|| Smokey Manor

Cabinet’s industrialization began in earnest in the mid-to-late 18th century, intensifying between 1760 and 1780, and transforming completely by 1800–1830. This matches the early phases of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, which formally began around 1760, though timelines vary by region and sector. For Cabinet, industrialization began in the 1720s–1760s period with water-powered wheels and small-scale workshops built along rivers like the Mouli, Bain-Marie, and Carbine. The setting was ideal: ample surface iron, deep coal seams, and abundant sandstone grit beds created optimal conditions for metalworking and tool production.   Craftsmen known as Little Mesters specialized in blades and cutlery. They were independent, highly skilled tradesmen who worked in small forges or out of their homes. Each focused on a single component—blades, handles, springs—and collaborated loosely through merchant coordinators. It was a flexible, high-output system that scaled quickly without needing capital-intensive infrastructure. Merchants handled logistics, coordination, packaging, and export, often operating from low-cost, family-run warehouses. Some had been in trade for generations.   Goods were moved in packhorse trains overland via toll-based turnpike roads. It was slow and expensive, but common. At the time, the Mouli River was only partially navigable, so local haulage relied on wagonways and timber sledges to move coal, iron, and finished goods between smithies, grinders, and storage depots. Finished cutlery was then carted to coastal ports like Hull or Gainsborough, then shipped downriver or over sea to larger markets—especially London. It was a bottlenecked system, but high enough in quality and volume to support profitable export. Fine cutlery commanded high prices in aristocratic, naval, and medical markets.   In the early 1740s, crucible steel was invented in Cabinet, enabling the production of razors, surgical instruments, and advanced tools. This steel was purer and stronger than blister or bar steel, making it perfect for fine blades and high-tolerance components. By 1743, silver-plating had also been introduced as a cheaper alternative to solid silverware. Both technologies triggered gradual expansion of grinding shops and forges throughout the 1760s and 1780s, giving Cabinet a critical lead in high-value metalwork.

The Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815) fundamentally reshaped Cabinet’s economy, population, urban structure, and industrial footprint. In the 1790s and early 1800s, the first steam engines arrived, and water power began to be replaced. In 1804, the first steelworks opened on Kelvin Island. Cabinet’s cutlers and forgemasters followed the wartime economy, supplying swords, bayonets, sabres, hilts, and early rifle barrels. But the military demands extended beyond weapons. Cabinet produced trench tools, field scythes, medical saws, surgical kits, and armor plate prototypes—rudimentary but useful in military engineering.   These contracts were lucrative. Cabinet’s early industrialists mirrored Sheffield’s wartime transformation. The war led to a dramatic spike in metal demand, triggering rapid expansion of forge capacity and recruitment of rural labor. The local labor pool was cannibalized by conscription, forcing industrialists to rely more on child labor, convict labor, and wounded veterans. The shift was brutal: boys as young as seven ran bellows and sulfur lamps; widows and amputees managed grinding shops and delivery chains. Women became increasingly visible in scissor-grinding, handle hafting, forge packing, and domestic-scale foundry work.   The war-era Cabinet workforce changed: fewer adult men, more underage sweepers, more widowed or dispossessed women working to survive. Black-market labor surged. Men who dodged conscription or deserted military service hid in forge-slums, working unofficially under alias contracts. Cabinet’s underground economy grew side-by-side with its official industries.   Prices for steel and iron goods rose dramatically between 1793 and 1810. Industrialists took out mortgages on their estates to build more workshops and compete for lucrative contracts. Yet Cabinet also suffered from the Napoleonic blockade (Continental System), which throttled international trade. Tin and copper imports stalled. Coal shipments from the Continent were disrupted. Tea, sugar, and opium shipments from India and China were delayed, taxed, or lost. William Wickerman, a rural merchant and opium supplier, began using this chaos to test the market in Cabinet. Seeing opportunity, he positioned himself to exploit medicinal demand by selling smuggled opiates at high profit margins, especially to the injured, insane, and destitute. Aware he was an outsider, he would use the political and social leverage offered by magnates and key stakeholders to break open this business market, which would form the foundation of Smokey Manor.

The Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, triggering a sudden economic crash. Military contracts vanished overnight. Thousands of demobilized veterans returned home, flooding the labor market. Demand for blades, tools, and trench instruments evaporated. Cabinet’s economy imploded. Bankruptcy was common. Unemployment surged. With it came hunger riots, rent strikes, wage protests, and disease outbreaks. Cabinet became overcrowded, underfed, and violently unstable. As a steel town without modern logistics, it suffered from impossible transport bottlenecks. Coal and pig iron still had to be carted overland—slow, costly, and increasingly dangerous on roads choked with bandits, protestors, and starving families.   Into this vacuum stepped William Wickerman. Having already supplied opiates and colonial goods during the war, Wickerman arrived in Cabinet in the late 1810s and began buying up bankrupt forges and slag yards at record-low prices. He took control of most of Kelvin Island’s abandoned steelworks and slag mills. Wickerman brought capital when no one else had any. He bought failing assets in bulk. He paid starvation wages and stripped safety precautions. His factories ran longer hours, used child and marginalized labor almost exclusively, and were notorious for workers vanishing. His was a model of vertical integration, colonial extraction, and local exploitation—a new, violent form of industrial capitalism.   As the post-war steel industry collapsed, a new merchant class formed in response—those who had survived the war or profited from it. They became majority shareholders in the surviving factories and created new industrial trusts, shipping syndicates, and chemical companies. Over time, they would consolidate ownership over steel, matchstick, and opium distribution lines. To restore exports, they lobbied for infrastructure projects—including canals and riverworks.   In 1819, the Cabinet Canal was completed, reviving trade and reopening access to Hull, the North Sea, and international shipping lanes. The canal slashed transport costs. Bulk coal, iron ore, and limestone flowed in from Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Blades, scythes, rasps, and surgical tools could now be exported at scale. The canal system also allowed rapid import of phosphorus, sulfur, and opium, funneled from India and the Netherlands through Hull’s East India warehouses.   In the 1820s, Cabinet’s economy began to stabilize. The production of hand tools, files, saws, and cutlery became viable again as mass markets opened. Crucible steel was widely adopted for finer instruments. Centralized factories replaced smaller workshops. Steam power eclipsed water power. On Kelvin Island, foundries multiplied. Entire blocks were razed and rebuilt to accommodate forges, bellows systems, sulfur rooms, and phosphorus vats. By the 1830s, Cabinet had entered a true industrial boom. Major firms emerged. Export networks were restored. Cabinet sold to France, India, the United States, South America, and colonial ports. The skyline became a mass of chimneys, slag piles, canal cranes, and smoke columns.

The Factory Acts, especially the Althorp's Act (1833), was poorly received by factory magnates. They switched to a sweating system. The sweating system was a form of subcontracted labor where work—usually low-paid, hazardous, and done by women or children—was carried out in homes or small workshops instead of regulated factories. Employers avoided legal responsibility by using middlemen (“sweaters”) who paid workers by the piece rather than by the hour. This system evaded Factory Acts, which only applied to formal factories and included rules on hours, child labor, and safety. Because sweating happened outside official oversight, it allowed long hours, child labor, and dangerous conditions without inspection or legal consequence.   Trades like matchmaking and cutlery favored this system because the work involved fine, repetitive hand tasks that didn’t require large machinery and could be done cheaply at home. In matchmaking, workers handled toxic white phosphorus, which caused severe illness—keeping it out of factories reduced employer liability. In cutlery, polishing and finishing work created harmful dust but required precision. Using sweated labor let manufacturers cut costs, avoid health regulations, and exploit a gendered, non-unionized workforce with no bargaining power.

