Absalom

“As a venture-captain, I’ve dispatched Pathfinder agents all across the Inner Sea and beyond, and I can tell you for a fact that there’s no city better than Absalom. Here in the City at the Centre of the World, a day at the market might turn up more priceless historical antiquities and magical treasures than a lucrative archaeological expedition anywhere else. The city is old. Osirion old. Aroden old. It’s been around since the beginning of the Age of Enthronement, gathering treasures, gathering secrets. The Pathfinder Society is based here for a reason: Absalom is the delve that never runs dry." —Drandle Dreng, Venture-Captain of Absalom.

Districts

Ascendant court

The geographical and metaphorical heart of Absalom, the Ascendant Court is the centrepiece of the city’s religious faith and the hub of its great thoroughfares. Piety is the order of the day here, but as just about every cult has its own definition of faith, the Ascendant Court is just as diverse (and in its own way, dangerous) as any of Absalom’s districts. The district’s populace ranges from the poor, penniless wretches looking for something to believe in along the Avenue of the Hopeful to sanctimonious manor lords crowding in from the opulent Petal District, their personal palaces encroaching ever more closely on the holiest sites of their beloved gods. The district’s guard, the Graycloaks, is composed entirely of incorruptible atheists sworn to protect the quarter against unrest.

The Coins

The centre of trade in Absalom and the city’s noisiest and most crowded quarter is the Coins, a sprawling and boisterous district wherein the currency of a hundred nations is exchanged for goods from all corners of the world. Whether it’s a relic of the ancient Jitska Imperium, a comb from distant Kaladay, or a common household slave, everything is available in the Coins—provided one is willing to pay the price. The district watch, often called the “Token Guard,” takes a soft hand on criminal activity, and consequently pickpockets, bunco artists, and more serious threats like assassins, poisoners, and thugs abound, especially off the main thoroughfares.

The Docks

The gateway to Absalom is a combination of constantly shifting ships and cargo and cheap places for sailors to get drunk, fulfill their carnal desires, and sleep off the effects of both. A district of flophouses and warehouses, the Docks claims a largely transient population, and the local watch, the Harbour Guard, is more concerned with fraudulent shipping manifests than knife attacks in dark alleys, so travellers had best remain vigilant.

Eastgate

A place of soaring towers and stately manors mixed with decidedly more modest villas and townhouses, Eastgate is a quiet residential district apparently free from the dangers and intrigues that plague the rest of the city.

Flotsam Graveyard

The tangle of half-sunken ships, light towers, tiny islands, and naval keeps along Absalom’s southern perimeter form a virtual district known as the Flotsam Graveyard. The region is the domain of the Pilot’s Guild, which alone knows a safe route through the maze of wrecks, and the Starwatch, which protects the city from its headquarters upon the cliffs above; few outsiders ever venture here without their permission.

Foreign Quarter

In most of Absalom’s neighbourhoods, residents who lack formal citizenship face higher prices and punishing taxes. These ordinances are relaxed in the Foreign Quarter, a populous district buzzing with hundreds of languages and influenced by the diverse cultures of the Inner Sea. Whole city blocks have distinct Chelish or Osirian feels to them, as natives of those lands and their descendants gather in tight-knit communities. Sailors and visitors coming in from the Docks crowd the district’s numerous entertainment dens and taverns, while young dandies from the Petal and Ivy districts mix nightly with petty laborers in a common enthusiasm for debauchery.

Ivy District

A place of beautiful gardens and manicured estates, the Ivy District also boasts the city’s finest theatres, performance halls, and artist colonies. Here performers and artists live off of patronage or scrape by from meal to meal, all the while wearing the most expensive clothes and bathing themselves in the finest perfumes. Fashions and artistic movements that spark here can grow into fires that spread across the Inner Sea. Foreigners and Absalom natives alike flock to the district in search of entertainment, making the Ivy District one of the city’s wealthiest.

The Petal district

Absalom’s wealthiest district looks down upon the rest of the city from its perch on Aroden’s Hill. Brick-framed medians upon the district’s broad avenues teem with colorful f lora, giving the quarter its name. The grandest families and richest merchants of Absalom dwell in sprawling estates here, ever competing to outclass their fabulously wealthy neighbors.

Precipice Quarter

In better days the Precipice Quarter was Beldrin’s Bluff, a carnival-like district of grand pavilions, museums, and stately manors situated around the three-towered cliffside demesne of the long-dead archmage Beldrin, a major figure of Absalom’s early years. A terrible earthquake in 4968 collapsed many of the Bluff’s structures. Whole city blocks sheared off the cliffs to topple into the harbour below, and thousands perished within the span of a few moments. The entire district was abandoned, its ruling council and city watch disbanded. Undead roam freely here, and no one is allowed into or out of the district between dusk and dawn.

The Puddles

The Puddles has always been prone to flooding. Indeed, some of its structures are ships washed ashore and incorporated into local neighbourhoods. But when the earthquake hit a decade ago, the Puddles sank a few critical inches, and now nearly the entire district is partially submerged. The centre of the quarter is a festering lake—the so-called Little Inner Sea—and most businesses are calf-deep in water even at low tide. Those who can afford to relocate have done so, leaving only the poor, dishonest, and bull-headed to dwell within the damp, rotting structures that have not yet collapsed.

