5E Crime Drama Domain: New Aporia, City of Silver Dreams

[Leliel]

So, while I know reception to VGR is mixed here, I don't think anyone's upset with the existence of domain creation tools. And, I thought to myself: What would a full, inhabited domain based on occult investigation as a genre look like?

I decided: Pretty much what would happen if the Yakuza series was more Gothic Punk. So, here's the beginning of my domain, sites and darklord to follow.

New Aporia

Urban Domain of Mysteries and Supernatural Gang Warfare

Darklord: Inspector Jan Grivas

Genre: Occult detective, gothic horror, and mild slasher horror - could all be considered gothic punk.

Hallmarks: Urban inequality, secret occultism, supernatural crime drama, corrupt legitimate institutions, moral uncertainty, being alone in a crowd

Mist Talismans: A double-headed Aporian silver dollar coin, a chipped magnifying glass with a ruby-studded handle, journal chronicling the regrets of a supernatural crime lord, a blueprint for one of the pocket dimensions of the Millennium Vault.

There are two lies to New Aporia, the self-proclaimed City of Silver Dreams. The first is that it is a shiny, happy metropolis, among the most advanced in the world, where rationality rules the day. The second is that anyone, especially Aporians, believes the former. It has another name, the City of Hexes, both because of the vicious struggle between various criminal syndicates that carry themselves like noble secret societies (and may have once been them before they had to catch up with the rest) that rely on the encyclopedic array of curses and arcane techniques traded in the back alleys and heights of the crystal and metal skyscrapers, and because he main streets of the vast metropolis form complex geometric shapes where each "constellation" is arranged with similar shapes in a hexagon - as well as the structure bureaucratic and judicial heart of the city, the Six Halls of Justice, and the vast, many-dimensional Millennium Vault under it occupies (in normal space) a hexagon-shaped space. This was intentional, a secret, well-intentioned attempt to give order and prosperity to the city through hidden geomancy, but all the magic in the world can't stop sentience when it wants to be corrupt; the sinister and backbiting nature of the syndicates has literally seeped into the city, meaning the geomancy has ended up instead making the back alleys of the city shift in response to occult stimuli, and has caused strange and powerful anomalies to appear throughout. Both are controllable by sentient will to a degree, giving the syndicates even more things to fight their myriad gang wars over, further polluting Aporia's geomancy.

It wasn't always this bad. The geomancy, while often malfunctioning, was not always completely set against its own intended purpose. The city would have muddled through, a functional mess, were it not for who was then a private detective, Jan Grivas - the man who singlehandedly managed to turn the seedy criminal underbelly into an anarchic mess of backbiting and ambition simply through his refusal to put out his neck for any one of his clients, or put justice before his personal safety - and so, never actually bothered to solve any problem at its root, or confront the growing corruption of the police force. Now he is the effective leader of a guard that has become little more than a legally sponsored mob themselves, the biggest in the city - and he is completely unable to enjoy his power and position, what is left of his conscience tormenting him over the source of his power, and bound by the same laws he arbitrates to maintain the lie of an orderly society.

And meanwhile, the mess shambles on, trying to be whole.

Noteworthy Features

* New Aporia is a large, dense city of advanced technology and magic that uses arcane infrastructure to expand upward, creating a set of vast towers where the most powerful and wealthy of the populace live and work at the top of the tallest and most ostentatious, looking down physically and metaphorically at everyone not in the "spires." Aporians tend to refer to the political and uber-rich classes as synonymous with the spires, to the point where a person who works and lives in one is often called a spire in Aporian slang. There are large parks often used also as a source of agriculture, and not-so-secretly lairs for more nature-loving monsters, including intelligent ones.

* There are two distinct levels of society in Aporia; the "civil' society of the government, the public, and business, and the "shadow" society of crime, violence, and arcane secrets. The civil society claims that it is an economically fluid society where anyone can achieve anything no matter who they were when born. In reality, everyone with any common sense knows that the spires do everything in their power to keep anyone else from accessing any opportunity to climb the class ladder, and will happily "push people out of the spire", sometimes literally. The only way to climb the ranks with any realistic hope of success, and to avoid life-ruining sabotage from rival spires, is to make a name in the shadow society.

