Free City - Regions and Neighborhoods
Free City is officially divided into three regions—Westhaven, The Heartlands and Easthaven. Each borough contains multiple neighborhoods and serves as a semi-autonomous unit for administration, policing, infrastructure, and municipal services. While the Free City Council oversees the metropolis as a whole, each borough has its own Borough Chamber, District Authority, and Civil Command Post, making the city a battleground of inter-borough rivalries and political maneuvering.
Westhaven
Westhaven is one of the three primary boroughs of Free City, occupying the city’s vast western expanse. With a population of approximately 1.7 million as of 2025, Westhaven is known for its sprawling industrial corridors, aging suburbs, rural outposts, and underground cultures. It stretches from the North By Northwest (NWA) in the northwest, through abandoned factories and trailer park sprawl, all the way to the freshwater boundary of Fresh Creek River, separating it from the city’s elite zones to the south.
Historically overlooked in city planning, Westhaven developed as a patchwork of necessity and neglect—a borough defined by its labor force, its off-grid defiance, and its refusal to be tamed. The borough includes the rusting megastructures of The Industry, immigrant-heavy ports like Delphsthaven, the suburban grit of Monclair, and the rapidly gentrifying tech corridor of Newport. Further west lie The Farmlands, a no-man’s-land of cornfields, cults, and survivalists who claim independence from city government.
Neighborhoods
Rural outer belt. Cornfields, meth labs, and militia compounds. Rural outskirts with agriculture, trailer parks, prepper communities. Rural noir. Backroads, abandoned churches, armed militias. Old Free City families, separatists, aging racists, and new-age eco hippies. Illegal weed farms, dog fighting pits, cult compounds.
Luxury enclave Free City’s Monaco. Originally a military island in the colonial era, now fully privatized by foreign capital and old money families. A water-locked paradise of wealth and opulence, accessible only by private ferry or air. Casinos, mansions, and private medical facilities. An exclusive enclave of waterfront mansions, five-star hotels, casinos, private yachts.
Heavy manufacturing zone. Loud, dangerous, and brutally real. Massive factories and smog-filled skies. Rusted factories, oil tanks, steelworks. Dystopian sprawl. Smoke, rust, abandoned trains. Home to tech pirates, hacker dens, ghost kitchens, underground raves.
Old working harbor. Gritty, industrial, and alive. Jamaican sound systems next to Korean BBQ joints. Old shipyards and fishing harbor. Working-class immigrant neighborhood. Famous for fish market, old churches and diners.
Suburban sprawl. Car-dependent and spread out, but peaceful. Known for its strip malls and cul-de-sacs. Lower middle class, many veterans. Suburban sprawl with cracked sidewalks and flagpoles. Strip malls, pawn shops, discount gun stores.
The Heartlands
The Heartlands is the central borough of Free City, encompassing the city’s historic core, financial institutions, and densest cultural zones. Bounded by the West River, Maze River, Free Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean, Heartlands occupies a cluster of interconnected islands, riverbanks, and waterfront infrastructure. As of the 2025 census, the borough has a population of approximately 2.7 million, making it the smallest by land area, but the most densely populated and symbolically significant of Free City’s three boroughs.
Originally founded as Nieuw-Rotterdam, Heartlands retains much of its colonial architecture, particularly in Little Rotterdam, which features preserved Dutch canals, cobbled streets, and radical squats housed in 17th-century buildings. Today, the borough serves as the spiritual and economic nucleus of the city—home to towering banks in the Financial District, sacred cathedrals and cults in Chapels, and the raw cultural explosion of Brixton, Hell’s Dishes, and Long Park.
Often referred to as the “Heart of the Night,” the borough is a vivid contradiction: it houses Free City’s most powerful elites and most dispossessed residents, often on the same block. It is a borough of billionaires and prophets, of blackouts and night markets, where influence is traded in both currency and blood. Freedom Night, a massive yearly rave that overtakes its canals and plazas, originated here and remains a symbol of its defiant spirit.
Neighborhoods
Everything beautiful and brutal about Free City in one place. You’ll find avant-garde art squats, crack dens, five-star fusion joints, child soldiers, prophets, and ex-mobsters in bathrobes. A living painting of madness. Tenement blocks and drug corners. Heavily contested Bloods/Crips turf. Daily gunfire. Known for graffiti art and drill music born from trauma.
Built around Free City’s largest green zone. Wealthy families with private guards dominate the skyline. City’s largest park. Originally designed as the “Central Park of the South.”
Post-industrial melting pot. Diverse, unpredictable, wild. A chaotic blend of Dutch legacy, Afrobeat, Vietnamese fusion food, and crypto bars. The colonial root of Free City. Dutch-style streets and canals. Now: anarchist bookstores, hidden art galleries, radical communes. Famous for Freedom Night, an annual city-wide street rave.
Corporate fortress. Full of banks, high-rises, and rooftop helipads. Most residents are expats, execs, or offshore traders.
Easthaven
Easthaven is the largest and most populous borough of Free City, located east of the Maze River and the Leak River delta. Known for its sprawling housing blocks, spiritual enclaves, digital underworlds, and developing megaprojects, Easthaven is home to over 4.3 million residents as of 2025, making it the most populous of the three boroughs.
Diverse in both geography and identity, Easthaven encompasses neighborhoods like Mahogony, an Afro-Caribbean stronghold known for botanicas, rituals, and resistance; Dreamville, a new-model suburb built on Chinese foreign investment; and The Maze, an anarchic network of non-Euclidian streets and alleyways said to defy mapping. At the borough's core are The Projects—a vast expanse of state-built high-rises, home to the city’s most feared gangs and fiercest poets. Up north you find the Saltmines; abandoned wastelands, an old industry filled with scavengers and rumored cults.
Culturally rich and socioeconomically fractured, Easthaven is often seen as the pulse of Free City's street culture, producing chart-topping rap, underground zines, fashion trends, and political uprisings. The borough also includes Oakwood and Burgundy, more subdued neighborhoods favored by retirees, students, and ex-cops.
Neighborhoods
Loud, proud, and raw. Home of streetball, dive bars, and spoken-word legends. Northern hood with rich hip-hop history and rivalry with Brixton.
Working class suburb. A bit rundown, but decent people. Close to Dreamville and Burgundy, so overflow is happening here. Quiet suburb filled with retirees and ex-cops.
Middle-class suburbia with flair. Suburban vibes with creative flair. A favorite for young families and artists avoiding the chaos. New city-in-the-making funded by Chinese capital.
Quiet urban suburb. Known for its wine cellars, bookstores, and secret jazz clubs. Popular among professors and journalists. Student-heavy, drug-heavy, art-heavy.
A tangled mess of roads. Safe haven for hackers, sex workers, ex-soldiers.
Red-brick homes, strong Afro-Caribbean heritage, and tight-knit communities. Gentrification starting to creep in. Culture-rich, solid housing, strong local pride. Some gang activity, underfunded schools, airport noise on east side. Afro-Caribbean quarter. Botanicas, rituals, hair salons, and spiritual resilience.
Technically city land, but functionally abandoned. Salt flats, chemical spills, and ghost towns. Abandoned salt mines turned refuge for off-grid communities. Populated by preppers, albino chemists, outlaw communes. Folk horror meets modern paranoia. Rumors: hidden temples, Cold War bunkers, forgotten experiments.