Claytown

A relatively new district on the southeast quarter of the city. The population here is mostly working poor. Initially populated by potters drawn to clay deposits on the southern lakeshore, anyone with the means to get out of the Knells soon followed. Nevertheless, the neighborhood draws shoppers from all over the city; just away from the stinking abattoirs is the best meat market in the city. Most buildings have a single upper story that overhangs the street; about a third have a stone first floor. At night, the streets are lit with single-candle lamps that provide just enough illumination to see one’s hand in front of one’s face.

• Stockyard Circuit holds the pens of animals newly driven into the city. Most of them are sold to butchers or cooks, but some working animals are sold here as well.
• Reyneke Square holds the leavings of the city’s slaughterhouses. Beastkeepers and chandlers take their pick of the offal, but most of the waste is hauled away at night by barge (after the Deluge of ‘82, it is no longer legal to dump charnel waste within city limits).
• Tannery Angle stands at the southernmost extreme of the city, and its boiling chemical vats are famously and universally avoided; tanners bring their wares to lederers in Oldmarket or Mentullius.
• Scorpion Lane is hazy with the smoke of many small forges. Household metalwares can be brought here and repaired by tinkers, blacksmiths, and braziers, who also sell small sundries.
• Claytown Lane runs along the lakeside. Even centuries later, the clay pits on the south shore are still active, the wheels of cranes visible above ground level. Potters’ shops stand inland.
• South Dockside Street runs south from the bridge until it becomes Potters’ Lane. It is the main thoroughfare of the district and holds a few parish temples.
• Cheap Street is a residential street with some pubs and shops. It is most notorious for being the purported site of the city’s black market.

Colossea

Within the inner wall, a cultural district where the properties are sumptuous and the people are poor. The neighborhood is the oldest in the city still standing; Knightswall was leveled to make way for the estates and Oldmarket is constantly redeveloping. The streets are thronged, day and night, with entertainers in bright clothing trying to catch the eye of a patron. The buildings are of a uniform gray stone, a bit bluer than in the rest of the city and worn so flat by the elements that individual stones can hardly be made out. The style is more archaic as well, with colonnaded facades rising to shallow peaks and shingled with simple slate. At night the district is the brightest in the city; torches burn in sconces lining nearly every facade, the streetlights burn bright with oil, and linkboys ply their trade outside every house of entertainment – to say nothing of the fire-eaters, torch-jugglers, flaming-hoop-acrobats, pyrotechnic vendors, and lightshow wizards, all of whom come out to take advantage of the darkness.

• Arena Circuit runs in a jagged rectangle around the Great Arena. The turns of Arena Circuit itself are used for foot and horse racing, but too narrow for chariots.
• Folderich Avenue holds the Imperial Zoological Garden. A terrific stench rises from the Zoo in all but the coolest months of the year, and the surrounding neighborhood is the poorest in Colossea. Soot streaks blacken the walls above every torch sconce, and the residents go without all but the dimmest light. Crippled laborers and soldiers play cast-off instruments in a cursory fashion, just so they aren’t legally begging; sailors carry bawdy songs with a bit more skill. But the zoo is festooned in colorful bunting, and a rotation of middle-class citizens make a day of each visit.
• Portrait Square is a sunny plaza packed with stands where patrons can sit for painters or charcoalists to render their pictures. The neighborhood is quiet and living spaces are overcrowded, but the streets are clean. It is an open secret that the Bowerbirds, a gang of jewel thieves who ply Knightswall, have their hideout somewhere nearby.
• Lion Row is a narrow street, quieter than the rest of Colossea. Here are workshops producing musical instruments, built into ancient warehouses. Some of the artisans here are wealthy indeed and live in two or three stories above their workshops. At the lower end of the street is a cluster of warehouses for exotic wood and brass; inevitably, a few carpenters have set up business here.
• Jongleur Place (officially Bargeil Square) is the hub of all street performers in the city. Though it appears a chaotic jumble, each performer must sign in with Hannah Mason, who lives in a townhouse in a corner of the square. She and her legbreakers mediate disputes over location and eject brawlers from the festivities. Housing near the square is cheap, as music and firecrackers last all through the night.
• Theater Way holds all the greatest playhouses in the city. The stone buildings put on plays, dances, and even circuses. The street is brightly lit, and even during the day thronged with theatergoers – groundlings from all over the city grudgingly make way for carts bearing aristocrats. Some of the theaters are temples to gods of entertainment or debauchery.
• Little Theater Way branches off of Theater Way and quickly becomes darker and shabbier. Less successful companies play in smaller theaters here, trading stages with nude comedies and erotic dancers. The warm glow of lamplight rises from the walled courts where temple prostitutes ply their trade.

