal as part of their body. Bushweird are common and vary in their degree of obviousness – but it’s pretty obvious that the northern suburbs, with the rich estates and police presence, have no Bushweird presence, and even more animalistic Bushweird wind up driven out of the city.

Gyre as Land of Stolen Labour

Gyre began as a prison colony. The first to arrive were the convicted and their guards: labourers and executioners both. While prisoners broke rock and built roads, their overseers waged the first campaigns of genocide against the Xalawa people. When the Pentagon Trading Company formalised the colony’s economy, Muthiran captives were imported in chains—slaves for the empire’s farms and fields. Together, the enslaved and imprisoned drove Gyre’s early growth.

Over time, prisoners (primarily from Actotum, and therefore, often white people with backgrounds in industries before their deporting) forged unions and dominated mining and construction. Meanwhile, enslaved labour fed the boom of agriculture—especially in the fertile band now called the Balm. But as the enslaved population grew, it became a political liability. Sixty years ago, there came two incidents in Gyre, close together; the Copperpalm Rebellion or Revolution, and then the reconquering of the city by the Empire, known as the Reclamation.

The Reclamation came with a new edict, the outlawing of slavery in an incident known as the Emancipation. Gyre’s population surged by a quarter overnight. One in four citizens had been enslaved the day before and that was just in the city – many, many more slaves lived out in the surrounding islands and on plantations. Emancipation reshaped the city’s fabric—and ruptured the empire’s. Freedmen’s rights bred fury. Exploiters fought back. Without slave labour to drive industry, the rules around convict labour were tightened and suddenly, many free souls were conscripted in labor gangs.

Even that was just a temporary solution in Gyre; across the sea, in Columbia, the colony initially delayed Emancipation, then eventually rose to reject it wholesale. That situation has grown into outright war, all while in Gyre economic disparity has grown worse and worse. The dream of freedom has curdled: five percent own ninety-five percent, most Freesouls have no wealth at all, and mobility is a rumour.

Gyre is far from the frontlines of Columbia, but its drydocks ring with hammer and flame, forging ships for a war it didn’t choose.

This is the now—an age of imperial retreat, tightening fists, and doors that only open from the outside.

Forms of Factions

Before delving into the factions and districts of Gyre, it’s important to understand that factions in Gyre serve different ends rather than just being ‘gangs.’

Gangs in a Gyre campaign are not simply generic blocks of criminals that intersect with one another. Rather, the nature of crime in Gyre is one where a criminal gang is seen as a form of surrogate government; they do something to consolidate power, they offer their territory something that the overarching ‘legitimate’ authority doesn’t.

That is there are Gangs, who are trying to maintain territory and control through any means, legal or not, there are Unions, who are trying to maintain territory and control through legal means (and maybe a little illegal means), and then there are Institutions, that do not have to care about the law. Finally, there are also Cults, which follow similar methods to gangs, but do not necessarily care about having access to power and control; their power and control is instrumental to some other end.

All police forces are Institutions. Institutions are powerful and ponderous. You can’t kill an institution by killing its members; anyone who dies in the institution will be replaced and they take killing very seriously. The Royal Guard are also an institution, as a kind of police force that can go anywhere in the city, and the Navy, while centered in Locke’s Quay are also an institutions.

It’s very hard to improve your reputation with institutions. They do not have pity or personality and are large enough that any individual friend you have in them cannot exert meaningful power over the whole. No amount of goodness from one good cop can ever make the cops as a group stop beating up people they think are making too much of a fuss. Similarly, if the Navy wants you arrested, you can’t do favours for them until they forget about it.

By default, you cannot increase your reputation with Institutions. You can only be forgotten about them, when the gang’s wanted level decreases.

Then there are Unions. Unions are much like gangs, and indeed, interface with gangs, but can have conflicting wants with gangs. By default, unions want businesses and industry to keep functioning, even if those industries are bad. The Wellhawks of Rocaphen are working class, anti-police, and fought to ensure that people have freedom to move without police detainment on the way to work. They also want to privatise the water towers, because that was where their power originally stemmed. Similarly, a union whose industry dries up can be left with a body of loyal people who have nothing to do. The Zookeepers started out as the Mancatcher Union and now they’re a racist street gang.

Still, what unions offer gangs is stability. A gang has a hard time handling as many companies or institutional wealth or power by comparison to unions. A good example is the Roasters, who serve as a union of coffee shop owners in the Hound’s Cradle, but who almost exclusively deal with other gangs, using the Beasts of Gevaudan for enforcement and using their transport connections to help move goods for the other gangs in the area. If you can do business, and you’re not bad for business, unions are very powerful friends. They can even make great patrons. Another example of a symbiotic gang-union relationship is the lumber union in the Splay, who are pretty tightly connected to the Chettes gang in Wickstand. The meeting hall for the union is far away from where any cops care to act, so Chettes can use it for meetings and storage, but the lack of business in the Splay for them means that they don’t stay there. Similarly, the Union’s official status means that it’s easy for Chettes to lean on them for legal protection against Institutions like police.

Finally, there are Cults. Cults exist in a space that’s not-quite-a-gang but not-quite-legal; they don’t want attention from Institutions and have inscrutable wants and needs, but they very much can’t treat the systems of power the same way a Union can. Even the Cults that are part of the church can’t necessarily rely on the power of the church. Cults need to be sneaky and extremely driven by connections: You may know a cult because of a person in it, not because of the way they fly their gang colours.

These faction types are all non-overlapping. You can be a Naval officer who’s secretly a member of a gang and also in a cult, but who has a strong tie to the union he used to be in. These are all possible relationships. Just they all put demands on you. Most of them are treated in layers of legitimacy, too; Institutions are more respectable than Unions, which are more respectable than Gangs, which are more respectable than Cults.

Cops Are A Ladder

The nature of policing in Gyre is descending authority. That is to say, there is a pretty reasonable sequence authority from location to location. If you do something in Wickstand, then head to Locke’s Quay and lay low for a little while, the police in Locke’s Quay don’t answer to the police in Wickstand.

There are exceptions; almost nothing can make the police of the Hound’s Cradle do anything. The Splay doesn’t really have its own police, which means that seeing any of the three connected districts acting means someone above them started it.

Broadly, it works out such that districts can make demands of the police beneath them in this kind of structure:

ElthamCopperquayThe ChantryWestcrook AbbeysSouth RocaphenLocke’s QuayWickstandAppenhelm

The Cannery, the Westery, the Centrum Tertiary and the Hound’s Cradle are somewhat special cases.

The Cannery is a private business residence and therefore asserts that no police authority holds within the district. They instead rely on Gripp & Pipe Human Resource Management, and they deliver subjects to the police. They just as much try to disappear police investigating in the Cannery.

The Westery has one police officer, Clem, and she is a detective who engages in community policing. She no doubt receives requests from neighbouring district police, and promptly loses them in her bungalow.

The Centrum Tertiary’s police force only have authority on trains and in the station, but that leaves large parts of the district that are technically the authority of someone else, usually Wickstand.

The Hound’s Cradle police force is so well-financed by the nobility and so functionally powerless that their only job is losing information that would embarrass rich clients of the businesses in the Cradle.

The Royal Guard serve as the cross-district police force, as free agents, and can throw their weight around freely. They are non-districted, and tend to form small strike forces to investigate specific problems. Killing them will only yield an institutional response.

