Greatshadow

Greatshadow is a hard place for hard people, its population a mix of miners, masons, traders, and mercenaries, with only a handful of true aristocrats who live far from the dust and gunfights. Humans make up the majority, though Dwarfish craftsmen hold great influence. Orcish, travelers from their less-civilized lands of dinosaurs and barbarians, carve out livings as laborers or hired muscle, while smaller populations of Goblins work in explosives, tunneling, and less scrupulous trades.

Technically part of Everwealth, Greatshadow is governed, really, only by whoever has the power to enforce their will. The appointed governor, Lord Eustace Drakewell, is little more than a figurehead, his influence extending no further than the walls of his fortified estate. In truth, power lies in the hands of wealthy mine barons, mercenary leaders, and the ever-present threat of mob justice. The influence of Lough Shears adds another sizeable layer to the city's power struggle. Shipbuilders, dockmasters, and merchants who depend on the lake’s waters wield considerable influence, creating a secondary economy separate from the mining elite. With unchecked piracy and smuggling along its shores, new factions have begun to take root, challenging the city’s already fragile hierarchy.

With little in the way of formal military presence, Greatshadow relies on hardened mercenaries, hired guns, and raw desperation to protect itself. The city’s geography serves as its greatest defense, surrounded by sheer cliffs, narrow passes, and winding mountain trails that make a direct assault nearly impossible. Fortified outposts and sniper nests line the city’s highest ridges, ensuring that any would-be invader must fight uphill against deeply entrenched soldiers. The waters of Lough Shears, however, present an unpredictable frontier. The city has attempted to control its lakeside docks, but pirate vessels and rogue traders use the deep bends between the cliffs to conduct business outside official oversight. While some factions have fortified sections of the lakeshore, true control of the water remains elusive. However, internal conflict is just as deadly, rival factions control different parts of the city, ensuring that violence is never more than a trigger pull away.

Mining and stonecutting are the backbone of Greatshadow, providing raw materials for the kingdom even as its people struggle for survival. Black-market weapons, smuggled relics, and outlawed goods flow through the city unchecked, making it a haven for those who deal in things best left unsaid. The city's artisans craft the finest stoneworks in Everwealth, while its mercenaries and bounty hunters make their living off the constant cycle of violence and retribution. Yet with Lough Shears acting as a maritime lifeline, shipbuilding has surged as a secondary industry. The city’s harbors produce war galleys, merchant barges, and smuggler skiffs, reinforcing Greatshadow’s importance as a naval supplier. The lake’s rich fish stocks also provide sustenance, with salted and smoked catches becoming an unexpected export.

Greatshadow’s streets are chiseled into the mountainside, a city of shadows, stone, and narrow passes, where bridges, tunnels, and scaffolded paths weave between sheer cliffs and deep quarries. The city’s architecture is crude but sturdy, its buildings carved from raw stone or reinforced timber, designed to withstand both harsh mountain winds and stray bullets. The city’s lough-front infrastructure is a mix of necessity and decay. Docks stretch along the calmer shores, some bustling with trade, others little more than half-rotted piers over dirty water full of dead bodies. Warehouses, fishmongers, and shipyards cluster near the water, forming an industrial zone separate from the city’s stone-cutting heart.

• The Quarry Quarter is the city’s beating heart, where stone and ore are mined, cut, and shipped off to distant cities. The air is thick with dust and the clang of hammers, and wages are low, ensuring a steady stream of desperate workers willing to risk injury, collapse, or worse.

• The Gilded Scar is a deceptive name for the city’s merchant district, where traders, smugglers, and black-market dealers sell everything from mining equipment to stolen artifacts. It is chaotic, dangerous, and incredibly profitable, with deals made over tables lined with cards, blood, or both.

• The Highstone Ridge houses the wealthy elite, such as they are, mine barons, business owners, and the rare noble who fancies themselves ruler of this broken city. Their homes are carved into the mountains themselves, fortified against bandit raids and desperate revolutionaries alike.

• The Bone Alley is where debts are settled. A winding row of gambling halls, bounty offices, and execution yards, this is where the city’s many vendettas, debts, and feuds meet their bloody conclusion.

• The Shearside Docks - A sprawling network of piers, warehouses, and shipyards along Lough Shears. Legitimate trade mingles freely with smuggling, piracy, and the black-market shipwrights who serve both.