* All official publications and news claims that magic is predictable, controlled, and scientific, and all monsters are simply nonsentient mutated animals, summoned demons, or constructs. All opinion to the contrary is mocked, disenfranchised, and shouted into silence if presented in civil society - not because it is unbelieved, but because confronting the truth in public exposes the lie of civil society, and ruins the sense of safety it gives people. Shadow society rarely disturbs civil society blatantly, because a lot of even the monstrous gangs have Humanoid civilian identities they care for and use to remain sane.

* New Aporia is prone to magical anomalies and spontaneous magic items that lend themselves well to underhanded advantages and cursing enemies for those who can figure out how to control them. Shadow society, at its core, is based around the control and research of these anomalies.

* The entire city is infested with criminal gangs and syndicates, most of them composed of or led by supernatural beings, and those who aren't generally have access to some incredibly powerful territory and items to protect the others' advantages. The goal of any syndicate, ultimately, is to elevate its leaders to the spires or keep them there, with the more ethical gangs drawing their minions up as high as the leaders feel safe. A little digging will show, however, that the motive for going spire varies - a very large minority of syndicates formed when it became clear just how little the police care about crime that does not affect the spires' civil interests, and by going spire, many syndicates hope to gain enough power to protect their communities.

* The official suzerain (mayor) of the city is the ultimate head of the justice department, and generally the head of the most powerful syndicate in the city - at the moment. This regularly changes, and the suzerain rarely has more power than what their own pet syndicate brings, and their civil society connections allow. Every two weeks, the in-theory democratically elected Board of Satraps holds a review of the suzerain's performance, and if they find a vote of no confidence (or the suzerain dies) a three-day public election is held in which a satrap is elevated to the suzerain's place. In practice, to be elected in the first place, a satrap needs a powerful syndicate backing them up for even honest supporters to feel safe voting for them, and given how frequently elections are held, satraps eyeing the position never really stop campaigning for election, with an "honest" election being one where the winning satrap's thugs guarding the ballot boxes don't stuff them with the votes of (truly) dead people. The only real stable position with satrap-level power is Head Inspector who organizes the city guard, and most people aren't aware of his name - he's notoriously adverse to public speaking, which most take as a sign he isn't half as self-aggrandizing as most satraps.

[Leliel]

Significant Sites

New Aporia is a dense city - an extremely large city, to be certain, but even back before the Mists surrounded it and its vast lake and bay, Eridanos, one got the sense that the builders were running out of space, so they built up - and down. It's impossible to map every nook and cranny of the metropolis, both for mundane reasons of lacking good maps for the regions that don't interest spires and because some obscure streets are so infused with geomantic power they change destination or are so valuable that their ruling syndicates ruthlessly suppress public knowledge of them. Some places, though, everyone (or at least, everyone important) knows.

Asphodel Shipping Dockyards

Aporians are not dumb, and if it's truly unavoidable, they will grudgingly admit that yes, there is something very odd going on. They know perfectly well that they are caught in a bubble of Mists, and the lands they can reach are not those of their own world. That hasn't stopped them from charging into the Mists in some attempt to explore them and, more importantly on a cultural level, find a coherent internal logic to be rationalized into their worldview. They have not found much, despite well-publicized claims in the newsbills about promising experimental results - but what they have found is the Sea of Sorrows, and the secrets of Mist talismans, along with some Vistani contacts. Which means, of course, that there is trade to be had, immigrants to welcome to the big city - and more business for the shadow world to exploit. The main dockyards of the Eridanos, owned by the venerable Asphodel Shipping Group, is a hot territory for the syndicates to feud over, trying to gain control of the only reliable smuggling business left, but it is surprisingly low-key; it is very much a goose that lays golden eggs, and the majority of the syndicates are smart enough to let the civil half functioning to bring in more ships. The stupider minority discovers the hard way that the elusive head of Asphodel's dockworker's union, Kerisax, is an aboleth who sleeps under the ships, and has a personal guard of weresharks and kuo-toa; while she has little ambition apart from making sure her cut of the cargo remains profitable, she is ruthless and brutal when it comes to reminding people of respecting her men; she is very generous with rewards to those who are creative in demonstrating her ire to people who hurt the overall function of the docks or try to take what economic power her workers have (she occasionally entertains the idea of using her slime to begin a communist revolution through subversion of the satraps, but she does not feel things are quite bad enough yet for that - or that she is in secure enough a position).

