Fu-Shan

Life for Lizardmen in the Free City of Arnoc is either passable, or terrible. Fu-Shan arbitrates that line, and he decides which side of it nearly all his fellow Lizardmen live on. Thanks to his role as gatekeeper to a better life, Fu-Shan is one of the most powerful people in the entire city. Arnoc’s Lizardmen live either in the sewers or in its ghetto. The ghetto has fresh air, access to the sky, and guards to police the streets. Lizardmen in the ghetto can rent a lot, build it up, assemble a workshop – as long as Arnoc’s guilds get their cut – and make a life for themselves. Non-Lizardmen cannot enter the ghetto without an escort, and the district is walled off from the outside, making it difficult to sneak in. A Lizardman living in the ghetto cannot be easily robbed and murdered by Humans or Elves – unless the would-be criminals have Fu-Shan’s permission, as he pays the guards. He also owns the land, and maintains the walls, the streets, and the relations with the rest of the city. Inside the ghetto, a Lizardman might have a future, but it means living and dying by Fu-Shan’s word alone. The alternative is worse. The sewers beneath Arnoc are massive and overbuilt, with hundreds of extra tunnels dug around the proper sewer system – some say they connect to an old Dwarven settlement underneath the city, but cave-ins and spider infestations keep the curious near the surface, and none have ever delved deep enough to confirm the rumors. If a Lizardman clan can’t afford Fu-Shan’s prices to dwell on the surface – or don’t want to live in his shadow – they live here instead, scratching out a living as brute laborers for the city above. But they are far from free here, because Fu-Shan is not just a landlord, he is a gang lord. The sewers are thick with a motley collection of criminals known as the Skinners, who assert control over and recruit from the sewer clans, extracting coin for ‘protection’ and making deals with topsiders for the labor that the sewer clans provide. If any clans 'struggle' with this arrangement, the Skinners punish them, sometimes even going so far as to live up to their name. Control over the sewer clans is hardly the extent of the Skinners’ ambitions, however. They also use the enormous space under the city to set up certain businesses far from the prying eyes of the topsiders, such as drug dens, gambling parlours, smuggling routes, thieves ‘guilds’, brothels, prisons, or whatever else there is demand for. All those businesses send a hefty cut to the one who makes it all possible: none other than Fu-Shan himself. If a topsider needs something 'sensitive' carried out, they know who to ask. And so Fu-Shan holds the ‘Free’ City of Arnoc by its feet – with the ghetto and the sewer clans, he controls the city’s cheap labor force. With the Skinners' operations, he controls the underworld markets. The guilds say they manage Arnoc’s economy, the city militia say they manage Arnoc’s security, and the council says they manage Arnoc’s laws, but should Fu-Shan make a 'humble request', he is quietly obeyed. Whenever these orders sit down to meet, each of them keep an empty chair at the table. Nobody ever sits in it, but everyone knows who it is for. At least, that is how things once were. King Tayba of Kaerok’s war changed everything. When the Banner Lords broke centuries of mutual defense treaties to storm the gates of Arnoc, chaos engulfed the city. Soldiers, peasant levies, and mercenaries roved through the streets, killing and stealing everything in sight. But they left the sewers alone – not because they feared the reputation of any gang, but because of the stench. Fu-Shan, having lorded over the sewer clans for decades, was forced to huddle down among them, as terrified of discovery by the rampaging army as the lowest of his slaves. Later Fu-Shan realized that the sewers were no sanctuary, either. For many years, the Cult of the Skullsworn – a pack of ancestor-worshippers that Fu-Shan had always dismissed as fools and madmen – had been cultivating their numbers. With the city burning and the old powers crippled, the Skullsworn seized the opportunity to rise up and protect the Lizardmen. They seized huge swathes of the Skinners’ territory and killed hundreds of the criminals in a lightning war. His forces backed into their few remaining strongholds and his grand web of influence torched to ash above him, Fu-Shan lurked in his hideout, waiting for opportunity to give him an opening at his enemies… or for them to finally bring the hammer down, and end his reign for good.