Districts of Gyre

Gyre is divided into two major regions, with a river running between them. The northern half of the City is divided into Eltham Font, Copperquay, The Chantry and the Majestic, with the southern, poorer districts comprising Westcrook Abbeys, Wickstand, South Rocaphen, St Biscuiton’s Provided aka the Cannery, Districts Three aka the Splay, Locke’s Quay, Appenhelm, the Centrum Tertiary, Hundenrum Pass, and The Westery.

Appenhelm

Appenhelm is the closest suburb to the Doldridge prison and functions as its effective dumping ground. It’s where fresh convicts are disembarked, then discharged convicts end up — a place of marginalization, survival, and quiet desperation. The district is defined by its proximity to the prison-industrial complex and the social decay that trails behind it.

Landmarks

Appenhelm Station — The station and post office, and technically part of the prison administration, Appenhelm Station is the one large, well-decorated and protected building in the district. The decoration is all on one side, where the back is covered with graffiti.

Bilge Market — The worst and lowest fence of the city. Bilge Market is the most unregulated place to trade in the city, and it’s full of con artists and scheisters. On the other hand it is how you can get things into the prison and how you can get things out of the prison. It’s nasty and brutish and it’s foul, and it sinks. Despite being atop a hill that can see the Cannery, the common line is that ‘Bilge is downhill from the cannery,’ because of the smell and the way stolen goods end up there.

Churn Lane — The prison does mining and industrial work, mostly some forms of refining for ransport. The waste from that is then brought it to the shore via the convict train and vented into a ever-burning pit in the mainland, around which has been built the horrible stone and wood street Churn Lane. Convicts scrape and fish the industrial waste for precious goods or sellable materials.

Forks Teeth — A jagged outcrop of stone on the edge of town. It’s a landmark in the classic sense – people know about it and use it to orient themselves and meet up.

Harrow’s Barrow — A grounded barge from the Stonehook days, Harrow’s Barrow has been pulled up on shore and is the closest thing Appenhelm has to a gaming/pleasure district. You have to walk down a long winding path to Harrow’s Barrow, and the path being uneven is seen as a good way to keep drunk convicts in the Barrow gambling and spending the little money they have.

Stonehook Crossing — Before the Doldridge had a train station and bridge, prisoners were transferred to the prison (at the time just a mining labor camp) by boats. Stonehook is the last remnant of the huge transport dock, designed to marshall and funnel convicts to it. Over the decades its dilapidation has led to steady dismantling of all the buildings and structures on the dock. There’s a joke that the cons steal even the nails as they take Stonehook apart, piece by piece.

The Brinehouse — Secondary processing for the prison’s industrial goods. Brinehouse is a place cons can get some work, but there’s no meaningful protections and it involves handling and breathing a lot of nasty materials. The fear is if you fall into the vats at the Brinehouse they’ll never even know you died. Still, if you can handle bricks of metal coated with a powder that burns your lungs for a few dollars a week, it’s work that you can do.

The Last Resort — A barely-standing church built from scrap metal and whale vertebrae, where the outcasts of Appenhelm seek solace. It’s not a cult, per se, but it’s hardly orthodox to the Three Gates. Its ex-convict priest, a long tripper, has lost his eyesight and now preaches about redemption, survival, and the cruelty of the world beyond the Doldridge, which takes the form of familiar church lessons, but definitely don’t come directly from the sciptures. The hope he has to offer is small but he takes it seriously.

Gangs And Factions

Appenhelm Constabulary – Former prison guards turned local enforcers. They treat everyone like a convict and lack the numbers to project real power. Very obsequious to even just the basic middle class and beholden to larger gangs that use Appenhelm for staging grounds.

Deepest Eye – A doomsday cult driven by whispers from beneath the Doldridge. They believe in omnicide and seek to spread a plague. Haven’t found a plague suited to the purpose yet, but they’re trying.

‘Apless – Pronounced “hapless,” this gang is the prison’s shadow network, focused on smuggling and influence both inside and outside the walls. There’s a lot of them, but they aren’t very well connected – ‘Apless don’t tend to come to each other’s aid outside.

Barbery – A protection racket that controls corners and extorts locals. Sometimes confused with the Auntie Jacks, since they both evoke barbers, but the Barbery are just goons with knives.

Long Trippers – Ex-prisoners who believe they’re just passing through. They run scams involving transport, mail fraud, and navy impersonation. You can usually tell a Long Tripper because they aggressively resist local slang and accents, and since they’re all born outside of Gyre, there aren’t any Bushweird in the gang.

Centrum Tertiary

Centrum Tertiary is the railyard heart of Gyre — a district that officially has no residences, yet teems with life. It is a legal grey zone, a place where the city’s infrastructure, commerce, and shadow economies intersect. Beneath the rails lies the Underrail, a subterranean bazaar lit by whale-bar lights, where the technically-unhoused, the exiled, and the entrepreneurial thrive. It is a place of movement, secrecy, and survival.

Landmarks

Catcher’s Cabins — The Catcher’s Cabins, once used for mass transport under brutal conditions, were officially decommissioned, but never destroyed due to cost. Left to decay in forgotten trainyards, they’ve become dense, makeshift housing for squatters and ex-cons.

Centrum Ward — The Centrum Ward’s head office is also known as the Centrum Ward. Officers here draw wages as police force, but their authority only extends to the trains and the stations – meaning that even just outside the station is a grey area for their authority. Their presence is strongest around train yards and the Underrail, where they keep a keen eye on illicit transport deals and counterfeit travel passes. Basically, if you can’t see one, you can probably get away with anything.

Scissor Row — The two forking lanes that reach around Underrail, Scissor Row is for people who can’t manage a permanent business and don’t have the money to pay into the fund for space. This is the kind of space Backtaggers set up pop-up shops. Also because of its shape it’s not hard to ditch the goods and escape if you’re rumbled by police or criminal rivals.

The Gilded Chain — One of the last warehouses with a known brand, because the Westery demands this brand never be forgotten. Gilderoy Holdings made the Gilded Chain, which was a warehouse for storing their ‘Labor Cargo.’ The Gilded Chain offices are essentially a public square for people, but overwhelming it’s favoured by Mithuran people and folk who visit from the Balm.

The Highest Time — The Centrum Tertiary’s clocktower is the central headquarters of the High Timers, and also the home of a specialised doctor who operates out of the peak of the building.

The Iron Chorus — A converted train carriage that functions as a music hall and gathering place. It’s got a pipe organ built into it from a converted engine.

The Ratwell — A section of the Underrail known for its cramped stalls selling suspicious wares — expired medicines, scrap-tech, and bootleg whale oil cartridges. Caveat Emptor!

The Sweepyards — The sprawling train storage yards where abandoned, broken, and illegally modified train cars sit in shadowed corners. The Centrum Ward patrols the area, but there are plenty of blind spots where gangs set up temporary operations or stash contraband.

The Transit Mortis — There’s one train line that runs up to Appenhelm then across to the Balm, meaning it was one train line that transported many tragically destined, abused people, convicts and slaves both. The line is regarded to be cursed.

The Underrail — The Underrail is an underground bazaar where ex-convicts, travelers, and locals do business. It’s lit by whale bar-lights, all under-cover with the only light from outside coming through the rails above. The stalls offer everything from salvaged mechanics to street food, while gang enforcers and Centrum Ward patrols keep a measured distance, respecting the neutrality.

