Factions
15 entries
Menshen Cabriolet Company
The operator of Nod's Red Cab service, the only organized surface transit alternative to the underground trains. Red Cabs range from horse-drawn carriages in the old districts to sputtering combustion vehicles running on thaumic capacitors to the occasional Earth-made car that someone drove through a gate and never drove back. The fleet's uniformity is limited to the red paint. Drivers know the city's streets with the granular familiarity of people whose livelihood (and lives) depend on never getting lost. Menshen operates from a depot in the Warrens and maintains stands in every major district. The company's relationship with the transit system is one of mutual disregard.
The Brotherhood of Diocletian
Military-religious. Founded circa 305 CE.
The Chroniclers
The Chroniclers are a loose fellowship of scribes, historians, archivists, and obsessives who maintain the closest thing the city has to institutional memory. They operate from a library in the Annex known as the Residuum, a vast and slumbering Carceri. They collect, copy, and preserve documents ranging from Council decrees to personal correspondence to Merchant Guild manifests that no one has looked at in four hundred years.
The Council
Seven sorcerers govern Nod in practice. They represent every major school of magic and come from backgrounds as varied as the city they rule. They are feared, loathed, and for most practical purposes, the law, at least until the Nemo decides otherwise.
The Dockmasters
Trade enters and leaves Nod through its gates, the Dockyards on the endless ocean, the roads leading out through the Deadlands and the Weald, and the work of Striders and Scribes who maintain transit connections with Earth and other Domains. The Dockmasters manage the logistics of this traffic at the city's major entry points.
The Ferrymen
Nod's waterways are older than most of its streets. Canals, flooded underpasses, underground rivers, and the brackish channels beneath the Stilts form a secondary transit network that is faster than surface travel for anyone willing to share the water with Merrow and worse.
The Germaine Foundation
Private. Founded circa 18th century.
The Guilds
The simplest of the guilds in concept. Payment in exchange for martial service. Contracts range from guarding a shopfront to waging war on rival communities. The guild also maintains contracts that extend into the mortal world, placing operatives in real-world military positions, a service that requires Striders or gate-marks.
The Hospitallers
Medicine in Nod is complicated by the fact that seven sapient species have seven different biologies, none of which respond identically to the same treatments, and all of which can be further altered by Nod's transformative effects. The Hospitallers are the closest thing the city has to a medical establishment.
The Lamplighters
Nod has no sun. Without the Lamplighters, it would also have no light.
The Merchants Guild
Purely capitalist. The Merchants Guild procures items that are rare in Nod from the mortal world, and items that are rare in the mortal world from Nod, and sells both to the highest bidder. The guild maintains its principal trading halls in Ashmarket and operates on Earth under the cover of a false corporation called Retinue Inc., running supply chains through mortal shipping infrastructure and maintaining ties to real-world criminal organizations. Retinue Inc. has shell subsidiaries, freight contracts, and enough legitimate-looking paperwork to move containerized cargo through customs in a dozen countries. The volume of Earth-sourced goods flowing into Nod through the Guild's operations is large enough to shape the material culture of the city; the canned food, electronics, building materials, clothing, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, and industrial equipment that most residents encounter daily arrived through a Merchants Guild supply line, even if the end buyer has no idea where it originally came from. The Bethier Portal in Ashmarket has become the guild's preferred transit route for high-value shipments while the docks are preferred for high-volume. The reliance on Kuron Inc.'s infrastructure is a source of growing unease among the guild's leadership.
The Order
A sect of fanatical knights whose current leadership believe that Nod belongs to humanity and that every non-human creature within it is an infestation to be eradicated.
The Pallbearers
Death is common in Nod. The disposal of the dead is a problem that most cities solve through municipal services. Nod solves it through the Pallbearers, a guild of morticians, body-handlers, and Speakers who manage the passage of the dead from the city into whatever comes after.
The Slavers Guild
The least pleasant guild and the most profitable. The Slavers Guild trades in sentient beings supplying Nod's powerful with laborers, servants, and worse. Humans are the most commonly enslaved species, lacking the natural defences or supernatural abilities that make other species harder to capture and hold.
The Tinkers
The Middens gather waste. The Tinkers consume it. Where the Skulks scavenge raw materials from Nod's refuse, the Tinkers process those materials into something usable. They are metalworkers, artificers, repairers of broken things, and manufacturers of new things from old parts.