Dandy Highwaymen: street gangs and street fashions of the Wicked City

When every law is unjust, and every official is corrupt, then what place remains for the criminal?

Given that the Wicked City is already effectively a gangster state, it might be thought that few roles remained for organised crime. The city's government is little more than a gigantic protection racket, and all kinds of enterprises that are forbidden in most other places - gladiatorial death matches, the sale of noxious narcotics, and so on - are legal in the Wicked City, as long as you have the right licenses and permits. And yet criminal groups proliferate, ranging from gangs of pickpockets and petty thieves, to formidably organised mafias which virtually function as semi-official government departments, to neighbourhood defence associations that exist to protect and avenge the people of a specific community in the face of the cruel indifference of the official authorities. For better and for worse, they step into the gaps created by the chronic malfunctioning of the city's government; and in many places, the rough-and-ready justice meted out by the local mob is a much more important and reliable source of social order than the arbitrary laws enforced by the King's Men.

It is true, however, that the city's government soaks up many of the kinds of people who become criminals in other nations. Anyone with a taste for thuggery and extortion can easily fulfill it by joining the King's Men, rather than risking any kind of criminal endeavour; and as a result, the city's gangs tend to be made up of the kind of misfits and individualists who struggle to fit into even the most corrupt of official authority structures. Incorrigible rule-breakers and iconoclasts, quixotic vigilantes and hair-trigger psychopaths; these are the kinds of people who fill the ranks of the city's multitude of criminal gangs. It is perhaps because individual self-expression is so important to so many of them that the city's gangsters tend to be a dandaical bunch, who advertise their status by cultivating foppish and exaggerated fashions which are pointedly at odds with the violence by which their positions are maintained. They wear their wealth on their sleeves, sometimes literally: the more successful the criminal, the more extravagant their clothes. Huge hats and turbans, brightly coloured fabrics, ornate watch-chains, and pointed shoes are as much a part of the city's gangster aesthetic as the knives and pistols thrust into their elegantly-tailored belts. Among the city's high society, it's the Cobweb families who are the trend-setters; but out in the streets, everyone wants to dress like a gangster.

Basically these guys, but in Early Modern Central Asia.

To generate a random street gang (and their amazing clothes), use the following table:

Size (roll 1d6):

1. Very small. 2d4 toughs in fancy hats. May all be members of a single family.
2. Small. 1d8+4 people leagued together in some shared criminal enterprise. 
3. Average. 1d12+6 active members, who may lay claim to a small area of the city.
4. Large. 1d20+10 active members. Probably act as the de facto authority in one or more communities out in the Streets.
5. Very large. 2d20+20 active members. Most gangs at this level of strength have come to an arrangement with the King's Men, who subcontract 'tax collection' (i.e. extortion) duties for one area of the city out to them in exchange for a cut of the profits.
6. Huge. 4d20+30 active members. Probably run a whole range of criminal enterprises simultaneously. May lay claim to an entire district of the Streets.

The local mob.

Signature Fashion (roll 1d10 and 1d12)

1. Huge...
2. Brightly-coloured...
3. Striped...
4. Extra-wide...
5. Fur-lined...
6. Spectacularly embroidered...
7. Subtly understated...
8. Sharply-tailored...
9. Ribboned and tasselled... 
10. Exquisitely pointed...

1. ...turbans.
2. ...hats.
3. ...capes.
4. ...shoes.
5. ...coats.
6. ...scarves.
7. ...gloves.
8. ...sashes.
9. ...masks.
10. ...waistcoats.
11. ...trousers.
12. ...robes.

I'm the dandy highwayman whom you're too scared to mention,

I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention...

Signature Accessory (roll 1d20)

1. Knives with fancy handles.
2. Ultra-long tobacco pipes.
3. Beautiful painted fans.
4. Stylised make-up.
5. Complex full-body tattoos.
6. Jewelled snuff-boxes.
7. Waxed moustaches.
8. Hair worn long and loose.
9. Hair worn in elaborate braids.
10. Long, pointy beards.
11. Ostentatious pocket-watches on chunky gilded chains.
12. Rings on every finger.
13. Jewelled earrings.
14. Duelling scars. (Gang members without them pick fights with each other all the time until they get suitably scarred-up.)
15. Beautiful lacquer boxes containing drug paraphernalia. 
16. Gold teeth.
17. Enormous gold belt buckles.
18. Painted and beautifully-manicured fingernails.
19. Eccentrically-scented colognes.
20. Collections of holy charms, semi-ironically worn around the neck.

Gang lookout relaxing in the ruined districts. Painting by Andrew Geddes.

Primary activity (roll 1d20, or 2d20 for very large or huge gangs)

1. Pickpocketing and petty theft. 
2. Burglary.
3. Banditry and highway robbery.
4. Fencing stolen goods.
5. Coining.
6. Forging - run a workshop crafting fake art objects, antiques, documents, etc.
7. Running unlicensed gambling dens.
8. Running unlicensed brothels.
9. Running unlicensed pit fights.
10. Information-gathering and blackmail. 
11. Cooking and dealing drugs. (Invariably impure: people who can afford the good stuff just go to the Serpent Folk.)
12. Hired muscle, no questions asked.
13. Black magic - put curses on people who don't pay them off, will curse your enemies for a fee.
14. Cogslicing - the forcible reprogramming of kidnapped or captured automata, most of whom are then sold on as labourers. Detested by the Brass Folk, who regard it as a crime worse than murder.
15. Protection racket.
16. Smuggling.
17. Contract killers.
18. Kidnapping - rich victims are ransomed, poorer ones are sold into slavery.
19. Protecting the interests of a single neighbourhood or ethnic group, usually at the expense of their neighbours.
20. Vigilantes, who mete out rough-and-ready street justice in the name of their community. Regarded as local heroes.

Painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Special Asset (roll 1d20)

1. Mostly-sane Shining One who acts as the gang's scout and lookout.
2. Crate of stolen clockwork monkeys, which the gang uses as covert messengers.
3. Connections to Red Brotherhood, to whom they secretly feed information in exchange for occasional assistance in emergencies.
4. Connections to the People of the Rubble, who offer them escort and shelter in the Rubble in exchange for gifts and goods.
5. Have a stolen printing press in a basement, and know how to use it. Have a sideline in printing seditious literature for pay.
6. 1d3 gang members belong to the Unkindness, and their ravens act as spies for the gang.
7. Have taken over and partially repaired a large ruined building out in the Streets, which they use as a fortified base of operations.
8. Have mapped out a network of tunnels in the upper levels of the Maze, and use them as hideouts and a means of covert movement through the city.
9. The gang's members are devout (if not exactly righteous) believers in one of the religions of the Great Road, and the other members of their religious community are willing to offer them support and shelter in exchange for protection and a tithe of their profits.
10. The gang has stolen some clockwork hardware from the city's military - for small gangs this probably just means things like chatterswords or clockwork wings, but larger gangs might have a suit of steam knight armour, or even a stolen gyrocopter or mech.
11. 10% of the gang's members are Maimed, whom they use as spies and enforcers.
12. Nest of semi-tame brass-snout rats in a basement, whom the gang uses as guards and attack dogs.
13. The brother of one of the gangsters is a Golden One, who patches up wounded gang members in emergencies.
14. One of the gangsters is a renegade Steel Aspirant, who grafts crude clockwork prostheses onto the gang's crazier members.
15. The gang has some compromising blackmail material on one of the Cobweb families, and is able to extort occasional favours out of them in exchange for keeping quiet.
16. The gang has connections to one of the villages in the countryside outside the Wicked City, and the people there are willing to hide them from the authorities when they need to lie low.
17. The gang has a contact in one of the city's merchant houses, who feeds them information about poorly-guarded warehouses and juicy incoming shipments.
18. The gang has a contact in the Ministry of Civil Order, who warns them of upcoming busts and raids.
19. The spirits of the Streets seem to have adopted the gang as part of their weird nocturnal ecosystem, and by night the streets and houses will rearrange themselves to help them rather than to hinder them.
20. One member of the gang is an intelligent clockwork octopus. (And, yes, he takes fashion just as seriously as the rest of them!)

Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man... (Painting by Rudolf Weisse.)

Current Leader (roll 1d12)

1. A Blood Man, thrown out of his regiment for insubordination, who brawled his way up the gang's heirarchy and now dreams of accumulating enough wealth to enchant his own cauldron and start brewing up a regiment of his own. 
2. A renegade Serpent Folk poisoner who has burned her bridges with her community through the rather reckless application of her skills. Her alchemical abilities are mediocre, but she's a very good shot with a poisoned blowpipe. 
3. An amateur clockworker, self-educated but possessing considerable talent, who has rigged up a variety of crude clockwork traps and automata to assist the gang in its endeavours. His followers all carry cogworms, which they use to steal power from untended machines at every chance they get.
4. A fearsomely driven woman who secretly belongs to one of the cults of the Blue Necropolis, and hopes to use her gang to procure enough victims to empower the being that she believes to be a great and benevolent queen from the city's past, but is actually just a ravenous Hortlak horror waiting for a chance to gorge itself on human flesh.
5. A deserter from the city's armies, who found that criminal life suited him much better than a military career. His military experience is a real asset to the gang in turf wars, and he still has a lot of friends in the King's Men who are willing to help him stay out of trouble with the authorities.
6. The latest scion of a well-established crime dynasty, whose family has been running this gang for generations. Its members don't always agree with her decisions, but find the idea of anyone else being in charge more-or-less unthinkable. 
7. An escaped slave from the city's foundries, horribly scarred by the burns of hot iron that he endured during his years of hellish forced labour. Enormously tough and more-or-less immune to pain. He has nothing but hatred and contempt for the city's authorities, and longs to see the King's Tower levelled with the dust.
8. A renegade from the distant and half-legendary Sunset City, who fled her home years ago under circumstances she doesn't like to talk about, and didn't stop running until she reached the Wicked City. She has an excellent head for business, and the glass daggers and bladed chopines she brought with her from her homeland ensure that she can hold her own in a knifefight. 
9. A steppe nomad who originally came to the Wicked City as a horse merchant, and drifted into criminality after he failed to bribe the right officials and had his business confiscated by the city's government. The city's not much of a place for a horseman, but he's an excellent archer and a brutally effective wrestler. Under his leadership, the gang has adopted a rough-and-ready version of the warrior code of his far-off homeland, and consider themselves honourary steppe warriors - a claim that any true nomad would find ridiculous. 
10. A huge and heavily scarred woman, the veteran of a hundred pit-fights. Born into wretched poverty, she turned her strength to account in the most straightforward way she could find, by fighting for money; ultimately, she earned enough gold and reputation to set up a criminal enterprise of her own. Her renown as a near-invincible fighter is a major asset to her gang, helping her to intimidate their rivals into submission; but she's not as young as she once was, and she fears that one day someone younger and faster is going to call her bluff. 
11. A Brass Man, who has never been quite the same since he took a heavy blow to his brain-case. Abandoned his community for a life of crime and eccentricity. Builds abstract and weirdly beautiful clockwork machines in his spare time. 
12. A spiteful young woman who was born into one of the Cobweb families, but managed to alienate all her relatives and was ultimately disowned. Puts on a good show of imperious authority. Fantasises about the day she will return to her birthplace at the head of an army of cutthroats and reclaim her birthright at knifepoint.

Painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme.

The Blue Necropolis

One of my historical reference points for the Wicked City is late medieval and early modern Samarkand, and one of Samarkand's most famous sites is the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis. In reality, it consists of twenty-odd large mausoleums, spectacularly decorated with the characteristic blue-green tiles of the region, and mostly containing various Timurid-era dignitaries of the city. (Timur loved extravagant building projects almost as much as he loved large-scale atrocities against defeated populations.) But the Wicked City is much larger than Timurid Samarkand, and much more morbid; and so its equivalent is not just a single street of mausolea, but a whole wilderness of tombs. The people call it the Blue Necropolis.

Shah-I-Zinda necropolis, Samarkand.

