It is the year of Silent Death; 1395 DR.

Waterdeep has transformed dramatically in the last 15 years. Where Artifice seemed a passing fad until 1385, the Spellplague changed the balance of power forever. Old magicks were useless at best, and hostile at worst. The city was a powderkeg of wild magic, spellscarred monsters, and wizards overtaken by their own power. Undermountain--already a source of neverending trouble for the city--overflowed with monsters fleeing even worse things below, and few had the power to stop them.

Few, save the Artificers, whose power did not flee them during the Spellplague. As quickly as possible, Artificers produced weapons to enable the people to fight for their city. And none were so prolific as Wright Enterprises, a small business known for producing labor-saving devices for the home, as well as made-to-order high-end vehicles. Soon enough, the Wright logo would be seen on thousands of weapons used to turn the tide in the battle for the city. Even as the company produced these weapons, its founder, Helena Wright, ventured into the Undermountain and somehow tamed it, stemming the tide of the evils below.

The city won its stability, and soon moved on to tame the surrounding lands. None would forget the role Wright played in its defense, but even if they had, that was only the beginning of the company's prominence. In all the intervening years, the company has grown exponentially, expanding in all directions. There is seemingly no end to the ingenuity of its founder, who produced locomotives to drive rail cars hundreds of miles, feeding the city's demand for ore and resources; massive automated machines to multiply the work of craftsmen, the better to build said railroads; even airships, filling the skies over the city--when they can be seen through the constant haze of soot from the phlogiston engines in the factories.

Waterdeep of 1395 is an industrial powerhouse, dominating all resources for hundreds of miles, and pulling in workers by the thousand to toil in highly demanding but highly lucrative factory jobs. Its broad boulevards, once wide enough to serve as open-air markets night and day, are clogged with motorcars, driven by those too wealthy and fancy to get around on the elevated and subterranean rail lines that move hundreds of thousands of laborers to and from their daily toil.

In a world where magic is a shadow of its former self, Waterdeep's industrial power would seem to make it invincible. But nothing could be further from the truth. In the west, the Iron Fleet controls the seaways that connect the city to the world. While they dare not test the littoral waters of the city herself, they make easy work of the fat merchant ships sailing south from their bases in the Moonshaes, and every other island in the Sea of Swords save Lantan--next on their list. Rumor has it they are making inroads with the frost giants of the far north, who ride white dragons into battle--bad news for the "inassailable" airships that defend the waters.

Where once there was tension between the rising powerhouse of Waterdeep and the "backward", agrarian lands of the Silver Marches, now they could scarcely be faster friends. The Eldar of the High Forest have made their move, annihilating the Southern League overnight with High Magic. The river Delimbyr now flows through their land--it is no longer a highway connecting the two realms. The Silver Marches has greenlit a rail line to Silverymoon and points beyond, and hopes to build defenses against the inevitable aggression from the south.

The threat of the Eldar is existential. Their stated goal is to retake the entire world--i.e. no more humans. It must be assumed that they will not negotiate, nor restrain themselves from any force required to achieve these ends. Now that they have proven capable of annihilating entire realms with a single spell, it must be assumed they will do so again.

Helena Wright, President and sole authority of Wright Enterprises, is the de facto defender of the city. The Masked Lords are all but dissolved--useless figureheads who long ago lost the city's trust as defenders. Though there is a nominal city government, no one can even imagine a conventional force that could defend the city against such a threat. Only the great inventor, the brilliant industrialist herself, can save Waterdeep.

And she has promised to.

Asking her workers to redouble their efforts, asking the government to ease all permitting and red tape in her construction needs, she promises that new defenses and weapons are already entering final development, and soon the city will be able to defend against any threat--and perhaps even bring peace to realms under the heel of cruel magical overlords.

This is all well and good for the huddled, terrified masses, who buy every ounce of propaganda they read. But the fact is, things aren't so rosy everywhere.

The Underground

As much as the city is a beacon of hope for those seeking a better life, where endless jobs await hard workers, requiring minimal skill and paying better than any other, the fact is that thousands of people have been left behind. Not everyone has the skills that Wright needs. Her engines put people out of work in droves, and they don't always replace every job with a new one. Craftsmen have been made obsolete, farmers have lost their land, paid for in a lump sum that can scarcely give them a run-down tenement home in the city, with no job to support it. Many have enjoyed lucrative careers in manufacturing, only to be injured by her machines, and rendered unable to continue working. And now, thousands more arrive from the Southern League, homeless and destitute. Where do they all go?

The answer? The Underground, of course! In her infinite magnanimity, Helena Wright has offered homes for the homeless, in beautiful, downtown...Undermountain. Having cleansed it of quite a fair percentage of its monsters and horrors, she has offered the former dungeon as a place to house those displaced by her own industry and progress. There, they can eke out whatever miserable existence they can manage, assuming anyone remembers they exist.

Not surprisingly, the Mad Mage didn't build his dungeon with much of an eye toward civic infrastructure. What little there is is homegrown, and quite insufficient. The air is stagnant, the sewage outflow is a fairy tale, and of course, forget about ever seeing the sun. But hey, it's better than being stuck outside the city walls, right?

"There will always be poor," she says, so condescendingly from her tower. "The solution isn't to throw coins at beggars. It's to create income--real, sustainable jobs--so people can keep their needs met indefinitely, and on their own terms. And nobody is doing more to create jobs than me."

A fine sentiment, one that might ring more true if her "progress" wasn't what put these people out of work in the first place.

Perhaps there is room to debate her economic policies. Many praise the new normal, clearly benefitting more from it than it costs them. The old wealthy have not found themselves too far removed from the new money--the wise among them have bankrolled her expansion and become richer still as a result. The new money flows in, and flows into the same classes as ever. Maybe that's a net neutral, if a depressing one.

But there are other consequences.

If the old phlogiston-burning furnaces weren't depressing, filling the skies with soot and choking the lungs of the children who clean their chimneys, the newer Energist-based machines seem to come with problems all their own. The purified Aether Energy they use is supposedly a "clean" and sustainable alternative to older, more volatile fuels. If that's the case, why is the reactors which produce it are so dangerous they have to be kept outside of the city? Why are they surrounded with blasted land where nothing can grow for a mile's radius?