The Sewer Rats are the younger and hungrier of Vedycaer’s two great criminal syndicates — a fast-rising power that has been eating into the older Caernathi Family’s trade. Where the Family deals in smuggling and stolen relics, the Sewer Rats deal in the plainer vices: gambling, flesh, and blood.
Rumor puts their ground in the Festival District, where they are said to hold the gambling dens, cantinas, and bawdyhouses, and to run illegal pit-fights beneath the Silk Pony Inn — the kind of bout the Amphitheater’s sanctioned games would never allow. The warehouses near the Amphitheater are whispered to be where their stolen goods wait to be fenced.
The name most often attached to them is Nicolai Selenium, spoken of as a cold and ruthless master: those who fall into his debt and cannot pay, the story goes, are simply never seen again — and no body is ever found.
The turf war
The Sewer Rats have pressed hard on the Caernathi Family’s territory, and the rivalry has spilled blood — in the sewers, and in corpses left on the riverbank as warnings. Open war has not come yet, but the two syndicates draw closer to it every season.