The Broadside Ballads

A Dark, Gaslamp Fantasy RPG

[broadsideballads]

Salutations, traveler. Pull up a chair and make yourself at home, and welcome to the Broadside Ballads.

The Ballads are a 3-3-3, 21+ low dark fantasy set in the city of Arngate, oldest, greatest, and most perilous of the Nine Ports which lie upon the northern shore of the tempestuous Fathomless Ocean. Here more than a million souls live within its winding streets and labyrinthine canals, holding on to the feeble lights of civilization in a cold and slowly dying world.

[broadsideballads]

THE BROADSIDE BALLADS

❖❖ An early modern dark fantasy of ghosts, intrigue, folk horror, and slow ruin. ❖❖

The sun is dying. The world grows cold. And the dead do not rest.

Type: 18th Century & Regency-Inspired Dark Fantasy · Rating: 3/3/3, 21+

Welcome to Arngate — a teeming, haunted metropolis of over a million living souls and uncountable dead. A place where the fog never quite lifts and the canals run black as ink. Part Georgian London, part Republican Rome, part haunted dream, Arngate is as much a being as any mortal. It is a city of coffeehouses and cutthroats, of Senators and smugglers, of eerie magic and crumbling grandeur. A Golden Age of Highwaymen and Pirates — and of every schemer bold enough to seize it.

Among the inhabitants of the city, and of the Known World, are:

❖ Mortals — merchants, magistrates, sailors, spies, opera singers, underworld fixers. Armed with nothing but wit, nerve, and ambition. 

❖ The Cursed — transformed by malign magic into something more and less than human. They possess strange powers entwined with monstrous hungers, terrible secrets, and compulsions that cannot be denied. 

❖ The Dead — ghosts, wraiths, and revenants who refuse to leave the living world. They haunt. They scheme. They lie. 

❖ The Changed — magicians leaving their humanity behind. One lives only as a reflection trapped in mirrors. Another sits surrounded by floating eyes that see all possible futures. What would you sacrifice?

❖ About Us ❖ 

❖ Original setting — Jane Austen meets film noir meets folk horror, with ghosts 

❖ Deep political intrigue and a rich criminal underworld 

❖ Eerie, unsettling magic with real consequences 

❖ Family scheming, old grudges, treacherous seas, and a world unraveling 

❖ Collaborative worldbuilding — your ideas shape Arngate 

❖ Welcoming community and character-driven, literate writing

❖ Guidebook ❖ Main Forum ❖ Canons & Want Ads ❖ Discord ❖

[mleprae]

thank you redhook for this

[broadsideballads]

Salutations, traveler. Pull up a chair and make yourself at home, and welcome to the Broadside Ballads.

The Ballads are a 3-3-3, 21+ low dark fantasy set in the city of Arngate, oldest, greatest, and most perilous of the Nine Ports which lie upon the northern shore of the tempestuous Fathomless Ocean. Here more than a million souls live within its winding streets and labyrinthine canals, holding on to the feeble lights of civilization in a cold and slowly dying world.

Arngate itself draws upon many real-world historical sources for inspiration, principally early-modern London, Nineteenth Century New York City, Belle Epoque Paris, and late Republican Rome. Here you will find all the cut-throat politics of the last days of the Roman Republic combined with the corrupt machine politics of Tammany Hall. The elite host decadent parties and social gatherings that might make a Paris courtesan blush and raise the eyebrows of the most debauched of Roman aristocrats. Here too are dances and masquerades that are at once genteel and desperate, social climbers trying to make their way to ever higher positions, and merchants and traders with ambitions great and small. And running through it all like the chill rain in the gutters, is the underworld, that most necessary of evils.

And then there are the Dead.

In the wild and empty places between the towns and cities, grim armies march in dead remembrance of ancient battles, wraiths and revenants carry on with the unfinished business of their former lives, and malign spirits twist the land into nightmarish mockeries of the quotidian world. Travel across such inhospitable and haunted county is no easy thing, and the couriers, mail coach drivers, travelers, and vagabonds who must cross such wilds would do well to stick to the roads and the feeble protections it offers. For there are more than ghosts in those wild and empty places.

It is only by the skill of magicians and necromancers that the ghosts are kept at bay, for it is they who carve and inscribe the spirit stele and tune the ghost chimes which only the greatest and more terrible of spirits can abide. Or so the magicians say. Yet it is not by skill and long practice alone that spirit stele are made. Without the ichor refined from the oils of the great leviathans which wander the depths of the oceans, the stele are only the mereest of candle flames against the darkness. Hunting such creatures is dangerous in the extreme, and any source of ichor that does not risk life and limb upon the sea would bring its discoverer unimaginable wealth.

A Spirit Stele Inscribed with protective serpents.

As the world dies and the sun grows dim and red in the sky, the ordinary rules of reality are breaking down and in their place are new rules; more fragile, more fickle, and more perilous. The skillful, the desperate, and the mad may harness these forces, but there is always a price for such power. The magicians of the age can work wonders and terrors in equal measure, but they are strange, subtle, and eerie things, like something drawn from the most beautiful of nightmares.

Yet most of the magic of this dying world neither notices nor cares for the pitiful whims of humanity. It is more akin to a kind of preternatural weather. A storm where the wind blows tattered dreams and rains lost hopes as much as it does water is no impossible thing. It is said, even that some magicians have traveled to the strange countries on the far side of the mirrors and there gained either wisdom or madness. To try and harness such forces is beyond most, and perilous to those who try. Yet magicians and mediums do exist and those that forge lasting alliances with the spirits of the air, the darkness, the dead, the stones in the streets, the birds of the air, or a thousand times a thousand others should find themselves in safer, if stranger, harbors. But be warned, there is always a price for such powers.

In this chill, strange, and unraveling world, this haunt of spirits and suspicions, there are many stories to be told, both great and small. Come then, and tell us the stories of this place, of its peoples and perils; from the lowest guttersnipe to the greatest senator, all tales are welcome. Tell us what we do not know, what we can only guess at, what we have not yet dreamt.

Fortune favor you.