i Think it is like Coruscant.
so i want to know what you think Sharn looks like
i Think it is like Coruscant.
a combination of New York 100 or so years ago for tone (think Gangs of New York) tight, dirty etc, and around the time of WW1 for look (towers etc). Coruscant is a good reference too, with city built on top of city.
In my mind the architecture is mostly vaguely Victorian, but flavoured based on the people living there, age and need, ie: lots of lower wards being more arts & crafts, while the floating portion of the city being almost Gilded Age America.
It's a huge city, so it looks different depending on where you are! Just remember- dark, dank & dirty for the most of it. And pretty much always raining.
edit: I also take a lot of inspiration from William Gibson's old cyberpunk novels, Batman (Keaton), Batman: The Animated Series, and the Walter Gibson's old The Shadow pulp novels.
Thanks so much for sharing.
Any idea who the artist is etc ?
Though I gotta say this painting really nailed it for me.
I've got a new desktop :D
While I like the cover art for Seventh Moon, I wouldn't want to take it as an accurate depiction of Sharn - too modern-looking. Too obviously based on Manhattan. It's even got the Chrysler building!
I've got a new desktop :D
Agreed. The picture is amazing.
My Sharn has always been like Blade Runner but more magically inclined (obviously). Dense, packed, overrun, hawkers on every street corner, streets floating out in space, towers all around and rain... lots of rain.
This line ends at Grand Union Station, located high in the middle levels of Lyrandar Tower. From there, elevated rail lines radiate outward to various points within the city, including Mourner's Watch at the edge of the Dragon Crypts necropolis, University Station near Morgrave, and several other locations in the Upper and Middle Wards. Two more lines form concentric rings around the outer edge of the city, connecting these points.
These lines are not operated by House Orien, but rather by the Sharn Elemental Transportation Company, a guild of Zil expatriates with ties to the elemental binding industry. The gnomes have had to deal with pressure and intrigues by not only Houses Orien and Lyrandar, but House Sivis as well, all of which would love an excuse to take control of this lucrative intra-city transportation business. Thus far, the SET Company has managed to balance these three very powerful business allies against one another for over a century, and shows no signs of crumbling anytime soon.
The carriages used are smaller versions of Orien's carriages, often older models that have been discarded by the House and modified by the SET Company to more easily handle the tight spaces and sharp curves that an urban environment requires. For the most part, these are strictly coach-style carriages, although open freight carriages exist for transporting goods from the warehouses above Cliffside to the main Orien freight station in Tavick's Landing. House Sivis also maintains a pair of carriages for moving mail around the city.
Some possible plot hooks associated with the Sharn Elemental Transportation Company:
Shadow Agenda: A Sivis excoriate has recently been named to the SET Company's business council. Although he is a long-time and trusted employee, he secretly hopes to bring the company under control of Sivis in the hope that he will be reinstated to his previous position in the House.
Ravenholm Station: There exists one station on the SET line that is not marked on any map, nor do any trains stop there. The station's windows are boarded up, the ancient sign that hangs there is faded to the point of illegibility, and just passing the place gives passengers a tangible chill. Something dark and terrible happened at this station, but nobody outside the company knows the story, and SET employees are bound by contract (and perhaps magic, as well) not to discuss it. If questioned, a SET employee will respond only by saying, "The trains don't go to Ravenholm anymore." (Note: Yes, the name is intentional, and I apologize profusely for my not-so-elaborate pun. Feel free to rename the station if the pop culture reference annoys you.)
The Dead Passenger: A zombie has been spotted riding the rails, shuffling from car to car and occasionally changing trains, seemingly at random. It does not attack or otherwise threaten anyone, but its presence disturbs the passengers. However, none of the company's employees are willing to confront it; thus, it rides for days on end, unmolested and seemingly uninterested in bothering anyone. In truth, it is a particularly dim-witted Karrnathi zombie that was accidentally left behind when a Karrnathi nobleman passed through the city with a retinue of undead bodyguards. The zombie is interested solely trying to finding its master, but it will defend itself if provoked. Said master may offer a reward for the zombie's return, although whether this will be more or less than the reward offered by the SET Company for disposing of this deterrent to business is up to the DM.
I originally entered Philip Straub's site for a better look at that Sharn pic he did for heirs of ash; But once in, i just saw some pictures that I think really capture the city, even if they're not really of it:
Sharn's population makes it a small-to-medium-ish city by modern standards, or a fairly large but not extraordinary one by pre-modern ones.
