A huge proportion of the black market in Horizon is controlled by three families to whom crime is a family business: the Columna, the Daynnan, and the Kellor. Each of them has built up power and influence while creating a respectable facade. In each case they have depended on their extended family and friends to build up their little empires, and their trust has been vindicated. The emphasis on family has lead these mobs to adopt codes of honour, rules of engagement between themselves: no children, no women, always respect a bet, and so on. Observers often note that the families treat the rules more as guidelines, but they're still there, and they're still acknowledged. The families also became interested in insuring that the criminal underworld stayed stable and prosperous, in the intention of having a going concern to pass on to their children; to this end, they sent out their goons to act as impromptu police, and enforce certain standards on the rest of the criminal scum. Naturally acquiescence to such standards will also be the first step to extended family control. Unfortuneatly the rest of the criminal scum also realised this and began to resist. Nonetheless, in the years immediately following Zero's election when the three families seemed to be taking control of the City of Traitors. But eventually they fought against each other, and Zero (alarmed by the gang war) organised a crackdown that they were ill prepared for. When they had recovered and regrouped, the families found that a number of other groups had moved into the Horizon underworld, none of whom respected them or the codes of honour they considered so important. The Merchants' Arm were a prime example, taking no social responsibility and regarding the criminal community as a crude tool. In the face of such threats to their culture, the heads of the three families met up, and agreed to lay aside their differences. They would cease to compete against each other and concentrate on battling their rivals, to return the underworld to how it ought to be. Honour among thieves, and three firm hands on the tiller.
The Three Families technically constitute the most powerful of the mobs of Horizon. However, for that power to be brought to bear in its entirety they would have to work together as one. No-one in Horizon can see that happening in the immediate future. They have a non-aggression pact and agree on a few principles, but old emnities die hard, and they still think of each other as their true rivals. Indeed, low level skirmishes and dirty tricks have gone on almost contiually between the three since the truce was agreed twenty years ago, and the alliance has almost collapsed on numerous occasions. It would only take a small shock to drive the families apart, but a large enough shock might finally drive them together.
The Families have influence and property throughout the city, but the only district they truly dominate is the slums. Here is the little property that the Columna still own. Here are are the rotting tenements into which the Kellors were pushed on arriving in the city forty years ago. Here are the alleys where the Daynann fought the Imperial police in nights gone by. And here the emnities between the families may finally erupt into war. They specialise in protection rackets and running gambling operations and other entertainments, but have a finger in most types of crime. The family heads regard mere burglary as vulgar, although individual gang members may indulge. All three families effectively have private armies, and also have the advantage of borderline social respectability. The heads of the families have been at pains to present themselves as respectable citizens, making sizable donations to charity, the University, and so on. So any member of these mobs will have a tailor made legitimate 'identity' (this is not an actual alter ego, but is a nominal job and position in the overworld).
COLUMNA: many crime lords behave like medieval nobles, ruling their fiefs without reference to the nominal government, which they regard as weak and irrelevant. The Columna certainly subscribe to that view, unsurprisingly as they genuinely are nobles. Before the last war they were Imperial nobles, ruling land in what is today [name]; that all ended with the Last Treaty, and they found themselves stricken with poverty. Upon finding out exactly how badly his family was ruined, the then Count Columna suffered a stroke, and expired not long after. His son, the current Count, was more stoic. The family still had a number of artworks, and some cheap property in the city itself. The new Count, Alric, had been a wild youth and mixed with what his father regarded as quite the wrong people. He flogged the artwork, got in touch with his old friends, and told his servants that they could either be unemployed or start retraining. Most chose to retrain. The Count then picked out the destitute merchants, moneylenders and fences among the refugees who filled Horizon'streets at that point, and offered them cheap accomodation in the property he owned, and also security - if they'd just agree to pay him back later. Times were hard for a few years, but eventually the family prospered. Now the Count has brought back most of the artworks he had to sell, and presents himself as a respectable but reclusive gentleman of leisure. He turns up at the Goodly Chamber once a month for an hour or so, chats, listens to the debate with a small smile, doesn't interfere. He claims that his restored fortunes result from 'wise investments, dear boy.' Many of his peers know exactly how he got his family back on its feet; some despise him, others respect him. He has shown interest in the Gentleman's Cause and the Old Club, but hasn't officially joined either (he knows the high probability that he'd be blackballed). Any player wanting to take high rank in the Columna must also take [nobility related merit].
