Where You Are

Six cities on one coastline, in a country nobody here bothers to name.

The old families are still running things the way they always did — the ranks, the pizzeria fronts, the judge who takes a call at home, the rule that you speak to somebody before you take their street. What changed is the product and the plumbing. Fentanyl instead of numbers slips. Ransomware instead of a protection racket. A crypto desk in a basement instead of a laundromat.

Nobody in this world finds that strange. Nobody in it has known anything else.

The shape of it

The land runs east to west along a coast, with the Narrows in the north-west and the Gulf of Ash in the south. A river comes down off the north coast into an inland lake, and the lake drains south-west into the bay past Redgate.

That water is the spine of everything that moves illegally in this country, and it explains the map better than the roads do:

Things come ashore in the west. They get made or stored in the middle. They get used in the south-east. They get paid for in the east.

Ashport and Redgate are the two doors. Ironholt and Blackwell are where product is cooked and warehoused. Sundale is where it gets consumed, at a markup, by people on holiday. Meridian is where the money ends up, and where the courts are.

You will spend a lot of this game moving things from one end of that sentence to the other.

Where you start

Everybody starts in Ashport, and Ashport is the only city on the coast that no family runs. That is not a courtesy. It is the poorest port in the country and nobody senior thinks it is worth the trouble.

It is still a real city — turf there can be taken like anywhere else. What protects you at the start is not the place, it is the bodyguard you were given at the door, and that runs out.