The Wayhouse — An old maintenance depot converted into an unofficial transit hub for those looking for off-the-books transport. The closest thing the Backtaggers have to a headquarters, which is why it’s decorated in their three main colours.

Gangs And Factions

Centrum Tertiary Crossing-Guards – Technically a police force, these are the ticket keepers and station enforcers. Their motto might as well be “not my problem.”

Backtaggers – A graffiti gang and crew of bravos who value visibility and style. They’re known for starting fights and winning them.

Underrail – The ruthless management of the Night Market. They control supply lines and enforce their dominance with brutal efficiency.

High Timers – Drug dealers who specialize in long-distance smuggling of organic goods from the Balm. They operate with patience and deep pockets.

Deadstops – Assassins who specialize in ghost containment. They kidnap targets and send them south on trains, ensuring their ghosts don’t haunt Gyre.

Copperquay

Copperquay is the administrative and financial heart of Gyre — a district of power, wealth, and bureaucracy. It houses Parliament, the city’s largest banks, the central police station, and the palace guardhouse. The architecture is grand, the streets are clean, and the scent of perfume masks the rot of politics. It is where laws are made, fortunes are traded, and secrets are buried beneath layers of civility.

Landmarks

Bastion Precinct — The central police station of the city, Bastion Precinct is a brutalist monolith of grey stone and mirrored glass. Technically, Bastion Precinct is the central police headquarters, and it holds the largest temporary prison in the city, numerous records, and is seen as the seat of authority for all the cops (but Clem). It even has a Royal Guard liaison.

Langford Auctions — An opulent, high-security auction house dealing in rare artifacts, ancestral heirlooms, and occasionally, people’s futures. Langford’s is where fortunes are made and lost in a single bid. Famously, it’s the largest purchaser of champagne in the city, because it uses it for so many formal events.

Parliament House — A grand, sea-facing structure of sandstone, chalk and ivory, Parliament House is where the city’s laws are debated and power is bartered. It’s renowned for being heavily perfumed (because the imported seats and upholstery in the building handle the humidity badly and smell bad).

Penghalion’s Pledge — At the center of Copperquay’s main plaza stands a baroque fountain of a weeping woman cradling a leviathan skull. Sometimes, donations can be found sunk in its water, and left around its base – bones, jewels and coins.

The Palace Guardhouse — A ceremonial and strategic stronghold, the Guardhouse is home to the city’s elite protectors of Parliament and the judiciary. Its members wear armor etched with sea-sigil runes and carry weapons blessed by both state and church. The Guardhouse is neutral in theory, but it absolutely turns as the Royal Guard edict.

The Vaulted Exchange — One of the two largest banks in the city, the Vaulted Exchange is a fortress of finance — its walls reinforced with copper and coralcrete. It’s where trade routes are insured, debts are bought and sold, and the city’s economic lifeblood is pumped. Notably, it has Mint privileges, and is the producer of the city’s Plaque currencies.

The Whisper Vault — An underground speakeasy and information exchange run by the Gargoyles. Hidden behind a false wall in a shipping office, it’s where secrets are traded like currency. The Vault is soundproofed with whalehide and lit by bioluminescent jellyfish tanks.

The Whitehall Pavilion — A graceful riverside structure built from pale sandstone, and chalk. It is officially a public archive and cultural center. Locals come here to read, reflect, or attend lectures on civic history, around a shimmering pool from the river. The Pavilion’s acoustics are strange; whispers carry too far, and sometimes the water speaks back.

Gangs And Factions

Copperquay Constabulary – A powerful mix of constables and royal guards. Possibly the most far-reaching law enforcement presence in the city.

Gargoyles – A criminal syndicate embedded in day jobs like food service and window cleaning. They observe, record, and trade in secrets.

Baptisers – A hyper-devout cult with ties to the Church, more zealous than the mainstream faith. Imagine if Jesuit monks were also Kung Fu munks, but also Sovereign Citizens.

Xaos Howl – Mentioned by name, but details are scarce — likely a shadowy or esoteric faction operating in the margins.

Districts Three (aka the Splay)

Legally, not technically a single district, it’s a place that intersects a bunch of connected districts so the police bicker over responsibilities. It is therefore, the heart of gang and crime activity

Landmarks

Boggrell Deeps — The river that runs underneath much of the Splay runs deep at the bottom of rifts in the rock the city has been built over, giving long drops and ‘under street’ spaces. Boggrell Deeps has its own deep people, cultists and weirdoes, and also just uh, a place to disappear bodies. Notorious for fights.

Hacksaws’ — The defunct loggers union hall which is now mostly frequented by heavies, goons and disorderlies looking for some way to make money. Notorious for fights.

Redbend Rounder — A twisting stretch of road marked by skid burns and wreckage, serving as the Bugknives’ main patrol. If you need to find a bugknife, you can probably find them if you head to this lit up district. Notorious for fights.

Sart Sales — A hawker’s corner and pawn store famous for a constantly defaced sign. Unlike the Underrail, you can almost always never see the same sale here twice – the business itself is practically vestigial and mostly known for the sellers outside kicking back to the owners. Notorious for fights.

The Breaded Basket — A crumbling, multi-level tenement where the Corkies operate under the guise of a community help center. Information is siphoned in and out of its walls, with residents unwittingly selling their privacy for small comforts like food, security, or forged documents. Notorious for fights. Notorious for fights.

The Emberfold — A half-burned warehouse where the Boiler-Rats run their gambling dens. Games range from blood sport betting to intricate cons, and outsiders risk being swallowed whole if they can’t keep up with the stakes.

The Hollow Hearth — An abandoned industrial boiler repurposed into the Rustjacks’ central distillery. Its pipes run deep beneath the Splay, carrying illicit red liquor to secret caches across the district. Notorious for fights.

The Teetertenner — A ten storey tall apartment complex built out of two buildings slowly creeping together across a steep cliff in the Splay district. The two buildings merged into one misshapen tower that also represents a bottleneck in the district, with multiple layers spreading out from its core, creating part of the spiderweb of the Splay. Notorious for fights.

Gangs And Factions

Districts Three Police — There’s no technical police force of Districts Three, but rather whatever Westcrook, South Rocaphen, Wickstand can spare.

Corkies — Freaks Only’ criminal organisation that just so happens to have extremely photogenic leaders.

The Real Corkies — A small core of agents operating out of the Corkies doing information brokering.

Tannersaws — Muggers, gangsters and rowdies subordinate to the Cannery gangs

Boiler-Rats — Pickup gang in the Splay taking advantage of a void, running books and controlling hoppers

Rustjacks — Hawkers selling bootleg hooch in the Splay. Their booze is typically coloured red.

Bugknives — Kamen Rider Bravo Bozos. Self-styled community watch who want to protect people in the splay, riding on modified bikes to get into fights quickly.

Eltham

Eltham Font is the crown jewel of Gyre — a district of wealth, legacy, and quiet power. Built from stark white sandstone and lined with tall, elegant trees, Eltham is a place of prestige and privilege. It sits on the riverbank opposite the ocean, close to Copperquay, and is home to the city’s elite: scholars, nobles, and the politically connected. The district exudes refinement, but beneath its polished surface lies a web of manipulation, entitlement, and youthful rebellion.