Too valuable to abandon, too violent to fully civilize, the city endures as one of Everwealth’s most profitable liabilities. Its quarries remain among the finest in the kingdom, producing dense structural stone prized for fortresses, ports, and war roads. Every block hauled from the Stonejaw Mountains strengthens Everwealth’s borders, even as it erodes the lives of those who cut it free. Chief among the city’s critical assets is the Greatshadow Limeworks, a surviving pre-Schism industrial kiln complex built to supply mass construction during the final days of The Lost Ages. Its furnaces still burn day and night, converting limestone into high-grade mortar and primitive concrete. Though dangerously outdated, the Limeworks endure through brutal maintenance, patchwork engineering, and expendable labor; Like slaves. Whoever controls its output controls rebuilding efforts across the region, making it a quiet chokehold on Everwealth’s defensive future; A different hand steering the wheel every year in a brutal, fatal contest of shady business practices. Equally indispensable is the Greatshadow Winch & Hoist Foundry, an ironworks devoted to massive load-bearing machines, cable systems, and vertical transport rigs once designed to lift stone blocks the size of siege towers from the mountain’s depths.
These machines remain irreplaceable. No modern craft can reproduce their tolerances, and no replacement exists for their scale. The Foundry’s winches haul quarry loads, dock cargo, ship timbers, and even entire scaffold platforms over chasms that plunge out of sight. Accidents are frequent, fatal, and quietly written off. Control of the Foundry means control of extraction, construction, and logistics, power worth killing for, and often paid for in full. Finally, Lough Shears itself, since the city began has remained the most contested asset. Heavily trafficked, patrolled on-paper and lawlessly exploited in practice. Shipyards, fisheries, and freight piers line its shores, feeding both legitimate trade and a thriving economy of smugglers. Pirates slip between the coves waiting to take you, your possessions, and your loved ones for everything they can get. Everything. The lough is secured enough to function, that is they best it can do. Every faction wants a piece, and no one can afford to lapse for a second. Greatshadow’s wealth is stable, its crime endemic, and its infrastructure indispensable. The city does not collapse because too many people are invested in keeping it exactly as broken as it is.

Greatshadow is ruled by stone, water, coin, ink, and blood; No faction present can afford to leave, or allow another to dominate unchecked.

• The Ram's Riders - Greatshadow hosts one of the densest Rider presences outside Opulence, due to its strategic position between mountain routes and Katharan trade lanes. Relay Houses near the docks and quarry roads operate day and night, carrying military orders, trade ledgers, and sealed correspondence between Everwealth, Kathar, and the frontier. Their horns sound often here, enough that locals distinguish “routine gallops” from “death rides.” While officially neutral, the Riders’ routes determine which factions receive warnings, and which are caught unprepared.

• The Merchant's Consortium - The Consortium maintains a powerful logistical footprint in Greatshadow, controlling bulk stone contracts, shipping insurance across Lough Shears, and the financing of shipyards and warehouses. Though they avoid overt governance, their coin dictates dock security, caravan schedules, and which factions receive credit or collapse under debt. A particularly infamous Consortium broker-house operates lakeside, rumored to negotiate trade pacts and quiet embargoes with Kathar under cover of legitimate commerce.

• The Scholar's Guild - Ever-present under the charge of education and recording history, the Scholar’s Guild operates colleges, survey offices, and cartography halls throughout Greatshadow. Officially, they teach literacy to miners’ children and maintain geological records. Unofficially, they catalog tunnel collapses, ancient shafts, and ruin-adjacent zones no one else maps anymore. Their presence ensures information flows outward faster than it ever returns, and few doubt they know more about the mountain’s depths than they admit.

• The Iron Claw Mercenary Company - Hired muscle for mines, docks, and caravans alike. Their contracts shift weekly, making them both stabilizers and instigators. Many believe Iron Claw leadership plays factions against each other to ensure permanent demand for their services.

• The Black Veins - Smugglers, relic runners, and fixers who exploit the oldest tunnels and Knife-Bends along the lake. They move goods the Consortium won’t touch openly and messages the Riders won’t acknowledge, thriving in the margins between legitimate trade and outright crime.

