Hello, friends!
I thought I’d share the design for the Jobs Court, the locale in which this story starts.
Like most of the designs, its specifics developed in the drawing; in the opening pages, I’d mentioned four exits, so it needed four exits: why? I reckoned that, given that it was a place in which industries had a deliberate presence, that each sort might form a consortium or guild and would operate a quarter of the space.
Since the Houtmark (the state in which the town lies) is the country’s lumber source (part of the reason that the castle and most of the buildings are primarily wood), it would need a wood market – not the wood itself, but for arranging larger shipments/futures/etc. The timber quarter wouldn’t be for hiring the workers, but for arranging what would happen to their efforts.
As it’s on a river and near a road network, there’s be a section for shipping or transport. That WOULD hire workers, and, as it’s upstream of much of the rest of the country and with a seemingly endless timber supply, would be the start point for flatboaters whose transports would be made out of constuction wood that could be disassembled and sold or delivered once the transported goods that had been moved by them reached their destination.
The Houtmark being a state in growth, there’d be need for constuction; as mentioned in the story, the court would be not so much for workers as for contractors and agents who could assemble teams according to the needed location and scope of a given project.
There’s also a manufacturing section, where one can either offer the services of the workers in or available to their employ to specific ends, or seek out the best price for components or goods needed.
Although I ended up using it for the crowd scenes in Broken Blade, I made this little clothing sheet so that I could grab and mix and match for the majority of characters in the jobs court (not all, as some would be traveling from elsewhere). My idea was that there might be aspects of clothing that carry from one state to another, but that each (like the Houtmark) would have some regional specificity. I also like the idea that an article of clothing can be worn many different ways, so the “craftjacket” here has a lot of modularity. You see one on the brickmaker in the crowd scene in Broken Blade, and one will be worn by a prominent character in Frontliner who we’ve yet to meet.
Chris