The imperfect jigsaw

The accounts of life in Altdorf are many and varied. Taken together they speak of wretched slums and indulgant luxuries, steam powered engineering marvels and mystical winds of magic, of high and low. It's the imperfect jigsaw of a city seething with life and passions, filled with dreams come true and nightmares come to life, uplifting hope and crushing despair, and I can never hope to paint one true picture of the city. I can offer glimpses, I can lay the puzzle with a myriad of pieces. But I can never paint the whole picture, never show the endless layers of life that lie beneath the surface. So I'm sad to realise that my work will be just one voice in a crowd of others.

Adolphus Altdorfer
Festag, Nachexen 4, 2522 IC

Much like Adolphus, I can only hope to cover bits and pieces of Altdorf. That is one of the reasons I chose a blog as a vehicle for this task, since it is eminent for laying out little pieces one at a time. But I have to limit my scope, I have to decide what goes into my entries, who to describe and what to cover.

At its roots this blog comes from the work I do preparing my own WFRP campaign. So that campaign will be the basis for everything I do. And I have made some ... let's say ... non-canon ... decisions which will influence this blog. High magic is right out. So I will not cover the colleges as they appear in Realms of Sorcery. I will not cover magic as a common occurrence in Altdorf. If I touch upon magic, it will be as a force unknown and feared. Halflings are gone, they don't exist. Elves are fantastically rare (rumoured to be a race of vampiric ghosts). Chaos is a threat, but I emphasise an enemy within, rather than a storm of chaos.

So 99% of the NPCs you will see here will be humans. The occasional dwarf, like Krag Jorgensen the famed dwarven weaponsmith, will make appearences and become a part of my jigsaw puzzle. Also, the subplots (of which I already have hinted at) will mostly concern human behaviour and implications of that. With the taint of chaos ever present, of course.

Magnus