Madtown
Madtown walked a line between usefulness and treason. A settlement in Wischigan territory, it served as a haven for freed Iron Slaves and progressive ideas during the Ironworks era, hiding its true purpose behind a facade of productive innovation.
The settlement was home to the only Red Star commune in a mostly Merican area, allied with the Sainthood of Ashes through a shared ideal: slavery is wrong. The Red Stars believed in the equality of all working people; the Sainthood held that keeping a person in bondage was immoral. Together, they made Madtown a secret refuge for escaped Irons, asking each newcomer to contribute their skills to building a better community as equals. The commune harbored the highest Iron Slave population of any commune worldwide.
What kept Madtown from sharing CinCinn's fate was its usefulness. The settlement's engineers and inventors produced devices that sped production across the entire Ironworks: faster rail cars, better harvesting tools, long-term storage solutions, and other innovations that the empire could not afford to lose. The commune took payment not in money but in supplies for constructing new items and mass-producing their creations. The Sainthood took in injured laborers free of charge, letting the Ironworks offload difficult medical cases. This mutual usefulness was Madtown's shield.
Jack Brunswold served as the commune's unofficial spokesman, though he never claimed leadership. He sat in on every dealing with the Ironworks, developed the commune's organizational tactics, and spoke with a commanding tone when times were dire, while always crediting the brilliant scientists and printers behind him. The community he fostered was strong: the Sainthood took in orphaned children who grew up to build for their benefactors, healed workers chose to repay their healers, and freed slaves contributed willingly as equals.
But the shield was cracking. The Chancellor had recently learned of Madtown's Red bastion and was displeased. A single misstep, an overly loud proclamation, or a complaint from Mill City would bring Ironworks troops to their doorstep.
The settlement was home to the only Red Star commune in a mostly Merican area, allied with the Sainthood of Ashes through a shared ideal: slavery is wrong. The Red Stars believed in the equality of all working people; the Sainthood held that keeping a person in bondage was immoral. Together, they made Madtown a secret refuge for escaped Irons, asking each newcomer to contribute their skills to building a better community as equals. The commune harbored the highest Iron Slave population of any commune worldwide.
What kept Madtown from sharing CinCinn's fate was its usefulness. The settlement's engineers and inventors produced devices that sped production across the entire Ironworks: faster rail cars, better harvesting tools, long-term storage solutions, and other innovations that the empire could not afford to lose. The commune took payment not in money but in supplies for constructing new items and mass-producing their creations. The Sainthood took in injured laborers free of charge, letting the Ironworks offload difficult medical cases. This mutual usefulness was Madtown's shield.
Jack Brunswold served as the commune's unofficial spokesman, though he never claimed leadership. He sat in on every dealing with the Ironworks, developed the commune's organizational tactics, and spoke with a commanding tone when times were dire, while always crediting the brilliant scientists and printers behind him. The community he fostered was strong: the Sainthood took in orphaned children who grew up to build for their benefactors, healed workers chose to repay their healers, and freed slaves contributed willingly as equals.
But the shield was cracking. The Chancellor had recently learned of Madtown's Red bastion and was displeased. A single misstep, an overly loud proclamation, or a complaint from Mill City would bring Ironworks troops to their doorstep.
History
Madtown grew from the alliance between Red Star communists and the Sainthood of Ashes, united by their shared conviction that slavery was wrong. The commune developed a strategy of survival through indispensability, producing innovations that improved production across the Ironworks while secretly sheltering escaped Iron Slaves. Jack Brunswold shaped the commune's organizational methods and served as its face in dealings with Ironworks leadership. Over time, Madtown accumulated the highest freed Iron population of any commune in the world. Mill City's Mayor Cunningham tolerated the settlement's liberal ideas, and the Ironworks accepted its inventions. But the Chancellor eventually learned that a Red bastion existed within the empire's breadbasket. By the late Ironworks era, a single wrong move threatened to bring the full weight of the empire down on Madtown's head.
Geography
Madtown sat within Wischigan territory, near Mill City. The commune was close enough to the main Ironworks infrastructure to participate in trade and deliver its innovations, but sufficiently small and unassuming to avoid the kind of attention that destroyed CinCinn. Its location within the broader agricultural territory gave it access to grain supplies and trade routes while allowing the settlement to maintain a degree of separation from the empire's direct oversight.
