This article builds on the previous two articles about the formation and lived culture of the necrostate city Hecsenfore, in the setting of Cobrin’Seil. If you have questions, it’s probably answered there, to start with, and this article just jumps straight into describing more of the districts of the city and what life is like in them.
The Hummingbird District
In the Hummingbird District, noble families trade and grapple with one another using secrets and lies and the manipulations of markets all in the name of coming out on top in the unidentifiably vague and complex game of negotiation known as The Intrigue. The Intrigue, in a meanspirited way, could be seen as a roleplaying game played by Vampire Nobles around the ideas of their own immortal sense of victory and loss, all played out in terms of bickering and negotiation. Imagine a social deduction game played across seasons rather than rounds.
Buildings in the Hummingbird district are oriented in circles around the central gathering spot, known as a square, but it’s round, so what do they know. There are numerous palaces and meeting halls, lavish estates, businesses that deal in exotics and fancies, wine traders and restaurants and some of the most elaborate luxury goods dealers in the world. It is a district with tailors and hatters and cobblers and people who regard all the makings of refinement as an interesting challenge to craft for. It’s a great place if you want to spend six months making one hat to make it perfect.
Every season – not quite on a precise timer, because the narrative has needs! – losers in the great story of the Intrigue are dragged to the centre of the square, have their crimes or failures or the people responsible for outwitting or defeating them in the game properly showboat for their moment in the moonlight, and then, they are decapitated in the guillotine. Their identities are ransacked in public, their public personas are derided and their place in the story ends there.
And then their bodies are dumped down, into the pit beneath the Guillotines and then, after a little while, those vampires are resuscitated for their next chance to keep playing in the game. They need some new identity, but you know, one of the traditional new identities is a thief or rogue! Always a good place to start over.
Madame Hummingbird: The grand spectacle at the heart of the Hummingbird District, Madame Hummingbird is the largest of a set of guillotines that are used for the regular public executions of nobles whose plans failed or whose reputational tricks led to them falling into disfavour. Madame Hummingbird is an important ‘character’ of the district, beloved by the audience that see her decapitating ‘corrupt’ nobles or just nobles who fell into the wrong negotiation position. The guillotine is enormous and can decapitate two people at a time, and is named because its blade has been carefully tended and decorated with inlaid designs of flying birds that make its blade sing a humming sound as it falls.
The court around Madame Hummingbird is full of vendors and traders, and beneath it is the disposal for the corpses of those it executes. That’s where the Vampires are given their blood dose to help them resuscitate and have the rules of the new season explained to them, with its intricacies and some details that let them get up to speed after their loss. Vampires executed in one season have a full season knowing they will not be executed in order to reconstruct a new identity, as part of the ongoing play of nobles.
The Honeyed Court: The Court of the Vampire Empress Rhiannon Du’Miel, the Honeyed Court is the closest thing the District has to a safe zone. It’s not that there are rules against trying anything in there, it’s just that Rhiannon is the coordinator of the Great Game, and you don’t mess around in the Dungeon Master’s own home, as it were. There are some people who have displeased Rhiannon and been disinvited from the District – resulting in a Vampire who now has to wear the humiliation of being ejected from the high class and high society, but also whose resources and connections all lie inside a section of the city where they will be gleefully taken from them by other participants in the game.
Rhiannon favours an aesthetic of gold and amber; honey features prominently in her dishes and her decorations, with the idea of it as being contained sunlight. Theories abound that when she wants to genuinely destroy someone, vampire or no, she has them encased in honey and preserved in a prison that will not kill them nor truly suspend them.
But really, most people assume she just uses Madame Hummingbird. She does love watching the executions.
The Future Futures Market: One of the problems with The Intrigue, and one of the ways that the true purists of the game are separated out from the other more narrative operators, is that The Intrigue is challenging to sustain if you don’t have a fictional rationale for what The Intrigue is. To this end, several Vampires have invited into the Hummingbird District inventors, artists and theoriticians who are proven to be unreliable and whose productions are of dubious value. Things that are legitimately useful, or likely to work, those are things that real investors may get involved in, but for the Game, you want things that tell an interesting story or have potential to do something exciting but any sensible investor wasn’t going to come along and disrupt your game with something that resulted in actual value.
