A Night in Baldur's Gate

Thick fog swirls in the damp, chill night. Echoes of soft footfalls and the sharper, heavier sounds of barrels and crates being unloaded or doors slammed rebound eerily in the night. They seem to come from everywhere, including the barely seen night sky above, where a few bright stars wink through the mist. And always, the soft scurrying of countless rats can be heard.

Though it’s hard to see past the end of a quarterstaff—or even a bargepole, of which there are hundreds in use down on the docks—the city is alive by night. Except for the Upper City, which “sleeps” largely by moving all activities inside its tall, grand structures from which only feasting smells and the rare blasts of fireworks escape into the quiet streets. Otherwise, Baldur’s Gate is a city that doesn’t shut down. It gets quieter than by day and a trifle more private, in part because the bustle of shipping and shopping in the streets dies down, but primarily due to the fog.

Unless a storm is raging or “new weather is blowing in” (local parlance for a front of warmer or colder air moving through), the winds around the city tend to die down at night, which causes the river mists to coalesce into a soup of fog. In the Lower City, visibility drops sharply to about 60 feet in lantern light or the length of a sailor’s arm in full darkness. Unless accompanied by intense heat that is warm enough to evaporate the fog, such as that generated by a burning ship or building, all smoke is trapped, thickening the fog and making it smell strongly of whatever’s burning. In damp, chill Baldur’s Gate, a lot of hearths, stoves, and ovens are in use, sending smoke out into the roiling atmosphere.

Through this damp world of muffled smells and hampered vision, Baldurians move cautiously, often resorting to lanterns and traveling in groups. The Watch and the Flaming Fist patrol heavily, and many folk are out on the streets, some engaging in legitimate business and others in illicit pursuits.

Any Lower City citizen who hears three sharp, swift raps on his or her door or shutter, followed by a fourth and heavier blow, knows that someone outside is willing to pay 2 cp or more for “burl,” or swift, temporary shelter from either the Flaming Fist or someone they fear. Some residents of strategically located buildings, such as those on sharp bends along the steepest Lower City streets, along narrow alleys, or near city gates, make a living from such fees.

Anyone who requests burl and then attacks or steals from the citizen giving shelter is marked citywide as a “drowner,” someone no better than a rat that should be drowned. The betrayer instantly becomes ineligible for guild or coster membership, unacceptable as a signatory to any contract, and unworthy of receiving burl in the future. So, those who violate this code must leave no survivors and be seen by no one who can identify them. And in the crowded city, sounds of fighting always cause someone’s shutters to creak open. Anyone seen wearing a mask who is not patronizing a festhall or attending an Upper City revel arouses instant suspicion.

On a typical night, when the Lower City is shrouded in fog, the mists are lighter in the Outer City and lighter still in the Upper City, where moonlight makes the thin fog glow milky white, outlining the figures of moving or standing people within 140 feet or more. Watch-escorted apprentice wizards make rounds to recast any failed or dispelled light spells, ensuring that the Upper City is always well lit and Watch patrols can see anyone they encounter out of doors.

The one place where hand lanterns aren’t needed in the Lower City is down on the docks and amid the surrounding warehouses, where large, permanent oil lamps burn to aid in the ongoing loading and unloading of ship cargo. These lamps are affixed to log “booms,” or cranes and mounted on an axle between two upright posts, either at dockside amid building fronts or actually rising up among wharf-edge pilings. Usually, locked chains control the angle of the boom, so the lamp can be lowered for refilling and raised to various heights to light specific spots. Most of the oil used in such lamps comes from fish or whales and is both smoky and reeking.

The waters of the harbor and the river are apt to be as busy as the docks by night. Large shipping vessels rarely arrive to moor in the hours after sunset, but rowboats take sailors to and from ships anchored in open water, and fishing vessels set out downriver in hopes of reaching the sea before dawn to make a good catch and return by dawn the following day. The poorest city youths use the night hours to gaff fish and the occasional seal attracted to lamp light, to net gulls as they sleep atop pilings, and to go “bobbing” for eels, usually using as bait a cluster of dead rats tied together by their tails or the severed head of a beast too rotten for a stewpot.

