Blackbellows Bastion
"Here the air tastes of smoke and sin, and every smile shows teeth." -First Mate Yara ‘Six-Toes’ Brinn
Blackbellows Bastion is a scar on the cliffside, a hive of rot and riches clinging to The Battlement Cliffs' northern face like a barnacle that forgot how to die. The smoke never clears here, it hangs heavy and sweet as sin, rising from forges, brothels, and burning ships until the very sky turns black with it. They call it a haven, but that’s a lie whispered between murderers. It’s a maw, the last place a man sees before the sea swallows him whole. Every beam drips tar, every smile hides a blade, and every prayer comes with a price stamped in blood. At its heart festers Captain Albert “Blackheart” MacLeod, his cursed Hooked hand drinking his life drop by drop to grant himself luxury, while his city rots on the fumes of its own greed. The Bastion pretends to be lawless, but the law here is older and crueler, take what you can, leave nothing behind, and never, ever, show weakness. Its docks ring with coin and cannon-fire, its alleys with laughter too close to screams. Here, you can buy anything, a name, a lover, a soul, if you’ve got the gall to keep it. To find Blackbellows Bastion is to damn yourself twice, once when you glimpse the smoke, and again when you decide to follow it. Sail in, and fortune might kiss you. Or she’ll gut you for parts and sell what’s left to the next fool chasing the same promise.Demographics
The Bastion teems with life both temporary and entrenched, its heartbeat set to the pulse of tides and bloodshed. Its population swells like a storm tide during raiding season, when every dock is crammed with ships stacked two deep, and shrinks in leaner months, leaving only the die-hards, debtors, and drunkards. The Bastion draws those with no other harbor, fugitives fleeing justice, failed revolutionaries with burnt banners still in their hands, exiled nobles clinging to tatters of silk, and shipwreck survivors whose minds broke long before their hulls did. Here, bloodlines blur, children born in the Bastion grow up with saltwater in their veins, learning to climb rigging before they can read, their first lullabies the sound of waves against wood and steel striking steel. Strange minorities form in hidden corners: a small enclave of half-drowned, pale-skinned sea-wives said to worship something older than the tides; a knot of desert nomads who speak only among themselves and work the gunpowder kilns; and a dwindling group of monks-turned-brigands who keep a firelit shrine in a backwater alley to “the Last Watcher.”
Government
Blackbellows Bastion is ruled in name by Captain Albert “Blackheart” MacLeod, whose word is technically law, though it’s whispered that law here is written on smoke and erased by the wind. His Hook makes him both feared and envied, but the man himself has gone to ground, holding court in the High Hammocks and sending orders through intermediaries instead of taking the helm. In practice, the Bastion is held together by the Dockmaster’s Moot, a loose cabal of the most influential captains in port. They meet irregularly in the chart-room of The Furnace, a place thick with heat and suspicion, where sea charts are weighed against ledgers and grudges. Each member is both a ruler and a rival. The Code of the Bastion, enforced with selective cruelty, keeps some semblance of order:
- No ship may fire on another within sight of the Cove. The last captain to break this was found in pieces across seven docks.
- All debts to the shipwrights and taverns must be settled before departure. Crews who fail to pay often vanish en route.
- Mutiny in port is punishable by hanging, for the mutineer and the captain who allowed it.
- Theft is permitted only outside the Bastion’s walls.
Defences
Approaching the Bastion is an exercise in suicidal navigation. Its only true entrance is a narrow, foam-choked channel hemmed in by black spires of rock, each large enough to hide a dozen cannon.
- Shore Batteries - Rotating platforms of cannon, mortars, and stolen naval rifles.
- Cliff Cauldrons - Iron vats of burning pitch that can be tipped to turn the entrance into a wall of fire.
- Ballistae & Crossbow Nests - Placed to pick off rigging, not men, crippling sails before a ship can turn.
- Hidden Mines - Powder-filled barrels tethered just beneath the waves, their locations known only to seasoned pilots.
Industry & Trade
Blackbellows Bastion survives and thrives on black market commerce:
- Shipbuilding - The shipwrights here can craft a sloop in days or a frigate in weeks, no questions asked.
- Smuggling - Exotic goods, banned magicks, and stolen treasures change hands daily.
- Vice - Brothels, fighting pits, gambling dens, and opium parlors operate without limit.
- Slavery - Folk of every stripe pirates can get their hands on, Humans, Whogi, Devils; It doesn't stop with sentient creatures either, beasts, aberrations, insects. The very souls of folk themselves are bought and sold openly as a deck of cards. No one is safe from a pirate's greed, you can and will be exploited or trafficked if you aren't careful.
- Forgery & Fencing - Documents, crests, and coats-of-arms replicated for a price; stolen goods laundered through shell crews.