Founded as a simple quarry town, Greatshadow grew into a city of outlaws, exiles, and opportunists. Over the centuries, it became Everwealth’s greatest source of stone and ore, but with its riches came lawlessness and bloodshed. Gangs, mercenaries, and mining barons shaped its evolution, turning it into a city ruled by the gun rather than the crown. Now, with Everwealth’s armies stretched thin and the roads crawling with danger, Greatshadow is left to fend for itself, and those who live there wouldn’t have it any other way.

• The Mines - Vast, labyrinthine excavations descending into the Stonejaw Mountains. Both the city’s lifeblood and its graveyard, the mines yield fortune and madness in equal measure. Many tunnels end in ruin, or worse, in silence.

• Gallows Square - The city’s brutal heart of justice, where hangings, shootings, and public floggings serve as entertainment as much as deterrent. Its beams are rarely empty, its crowds never silent.

• Bonebreaker’s Pit - Greatshadow’s infamous fighting arena, where miners, mercenaries, criminals and slaves settle blood debts before roaring crowds. Less-popular than others, sanitation a large concern... Nonetheless fists, blades, pistols decide fates, and the betting never stops.

• Castle Lough - The heavily fortified estate of Count Eustace Drakewell. Its stone walls and armed guards make it a symbol of authority in name only, for few still heed its decrees.

• The Knife-Bends - Hidden coves along the lake’s jagged cliffs where pirates, smugglers, and fugitives conduct business under moonlight. The water here runs deep, and red, when deals go bad.

• Blackcap Powderworks - The thunderous mills where Greatshadow’s gunpowder and dynamite are made. The air is thick with smoke and danger, and one spark too many could erase the district entirely.

If one comes to Greatshadow, it is typically for work or desperation rather than solely for pleasure. Wealthy investors and merchants arrive to inspect their mining operations, mercenaries and bounty hunters seek work, and criminals on the run find refuge among the many locals willing to trade silence for a price. Treasure Hunters and ruin delvers occasionally brave the mines, lured by tales of buried vaults and lost relics, though few return with more than a bullet or a missing limb. Yet should one seek reprieve, there exist many avenues albeit for the, rougher, sort. Gambling dens, brothels, illicit fighting rings and drug dens aplenty, ensuring that coin never lingers long in anyone’s pocket, by temptation, or force. There is little in the way of true hospitality, most inns double as fortresses, and those who fail to keep their wits about them rarely make it through the night.

Greatshadow’s architecture is sturdy, practical, and completely devoid of luxury. The majority of buildings are carved directly from the mountainside, reinforced with timber and iron, their exteriors weathered by wind and soot. Stone structures dominate the city, often scarred by bullet holes and old fire damage, while wooden scaffolding, rope bridges, and makeshift platforms crisscross the cliffs, allowing access to different levels of the settlement. Iron-braced saloons, grimy bunkhouses, and fortified mining offices stand as the only true businesses, their interiors dimly lit by lanterns and perpetually filled with the scent of smoke, whiskey, and blood. The city has no grand halls or towering monuments, only dust, sweat, and the constant clang of pickaxes against stone.

Nestled in the shadow of the Stonejaw Mountains, Greatshadow is carved into rocky hills and ridges, its roads winding along jagged cliffs and deep mining pits. The terrain is harsh and uneven, with frequent landslides and rockfalls shaping the landscape over generations. Sparse scrubland and pine clusters dot the outskirts, though the deeper wilderness is known for predators, bandits, and worse.

Greatshadow endures long, bitter winters with harsh winds and frequent snowfall, while summers bring brief but scorching heat. The mountains trap cold air and mist, often keeping the city shrouded in gloom, adding to its namesake. Sudden storms and heavy rains frequently flood tunnels and erode roads, making travel a constant gamble.

Greatshadow’s wealth extends beyond its mountains, with Lough Shears providing an essential, often overlooked, bounty. The lake's deep waters offer valuable fish, while its mineral-rich silt is prized by farmers along its banks. The timber-rich shores supply wood for Greatshadow’s growing shipbuilding industry, particularly the robust Shipwright’s Timber used in durable lake-faring vessels. The lake’s unpredictable tides frequently unearth valuable and rare, but dangerous, Mire-Iron deposits, adding to the region’s metal supply. Despite the city's reliance on mining, the growing maritime trade has led to an increasing demand for ship-ready materials, further entwining Greatshadow’s fate with Lough Shears.