Landmarks

Ashcroft Pier — A quiet but strategically placed dockside used for discreet naval operations. By night, smugglers whisper that the Bluecloaks use it for dealings that never make the official police ledgers.

Coastal College — The city’s elite university, where scholars, heirs, and politicians-in-training shape their futures under watchful faculty. Its sandstone halls echo with tradition, while hidden student factions — possibly the Majesties — maneuver in the shadows.

The Beacon of Dominion — A towering bronze monument commemorating the empire’s naval supremacy. Some admire it, others question the quiet military presence always lingering nearby.

The Ellford Museum — A stately institution filled with maritime artifacts, royal decrees, and the preserved records of Eltham’s founding families. The Bluecloaks monitor its archives closely, ensuring certain histories remain buried.

The Halewick Gardens — A sprawling public garden adorned with exotic flora, regal promenades, and carefully curated water features. It’s a place of leisure for the wealthy and a retreat for academics escaping the rigidity of Coastal College.

The Highspire Amphitheatre — A grand, open-air performance space carved into the hillside, where operas, speeches, and political debates unfold beneath the sandstone-clad skyline.

The Rook’s Promenade — A winding riverfront boulevard lined with fine restaurants, scholarly retreats, and dignified townhouses. Chances are if you see a fight here between young people it’ll get blamed on ‘The Ellraisers’

The Veil District — A cluster of imposing mansions whose owners remain elusive, linked by cryptic business ventures and private gatherings. The Majesties are rumored to meet here, but no proof ever surfaces.

Gangs And Factions

Eltham Font Constabulary – Well-equipped and well-trained, often composed of Navy veterans and privileged second sons. They maintain order with quiet efficiency.

Bluecloaks – A gang embedded within the police force. They monitor, manipulate, and suppress inconvenient truths.

Ellraisers – The rebellious youth of the elite. They engage in criminal mischief for thrills, often protected by their family names.

Majesties – Political conspirators and manipulators. They operate in the shadows, influencing the governor and shaping the city’s future through smuggling and information control.

Eltham Student Body – While not a gang per se, the student body of Coastal College is a political force in its own right, with factions and rivalries that spill into the city.

Hundenrum Pass (aka The Hound’s Cradle)

The smallest district in Gyre — just one street long — Hundenrum Pass is a paradox of power and permissiveness. Known as The Hound’s Cradle, it is a haven for artists, bohemians, political dissidents, and red-light workers. Despite its size, it generates immense wealth and cultural influence. It is a place where rules bend, masks are worn, and secrets are traded in plain sight. The police are well-funded but largely powerless here, and the community polices itself — flamboyantly, fiercely, and with flair.

Landmarks

Brickery Song — Technically, an inn with in-house entertainers, the only permanent residents are the freesoul family living there. A tall multi-storey house, people rent time there by days, but only stay there by hours. It’s not a sex shop – it’s known for music, food, and art.

Tarmin and Anzims — Most businesses in the Cradle are kind of single-purpose; theatres owned by one small company, bars with one speciality, sex shops with specific workers. Tarmin and Anzim are notable for being a place with rotating contributors.

The Cauldron — A longstanding lesbian bar founded in the basement of an old sewer plant, renowned for witch vibes.

The Hound’s Pigs — The police station of the Cradle. It is the most well-paid police station in the city. It has a truly abysmal arrest rate. The police complain constantly about the unhelpful community, but are financed well (to make records disappear)

Gangs And Factions

Cavorters – A cult devoted to endless indulgence and ecstatic ritual. They perform bimonthly human sacrifices and are building a god from noble body parts.

Beasts of Gevaudan – The de facto community police. Styled like pirates, they take a modest cut from local businesses and ensure order. They wear denim jackets with their name emblazoned on the back.

The Roasters – A union of coffee sellers who once held exclusive rights to the district’s coffee trade. Now a powerful and organized economic bloc.

Hundenrum Pass Constabulary – Technically the police force here, but with little real power. They mostly extract people from situations rather than enforce laws.

Jamskips, Rollers, Windowblacks – Mentioned by name but not detailed. Likely minor or specialized factions operating in the Cradle’s unique ecosystem.

Locke’s Quay

Locke’s Quay is Gyre’s dockside district — a chaotic blend of industry, nightlife, and maritime grit. It’s where the city meets the sea, and where the rules start to blur. Tattoo parlours, concert halls, and pleasurecraft line the waterfront, while smugglers, sailors, and syndicates move goods and secrets under the cover of salt spray and moonlight. It’s loud, lawless, and alive.

Landmarks

Her Majesty’s Finest Shipyards — A chaotic sprawl of ship construction sites, where half-built destroyers loom over workers hauling rivets and plating. The Navy controls access, but smugglers bribe their way in, slipping contraband onto vessels before they’re even seaworthy.

Huntrum Tower — A looming government office overlooking the docks, where naval officers dictate ship movements and recruitment orders. It’s a fortress of bureaucracy, but its records — if one could get to them — hold damning secrets on forced conscription and hidden wartime dealings.

Sirens’ Landing — A lavish waterfront hall run by the Sibs of Siren, serving as a pleasure den and information hub. Officials, gang leaders, and even constables drift through, indulging in its intoxicants while slipping requests for intel across polished counters.

The Black Piers — A stretch of docks that rarely sees daylight, where the Ironhatch load their barges under moonlight. The air reeks of salt and oil, and whispers of disappearances linger in the night air like ghosts clinging to the tides.

The Briny Chapel — A decrepit, salt-eaten chapel where sailors leave offerings to old sea gods and mourn those lost to the depths. Overseen by a priest with faceblindness.

The Cutlass Row — A long strip of dockside workshops where shipwrights modify vessels for speed, stealth, or smuggling. The Naval Gazers frequent these shops, outfitting their personal crafts with hidden compartments and reinforced hulls.

The Keel’s Haul — A dense, open-air trading ground where shipbuilders, sailors, and pirates alike come to barter for supplies. Everything from stolen naval equipment to forged documents passes through its stalls, unbothered by law enforcement.

The Scuttler’s Arms — A pub with walls scarred by blades and bullet holes, favored by Naval Gazers and mercenaries. Dockside deals are struck here over strong liquor, and every patron knows that speaking too loudly could mean winding up on an unmarked barge headed far offshore.

Gangs And Factions

Locke’s Quay Constabulary – Numerous but disorganized. Their main goal is to keep customs running smoothly, not to enforce the law.

The Navy – Present but not omnipresent. They exert influence through bureaucracy and intimidation.

Ironhatch – Assassins with access to body disposal via junk barges. Efficient and terrifying.

Naval Gazers – Smugglers who operate out of the shipyards. Known for modifying vessels and running contraband.

Sibs of Siren – Tattoo artists, gossips, and assassins. They run Sirens’ Landing and trade in secrets as much as ink.

South Rocaphen (aka Rocaphen)

South Rocaphen is a district born from exhaustion — a suburb that grew out of the city’s mining operations. As the mines were depleted, the district expanded into the hollowed-out spaces, creating a layered, sunken sprawl of stone, steel, and soot. It is a place of industry and resilience, where the ground itself has been carved into homes, workshops, and strongholds. The air is thick with dust and the scent of labor, and the people here are tough, proud, and fiercely territorial.