Infrastructure
The Bastion is a multi-tiered hive of piers, docks, and stacked buildings clinging to the cliff face, linked by a chaos of rope bridges, lifts, and tunnels bored into the rock. Below, the Black Docks accommodate even the largest galleons, while above, the Smokehouse Row shipyards feed the forges that earned the Cove its name. Rainwater is collected in cliff cisterns, while food arrives in the form of salted fish, dried meat, and whatever crews bring back from raids.
Districts
- The Black Docks - The main harbor; chaos given timber and tide.
- Smokehouse Row - For shipwrights, forges, and cannon founders.
- The High Hammocks - Luxury quarters for captains and high-rolling criminals; where Blackheart wastes his days.
- Gallows Green - The open square where executions are held; also doubles as a marketplace.
- Bilge Alley - The filthiest drinking dens and cheapest brothels; “where virtue goes to die.”
Assets
The Bastion’s most famous asset is the Hook, in Blackheart’s possession. Its second is location, hidden, defensible, and close to prime hunting waters. Add to that the shipyards, the powder magazines, and the sheer concentration of skilled killers, and the Bastion is a power far greater than its size suggests.
Guilds and Factions
- Dockmaster’s Moot - Collective leadership of the Bastion, composed of numerous, constantly changing leadership, its 'offices' filled with whichever 13 pirates are the most respected, or still-alive, at any point in time docked within the Bastion long-term.
- The Dwarfish Cartel - Honorable yet illicit criminals who dip their toes in the black markets here though at a respectable distance, uncomfortable with melting pots of criminal factions they cannot control, bureaucratical as their group is. Saboteurs, smugglers and exploitation for-hire atop select assassination. Only a small presence is ever active here, but a valued one for the cartel's specialty in pilfered magickal tools like invisibility potions, outlawed and heavily monitored by The Arcane Coalition, the Cartel's smuggling network renown for its near monopoly on moving such goods.
- The Orcish Crime Syndicate - Folk trafficking, murder-for-money, theft, and any other brutish arrangement so-long as your money is good. They are quite entrenched here, the income-based arrangements and their cooperation with any with 'honest' coin, have seen that they have stayed that way longer than any standing faction here aside from the Moot itself; The pirates pay the Orcish criminals, the Orcish criminals do what they do best. The Skinmerchants - Slavers and flesh-brokers.
History
Legends say the Bastion began as a smuggler’s dock for deserters from the King’s Navy, hidden behind a curtain of smoke and stone. Over decades, it became a raider’s nest, then a fortress, and finally the churning black-hearted leviathan housing brigands from all across the known world we are familiar with today.. A more sinister version of the tale claims the Bastion was built atop an older ruin, some fortress dedicated to a foul, wrathful god swallowed by the sea long before men came to the cliffs. Fishermen dredging the deeps near the entrance have hauled up chains of a metal no forge can cut.
Points of interest
- Deadman’s Dock - Sometimes referred to as such, as according to superstition says each crew that moors here gains a ghost.
- The Furnace - A ring of forges burning day and night to keep the city and its many transient ships in-need of repairs afloat.
- Sirena’s Wake - The richest brothel in the Bastion, perhaps the entire world, and assuredly with many in its employ who aren't there willingly.
- The Hanging Steps - A cliffside staircase leading to the main guard tower outside the entrance, lined with dangling bones, the many, bloodied trophies of raids past.
Tourism
Tourists here are either pirates or fools. Some survive; most don’t, none forget it.
Architecture
A chaotic stack of ships’ hulls repurposed into homes, cliff-bolted shacks, and sailcloth awnings. Everything smokes, creaks, and sways.
Geography
Wedged between the Northern Battlement Cliffs and the Bay of Knives, the Bastion is invisible from open water unless you know the markers, two jagged spires nicknamed The Jaw. Even from land, the smoke cloaks its true size, giving the illusion of a single cove when in truth it stretches deep into the rock like a burrow.
Climate
Mild maritime with heavy fogs that roll in like ghosts, clinging for days. Storms come fast and hard, and the smoke from the forges never clears completely, staining the sky a permanent bruised gray.
Natural Resources
The Bastion lives off the sea: saltwater fish in endless supply, cliff guano harvested for powder, driftwood for fire, and scavenged timbers from wrecks. More curious is the “green glass” occasionally found along the tideline, its faint hum drawing both fortune-seekers and those who would rather it be buried again.
-A Pirate's Castle.
Alternative Name(s)
'Pirates'.
Population
5,000 hardened souls, 12,000-15,000 during peaks in trade and raiding.
An intriguing setting, well drawn. Good job! If I may, however -- I found your body font to be a hindrance to my enjoyment of the article -- it's fine for titles or sub-titles, but as your main font it's just distracting and hard to read. Please consider something other than an all-caps font. A good serif font would work wonders, I think.
I'm glad you liked the setting, and I have also heard the font complaint before. I do plan on making a change I just haven't gotten around to it but hearing that issue again has definitely moved it up the list. Thank you for the comment my friend.