Pondering about trains.

[Wakshaani]

Teh Guild uses trains to cross the Breach, to bring in people and cargo, and to ship out products, people, and, most of all, SoulStones. 

But it leaves me with a few questions.

How many trains travel through the Breach each day? What percentage are Earthbound and what percentage are Breachbound? You'd imagine 50/50, but I can't see that many exports leaving, so most of the departing trains will be empty. Are most trains just cargo shipments from Earth, sent back empty, with only one or two a day having passengers? How many people fit on each car? How many people a day wind up in Malifaux?

For instance, if a hundred people a day come in, over three years and change, you get 100,000 people. Is that the population of Malifaux City? More or less? What about the outlying areas? How many convicts are moved in and has that ratio stayed the same or has it gone up or down over time? 

Weird questions I know, but I'd like to start off a game with the trip through and the arrival and I realized while doing early pokes at it that I had no idea just how busy, or quiet, Malifaux Station really was. The trip itself is super short, so there's no need for a dining car or the like, but there'll likely be a "resting station" Breachside for travellers to settle down into and relax after the harrowing trip. This gives the trains time to be decoupled, cars moved around to Westbound, Eastbound, or Southbound trips, hooking up cars as needed for teh eventual destination and also transferring cars to the Earthbound return trip.

At the moment, I'm mentally using an older model Pullman car design in my head, where two seats face 'North', then a table, then two seats face 'South', giving you a Stagecoach-like seating arrangement (which would encourage new-arrivals to talk to one another a bit, hello gaming hook!) ... three of those sets each on the 'West' and 'East' side of teh car, leaving a path in the middle. At the far 'North' of teh car, where you enter and exit, there's a lone bench on the 'West' and a guard posted on the 'East' who checks tickets and provides security. It's not mentioned, but his real job is to keep an eye on passengers that might flip out and go magic mayhem during the trip and put them down... the rest is just busywork that makes passengers *feel* safe. This gives you (12 + 12 + 2) 26 seats... which just so happens to be half a deck of cards. You can number the seats from 1-13, splitting them into Red (East) and Black (West) if you ever want to do some random element, like tossing in visions during the trip or whatever. A Joker means the effect gets the guard. Oops! 

 I know that there are patrols of Witchhandelers and Witchlings there, again to keep an eye on people expressing magic, which is a great bit of exposition to set the tone when someone on teh train starts going magic and gets taken down by the Witchlings to protect everyone ... and you can later re-introduce that magical person as either a Sanctioned Spellcaster or as a Witchling to expose some of the horror elements of the Guild. 

But if anyone has an idea about how many trains there are a day, how much they carry, and general population numbers, I'd be much obliged.

[Ebb]

There's only one train that travels back and forth through the breach, it's  "The Iron Ram" and it makes six to eight trips a day. A huge proportion of travelers are Breachbound, especially if you count all the convicts that the guild imports from prisons around the world, but even without them, the tickets out of Malifaux are intentionally priced much higher by the Guild (and normal people have to save up to afford the ticket in) so for the most part, it's only rich people leaving. There aren't many goods (other than convict labor) that the guild imports from Earthside, mostly just luxury items, and the train should never be empty on the way back.

The TTB Core Rulebook has a bunch more information on the subject (page 38) only other thing that's not there that I can think to mention is that you are right about the Pullman style seating, that much is clear from a few of the stories.

Edited:

Oh also, there are way more people then that in Malifaux, even if you're just talking about the city then I'd guess a few million at least.

[Harlekin]

2 hours ago, Ebb said:

Oh also, there are way more people then that in Malifaux, even if you're just talking about the city then I'd guess a few million at least.

I really don't think that there are a few million of humans in Malifaux. This would require a hell lot of agriculture to get them fed alone. 

And that's not considering the logistics to even get those people to Malifaux: 1 million people within one year would result in over 2700 per day arriving from earth. And none of them dying after their arrival to keep the number this high. 

