The Swollen Goat

The main port of call on Goat Ass Island, it serves as the primary means of delivering stolen goods and hijacked ships. The primary waterway is channeled between the main island and a smaller barrier landmass, and is too shallow for larger ships to come all the way in requiring smaller vessels to be used to bring most goods and items ashore. The main docks service the Merchants Guild’s receiving area and warehouses, with another one a little further up for the Hunters Guild, which is also headquartered nearby. The beach itself also has a collection of tents and ramshackle booths that serve every purpose from temporary housing for crews on leave to serving as impromptu places of business. You can find someone that will do or sell you about anything on the beach, but it comes without the reputation and limited guarantees of the Merchants Guild.

The Hunters Guild is a pair of compounds, with the larger one established at the west beach with a single dock to provide a means for cargo receiving and transport. The compound itself has several single story buildings of various sizes and uses, along with two adjacent buildings that have a connecting balcony made of wood and tightly rigged ship’s rope, with one of the second stories serving as an aviary and the other as a kitchen and dining hall. A grassy area near its east end is fenced off and divided up as enclosures for several of the kept beasts. Its north end directly adjoins the sea, and is used for keeping, training, and raising marine life, featuring two docks for trawling vessels and fishermen to arrive and depart.

The second compound is further inland, and while it’s not hard to spot, just why it’s so far out of the way isn’t talked about much, and its crew isn’t much for spreading rumors.

A recent addition is an airship tower near, but not too near, one of the warehouses. It isn’t especially large and can only host two ships at once, and the construction itself looks and feels pretty ramshackle but ultimately reliable. It’s commonplace enough for something to fall off or be damaged in a departing ship’s takeoff that the crew responsible for its maintenance have started to place bets on what will go next.

Overlooking Goatsport from a hill atop the barrier island adjacent the town is Fort Billy (or Fort Fuckass), the most recently completed bit of construction and the most resource intensive the Goat has undertaken yet. While much of it is constructed from stone and reinforced, this is primarily toward the ocean, and the “back” wall is a wooden frame shored up with alchemic mortar (cement) rather than being stonework through and through. Its higher elevation serves to both increase the range of its cannons and give it a more advantageous position in a land defense. It has several cannon positions of various barrel lengths and load weights, and will outrange most warship loads by a healthy distance making an approach dangerous and likely costly. It has a heavy main gate that gives way to a central courtyard with multiple staircases to the walls and battlements, as well as a path to a subterranean storage space, the contents of which are not public knowledge.

The Merchant’s Guild is headquartered toward the center of the town, but its warehouses are kept at the shore for ease of loading and unloading. Two long buildings that run parallel with small amateurishly paved pathways for rolling heavier loads on carts in and out, with barred windows and only one primary entrance and exit into the warehouse proper each, aside from the loading bays. The warehouses themselves are always under guard, but serious attempts to try and rob them are almost unheard of even being planned between a variety of factors, not the least of which is the difficulty of getting cargo out of them and onto a ship, and the ship out of cannon and pursuit range before being noticed.

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Beyond the warehouses is Goatsport itself, a collection of buildings erected out of a combination of lumber and salvaged ship parts, giving the whole place an overall feeling that’s part small town part ship graveyard. The walk in from the west beach starts off as sand but a paved road replaces the bare earth heading toward the town heart, the Swollen Goat itself, where it forks off and is mostly replaced with packed dirt. The only noticeable amount of paving elsewhere is Iron Alley where many of the blacksmiths, artificers, and other artisans have set up shop.

