The Street of Beggars

The most impoverished residents of the City live on the wretched Street of Beggars. It hosts leper houses, orphanages, religious mendicants, and a vast homeless population.

Despite its residents being in abject poverty, the Street of Beggars is the home to one of the City’s most powerful factions: the Beggars Guild. The Beggars Guild regulates all petty crime. All pickpockets, racketeers, highway bandits, and river pirates pay tithes to the Beggars Guilds. The thieves who don’t quickly find themselves turned inside out and dumped into the Grey.

Is every beggar you see some expert thief? Of course not. But it’s possible they pay dues to some faux-beggar that is. If they see something worth reporting they might get a kickback. That’s why it’s risky to speak about clandestine matters in the City streets: you never know what lurking leper might overhear you and report back to their masters.

Sensations:

If you’re not from the district, it’s almost impossible to move through it without a sturdy honor guard: the lame, widowed, disenfranchised, and orphaned cluster around you. Lice and fleas are stirred by your steps down the street. It smells of dust. Twisted brown mushrooms grow from the wooden planks of the dilapidated houses. You hear the ringing of hand bells warning you that a leper colony is coming up behind you.

Rumor:

The Beggars’ House is an almshouse providing squalid shelter to the homeless population of the district. It is also the (not so) secret headquarters of the powerful Beggars Guild. Everybody knows this.

People don’t know that the Beggars’ House also hides a secret entrance to the Underworld. This is how members of the Beggars Guild transport booty back from the Underworld while avoiding the City’s adventuring taxes.

However, anybody using this portal is subject to a more insidious tariff. The ancient masters of the Beggars Guild are entombed in the catacombs of Beggars’ House. The thieves that pass through their domain must pay the strange price demanded by these unliving things.

Special City Action:

• Join the Beggars Guild: For 100g in dues, you can join the Beggars Guild. Thereafter, you may use the Beggars Guild’s secret entrance into the Underworld. The Beggars Guild does not impose a 50% coin tax. They do, however, require that you “donate” one item of their choice whenever you use their secret portal. This might be your most precious artifact. This might be an item of no consequence.