For comparison: 

Quote

 In 1912, for example, Grand Central served 3,175 passengers per day*

* Wikipedia Grand Central Station Chicago

So, I consider it highly unlikely that the number of humans is so huge in Malifaux but more like about 10% of that: Big enough to have reasonable infrastructure and offer enough anonymity for an urban feeling but not as overwhelming as, say, Chicago in the 1920s. 

[Wakshaani]

4 hours ago, Ebb said:

There's only one train that travels back and forth through the breach, it's  "The Iron Ram" and it makes six to eight trips a day. A huge proportion of travelers are Breachbound, especially if you count all the convicts that the guild imports from prisons around the world, but even without them, the tickets out of Malifaux are intentionally priced much higher by the Guild (and normal people have to save up to afford the ticket in) so for the most part, it's only rich people leaving. There aren't many goods (other than convict labor) that the guild imports from Earthside, mostly just luxury items, and the train should never be empty on the way back.

The TTB Core Rulebook has a bunch more information on the subject (page 38) only other thing that's not there that I can think to mention is that you are right about the Pullman style seating, that much is clear from a few of the stories.

Edited:

Oh also, there are way more people then that in Malifaux, even if you're just talking about the city then I'd guess a few million at least.

Agriculture, and water, are the big two for imports. It takes a TON of food to feed as many people are in Malifaux and things don't grow very well there. I mean, where the heck are *any* farms? The swamps? No. The woods? Probably not. The Badlands? Maybe some subsistance work, but it's not easy, and the usual counter for this, grazing animals, doesn't end well since malifaux's magic tends to twist critters. 

And water? The water shortage's even worse, since you can at least hunt varmints for food, but water's essential for life and the citywater's  been bedeviled for years. That means importing, and importing water's going to take a LOT of cargo space and weight. 

After that? Raw materials for all the iron needed, wood like mad since Malifaux's main sources of woods (the Bayou and the Knotwoods) are filled with hostiles, and basic fabric for clothing which is *also* in short supply. Luckily, Soulstones exist, which pay for it all, but ... man, it's expensive to keep Malifaux City afloat, let alone the more far-flung areas.  

But I was more worried about the flow of people than freight. Not that I'm obsessed with logistics or anything. *cough*

[diki]

I assumed everyone in Malifaux lived off flying pig meat! (and moon shine)

[John M]

So this is a good question. 

 

The US, in 1910, had 6 361 502 farms:

 

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/volume-5/volume-5-p3.pdf

 

In 1910, there were 93,000,000 people.

 

So about 1 farm for every 15 people. (Obviously, some farms were bigger or smaller). 

 

But wait! The US exported about 361 million dollars in prepared and raw foodstuffs:

 

https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/FRB/pages/1915-1919/24528_1915-1919.pdf

 

So it would require less to be self-sufficient. All told, about $60 a farm was exported. 

 

But wait! $60/farm works out to be $1661.14 in today's money.

https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1910?amount=60

 

That means that about 10 tons of wheat per farm was being exported in 1910:

https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/markets-and-trends/crop-prices/wheat-edges-past-160-t-for-first-time-in-2020

 

(With apologies. It's not exact due to lack of information)

 

Each acre creates 2.62 tons of wheat:

 

https://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_yield_of_wheat_per_acre_in_the_UK

 

Which means that roughly four acres per farm exported wheat.

But wait! There's more! The average size of a farm in 1910 was 145 acres:

http://lib-usda-05.serverfarm.cornell.edu/usda/AgCensusImages/1940/03/02/1275/Table-01.pdf

 

Which means it took about 141 acres per farm to feed 93,000,000 people.

 

So: To eat like an american required each farm feeding 14.619 people. Each person ate 10.3 acres of food a year.

 

So just take whatever you think the population of Malfaux is and multiply it by 10.3 acres to be self-sufficient. It probably isn't a huge amount with it being only a single city with a few dotted towns. The woods to the northeast. The area near the wetlands but not yet the Bayou.  Malifaux could be self-sufficient, or darn near close to it.

 

You're welcome for the inundation of information.

