The
mindset of a resident of Umberwell can be stark or bleak. Adventurers
profit from misery because misery reeks of opportunity to make coin
when things have gone horribly sideways. The city’s citizens are
vulnerable prey in a metropolis filthy with predators; they suffer
when they feed their addictions and when they’re offered false
salvation. Credible threats of violence are a functional insurance
policy that keeps the city’s machine in motion. When your moral
compass points only to the downward spiral, damnation feels like a foregone
conclusion.
However,
the adventurers created by the players might be a strategic
intervention into the black beating heart of the city. Adventurers
represent a line of flight away from authority and the depredations
of misery. A literally violent break occurs here: an adventurer’s
purpose is to disrupt, to tip the balance, to right wrongs—even if
only by accident or because there was money in the chase. Adventurers
are a fraught crack in the city’s ecosystem because a continual,
nomadic becoming-picaresque is a process that veers dangerously
toward re-assemblage within the metropolis's appropriated war machine.