Sea-Jeweled Providence – Google Docs
Sea-Jeweled Providence
City: Providence, Rhode Island
Population: 6,000/18,000
Controls: A remarkable hunk of Rhode Island
Government: Machine
Problem: Monsters
Heroic Opportunity: Trade Goods
City Aspect: Surviving and Secretive
Providence should be yet another sodden, corpse-heavy, monster-haunted marsh on the Drowned Coast. Arguably, it is — most of the population died in the original tsunami, and the people living there now include refugees from all over coastal New England — but the new town is amazingly functional. Again, for a city on the Drowned Coast.
It was most likely due to the nature of the Serpentfall itself; Providence is protected by several islands in Narragansett Bay. While those islands disappeared like ice cubes in a blast furnace, the tsunami was still affected just enoughin that area to make sure that Providence disappeared under a 50 foot-tall wave of water, instead of a 200 foot wall. The previous population still died, both in the original wave and in the wave of water from when the tsunami receded, but a surprising number of buildings managed to survive. If you ran for the roof as soon as you heard of the coming wave, and your building was high enough, you had a better chance of living. Not a great one, but a better one.
Providence is remarkably well-turned out, all things considered. The new settlers have consolidated around Federal Hill and the harbor itself; there was certainly no shortage of stone and brick to work with. Unlike many settlements in the Drowned Coast, Providence actively welcomes settlers and refugees; they typically end up reclaiming more land for farming, or else working the fishing boats. Providence is still absolutely dependent on fishing to live, but fortunately there’s no shortage of seafood. It’s highly aggressive seafood, to be sure, but Providence seamen have their little ways of handling that.
The settlement is run more or less on the family level: the Eliots and the Waites represent one major faction (survivors of the flood) while the Sawyers and Whateleys more or less speak for the other (resettled refugees). There’s not much in the way of real friction, however. The population has (just) enough to eat, and Providence is surrounded by thousands of square miles of wasteland filled with hungry monsters. This encourages a certain amount of cooperation.
Adventurers will discover that Providence is extremely isolated: their closest civilized neighbor is New Hampshire, which is itself out in the middle of nowhere these days. However, Providence does have regular visitors by sea. In particular, certain ships will put in — ships too small to be true ocean-goers — to trade supplies and salvage for Providence’s fish and jewelry (the city was known for its jewelers even before the Serpentfall, and enough of them survived to keep the traditions alive). When asked about it, the people of Providence shrug. Some survivors from up the coast, they say. They don’t talk about themselves and we don’t make ‘em.
That reaction is common, in fact. People in Providence get pretty quickly into the habit of minding their own business about things that aren’t their concern. It’s not an unfriendly town — Providence lads and lasses would have a reputation for friskiness if there was anybody near enough to really notice — but it’s not a place that welcomes poking around. It does welcome people willing to come in and kill krakens at sea and devil-flowers by land, however. But not many ghouls, thankfully. The immediate area around Providence seems to be more or less free of that particular scourge, much to the relief of the walled farming communities that surround the town itself. They have enough problems as it is, honestly.
TV Tropes: “names to run away from really fast”.