 

 

[SEV]

I'm not a TTB player myself, but I just want to say kudos for this thread, it was genuinely interesting to read (and the answers well)! 

Also, you get my vote for the thread title of the month 😁.

[Wakshaani]

1 hour ago, John M said:

So this is a good question. 

Wonderful facts, thank you! I knew that the era was running around 10% farming, due to not having modern techniques like tractors, insecticides, or antibiotics, but 6% (The one farm feeds 16.3% people) is even better than that. The acreage is even more useful since we know how big Malifaux City is, and we could do some projections based on population density of the time. It's safe to say that occupied MC will have a density akin to London, while Quarantine MC will have significantly less (but not zero). 

The urban vs rural divide is trickier as  the era saw a rapid rise in urbanization.

1890 saw 35% urban vs 65% rural.  
1900 saw 40% urban vs 60% rural.
1910 saw 46% urban vs 54% rural.
1920 saw 51% urban vs 49% rural.

If we use the handy 40% number for 1900, and we can figure out the population of MC based on population density, then that will lets us figure out the rural population which, for our purposes, will be "everyone else" despite the largest mining towns and teh Falls in the Knotwoods probably counting as urban but we're spitballing here.

A quick search says London in 1900 had a population of 5 million and covered 200 square miles, which is 25,000 people per square mile. That's huge. (Today's New York City has 11,000 people per square mile, as a comparson!) and it's done in Victorian-style buildings, which are a fraction of the size of today's homes and without full verticality. Many Victorian homes were several stories tall, but five was a pretty hard limit and certainly nothing like today's skyscrapers! Sizes shot up quickly in the 1900's but I don't think anyone wants that style of building in Malifaux. Let's trim it back a bit to, say, 20K per square mile. That's a softer figure but usable.

Now we just need the square miles of MC. To the map! 

[Wakshaani]

On the map, 1" = 3 miles. Firing up the ol' IRFanView, the inch marker is 60 pixels, so, 20 pixels = 1 mile. 

Now we're in business. These sizes are rough, due to the shapes of the zones, but we can dig in all teh same.

The New Construction Zone is roughly 103 pixels by 63 pixels
The Easterly Slums are 201 x 93.
Downtown is about 150 by 150.
The Industrial Zone is about 192 by 60.
The riverside New Construction Zone is around 114 by 53.
The LIttle Kingdom is 64 by 38.
The Howling Slums are about 58 by 45.
The Burns are 113 by 86-ish.
The BIG slums that includes the Little Kingdom is around 147 by 302, plus another limb of 81 by 87-ish.
The slums across teh river from Downtown have two halves, one 124 by 97, the other 158 by 75 minus the Howling Slums inside of it.
The final slums that include the Starlight Saloon are about 223 by 69. 

These are rough numbers, obviously, but should let us work some magic. We're also counting out the population of the Quarantine Zones. There are obviously people who live in those areas but they don't get Guild support, so in terms of food and water, they're on their own. 

Now we just need to break out the old geometry and 4th grade math and we should start getting some numbers.

[Harlekin]

Regarding the history of urbanization there is quite some data/research available. A quick search in my personal files lead to no relevant articles on the topic (sorry). For my research I already worked on a related topic (mainly energy consumption) and IIRC about 20 times the space for providing life support was needed compared to the space of an urban area at the end of 19th century. 

I will try to find the related articles and data if/when I recover the articles in my personal archives. 

[Wakshaani]

I'm gonna make my life easy here. Slums get 20K people per square mile because slums. 

Everywhere else gets 10K people per square mile because it's got space taken up by lots of non-residential (Downtown shopping, Industrial Zone, uh, industry, New Construction Zones because New.)

So, the New Construction Zone north of the city, which we'll round to 105 by 90 pixels is 3.5 miles by 2 miles, so 7 square miles. With a population density of 10K per mile, we get 70,000 people in the New Construction Zone.

Easterly Slums are rounded to 195 by 90, or 6.5 miles by 3 miles, for 19.5 square miles, for 390,000 people. 

