Old City
The oldest part of Waynesburg, location of the original fort and settlement, enclosed by the first walls. This was still the mercantile center of the city in the 1600s. The great trading firms are all run out of here, so is the government, etc. The Central Bazaar is the major trade area in the city - the best place to find anything, though for a premium price. St Michael's, the city's oldest University, the oldest University north of the Kingdom, is here. Most major civic events happen here.
At the same time, the City has seen better days. Though less affected by the Troubles than other parts of the city, it was affected - it could not seal itself off the way Peterborough did. It was stricken with violence and strife; it lost a large part of its population during the wars, and even int he 1610s, was not back to its 1590s population. Much of it was empty - there are abandoned houses, falling into ruin, claimed by squatters and ne'er-do-wells. The infrastructure was neglected, though not destroyed - houses, sewers, the walls, the water supply, were al in much worse shape in 1610 than in 1590. These changes made the Old City seem smaller than before. It is less crowded, but also less sophisticated, less varied, more insular and paranoid. This was definitely true fo the culture, which had shrunk and retreated noticeably from the 1580s and 90s.
There were always very sharp class differences in the City, and these remain. The areas north of the main road (Wayne Street) are settled by old money and a people with connections - politicians, a few scholars and artists, and churchmen, certain very respectable adventurers. Some of these have bought their way in, displacing the merchants who used to live there. The most powerful arrivistes, though, tended to live in the heights, as do the richest of the rich. This area is well protected by the City Watch, as well as many variety of private security. South of the main road, though, things are different. The southeast quarter is dominated by the university, and students and scholars and others associated with the university. There are also quite a few small merchants, artists and artisans, churchmen and the like - people with pretensions of respectability without the money.
To the southwest, though, things get bad. The streets around the wall on this side of the old quarter are a slum. Old, wrecked houses have been transformed through the years into tenements - many are collapsing into ruins, and being replaced by shanties and other improvised housing, This area is a nest of crime and poverty, though sometimes the crime overwhelms the poverty. This is where you can get drugs, or any stolen goods - this is where the wall is coming apart most completely, and is thus the favorite illicit route into the old city. At the same time, it is never quite as bad as the Gully and some of the other slums outside the old city - there are enough students and artists and whores living here to keep some degree of civilization. The people living in squalor here are as likely to be University students or clerics on the bum as to be unemployed laborers. And there is always some tension between the collapse of the town and people willing to put some work into their houses - as the city’s fortunes rise and fall, you can see the slums competing with the renovators.
For all this, there is a certain romance to living in the Old City - even the desperately poor who live there tend to think of the location as a kind of compensation for the dreadful conditions. Among the more powerful denizens, this aspect is very strong. Though most of the really big money lives in the Heights, most of the civic power remains in the Old City - the bureaucracy, the high churches, the better sort of guilds and their leaders. Things tend to be very formal here, even where there is not as much money as people let on - as at the university.
St. Michael’s university is a case in point. It is the oldest university in the north - it has a long honorable history, which is it very aware of. It is very exclusive - you need a name or a very large pile of money to get in - the classes are regulated fairly well, so random strangers can’t sit in on classes - its hierarchy and structure is very rigid. Traditions are carefully maintained - ceremonies are dutifully performed, there are scandals when professors fail to observe the strictest forms of teaching . . . It is very high church. This is somewhat ironic as this university is extremely secularized - indeed, it is as close to a university of magic as you will find. But it is also true that there are very powerful groups of wizards in the city, who do not take kindly to innovation. They are among the most powerful and carefully organized groups in the city. They do this to maintain the respectable fiction that magic is an academic discipline - they quite aggressively police themselves - enforcing the wearing of proper clothing - robes - and, for wizards in good standing in the guilds, robes of the proper colors. Red for evokers - blue and white for conjurers - black and white for transmuters - gold for enchanters - burgundy for abjurors - green or teal for illusionists - blue, with stars and moons for diviners - there is no official necromancer color, for they are frowned on, though most go for black and red, and claim to be transmuters/conjurers - and silver for non-specialists. Various designs offer information about specifics, such as who your master was, your level, and so on. The idea being that magicians should be readily identifiable.
All this is here, at great length, because this sort of thing is important in the old city - and not at all in most of the rest of the city. In fact, wizards wearing their colors mark themselves as living in the Old City - which is very useful of course. They have affiliations - they have the muscle of the guild, the university, the various houses and colleges behind them - so they do get away with things. A wizard dressed like a thief (as the traditionalists tend to sniff at those who dress like normal people) is on their own . . .
The kinds of divisions, say among wizards, are even stronger in the 1600s.
Demographics
Race/Demographics: mostly human, with a fair scattering of elves and half-elves - almost all adventurers, and more specifically, magicians and bards. Halflings and dwarves are common in the Central Bazaar, though the ones who can live elsewhere - even if just in South River or along the river. Quite a few Halflings, though, do live in the Old City. Half-Orcs would find this extremely unwelcoming. (That doesn’t mean there aren’t quite a few of them in the slums - but they have it hard, since orcs are hated in Waynesburg as a whole, and this is sharpest in the Old City.)
Alignments: All, skewing to LN, N among the merchants; N, CN, NG, CE among the magicians; CN, CE, CG among the poor.
Defences
Surrounded by the oldest walls, still formidable, though fallen into some disrepair through the centuries.
Infrastructure
Very well built up, with extensive sewers and water supply underground, large buildings, roads and so on. At the same time, the City has seen better days. The walls are very ancient, and have been coming apart for some time. The city attempts to keep them under repair, but isn’t very reliable about it, and no major renovations or repairs have been attempting in a long time. Granted, these are now inner walls - but they are still great masses of rock and mortar that has a propensity to fall down. The walls are rumored to be penetrated through and through with tunnels and passages, even where they are not crumbling. Certainly, several people every year are killed or maimed by falling chunks of granite—and these falling rocks often reveal the hollowness beyond. Tunnels through the wall are illegal, and some effort is made to seal them up when they appear, but these efforts aren’t all that energetic. There’s also the problem that the work of sealing the tunnels is usually contracted out - the contractors are not always honest - they often seal up the ends, but leave the tunnels intact, with hidden entrances to be used for less honest purposes.
Architecture
Mostly stone, many houses of great age. This part of town has not been destroyed as much as some, partly bvecause of the walls, partly because of the construction methods. So plenty of old, handsome stone buildings - though many have been divided and sub-divided again to accommodate all the people.
Geography
Mostly located on a hill, standing near where the Northflood flows out of the lake. Some of the hill is quite steep.
Alternative Name(s)
City; Old City
Type
Neighbourhood
Location under
Included Locations
Owning Organization
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