In all there are several hundred grand tombs in the Blue Necropolis, although some of the oldest ones are now little more than wind-worn ruins marked with ancient and illegible names. Here, in elegant tiled mausolea, rest the great and good from past centuries of city's history: kings and queens, princes and princesses, scholars and generals, ministers and holy men. Here too, in huge and over-decorative tombs which testify to both the wealth of their builders and to their horrible lack of good taste, lie the dead members of the city's more recent dignitaries: the heads of Cobweb families, and the lucky minority of deceased ex-ministers whose careers ended with posthumous honours and state funerals rather than with midnight visits from the secret police. The building of each mausoleum can take years, and there's usually a work-gang of artisans and clockwork labourers sweating away somewhere in the Necropolis, building the latest monstrosity in honour of some recently-dead member of the city's elite. Being quieter than the Grand Bazaar district, and not subject to the bizarre curse which falls upon the Streets by night, the Necropolis also serves as a site for various forms of covert commerce, prostitution, and the sale of stolen goods.

When the Wicked King came to power, he purged most of the city's old aristocracy, killing or exiling their relatives and handing over their estates to the henchmen and sycophants who would go on to found the families of the Cobweb. In many cases these tombs are now the most substantial remaining monuments to their vanished power, and they have thus come to serve as natural meeting-points for the scattered and shattered remnants of those who still preserve some nostalgic loyalty to the old order. Distant cousins of murdered beys meet outside the mausolea of their ancestors, to clean their tiles and speak mournfully of the glory days of their family. Men and women whose great-grandparents served as officers under generals whom the Wicked King exiled, or as attendants to the holy men he martyred, meet at the tombs of their glorious predecessors and shake their heads at the doleful condition of their land.

Mausoleum in Shah-I-Zinda, Samarkand.

These meetings seldom come to anything, of course: the Wicked King's statue network runs throughout the necropolis, ensuring that no-one there dares to express any real disloyalty or sedition. But sometimes... sometimes, as they gossip and complain, the little gatherings are joined by voices from within the mausolea. Old voices. Thin voices. Voices speaking in antique dialects.

'What has happened to our city?', they murmur, plaintively. 'What has become of us?'

Shah-I-Zinda again.

The sad truth is this: under the influence of the city's miasmic spiritual corruption, more and more of the dead of the Blue Necropolis have begun to rise as Hortlaks, Those of them who return without intelligence just thump around inside their coffins, occasionally scaring passers-by with their muffled howling; but the more intelligent of them claw their way out of their graves and lurk inside their mausolea, listening at their sealed doors. The holy rites with which the mausolea were constructed prevent them from leaving their tombs; but they can and do speak through their doors, with lying, wheedling voices, cajoling the furtive groups who gather there into talking to them. Listening to them. Obeying them. And bringing them victims.

'Just let their blood run under the door', they say. 'This is old magic. It is secret. It is important. It will be the salvation of our city. You are heroes, you who are doing this. One day, your great deeds will be rewarded. Just a few more victims. Just two more. Or three more. Just let their blood run under the door...'

And so they feast, these horrible parodies of the city's long-dead dignitaries, ancient generals and princesses scrabbling around on all fours within their mausolea, licking blood from their cold stone floors with long and blacked tongues.

PCs looking for potential allies against the Wicked City's tyranny could easily end up crossing paths with the Necropolis gangs. They might well be willing - even eager - to believe the stories such gangs tell them, about great warriors and holy sages from the city's past ages lurking inside their tombs, waiting to burst out and free their nation if only they can be fed enough human blood. Some of the gangs have degenerated into mere murder cults, drunk on covert violence and misguided dreams of their own future glory; but others make a sincere effort to only kill the 'right' sort of victims (criminals, informers), and genuinely believe themselves to be working for the city's redemption. If the PCs can persuade them that no salvation worth having can really be achieved by pouring human blood into ancestral tombs, they could potentially become valuable allies. But if, on the other hand, the PCs enthusiastically join them in their endeavours, the consequences could potentially be dire.

For all of the Hortlaks of the Blue Necropolis have the same dream: that one day, glutted on blood, they will become so swollen with stolen life-force that they will be able to burst the doors of their mausolea and escape, laughing and ravenous, into the vast and victim-filled city outside...

Merchant houses of the Wicked City

Even in its decayed state, the Wicked City remains a major centre of trade in six commodities: clockwork technology, medicines and opiates, coal, guns, metalwork, and slaves. No foreign merchant likes visiting the place any more - although some of them guiltily look forward to it, as a chance to indulge in various horrible vices which the rest of the world has quite rightly forbidden - but as long as the prices stay competitive, then what are they supposed to do? Business is business, after all - and if they don't take advantage of the economic opportunities that the city offers, then their competitors certainly will.

And so the caravans continue to trek through the desert to visit the Wicked City, even though they assure the kings and holy men of their far-off homelands that they will give the place as wide a berth as possible on their long, long journey across the Great Road. They bring wine and grain, dye and coffee, cloth and silk and carpets; and they leave with bundles of guns and bales of opium and files of jerkily-marching clockwork soldiers, which they sell in distant marketplaces in order to enable the perpetuation of old and ruinous wars. When they return home again, who is to say which part of the money in their purses came from this trade, rather than from any other? The face of the Wicked King, after all, has never been stamped on any coin...

This trade is overseen (and largely controlled) by the merchant houses of the Wicked City. Before the city's decline, they were great merchant consortia, who traded across the length of the Great Road and returned with wealth to rival that of kings; and while their stature has shrunken along with that of their city, what they have lost in size and reach they have more than made up for in greed and guile. Their dilapidated mansions fill the streets around the Grand Bazaar, their rooms piled high with mouldering curios imported by their adventurous ancestors: stuffed animals from distant jungles, relics from far-off ruins, and books written in languages that no-one has spoken for a thousand years. Legendary treasures are rumoured to lie rusting in their hidden vaults, guarded by devious traps and unsleeping clockwork sentinels. Maps of half-mythical foreign kingdoms are pinned, sagging, to their stained and crumbling walls. And amidst all this decayed splendour their scions sit looking out at their soot-stained courtyards, their fingers heavy with antique rings, sipping strong coffee and clicking the beads of their abaci, calculating the profits of their trade. They know their city is corrupt, and that they live amongst evil and violence and squalor, but still - one must balance one's books, must one not?