Downtown is 150 by 150, or 5 miles by 5 miles, for 25 square miles, for 250,000 people.

The Industrial Zone we call 195 by 60, or 6.5 miles by 2 miles, for 13 square miles, so 130,000 people.

Riverside NCZ is 120 by 60-ish, or 4 miles by 2 miles, for 8 square miles, giving us 80,000 people. 

The Little Kingdom is around 60 by 30, or 2 miles by 1 mile, for 6 square miles, giving us 120,000 people.

The Howling Slums are about 60 by 45, or 2 miles by 1.5 miles, for 3 square miles, giving us 30,000 people.

The Burns are around 120 by 90, or 4 miles by 3 miles, for 12 square miles, but we'll half this one section to 60,000 people.

The BIG slums have 150 by 300, or 5 miles by 10 miles, for 50 square miles, minus the Little Kingdom's 6 square miles, gives us 14 miles for 280,000 people. 
The BIG slums second half is around 90 by 90, or 3 miles by 3 miles, for 9 square miles, or 180,000 people.

The south riverside slums are 120 by 90, or 4 miles by 3 miles, for 12 square miles, or 240,000 people.
The second half of that is roughly 150 by 75, or 5 miles by 2.5, for 12.5 square miles, minus the Howling Slums 3, gives us 9.5 square miles, or 190,000 people.

The final slums we'll call 210 by 90,  or 7 miles by 3, for 21 square miles, or 420,000 people.

So, if we tally this all up, we get...

2,440,000 people living in Malifaux City.

That's about half the population of London, which is the most populous city on Earth in 1900.

And if we use the 40/60 ratio, there'd be 3.66 million people outside of the city, which seems excessive. Let's cut that ratio to 50/50 since the world's so dangerous, iving us a total population of about 4.9 million people in the world of Malifaux. Call it 5 million for an even number, and then you can figure out what kind of supply chain you're looking at.

Math! It's fun, honest!

[Cats Laughing]

Side comment (not following on the interesting pop-density comments) but there are definitely farms Breachside.  There's at least one story involving the livestock going mad and presumably killing & eating farmers (no bodies to verify).

[Harlekin]

Yeah, the model looks legit. On first glance. 
I don't think that Malifaux City is this densely populated on average. While it might be true for at least some of its Zones there are vast areas of the city which almost no population at all. 

A lot of speculation and guessing on my side, of course and the topic probably wasn't ever part of the process of designing the setting/world of Malifaux. The lore I read doesn't offer a lot of clues but let me imagine the world of Malifaux as one with only very sporadical settlements outside of the city. 

I'll ask a colleague about the topic. He is no RPGer but nerdy enough to understand my troubles for gaining a realistic grasp of our troubles of supplying Malifaux City with life support

[Wakshaani]

3 minutes ago, Cats Laughing said:

Side comment (not following on the interesting pop-density comments) but there are definitely farms Breachside.  There's at least one story involving the livestock going mad and presumably killing & eating farmers (no bodies to verify).

There are, yes. We're not sure how many, and we know that the livestock end up Twisted. i don't think that the flora wind up thus, but it might be a matter of time ... with only a few months of growth before being harvested, they might not have time to absorb ambient magical energy. That's just speculation, mind you, and the livestock don't universally go Twisted, just some. It remains to be seen if the meat's tainted and, if so, what effect that, and the water issues, cause on the population. 

There's a lot of appeal in farming in one of the safe-ish areas near the city but not inside it proper ... less control from the Guild, and lots of people value freedom more than (relative) safety. It falls in the skillset of many people more than the more skilled trades of the city, and depending on where they're from, it can be a less-dangerous occupation ... convict miners who pay off their time but can't afford the ticket back to Earth could go do farm labor and, yeah, some Twisted wolf runnig out to snatch you up in the middle of the night is bad, but compared to cave-ins, drowning, gas leaks, and worse? It's a friggin' paradise. 

