Esoteric Enterprises - Gangs of Coal City

Just the ones the players have discovered so far

HUMANS

Ursus Cult
Worshippers of the great bear. Their public facing doctrine is all about personal fitness, building strong morals and a strong body through a supportive community that reinforces good habits. The esoteric doctrine adds living in caves, gluttony and occasional cannibalism. They grow in size as they increase in rank within the cult.

Mama Bear, High Priestess of the Ursus Cult, with a Bearskin Rug

The Ursus Cult is ordinarily friendly and hospitable to underworld visitors. The players have abused their trust enough to get on their bad side. The bears won't be fooled again.

Fat Sun Mercenaries
Private security provider, veterans of urban combat in hazardous environment conditions. Recruits from military and law enforcement who have encountered the supernatural and survived.

Lieutenant Mara is their representative on the surface, managing contracts for things the group doesn't have the manpower or time to do itself.

Captain Inger leads the platoon in the limestone caves, guarding them for an unknown client against the Lithic Courts and the Morlocks. They've been down there for weeks now, the situation can't be good. She wears a metal breastplate instead of a plate carrier.

Cpl Johann took a blast of radiation from a glowing "rock man" and had to be evacuated from the caves a few weeks ago. He was further injured in a sewer gas explosion on the way back to the surface. Currently regaining the use of his hands and intestines through microsurgery, physical therapy and a fecal transplant.

Ponda Ray Family
Wise guys with distinctive earrings. Meta-criminals who skim off other people's scores, providing protection and dispute resolution in the lawless underworld. Friends with the Union.

Ezzy is the barkeep at Vinculum, a low key jazz club in the Belly neighborhood downtown. She wears a beautiful scarf on her head, covering one eye. In the backroom, a pair of goons with guns guard a dungeon entrance, watched over by a statue of Wallace, the legendary dungeoneer who first explored the undercity in the old times. The mobsters take a twenty percent cut of anything brought back to the surface through this entrance, but protect users against exit campers.

Rumor has it they made a lucrative deal with the Lithic Courts. Nobody knows what they agreed on.

Smugglers
They run the gin joint Auld Tam on the East side. The gin served there comes from the Fairy Enclave. The smugglers pay for it with children from the surface. Allegedly, they only traffic neglected kids who will have a better life with the Fey. Not that anyone has verified this. They must have an underground hideout, somewhere. None of the players have actually met them.

Sunflowers
A wealthy volunteer militia, sworn to protect the tombs of their ancestors. They patrol the necropolis of the Hill at night. Named for the Sunflowers, which grow among the crypts and graves. They despise criminal adventurers, who use their mausoleum as a highway to the underworld.

Adjutant to the living Sunflowers are the honored dead, risen from their graves to help their descendants protect their tombs. The death knights are fearsome opponents in hand to hand combat, while the mummified saints bless the faithful with support magic.

The Sunflowers get in trouble with the cops a lot over their shootouts with "graverobbers"

Fat Buddhas
A street gang on the East side, on the border between downtown and the old mine district. Their signature outfit is a vest with no undershirt. Mostly low level criminals with guns and sharp objects. Ran the Pho King restaurant as a front before it burned to the ground. At war with the Red Caps.

Red Caps
A gang of short, malformed weirdos in eponymous red hats. Love violence in all forms, but their signature move is to walk up to the target and knife them repeatedly before they know what's happening. They run the Blood For Sex, a nightclub with an underground mosh pit that doubles as an entrance to the underworld. They don't take a cut of your stuff on the way out, but they let any random faction party there, making visits dangerous for anyone with enemies in the underworld (like the players).

Positively disposed toward the players, due to their appetite for violence and spreading fear through the undercity.

Union
International Fraternity of Stevedores, Teamsters and Draymen, Local 99. Work out of Old Harbor Island, handling the occasional container ship. The port hasn't done so well due to increasing international competition from ports with better on-dock rail connections. In Coal City, everything has to be drayed out of the harbor on trucks before it can be transloaded, increasing the cost of every container moved.