The Swollen Goat isn’t in the dead center of town, but it’s not far off either. The main road from the west beach heads straight to it, then diverts left and right at angles heading into the rest of the town. The Goat itself is a large building that’s half a shipwreck and half a bar and apartments built on, with the topmost deck inaccessible from the bar itself. The interior has a ground floor with two more floors fashioned out of the repaired and refurbished decks, reachable by stairs and with ropes erected at the ends to try and spare drunks an unpleasant tumble over the side to the ground below. The ground floor has tables, an open dance floor (that doubles as a brawling pit), and a handsomely stocked bar with the Montcada’s living space separated from the rest by a single large kitchen that services the family and customers alike. The furnishings in the Goat are almost entirely stolen and run a gamut of misplaced expensive and well made to water-damaged and barnacled on the underside. Decorations are in the same vein of being largely stolen and therefore having no real consistency, and also include skulls, weapons, and bits of armor as trophies, and a wall over the bar that features wanted posters of the more prestigious criminals that come through. If a verified poster or bill with a value of 500 gold or more is presented then the subject of interest is awarded a spot on the wall and given a discount on drinks (but not meals).

The Swollen Goat also serves as the Merchant Guild headquarters, with meetings often held in the Montcada family apartment, but just where records of import in its business are kept isn’t public knowledge.

Near the head of the right-hand street that departs from the goat is Madame Redacted’s brothel, not the only place in town but the most profitable, being one of the few buildings built entirely out of stonework instead of repurposed ship parts, and the most closely associated with the guilds and the Montcada family. The brothel is open all hours with a rotating staff, but with certain expected noise restrictions come around two A.M. or so under most circumstances. In the daytime it’s a more relaxed space with an almost calm environment and quiet drinking, while come night it becomes a nonstop debauched party. Much like the exterior the interior is new and fairly consistent in its theming and decoration, feeling more like an expensive establishment in the old world than a seedy bordello on an island in the Caribbean. The ground floor is reserved exclusively for public partying and has several rooms for VIP attention, but no actual intercourse, while the second and third floors are reserved for paying customers to busy themselves with the workers, with the more expensive and prestigious exclusively tending the third floor.

Beyond the brothel are shops where the merchant guild sells some of their wares locally, as well as some residential housing for those that have opted to settle more permanently in Goatsport.

Not much further up the same street, where the road is still paved, is the Bards Guild headquarters. Given the clandestine nature of the guild’s more critical operations the building is presented most prominently as a theater, complete with an acoustically accommodating stage, orchestra pit, and reasonable floor plan. The main entrance features two hallways going around the theater and providing side entry to its floor space, while the most obvious side rooms in the hallways going around the theater are dressing and rehearsal spaces, meeting rooms, and storage. The right-hand hallway ends in a wall that has a hidden mechanism to open a doorway in it and proceed into the roguish backrooms that service the guild’s clandestine operations, including stores of supplies, weapons, and costumes, an extensive library of gathered information and stolen items, training space, and a meeting space. This is not inaccessible from backstage or the left hand hallway, and not every member of the guild is aware of it, only those involved with those particular operations.

Beginning shortly on the left-hand path from the Goat is what’s colloquially referred to as Iron Alley, a well paved (by the Goat’s standards) street which houses a row of the most prolific and influential workshops and craftsmen on the island. Blacksmiths, artificers, gunsmiths, shipwrights, and more can be found down Iron Alley. Each building also features a rather spacious workshop that can serve more than one artisan working on a project at a time, barring commission needs demanding a full load, and it isn’t uncommon for any of the craftspersons on hand to sparingly take apprentices in their trade if a wandering soul or sea dog decides they’d like to have some solid ground under their feet and plenty of sweat on their brow.

Beyond Iron Alley the paving ends and the road turns to dirt, and some few more shops and craftspersons places of business and practice can be found, as well as residential housing.

Further up the two main roads, and along their arterial streets, is an assortment of small residences, further shops, and dirt roads, as well as a school house for the island’s few children of an age and with parents or guardians of an interest in sending them somewhere to be educated. Many of these buildings are made with obvious bits of ship salvage, with tells such as masts and portholes, or even lingering barnacles baking in the sun on their walls. Some homes have leaned into this consciously and look more like ships than residences, or have set up balconies with rigging access and crows nests rising from their homes to lounge on during fair weather. Not all of these buildings are filled either, given the dangerous nature of many folk’s work on the island, and sometimes a place can be found to squat for a few days. There is no church in Goatsport, more out of lack of a want to codify anything even implicitly than a scathing disdain for spirituality.