Using the rough number of 10 acres of farm per person per year, we need 50 million acres to feed the population of Malifaux (city and not), and there are 640 acres in a mile (an apology, here, for the Euro-people reading this and staring in horror at non-Metric measures),  which would need around 78,125 square miles of farms to feed the entire population at US levels of chow.  The Iron Ram, and by extension the Guild, is the only source of seed to start farms, which puts people under the thumb of teh Guild to get started and the costs are, obviously, going to be inflated, but since the Guild NEEDS food, it's probably paid off with some REALLY harsh tax rates. 

That means that there'll be a black market both for seed and for produce. Easy to get assorted root veggies, like potatoes or turnips, but fruit probably costs so much that it's a rare treat and a sign of wealth. Wealthy people taking a bite out of an apple while poor people watch through glass windows and drool before being run off from the restaurant by the owner shaking a broom. Criminals being hired to steal a crate of oranges. Arcanists having a small PR arm that distirbutes food and clean water to the slums to win hearts and minds. Small stores tucked into the shadows of the Little Kingdom that sell traditional food imported from *somewhere*, and rice farms along the edge of the Bayou that are a major food source that most of Malifaux City doesn't really know about.

Plot hooks!

 

[solkan]

For what it’s worth, that one herd of cows going twisted in the story was probably an isolated incident.

Otherwise you couldn’t have things like the Ortega ranch.

[Harlekin]

"Now one kg of wheat is about 3400 Calories. A human needs about a million Calories per year (2700 Cal/day for 365 days), so that would be 294kg, (ignoring varied dietary needs for a sec). So one modern, say Belgian cultivated (yield 9t/ha) hectare of wheat would feed 30 people. So one sq. km would meet the calorie needs of about 3000 people. Obviously you will want meat, and other fruits and vegetables, so you could cut that to about a third (wheat --> meat has relatively low efficiency), so you could easily feed 1000-1500 people from a sq. km. of fertile modern-tech cultivated land. With hydroponics or other green-house style tech, and providing your own light, you could go a lot higher. If you covered the Earth in arcologies and dedicated a significant fraction to climate and light-controlled greenhouses, you could support trillions of people on Earth."

Source: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9582/how-many-people-can-you-feed-per-square-kilometer-of-farmland

See also: 

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

 

But mainly: 

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Annual-per-capita-requirements-for-productive-agricultural-land-by-diet-scenario-and_fig2_305627253

As you see we need 0.13 ha per person per year with a full vegetarian diet. Thus, 1 ha can support about 7.5 persons per year. If they are only consuming vegetarian food crops (potatoes, corn). 
The more varied the diet becomes the bigger the area needed (meat consumption is highly inefficient in this regard). 
Let's consider the OMNI40 (a variety of fruits and vegetables, plus milk, cheese, eggs etc. and occasional (40%/meat related products) meat) as a typical diet for Malifaux residents.

We then can offer nutrition to about 4 people per year. For 1 million of people, we thus need 250.000 ha. Which is 2.500 km². 

This is about the size of: 

Moscow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow)
Manitoulin Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manitoulin_Island)
Saarland (smallest state of Germany) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saarland) (with a population of about 1 million people (surprise^^))

For 4 million people we would need 10.000 km² - an area the size of:
Hawai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_(island))
Jamaica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica) 

Those areas have to fully used for agricalture. So, any square metre has to be used for farming. No forrests, no ponds, no rivers, no wasteland, no roads... Highly crowded countries like typical European nations with highly fertile soil and great weather conditions for farming (France, Germany, Spain, etc) offer a quota of about 50% of their area for farming. To get realistic numbers, we'd have multiply the areas mentioned above by 2 (at least). 

Edit: I don't see farming happening on an area the size of Hawai or Jamaica going on in Malifaux. Not even close. 

Any hint from anybody deeper in the lore than I am is gladly welcome.

[John M]

This is the greatest thread in the history of Malifaux. We're starting to make some big assumptions on population density, so we're getting further away from hard facts, but some nice base assumptions.