Hooks the Stevedore has hired the players in the past, to steal magic books from the occult library in the dungeon. The Union might be moving more than just freight in those containers.

Sometimes they do favors for the Ponda Ray family.

The Library
A repository of mysterious and magic texts in an abandoned mine tunnel on the East side of the city.

Cilian the Occult Librarian and Cyby her Occult Assistant welcome visitors seeking knowledge. As long as they treat the books with respect, and don't try to leave the Library with them. Their Living Lamp guards the shelves against thieves, never sleeping.

Valeria the Hypnotist is a regular visitor. She is always accompanied by an ensorceled crowd of gun toting thugs. She takes attacks on the Library personally, despite not actually working there.

The Library doesn't like the players because they stole a book. Valeria tried to gank them because they told her they were working for the MIBs.

The Men in Black
Representatives of an unknown government agency. They appeared after the Paradox Beasts escaped into the dungeon a couple weeks ago. Law enforcement does what they say, and underworld inhabitants give them a wide berth. They strong armed the Fairy Enclave into granting them safe passage into the dungeon.

Agents Karla and Kid wear suits, and carry badges that compel obedience from the viewer - most of the time, anyway. They work out of a safehouse in the Tail, on the West side, though it may be abandoned by now. They haven't found the Paradox Beasts yet, and have hired the players to place powerful sensor devices in the underground so they can track the monster.

The Masked Man's face is hidden behind a porcelain mask. He towers over the two Agents, who treat him like a timid but loyal dog, in constant need of reassurance. He is confused and fascinated by the world, everything is new to him.

Agent Kid and the Masked Man

The other underworld denizens have heard the players are working for the MIBs, and are not happy about this Whitey Bulger arrangement.

NONHUMANS

Fairy Enclave
Creatures sprung up from the dreams of humanity. Divided into two courts, Seelie and Unseelie, based on whether they come from pleasant dreams or nightmares.

The enclave is accessible from the surface world through a disused gallery in a museum on the Hill. It used to be guarded by a Lawful Good Troll and a Chaotic Evil Ogre, who passed the time playing petanque. The Men in Black have taken over the entrance with security cameras and a bullshit story about asbestos coming out of the walls, banishing the pair of monsters to the kitchen below.

The Seelie King does not like the players. They released Paradox Beasts in his backyard, and that got the Men in Black interested in his kingdom. He's instructed his wife's Unseelie Knights to kill them on sight.

The Unseelie Queen arranged the gin-for-kids trade because the way humans treat their kids upset her. How could it not? She was birthed from the nightmares of frightened, abused children. She used to take a different Knight to bed every day of the week, but fights with the players and the Ursus Cult have reduced their numbers and deprived her of this.

An Unseelie Lord - Thinks he's the Queen's favorite

Lithic Court

Rock men from the molten world beneath the earth's crust. Their mission on the surface: the recovery of a mysterious geode from the cavern occupied by the Fat Sun Mercenaries. They were dealt a serious setback a few weeks ago when the mercenaries cast Stone to Mud on them, dissolving several of their top nobles and liquifying much of their embassy.

Anticline the Emissary is a squid made of dull gems, socketed together in layers of interlocking stones. "He" carries a cage of Flint Songbirds, shards of sharp rock that flit around the air, sparkling with sharp edges.

The players have yet to witness the true power of the Lithic Courts, but they've heard rumors. Giant magma worms, and radiation men made of uranium deposits.

Morlocks

Secretive troglodytes, descended from the same hominids as homo sapiens sapiens. Once slaves of the serpent men, they live in superstitious fear of their former masters, cultivating magic power in anticipation of another apocalyptic fight for freedom. They scribe spells as tattoos on their bodies, to keep them close at hand. Obsession with sorcery has made the wisest members of their race into savants, who can kill with a whisper, but would struggle to tie their shoes if they wore any.

They have only met the players once, but hold them in contempt for their service to the Fat Sun Mercenaries, who are meddling with "power they do not understand" in the limestone caves.