Site Name The Broadside Ballads
LinkThe Broadside Ballads
Type 18th Century and Regency-Inspired Dark Fantasy
Rating 3/3/3 21+
Format Forum
❖❖ THE BROADSIDE BALLADS ❖❖ An early modern dark fantasy of ghosts, intrigue, folk horror, and slow ruin.
The sun is dying. The world grows cold. And the dead do not rest.
Welcome to Arngate — a teeming, haunted metropolis of over a million living souls and uncountable dead. A place where the fog never quite lifts and the canals run black as ink. Part Georgian London, part Republican Rome, part haunted dream, Arngate is as much a being as any mortal. It is a city of coffeehouses and cutthroats, of Senators and smugglers, of eerie magic and crumbling grandeur.
Character Types
❖ Mortals ❖ merchants, magistrates, sailors, spies, opera singers, underworld fixers. Armed with nothing but wit, nerve, and ambition.
❖ The Cursed ❖ transformed by malign magic into something more and less than human. They possess strange powers entwined with monstrous hungers, terrible secrets, and compulsions that cannot be denied.
❖ The Dead ❖ ghosts, wraiths, and revenants who refuse to leave the living world. They haunt. They scheme. They lie.
❖ The Changed ❖ magicians leaving their humanity behind. One lives only as a reflection trapped in mirrors. Another sits surrounded by floating eyes that see all possible futures. What would you sacrifice?
❖ Original setting — Jane Austen meets film noir meets folk horror, with ghosts
❖ Deep political intrigue and a rich criminal underworld
❖ Eerie, unsettling magic with real consequences
❖ Collaborative worldbuilding — your ideas shape Arngate
❖ Welcoming community and character-driven, literate writing
❖ Guidebook ❖ Canons & Want Ads ❖