Duluth

* **Population:** 105,360 (2070), Duluth/836,397 (2070) Great Metro Area
* **Government:** Resides under the jurisdiction of the UCAS state of Minnesota. On paper. Duluth has a Mayor-Council form of government, with the City Administration, led by an elected Mayor who makes policy proposals to a nine member City Council. Duluth's five representational districts are divided into 34 precincts. Each of the five council districts elects its own councilor. There are also four at large councilors, representing the entire city.
* **Territoriality:** While Duluth (and its companion towns of Proctor and Hermantown and Arnold) is technically run by its elected government, all the utilities, city administration and security is contracted to the Duluth Industrial Authority, a consortium of the biggest corporations operating in the metro area [Ares Macrotechnology/Cirrus Aircraft, Tong & Anvil Manufacturing (EVO-4M), Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industry, Great Lakes Transportation, Allete, Loomis Armored and Sanssentia]. These seven corporations all have major extraterritorial holdings in the Great Metro Area, and form the underpinnings of the manufacturing and shipping industry in Duluth. The Authority also owns the LSH Lake Superior Hospitality Corporation, which manages most of the major tourist destinations on the lake.
* **Law Enforcement:** Knight Errant Security holds the contract for metro-wide security, although each member of the Industrial Authority maintains their own small, personal security forces.
* **Transportation:** Land transportation is handled by DHP (Duluth-Hermantown-Proctor) Transit Company, which is a subsidiary of the AAA-Prime Corporation EVO-4M. Water transportation is handled by DIA member Great Lakes Transportation.
* **Demographics (by metatype):** 59% Human, 22% Dwarf, 10% Troll, 7% Ork, 1% Elf, 1% Other

The second-largest metro area in Minnesota, Duluth remains true to its roots in mining, industry, tourism and shipping. And business in Duluth is defined largely by its geography, with mining and processing from the Iron Range to the north and shipping across the increasingly volatile Lake Superior to the east. The city has had to rebuild nearly its entire maritime infrastructure to accommodate the increasing highs and lows of Lake Superior over the last half-century (which forced abandonment sister town of Superior WI several decades ago). Despite the rapidly degrading environment, made worse by ongoing industrial efforts, Duluth remains a key tourist spot for Minnesotans.

Duluth is also famous for its disproportionate Dwarf community. During the early days after the Awakening, as the first generations of UGE kids were growing up, prejudice against metahumans often forced them, and their families, out of their homes and places like Duluth became refuges for specific metatypes, in this case a group of young Dwarf entrepreneurs founded a company to help their own kind, which later grew into Tong and Anvil Manufacturing. Although UGE metatypes no longer face the same level of persecution they did back in our parents’ and grandparents’ days, the large, vibrant Dwarf community (nearly a quarter of a million in the metro area), still remains one of the hallmarks of Duluth's culture.

On the shadow side, the port and the sprawl are particularly tempting for crime, with the port as the more lucrative, and the sprawl the less policed. Duluth tends towards cycles of profitable crime (which tends to accumulate upwards to the powers that be in the forms of payoffs) and spectacularly harsh crackdowns when they need to make a show of it. Which is one of the reasons that crime here is often best left to the locals, who know these cycles as a survival skill. At the top of the local food chain is the Mustafa Clan, an affiliate family of the Callahans down in the MSPlex, who run both their criminal and legitimate enterprises with the same business-like style and ultimately get a cut of pretty much every criminal enterprise in the greater Duluth Area.

## PORT OF DULUTH

The port has always been the center of Duluth’s economy, one of its great reasons for being, and that has only gotten more so in the twenty-first century.

As Lake Superior has grown more hostile, the powers that be, who profit from the port have compensated by building up the port even more, until it is now a massive forest of brick and metal, free-standing or fixed floating installations to dock ships, take on cargo, do repairs, process salvage etc. This maze of industrial machinery, built to Brobdingnagian proportions, criss-crosses the waters of the St. Louis River, St. Louis Bay, Superior Bay and the waters over the ruins of Superior itself.

Newcomers are often awe-struck or terrified by the size and extant of the facilities, built on a scale that takes no metahuman concerns into its consideration. This is a place for machines and the metahumans who work it must adapt themselves to their needs, not the other way around.

Territorially, this is all Authority-controlled extraterritorial, except for the solely Ares-controlled 'Ares Inland Sea Administrative Complex', which serves as a headquaters for all of Ares' operations on the Great Lakes.

## CORE DULUTH

The heart of Duluth is the Core. This is where the real decisions get made and the business of the city gets done. Still placed right on what was the shore of Lake Superior, vast constructions have been built to protect and seal-off the Gleaming towers rise above the massive seawalls that protect them. This area includes the ancient seat of city government and the sky-piercing high-rises of all the member corporations of the Duluth Industrial Authority. And that’s actually a pretty good representation of the downtown aesthetic, with centuries-old brick and stone next to newly-built glassteel skyscrapers. A lot of people work in the Core, but almost nobody lives there, with the big wheels living on the hillside, the drones live IN the hill, and the little people who actually do the work have to commute out to the Sprawl.