Tartari Housing Projects (the Rookery)

Few places are greater testaments to the half-hearted nature of what social programs the spires will support than Tartari. Originally drafted as a sector dedicated to universal housing for the poor and homeless, it quickly was left to rot as soon as the spires felt nobody was looking, and now, the Rookery (so called for the population of giant crows that seem to have occupied one of the largest buildings semi-permanently, and who quickly turned the rest of the projects into their occasional nesting grounds) is the worst slum in the city, the absolute bottom of the social ladder; it's said that the beggar population fears being forced to dwell in Tartari. The entire set of five blocks, located on the east side of Elysia, on the opposite side away from Ploutos, is only standing due to a combination of the constellation built into it slowing decay and the native syndicates getting just enough money to pay for minimal renovations. Ironically, it is also one of the few places in New Aporia where people trust each other on a frequent basis; since the gangs see no point in hiding, and in fact maintain order in face of the police only coming around there to shake down the residents for what little they have and to jack up their arrest statistics, the criminals wear their affiliations and sometimes true nature on their sleeves, meaning that Tartari residents generally expect the knife to come from the front rather than the back. The Rookery is a perennial recruitment ground for the syndicates, with people eager to get out of the drug, monster, and violence-infested poorhouses as soon as possible - and a home base for the few people trying very hard to improve the city when chasing down opportunities to do so (although admittedly most with the option to do so keep a house outside of Projects), as this is where the mask over the darkest aspects of Aporian society is dropped, making it a good place to find leads to the various dealings to the syndicates. What's more, the slum dwellers do not have the ability to really enjoy civil society, meaning they will happily hide people who have pissed off the spires or syndicates in ways that help them, both as a general cultural zeigeist and as an impetus from the wereravens that hide among the crows, trying to do what good they can.

Elysia Metropolitan Park

For all their faults, the Aporians are relatively environmentally conscious - Elysia is proof of that, a vast area of temperate forest near the center of the city that has been carefully cultivated as a place of semi-natural beauty, criss-crossed with beautiful park architecture. Shame that a lot of it is dedicated to crops now - while Aporians are advanced enough in civic magic that the spire towers could support more than enough hydroponic gardens to feed the city, the spires themselves forbid it, and attempts to create a spire garden face stiff and brutal resistance from other spires terrified the people will rally behind the one who feeds them. Thus, a good half of the original beauty is gone, dedicated to inadequately feeding the city cut off from its support apparatus by the Mists, and while the rest is still pretty, it is the domain of monsters who wish to be part of the City of Hexes' shadows but are naturally wilderness creatures. Hags and lycanthropes stalk the paved paths, and hostile fae hide in the fountains and gazebos - particularly since the particular geomantic constellation that governs Elysia tends to make the remaining bits of the artificial forest strangely bigger once you're inside them, and make the farm fields easy to be lost in. Many syndicates compete over these spatial anomalies as potential safehouses and bases, but the dominant two forces are the 13th Street Darlings (a mostly-hexblood fraternity led by the science-minded annis hag Emilia Moli, who seek to corner the black market magic item trade and preserve the network of struggling Aporian orphanages), and the Black Shucks (a group of anarchist lycanthropes and urban druids led by one Elias Chondro, a former spire who tried to make his part of the tower a food garden, and used forbidden druidic techniques to make himself a loup-garou ecoterrorist after he discovered just how vicious his fellow lords' paranoia was). To do anything in the Park usually requires the help of at least one of the two, lest the the rivals unite to tear the arrogant upstart apart.

Ploutos Economic District

Technically, the Ploutos is simply the spire at the heart of this district, the tallest untethered building in the world at the time of its construction (even its neighbor, the Kore Arcana Research Center, is a few stories taller), but frankly, as the first spire, it's so deeply entwined with the mythology of the City of Silver Dreams that it quickly lended its name to the rest; when people are thinking of spires as buildings, they are thinking of Ploutos, the beating capitalistic heart of money and power - and it's a pretty black one. At this point, the corruption of how one gets to be and become a spire has become self-sustaining, and attempts to truly break the cycle are sabotaged by the darklord, afraid of losing the power he has over his part of the governmental apparatus. The tops of the towers hold the spire class in luxury unimaginable to the middle classes, let alone the maligned children of Tartari - and yet, those few who have lived in both the pits of the slum and the pinnacle of the towers come to prefer the social atmosphere of the slums. The Housing Project is not a safe or sane place by any measure, but at least if fosters a sense of camaraderie, in the sense of "us against the world." For the spires, it's purely "me against my brother", and so it is a paranoid, twitchy existence where any stumble may lead to a long fall; even the entirely human and non-criminal affiliated spires usually have a second life as middle-class skilled laborers, where they get to enjoy life without a hand clenched around the dagger. There is even less control of a single syndicate up here than there is down below, though the vampiress Victoria Vidalou seems to have made herself a neutral go-between of the "self-made spires" as the owner of an important upscale bar and nightclub that caters to mostly spire-and-their-assistants clientele - she happily uses her bar as a way to pass covert messages, with her being officially uninvolved. Perhaps surprisingly, she means it; the bar keeps her wealthy and with a pick of prime young blood to keep herself sated, she has absolutely no desire to upset the status quo. Of course, the problem is, to actually fix the city, one would need to upset the status quo - she is the primary informant of Inspector Grivas, when something seems primed to upset his delicate balancing act and expose his part in keeping things rotted to the core.

