Arcadia

**Arcadia** (Ar-kedja), also known as Slaveport, is the capital of Tambaku. It is an ancient city, developed from villages and settlements going back thousands of years, into the Dark World. What it's built *on*, however, is mostly mud.

## Geography

Technically, there is no solid ground in the entire region of Tambaku in which Arcadia lies. The entire region is below sea level, and the sediment is itself a slow moving liquid. Arcadia, thus, is built mostly on stilts, hidden barges, and carefully relocated landfill. Arcadia is a port, though due to the massive tidal basin in which it sits, it has no harbour. Instead, every part of the city has water access. Due to its ecenomic and political importance, as well as its central position between the east and west halves of Tambaku and its proximity to the Far South, most of the slave trade in Tambaku passes through Arcadia, granting the city the less friendly title "Slaveport".

The main drag of Arcadia is both a road and a river, a feature known as the Riviere de Sang. The river runs through the center of town, from the prosperous Ivory Quarter down to the Sin Basin, the raucous part of town, before emptying into the Dark Sea.

## History

Arcadia was, originally, a fishing village on the southeastern coast of pre-colonial Tambaku. When Soleil explorers came over, during the Dark World, they found the tidal basin an ideal place to anchor ships and come ashore. From the village, they were able to explore the interior of the Tambako subcontinent, following the Riviere de Sang up to its tributaries. The native Tambaks were initially welcoming of the settlers, but we all know how that turned out.

After Tambaku was settled, and slavery began to spread, Arcadia's central location made it ideal for shipping slaves by boat. Since then, millions of Tambak natives have been shipped east to Pays and the Forgotten Empire, north to Blaekera and Chelta, and south to the Interzone and the Far South. This is not to say all black Tambaks were enslaved, though. The peculiar institution took shape over a century, during which some settlers married into the population, accounting for the original population of Tambak Creole.

During the Fallen World, Arcadia's primarily magical upkeep was gutted. Many neighborhoods sank into the swamp or crumbled. The richer parts of the city were largely depopulated for decades, and the poorer (and predominantly black) parts were left to keep the city running. As local and international demand for slave labor, cotton, and tobacco increased over the course of the Fallen World, however, business kept moving through Arcadia. Over time, the city was restored, eventually reaching old heights by the time of the Awakening.

During the Great War, Arcadia was host to the Paysean navy in the south, helping them to blockade Rotoxa (and thus gain the benefits of increased overland trade with Lotruna). However, not all was well. One of the Tambaku Uprisings, the Arcadian Revolution, saw a unit of veteran buffalo soldiers organize an armed revolt inside Arcadia, conducting guerilla warfare against the city's fragile infrastructure and indolent aristocracy.

The resulting battles between the revolutionaries and the the Tambako Army laid siege to the city, disrupted trade, and weakened the country's defense against the Cheltic Army, as well as its ability to put down slave revolts in the other states. In the end, the revolution was gruesomely quelled and the local population even further disenfranchised, resulting in the renaming of the Red Quarter to the Sin Basin.

Since the end of the War, Arcadia's business has shifted focuses. Internationally, demand for slaves is lower than it's been since the settlement of Tambaku, but demand for cotton and tobacco has never been higher. Domestically, Arcadia's been able to rebuild thanks to the opportunity to freely move goods and slaves across the states once again, but the events of the Arcadian Revolution have rendered any sense of peace inherently uneasy. To make matters worse, the Treaty of the Half Moon has incorporated the Interzone as an independent nation, meaning Arcadia's ability to trade with the various ports along its coast has been greatly reduced.