Singapore

The captain is a one-armed dwarf,
He’s throwing dice along the wharf
In the land of the blind
The one-eyed man is king, so take this ring

Enough said… carry on!

In addition to quarters dedicated to the peoples common to the archipelago, there are three major population groups in Singapore: the Chinamen, the Moors and the Children.

The Chinamen: This is the largest group of Singaporeans, with skin as white as albinos and blue-veined like crones, they long ago took on the name of “china-men” after the delicate blue and white imperial China in which Singapore trades. Brittle, hard and sensitive like their namesake, they are engaged in constant battles of honour prosecuted through trade, petty theft and knife-dueling. Nearly all artisans are Chinamen, as are almost all officials whose offices are tied to their artisanal guild. Only the doge of Singapore is from another people.

The Moors: The Moors, migrants who came only a few hundred years ago, settled the disputes between the warring Chinamen by establishing the cult of their one God, Aton. Originally fanatical henotheists who sought to convert all, the Moors are now quite happy to have remained a minority that skims vast surplus from the city through their trading monopoly and exclusive right to select the Doge. The minarets of their temples are apparently all subtly different, indicating membership in varying lineage-based religious factions of the Atonic faith whose differences are incomprehensible to all non-Moors.

The Children: Perhaps there are just a lot of orphans in Singapore. But this seems an inadequate explanation. The thousands of apparently parentless children who roam the alleys and wharves of the city at night seem to defy any reasonable theory of how the local population grows or reproduces. There also seem to be no adults who claim to have grown up as children. It might be that high mortality and shame could account for this but it seems unlikely. How is it that the alleys and wharves fill with children between the ages of five and twelve at night and most vanish by morning, leaving only a handful selling street meat and begging?

Stiletto-wielding children are a constant danger for travelers unused to the darkness and humidity of Singapore; they might steal your possessions while you sleep or worse yet, cut your throat. Even when no lasting damage is done, a common game is to creep up and slice into strangers’ flesh with sharp blades leaving wounds only noticeable some time later by enormous blood stains in the clothes.

While our world’s Singapore is a city of concrete built atop a city of bamboo, the Singapore at which DPoNI characters land is a city of iron. This presents special challenges given the extraordinary heat and humidity of the low-lying city. Nearly everything is covered in rust, causing the black boats, buildings and tools appear to be hemorrhaging, the streets, similarly, run with brown, orange and red water from the frequent rains and constant sweating humidity.
Naturally, good iron is expensive in the extreme and Singapore, as a result, has various grades of building materials and tools:

Unrefined ore: Blocks of stone containing unrefined iron ore, supplemented by bamboo, are the main materials used to build the domestic and institutional buildings of Singapore as well as the main paving material for important (non-dirt) roads. Cut into heavy blocks by masons, it was mined at some distant location many centuries, possibly millennia ago when the city was first built and transported to the island on barges. In recent centuries, major temples and chateaus have been pulled-down so that ore can be extracted from the heavy blocks of their construction in the blast furnaces along the southern wharves, leaving muddy pits and piled of broken stone.

Pig iron: In Singapore, this has been the preferred material for fashioning furniture, large storage vessels and iron boards, used as a substitute for the mahogany common in construction on nearby islands.

Wrought iron: Chisels, hammers, cleavers, spades and other tools are typically fashioned from wrought iron. Long ago, Singapore had a vast surplus of these tools and traded them for luxury items; even now, it is easier to obtain carefully preserved antique tools than to commission new ones from local smiths. It is from this most ancient of the iron supplies that the city’s constantly-heard temple bells are heard at all hours of the night.

Cast iron: Recently, Smiths have begun casting iron based new smelting processes and molds brought from the Empire. It is for this iron that roads have been torn-up and chateaus pulled down most recently. Overwhelmingly, this iron has been used to make components for the muskets and cannons that now defend Singapore’s harbours from the imperial attack that is now feared.

Steel: Despite the ubiquity of iron and the proficiency of Singaporean smiths at working it, all steel items have been imported from off the island. The frequently polished cutlasses worn by bouncers, watchmen and pirates are not of local manufacture but come from “away.” The various smithing guilds of Singapore have succeeded in prohibiting their sale or trade on the island but underground steel markets periodically convene late at night on the wharves.

All this iron leads not just to the appearance of blood-like rivulets running down walls and through the streets but to a sanguine smell in the air at all times. On very humid days (as opposed to the usual humid days), the air is pregnant not just with the bloody odour of rusting iron but with so much iron that the rivulets of orange and red appear spontaneously on the sweating faces and limbs of the inhabitants.

The humidity of Singapore is legendary not only for its extraordinary iron content and omnipresence but for the tricks it plays on Singaporeans. Sudden orange rains can erupt anywhere at any time, when moisture saturates the air so thoroughly that minor downpours interrupt banquets, court proceedings or any event where people are gathered. These are especially concentrated in the hours around sunset when the air cools. Just as abruptly, rains can cease and steam begin rising from all surfaces.

It is at these moments that people and even objects, momentarily obscured from view, can vanish without a trace. Some explain these events as the work of quick-handed thieves and kidnappers who make use of these strange properties of the weather but most believe that at least some of these disappearances are the sudden evaporation of people and their goods into the air, never to be seen again, or, worse yet, cast dead and broken to the earth during the next heavy rain. To ward against this effect, many locals fill their pockets with earth, stones and other heavy objects that have been found less prone to sudden evaporation. Others seek to ward off the sudden evaporations by covering their bodies with creosote or the jelly used to make Greek Fire.