Six Halls of Justice and the Millennium Vault

If Ploutos is the heart of the city, than the Six Halls are the brain - and that does not speak well of its soundness of mind. This place is where Perseph Hall, the suzerain's place of work, stands, a building as anachronistic in architecture as the suzerian's own title (it is a relic of a long-ago time when the city was a merchant port of several independent nations, with the satraps being their representatives), a stately stone neoclassical dome in a city of steel brutalism and art deco. It is also where the city courts hold trials, and the headquarters of the Silver Guard, the official police of New Aporia - or rather, it is where the Silver Guard permits the courts to operate, as a ruling that displeases the Guard or Grivas quickly results in the police making the errant judge's life a living hell until they relent, resign, or come down with a bad case of "accidental" death by "mugging" for those who especially threaten the police's stranglehold on civic power and ability to regulate shadow politics. The only fair trials here are those held with thorough bribes or when the Guard does not care, so few people respect the judiciary. Really, most people barring the politicians would be uninterested in this place, were it not for the Millennium Vault beneath it, an underground repository of all the anomalies and magic items the Silver Guard have confiscated over the years; it's called that because of a deliberate spatial warping that makes it far bigger and more labyrinthine on the inside, to the point where it's said the best line of defense it has against capers is that it would take a thousand years of searching to find something directly useful. And yet, every major syndicate has entertained the idea of robbing it - some of the most powerful items in the entire domain, plus a few produced by the bizarre nature of the Vault itself, makes a caper that "is one for the eons" the kind of thing that can catapult a gang from a nuisance to an unassailable private kingdom. Finding which specific item is best for the syndicate from the outside is, of course, step one - hence why Inspector Grivas sleeps in the Vault, the one policeman he knows can't be bribed into helping find some of its secrets (after all, said secrets often implicate him - he hides the records of his own dealings here, and thanks to his torment, a successful robbery often accidentally picks up some aspect of his past and own criminal dealings).

[Manofevil]

This is impressive, and I think worthy of Ravenloft. I think you should keep going but don't take it too far into the modern age. I think a steam railroad should be as far as you should go, maybe with horse drawn trolleys. Maybe even the telegraph, but that's about as hfar as you should go technology-wise.

For flavor, I suggest watching the following if you haven't already:
Gangs of New York: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_of_New_York

Penny Dreadful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Dre ... TV_series)

Copper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_(TV_series)

And Sweeney Todd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISp5sjaSnl0

I also wrote a piece called 'The Old Brewery' that could be adapted for what you're doing here. It's in this netbook: http://www.kargatane.com/sacrifices/bosacpdf.zip

And another about Sweeney Todd may be found here: http://www.fraternityofshadows.com/Library/Qtr25.pdf

Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' may also be of use to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx-vMdGqL3A

[Leliel]

Thanks for the tips! Honestly, I had Disco Elysium in mind, but that's a 1970s setting; probably a bit too advanced.

Inspector Jan Grivas

The greatest crime lord in a city infested with them is one who isn't aware of his status. If you asked Jan Grivas, he is the only sane man in a world gone mad, the only thing holding it together - and then he'd mark you as a target to be discredited, destroyed, or forced into the Silver Guard's legion of "informants", many of whom are secretly mercenaries he gets his men to call up for when they don't want to risk an officer. See, Grivas has a very particular definition of law and order, one based less around reducing violence and crime and more around making sure that the careful system of interlocking underworld factions isn't upset; in his metaphor, he's fine with people moving around the chessboard, but breaking the rules or threatening the board itself? That's a threat to the safety of the city. Of course, the fact that everyone, including him, is miserable with life on the board is blithely ignored or rationalized away; to him, it's either the board or anarchy, followed by death. It has to be; otherwise, the steps he had to take to become the king piece wouldn't be worth it, and the conscious realization of that would break him.