To that end, the Hummingbird District has the Future Futures Market, which is a speculative investment market for people to bring projects and plans that need some investment and promise some returns, but which any sensible investor has rejected. The Futures Futures Market is made up of roughly equal parts true believing idealistic fools who don’t realise the limits of their inventions and ideas, and scam artists who think that their way into the future is to try and convince a Vampire to give them a large pile of gold with no plan of return, ever. Ironically, it’s this second group of scammers who don’t realise that their ongoing stories of drama and failure and hold-ups on their projects are legitimately the product Vampires are paying them for, and a number of scam artists are operating in the Futures Futures Market with no idea that they’re being paid for their fiction, not their facts.
The Market is a building, in which hawkers come and write proposals in great tomes, which are then laminated to ensure they cannot correct or change their text after the fact, which are then scrutinised by participants in the game. Investors rarely sink money into projects with other participants, and there’s some negotiations at work, which means investors are almost always looking for today’s most delightful weirdo. The result is a place where you’re always incentivised to be a bit of a weirdo.
The River Beneath
The sewer system of Hecsenfore is very carefully laid out. It’s set underneath the city, planned ahead of time, and designed to prioritise long term growth – meaning that it is built out of large channels that feed smaller channels. There’s a central reservoir that can tend to the city’s needs and there are even purification plants for converting sewer water to clean water for the city’s use.
When someone moved in to live in the sewers, though, it created a new tension where suddenly all the other Vampires in the city found themselves unable to enter the sewers without an invitation. This single denizen had made themselves a new district, a domain large enough that other Vampires could sense it, but with a clearly demarked boundary: The Sewers belong to the Beast of the River.
The Beast of the River: A Goblin Vampire, the Beast of the River is extremely typical to Goblins. The Goblin capacity to survive on eating anything extends to her vampirism, meaning that she can survive on a shocking number of foods as long as she can bite into them and suck fluid from it. The fact this means she can sustain herself happily on things like mangos and watermelons annoys some of the more classical Vampires Lords of the City, but she at least makes up for it with defensive aggression when anyone threatens to hurt her sewers and the few people who live there. Her home is a houseboat in the centre of the reservoir, which she has festooned with her collection of weird things that come through her domain.
Purification Stations: Clerics, such as those that work in the Lunaria of the surface, take work in these stations to perform rituals that let them keep the water supply of the city both fresh and safe to drink. Most people who live in the city aren’t aware of just how quickly water progresses from use to disposal to reuse again.
The Rancel Network
Hecsenfore is a modern city, in the context of Cobrin’Seil. It was created, from the ground up with modern amenities in mind, a road system that overlaid a sewage system and transport at both the harbour and the highway. What it didn’t have, at inception, and had to develop afterwards, is its train network.
Vampires come to Hecsenfore all the time. Usually they settle into one of the existing districts where there’s a dynamic or an opportunity for their personal interests. Some come with a new idea or an assumption about their opportunites that results in them being excluded from the city, or, worse, encountered by the Stakeholders. What’s rare is when a Vampire arrives in the city and approaches the other Vampire Lords asking for them to sign off on a totally new project that none of them seem likely to care about, but that’s how Rancel Enpry arrived in Hecsenfore.
Rancel had a new idea, a new technology from afar that fascinated her so very much: she had encountered the Kobold engineering league’s new invention of a train, and the powerful brain worms of a Vampire kicked into overdrive. She wanted to build trains. She wanted to manage train networks. She wanted to drive this technology forward, she wanted to see the way new and different trains got made and she could tell there was going to be an immense industry here. Hecsenfore seemed the best place to start this project, and she was right.
The Rancel trainyards don’t just manage and maintain the trains for the city of Hecsenfore (its internal tram system and its overland train transport to nearby cities) but also manufactures and maintains trains for transporting to other countries that are establishing trains themselves. There’s a feeling of constant development, an exciting forefront of technology. It’s also, low key, one of the things that prompts a lot of people to dissent with trains in the rest of the world, because, well, you know that’s vampire technology.
