Encyclopedic Entities: The Great City (Patreon)

 As before, if it is in italics, then it is official material, everything else apart from information on game content is speculation, conjecture or received via back channels (which means it's mostly official, but subject to potential change).  

Time to delve into the place we know the most about despite barely touching on it in game. The Dark City, home of the Noble houses, the Great Game Hunters and the mysterious entity at the heart of the place, the Dark Surgeon.

I'm going to bring out all the lore we have in order before we start digging into things:

The Great City

The Great City is a bizarrely flourishing city made up of noble houses. Many generations of families have survived astonishingly well, growing complacent and wealthy in the city. Beneath the worldly noble exterior of the city, inhuman forces breed intrigue and family rivalries.

One of the more notable types of houses are the houses of the Great Game Hunters. These hapless nobles squabble over resources and knowledge, risking their lives in competition for prestige, chasing rumors of ever more dangerous game.

Nobles

The Nobles are the grandees of the exalted houses of the Great Game Hunter city; infinitely wealthy, proud, and ruthless. The city's monolithic sewers run red with the wages of their unseen war for status and power. 

In their quest for supremacy Nobles will secretly venture into the bowels of the city seeking alliances with untold entities that happily feast on the Noble's desperation. 

Just to enjoy a well received appearance at the Bankers annual grand ball, Nobles must mint coins in their own blood to pay the staggering fees for the 66 doors. Doctors are employed for months-long transfusions just to obtain enough Noble blood for the minting process. 

Great Game Hunters

Great Game Hunters are a character class for Kingdom Death. They come from the largest standing human city. Great Game Hunters venture beyond the safety of the city gates to win fame and fortune on behalf of the bickering noble houses that control the city. Rich with finery and honed weapons, they confidently stride into the unknown, often never to return. 

The Great Game Hunters are aristocrats, cultivated sportsmen who compete for the prestige of killing the most ferocious of monsters. The Great Game Hunters hail from a bizarrely flourishing city. Many generations of families have survived astonishingly well, growing complacent and wealthy in the city. Beneath the worldly noble exterior of the city, inhuman forces breed intrigue and family rivalries. These hapless noblemen squabble over resources and knowledge risking their lives in competition for prestige, chasing rumors of ever more dangerous game. 

Great Game Hunter Rogues

Strong-willed sons and daughters of powerful Great Game Hunter houses sometimes find themselves bored of the intricate courtly intrigues they must entertain. These Rogues will eschew the stuffy machinery of the city, turning their attentions to mastering the wilderness beyond. Armed to the teeth and rich with all the advantages of their houses' resources, they set out to live rough, or as rough as nobleman of fine-breeding and plentiful wealth can live. 

A Rogue's relationship with her family is never simple. Some maintain the delicate balance of seeking their fortune while appeasing their clan at home. The cost of neglecting household affairs can be steep. Some are sold to other houses while they are gone, others harbor secrets that prevent their return, and some fall into disgrace so deep that they become the target of a hunt. The Great Game Hunter Rogue eschews the regrettable circumstances of their standing at home, becoming completely absorbed by the thrill of what lies far beyond the Game Hunter city. 

Chefs

Chefs train from childhood to know the palate of a particular noble house by consuming a diet of table scraps and refuse. Each noble's favorite dishes reliably perfected through careful gustatory study. Great Game Hunters are so well nourished by their chefs that their bodies form dependencies on a chef's cooking. The health of a Great Game Hunter that loses their chef is sure to dwindle without an adequate replacement. 

Many Great Game Hunters would readily accept death before accepting a poor meal. Their traveling kitchens are obstinately impractical, able to produce a feast under even the harshest circumstances. Rival houses know that a surefire way to hamstring their competitors is to find a weakness in their kitchen. An extra-rich stew laying too heavy in the belly or a spoiled, gut-wrenching ingredient may be a hunter's undoing. To this end, hunters shower their chefs with riches and keep the threat of grievous harm close at hand. 

Doctors

One of the Dark Surgeon's 6 wonders, the Doctors are physically far more then human. Doctors have a second, smaller heart grown from their lord's cells implanted on the right side of their chest. It produces a supply of virile transfusion-ready blood that overruns the doctor's weakened immune system. It makes the doctor an ever-ready donor of blood and organs for a lordling in peril. 

Becoming a Great Game Hunter's doctor is often less desirable than slavery or even serving as a human cog deep in the machinery of the city's sewage system. Each new doctor is brought before the Dark Surgeon who excises the doctor's face in exchange for medicinal knowledge. The newly minted doctor will erase their physiological identity to become a host for replacement limbs and organs they will provide for their lord. The doctors are expected to remain sane and sober in order to offer the finest care to their master. The few that escape are swiftly hunted down by the Dark Surgeon's adjudicators and find themselves subject in unthinkable medical trials that make their former fates seem palatable. 

Ammo Slave

When a lauded Great Game Hunter house falls to ruin, their loss is compounded by generations of shame. The fallen family is stripped of its heraldry and its lineage is sold into servitude among the remaining houses. The highest patriarch to the lowliest footman are given ignoble roles, as weapon caddies or cannon fodder to maximize their public humiliation. 