Even on its world, New Aporia was a city of vice and secrets; it was one of the crown jewels in a great empire at the cusp of an industrial revolution pioneered by the discovery of how to harness electricity safely and reliably with non-magical means. It was early when the city was taken by the Mists, and quite unlike the typical idea of the steam age - the most advanced electric circuitry most citizens ever see is lightbulbs in highly important buildings, the average horse is more reliable (and likely a better investment than) battery-powered auto-carriages, and the pinnacle of firearms tech in Aporia is still unreliable flintlocks, and it's been found bows and knives are easier to enchant into far more devastating weapons - but even the limited use of electricity in most scientific laboratories has led to massive discoveries in refrigeration, heating, architecture, and medicine. New Aporia was at the heart of much of it, its placement on its world making it a perfect crossroads for the exponentially growing economy of industry - and that made it a hotbed for more illicit economies, especially given its history as originally a neutral port for merchants and guilds had given it a lassiez-faire attitude towards acquiring wealth. If it didn't hurt the official business of the City of Silver Dreams, the Silver Guard would ignore it. No, then, if you were anything other than rich and you wanted some kind of justice for crimes against you, you hired a private detective.

Grivas was one of the best detectives there was. A dropout of the highly prestigious Seven Stars Academy for mages who turned his mind instead towards the new field of forensics and the law, he was officially actually a professional consultant for trial attorneys. This did not win him many friends among the Guard, given how an innocent verdict made them look bad, especially if he found evidence they missed or did not comprehend. But he was fine with it, along with his occasional moonlighting job as a more classic PI for seeking out missing people and cases the Guard did not care enough to dedicate their resources too - and he made quite a name for himself for his capacity to investigate magical crimes. But fame was never enough - as someone involved with the worst aspects of urban existence, and seeing horrific crime after horrific crime beneath the veneer or civic society, he became pessimistic and cynical about mundane ability to resist the power of the supernatural, casting a pall over his work even as he built up a circle of close friends, including his on-again off-again lover, the vaguely honest Guard captain Effie Argyra (as in, she only accepted bribes to overlook victimless crimes).

But, life went on; there are several books' worth of stories about his cases, and his tangling with the then-dominant Circle of the Black Portal syndicate of planar smugglers would be worth an epic song in its own right. But as he finally tracked down and found evidence that led to the arrest of their kingpins, he saw violent crime only go up as other gangs started to rush for their opened territory. That he had saved New Aporia from the Black Portals epidemic of literally infernal narcotics was the furthest thing from his mind - all he saw was the disruption to the order he dedicated his life to preserving, the civic order of things disrupted as chaos in the shadows rose to a fever pitch. But then, he realized, the chaos came with an opportunity - the Silver Guard, suddenly expected to actually police the city to restore order, as the chaos had become impossible for even the spires to ignore, were caught unprepared and in disarray. To save their reputation and prevent talk of reform that might leave many of them without jobs, they were desperate for any trace of good news.

Grivas supplied it - in the form of underworld contacts who were happy to take out the competition. All he asked for was a closer working relationship...

Slowly but surely, Jan Grivas became Inspector Grivas, as the Guard "hung up the hatchet" in thanks and slowly accepted him as an official legal consultant - and then a member of a new "special resources" team. Slowly but surely, order was restored, as was the status quo of civic society - at the cost of the civic government losing what functionality it had. The Guard's ties to the criminal syndicates became more and more and more core to their operations, and with it, so did the ties of the underworld to the mechanisms of government itself. Slowly, it became impossible to get anything at all done without some support from shadow society, lest one's rivals use their own contacts to undo whatever political or public ambitions they had.

Argyra was aware of this, of course - it was impossible not to be. But she tolerated it, at least at first, even as her opinion on Grivas became ever lower. After the first "criminal satrap" got in though - a necromancer who made her fortune and and political network largely through her abilities to create undead-to-order for other criminals - she couldn't ignore it any more. She confronted him, and she was listened to; for a brief moment, it seemed like Grivas would use the same network he had become the center of to dismantle it, by revealing all the secrets he had accumulated until then.