Landmarks

Cordwain’s Own Bastion — A fortified district outpost for South Rocaphen’s Constabulary, where officers operate with precision, balancing their role between industrial oversight and keeping gang conflicts from escalating too far.

Quarry Row — The heart of Second Rocaphen, where homes have been carved into the old stone pits. A maze of reclaimed tunnels, makeshift workshops, and hidden gathering spaces, fiercely defended by the Underminers.

Sledgecross Yard — A training ground for the Bricklayers Union, where members test the strength of their tools, reinforce structures, and handle disputes in their own brutal, practical fashion.

The Cutwell Den — An underground market hidden within a collapsed quarry, where smuggled goods and unregistered mining tools are exchanged. Flintbacks control access, ensuring only trusted hands make deals here.

The Emberlock Square — The district’s central plaza, once a wellspring for water traders but now the main gathering point for workers and business leaders. Wellhawks patrol it vigilantly, ensuring safety in the otherwise tumultuous cityscape.

The Gearsward — A sprawling rail interchange where mining carts are loaded onto larger trains for transport down the mountain. Flintbacks operate discreetly here, sneaking contraband among legitimate shipments. It’s also the great engine that drives the gear stations around the district.

The Stillglass Foundry — A massive glassworks where industrial-strength panes, lenses, and bottles are crafted. The furnace glow never fades, and Wellhawks keep its perimeter secured from reckless thieves.

Trestlecrown — A towering steel bridge built to support Rocaphen’s trains as they descend toward the city below. It’s both a breathtaking landmark and a critical transport artery, closely monitored by the Constabulary.

Gangs And Factions

South Rocaphen Constabulary – A powerful force outside the tunnels, thanks to reinforced chokepoints and control over mining roads.

Wellhawks – Water hawkers with access to the district’s supply. They also act as a semi-official security force.

Bricklayers Union – A labor union with muscle. They train, build, and settle disputes with practical brutality.

Flintbacks – Miners turned smugglers and fraudsters. They coordinate theft and contraband across multiple sites.

Underminers – Guardians of the lower tiers. They provide protection and enforce order in the sunken parts of the district.

St Biscuiton’s Provided (aka The Cannery)

The Cannery is not so much a district as it is a sprawling industrial organism — a tangle of businesses, factories, and processing plants that grew out of a single enterprise and never stopped expanding. It famously lacks a police station, relying instead on private enforcers and corporate muscle. The Cannery is loud, hot, and dangerous, with a rhythm all its own. It’s where labor meets exploitation, and where the smell of whale oil never quite fades.

Landmarks

Briggen Slaughterhouse — A specialised service for the slaughter of almost anything that comes out of the sea. Most of its bulging warehouse space is dedicated to the foul task of dismantling the strange and alien whales of the Gyre, but they also have the infamous P&P boiler, used for P&P Oil.

Gripp and Pipe’s Union Of Gripp and Pipe — Rather than a police station the Cannery has Grippe and Pipe, a business of strikebreakers, counterorganisers and indigent corallers. Grippe & Pipe are funny cartoon mascots for the people they represent.

Moist Lane — A slop discharge lane for multiple parts of the cannery. The worst houses flank it, atop a towering wall, and the street runs over audibly active gross fluids. It smells ferocious. Famously cop-light.

Pippin’s Paytower — A single large tower that exchanges company scrip for actual coin, the Paytower is a famously robust one-stop shop for Cannery workers to get paid, so St Biscuitons doesn’t need to transport money to many locations. Fights are common.

Gangs And Factions

Gripp & Pipe Labor Negotiators – Not a gang in the traditional sense, but a powerful force. They operate on their own schedule and enforce corporate interests.

Yard Rags – A loose mob of bravos, traders, and opportunists. They’ll do anything for a bit of extra cash.

Rib-Crackers – A lightly corrupt crew that operates like a union — but isn’t one, because if it were, Gripp & Pipe would crush it.

Pit Kickers – A hardened gang that deals in raw whale blood. They’re tough, dangerous, and deeply embedded in the Cannery’s economy.

River Pigs – Hitters who specialize in body disposal. If someone disappears in the Cannery, the River Pigs probably helped.

The Chantry

The Chantry is the spiritual and cultural heart of Gyre’s Church — a district of towering cathedrals, sacred gardens, and quiet surveillance. It is a place of worship, education, and judgment, where class divides are etched into the very pews. The Chantry is both sanctuary and stage, where sermons are delivered, secrets are kept, and power is sanctified. It is beautiful, solemn, and always watching.

Landmarks

The Basilica of the Three Gates — A towering cathedral of white stone and stained glass, this is the spiritual heart of the Church. Its three massive doors — each representing one of the Gates — are only opened on high holy days. The wealthy worship in the gilded upper tiers, while the poor gather in the shadowed nave below. The Medicants maintain a quiet presence here, watching.

The Chapel of the Quiet Flame — A small, elegant chapel by the riverside, known for its silent services and candlelit rituals. It’s a favorite of the upper class, who come here to confess without being heard. It’s a place where upper and upper-middle classes can actually interact, albeit through passed notes.

The Cloister of Saint Arthruongus — A serene, walled garden and seminary where the Church trains its future clergy. The fruit trees here are older, twisted, and carefully pruned. Students chant in the mornings and debate theology in the afternoons.

The Ember Court — A public square where sermons, trials, and – back when such things were common enough – church executions are held. The ground is scorched from past burnings, though it’s been paved over with white stone. The Medicants do public lessons on ‘spiritual hygiene’ here.

The Fruit of Grace Walk — A long, tree-lined promenade that winds through the district, connecting seminaries, shrines, and schools. The fruit trees here are bloom year-round and nobody knows why (but it’s probably shifty). It’s a place of peace, but also of quiet surveillance — Chantry police patrol it in pairs, always watching.

The Hall of Ash — A long, open-air colonnade where the Medicants display the remnants of their purges — burned charms, shattered tincture bottles, and scorched effigies. It’s both a warning and a sermon. There are even large, human-sized bird cages that have not been used since the Emancipation suspended on high columns – which means the human bones in them are bleached quite white.

The Lantern Archive — A vast, multi-tiered library of religious texts, folk records, and banned writings. You need signed permission to come here, but it is an invaluable archive.

The New Politano — A large, religious eatery, a place people go after church to contemplate and communicate and also, a corrupt business where Bridge Grunts do deals and make trades. Disturbing the peace is one of the only offenses a made member can do that remove their protections.

The Open Tithe — The Church’s bank, housed in a fortress-like building of pale marble and ironwood. Ostensibly, this is the place people can go to donate to the church, but also, look at the church’s books to see where money is being spent. The Candlekeepers have a strong presence here, ensuring their wares are always in demand. The Bridge Grunts have tried to skim from it — once.

The Reliquary of Saint Morrow — A museum-like vault of sacred relics, including bones, robes, and “miraculous” artifacts. It’s heavily guarded and open only to the devout — or the wealthy. Most notable, though, this is one of the centers of Kings Resort information brokers.

Gangs And Factions

Bridge Grunts – Control the bridges between the Chantry and Wickstand. They operate on a contract system and enforce movement rights.

Candlekeepers – Providers of liturgical goods made in Gyre. They ensure the Church’s rituals are well-stocked and well-paid.

