The State of the World

The Age of Cracked Crowns grinds on, and the world around Gotham fractures into hungry powers and haunted shadows. Kingdoms collapse into baronies and war-camps, while faith curdles into inquisitions, cults, and secret orders. In this age, Gotham is less a city and more a battlefield of competing nightmares.

Gotham, the Black Lantern

Gotham rises from the marsh like a stone nightmare, its crooked towers and soot-choked alleys lit by guttering lanterns. By day, the streets choke with merchants, beggars, and mercenaries. By night, the city belongs to masked vigilantes, cults, and monsters in human shape.

Officially, Gotham is a free city-state, ruled by a fractious council of nobles, guildmasters, and war-profiteers. Unofficially, it is a feeding ground where a dozen factions carve invisible borders across every district. Law is a language of negotiation; justice, a costume.

The city clings to survival by leaning on secrets: forgotten pacts with inhuman peoples, illicit trade in forbidden weapons, and alliances with powers beyond mortal ken.

Goblin Raids and the Wound of Betrayal

Once, goblins helped build Gotham’s foundations. Their tunnels and stonework made the city defensible during the oldest wars. That cooperation ended in blood and fire when famine stoked hysteria. Goblin enclaves were purged in mass burnings, scapegoats for every misfortune.

The survivors fled into the Gloaming Vale beyond the walls, gathering under warlords and seers. Beaten to the edge of extinction, they turned to the tools of the weak: stealth, speed, and terror.

Now, goblin war-bands strike from the mists with brutal precision, ambushing caravans and torching border farms. More chilling are the kidnappings. Entire hamlets wake to find their loved ones gone, doors smashed inward but no tracks left behind.

The Many Faces of the Taking: Why Goblins Kidnap

To the goblins of Grimhollow, a captive is not just a body. They are a resource, a symbol, a message, and a future.

• The Ransom Economy: This is wielded with surgical precision. Goblins kidnap the wives of ambitious guildmasters, the nephews of complacent nobles, and skilled factors who manage Falcone trade. The goal is leverage: to force a withdrawal of Watch patrols, to secure the release of captured kin, or to bleed the city's elite for resources.

• The Unmaking of Expertise: Survival requires skills they were forced to abandon. They kidnap for knowledge. A captured engineer is forced to reveal the weaknesses of the river-gates. A Falcone bookkeeper explains shipping manifests. A stonemason is put to work shoring up the Redoubt. These prisoners are a living library, "volunteering" information for another day of life.

• The Fuel of Dark Magic: The Bone-Seers of Grimhollow require more than bones for their potent divinations. They require the essence of terror. They kidnap for sacrifice as a ritual component. A captive's fear can be woven into a curse to blight an enemy's field. A prisoner's dreams, twisted by isolation, can be read for prophecies. Suffering is alchemically transmuted into power.

• The Twisting of the Old Pact: This is the most insidious motive. The eldest goblin matriarchs whisper that if humans will not share the city, then goblins will take the future. They kidnap children for assimilation. Raised in the shadows of Grimhollow, they learn the old tongue and the history of the Betrayal. They are not slaves, but goblins. It is a slow act of cultural revenge, ensuring that, in a generation, some of Gotham’s blood will flow in its enemies' veins.

• A Counter-History in Stolen Lives: Every kidnapping is a political act. It refutes the history that paints goblins as vermin. A kidnapped noble, ransomed back with a goblin-made nail lodged in his carriage, is a message: We remember. The raids are a bloody referendum on Gotham's rule, a history written in stolen lives.

Grimhollow Redoubt: The Goblin Stronghold

Deep in the Gloaming Vale, where mists never lift, the goblins have forged a nation: Grimhollow Redoubt. Built atop an ancient fortress, it is a jagged crown of stone and rust, ringed by palisades. Below spreads a labyrinth of tunnels and kill-chambers.

Within, the Ironfound—goblin engineers—forge ingenious devices from scrap. In the central hill lies the shrine-cave of the Bone-Seers, hung with skulls carved with prophecies. Grimhollow is a military threat and a moral echo, reminding the city that the monsters at its gates were once its betrayed partners.

The Court of Owls

Beneath Gotham’s noble facades sits the Court of Owls, an ancient cabal of families who have guided the city since its founding. They meet in hidden chambers, faces masked behind pale owl-visages, their whispers steering assassinations and policy.

To the Court, goblin raids are an opportunity. They manipulate panic to push for harsher curfews, strengthen private militias, and acquire properties from ruined families. Some even profit from supplying both sides. Rumors persist that the Court was involved in the original pact with the goblins—and its betrayal. Their talons are sunk deep into both Gotham and Grimhollow.

Intergang and the Cabal of the Star-Fallen

In the cracks between factions moves Intergang, now metastasized into the Cabal of the Star-Fallen, a death cult devoted to the fire-pit gods of Apokolips. They wield otherworldly Star-Iron weaponry that outclasses any steel. They kidnap not for coin, but for sacrifice, abducting victims for gruesome rituals.

Their silent airships add cosmic horror. Villagers whisper of night assaults where cloaked figures descend, dragging captives into holds of black iron. Intergang complicates every conflict. Desperate tribes sometimes accept Star-Iron weapons for services, binding Grimhollow’s fate to an alien will.

The Falcone Merchant-Mercenaries

The Falcone family dominates Gotham’s ports. Publicly, they are respected silk magnates. In truth, they run the city’s most efficient mafia. Their private army operates as dockside security and enforcement squad.

Goblins are leverage and labor. They quietly purchase captives, forcing them to work in dangerous, off-the-books operations. This has made them a prime target. Recent goblin raids on Falcone interests hint at a brutal shadow war.

The Entangled State of the World

The world is a web of overlapping terrors:

• Grimhollow kidnaps to survive, avenge, learn, fuel magic, and reclaim its future.

• The Court of Owls shapes policy from shadows, its origins tangled with the goblins it exploits.

• Intergang feeds an alien hunger, flooding the land with Star-Iron abominations.

• The Falcones weaponize trade, treating goblins as disposable tools.

• The City Watch staggers under an impossible task.

Between Gotham’s walls and Grimhollow’s palisades lies the Gloaming Vale, a fog-shrouded wound where people vanish and banners clash in the night. The world competes over what monstrous form the future will take.

In this age, goblin kidnappings are not just crimes. They are a counter-history, a ritual act, an economic necessity, and a desperate bid for survival. Every player seeks to decide whether Gotham will be a bastion, a ruin, or a crucible that forges something new and terrible.

Until that future is chosen, the city remains what it has always been: a black lantern in a dying world, drawing every monster and would-be savior into its failing light.