LUSKAN LORE

A character knows the following information with a successful skill check.

History DC 20: In the Year of the Haunting (1377 DR), Captain Deudermont of the pirate hunter Sea Sprite broke the stranglehold of a collection of pirates and evil wizards over Luskan to briefly serve as governor. Deudermont’s reign was short—the populace was too accustomed to the corruption-as-usual practices of the former city masters. The City of Sails ultimately fell back into the hands of the surviving high captains, who immediately began to fight among themselves. Within a decade all four had either been killed or run off.

Left without any central government, even a corrupt one, there was no hope left for Luskan. Rival gangs of thieves and pirates have been fighting, street by street and alley by alley, ever since. In the ensuing decades, numerous attempts have been made by master thieves, pirate captains, bandit kings, and monsters ranging from kobolds to beholders to take control of the city, but nothing resembling a government has stayed in power for more than a few months.

Streetwise DC 15: Huge tracts of Luskan lie in ruins—four thousand people inhabit a city built to accommodate ten times that many. The port is now useless, crowded with the half-sunken hulks of the last ships unlucky enough to tie up here, including the once-mighty Sea Sprite. No central leadership, and nothing even remotely resembling a city watch, exists. On a walk through the streets of Luskan, one encounters rats and other vermin the size of horses, roaming gangs collecting whatever meager spoils the rubble might still yield, and dead people and animals rotting in the streets or floating face down in the filthy, disease-ridden Mirar River.

Thieves and other outlaws who flee justice from places such as Waterdeep are never pursued past the gates of Luskan. No dungeon cell in another northern city could possibly be a worse fate. This sort of “immigration” is primarily how the population replenishes itself.