King’s Resort – A gang with crown imagery and a freesoul presence. They deal in information and influence.

Inner Dark – A cult that believes the void is within. They seek to extract it — violently.

The Chantry Constabulary – Church-aligned police who travel with clergy and can summon the Medicants.

Altar Egoes – A gang with ties to the Plague Doctors. They exploit the aftermath of divine judgment.

The Majestic

The Majestic is not really a district — it is the Governor’s estate, a sprawling palace complex perched on the mountainside, large enough to be its own city. It is a symbol of imperial authority, opulence, and isolation. Overseen by Governor Killdeer Maquisdeux (formerly Huntrum, formerly Paul, formerly Knight), the Majestic is a fortress of bureaucracy and legacy, where power is inherited, rewritten, and enforced with quiet brutality.

Landmarks

The Palace – A literal palace. Grand, fortified, and self-sustaining. It is the seat of the Governor and the heart of imperial control in Gyre.

Gangs And Factions

The Majestic Royal Guards – Elite enforcers who only care about crimes committed within the Majestic — but they can go anywhere in the city to pursue them. Their authority is absolute.

The Magistry – The palace’s servants and working class. They are a mixed group, bound together by the knowledge that any mistake will be punished collectively.

The Westery (aka The Westery)

The Westery is a dense, walled district built atop the ruins of a former plantation. It is a place of resilience, memory, and resistance. The original buildings were torn down during the uprising, and now the district is a maze of stacked housing, narrow alleys, and fortified tenements. With only one road in and out, and high white walls on all sides, the Westery is both a sanctuary and a stronghold — fiercely independent and deeply suspicious of outsiders.

Landmarks

Clem’s House — A modest, sun-faded bungalow tucked between two towering fig trees, Clem’s House is probably the safest place in the Westery. People from outside the Westery have tried to attack it to find that even Westery’s gangs don’t tolerate that.

Cruikshanks’ Shack — A leaning, creaky structure built from salvaged wood and rusted tin, Cruikshanks’ Shack is where a bunch of clerical storage wound up. It’s one of the most comprehensive archives of sold newspapers across the city’s history since Emancipation.

Messy Jo’s — A beloved café and community kitchen that serves food; it also has a ‘ladel lick’ rule, where if you can’t buy anything, you can still get some of the stretched soup. It’s run by Miss Jo, a retired boxer with a booming laugh and a strict no-fighting rule. The back room of Messy Jo’s is a neutral ground used for negotiations with gangs.

Popwan Apartments — A towering, patchwork complex of stacked units, balconies, and rooftop gardens, the Popwan Apartments are the largest single residential space in the Westery. It has two entrances, making it very well fortified and controllable by the gangs. Each floor tells a different story — murals, flags, and windchimes mark the passing of years. It has huge rain-tanks on the rooftop, one of which has been disconnected.

Saltseat Prayer House — Technically, not a church, but a place where the faithful of the Westery gather to worship. It does occasionally stray into heretical ideas, suggesting the influence of the Ash Lady cult.

The Black Bank — The physical location of the Black Bank proper is hard to know; it instead has agents around the district who move to a few pre-determined locations. They dress in black robes, with golden trim, and advocate for the Thousand A Term Association to encourage Westery families to save money.

The Chalk — A community-run art space built into the inner side of the Westery’s tall walls. The murals here are ever-changing, painted by local artists and children alike. Some depict ancestral stories, others protest injustices. The Ash Lady cult occasionally leaves offerings here, believing the wall is a sacred canvas.

The Listening House — During the plantation days, isolation was used to punish people; the foundation of a prison block, when it was flattened, became a shaded open area for elders to come and share stories for the gathered community.

The Root Market — The Westery’s answer to the markets of the other districts, Root Market is set up around and under the shade of an enormous fig tree, one of the only parts of the old plantation that wasn’t destroyed in the uprising. People come to trade here under its shading branches.

Gangs And Factions

Clem – The district’s lone detective. Respected, patient, and untouchable.

Mr Smith – A gang of hawkers and sellers who all go by the name “Mr Smith.” They operate on a strict code of silence.

Ash Lady – A cult that worships a Mithuran figure born of volcanic collapse. They leave offerings at The Chalk.

Black Bank – A financial gang that offers recovery, restoration, and insurance services. They’re on the right side — but they are still a bank.

Popwan – The gang that controls the Popwan Apartments. Their territory is hard to breach and harder to escape.

West West – Hitters and runners who strike outside the Westery, then vanish back into its depths.

Westcrook Abbeys

Westcrook Abbeys is a dense, working-class district nestled near the government center of Gyre. It’s a patchwork of houses, lodgings, meeting halls, and public works — a place where laborers live, unions meet, and quiet deals are struck. Though not the poorest district, it’s a place of tension and transition, where the old bones of the city creak under the weight of ambition and corruption.

Landmarks

Bass Bridge — One of the bridges from Westcrook across the river. Bass is the single largest bridge, even having its own watchtowers on each side and storage housing along its length. It’s technically two storeys.

Bindi Bindi — A lagoon under the district where Xalawa gather, where supposedly great crocodiles come and rest in the dark. Known as a great cave it’s also a place basically impossible to find your way in on your own, and ‘Gone Bindi Bindi’ is a way to suggest someone is hiding there. “Gone Bindi” means someone is lost in there.

Brassbone Bucklers — A toolsmith’s that specialises in integrating whalebone bought from the Cannery. Some folk like to claim that Brassbone can make a body disappear into their weapons, but who believes that? This is middle class business stuff, not the Splay.

Broad Street — A very wide main thoroughfare that has tram tracks and overpasses on it. Known for both the Broad Street Riots (when union members formed barricades and sniped at Gripp & Pipe + Army Agents) and the Braod Street Push (where Mae Copperpalm took and held the street on her way to the palace). The police station sits on Broad Street now, facing the Fire Station.

Crooked Lane — A long and winding series of streets that slowly got eroded into one another until they’re all functionally known as Crooked Lane, full of corners and nooks and technically-illegal traders doing business from carts and wagons.

First Dees — A large bank that wears the title of First Desegregated, proudly proclaiming it was the first bank anyone could get an account in, and lists a date. Near the edge of the district to try and score navy business from the port.

Flinders Bridge — One of the bridges from Westcrook across the river, Flinders is the smaller one that leads into the Chantry. It’s a very flat bridge, for the trams, and has supports in the centre, sunk into the river. Flinders is why boats over a certain size can’t go up-river.

Postflood Insurance — A pawn shop that bills itself as an insurance business. Specialise in buying damaged goods and recovering losses but at truly awful rates. You can basically go to Postflood and tell them ‘here’s all my damaged stuff, what will you pay for all of it,’ and they’ll manage recovery/reclamation of the goods, for cash in hand. Terrible deals but sometimes the best you’ll get.

Saint Sweetmallow’s Sacrosanct Serums — A pharmacy with an incredible product, a chemical genius propreitor, and a constantly cycling staff because that boss is a nightmare to work with.

The Governor’s Ribs — By the side of the river there’s the hull of an ironclad that’s been sunk vertically into the mud. It was a vessel that was run aground then destroyed by the rebels during the Reassertion, just before Emancipation.

The Hooked Cleaver — Exotic fish butchers that owns an eel farm. This is obviously not suspicious at all, why would you act like it’s suspicious?