The elite of Smokey Manor tied directly to William Wickerman (Ol' Smokey) are vampires. However, Smokey Manor differs from typical vampire colonies in that they do not focus on increasing population to achieve swarming, something that has confounded The Stokers. Every vampiric member of the Smokey Manor elites are first-generation vampires, with a couple having mutated their vampiric method of feeding with the acquisition of a secondary Dreadfulness (these are noted as "1st-Gen MVFM"). Other elites in key positions listed as first-generation can be reasonably assumed to have a Dreadfulness manifestation that does not directly impact their vampiric feeding itself (these are noted as "1st-Gen").   Otherwise, all 2nd-gen (these are noted as "2nd-Gen") vampires are sired by William Wickerman and are in his lineage. William Wickerman uses selective vampirism as an executive control mechanism. Elite human operatives within the Smokey Manor hierarchy—especially those proving competent, loyal, or ideologically aligned—are offered transformation into 2nd-generation vampires. It is positioned as a reward: immortality, peak physical performance, and access to inner oligarchy power. Wickerman’s motive is layered. By siring them himself, he guarantees generational inferiority, giving him partial to complete compulsion control over them. While a 2nd-gen may retain cognitive independence, Wickerman can compel their actions or command obedience to a degree in direct pressure situations.   Ironically, Wickerman has worse relations with other 1st-gen vampires, despite them occupying the most executive roles. While powerful, they cannot be compelled. Most acheived first-generation status by hybridizing with a secondary Dreadfulness, breaking mnemonic links and becoming neurologically opaque. Wickerman views them as ungovernable risks. They are tolerated only because they're indispensable, but are monitored closely. No other 1st-generation vampires are allowed to sire inside Cabinet’s Smokey structure. Wickerman prohibits horizontal vampiric reproduction within the ranks. This creates lineage bottlenecking, ensuring that all 2nd-generation vampires are subordinate to him alone. It also prevents uncontrolled spread, maintaining exclusivity.

Cabinet’s local government is governed by a statutory Improvement Commission established under the 1818 Act. It operates as a proto-municipal authority composed of local landowners and guild figures elected by property qualification, not universal suffrage. The commission oversees public infrastructure: paving, street lighting, refuse and cesspit management, and poor relief. Its authority spans enforcement of nuisance ordinances, regulation of markets, and sanitation. It sets local tax rates (roughly 1s3d per pound on property value) and maintains a contingent of night-watchmen. A separate, uniformed police force—emerging post-1836—is slowly replacing informal patrols, though many areas (especially Burnside District) remain effectively lawless.   Smokey Manor influences this commission through both direct representation (Wren Newall-Clouvis) and indirect financial patronage. Approximately 60-80 of the 80-120 commissioners (numbers fluctuate) are either bribed or beholden to the Manor oligarchy via land deals, business interests, or “philanthropic” grants. While these individuals are not technically staff of the Wickerman estate, they serve as its political front, ensuring decisions on gas-lighting, paving contracts, and nuisance regulation protect the interests of industrial magnates. Informal allies—ward captains, JPs, and dinner guests—round out the syndicate’s sway over policy. Policy opposition is primarily from guild leaders, who serve the interests of the middle-lower class tradespeople.   The commission as a whole is currently petitioning for municipal borough status with full support from both sides. There was formerly tensions with the popular reformists for incorporation, partially due to the watchmen, who are criticized for ineffectiveness and corruption. A response from the commission was the 1836 Cabinet Improvement Act, which established a uniformed police force, which was designed to delay integration with temporary public appeasement. Now, the guild leaders want the borough benefits, and Smokey Manor is assured of the majority they would hold over mayor and city council positions. This is a unanimous green-light go-ahead, though it's still being buffered to ensure a profitable transition.

Smokey Manor And The Cabinet Trade

Smokey Manor is a British-run mercantile house and criminal front. Headquartered in India and officially licensed by the Company, it functions as a “country firm” engaged in smuggling opium to China. It maintains storage depots in India, coordinates bribes to local officials, and arranges secret convoys across the Bay of Bengal. Once the opium is delivered to China and sold, the silver proceeds are funneled back to Calcutta, the financial heart of British India.   A portion is remitted to the East India Company, funding military operations, bureaucratic salaries, and the purchase of Indian textiles and raw materials for British industries. Another portion is used by Smokey Manor to buy Chinese luxury goods for resale in Britain, where demand remains high. Normally, the balance would be transferred via bills of exchange—a complex financial system where silver could be claimed in London or India through East India Company networks. However, Smokey Manor prefers to physically transport silver bullion and ingots back to Cabinet, where it is laundered into the local economy and used to fuel the growing silverware industry.