A small distance beyond Goatsport to the north east are the farm lands, a loose collection of homesteads that cultivate various crops and raise assorted animals to supply the town with its own resources in the nigh-inevitability of a siege. Primary crops include sugar cane, bananas, coffee, tobacco, root crops like cassava and yams, and citrus fruits, among less common outliers. Animal husbandry is also practiced, though the livestock is split between more familiar beasts like pigs and chickens and the island’s native reptilian life. Beef is a rarity and is usually imported, making it more expensive and one of the first things to go when supplies are limited or cut off.

The jungle on Goat Ass Island sprawls beyond the farmlands, effectively covering much of the terrain around the mountain in the island’s center and out toward the indigenous dwellings on the other side. It’s predominantly palm trees and inhabited by birds and large reptiles and lizards, the majority of which are endemic to the archipelago if not just the island in particular. There is nothing in the way of habitation barring small, scattered indigenous communities on the eastern side of the mountain and the Hunters Guild second compound which is precariously built some way up the mountain on its north east face.

The dick (or the dike if you prefer) is a landmass extending southward from the southeastern edge of Goatsport, colloquially named by the ever witty Montcada patriarchs for reasons that become apparent when viewing it on a map. It serves as a reasonably accessible seaside alternative to the west beach and the shores of the fort, lacking any of the mercantile or shanty elements of the former and the Importance of the latter. It's a common spot for people to head to for a nice day enjoying the sun, sand, and sea, and it's a long enough stretch of land that there's plenty of room to find yourself a cozy little spot to yourself if you'd rather avoid anyone else.

A large freshwater lake that has formed over time in the sinkhole of a volcanic caldera, Big Hole Lake is a distance into the jungle beyond the farmlands. While it is a large source of fresh water, most of the water in Goatsport is captured through wells from an aquifer, though the water from the lake can be safely drunk. It has a small ecosystem within its confines including semi-aquatic carnivorous reptiles that typically don't grow larger than a big dog, and plenty of fish for them to prey upon. Most folk in Goatsport assume the fish were introduced by the natives, but nobody's really sure how they got there. During the unnatural winter the lake surface can freeze up, but the chill never goes very far down and it's not advised to try skating or walking on it.

Big Hole Lake rests more or less in the center of Goat Ass Island and as such can be a useful landmark for navigating the jungle and reorienting ones sense of direction, and it also acts as an unofficial dividing line between the territory of Goatsport and the indigenous population, more in the sense of development and expansion than being a hard border to not cross on foot.

A cave near the Goat's "head" that approximates the position of an eye. Not much is known about it other than that it's there, and that wherever it goes it's going deep and far. So far exploring it hasn't been a big priority given how far out it is and the thin likelihood of anything useful being in it, but there's also a certain feeling of dread associated with crawling down into its deeps, one that may just be the natural reaction for any surface dwelling, light loving creature faced with the prospect of descending into the bowels of the earth.

The Outpost is a small two building compound out beyond Goat Ass Island, located on a smaller island that's just called "The Outpost" because nobody much lives there. It serves as an early warning system for ship traffic from the south, incoming weather, as well as serving as a potential way station for anyone fool enough to get lost on a whole other island. The Outpost is manned by a small, tight-knit crew of mostly loners and the otherwise ill-adjusted, as they spend weeks if not longer living alone on an otherwise uninhabited island. In an unofficial capacity it also gathers data for the Hunters Guild. Their primary means of sending word to Goatsport is via messenger bird, and they are largely self sufficient.

The compound itself is a three story tower and a longhouse placed close by one another, with an enclosure for a few domestic beasts. The tower also has space on its roof level for serving lookout, or as a bird's nest for a capable marksman.