Then, Argyra tried to take down a spire - the very same man who had helped raise Grivas to legitimacy and his way of controlling the Aporian order of things. In that moment, Grivas knew that to reveal the secret of the Guard's "competence" would reveal his mentor's own criminal dealings, and tarnish Grivas' own name forever, turning him back into the same ignored consultant he used to be, now with the personal hatred saved for a snitch. So, he received her calls for help - and did nothing.

As her corpse was tossed into the bay, the Mists rose from where her body broke the water.

(It should be noted that while I am saving this so that it isn't erased, Argyra wasn't quite fridged - she was killed, but part of Grivas' torment is that her ghost is still around, and knows what he did. She's an element of chaos in his carefully crafted world.)

[Manofevil]

Good. Real good. When you watch Gangs of New York, if you haven't already, you might adapt the riot portrayed there as the very form of social disorder that Grivas fears most. The poorer neighborhoods would, of course, be breeding grounds for things like The Old Brewery and Sweeney Todd.

Thanks for the tips! Honestly, I had Disco Elysium in mind, but that's a 1970s setting; probably a bit too advanced.

That might fit pretty well in here:http://fraternityofshadows.com/forum/vi ... f=1&t=6814

[Leliel]

A few weeks ago, I started this.

I think I should probably finish it!

Powers and Domain

Inspector Grivas is precisely that, a detective - he prefers not to fight directly, knowing he is closer to being a mere mage with a focus in Divination more than anything else. He really doesn't need the raw power - he has the institutional power of an entire city to back him up. His tactics for dealing with a potential threat hopefully involve him never facing his target directly, or if so, they will be in chains as he supplies evidence for the prosecution; one of the reasons he is not better-known in New Aporia is him remaining safely behind the scenes as he plays underworld politics. To that end, he has several powers that assist his velvet glove in the underworld and his iron fist in the form of the Silver Guard both.

Every Man Has A Price: Through a combination of magic, mundane detective work, and the subconscious connection he has to his domain, Grivas can figure out the selfish desires of any person he profiles over the course of a few hours. This is just as much intuitive guesswork and leaps of insane logic as they are a scientific psychological study, guided partly by the Dark Powers, but they are rarely inaccurate. He uses this to figure out both what the ideal bribe is to a potential agent, and where to start looking when he needs to find motive for one of his pawns' crimes when they outlive their usefulness. The one thing he can't predict is what will cause someone to act on nobler instinct instead, but given how his power regards things like "mother wants her child to be happy because that means she was a good parent" or "paladin wants to be respected for dying to save comrades" as selfish enough to be detected, he has a good sense of which people will act unpredictably principled.

Inescapable Forensics: By breathing on the body of a victim of murder or manslaughter, Grivas causes any evidence that would lead to concrete identification of the killer to become obvious, and if there wasn't any, it will materialize, even changing history slightly to leave said evidence - pieces of a wizard's coat are found torn on a hook, wiped-off fingerprints congeal, the coroner finds the tip of a very unique knife lodged in said victim. There is a limitation on this power, in that it only works with victims of genuinely malicious acts - a person killed in self-defense would not qualify, nor would someone who died despite the attempts of the cause to save them, and to his eternal frustration, sometimes acts of justified revenge and defense of others are well-intentioned enough to frustrate this ability - but homicide is more than common enough in Aporia for him to have a substantial amount of blackmail or to speed the wheels of justice when he wishes to crush someone between them.

The Map Is The Territory: In his spartan townhouse, Grivas has a single vanity - an extremely precise miniature model of all of Aporia, with one exception - when a crime lord takes control of an area, a uniquely decorated chess piece materializes in the area corresponding to their place of residence, growing a small silver platform to rest on (any damage to the model or removal of elements is undone the moment nobody is observing the model or stolen elements), This decoration is repeated in minute patterns that cover and mix the lord's particular territory, creating a dizzying fractal effect. While he does not know the identities of the crime lords just from their pieces, every piece is unique, and the board updates itself daily - it doesn't take him much research to figure out what the shadow world's politics are.