Naturally, this is also the most heavily-policed part of Duluth, home to the headquarters of the metro-area Knight Errant security, who tend to make themselves fairly inconspicuous here, so as not to inconvenience their highest-paying clients, except when they’re dispatched to the sprawl or the Tides in full kit, to reassure the paying customers.

### The Ring

Despite the increasing unpredictability of Lake Superior (the great lakes seem to make new record highs and lows every few years, receding and rising destructively), Duluth is still a major tourist destination, especially in the summer. And one of the reasons for that is that they have adapted their physical infrastructure to compensate for these destructive cycles. And the biggest way they’ve done that is ‘the Ring’, a series of city-block-sized platforms that ring the Core, giving it it’s name. These platforms can lay flat on the stony beaches in the off-season, can float on the waves when the waters rise up to to threaten the Core and can be floated out on the Lake when the water levels are low and the coastline retreats. These platforms contain hotels, docks for private craft, bars, restaurants, gift shops, sightseeing and even artificial sandy beaches to accommodate the lake-loving tourist.

Naturally, the Ring was built by and mostly owned by the LSH corporation, except for a few private platforms in the hands of specific corporations and the particularly rich.

## UNDERIDGE

Duluth's topography is dominated by a steep hillside that climbs from Lake Superior to high inland elevations, giving it the nickname of "the San Francisco of the Midwest.” Always an important part of what defines the city, physically, this rise has only gotten more central as the twenty-first century has gone on. The sides of the hill have always had the big institutions (universities and government buildings) and the sprawling homes of Duluth’s wealthiest, and that is still true. Some years this area is high and dry with a commanding view of the distant beach, some years it forms the coastline, but above the watermark, the stately old homes (and some very fancy stately new homes) continue.

When the Dwarven community began to gather in Duluth, Tong & Anvil started an ambitious project to build housing and amenities below the hill, in the very rock. This project has continued up to the modern day and a thriving ‘Underidge’ district has grown up, carved into the very rock of Duluth. Originally intended as housing for the Dwarf community, it remains a solidly Dwarf-majority district, although a lot of non-Dwarven middle management and other corporate functionaries (largely from the Core) also make their home there, living underground in order to shorten their commute. The whole of the underground neighborhoods are connected by the DWP Highway, an expanded tunnel that runs through the whole of the Underidge.

## DULUTH SPRAWL

Beyond the steep hillside over the lakeside, Duluth continues on over land, for miles, extending into Harmentown, Proctor and Arnold, a vast mix of factories, warehouses, residences and retail, with the usual mix of industrial wage slaves, SINless dispossessed, corporate control and crime (when you can tell the difference).

The thing that sets the Duluth Sprawl apart from other sprawling semi-urban wastelands is that it doesn’t really look like an urban sprawl. Sure its got the usual cracked concrete, low-lying, cheaply-built modular buildings, big, anonymous industrial complexes. But its also got trees. A lot of trees. A combination of the heavily-forested north country and the poor urban maintenance means that the urban sprawl is as much a forest as a sprawl. Not only the native Cedar, Spruce, Pine and Tamarack, although plenty of those as well. But also some of the Awakened species in the north woods, such as the sprawling, fast-growing Wattieza and the hard-to-kill fireproof Omaaî Mitig. These woods also are home to a great deal of fauna, both mundane and awakened, like Hypersquirrels and Aniwye. The gangs of the Duluth sprawl have to practice just as much woodcraft as street skills.

## THE TIDALS

When the city of Superior WI, just across the Lake from Duluth, had to be abandoned, due to the increasing cycles of heavy flooding and extreme low tides, which made shipping difficult, some of its inhabitants were absorbed into the growing Duluth Metro Area, but many weren’t able to find places in their neighboring city. A lot of them found their way to other places like Green Bay or the MSPlex, but some got left behind or stayed behind. They ended up as scavengers and itinerant workers in the growing port. Now, two or three generations later, they have formed a bit of a permanent underclass, annoying for the Industrial Authority for being off the grid but useful for being a pool of expendable labor.

Without a permanent town, they tend to migrate depending on the river, living in the flooded-out ruins of Superior when the waters are low and in a ragged fleet of houseboats when the waters are high. They live by taking day work in the Port of Duluth, scavenging in the ruins of Superior and other ruined communities along the coast, busking and trading with the tourists on the Ring, and farming on bits of reclaimed lakebed during the times of low water before moving on, as they always do when the waters rise again.

And accordions. For some reason you can always tell a ship of Tidals by the presence of at least one accordion. Nobody seems to know why.

## Hotspots

* **Tom's Logging Camp**, a Tidal high-water camp just beyond the Sprawl, where they keep all manner of strange Awakened creatures...
* **Grassy Point Railroad Bridge**, across St Louis River, festooned
* **Uncle Harvey's Mausoleum**, an abandoned concrete bin out in the Bay, a low-water Tidal base and tourist draw
* **Karpeles Manuscript Archive**, underwater library of private manuscripts, ancient and modern, magical and mundane
* **Brewery Row**, a part of the Ring that houses the many breweries of Duluth: Suspension Brewing, Big D Duluth Brewing Company, Twinports Brewing, Whaleback Brewing Co., Missabe Brewing and others

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