Many of those who aren’t working seek out the city’s night life during the dark hours. A green-glassed lamp above an establishment’s door signals that the place—perhaps below street level but more often just indoors—is open for business. It could be a tavern, an eatery, or a festhall. Such establishments range from the “highcloak,” or socially important, Elfsong Tavern down to dingy rooms in which small, established groups of Baldurians meet for their evening gossip and games. Such groups often engage in low-stakes gambling over cards or dice. A lot of informal face-to-face business, whether outside the law or legal, goes on in these places.

Day laborers dominate the traffic of the first half of any night when they visit such places to get their main meal of the day, indulge in gossip or flirtations, and look for someone to hire them for the day to follow. As the night wears on, lowlier Baldurians who rise in the evening to work the dark hours arrive for their breakfast. The din of their indoor work can be heard for the latter half of every night in the Outer City, but laws limit noisy dark-hours labor in the Lower City and ban it altogether in the Upper City. Other individuals gather for meetings and meals throughout the night— hard drinkers, criminals of all sorts, the dejected, and anyone looking for a dry spot on a wet or cold night end up being the last patrons of any place of business still open in the hours between midnight and dawn.

So busy are the Gate’s less honest residents by night that the Flaming Fist–controlled drawbridges of Wyrm’s Rock are raised at sunset to cut off bridge access through the fortress until dawn. Timid shopkeepers and those who have the most valuable and vulnerable wares—notably jewelry, perishables, and weapons—close at sunset, typically clearing their shops aided by loaded crossbows or Flaming Fist assistance, if suspicious individuals seem unwilling to leave. They lock their doors, chain the handles of any double doors together, shoot bolts, and drop stout wooden or metal bars into place inside cradles, thus barring cross hinges and door frames as well as doors.

Windows, which rarely contain glass except in the Upper City, are covered with stout, swinging shutters and then barred on the inside in the same way as the doors. In the most dangerous areas of the Outer City, grates of welded bars are then affixed into place inside the windows. Bars and grates are often chained to handles, railings, stout furniture, or “dogs,” which are metal pins slid into holes in walls, floors, or ceilings, to keep them from being forced aside.

Baldur’s Gate is famous for its shopkeepers setting up interior crossbows on trip cords to “ventilate the unwanted.” Some establishments deal with security in quite another manner: They never close and hire toughs to provide armed security.

By evening, the Upper City is at its social height indoors. The streets are deserted except for frequent Watch patrols and the occasional patriar entourage traveling from house to house with liveried servants and a respectful Watch escort. Anyone who shouts while out in the Upper City at night is likely to be clubbed silent by the Watch for failing to pipe down when ordered to do so. (Of course, if the boisterous one is a patriar, that worthy will be hustled indoors instead.)

When the time comes to sleep, patriars retreat to their homes or enjoy the hospitality of a friend. Many of Baldur’s Gate’s shopkeepers, laborers, and craftworkers grow accustomed to napping in odd moments by day (which is the real reason why most city shops have a bell or a chime that sounds when the front door opens) and sleeping when there’s noise and bustle all around. This ability affords them the opportunity to rest for only a few hours at night and still get up in the predawn darkness to prepare for the next day. Many harborhands simply lie down atop cargo that won’t soon be disturbed in warehouse lofts and sleep until they are roused for their next shift. Others retreat to their homes and apartments, often sleeping in crowded rooms occupied by an extended family, multiple families, or multiple renters. Those who have no bed for the night will seek out any dry spot where Flaming Fist patrols are unlikely to notice them.

As the night wears on, different Baldurians rise in their separate but linked cycles of waking, working, playing, and resting, and the whole machine of a living city runs on for another day