Fowlerville

The first stop inside the main gate, containing services catering to travelers. A canalside wharf allows riverboat passengers to disembark here; the docks in Lakeside primarily deal in cargo. The streets are kept spacious for the comfort of visitors: buildings have a stone bottom story and often a terrace, setting the one or two timber-frame upper stories slightly back from the street. An exception is the style of tenement block for service workers, which are kept back from the main roads and made entirely of dark wood in a compact, boxy configuration. Buildings on main thoroughfares are required to have large windows at ground level that remain brightly lit through the night to provide streetlighting; a distinctive trefoil sconce for oil lamps is often spotted in the windowframes with a darkened shop behind it.

• Straight Street runs parallel to the city wall. It holds coaching inns and stables, and a variety of cheap eateries and general stores.
• Fountain Street is lined with artisans’ shops selling land vehicles of all kinds, from ornate coaches to rugged wagons.
• Traveler’s Row runs just behind Straight Street and holds many small hostels. It also holds some amenities for travelers, including a gymnasium and a few temples and brothels.
• Veteran Street makes a long circuit through the heart of the district. It is a largely residential street, once a cheap neighborhood where returning soldiers could buy a house with their bonus pay, but now an upper-middle-class enclave of fine townhouses.
• Waldorf Square is a dedicated gravel plaza for trade caravans to park. Most incoming shipments already have a buyer, but a few traveling merchants set up stalls here as well.
• Armorer Lane is a short street of forges and smithies. It is located convenient to the gate to entice departing travelers into buying last-minute protection.
• Mission Street holds several temples that run charity hostels with an eye to evangelizing foreigners out of their rude customs.
• Mercenary Row runs through a middle-class neighborhood. Those who have made modest fortunes as private soldiers live here. They are well-connected with each other and younger mercenaries, and many of them run informal hiring agencies out of their homes; thus the street has gathered a handful of armorers and barracks-style flophouses.

The Knells

North of the river, on the east side to the extent that the waterfront allows. The district is bisected by the Kobold Enclave, a ghetto where the small dragonborn live in poverty but with a few hard-won privileges, like a Free City inside the city. The north, by the edge of the city, is dominated by noxious land uses, and the south by those who have nowhere else to go. Buildings are one to three stories and entirely made of wood, except for a few hovels where a roof has been placed over the single stone story of a ruined building. Other exceptions include the tenements around Washerwoman Square and the crazy, bridge-linked stacks of the Enclave. Shingles are of wood. At night the city provides only the most cursory of single-candle lighting, on a single street running on each axis. The Sisters of Sacred Charity supplement this with a brazier burning bright at all the major intersections.

North

• Washerwoman Square stands at the edge of the district, and a stream of visitors from other districts come to hire the trade. Great cauldrons bubble on roaring fires at all seasons of the year, and the sky above is crossed with clotheslines.
• Alchemist Row is an outpost of the middle class in the district. The houses have steep roofs with dormers and, by ordinance, distinctive tall chimneys to keep fumes off the street. Regulations against the dumping of liquids, however, are universally ignored; the street and gutter are kaleidoscopic with stains, and the courtyards behind the house have been rendered into poisonous swamps.
• Whistle Street is the dyers’ district. It branches from Alchemist Row, and there is a considerable degree of overlap between the two trades. The workshops are humble, but they see brisk business from the rest of the city.
• Nightsoil Square is where the nightsoilmen live, store their carts, and, most notably, pile their wares to compost before selling them to farms in the Garth. The site is avoided by everyone else except the Sisters of Sacred Charity, who maintain a clinic here for the diseases attendant to the trade.