There are dozens of such merchant houses in the Wicked City - far too many for it to be worth detailing them all individually. To generate one, use the following tables:

Primary Business (roll 1d12)

1. Exporting coal. (Will have strong connections with the city's mines.)
2. Exporting metalwork. (Will have strong connections with the city's foundries.)
3. Exporting clockwork technology. (50% chance of being Brass Folk; if they're not, they will have very good contacts in the Brass Folk community.)
4. Exporting medicines and opiates. (50% chance of being Serpent Folk; if they're not, they will have very good contacts in the Serpent Folk community.)
5. Exporting guns.
6. Importing and exporting slaves.
7. Importing silk and textiles.
8. Importing wine.
9. Importing grain.
10. Importing coffee.
11. Importing horses.
12. Importing gold, silver, and jewels.

Their mansion is... (roll 1d6)

1. Built around a single large courtyard, once bright with flowers and water, now blackened with smoke and soot.
2. Built around a series of smaller courtyards, each one opening onto the next.
3. Built like a small fort, with thick, heavy walls and narrow windows ideal for firing muskets out of.
4. A large building surrounded by lavish gardens, which are in turn surrounded by a high wall to keep the people of the city out.
5. A sprawling building containing a confusing labyrinth of rooms, connected to one another apparently at random by corridors, balconies, and staircases.
6. Built around a large central tower, in imitation of the spires of the Cobweb.

Their mansion contains... (roll 1d20 1d3 times)

1. Networks of concealed rooms and secret passages.
2. Hidden treasure vaults that even the current family don't know how to find.
3. Ingenious clockwork traps installed at strategic points to immobilise and/or kill intruders.
4. Vast networks of half-collapsed storage basements, which ultimately connect to the Maze.
5. A set of rooms which no-one goes into because everyone believes it to be haunted.
6. A staff of ancient, creaking clockwork servitors, who wordlessly serve the family in place of human servants. 
7. An exceptional menagerie of exotic animals, some of them extremely rare and dangerous.
8. An exceptional menagerie of clockwork animals, some of them extremely rare and dangerous.
9. An extraordinary collection of art from a far-off nation, collected by one of the current family's ancestors.
10. A secret room containing a miserable-looking peri in an iron cage.
11. Extensive alchemical laboratories, in which one of the the current family's ancestors sought the secret of eternal life. (1 in 6 chance that she sort-of-succeeded and is still down there, her withered body connected by dozens of metal tubes to the cumbersome alchemical apparatus which maintains it in a semblance of life.)
12. Marvellous fountains and water gardens, full of exotic fish.
13. A collection of fossilised dinosaur bones from the Cold Desert, including 1d6 complete skeletons.
14. 1d3 ravenous Storm Worms imprisoned in a hidden pit. 
15. 1d4 technically-not-quite-dead elder members of the family, their brains preserved within clockwork bodies so that they can continue to act as advisers for its business affairs.
16. An extensive collection of antique weapons and armour, drawn from many cultures.
17. Maps of a far country long believed to be entirely mythical, which the current family swear that their ancestors actually visited.
18. A small but impeccably-equipped observatory at the top of a high tower, complete with high-quality telescopes from the distant Sunset City.
19. A great library of poetical and philosophical works, written in many languages.
20. A large collection of notes, plans, and charts written by one of the previous heads of the house, relating to a never-completed expedition to investigate (and, if possible, seize and carry back) the Bronze Gods of the Frog Men.

The current head of the family is... (roll 1d12)

1. A ruthless social climber who aspires to their own tower in the Cobweb.
2. A loyal scion who dreams of restoring their family to its former glory, and is working steadily to turn that dream into a reality.
3. A scholar and a mystic, much given to abstruse philosophising while under the influence of opium.
4. Secretly a member of the Red Brotherhood, covertly channelling wealth towards resisting the wickedness of the city's government.
5. A once-ruthless merchant grown old and fearful, who now spends money lavishly on religious donations and holy relics in the hope of averting the wrath of heaven.
6. A decadent wastrel who squanders the wealth of their family in hedonistic self-indulgence.
7. A depraved cultist who worships the Wicked King in secret, and regularly purchases slaves for ritual sacrifice in a hidden shrine beneath their mansion.
8. An impractical dreamer, helplessly watching the fortunes of their family decline and longing for the better days of the past. 
9. A once-dutiful individual made reckless by desperation; they know that their family faces ruin within a few years unless some radical change occurs, and will do anything to save it.
10. Sick at heart of the cruelty of the Wicked City, and secretly planning to emigrate to somewhere less horrible while taking as much of their family and fortune with them as possible. 
11. A fearless merchant-adventurer, who has travelled through many lands and suffered many hardships, and boasts that they have seen all the wonders of the earth.  
12. A sleepless stimulant-addict, hooked on coffee and liquid brightness, who roams their mansion by night shaking and twitching, watching fearfully for some nameless threat to come creeping in from the darkness outside...

The Thirteen Ministries

From their offices high up in the King's Tower, the eight Lesser Ministers and the five Greater Ministers oversee the government of the Wicked City, such as it is. The primary concern of the Lesser Ministers is scheming to engineer their promotion to the ranks of the Greater Ministers. The primary concern of the Greater Ministers is keeping the Lesser Ministers firmly in their place. A shocking amount of gold, blood, and twisted ingenuity has been expended in the name of these two objectives over the years.

In the great hierarchy of abuse which makes up the social order of the Wicked City, the thirteen ministers are very, very close to the top; but this position makes their own vulnerability harder rather than easier to bear. How utterly unfair - how unbearably unjust - that they, who possess so much wealth and power and status that they can ruin the lives of lesser men with a mere gesture of their languid hands, should be as powerless as anyone else in the face of the secret police! And yet this is so: the thirteen ministers exist in the shadow of the fourteenth ministry, the Ministry of Information, whose workings they are not privy to and whose edicts they are not expected to question, only to obey. If the endless status games played by the thirteen ministers often seem almost incomprehensible in their cruelty and pettiness, it may be because their true purpose is not to reallocate actual power between them, but to distract their players from the fact that true control over the city does not rest with any of them, and never really did. They behave like vindictive gods among men to protect themselves from the knowledge of their own vulnerability. Their offices are decorated like palaces and defended like fortresses, but they know that none of that will count for anything if the secret police decide to pay them a call.