Given this, I suppose I see the huge towers of Sharn as not being how most people live -- most people don't like having to either climb huge flights of stairs or hiring a costly aircab to get to their apartment and back. For a typical resident, it's a more typical dense but not towering medieval town -- streets flanked by unbroken lines of apartment buildings perhaps four or five stories tall, with commercial establishments at the bottom, not so different from what you might see by walking around Paris circa 1400.
The downtown area with the huge towers is economically important and makes use of the geothermal energy and Syrania manifest zone and houses a number of prestigious institutions, but the skyscraping spires are overall not the majority of Sharn.
I guess one thing that I can't keep out of my mind is that Sharn has a population of 200,000. That's about the population of Des Moines, Iowa, Spokane, Washington, or Akron, Ohio.
I use 10x the population figures as listed in the book.
The wharfs in the wharf section detail seem to be about 75 feet long. (an 8x8 pixel square represents a 5x5 foot square)
On the Sharn overview map, those wharfs are about six pixels long (5 x 3, at an angle -- sqrt(34) length). So let's say that a pixel represents 12 feet.
Sharn is approximately circular on that map. It fits approximately in a square of 340x340 pixels. So the radius is about 170 pixels -- about 2040 feet.
pi*r^2 = 13,074,051 square feet = 0.47 square miles.
Density = 426,469 people per square mile.
This is about six times the density of Manhattan.
Incidentally, if you said that half of the space consisted of gaps between towers for streets, unscalable volcanic ridges, and such, and you said that half of the tower space were commercial/industrial/governmental and that half of it were residential, and you wanted to give every man, woman, and child in Sharn 200 square feet of apartment space (so an "average" (mean, not median) family of four has a 800 square foot apartment, with most people being more cramped and the rich having much more, you could find the average number of stories in a tower, as being:
(200 * 200,000)/(13,074,051 / 4) = 49
So it looks like ChrisTheS is right: Sharn really is a massively verticle, towering city, packed into a tiny space about 1/3rd the size of Central Park. One could walk from one end of sharn to the other in 15 minutes.
Now the only question that makes me wonder is exactly what's driving that tiny, superdense pattern of urban development, even taking into account the geothermal energy sources and Syrania manifest zone.
Also consider the fact that at any given time there are propably hundreds if not thousands of merchants in the city at a time. This city is over packed all the time and as such is a very dirty, dark, crime infested cespool of a city.
But it is also a haven for adventure so anything goes in sharn, anything at all!
Just make the place crowded, noisy, seedy in places, bright lights in others. Posh parts, dangerous parts and those parts that are simply called home.
Lots of street vendors, entertainers and of course pickpockets !
Just my 2cp worth...
12 stories on average might mean a few downtown core towers that are 50 stories tall and the like, and other portions of the city that are more like five stories tall.
UPDATE: A putative distribution of Sharn's residential architecture:
10% -- Semi-suburbs. These are detached houses with yards and everything. They combine a mixture of cheap land values (for Sharn) and wealthy residents.
60% -- Dense Medieval City. This is most of Sharn -- narrow streets flanked by unbroken lines of apartment buildings, on average perhaps 5 stories tall (some 4 stories, some 7, etc), with cheap apartments at the top, nicer ones nearer to the ground, and retail establishments at the ground floor. So long as you don't look at the skyline, but keep looking around the immediate area, being in this sort of neighborhood isn't so different from being in the middle of Paris circa 1400 or so.
20% -- High-rise: These are the parts of Sharn that are more than seven stories tall, but less than 35 stories. On average, these areas are perhaps 20 stories tall. Here, Sharn leaves the medieval Paris look behind and begins to take on a style that is dependent on the Syrania manifest zone. Magical lifts start to play a prominent role, etc.
10% -- Skyscrapers: These are the 35 stories and up parts of Sharn, maybe an average of 50 stories, with a few "supertowers" that might be 100+ stories tall, nearly as tall as or even taller than the tallest skyscrapers of Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Manhattan, or Taipei.
That averages out to 12 stories.
Why does anybody ever really need to know the exact number of people in Sharn ?
Just make the place crowded, noisy, seedy in places, bright lights in others. Posh parts, dangerous parts and those parts that are simply called home.
Lots of street vendors, entertainers and of course pickpockets !
Just my 2cp worth...
Aye.
Those pics are all nice though.
Basically...first of all, it's not plateaus and stuff, it's flat, and there are only man-made walls between districts on the ground level. Then it gets really complicated. It has five levels, the Ground Level, Lower Levels, Middle Levels, Upper Levels and Skyway or whatever it's called floats at the top of the city.
I could give you a really long description of how my is completely different to Sharn...but it would take a lot of time, and I can't be bothered. I think mine looks in a way like Hollow Bastion, except with more straight edges, and less insane. And it has a ground level instead of water.