Blackbones — Places of Interest

Drummond's Independents

A forge that refuses to belong to a house, a guild cartel, or a foundry syndicate—and survives because it produces work no one else can replicate. Drummond's sits close enough to a Fernia manifest zone that the heat has a different quality: metal takes temper fast, slag runs strange colors, and the air shimmers. The crew runs strict safety rules and enforces them, but the real reason the place stays independent is reputation. If you need a blade that holds under elemental load, a rivet batch rated for serious stress, or a rush repair that has to be finished tonight, you come here and you pay what they ask.

The Bonebridge Lift House

The lift house that handles Blackbones' connection to the surface shafts: iron catwalks, chain winches, and guardrails worn smooth by generations of hands. It's where shift workers pour through in waves, where foremen post notices, and where the desperate try to get pulled into a crew. If Blackbones has a public pulse, it's here. The minute the lift gates open, the neighborhood becomes louder, meaner, and more alive.

Charcoal Row

A cramped tunnel market running out of reinforced alcoves: tool traders, scrap sorters, alchemy hawkers, and food that tastes like it was cooked in the same furnace that made your nails. Not illegal—just the kind of commerce that happens when official supply can't keep up with the Cogs' appetite. Most stalls have a front table and a back ledger. The first sells to anyone. The second sells to people who look like they won't bring trouble.

The Sootcup

A shift tavern: cheap drinks, hot stew, loud arguments, and a room that never fully cools. The Sootcup is where crews decompress, where grudges get aired before they become blade work, and where favors get bought with rounds and good timing. The owner keeps a hard rule: no fights that break furniture—not because they're moral, but because repairs cost money and the night shift doesn't wait.

Blackbones Mutual Aid Desk

Organizes small emergency funds, funeral collections, strike meals, and the logistics that follow when someone gets crushed and leaves a family behind. It's the closest thing Blackbones has to a civic institution not owned by a house or enforced by a badge. People argue here, but they also show up—because the Cogs eats people, and Blackbones learned long ago that the only reliable safety net is one you build yourself.

The Pool of Onatar's Tears

A temple-forge built around an impossible sight: a small basin of cool, crystal-clear water nested inside a wider ring of living lava. The engineers cutting Blackbones' first channels discovered it, and a dwarf priest of Onatar declared it sacred the moment he watched steel take the lava's heat and the pool's temper—and come out better for it. Today, smiths, artificers, and metalworkers travel from across Khorvaire to receive blessings at the pool, to have their work tempered here, and to say it was. The pool's reputation is not entirely unearned: those who temper metal using its water find their craft runs true, and those who work Artifice magic in its presence find their power comes easier.

The current caretaker is Smith, one of the few warforged priests in Khorvaire. Smith served in the Last War and emerged from it with a deep faith in Onatar, whom he believes guided mortal hands to create the warforged race. He holds that the god has a plan for both peoples—forged and flesh-born alike—and he is a vocal opponent of the Lord of Blades' ideology. Visitors seeking the pool's special blessing are permitted to dip their hands in the water; Smith rarely allows anyone to take water away with them.

Cannith Workhouse

A high-output Cannith facility running on structure, quotas, and inspection. Cannith overseers are stationed throughout the Cogs to maintain order; this workhouse is where that institutional presence takes its most direct form in Blackbones—shifts, piecework, and disciplinary standards that keep the furnaces fed and the parts moving. People come here for steadier coin than most Cogs operations can promise. The workhouse provides food and a bunk; the schedule does not adjust for exhaustion.

The Red Hammer

The only inn in Sharn maintained by and for warforged—though "inn" undersells it. Warforged have no need for food, drink, or sleep, but they can still want company, and the Red Hammer provides it: a place to gather, exchange stories from the war, and find some version of camaraderie in civilian life. The Hammer is owned by two warforged, Blue and Crucible, who fought in the Last War.

The Hammer doubles as a repair and cosmetic improvement shop, with rates equivalent to a house of healing. Blue and Crucible share Smith's views on warforged-mortal coexistence and stand against the Lord of Blades. For warforged seeking information about Blackbones or the broader Cogs community, the Red Hammer is the best place in Sharn to start.