Violence! In the Baronial Capital!

The Baronial Agents 

They do not control a monopoly on violence, and are popularly described as simply the largest and best-equipped gang in the city. The Agents patrol the city in pairs, and have broad authority to interpret the Baroness' legal codes, and to enforce her justice at their disgression. They can deputise citizens of the city into militias, and they receive combat training, but most of their skillset is in police work and troubleshooting. When serious fighting or anarchy breaks out, Agent patrols can call on organised units called Pacification Squads, made up of twelve heavily armed fighters, and always be accompanied by a veteran captain and a rifle team. Rifle teams carry enormous, long-barrelled firearms loaded with specialist expanding ammunition capable of decapitating a human with a single shot. They take two people to operate and are fitted with range-finding optics, which are so rare and poorly understood that they are thought to house spirits.

The 52 Girls

One of the oldest gangs in the city. The 52 Girls allow membership only to Girl- and Thou-Bravos, a practice that the other Bravo gangs consider archaic and religiously conservative. They make greater-than-normal use of plate and other heavy armour, and famously carry telescoping batons and large steel clubs in addition to their cross knives, which their fighters tend to use as off-hand parrying weapons. Their armour is painted in dark, opalescent purples and matte whites, and their masks are often crafted to resemble the heads of insects. They use cleavers and other butchers' knives to dismember those who challenge their champions to death-duels and lose. There is a rumour that they eat the bodies but this is not true - usually they dissolve them in acid to prevent proper burial and potential resurrection. 

The Baron's Men

A gang whose members are mostly the children of rich merchant families and other scions of the often-idle upper-middle classes. They reject the authority of the Baroness, and consider the legitimate head of the Capital to be the man who died so that she could take up her position. They wear black armour and masks, paint the blades of their knives black, and are fond of brightly coloured chemical flares and smoke bombs imported from the White City. They are also famous for fighting in bonded pairs of lovers. Their politics are not taken seriously by the powers that be, and are not seriously pursued by the gang itself.

The Revelry

The Capital does not have a true working class, because it doesn't have factories or heavy industry, but there are many itinerant day-labourers, stevedores, haulers, and other unskilled workers living within its walls. The Revelry are drawn mostly from their ranks. They don't wear masks, and instead paint their faces bright, bloody red when 'in colours.' They also have one of the most sophisticated and complex hunting languages (instantly recognisable to other Bravos), and are famous for making no other sound when fighting. They have many poets in their ranks. Their armour is painted in many, clashing colours, and in it is said popular myth says that this is because they steal the individual pieces from defeated enemies (not actually true, but a great image that they lean into). They were the first to wear the harlequin half cloaks that have become broadly synonymous with the Bravo knife-fighting style. The Revelry fight under the influence of painkillers and dissociatives. 

The Three Word Gangs

The Three Word Gangs are an artefact of the academies, and are associated with but separate from the larger and more embedded Bravo gangs. A Three Word Gang is typically composed of 5 or 6 undergraduates, studying together, often living together, and caught up in the great romance of the pursuit of knowledge. They are considered eccentric and dangerous, because their studies bring them into contact with entities, and most Bravos would rather face the knives of their enemies than feel their organs cook and their vision darken under their terrible psychic assaults. Useful allies and bad enemies. 

• MACHINES ARE DIGGING (cryptography students)
• PEOPLE EQUAL SHIT (students of practical geometry and engineering, especially ballistics)
• ANGELS ARE DEMONS (gnostic heretics, tolerated for their youth, history students)

Sword Charms

A sword charm is a small, painted, wooden icon that can be fastened to a weapon with cord or thin chain. They used to be produced exclusively by the church and were considered holy artefacts, until the academies began making their own and undercutting the church monopoly about sixty years ago. This was popularly felt to be a blow to the authority of the religious leaders, and has been blamed (among many other things) for the relative secularism of the Baronial population. 

A sword charm is something like an entity, but simplified to the point of non-sentience. They possess language-processes that function in complicated series, but that never cohere into anything capable of systematic thought. This makes them relatively cheap to build and purchase, but dangerous to operate - it is your own mind that completes the 'circuit' that allows the charm to function, and this process can be traumatic. Users will find their thinking drastically slowed, their coordination shot, their limbs weak, and their sense of self tapped. 

Many duelists consider the benefits to outweigh the disadvantages.

A sword charm can be amateur, professional, or masterwork, and has a single quality. You can attach as many sword charms as you wish - all penalties are additive. Despite the name, a charm can be attached to any melee weapon. 

An amateur charm drain d6 stats, a professional d4, and a masterwork d3. This drain only effects you while you are wielding the weapon - when you sheathe it, you get the stats back. At the start of combat assign one of your core stats to each number, roll as many d6s as you are losing stats, and subtract as indicated.

Qualities can be whatever you want. The charm is a bloodthirsty almost-mind and has a powerful urge to hurt things, so get creative. Some boring options: 

• Doubles your STR bonus when calculating damage.
• Changes STR to DEX bonus when calculating damage.
• Grants the bonuses of a +1 weapon.
• Increase crit range by 1.
• Increases number of dice rolled on a crit by one.
• Adds one point of psychic, fire, or electricity damage to your hits.
• Forces those wounded by it to check morale.
• Heals you for a single point of hp whenever it kills something. 

Cursed or defective charms steal stats permanently. If you want to fuck around with multiple charms, you should be prepared to lose a character to bad rolls on the stat drain (intentional). Weapons with innate magical properties of their own will not play nicely with sword charms (at a minimum the charms won't work, and there may be other consequences).

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