Ludendorf
Ludendorf, the industrial heart of Lamordia, is a city of choking smog, groaning machinery, and relentless progress. Built on the northern shore of the Sea of Secrets, it sprawls outward in black-bricked blocks and iron trestles, a place where coal dust settles like snow and the sky glows orange with forge-light even at midnight.
Ludendorf is a city in motion, powered by gears, pistons, and the ambition of its ruling elite. Towering smokestacks loom above rows of narrow housing blocks, each building trembling with the rhythm of nearby turbines or conveyor lifts. The scent of oil, sulfur, and molten metal clings to every stone. Whole neighborhoods are built around specific industries—textiles, metalworks, tanneries—and all are driven by an obsessive belief in rational invention and technological supremacy.
Progress is everything. Human suffering is a cost of doing business.
Ludendorf is where enlightenment becomes obsession, where flesh is made obsolete, and where the soul is just another variable in a scientific formula. It's a city that builds its future from the bones of its people, and insists it’s doing them a favor.
Government
The true rulers of Ludendorf are the Barons of Industry, a cabal of wealthy factory owners who control the city through guilds, private enforcers, and legal manipulation. Each baron sponsors particular sectors of research and maintains private security drawn from the city's disillusioned working class. Their wealth keeps Ludendorf’s gears turning, but their greed ensures its people are ground down alongside the ore.
Some say these barons no longer even meet in person—only through brass golems or phonograph calls, to keep their hands clean.
Industry & Trade
For the workers, Ludendorf is a life of early mornings, back-breaking shifts, and nights haunted by steam sirens and phantom tremors. Factories run ceaselessly, powered by laborers housed in bleak dormitories or cramped tenements. Children work alongside adults, breathing the same poisoned air. Those who falter vanish into alleyways or reappear stitched into medical "volunteer" records at the university.
The city’s few entertainments—mechanical theaters, gaslit drinking halls, and illicit alchemical dens—offer distraction, but little hope.
Points of interest
At the city’s soot-streaked center rises Ludendorf University, an austere campus of clock-faced towers and glass-domed laboratories. Scholars here chase knowledge with ruthless intensity, funded by morally bankrupt barons who use the institution’s discoveries to improve their factories or weapons. Departments of engineering, biology, necrotech, and arcano-mechanics operate under strict rationalist dogma—superstition is ridiculed, and magic is treated as a flawed branch of physics.
Whispers speak of hidden laboratories beneath the school, where ethics are dissected as easily as cadavers.
Climate
- Color palette: Grays, sooty blacks, and glowing copper
- Sounds: Clanking chains, steam whistles, ticking clockwork, distant screaming
- Smells: Burning oil, iron, chemical smoke, formaldehyde
- Vibe: A cold Enlightenment gone wrong—reason without restraint
Comments