Law and Order in Corvis

“We might have a reputation here in Corvis, but we follow the king’s laws, just like any upright citizens. The watch might be keen to look the other way from time to time, and there’s all that illegal stuff happening in the Undercity, of course. And yes, more’n a few river pirates call the City of Ghosts their home port. Not to mention the gangs. Oh, and the cults.

“Hm. Maybe we deserve to have a reputation after all?” Corvis prides itself on being a bastion of law and order—a city where anyone can take a walk in the middle of the night with no fear. Unfortunately, the politicians who propagate this view are delusional, probably as a result of their bodyguards and gated homes. Corvis is a rough town, and it has cut more than a few tough folks down to size.

Even though Corvis is still beholden to the laws of Cygnar and its king, its distance from the capital means it is left largely to its own daily governance. The city is directly supervised by the Baron Bartley Redgrave.

Crime	Punishment
Improper speech	A night in the stocks
Public drunkenness	A night in the stocks
Assault	Flogging
Theft	Flogging
Burglary	Heavy flogging or forced labor
Counterfeiting	Heavy flogging, imprisonment, or forced labor
Arson	Hobbling and exile, imprisonment, or death by hanging
Treason	Imprisonment, or death by hanging or firing squad
Piracy	Death by drowning, hanging, or gibbeting
Murder	imprisonment, or death by drowning, hanging, or firing squad
Infernalism	Imprisonment, or death by drowning, hanging, or firing squad

’JACKING

’Jacking is a grave and brutal punishment reserved for the basest criminals. The condemned prisoner is manacled to the body of aSteamjacks, limbs along limbs, after which the ’jack is instructed to parade to and fro. The result is almost always the death of the prisoner, and the extent of the suffering depends on how the prisoner is bound to the ’jack. The guilty individual is typically manacled so that his limbs bend in the same direction as the steamjack’s, but a criminal is sometimes manacled facing the construct so that the limbs do not bend the same way; in these cases, the steamjack’s first movements immediately shatter the prisoner’s joints and tear the body limb from limb. As if the strain on the body were not enough, the ’jack soon becomes scalding hot. A few criminals have miraculously survived this punishment, but those who did were little more than paralyzed, useless husks of cooked flesh and bone.

This punishment was phased out during the reign of King Leto, but it persists as a sentence handed down by backward-thinking local magistrates in some regions. In Corvis, ’jacking is exclusive to criminal gangs who want to make an example of someone, like those who inform on the gang to the Corvis City Watch.