DAYNANN: these were the most powerful criminal family in the last days of the Empire and even had a kind of folk hero status as they stood up to the increasingly ineffectual and vicious Imperial government. Unfortuneatly the then head of the family Jimmy Daynann allowed this status to go to his head, and got the clan involved in revolutionary politics. A couple of years before the Last Treaty, this all ended with an Imperial cavalry regiment burning down the Daynann family home and those of most of their supporters, before publicly beheading Jimmy. Many poeple were lost in the streetfighting that surrounded this event, and the Daynanns lost a lot of prestige. However, they had been the alternative royal family of Horizon's working classes for generations, and were soon able to bounce back under the leadership of Jimmy's lieutentant and younger brother Ray, or Raymond as he now prefers to call himself. He is now the Grand Old Man of the Daynanns. To polite society he is a respectable merchant, though the truth is relatively widely known. He can expect to be cheered whenever he walks down the street in a part of the slums inhabited by 'old' Horizoners. The Daynann family home is certainly not in the slums; it is in a respectable part of the commercial quarter. The Daynann are less dominated by Raymond than the Columna are by the Count, and the younger generation is increasingly taking charge of this family. As well as having the support of the slums, the Daynann get a certain amount of grudging respect from old-school criminals who have operated in Horizon for many years. They have a correspondingly touchy relationship with the Watchdogs.
KELLOR: forty years ago the Kellor were a bunch of bums and petty crooks in a backwater country town. Then the tides of war swept across them, and an Irgarim army burnt their house to the ground and claimed their land in the name of honest folk who aren't lickspittles to a mad Emperor (ie the Irgarim general). The Kellor joined the horde of refugees trooping into Horizon, where they were packed into a filthy overcrowded tenement by an unscrupulous landlord. And there the family was reborn. Before the war the head of the family, Papa Kellor, had barely stirred from his chair for seven years, and the refugee trail was too much; he was buried by the roadside. Mama Kellor had always ruled her own children with an iron fist and in that tenement she became the leader of the whole extended family. They were a bunch of good for nothings, her sons and daughters and nephews and nieces, so she thrashed them into shape with the help of her trusty stick. She made them do what they had to do to survive, and that meant shaking down the rest of the tenement for protection money and making use of the one talent the family had ever had - gambling. The years went by and the family became good at what it did. Mama Kellor became Grandma Kellor. Widely despised by the locals and ignored by the city authorities, the immigrants from the war learnt to put their trust in Grandma Kellor's boys and girls. She herself became aged before her time, a little white haired old lady spitting abuse and instructions at her terrified progeny from a rocking chair. When the heads of the three families came together to negotiate the truce, Raymond Daynann and Count Columna had to hide their smiles as she was helped into the room by her son.
There's an experiment you can do these days. Say 'Grandma Kellor', loudly. The Grand Old Man, no matter what company he is in, will immediately spit with the greatest violence. Count Columna will make for the nearest source of sherry and pour himself a large one.
Grandma Kellor is dead these three years, but her portrait hangs in the corner where she used to sit. The Kellor family still lives in the same tenement, which they now own all of, and have considerably renevated. Leadership of the family has effectively skipped a generation, since all of Grandma Kellor's children were too cowed to even consider taking control. That generation are either retired, dead or just stick around doing whatever jobs they're given. The family is cuurently run by a loose grouping of under 35s, with no one clear leader. Yet....
Out of the three families, only the Kellor live near their constituents. They may yet lever this into more influence with the lower classes of Horizon, but as yet they are still mistrusted by 'native' Horizon citizens.
RELATIONS BETWEEN THE THREE FAMILIES: under the surface, there is serious class resentment between the Columna and the Daynann; the latter consider the former to be effete amateurs and dilettantes who are moreover born with the proverbial silver spoon. In return, the Columna consider the Daynann to be hopelessly undereducated oafs who only got where they did because the Emperor was cracking up, and are now useful as little more than hired muscle. Both consider the Kellor to be filthy immigrants who are more interested in scrounging than doing an honest day's work and are liable to corrupt the moral standards of the city's youth with their loose behaviour. The Kellor see the other two as fat and complacent. All this is before we get on to practical matters like territory and influence.
You would suspect none of this if you saw Count Columna and the Grand Old Man sipping port together in a smart club. Nor would you suspect the five separate occasions on which they have attempted to assassinate each other.