Wishray Wiki

The city is so large that only a handful of organizations can be said to be truly found everywhere.

The office of the Mayor is a position of almost zero authority. In a very theoretical way, the Mayor constitutes a central authority of the Great City. In practice, however, the individual feudal lords of the various neighborhoods of the city control their parts of the city, and pay the Mayor no heed. In fact, in practice the lords use the Mayorality as a scapegoat, or a place to shove off problems when they don't want to solve them.

This is very inconvenient for the person so shoved, given that the Mayor has no single residency. Instead by perceived necessity the Mayor travels around the city, going from neighborhood to neighborhood, in an attempt to be able to speak with the citizenry and address their issues. So finding the Mayor at any given time may require some investigation and extensive travel across the city. And few bother, since the Mayor has no real power to effect changes. They Mayor may remind a local lord of their duty to the city and upholding a fair rule, but it's up to the lord to actually address any issue. If the Mayor's suggestion is inconvenient, the lord in question usually just says that they'll take the suggestion under consideration, and then forget about it after the Mayor leaves.

Mayors who have gotten out of line have frequently been assassinated, and it's not a very sought out position. The position has no salary, but most Mayors make a reasonably good living through accepting bribes for the minor favors that they can give out. And since they always have a food and board provided by the lord with whom they are currently visiting, they don't have much in the way of expenses. That said, one of the real reasons for the Mayor's nomadic nature is that they fear to stay too long and annoy the lord who currently houses them. So best to move on to annoy another lord before being assassinated.

Given all this the job of the Mayor tends to change hands very frequently. As such, no description of the Mayor is given here, allowing the details of the current Mayor to be made by the GM if and when a visit occurs. Not all Mayors are weak-willed dupes; although this is the common stereotype that people have of what a Mayor is likely to be like. Occasionally a strong Mayor comes along who acts with some sort of integrity. This does not change the fact that they have very little power, and that no Mayor is ever likely to have much.

The Mayor theoretically has power in the form of the City Guard. Like the Mayoral offices, it is traditional for lords to create a guard hall somewhere in their district (the Architects are supposed to create such free of charge as part of their mandates), and to pay to keep guards stationed. In practice, the lords usually do not pay very much, meaning that there are very few guards, and they are very poorly motivated. That, or the local lord pays them under the table to be just another arm of their own power-structure. Those that don't pay off the City Guard usually have even more powerful personal guard regiments.

Because of this, going to the City Guard to get justice is a dodgy proposition at best. Most never bother, and instead go to whatever powerful patrons they have for protection and redress of issues that they may have.

The city could not exist in its current form without the existence of the members of the Architect's Guild. Architects perform the extremely complex arcane art of constructing buildings with magic. Materials have to be brought in for them to assemble, but not nearly as much as if the buildings were built in a mundane manner; meaning they can build in the claustrophobic precincts of the city, even atop other structures.

The powers of the architects are entirely constructive, they have no means of demolition. And the structures they build are impossibly strong. As such, few even attempt demolition before starting a new project. Far easier to simply build atop an unwanted building than to try to destroy it to create space. Further, since this began, the city has climbed ever skyward, and building at low levels would mean being in the shadow of other places. So the city just keeps being built up, layer upon layer. This has been going on so long that none are very sure how deep the depths of the city go. Most of the sewage systems built into new buildings simply drain down to lower unused levels somewhere, as does rainwater runoff. Meaning the bowls of the city are often dripping awful places that nobody goes. In the earliest days the architects even built down into the earth, meaning that even where you find “Ground level” this may not be as low as you one can go.

There are, in fact, places where one can reach the earth easily, however, places where the architects are mandated to build so as to allow light to reach to the lowest parts of the Great City… the farms…

Like the Architects, the Harvesters are a caste of people without whom the city could not exist in its present form. The Harvesters are capable of creating huge supplies of food for the city by growing new crops of food every single day. They operate from “Farms” that dot the city. These open areas of substantial size can be found at least one to every neighborhood, sometimes more. They all take similar forms, a “dent” in the skyline of the city that the architects must arrange to be sure that the sun hits the ground by 10 AM on a winter day. The fields themselves are typically surrounded by a two-story ring of buildings that form a wall, into which are built all sorts of bakeries and market stalls, taverns, even restaurants.

Each lord is held responsible by his citizenry for ensuring the proper operation of the farms in their precincts. A lord who somehow mismanages their farms is likely to end up lynched in very short order by a populace who is well aware of what happens when the farms fail. This does happen with some regularity here or there about the city, and the results are always a wave of refugees that pours from one part of the city to the next, resulting in rioting, looting and many dead. This also means that lords pressure each other to ensure proper operation of their farms, so as not to have to deal with issues should a farm fail in a neighboring precinct.

That said, the lords do not have direct control over the farms, but merely facilitate these operations. The farms themselves are peopled by a the harvester caste of people who live in little rural villages amongst the fields. They are a close knit folk who do not like city folk getting inside the “walls” of their farms. Though seemingly isolated, their culture is common to all farms, as they have a tradition of having their children marry outside of the farm on which they grew up. In this way, the harvesters spread their knowledge about as well.

And though most denizens of the city see the harvesters as somehow rustic, this is entirely a preconception formed by meeting very few. They are, in fact, just as cosmopolitan and mixed up in the affairs of the city as are the other citizens.

ECCO