The Old Cathedral — A half-built ruin sunk into the river, the Old Cathedral is a freshly constructed ruin made by the Medicants meant to represent the idea of the church as an eternal presence in the culture.

Gangs And Factions

Gyre’s Voice – A cult that believes the Miasma is the Gyre’s rage. They speak for the deep sea.

Aunty Jack’s – A criminal network led by a former horse thief turned “architecture expert.”

Venom Princes – A gang that poisons medical supplies.

First Dees – The bank itself acts like a gang, with private agents and political influence.

The Alder & Bailie – Elected officials who focus on staying elected and not wasting resources.

Westcrook Constabulary – A small but dangerous police force made up of ex-unionists who chose power over solidarity.

Chimneycrooks – Rooftop climbers and second-storey thieves.

Pipehitters – A failed firefighter group turned protection racket. Sometimes they start fires.

Wickstand

Wickstand is the poorest “safe” district in Gyre — a dense sprawl of slums, stacked housing, and overlapping structures that even extend into the mined-out earth below. It’s a place of survival, grit, and community, where the people are tough, the streets are tight, and the law is more of a suggestion. Despite its poverty, Wickstand is fiercely alive, with its own codes, cultures, and power structures.

Landmarks

Brasscross Arcade — A covered shopping row lined with iron-framed storefronts where you can buy everything from boots to fine stationery. The Grackles monitor its crowds carefully, selling discreet reports on who shops where and what deals are struck. Always look up.

Bundram’s Hall — The sprawling union meeting place where labor disputes are negotiated and deals are struck between factory leaders and workers. The Grackles watch everything here and everyone pays for hte minutes.

Claymore Square — A dense housing block where families live stacked in brick-built tenements with iron balconies overlooking the bustling streets below. It’s fiercely working-class, with a deep distrust of outsiders, and the Chettes ensure no trouble spills into its borders.

Fenwick & Sons Foundry — It’s hard to have a ‘big’ steelworks inside the city, when there are islands dedicated to it, but Fenwick have the largest one outside of Rocaphen. They aren’t allowed to make weapons. People get weapons there.

Gallowsford Station — The warehouses that stand to support Centrum Tertiary. Gallowsford is just the name of the tiny station that services people there, but industrial trains don’t stop at the station – they go straight into warehouses to get unloaded.

Shoreditch House — Once, it was a factory. When it was made policy that Gyre would not have its own manufacturing industry, it was refitted into a huge set of flats, which are all awkward and rats-nesty, making it a great place to hide people.

The Blackpowder Tavern — A high-ceilinged pub with oak beams and brass fixtures, with a proud ‘everything is imported’ easthetic. The Inktreaders frequent it for quiet business meetings, while the Chettes drink there in force after long shifts.

The Crownmere Registry — A government subsidiary office where critical documents — property deeds, business charters, and high-level permits — are signed and sealed with ink from the Inktreaders.

Gangs And Factions

Zookeepers – White supremacist cultists who oppose “Bushweird” beliefs. Dangerous and hateful.

Inktreaders – Owners of the ink factories. Surprisingly entrenched and influential, with export ties to St Biscuiton.

Chettes – Jungle-knife-wielding territorial enforcers. They know every alley and shortcut.

Grackles – A snitch and fence network that monitors Wickstand and the Splay. They sell information and keep tabs on everyone.

Wickstand Constabulary – Local cops with roots in the community. Often treated as the de facto authority in nearby districts.

Bundram’s Meeting Hall – Not a gang, but a respected organization of dues-paying workers. They lack leverage but have moral weight.

There’s More

This treatment is already unmanageably large. The remaining segments I considered putting into the document were Life in Gyre, that talked about each district as a place to live told as a single narrative, Media & Information, about each district’s information networks and their newspapers, and Common Art, which was about the currency and common brands of products in Gyre.

But if you got this far, say Banana.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#blades in the dark #gyre #World Building #Games #Making

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sweetdreamsjeff · 1 month ago

Text

The Observer, June 8, 1997, Page 69. via Newspapers.com

The Observer Review 8 June 1997 Inherited torment WE o Jeff Buckley swam out into the Mississippi and never came bad;. Did his father drag him under? Walking to the bright lights in sorrow, Oh drink a bit of wine, we both might go tomorrow ... And the rain is falling, and I believe my time has come ... And I feel them drown my name ... lm not afraid to go, butitgoes so slow ...

' - Jeff Buckley, 'Grace', 1994 have never heard anyone sing with as much emotional force as Jeff Buckley. When I saw him play in New York in 1994, 1 was in tears for almost the entire concert Why? The truth is, 1 don't know. Though the songs he performed (his own and other people's) were often sad, it was not the lyrics nor the melodies that were moving, so much as the singer himself. His voice, though it was often aqueously beautiful, also had the power to terrorise; he could shift from a melancholic sigh to a scream of despair or a howl of desire within the space of a line. He sang as though his life were flashing before his eyes, as though this might be the last chance he had to express what he felt inside.

He once declared, about the experience of performing: 'Sometimes it's like sex, when you transcend the physical and make something spiritual, when you fly ...'A Jeff Buckley concert was a slow-motion petit mort. Tou have to let yourself go,' he said, 'and it can scar you or destroy you. It's a bit like dying.' The man acclaimed by many as the most naturally talented rock vocalist of his generation gave his final performance to an audience of one. He was singing and laughing as he swam out into the Mississippi River on a spring Tennessee evening, before being pulled beneath the water's surface. His end, though tragically premature, was as musical and darkly romantic as his short life.

On Thursday 29 May, around 9pm, Jeff and a friend, Keith Foti, were sitting on the quay of the Mud Island marina, where the Mississippi joins downtown Memphis. They had an acoustic guitar and a ghetto blaster, and they were singing songs together. Buckley, In a playful mood', went swimming full)' clothed; Foti says he tried to dissuade him, as that stretch of river is known for its dangerous underwater currents. Buckley swam and waded for 15 minutes before a passing tug boat created a large wave. Foti turned away momentarily to move the ghetto blaster so it wouldn't get wet When he turned back, Ms friend had disappeared Jeff Buckley was 30 years old.

His body wasn't found until last Wednesday, but the outpouring of grief that followed the announcement of his disappearance was immediate and intense. There was a candlelight vigil in New York, at the site of the Sin-e Cafe in Greenwich Village, where he used to play, and 125 pages of emotional tributes and poems on the Internet. 'His music and voice were clearlv too beautiful to be from this by Sam Taylor humble planet,' said one. Another said simply. This really f ing hurts a lot' Though never a big star in commercial terms, and despite having recorded only one full-length album (Grace, released in 1994), Buckley will be remembered as a songwriter of great potential, a superb guitarist a charismatic man and one of the most extraordinary singers in rock history.

U2"s singer, Bono, declared: 'Jeffs voice was a pure drop in an ocean of noise.' He will also be remembered as the son of Tim Buckley - possibly the only other white male pop singer of the past 30 years with a comparable vocal talent. Father and son met only once in their lives - for nine days when Jeff was eight years old -and Buckley Jr hated being compared to a man he barely knew. But Jeffs premature death means the pair will be forever linked in people's minds: two months after he met his son, Tim Buckley died of a heroin overdose. He was 28. Perhaps inevitably, given his family history and the nature of his profession, there have been recurrent rumours that Jeff Buckley's death was a suicide attempt or an accident caused by drugs or alcohol.

