Rainoga

Harborside Hospital stands as a grim monument to Baldur’s Gate’s hard-earned lessons in public health. Born from the ashes of the deadly “dancing croup” plague, this institution was erected to stem future outbreaks by centralizing medical care for the city’s poorer denizens. While its founding was a rare moment of collective action in the Lower City, the hospital swiftly fell victim to the Gate’s enduring truth: wealth dictates outcomes. Though temples across the city offered clerics in exchange for fewer infectious congregants, their services are rarely free, and the line between healing and commerce remains thin. Patients unable to pay often find themselves in the hospital’s dismal basement, subjected to chirurgeons-in-training or dubious divine intervention. The building teems with dangers — from theft and narcotic abuse to wandering undead — making Harborside a place of both salvation and fear, where healing is never guaranteed.

The hospital looms like a patient left too long unattended — sprawling, stained, and solemn beneath the cliffs near Cliffgate. Its sea-facing wall is pitted by salt and wind, while soot-blackened stone towers slump toward the sky like weary sentinels. A rusted bell in the courtyard tolls when new patients arrive, its mournful clang echoing off tombstones in the nearby graveyard. Inside, the scent of dried blood and pungent alchemical poultices clings to the air, mingling with incense meant to mask death. Hallways flicker under sputtering lanterns, casting long shadows over groaning cots and curtained triage corners. Clerics in soiled robes move swiftly between moaning patients, some murmuring blessings, others bartering over coin. In the basement, the light fades entirely — the groans louder, the care colder. Even the walls seem to sweat. This is Harborside: desperate, haunted, alive.