Royal Chambermaid

The Royal Chambermaids guard their lieges from menaces within. Unassumingly, they tend to their sovereigns’ countless needs, be they mundane routines like grooming and thwarting assassinations, or more prosaic duties, like feeding their blood to the royal house’s countless scab-wards—lest the imps imprisoned inside escape and require most tedious slaughter. 

Finally we have an appearance from the Dark Surgeon itself in the Hunt Event - Surgeon.

So, with that done, we're going to apply Ockham's Razor to all of this, first of all by pulling the common themes and tropes out so we can see what's visible.

• Blood
• Servitude and Indentured Servitude of own populace (which is a smidgen different from slavery)
• Imps and Devils
• Nobility and the way that nobility will hunt game for sport
• Eating
• Use of humans as thralls
• Surgery and Medicine gone twisted
• The number 6
• The Dark Surgeon has a gnarled hand and travels around in a red/gold carriage, pulled by ???
• Power is fragile there, it costs a lot to survive and thrive
• Crossbows are in common use and there is some human powered machinery

Also, amusing call out giving the doctors a second heart Adam, I see what you did there.

You can also entertain that the Aries Knights come from the Great City as their armor is constructed by scabbing, however that's a tenuous reach and it's not something that's worth crafting right now because there is precious little 'pinned down' lore on that particular survivor type. Trying to expand on the details of the Aries Knights beyond what we have from that lore and what was unofficially leaked (which means it can be changed whenever Adam feels like it), is a futile waste of time. Perhaps there will be an entire zodiac range of models in that gorgeous 75mm style.

So, lets pin what we can down about the Great City.

We know that this is a thriving large size settlement with a single entity at its heart, this Entity is known as the Dark Surgeon. That matches every single other "human" settlement we've encountered so far, all of them are based around some powerful creature that provides knowledge and protection in exchange for something that is on the entities agenda.

Based on the tropes and the information we see above, it seems highly likely that the Dark Surgeon is a vampire type creature, it ticks a huge amount of the tropes that fit the vampire. Blood is a massive part of the societies' structure and we even have the classic riding around in a carriage, associations with hunters, crossbows and the inclusion of imp/devil types. So I think we can be confident that this is the Kingdom Death equivalent of a city ruled by a vampire. Everyone apart from the Dark Surgeon are cattle, hence the emphases on food and using living things for parts and generating power.

There is also a large Machiavellian context to this place, we're seeing a lot of links to how easily and far a noble house can fall, very quickly. When this happens they're rapidly treated as property and used in a variety of awful manners. But it is not just Machiavellian, this city is highly capitalistic, but the currency is literally human blood. You would not be wrong if you assumed that Adam is quite socialist in his leanings for his lore, which is in part because Capitalism gone unchecked is a great horror and nihilistic trope to use and in part because with the technology level the survivors are at, capitalism just isn't even something that could become stable most of the time.

Below the Dark Surgeon are all the noble houses, of which Great Game Hunters are just one such thing, and the bank. There are inhuman influences at work throughout all of this, and they move to increase and continue the strife and keep the structure from being stable. This is again a tool of an unchecked capitalistic society - you have some people gain great power because this has the man below desire that position, and the man below him desire more and so on. It's what causes people to protect billionaires from criticism - the want to be that billionaire, they believe that they might still get there instead of accepting the reality that they are poor and only chance can change that. For an entity who thrives from this, having a power structure built around them that is unstable for everyone involved (except themselves), is a huge benefit. If you have everyone against everyone else, they're not going to turn on the thing in charge.

What the Dark Surgeon gets from all of this, and if the Dark Surgeon really is the entity at the heart of the problem (it probably is), remains a mystery and for as long as we remain with the current setting it's going to stay that way. Labyrinth and the Lantern Festival could have shed some light on this matter, but neither of those look like they'll be appearing anytime soon.

Finally. "But fen, where's the Manhunter? He's from the Great City, I know cause reddit told me so."

Sorry, but with the current evidence, the odds that the Manhunter comes from the Great City are far smaller than the odds that it comes from the Golden City. The only links between the Manhunter and the Great City are the traps, Pistol, stakes and the blood. Whereas the links between the Golden City and the Manhunter are White Lions (they use them as partners/pets), blood as candy (honey), stakes, the pistol, the pistol's handle, abductions, castration themes, manufacturing of humanoid monsters and the bizzare appearance of the Manhunter (which is very close to that of the Lion Knights when they do not have armor on). When you don't have enough information to work on, you should go with the one which has the most links, not be a contrary cheese and try to claim it's the other way.  I'd say right now it's 80/20 in favor of the Golden City.  Also, there is little need for the use of Manhunters as enforcers/abductors (which they do on the Lone Traveler Lion God hunt event) when the Great City already has a massive amount of Great Game Hunters who fill that role.

I'm willing to be wrong on this, in fact I don't care if I am, because Adam's written all the tropes and links in a way that leads to the Golden City and as someone who was trained by Her Majesty's Government to investigate and analyse information for far more serious matters than which fictional city a plastic man comes from - my training states, follow the option with the most evidence until something concrete contradicts it. And at the moment, the evidence points to the Golden City, but as I mentioned in the Podcast on this matter, it could go either way in the end. Love with you heart, use your head for everything else.