Westgate

This mostly residential quarter is home to mid-tier merchants, common shopkeeps, and up-and-coming citizens who can’t yet afford more expensive accommodation in the upscale neighbourhoods of the Petal or Ivy districts. Businesses mix with townhouses and flathouses where the district abuts the Foreign Quarter, but Westgate grows more residential as one approaches the city wall, with smaller homes being replaced by modest manors and stately villas. Westgate’s conservative district council and its stalwart watch, called the Sally Guard in honour of the Sally Gate leading to Westerhold and Shoreline, fiercely protect the quiet, well-behaved demeanor of the district, giving it a reputation as one of Absalom’s sleepiest, safest quarters.

Wise Quarter

Over the millennia since its founding, the city of Absalom has attracted learned scholars and voracious students, a tradition that continues in force to the current day. The Wise Quarter throngs with academics, housing some of the finest institutions of learning in the world. The district is so dedicated to learning that its watch, the Learned Guard, is tasked with protecting the librams of the Forae Logos library before even the safety of the quarter’s people.

Outer Villages

Absalom’s intrigues don’t end at the city walls.

Copperwood is a modest town, and is the home of many of Absalom’s laborers, simple tradesmen, and domestic servants. “Copperheads” often hire themselves out as guides or porters.

Dawnfoot is the imposing Starwatch Keep perched on the cliffs overlooking Absalom Harbour houses the law enforcement and internal defence force that keeps peace within the city as a whole (as opposed to the First Guard of Azlanti Keep, which protects the city from external threats, and the district watches, whose jurisdiction does not extend beyond their quarters). The tightly knit military community of Dawnsfoot is home to the officers, families, and menials required to support Starwatch, which by ancient decree must be stationed outside the city walls.

Shoreline What started as a simple fishing community has grown into a bustling home for artisans and laborers. Known for its pungent smells (tanneries and breweries abound) and the hard-working demeanor of its people, Shoreline may be nearly as poor as the Puddles, but at least it’s dry.

Westerhold. This is the richest of Absalom’s outlying towns. Lesser scions of some of Absalom’s wealthier families have small estates here. Westerhold boasts the city’s strongest concentration of dwarves as well as the region’s most trustworthy and capable stables

Defences

Siege Castles

The decaying fortresses of would-be tyrants that encircle the city and dominate the Cairnlands to the north are known as siege castles. Very few of these locations are uninhabited, and many are known to contain vestiges of the armies that once had designs on the city, and still pose significant danger to those who would plunder their near-forgotten tombs. Interested Pathfinders are encouraged to contact Venture-Captain Shevala at the Grand Lodge, who maintains extensive notes on key siege castles and related locales. The legendary Durvin Gest’s catalog of 31 siege castles in Volume 2 of the Pathfinder Chronicles remains the best historical reference on the subject.

Asad’s Keep

Among the many crumbling siege towers littering the Cairnlands stands one of particular interest to many members of the Pathfinder Society—a Qadiran fortress known as Asad’s Keep. Built centuries ago by the ambitious Taliq Asad, the sturdy structure sank into the earth around the time Asad’s pitiful efforts to take the city failed, but whether his failure led to the collapse or the loss of his bastion brought about his downfall remains unknown.

The Fallen Fortress

A very recent minor earthquake did little damage to the city itself, but proved to be the final insult to the siege castle Durvin Gest called the Grasping Tower, situated north of the city. The tremor managed to achieve what even Gest could not, toppling the location’s massive eastern wing and allowing access to the structure for the first time in thousands of years.

Pyramid of the Dog

Situated on the beach south of Shoreline, with easy access to the Puddles, the Pyramid of the Dog is one of the closest siege castles to the city walls. The decrepit structure is fashioned from four battered, ancient siege towers, three of which have collapsed inward toward the largest, forming a huge wreck. The Pyramid has had many inhabitants and many names over the centuries, but the name used now derives from its current “owners,” a ruthless criminal gang known as the Warhounders.

The Red Redoubt of Karamoss

A thousand years ago, the so-called “Machine Mage” Karamoss erected a looming crimson edifice north of Absalom from which to attack the city. Karamoss was a Numerian, and spent many years within the technological marvel known as the Starmount, where he must have learned to employ the mechanical artifice still active within the Redoubt. That artifice—if an agent could ever survive the attempt to plunder it—would be most useful to the Society, as all the Society’s efforts to date in Numeria proper have met with dismal failure.

Spire of Nex

Situated 10 miles northwest of Absalom, the mile-tall Spire of Nex is visible on the horizon from almost any point within the city. In the city’s early years, the archmage Nex erected the tower and filled it with numerous demiplanes pilfered from the Great Beyond, from which he drew the strange creatures and shadowy warriors that served in his army during his ill-fated invasion of the city. Almost no one has figured out how to enter the tower since Nex’s defeat, but incalculable treasure must surely remain within.