 

If there are 4.3 million Malifauxans, it would require arable land about the size of Washington State in Malifaux. Malifaux IS huge, though. So maybe? Now I want to know how big the 'Known World' of Malifaux is. We know the Ocean is huge base on what the Explorer Society book says, but how big's the land?

 

(And this would be if they ate like early 20th century Americans. I wouldn't be surprised. It's rough and tumble in Malifaux)

[Harlekin]

PS: To demontrate the relation between city and surounding rural area, here is a pic of Kingston (home to a population of "only" 1.3 million people / population density of 1,380/km² (3,600/sq mi)) and the rest of Jamaica. Remember: any square meter of Jamaica would be needed to offer nutrition including occasional meat for about 3 times the number of people living in Kingston.

Pic shows Jamaica. The marked area is the city area of Kingston.

[Cats Laughing]

1 hour ago, Wakshaani said:

The Iron Ram, and by extension the Guild, is the only source of seed to start farms, which puts people under the thumb of teh Guild to get started and the costs are, obviously, going to be inflated, but since the Guild NEEDS food, it's probably paid off with some REALLY harsh tax rates. 

That means that there'll be a black market both for seed and for produce. 

 

Love all the speculation and Plot Hooks.

Large amounts of seed is probably hard to smuggle on the Iron Ram but I've got more seed than I'll ever plant in my yard (probably won't use more than 1,000 sqft of it) in a gallon ziploc baggie, which distributed through out hidden pockets on clothing or in chests, or whatever, might be easy to smuggle in.

There's also at least the Ten Thunder's breach for smuggling in such goods, and if the Guild is inflating prices excessively, it could be possible that the price of seed is high enough to be worth it by volume.

 

That said, I think I recall guild related stories talk about feeding Malifaux (not in detail, probably more just mentioning it as a duty) so I assume some part of the Iron Ram loads are food related and there are likely also Guild Sanctioned farms as well.

[Ebb]

6 hours ago, Wakshaani said:

So, if we tally this all up, we get...

2,440,000 people living in Malifaux City.

That's about half the population of London, which is the most populous city on Earth in 1900.

These are the sort of numbers that I was thinking. And also, this is turning into a really interesting thread 😃

As far as logistics, I'm not an expert, I'm just telling you what I've read in the books. My guess is that most of the farming takes place in the Northern Hills, although "Above The Law" spends some time elaborating on how much time the Ortega family spend farming and helping others to farm. I should also mention that The Southern New Construction Zone has a thriving fishing community (Core Rules pg. 46) on the fortune river, so if the fish are edible, I would guess that the water is potable, but I haven't read that specifically.

As for how that many people get to Malifaux, the information I was quoting about the train was from 1907. When the Breach first re-opened in 1897, the Guild went kinda all in on resettlement. I don't have any specific details but it sounds to me like, for the first couple years, the number of people being shipped into Malifaux was less "public train station" numbers and more "huge civil project" numbers. 

The only reference that I've found which mentions numbers at all is pretty vague:

"The nations of Earth, eager to regain access to Malifaux, supplied the Guild with a workforce of convicts and indebted laborers, and scores of troops were redirected from the resettlement effort and marched north to serve as guards and supervisors in the newly re-opened Soulstone mines." (Core Rules pg. 22)

Score only means 20, and in this context, I would guess it would be about one-two hundred? Though to be fair, that's in the first year, and it's only referring to the "Resettlement Corps" numbers.

The point I'm making is that I don't know how many people we are talking about, but it seems to me from all that I've read about Malifaux it's more like 1910 Londen then 1910 San Francisco, but like I said, I'm not an expert.

Edited:

I should also mention that one of the books gives the total area of Malifaux city: 850 square miles. I can't remember which book but I wrote the number down =P

Obviously that whole area is not densely populated (although if you read Under Quarantine, some of the quarantine zones shouldn't be discounted) it just gives a total area, so any calculations about the size of individual zones should add up to that (excluding the Northern New Construction Zone).