They hold meetings in a great chamber on the thirty-first floor of the King's Tower, around a huge table with fourteen chairs. At this table the thirteen ministers debate, snipe, harangue, insult, plot, scheme, declaim, manipulate, flirt, and rage at each other from their gilded thrones, while the masked representative of the Ministry of Information - always code-named Captain Six, even though it is obviously a different person each time - watches them impassively, seated in silence upon a simple wooden stool. Normally their meetings are fantastically unproductive, as each minister pushes their own pet projects and personal agendas into the teeth of the rest; but, from time to time, Captain Six will rise to his or her feet and modestly suggest a course of action. Then the thirteen ministers will all go very quiet and agree to do that, instead.

The thirteen ministers hate and fear Captain Six more than anything in the world. It is the only thing they have in common. They hate the fact that the secret police can't even be bothered to send the same person to each meeting. They hate the fact that none of them are brave enough to object to it. They have nightmares about that bland, featureless mask.

The five greater ministries are these: Trade, War, Diplomacy, Finance, and Religion.

The eight lesser ministries are these: Words, Heavens, Civil Order, Fortifications, Agriculture, Roads, Technology, and Industry.

These are their functions.

- The Ministry of Trade oversees the dealings of the city's great merchant houses, ensuring that a suitable cut of their take is redirected to the government's coffers, and that a sufficient number of the caravans of the Great Road continue to come to the Wicked City, however guiltily and furtively, to buy and sell those goods which can be traded nowhere else. The current minister is Shining Firuza, an elderly and embittered woman whose chief interest is in adding to her collection of antique ceramics. When she was younger she had a reputation as a fearsome black magician, but she has long since become disillusioned with sorcery, and her terrible grimoires now do little except gather dust upon her secret shelves.

- The Ministry of War has responsibility for the organisation and supply of the King's Men and the First Brigade, and deals with the defence of the city and the pacification of the surrounding countryside. The current minister is Uruslan the Benevolent, a cruel, limping old soldier who takes an obvious sadistic glee in doling out corporeal punishments to his inferiors. He is secretly a bone witch, and the fossilised dinosaur egg bound over his heart is the only thing which keeps his crippled body alive.

- The Ministry of Diplomacy is responsible for relations with foreign powers, which in practise means handling the vast networks of spies, informers, and secret agents that the Wicked City has embedded in every state for several hundred miles. The current minister is The Most Merciful Shahnoza, whose head is encrusted with so many layers of networked logician implants that she has to be accompanied everywhere by servants who help her to support the enormous weight of her giant mechanical brain.

- The Ministry of Finance deals with the collection of taxes, and the funding of all the other departments. Because none of the other ministries can function without money, this is generally viewed as the most powerful of the Thirteen Ministries (although, for precisely this reason, most of the other ministries have set up their own systems of extortion to provide them with revenue streams independent of the Ministry of Finance). The current minister is Farrukh the Glorious, a devious weasel of a man who spends most of his leisure time indulging in horrible combinations of mind-altering narcotics provided by the serpent folk.

- The Ministry of Religion is responsible for the maintenance of the Wicked City's awesomely corrupt state religion, which is now little more than a hollowed-out shell of what it once was. In practise this means that it maintains the city's temples and religious hierarchies, and squeezes money out of the population in the form of 'offerings'. The current minister is Her Supreme Holiness Umida, a brutally pragmatic woman who is only interested in religion insofar as it offers possibilities for personal self-enrichment. She has a healthy respect for its ability to inspire loyalty and dread, however, and demands actual worship from her unfortunate subordinates, insisting that she alone can interpret the will of heaven.

- The Ministry of Words is responsible for the regulation of printing, education, and theatrical performance in the city. (This also means that it provides the licences for the schools of the Mindblade Orders.) Its main activities are censorship and squeezing money out of people in exchange for licenses of various kinds - to print, to teach, to perform, and so on. The current minister is The Most Wise Durdona, whose veneer of high culture and profound emotional sensitivity conceals her shocking and amoral heartlessness. She plots to replace Shahnoza as Minister of Diplomacy.

- The Ministry of the Heavens is responsible for the city's observatories, and for the regular compilation and analysis of astrological predictions and horoscopes. For no very logical reason, it is also responsible for the Cloud Castle and the Air Corps. The current minister is Alisher the Just, a young man of exceptional physical beauty and limitless personal ambition, who craves power for its own sake and will break any number of lives to attain it. He schemes to replace Farrukh as Minister of Finance, and he has begun to worship the Wicked King in secret in the hope that this will help him to achieve his goals.

- The Ministry of Civil Order is responsible for maintaining civic order in the Wicked City and its dominions. In practise, this means maintaining the city's statue network and overseeing its fantastically unjust legal system, which exists mostly as a way of collecting additional revenues in the form of legal fees, bribes, and fines.The current minister is Gulnora the Radiant, a coarse and low-minded woman whose chief interests are in food, drink, and sex, and who is seldom seen without a handsome young Murder Harlot on her arm. She aspires, in a vague sort of way, to replace Umida as Minister of Religion.

- The Ministry of Fortifications is responsible for maintaining the vast ring of crumbling walls, towers, and forts which circle the Wicked City, as well as the various watchtowers and border forts which the city maintains out in the hinterlands. The current minister is Aziz the Magnificent, a weaver of labyrinthine conspiracies, who plots with infinite patience to remove and replace Uruslan as Minister of War.

- The Ministry of Agriculture oversees the operation of the city's farmlands, and the endless, thankless task of repairing their continually-crumbling irrigation networks. The current minister is Yulduz the Compassionate, a murderous psychopath with a room full of guns and a hair-trigger temper, who has been murdering her way up the ranks for her whole adult life and sees no reason to stop now. She currently has her sights on the Minister of Finance, Farrukh.

- The Ministry of Roads is responsible for keeping the streets of the Wicked City clear for traffic, and maintaining the roads which connect the city to the outside world. The ministry also maintains the network of messengers who carry communications back and forth across the city-state, and is responsible for keeping the roads clear of thieves and bandits, or at least ensuring that their numbers are kept down to a tolerable level. The current minister is Jamshed the Valiant, a paranoid wreck of a man who plots ruthlessly for his own advancement - not because he has any actual desire for power, but because he is convinced that only when he reaches the very top will he finally be safe. He makes heavy use of Maimed assistants, whose Cruel ears and eyes allow them to gather the information he needs to stay ahead, while also reinforcing his paranoid belief that the world is a relentlessly horrible place full of people who want him dead. He aims to displace Firuza as Minister of Trade as the next step in his ascent.

