Prelude: Marienburg, the Greatest Port in the Old World

Welkom in Marienburg!

The largest city and the greatest port in the Old World, Marienburg offers endless possibilities for adventure. What's to be seen there?

Streets, for a start. Full of buildings. Marienburg has lots of buildings. Dwellings of every class from hovel to palace. Shops selling everything from fish to diamonds, from bread to dried Vampire’s blood. Workshops representing every craft and trade from alchemy to zymurgy (that’s brewing to you). Inns, taverns, hostelries, dives, grand hotels and flophouses. Theatres, opera houses, cockpits, burlesques and bordellos. All you can imagine, and more.

It is said that there is no human activity which cannot be found in Marienburg - and turned to profit, at that. There are traders and artisans of every type operating on both sides of the law. If you can’t buy it in Marienburg, the odds are it hasn’t yet been invented! And every conceivable service can be bought and sold - necessary or unnecessary, legal or illegal, moral or otherwise. If the mind can conceive of it, Marienburg can supply it - for the right price.

And overseeing it all there are guilds, factions, political and mercantile parties, courts, councillors, lobbyists, agitators, demagogues and peddlers of influence. There are thieves, beggars, racketeers, neighbourhood associations and local gangs. There are wizards of a dozen hues and priests of half a
hundred gods. There are garrisons, watchmen, bailiffs, merchant militias and the ever-watchful Excise. Who wields the true power? It depends on what you want.

Then there are the wonders of Marienburg. The docklands of Suiddock, stretching along the Reik for more than a mile - the largest in the Old World, with ships leaving daily for nearly every known place. The great Temple of Manann - the heart of the cult of the sea-god, adorned with the wealth of generations of grateful sea-traders. The lofty towers of the Hoogbrug bridge, one of the marvels of the Old World. The dark corners of Three Penny Bridge, the notorious thieves’ kitchen where, they say, anything can he bought and sold - even a life. Rijker’s Isle, the great fortress-prison looming over the river like a man-made mountain.

And not the least of these many wonders is Sith Rionnasc’namishathir, “Star-gem of the Sandy Coast”, known as Elftown - a city within a city, and the oldest and largest Sea Elf community in the Old World.

There are the palaces and warehouses of a score of merchant princes, stuffed with exotic treasures from the far corners of the world; the enclaves of traders from Araby, Norsca, Albion - even from distant Cathay and Nippon. Marienburgers claim they took to the seas because the Old World had nothing more to show them. They could he right.