The Railworks: Central to the train network is a multi-warehouse chunk of territory, carved out of the Harbour district originally, the Railworks isn’t just a place to store trains and repair trains, but it’s also a place that builds and experiments with trains for potential implementation and export. Agents of the Railworks are a strange mix of engineer and docker, people who care about fine details for extremely large tolerances – anything below a few thousand kilograms of weight isn’t important, but when you are measuring weight that matters, you measure it precisely.
The Foundry: Not actually a foundry. The Foundry is the real heart of the Rancel network, because it’s a business whose number one concern is the purchase and acquisition of steels. The Foundry treats steel with the kind of detail that is normally used for distribution of wine or magical components. They very rarely sell steel – mostly, they exist to buy steel, buying and tracking steels of different provenance, of different tolerance, all in order to feed the network’s need for the metal.
The Grand Gardens
Reaching to the Mayoral Palace and out to the edge of the city on the northern side, marked as a boundary with a series of flags and fences to keep the woods from just spilling into the city directly, the Grand Gardens represents a project to try and connect to nature in the perspective of an individual who has died once and found it did not take. Technically speaking the Grand Gardens extends beyond the boundaries of Hecsenfore and into the forest; one could in theory pass through the forests and into Hecsenfore itself. But the Grand Gardens do have some kind of a boundary – the Vampires that live there have indicated that there are definitely some wobbly lines that they cannot cross, even if it’s not the same for all Vampires of the space.
The Vampires of the Grand Garden like to style themselves as wild beasts; as hunting animals, stalking in the dark. Salter Bowelle, the Vampire Lord of the Dark Woods, is a naturalist and zoologist of sorts who sees the best way to understand nature is to embrace it. The Grand Gardens is much like a wildlife park, where people can travel and see Forest creatures in their natural habitat, guided by Vampires who know how to keep them safe, even all the way to Salter’s Henge in the centre of the Garden. What Bowelle has constructed is a circle of stones and caves in which the Vampires of the Gardens camp, gather, and talk about what they find and share in the gardens.
Agents of the Gardens are inevitably interested in monsters, lore about monsters and ways that they can understand the relationships between complex life forms in their own ecosystems. For Vampires that love to profess their savage, animalistic nature, there’s a lot of writing things down for the Agents of the Garden.
The Great Game: One of the services the Gardens offer is a monthly excursion of the Great Game, in which Vampires sign up to either be hunted by a pack of werewolves, or attempt to hunt one Vampire chosen to be their prey for that hunt. This kind of elaborate life-or-death lethal play is managed carefully and is no more or less dangerous than normal hunting, but it is, obviously, a thing that calls for true weirdoes and their support.
The Stalking Hut: In the Grand Gardens there is a hut, parked somewhere where it isn’t readily accessed by most. Whenever it’s been discovered and visited too much, it stands up on long, insectile legs, like a preying mantis, and scuttles off somewhere else in the forest, somehow stalking from treetop to treetop, until it finds a new place to settle. If you do find it, and visit, you have a chance to speak with a mysterious apothecary of indeterminate nature about potions and pills, mysterious and unique forms of magic that are tailored to teach rituals and rites to those who seek them.
There isn’t one Stalking Hut, but part of the point of the organisation is making sure people think there is.
The Bloody Grove: Folded into the Grand Gardens there is a little manse, a subtle little slip into a magical space that isn’t visible from all sides. In this little slip, there is a glade, in which magical trees grow strange and unnatural fruits that are made for a Vampire’s needs. There are trees that grow sacs of blood and flowers that bloom with moonlight, allowing a Vampire to stand in their presence even under burning sunlight.
The Bloody Grove does not seem to have its own agents, but it certainly factors into the needs of other Vampires sending their agents about the world.
The People’s District
Finally, there is the Central Organisation District. The most oddly-shaped district, the People’s District includes the Mayoral Palace, two long streets (known as the Aorta) from the Palace to the much larger layers of houses and businesses that make up the Outer City. Fully half the city counts as the People’s District, which is composed of enormous amounts of public housing, and small distributed shops, usually at each divided corner. Signs of the People’s district are signified by being brown and grey, evoking cut stone and unpainted wood.