- The Ministry of Technology is responsible for the maintenance of the various clockwork automata upon which the city's economy relies, from the clockwork digging machines which excavate the irrigation channels in the fields, to the warehouses full of clockwork soldiers which stand in long, dusty rows, waiting to be wound up if the city ever comes under attack. The minister also acts as a kind of liaison between the city's government and its populations of Brass Men and Steel Aspirants, and has responsibility for the Clankers. The current minister is Sezim the Brilliant, a woman of great intelligence and charisma who uses her natural talents to coast through life in a careless and haphazard fashion, confident that she will always be able to find someone else to take the fall if things go wrong. (So far, she has always been proven correct.) She aspires to replace Shahnoza as Minister of Diplomacy, but hasn't really gotten around to doing anything about it.

- The Ministry of Industry deals with permits for the city's many foundries and furnaces, and with the operation of the coal mines up in the hills which feed their insatiable appetite for fuel. In practise, this means that most of the ministry's work is taken up with maintaining order and discipline among the army of slaves who work in the city's mines, and stamping out the regular escapes and rebellions among them. The current minister is Rostam the Charitable, a pallid, joyless workaholic who never seems to eat or sleep. He is a dogged advocate of the merits of necro-mechanical clockworking, which he insists is the magitechnology of the future, and his offices are full of zombies with weird clockwork prostheses which he keeps around as proofs of concept. Spiteful rumours accuse him of indulging in bizarre and outlandish sexual perversions behind closed doors, probably involving all those clockwork zombies. He plots to replace Firuza as Minister of Trade.

(A note on levels: most of the ministers are mid-level Tricksters. Firuza is a high-level Scholar with access to all kinds of horrible black magic, although she doesn't much like using it. Uruslan is a mid-level Fighter with a terrible Constitution score, and powerful magic weapons made from fossilised dinosaur bones. Shahnoza and Rostam are mid-level Scholars, though Shahnoza's logician implants allow her to effectively function as a human computer. Yulduz is a very high-level fighter who owns some of the finest guns ever made in the Wicked City, and is easily the most personally dangerous of the ministers in a straight fight. Specifics should be adjusted to suit individual campaigns.)

Feeding the Wicked City

Before its fall - back when it still had a name - the Wicked City was the jewel of the Great Road. None of the other oasis kingdoms could compete with its wealth or its splendour. Caravans thronged the roads that led to it. Almost a million people called it home.

Feeding a city of that size was a serious undertaking. Some of its food was brought to it by the caravans, imported from neighbouring kingdoms in exchange for the manufactured goods in which the city's artificers excelled; but most of it was grown locally, in the vast network of irrigated fields which surrounded the city. Every river for a hundred miles was tapped by networks of irrigation channels which carried their water far from their natural courses, making land fertile which would otherwise have been arid; and every stream which once trailed off into the desert was rerouted by the patient labour of the people, their waters channelled back into the fields, instead. A thousand wells were sunk deep into the ground to tap the waters of the oasis. Great underground aqueducts were dug through the earth to carry the water where it was needed most. The city's irrigation systems were accounted one of the wonders of the world.

Underground aqueduct, Iran.

As the city fell into wickedness and ruin, and its population declined, the vast infrastructure of its canals and aqueducts sank into decay. Today the productivity of its farmlands is less than a third of what it was at their height; the intricate system of shared labour by which the irrigation system was once maintained has now disintegrated almost entirely, and it is only preserved from complete collapse by the work-gangs of slaves and water-powered automata which are dispatched by the city's government at irregular intervals to carry out particularly urgent repairs. As the channels dry up, the people of many outlying villages have reverted to subsistence farming, or simply abandoned their homes in the face of accelerating desertification. The subterranean aqueduct system has become infested with pig-men, who burrowed into them from God knows where years ago, and entire sections of it are now effectively no-go areas. Rusting chunks of water-pumping machinery litter the countryside. Out on the borders, where the cultivated land fades into the desert and the authority of the city's government is especially tenuous, roving bandit gangs have converted a number of dried-out wells into makeshift oubliettes.

In their current state, the hinterlands of the Wicked City resemble a kind of crazy patchwork. A collapsed irrigation channel can lead to the development of a few square miles of desert, surrounded on all sides by fertile and productive farmland; similarly, a still-functional well can keep a patch of land in cultivation when everything around it has collapsed back into arid dust. When roaming through the surrounding countryside, the state of any given area can be determined by rolling 1d10:

1: Productive farmland. One of the lucky areas where the old maintenance system still more-or-less functions, with everyone taking turns to repair and maintain the irrigation channels on a system which seems nightmarishly complex to outsiders, but which seems as natural as breathing to the locals . The area produces a large surplus of agricultural produce, which is sold in the markets of the Wicked City to feed what remains of its population.

2: Recently repaired. The work gangs recently passed through here in a flurry of activity, and for now the aqueducts and irrigation channels are working again and the land is fertile and fruitful; but the arrangements put in place to maintain them are desperately inadequate, and it's obvious that the works will simply have to be repeated in a few years time.

3: Repairs in progress. This area is currently a hive of activity, with chain-gangs of sweating slaves clearing and repairing irrigation channels under the watchful eyes of their pitiless Blood Man overseers. Huge clanking clockwork automata chew through the earth wherever heavy digging work is required; and whenever the mainspring of one of the machines is almost unwound, it stomps off through the fields to dip its water-wheels in the nearest body of running water, gradually powering itself up again. A handful of engineers and bureaucrats are overseeing the work from a hastily-erected pavilion, worrying about how to get the repairs completed on-time and on-budget; security is provided by a detachment of the King's Men, who mostly view this assignment as an opportunity to engage in petty extortion among the villagers. Everything's very chaotic, and enterprising PCs could probably liberate a few slaves and ride off on a hijacked digging machine before anyone realised something had gone wrong...

4: Marginal farmland. The irrigation infrastructure out here is in a very poor state of repair, but enough water gets through that the locals are able to eke out harvests from the soil, and on good years sometimes even manage to raise a surplus to export to the Wicked City. Opportunistic bands of the King's Men occasionally ride through the area, checking if times are good enough for the people to have something worth stealing.