As long as two years ago, there were mutterings that his record company, Columbia, had been pushing him too hard to promote Grace. 'People thought the company wanted their pound of flesh,' said a friend of Buckley's, that they'd put a lot of money into marketing him and were disappointed by the sales. The last time 1 saw him, in '95, he looked really tired - it was a gruelling schedule. But I talked to him more recently and he sounded much happier and more relaxed I'm just glad that he had time to enjoy life again before he died.' Buckley's last message to the world came in December 1996, when he posted this memo to his fans on his official Web site: Tm in the middle of some wild shit right now. Please be patient.

Tm coming soon to a cardboard display case near you and ni come out of my hole and will make bonfires out of ticket stubs come the summer.' Since then, the singer had been living in Memphis, working on his second album with producer Tom Verlaine, but. unhappy with the results, he had scrapped them and asked his band to leave town while he wrote new songs. He and the band were due to start recording again with a new producer last week. Buckley and Foti were on their way to the studio when they stopped at the marina. 'Maybe he was depressed about the recordings,' said Chrissie Hynde, lead singer with the Pretenders and a friend o: Buckley's.

'But all singer-songwriters ge: depressed - it goes with the job. All I knov is that he loved music. The feeling I got from him was that he was gonna be around for many years and produce i great body of work, that he was just star ingout The speculation now will concern in Photographs: Rex Tim Buckley was a free-flowing songwriter of the late Sixties. He died at 28. All he left for his son to love was his music recordings that he scrapped.

It seems almost inevitable that Columbia will release them in some form. The music industry and human nature being what they are, there is every chance that Jeff Buckley's death will transform him from a cult singer with huge potential into another rock icon - a sensitive, Keatsian addition to a pantheon of self-destroyed ghosts that includes Jim Morrison,'Kurt Cobain and, of course, Tim Buckley. One remark, made by Jeff Buckley around the time of Kurt Cobain's suicide, now sounds horribly prophetic. "You gotta make your own life,' he said. 'You can't leave it up to leaders.

Jesus, JFK, Kurt Cobain - they all got f ed up. Kurt didn't feel loved, or maybe he didn't know how to recognise it. But it won't ever happen with a leader; independence has to come or you'll die. You'll end up like someone's puppet and you'll be gone like a chump before you're 30.' Did Jeff Buckley 'go like a chump'? There are plenty of portents to suggest he committed suicide, but no evidence. Buckley himself was always wary of people reading too much into his life: 'Critics look at the complicated things and try to simplify them.

They think they can nail your whole life down just by knowing the bare bones of your history and partaking in 10 minutes of conversation.' One of the most persuasive arguments not to assume that Jeffs death was self-inflicted is the death of his father. Tim Buckley died of a heroin overdose: it looked initially like suicide, but evidence emerged that he had sniffed the heroin in the mistaken belief that it was cocaine. According to Buckley's guitarist, Lee Underwood, it was only because Buckley had recently given up drugs that the dose was enough to kill him. Another man was subsequently charged with murder for supplying him with the heroin. A charismatic troubador' of the late Sixties and early Seventies, Tim Buckley recorded nine adventurous albums of wildly varying quality, which mixed the bloodlines of jazz, folk, rock and soul; at his best, as on the morbidly beautiful 'Song to the Siren', he was better even than the young Van Morrison.

A free-flowing, inspirational singer -songwriter, he was never commercially successful, but his reputa tion remains extremely high. At 19, when he was still an unknown) he married a young Panama-bom woman named Mary Guibert. On 17 November 1966, Mary gave birth to a son. She nanie&bim Jeff. Tim left her six months later.

Jeff Buckley spent his childhood moving from town to town around southern California with his mother and younger brother (the child of another relationship). He later recalled that he did not even have any luggage; he transported his possessions in paper bags. 'We lived in little white trashville towns overrunby Burger Kings and malls. It was a dislocated childhood . .

. moving from place to place, grabbing on to people, making fast friends, letting them go. I'd get a part in a school play and find out that evening that we had to leave. It made me grow up more quickly -I was the man of the house from a very young age. I feel I wasborn old.' Asked why his family was so nomadic, he replied: 'I guess my mother just always wanted to know what was round the next corner.' He met his father briefly in 1975, and his comments about him in interviews revealed a feeling of bitterness masquerading as indifference: 'I knew him for nine days.

I met him for the first time when I was eight years old, over Easter, and he died two months later ... We were born with the same parts, but that's all. I'm Mary Guibert's son, not his.' Those 'parts' included not just his looks (their faces were strikingly similar), but his soaring, wonderfully expressive voice. Music was Jeffs life from a very young age. His mother was a classically trained pianist, and they would sing together in the car.

When he was five, she taught him one of his father's songs, 'Once I Was'. 'There was my mother's breast, then there was music,' he once said. 'It's been my friend, my ally, my teacher, my tormentor. Singing just took me over.' Jeff left home at 17 and moved to Los Angeles. He lived there for four years, playing guitar in bars, but never felt comfortable with the city's superficiality.

At one point, feeling isolated, he tracked down his father's relatives. 'I talked to the whole cast of characters, and then I was done with it. It revealed a lot of ugliness that I can't talk about.' He never did. And so he moved to New York, a place he had always thought of as his spiritual home. Ironically, the first time he ever played in New York was at a Tim Buckley tribute concert in 1991, where he played 'Once I Was'.

This seems odd, given Jeffs comments about his father, but he told Boiling Stone: 'It bothered me that I hadn't been to his funeral, that I'd never been able to tell him anything. I used that show to pay my last respects.' Chrissie Hynde thinks that: 'Although he obviously had unresolved feelings about a man who had abandoned him, he really knew and loved his father's music. He never talked about him, but I think he was really proud of his father.' There is evidence to suggest that, for all his denials, Jeff was obsessed with his father, and with other people's identifica tion of the two. In an article posted on the Internet last week, he was quoted as saying: 'All this stuff about my dad . .

. it's so hard to live with. I'm Jeff, not Tim. Do you think what they say is true?' In 1992, Jeff began playing dramatic, sometimes disastrous, solo shows in East Village bars and cafes. His first record, the independently released EP Live at Sin-e, reveals Buckley's nascent talent in all its self-indulgent, undisciplined glory.

International recognition came in 1994, when, having put together a young three-piece band and signed for Columbia, Buckley released Grace, an astonishing debut album that he described as 'an elegy, sort of a child's coffin ... full of past ghosts, exorcised in song'. The only solid legacy of his brilliance, Grace sounds almost unbearably poignant now. It is dense with memories and prophesies, from the title track's eerie premonition of death through the delicate version of Britten's 'Corpus Christi Carol', to the final track, 'Dream Brother', about his lost father; 'Don't be like the one who made me so old Don 't be like the one who left behind his name 'Cause they're waiting for you like I waited for mine And nobody ever came. .

. ' It is convenient and romantic to assume that Jeff Buckley's death was not a freak accident but an act of desperate self destruction But the truth is, until the coroner's report is released - probably this week - we will not know whether the singing swimmer in the Mississippi was waving or drowning..

#jeff buckley #jeffbuckley #the observer #june 8 1997 #1997 #june 8 #newspapersdotcom

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