Cabinet's Wicker Wharf District Smuggling

Cabinet’s Wicker Wharf District has loose customs inspections, corruptible dockhands, and network of rail lines that make it a prime transshipment zone. Opium and silver arrives openly. These shipments are then distributed inland via Cabinet’s merchants. A lot of it is processed into laudanum, but a good portion is stocked in warehouses and discreetly disseminated into the lower social strata. Among Cabinet’s underclass, opium serves not just as escape, but as sedation. Prostitutes use it to endure and forget sexual violence. Children are fed it to sleep through hunger. Factory workers, pushed to breaking points, are kept compliant by addiction.   The city's lower class has an unusually high ratio of smokers, not drinkers—and this is by design. Opium smokers, especially those deep in addiction, sometimes hallucinate. And in Cabinet, not all hallucinations are false. These drug-fueled visions may reveal traces of Dreadfulness—supernatural phenomena that Smokey Manor would rather not see the light of day. In a society where addiction is common, such visions can be dismissed as opium delirium. It is a perfect mask for things no one dares admit are real. Opium dens proliferate in Burnside District and Wicker Wharf District, but are starting to spread in small numbers in Eastbank Works, Kelvin Island, and St. Lawrence Quarter. The opium dens range from squalid, smoke-choked dens to upscale lounges patronized by middle-class clerks and slumming aristocrats.   This system is self-regulating. Should unrest rise—strikes, protests, riots—the syndicates can cut off the city’s opium supply, using threat of withdrawal as a weapon of pacification. The working class, addicted and despairing, is thus kept in check by vice. Most people are away of exactly where the opium comes from, and that Smokey Manor has a relative monopoly over it.

Cultural And Moral Attitudes Towards Opium Dens

Because it's sold legally and marketed as medicine, it does not initially carry a strong moral stigma, especially among the middle and upper classes. Opium smoking, however, is viewed very differently. It is foreign, visually dramatic, and associated with the Chinese. In Britain during the 1840s, opium smoking is rare but not unknown—particularly in port cities or neighborhoods with Asian sailors, lascars, or Chinese migrants. To many Britons, smoking den culture appears alien, decadent, and corrupting. The morality concern focuses less on opium per se, and more on the manner and context of use.   Cabinet, like the rest of Britiain, experienced a cholera outbreak in 1832. It was massively deadly, especially in urban, poor, industrial zones like Burnside District. In the rise of Victorian industrialization, poor sanitation, and urban overpopulation was a recipe was disaster. This saw a surge and popularization of laudanum and raw opium use, both as a "cure" and as a calming agent during a time of horror and grief. The government’s inadequate response, and reliance on private charity or quack medicine, opened the door for Smokey Manor and peripheral syndicates to become de facto providers of “relief.”   Early temperance and moral reform movements did exist in the 1840s, and some began to lump opium in with gin and other “social evils.” They raised concerns about the effects on the working poor, especially women and children. But opium hadn’t yet become the centerpiece of a public moral crusade. Even in the 1840s, opium dens—especially imagined ones—were wrapped in Orientalist tropes: the idea of sloth, sensuality, and spiritual decay. These ideas were more projected onto the Chinese than seen as homegrown dangers, but this started to shift.   So in Cabinet’s case, opium smoking is common and visible but morally suspect by 1840s standards, especially among reformers, clergy, and conservative press. The dens are seen as decadent, foreign, and socially corrosive, even if the broader use of opium (especially in medicinal forms) remains normalized. However, there's a bit of social and moral unease growing in Cabinet as the bottom-most class appear like stupefied zombies when high, and at all other times listless and craving their next visit to the opium den. It forms a component of the Ol' Smokey Bogey Tale. The Stokers as a group and Porter Shaftesbury as an individual are opposed to it, but are not actively pursuing change in the ecosystem.

Final Summary

Smokey Manor functions as a country firm, a legal and economic structure common in British India wherein private British merchants operate under license from the East India Company but maintain independent capital, personnel, and trading arrangements. While William Wickerman is the dominant figure within the Cabinet-based branch, the full operation is far larger and transnational. It is collectively governed by the executive core of Smokey Manor, which includes figures like Pot Pourri (who independently owns and manages the opium distribution network), Tāo Lièhàn (who oversees industrial logistics), and ____ (who maintains the legal and financial infrastructure).   Much of the coordination, negotiation, and record-keeping occurs through the firm’s administrative staff and warehouse managers in Calcutta, where the trade is legally routed, silver is processed, and Company networks are navigated. The Cabinet arm—focused on laundering silver, expanding consumer demand, and using opium for social control—is just one node in a global commercial organism. No single figure could manage the full enterprise alone; Smokey Manor’s power stems from its oligarchic structure, intra-firm loyalty, and careful personnel placement across ports, banks, and city commissions. This personnel demand is the entire reason behind the existence of the oligarchic executive core, as opposed to William Wickerman trying to retain a complete industry monopoly.