5: Subsistence farmers. The few wells and irrigation channels that still work out here are barely sufficient for the few remaining farmers to raise enough food to feed themselves. All the people who worked the poorer fields have long since fled, and even those who live on what was once the best land now supplement their harvests with hunting and scavenging in order to keep their families fed. Everyone here is so miserably poor that the King's Men never bother to come out here, and as a result that there's a one in four chance that each half-abandoned village is currently inhabited by 1d6 wanted criminals and/or political dissidents, hiding out here from the authorities.

6: Abandoned villages. The irrigation channels have collapsed, and this area has reverted to desert, crisscrossed with dried-out canals and abandoned farmhouses sinking into ruin. Each settlement has a one in three chance of having someone hiding within it. (Roll 1d4: 1 = crazy old hermit, 2 = impoverished scavengers, 3 = wanted criminals, 4 = band of pig-men.)

7: Bandit camp. Abandoned by most of its former inhabitants, this mostly-desertified area has become the home of a gang of bandits, who raid nearby roads and villages and stash their treasures and victims at the bottoms of dried-out wells. Roll 1d4 to determine the nature of the band: 1 = former farmers, starving and desperate, 2 = opportunistic bandits from the desert roads, 3 = criminal gang from the slums of the Wicked City, 4 = Brigands of the Noonday Dark.

8: Pig-man infestation. This area of farmland was once supplied with water by underground aqueducts, but now the aqueduct network has become infested with pig-men and all the human inhabitants of the area have fled. The pig-men mostly live underground, filling their slowly-collapsing aqueducts with filth, but make regular scavenging trips to the surface.

9: Rusted machinery. This was once a major pumping station, redirecting huge volumes of water for agricultural purposes; but now the farmland is desert, the villages are abandoned, and the pumps lie rusting within buildings half-fallen into ruins. Masses of broken heavy machinery and unstable walkways over huge, empty reservoirs make this a very unsafe place to move around, and thus potentially a very good place to lure someone for an ambush. There's a one in three chance that a band of scavengers live here, looting the old machines for components that can be sold in the Wicked City.

10: Underground aqueducts. A major system of underground canals once brought water to this region; today they are mostly dry and empty, a now-purposeless network of tunnels that runs for miles in every direction. Occasional bands of pig-men, nests of brass-snout rats, and miscellaneous tunnel-dwelling crazies mean that they're not exactly safe, but if properly mapped out they would provide a great way of secretly traversing the area. There is a one in three chance that, if the tunnels are followed for long enough, they will eventually lead into the Maze beneath the Wicked City itself.

The Wicked City: Story Hooks

I've written a fair bit about the Wicked City since starting this blog, but one thing which could probably have benefitted from being addressed more directly is why on earth PCs would end up there in the first place. The standard D&D dungeon has a built-in reason for people to want to go there, despite its dangers, in the form of treasure; but unless the campaign premise is 'liberate the Wicked City', why would your PCs ever want to go to this horrible half-ruined police state to begin with? My intent has been for the Wicked City to be a very 'sticky' location, insofar as once the PCs arrive, there's lots of things around to prompt them to either remain for longer than they intended or to make repeat visits in future. But first you need a reason for making that initial visit - so here are twelve...

Reasons for a brief visit to the Wicked City

1. To buy something which is only for sale in the markets of the Great Bazaar.
2. To seek out the clockworking expertise of the city's Steel Aspirants, which has no parallel elsewhere in the world.
3. To hunt down a wanted criminal who has fled to the city.
4. To seek out information known only to a famous spy, who has since taken up employment among the families of the Cobweb. 
5. To evacuate a specific individual or family from the city. 
6. To retrieve a magical or sacred item from the Maze.
7. To make contact with the Red Brotherhood on behalf of a foreign government with an interest in undermining the rule of the Wicked King.
8. To make contact with one of the Cobweb families, on behalf of a foreign patron who needs access to some knowledge or object which only they possess. 
9. To locate and free someone who has been imprisoned by the King's Men on trumped-up charges, probably because they looked like a good target for extortion. 
10. To broker a marriage between one of the Cobweb families and a foreign aristocrat who really, really needs to marry into money.
11. To locate and free someone who has been captured by the Brigands of Noonday Dark and sold into slavery in the Wicked City.
12. To make contact with the embassy of the Scarab Men in the Wicked City, as this is the only channel of communication known to exist between the Insect Queen and the outside world.

Once they're in the city, of course, their opportunities for becoming entangled with its horrible destiny multiply. PCs who appear to be competent (or simply cheap and expendable) might find themselves recruited as agents by any of the city's factions; idealistic PCs may be moved to take a stand against the city's injustices, especially if they've formed personal connections with some of its inhabitants, while more vengeful ones might turn against its government after one too many shake-downs by the King's Men. Then again, they could just be given some kind of mission that is likely to involve a lengthy stay in the city, as they gradually work out how to achieve their goals. Here are twelve possible reasons why PCs might find themselves needing to stay in the city long-term:

Reasons for a long-term stay in the Wicked City

1. One of the PCs, or someone close to them, has unwisely become hooked on some horribly addictive narcotic, and only the Serpent Folk of the Wicked City can supply them with their regular fix.
2. One of the PCs, or someone close to them, has fallen in love with one of the Wicked City's residents, and the Man With Stones For Eyes won't let them leave.
3. To find some way of liberating the Cloud Castle from the city's government, as a way of earning or repaying a major favour from the Blue Folk.
4. To free the spirit of the ancestress of the Children of the Pines from the King's Tower, as a way of earning or repaying a major favour from them.
5. To steal some kind of experimental military technology from the Clankers or the Air Corps on behalf of a foreign power. 
6. To rescue someone being held captive by the city's secret police in the Ministry of Information.
7. To free a peri who has been captured by the city's government, and is currently being used to power a weird perpetual motion machine somewhere in the King's Tower.
8. To find out what's going on at the top of the King's Tower, and who (if anyone) is actually running the Wicked City.
9. To steal the war mask once worn by the Wicked King before his disappearance.
10. To find out what has happened to the city's spirits.
11. To lay the groundwork for a rebellion against the city's government, preferably with the aid of the Red Brotherhood, the People of the Rubble, and the various inhabitants of the Maze.
12. To discover the city's true name, and the true nature of the Wicked King.

