[IC] The Shanty Town
You walk the shanty towns, standing out against the squalor. The lame, crippled and ill beg as you walk past. You see many starving or quite ill, and countless beggers.
The illicit markets of this city are unfamilar to, but they are not well hidden here, in this weeping sore of poverty, and you quickly find a variety of criminal enterprises.
Naturally, there are the press gangs, who take young men and women to ships and press them into involuntary service as slaves. Around here, some of them even come volentarily, though you wonder what is the point of recruiting some of these wretches due to their ill health. They were spectacularly unpopular, and did not advertise or appear in the day, but their activites were whispered of.
There is, of course, a thriving market of "salvaged" and "used" goods from ships, wreckage and (lets face it) stolen goods available in a variety of stores, from semi-decent pawn shops a semi-respectable merchant might visit, to hasily bundled silverware sold out of a blanket.This seemed to be the place where non-top end items were being fenced.
And of course, there are drugs. Sargasso red seaweed, processed into a smokable herb like tobacco (only the stench was far worse), was technically illegal due to the fishy stink but was commonly smoked downwind. Flashpowder form the howler lands was snorted, and of course, milk of the poppy was readily available from the northern fields for those who had the money.
There were beurocratic related criminal enterprises which didn't quite interest Plaga quite so much, dealing in forged documents, papers and permits to deal with the cities guilds and families. That really was more of a theives guild thing, and those involved looked quite connected.
Most of these operations were allowed to operate with a degree of independence, provided they paid a cut to the thieves guild - there didn't seem to be an overarching criminal organization running all this. However, there were a few gangs.
The two most interesting to Plaga were the cutters - the small gangs of roving youths who had banded together for mutual protection. They were poor, violent, and ran light protection rackets on the merchants who were too poor to hire competent guards. They were less an organized criminal enterprise and more of a street gang. You might be willing to work with them.
There was also an old abandoned church that had been taken over by "lay monks" called the order of the Saintly. The monks had declared themselves a non-affiliated holy order but were not officially priests of the one, and offered a wide range of criminal services and protection for nearby buildings.
Finally, there were the shellbacks, a group of theives smugglers who took messages across the ocean in small boats at night. This also allowed them to access boats and pier warehouses, or for particularly enterprising ones to raid foreign ships directly. They had their own useful criminal niche.
This message was last edited by the GM at 16:09, Tue 06 Nov 2018.