Jack Mauver, common miner and regular patron of the Feral Dog Tavern, a week before his death by a falling girder in the Tilgast Mines:
So, you wanna know what life is like in Diamond Lake? Hells man, why would you want ta give a s+%@ about this place? It’s a piss hole. My old bones sweat their last in those mines, and I’ve got nothing to show for it except a case of gout and the hacking lungrot.
You ain’t going away are, ya? Well then, sit down. . . I’ll talk to ye about the sights around here, but it’ll cost ya a few rounds . . . the Good Dwarven stuff too, you cheapskate. Okay, where was I? Diamond Lake, a s@**hole like no other. . .
hymns to St. Cuthbery, clutching to their idealism and principles like cornered animals. Their wild-eyed chief minister smiles as he draws a cat-o-nine-tails across his bare back, awash in their adulation and the spirit of his god.
But it's just another night in Diamond Lake...
Welcome to
Diamond Lake
At a perfumed arcade known as the Emporium, Governor-Mayor Lanod Neff rubs shoulders with common laborers awaiting an appointment in the Veiled Corridor. In an adjoining antechamber, snakes and exotic dancers gyre to a sonorous weave of cymbals and seductive pipes.
A floor below, a gaggle of grasping miners presses against the windowed door
of a darkened cell, impatient for a glimpse of a two-headed calf.
Out in the street, a gang of rowdies screams obscenities at a crumpled halfling, kicking it as if scrambling for a ball. Their drunken laughter echoes off shuttered windows and bolted doors.
In a tower-flanked fortress across the shadowy square, filthy men with nothing to lose shout