Minimalism and Maximalism (AKA 'do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Lore').

The first game setting I ever read wasn't a D&D book: it was Titan, the 1986 world-book which described the setting of the then-popular Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. As anyone who had an interest in fantasy and/or gaming during the 1980s will probably remember, Fighting Fantasy was everywhere at the time. (In retrospect, they played an obvious transitional role between the early tabletop RPGs of the 1970s, which they grew out of, and the computer RPGs of the 1990s, which ultimately supplanted them.) Early on, each FF gamebook was completely independent, with only the barest hints of any kind of shared setting. But then Titan came along, and mapped out - literally - how Firetop Mountain and Scorpion Swamp and The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom all fitted together as component parts of a single imaginary world, with its own history and gods and mythology and all the other stuff you'd expect to find in a fantasy setting.

This map has held a special place in my heart ever since.

At almost exactly the same time, the same thing was happening to D&D. The Keep on the Borderlands and The Lost City and The Palace of the Silver Princess aren't really located anywhere in particular: they're just places where adventures can happen. But as time went on, the D&D adventure modules started getting welded together: first as part of something called 'the known world', and then as components of the Greyhawk and Mystara campaign settings. And then the deluge of setting information began.

I have always found this process rather fascinating. In 1994, the background of Warcraft consisted of little more than 'Orcs from orc-world are attacking humans from human-world! Now fight!' 23 years on, there's more Warcraft lore than you can shake a level 110 Blood Elf Death Knight at. Shortly before Magic: The Gathering went into production in 1993, Richard Garfield decided that just having cards called 'Dryads' or 'Dragon' or 'Warlord' sounded a bit bland, so he went through the list adding nonsense adjectives: Shanodin Dryads, Shivan Dragon, Keldon Warlord, and so on. 24 years later, there have been entire novel cycles written about the heroes of Keld and the histories of the Island of Shiv. In 2001, a couple of brothers from Cambridge coded a simple little online game called Runescape, where you could run around a fantasy village and do a few quests for the locals and fight goblins out in the woods. 16 years worth of weekly updates have turned this minimalist concept into a sprawling, baroque nightmare of false gods and dying worlds and hidden secrets. Let's not even get into what's happened to Warhammer 40,000 in the three decades since some innocent Games Workshop staff member first said: 'What if we did Warhammer, but, like, in space?'

Lore accumulates. It accumulates fast. A dungeon grows into a wilderness which grows into a campaign world. When I was 14, and I had just started a new AD&D campaign, I drew a circle in the middle of a piece of paper and said to the players: 'This is an inland sea. The dwarves live to the north-east and the elves live to the south-east and the humans live everywhere else.' By the time I was 18 I had written hundreds of pages of information on the geography and history and races and religions of the enormous fantasy world which now sprawled out in every direction from that original circle-on-a-map. To my shame, I think I can even still remember most of it. (Narsier. Utrean. Faserik. The Cathideni City-States. The Throongorm Mountains, whose foothills were home to the Blackfang goblin tribes. The Bloody Plains. The Men of the Keeps. The Forest of Whispering Trees.) The rise of the internet has made it very clear that the creation of immense imaginary worlds, complete with myths and legends and lineages of kings and whatnot, is not some rare and difficult achievement. Quite the contrary: it can be, and very often is, accomplished by anyone with a bit of spare time and a word processor.

How much lore is too much lore? Everyone has different tolerances. Some people will always prefer the most minimalistic, lightly-sketched-in version of a setting to anything that comes later: the 1977 version of Star Wars, the 1987 version of Warhammer 40,000, and so on. Others really love the sheer piling up of information for information's sake, preferring the most complex and fully-detailed versions precisely because of their detail and complexity. As far as RPGs go, though, I think the key point to bear in mind is probably that the low-lore and high-lore settings are different kinds of tools, which are useful for different kinds of games:

• A minimalist approach presents a setting as though from an outsider's perspective, in which only the most sailent characteristics of the situation are immediately obvious, and the reasons why things are the way they are is often unclear. It thus encourages PCs to act like outsiders, engaging in activities such as exploration, crime, raiding, and the disruption of established social orders and hierarchies.  
• A maximalist approach presents a setting as though from an insider's perspective, in which the complex web of relationships and institutions and traditions which bind different elements of the setting together are intimiately understood. It thus encourages PCs to act like insiders, engaging in activities such as trade, politics, or military service, which rely on all parties having a reciprocal understanding of their relationships with society as a whole. PCs in such settings are much more likely to join established groups and work within them, rather than just trying to rip them off or tear them down. 

A minimalist setting will feel open, mysterious, and full of possibilities, its history and geography a largely-blank canvas across which the PCs can paint their own crazy destinies. A highly-detailed setting, by contrast, will feel defined and bounded, with PCs much more likely to try to seek places for themselves within the limits defined by its existing social systems - even if it is exactly the same setting. You can describe a setting as vast and wide-open and full of mystery and adventure, but if you then go on to explain everything about it in encyclopedic detail then it will feel small and cramped and fussy, no matter how many thousand-mile wildernesses you draw on your map. (Exhibit A: the Forgotten Realms.) By the same token, even if your setting is described as crazily complex, it will feel as though it is open to freewheeling adventure as long as that complexity is communicated through broad-brush outlines and maybe a random table or two.

I've deliberately kept the level of detail and interconnectedness in ATWC very low, in order to encourage that outsider's perspective, and to ensure that everything feels suitably open. But if you wanted your PCs to feel like insiders to one part of the setting - their home khanate, for example - then one could easily detail that bit of the world in great thoroughness, presenting PCs with lists of clans for their characters to be from, famous warrior lineages they might be descended from, ancestor spirits whom they might revere, wrestling tournaments they might have taken part in, and so on. In fact, the contrast between their highly-detailed homeland and the lightly-sketched-in world outside - 'It's a city which trades in... um... goods and services? Anyway, there's lots of rich merchants about. Wanna rob one?' - might be quite a good way of emphasising the difference between their insider-perspective into their own culture, and their outsider-perspective on the huge and mysterious world outside. Their homeland is a place to live in. But the outside world is a place for adventure...