The matchstick industry in Cabinet is centered around the Eastbank district, adjacent to the steelworks and canal networks. While the invention of friction matches dates back to 1826, their mass production using white phosphorus surged in the 1830s. This process was cheap, chemically unstable, and deadly—especially for laborers. Cabinet’s industry grew rapidly on the back of low-skilled female and child labor, cheap timber imports, and lax regulatory oversight. By 1840, Cabinet is home to multiple small-scale match workshops, but the dominant enterprise is the matchstick works operated under Wickerman Mansion’s industrial estate.   Wickerman's facility represents the centralized, mechanized end of the industry. It houses the most advanced (if unsafe) phosphorus handling equipment, automated dipping lines, and rail-connected shipping routes. However, only part of the match production occurs inside the factory itself. A significant portion of labor—especially box assembly, packaging, and minor gluing—is subcontracted to sweatshops and domestic workshops, where workers are paid by quota and safety is nonexistent. These cottage-industry locations exist throughout Eastbank Works and Burnside, run by loosely affiliated overseers. The Mansion's managers turn a blind eye to conditions, allowing for maximum output with minimal accountability.   The central plant contains salaried roles, basic protections, and internal oversight, while sweatshop labor is outsourced entirely, often facilitated by Box-Folding Overseers and cartage runners who move goods to and from the estate. The match and chemical division has its own internal chemist, working under dangerous and volatile conditions.   Despite widespread illness—particularly phossy jaw, a necrotic bone disease caused by white phosphorus inhalation—the Improvement Commission has not implemented any safety ordinances. This is due in part to two Smokey-aligned investors with some say in the commission, who oppose reform and ensure that street lighting contracts and civic supply policies continue to favor phosphorus matches over safer but more expensive options like red phosphorus. Meanwhile, Wickerman’s monopoly on phosphorus supply chains and timber imports enables his factory to dictate prices across the district.

Wickerman Mansion does not operate a formal cutlery, silversmithing, or metal finishing division. These trades remain under the jurisdiction of semi-autonomous workshops and guild structures, where production is fragmented across blade-makers, handle-fitters, polishers, and finishers. This industry is too exclusive for Wickerman to break into. Hallmarking laws (Assay Office regulations) mean silver goods require legal stamps from guild-authorized institutions. The social and legal thresholds for silversmith legitimacy are high; you can’t simply run a silver shop out of a foundry. Industrialists fund silver as investors or patrons but would not fabricate under their own name without enormous political pushback. A lot of the cutlery industry has actually been opened up by The Stokers through guild connections and chemical solution patents.   Instead, the Mansion maintains a Finishing & Artisan Liaison Office—a small internal unit that coordinates material supply, contracts, and white-label arrangements with external workshops. This way, Smokey Manor can fund or underwrite certain independent workshops in exchange for bulk contracts (e.g., state commissions, civic presentation pieces), control the upstream supply chain (e.g., sheet steel, nickel alloy, carbon billets) and charge margin on raw material supplied to guild artisans, engage in white-label finishing—paying master cutlers to mount or engrave their branding on certain lines as prestige goods, and lease showrooms in city centers to act as vendors for high-end or industrially styled silver/brass fixtures, not artisan blades.   Women and children form the labor backbone of the cutlery finishing trade, particularly in tasks such as buffing, polishing, hafting, and assembling blades. These processes, though technically part of the artisanal supply chain, are often offloaded into domestic workshops or small-scale “sweatshop” environments scattered across Cabinet’s back-to-back housing districts. Paid by the piece, these workers operate outside formal guild oversight, allowing for the mass finishing of blades at minimal cost. This system—exploitative but legal—enables certain cutlery magnates to scale production while bypassing the slow, traditionalist bottlenecks of full guild control.   The rise of “cutlery tycoons” (in the executive core) is basically that while fabrication remains fractured across specialist craftsmen, men at the executive core can consolidate power by controlling capital, material flow, and finishing labor. These tycoons do not make knives themselves but finance, coordinate, and brand their output. It's logistical centralization, access to steelworks, and command over informal labor networks, not artisanal legitimacy. The term “tycoon” applies because their wealth derives not from mastery of a trade, but from industrial-scale orchestration of tradesmen and subcontracted labor.