#City23 Update: 2nd Week of February

#City23: 2nd Week of February

I’ve written about my City23 projects here and on Tumblr. Check out my last post.

I’m working on two #City23 projects: a fantastical version of medieval Nottingham and a contemporary fictional city in Maine called Cape Crescent. The first is best suited to my game Sherwood, while the second might be a good alternate setting for Moonlight on Roseville Beach or another paranormal sleuths game (waves excitedly at Goblin Archives’ Liminal Horror).

This week, I continued working on the Outer Bailey of Nottingham Castle and the businesses that serve as fronts for Cape Crescent’s mysterious Ghost Bay Foundation.

Nottingham & The Castle

When I started working on the Outer Bailey of Nottingham Castle (a much more traditional Norman castle than the modern structure in Nottingham now), I focused on the guards, the main stable, and the kennel. I may yet return to these, but this past week, I started working on an old house inside the castle walls that the kings (Nottingham was a royal residence) and their sheriffs used to house almoners employed to pray for the soul of their benefactor. This is mostly a fictional institution: I don’t know of an almshouse inside a castle’s walls, much less if there was such a thing in Nottingham Castle, but it gave me a chance to look at how the current sheriff has taken an already corrupt and problematic institution and made it more explicitly corrupt.

This last week saw me adding a population of 8 (mostly unnamed) bedesfolk to the almshouse, though I only detailed four so far. All of them seem useful to the sheriff’s ambitions:

• The Bohemian aristocrat Irena, who’s actually an alchemist with several followers
• Alfreton, Irena’s associate, who’s 85 but seems to get younger the longer he stays in the almshouse
• Morwen, an aging (ageless?) poisoner working for Irena.
• Osbryht the blind locksmith who dislikes Irena but who works for the sheriff.

Cape Crescent

If you’ve read much on my #City23 entries, you’ll know I’ve struggled to pinpoint where in time we find Cape Crescent. For now, I’m going to say 2005: a period after cell phones but before popular, commercially available smartphones in the US.

This week, I added an NPC to the Ghost Bay Foundation’s administrative front, Pine State Realty: a researcher named Alena Cliff, who’s married to Pine State’s owner/Ghost Bay senior administrator Theodore Cliff.

I also added some boats (it’s a beach town!). Cape Crescent Fishing and Tours, despite its name and its past doing fishing and tours, is now exclusively in the employ of Ghost Bay Foundation. Lena Asadi, a recently orphaned 30-year-old who grew up in Cape Crescent, and her assistant, lovelorn and crush-prone Californian Reza Dolton, don’t officially work for Ghost Bay but don’t have a way out of their contract.