Closing the Borders: While he rarely does so, since the city depends on trade, Inspector Grivas is aware of his link to the Mists and can will them shut if a target of his has truly upset him and he doesn't wish them to escape before a properly spectacular trial and punishment as a warning. When he does so, the Mists become infested with nightmarish undead versions of the Silver Guard that assault attempted escapees in reckless waves - it's theorized by the few aware of this ability of his that every member of the Guard who dies in the line of duty joins the ranks of his "border guard." Attempting to escape by boat is no refuge - the ghostly Silver Guard rams derelict vessels into large ships and clamber out of the sea on deck to force the would-be refugee back to safer waters or into the sea.

Torment:

Ultimately, Jan Grivas thinks of himself as the last bastion of order and security in his city, with his darklord abilities proof of his purity of intention. His torments are all based around putting the lie to that statement, and showing that in reality, New Aporia would probably be safer if every single member of the Silver Guard died.

* Inspector Grivas wants nothing more than to be the thin silver line between the safe, mundane world and the treacherous shadow one, keeping the monsters and wild magic safely contained. The city has grown so riddled with hidden agendas, conspiracy, and social stratification that keeping a purely mundane life is a miserable sham - to be safe at all, one must be involved with wild magic and the monsters.

* A functional justice system is based around at least the appearance of fairness and coherent logic, and Grivas wishes his city to at least be socially ordered. Absolutely nobody respects the courts except as a blunt tool of the spires any more, and the Silver Guard is so notoriously and obviously corrupt and ineffectual that gangs form purely for the sake of actually maintaining order - and the poorer areas are breeding grounds for serial killers, social decay, and would-be revolutionaries just itching for a chance to overthrow the toxic order.

* While he is humble enough to not want his name plastered on everything, Grivas expects to be appreciated for being a good cop. Few people are even aware of him except in passing, and when he directly helps someone, fate conspires so that the recipient of his help learns of his underworld connections and underhanded behavior. Even the few people who know and like him mostly do so out of a scoundrel's sense of camaraderie, being corrupt themselves, and he knows it.

* When appearing in public, Grivas is usually wearing gloves, as they sweat blood at seemingly random intervals. They aren't - it just so happens that his hands become bloody when the ghost of Effie Argyra is awake, usually because someone is investigating a crime that could disrupt his influence runs or inform the public that he is at the heart of their city's woes. Normally appearing as a stunningly beautiful and somewhat sultry living half-elf in a gown as red as her long hair (her last happy memory before her abduction and murder was going out for a night on the town), Argyra (who generally uses an alias when awake) is cursed not to speak of who Grivas is to anyone not aware of his true nature, but that does nothing to stop her from hiring clients to investigate leads that reveal more of the hidden picture of her former friend's influence, or as a "witness" that exposes leads that would be otherwise impossible to find. Even when quiescent, Agrya still torments Grivas in his dreams, appearing in the form of her waterlogged and mutilated corpse, eagerly showing all the ways Grivas sold his soul for a bill of goods. He pretends she was warped by death when he's awake.

Roleplaying

Inspector Grivas is meant to be a dark spin on a typical urban fantasy archetype - the mystical detective. He has the same love of his city and a desire to protect its citizenry as a good noir protagonist - except in him, his cynicism and fundamental moral cowardice has warped him from someone who seeks the truth and justice no matter how hopeless into an obstacle to any kind of justice or truthseeking. Ultimately, for all his bluster about protecting his city, his core motive is selfishness and ego - his city, nobody else's, and he wants to prove to everyone that his way is the best and only good way, even if he has to sabotage others to get his point across. Even so, he's best used as someone who initially seems like a potential friend on the force, an ally to PCs, up until it becomes more reliable to blackmail them into his bidding, and the true face of Jan Grivas shows itself - a spiteful, self-righteous bully. In an ironic twist, he's actually entirely right about being the last stand of order in New Aporia. It just so happens that order is irredeemably corrupt, and needs to be broken at least a little to heal (permanent defeat would likely involve proving that the city does not actually need him in some symbolic way - likely the satrap arresting and convicting him in a truly fair trial despite the efforts of the Guard).

Personality Trait: "Come hell or high water, no matter what I must do, I will ensure my city remains as safe as possible - even if all that's possible is the status quo."

Ideal: "If I'm on the case, I will find the truth of it - and I will decide what is just soberly and logically."

Bond: "The city's a trash pile, but it's my pile. People who get that are among the few friends I have."

Flaw: "What I do is necessary. If something comes up that seems to suggest that it isn't, then I'm really doing it a favor by nipping it in the bud before it finds disappointment and hurts more people crashing down. If this proves hard, or the source tries again, I don't get mad with them - I get sadistic."