[Ebb]

So, re-reading Under Quarantine, in the section on Gremlin's Wharf, it says the stagnant water in that zone is poisonous to humans "as a result of the yearly fumigation of the district". I don't know if this is implying that the water would otherwise be drinkable? However, it is the part of the city that is furthest downriver.

If anyone has specific information about whether or not Fortune river has potable drinking water upstream (even if it's outside the city, in the western Knotwoods) that would be very useful, since without that I doubt the city could support the kind of population that I'm assuming.

[Wakshaani]

The river got hit at some point by some kind of volcanic disturbance. Not sure on the deets, but regardless *something* bubbled up under the city and, when it did, it screwed up the water table and the river. The water has to be boiled, and even then it's not perfect, so finding a better source of water was a huge priority. That's beyond the toxic water from fumigation, which is party of the anti-mosquito (and other bugs) issue. I'd have to dig in to see where that info was ... 1st ed book or Under Quarantine would make the most sense, but I'd have to go a-diggin'. 

Slot that in as a project for when I get off work tonight.

[Ebb]

1 hour ago, Wakshaani said:

The river got hit at some point by some kind of volcanic disturbance. Not sure on the deets, but regardless *something* bubbled up under the city and, when it did, it screwed up the water table and the river. The water has to be boiled, and even then it's not perfect, so finding a better source of water was a huge priority. That's beyond the toxic water from fumigation, which is party of the anti-mosquito (and other bugs) issue. I'd have to dig in to see where that info was ... 1st ed book or Under Quarantine would make the most sense, but I'd have to go a-diggin'. 

Slot that in as a project for when I get off work tonight.

Great point! The information that you mentioned is in the Core Rules page 31-32. It can probably be found elsewhere as well, but it talks about the Event and the fall of the Red Cage (1902-1903, not sure?) and how Cherufe drew magma up from the mantle, poisoning the local water table. It says that "much of Malifaux City's drinking water" became non-potable, and needed to be boiled (although it doesn't say here that boiling the water was a problem). Unfortunately it doesn't give the exact source of Malifaux's drinking water, but if it isn't the river, then the only other place I can think of would be the Northern Caverns and the Footprints canyon (I don't know how far away those are exactly). Regardless, even though it doesn't say it here, I don't think that the issues with the local water supply could have lasted more than a year or two? unless people are still selling boiled water in 1907?

Other than that it also mentions that during the period of Martial Law (1903-1904) the Guild implemented rationing but again it doesn't talk about where those rations came from, just that smugglers supplemented the meager supply with food from various sources outside the city, notably pork and moonshine from the bayou gremlins. Which makes me wonder how productive the gremlin pork "industry" could be? funny but also interesting question =P

Besides all this, and maybe some other isolated events, I really just don't remember anything about long term food shipments coming through the breach? The books give specific details about the compositions of the regular freight, and I can't find anything about significant food cargoes. Whatever the population of Malifaux city is, I think it must be supported by local production, unless there is some contradicting information that I am missing?

[TheOrrery]

9 hours ago, Wakshaani said:

it's done in Victorian-style buildings, which are a fraction of the size of today's homes and without full verticality.

So a key thing here, that From Nightmares expands upon, is that Malifaux's architecture is Alien. Buildings can reach quite high, the Fae way-back-when were quite the architects.

[Wakshaani]

3 hours ago, TheOrrery said:

So a key thing here, that From Nightmares expands upon, is that Malifaux's architecture is Alien. Buildings can reach quite high, the Fae way-back-when were quite the architects.

True, but I don't think Malifaux has skyscrapers, more that there's some Victorian, some Aztec, some Maori, etc, designs in the mix and, fo cruose, much of the city's since been rebuilt by humans once they came in, and they're far more limited in tech. The clocktower, which last I saw was still sealed tight, was the tallest building in the city by a big margin. Not sure how tall it is tho. There was a big duel there at one point between a big hero and his main villain (a former buddy, they split over a woman, IIRC) and, since that fight, the tower's been silent as well as unopenable.

Lots of little city tidbits hidden here and there. It's neat! But tracking some of this info down is a struggle.