This is the defining character aesthetically of the People’s District; spaces are designed to maximise the physical space, and minimise intrusion on the land. Uneven street surfaces roll up and down around boxy buildings, usually something a bit like a square, and each of them stand two or three storeys tall, creating tall streets. The rooftops of these outer buildings, thanks to the rising terraces of the inner city, abut the outer walls of the inner city, which creates a very distinct demarcation line between the districts.
The People’s District is a region where it’s officially unlawful for a Vampire to own property. This tends to get it called the ‘Human District,’ but they’re only the largest group of the population, and by no means the majority. Vampire’s lack of ownership within the People’s District creates awkwardness because it means any given Vampire has to ask permission to enter any building. Even the public ones: Businesses have ribbons in a clasp by the door, that Vampires can tie to their wrist while they wait outside, to signal ‘I would like to come into this business and need to be invited,’ while not looking particularly silly. You know the expensive businesses are the ones who can have embroidered ribbons, because of course, a lot of the time, those ribbons go walking off with the client.
This inconvenience does its job; Vampires are rare in the People’s district, but not unseen. Vampires will come to the district and do business, but they do tend towards the other districts.
The Downe Institute: This T-shaped building is one of the larger ones in the People’s District, and has its own inner quad where people can do combat training. It is technically, a kind of police/administrative facility for the non-Vampire agents who are tasked with investigating and error checking Vampire accountancy and projects from the inner city. This is the home of the agents known as the Stakeholders, investigators who are free to move around the city in ways Vampires can’t be, and also, with the backing of an authority willing and capable of leveraging violence against Vampires who are proven to be avoiding the rules for cohabitation.
The Mayoral Palace: The Mayor’s palace is the place zoned for Vampire Lords to negotiate with one another about specific inter-district guff. Since none of them own the Mayoral Palace, every day they want to have this negotiation they need to do it when the Mayor is there, and she is prone to setting strict time limits to force Vampires into quick negotiation with decisive choices. The Palace itself is otherwise a perfectly nice building – not particularly gaudy, more like a very nice town house than any kind of parliamentary estate.
The Common Gates: The entrance point to Hecsenfore for most people is a road gate suspiciously built to the width of the King’s Highway from the Eresh Protectorate. It’s also got stables and lodgings just outside the city, designed for coaches and carriages to carry things along a much more modest road that reaches to the township of Poineria, which is near the King’s Highway. For a town as small as it is, it’s pretty well populated, certainly since it became the gate from the Protectorate to Hecsenfore.
As presented this is the general write-up of all the city-state’s districts and its major political powers, its general cultural framework and ideas for where your characters may be from or what their lives may have been like in the context of living in or visiting Hecsenfore. This isn’t everything, of course not. There’s more – always more. Some things that I’ve been considering that need addressing here are:
- A revamp of the Vampire class to make it a better and more appealing option for one of the Vampire citizens of Hecsenfore
- Bloodlines, special Vampirically-powered character options that let player characters who aren’t Vampires carry some special traits that signify their attachment.
- These create their own questions, since the original idea was that they were rethemed versions of the Eberron Dragonmark feats
- Should those feats be pulled apart and made into more balanced player options? Could they be reimagined as themes or broken apart into feats with requirements for one another?
- What about the town of Poinera? It has its own culture, it has its own specific traits being a throughpoint to the necrostate.
- Themes for character options like Stakeholders, the Helikos agents, the agents of Mercy, things that help to highlight how your character’s interests as an adventurer are different to most.
This was originally one article. One, nine thousand word long article. Now we’re looking almost at ten thousand, just because preamble and clarifications were needed across these three articles, which are, again, each three thousand words and more. I’ve considered putting it together with some art and diagrams onto DrivethruRPG, though I don’t have art or diagrams of these things, and that’s a place that’s renowned for its heavy presence of slop content currently being pumped out by tools like chatGPT.
If you got here, hi Tab!