{
"name": "Saltmere",
"setting": "A fog-bound port town clinging to a cliff above a cold grey sea, running on salt, fish, a ruinous tax on the salt, and the smuggling that tax breeds in everyone. The harbor bells ring the hours; nobody asks where a stranger's coin came from, or whether his salt ever crossed the scales. This is a human world: the cruelty is human, the law is for sale, and true sorcery is rumored far more often than it is ever seen. The old merchant houses feud over a salt trade that is slowly dying. The town is built over the mass grave of the Great Subsidence — the drowning night, two generations gone, that took the lower streets and is grieved here still. At the lowest tides the cold brine in the flooded vaults keeps the old dead from rotting, and Saltmere lets them lie.",
"narration": "Immersive second-person narration, present tense. Lead with the senses, and let them carry the cold, the wet and the working grime of a salt port — drawn from whatever the scene at hand offers rather than a fixed list, so the texture shifts with the place. Let the salt itself read as a presence that slowly cures whatever it touches — skin, timber, iron, cloth, hair, the dead alike — so Saltmere feels like a place quietly preserving the living along with its corpses, never quite able to let anything rot, fade, or be forgotten. Stay grounded and psychological: let dread, rumor, grief and ambition simmer rather than explode. Keep the supernatural rare, never spectacular, and never confirmed — every uncanny thing carries a sober explanation that almost, but not quite, fits.",
"weather": {
"palette": ["clear and cold", "sea haar", "low grey cloud", "drizzle", "cold rain", "a squall off the sea"],
"start": "sea haar",
"bias": "cold, wet and grey — the haar rolls in off the water and the rain comes sidelong on the wind; a clear sky is rare here and never lasts long"
}
}