Kobold Enclave

• Rafter Street is a typical example of an Enclave street, and a significant thoroughfare. Narrow buildings rise four or even six stories high, and bridges and rope gondolas web the sky above the street. The sounds of chittering laughter, whistling kettles, and fiddle music filter down from above.
• Clockmaker Lane is kept open and comfortable for non-kobolds, as the clockmakers there draw clientele from all over the city. To demonstrate their craftsmanship, their workshops are built with huge clockwork mechanisms attached to them: automatic elevators, bell towers, self-watering gardens, and the like.
• Zaldu Tunnel has been excavated under the streets of the Enclave, studiously sealing off exposed parts of the undercity and rerouting storm tunnels. It is a dark and mysterious place, thick with incense and the jangling of chimes. Many of the shops here are of mere mountebanks and cheap fortune-tellers, but in some kobold sorcerers the blood of dragons runs strong indeed.

South

• Sickman Circuit stands about the Sanitary House. The House is a sanitarium designed to isolate those with contagious diseases; it is endowed with a large hypocaust for the replacement of tainted air with sharp-smelling herbal perfume. Many of those admitted to the Sanitary House recover simply from receiving consistent food, clean water, and regular baths.
• Poorhouse Lane holds the city’s two major poorhouses. Several manufactories have sprung up around the lane to draw from the poorhouse labor pool.
• Ragman Row is a dull lane of crumbling shacks along a stagnant branch of canal. Here live those making their last attempts at a livelihood before utter destitution: rag-and-bone men, street sweepers, and so on.
• Beggars’ Row is where those with no occupation and a fear of, or exile from, the poor houses eke out an existence. They live communally in buildings with the walls heavily patched with wattle, the ceilings with tarpaulins. The street stands just adjacent to Colossea, where the beggars ply their daily trade.

Knightswall

The wealthiest part of the city. A marble wall sculpted with wyvern-riding warriors controls traffic to and from the rest of the city. The lots are divided between genteel housing and noble estates. The former consist of airy townhouses, with the entrance on a second-floor patio. The noble mansions sit away from the road in lawns or gardens. They are built all of stone in a neoclassical style. A universal feature is a terrace one or two stories up with a rooftop garden that looks out over the city. Each estate is connected to the streets by a bridge running over a ha-ha that keeps street traffic from encroaching. Glass oil lamps hang from arching iron lampposts.

• Cliffside Street runs along the western bluff of the hills. One side of the street is lined with merchant homes. On the other a strip of parkland separates it from the inner wall, which is only waist-high on the inside here but plunges tens of meters down the cliff face beyond.
• Greenhill Road meanders up the shallower south side of the hills. The merchant residences here are spaced a little more widely, with small lawns around and rising behind them; a few successful dwarves make their homes here.
• Ulrika Gardens is the main boulevard through the neighborhood of elite estates. A tree-lined parkway runs up the middle of the street, dotted with fountains and small pavilions.
• Moonrise Estates is an elite district, with a hedge and wall of its own, where the noble elven families of the city make their estates. The mansions are like the human ones, but screened from the road by arcs of trees and having steeple-like spire roofs of green lacquered shingles.
• Reservoir Square is the main neighborhood where noble and merchant estates meet. Larger noble manors stand side by side with smaller mansions. The center of the square is occupied by the massive reservoir that provides clean water to the inner city, a towering edifice of columned stone. Colorful merchant stalls line its arcades. A ropeway carries tuns full of water up from the spring on Hydra Boulevard.
• Garden Way winds up the last stretch of slope before the palace walls. It passes terrace after terrace of open lawns and flower beds. The manors here are widely spaced, providing the palace with clear firing lines.
• Wenceslaus Boulevard runs from the Knightswall gate up through the outer court of the palace. Lined with incense-sellers, musicians, and traveling players, its smooth-paved street is the route that parades take up to the palace and armies down.