| abstract | - Neues Emskrank was the first port in Nordland to open in 2460 IC as a scheme to siphon off business from Marienburg. Failed miserably.[1b] Originally a small fishing village called Pugsblatter, the rights to the town were bought by an investment group headed by a charlatan named Jens-Pieter Riemanns, and which numbered among its backers three Elector Counts and several lesser but still wealthy and powerful nobles and Imperial merchant houses. Their plan was to create two ports that would siphon off traffic from Marienburg, thus cutting out the middlemen there and creating more profits for themselves. To this end, Pugsblatter was bought in 2460 and renamed “Neues Emskrank.” The local residents were forced out and resettled in the area of Wilhelmskoog, and colonists were brought in to reinvigorate the place. The cartel built houses and shops to give the city a fresh look, they invested in warehouses to handle the traffic surely coming their way, and they built new trading caravels that would be the vanguard of their fleet. Naturally, it was a total disaster.[1a] Things went wrong during the construction, so much so that the new residents swore the old Pugsblatters were sneaking back to sabotage their work: there were fires and accidents, and once the town flooded when the Salz overflowed its banks, something that had not happened in living memory. When the first ship capsized after leaving its dock for the first time, people began to say the town was cursed. Of the ships launched from Neues Emskrank and its sister-town in Ostland, Salkalten, none returned. The cartel collapsed, the investors tossed Riemanns into a debtor’s prison, and Neues Emskrank was sold to the Elector of Nordland for a pittance.[1a] Now the town is a depressed fishing village that lives off the catch from the sea, whatever trade comes through, and money made in the service of the priests of Manann at the monastery of Manaansheim in the bay. The buildings have a rundown, ill-kept look to them, and strangers are not readily welcome there. Surly townsmen and their hard-bitten wives and sullen children stare out at strangers from decaying houses that saw their best days long ago. Neues Emskrank has such a depressed, unloved feel to it that other Nordlanders have begun to speak of it as having a “taint.”[1a]
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