Hard Times in New Bast City
NEW BAST CITY — also known as the Big Claw, the Cathouse, or the Basket — is the seething metropolis at the edge of the Veil of Sighs. Its streets rumble with the promise of the new century. Runic engines pull streetcars up sandstone streets, powered by the moon or the geomantic energies of the Earth. The dead pharoahs of yesteryear are long forgotten, their tombs and palaces torn down and replaced by towers that pierce the sky like broken teeth.
Necromancy's grip may have been shattered by the Revolution — but something else inhuman has seized power. The city jingles with the coin of half the world. Factories are filled with Varangyr smiths and Anubite workers, lured by the promise of coin but paid only in scrip. Markets uptown trade the future in books filled with numerology as arcane as any grimoire. And downtown, mafia barons trade bricks of lotus-root for bricks of gold. Money sings, and the city dances to its tune.
On the other side of the Veil lies Kheprograd and the scarab-ruled realm of Khadab-Ra, where runecraft rules and humans are chattel. Crossing the Veil is strictly forbidden, as is the infernal magic of sorcery. But few people in the Basket follow the law as closely as the Alliance would like...
And that's where the Bureau of Abrogation and Temperance comes in. BAT agents are sworn to protect the Allied Provinces against sorcery, organised crime, trans-Veil smuggling, and drug abuse. They are separated firmly from street-level cops who answer mostly to the call of cash, and given an Alliance Warrant to override the NBPD and take on criminals directly.
These are the characters in our game. The abrogators, wardens, and detectives who fight to stop sorcerers and smugglers no matter the colour of their currency, or the names of the clubs they belong to.