Another major premise of the setting is that the Gods were once present but have since faded away and left man to their own workings. Chapter One - The City Of Elweir. The setting focuses on a single large city, rather than the world at large. We get a detailed picture of one of the worlds largest, richest, and most depraved cities. Elweir sits inland from the sea where two major rivers meet, splitting the city into three distinct portions, and eight neighborhoods. Before the city itself is described the chapter covers the culture of the city itself. Elweir is, for all intents and purposes, a good sized City-State. Starting with the History of the city from its beginnings as a series of huts on the river and covering major growth points in the history, up to the current times. The Overview of Elweir covers the geography of the city, climate, calendar, currency, religion and daily life. Property is also covered, and how it's handled in the city, commoners of any level don't own land, the nobility owns all of it and makes their money from the rent, not taxes on the common man. The Rulership covers the Prince of the City, and the noble elite, called the Fifty Families. It is this group that owns the land in the city and grants leases for people to control it under their name. The Law and the Underworld, sometimes they seem one in the same, covers how the criminal aspects of the city are handled, from bribes to gangs. The detail presented in this part of the chapter could be used not just in Elweir but as a basis for any medieval cities structure. The Neighborhoods describes each of the eight major sections of the city. The biggest distinction made of how to tell who is from which section is how they dress, and interesting cultural aspect that puts many different kinds of people into a single setting. Each neighborhood has enough of it's own personality and aspects that it is very close to a traditional Kingdom spanning campaign with different peoples. Elweir is far from a homogeneous city where all the people are very similar in attitude. Gibberish is the northern most neighborhood, and is where sea captains come up river from the ocean to trade in Elweir, it's called Gibberish because most of the people there don't actually speak the language common to the rest of Elweir. Along the larger River Serpentine is the neighborhood of Lowtown, which is on both sides of the river.
