🤡 Clown Hospital of Harlequin Vale
“The show must go on — even when it hurts.”
🩸 Overview
The Clown Hospital serves as both medical center and rehabilitation facility for Harlequin Vale — a civic hybrid born from the city’s belief that mercy and spectacle can coexist.
It sits at the far end of Clown Alley, its red-striped walls visible from nearly anywhere in town. Inside, stretchers roll past juggling nurses, and the smell of greasepaint mixes with antiseptic.
Citizens come here for broken bones, chemical burns, or stage injuries.
Criminals come here when the Sawdust Courts decide they’ve failed their act in the eyes of the crowd.
The hospital is loud, efficient, and terrifyingly cheerful.
⚖️ Role in Justice
When defendants lose a case in the Sawdust Courts, they are sent here instead of a prison.
Their “sentence” is rehabilitation under the supervision of Doctor Patch and his masked staff.
The treatment is practical, not mystical — medical recovery paired with civic service, therapy, and supervised labor.
Offenders assist with stage maintenance, ropework, and prop fabrication until they can demonstrate responsibility and self-control.
Visitors often joke that it’s “half hospital, half theater, half jail.”
No one laughs for long once they hear the locks click.
🏥 Facilities
The Upper Wards: Legitimate medical wings for burns, falls, and beast-related injuries. Patients are treated by a mix of medics, engineers, and clown nurses trained in Smirkus Academy’s first aid track.
The Red Curtain Wing: The rehabilitation level. Patients from the Sawdust Courts work under medical supervision repairing props, sewing costumes, and assisting in low-risk stage acts for therapy.
The Morgue Workshop: Overseen by Doctor Patch personally — where failed medical experiments, prosthetics, and experimental treatments blur together. It smells of formaldehyde and brass.
⚙️ Administration
Chief Physician: Doctor Patch — Gnome surgeon, atheist technologist, and local legend. He believes punishment and healing are two sides of the same process: both require confrontation and repair.
Head Nurse: Nurse Chuckle — Human woman with military medical training; blunt, competent, and always slightly too loud. Keeps Patch’s chaos functional.
Judicial Liaison: Judge Carnelia Thist — Oversees the transfer of court-assigned patients; insists on humane conditions and public accountability.
Rehabilitation Coordinator: Eldric Reeve (part-time intern) — Tracks expenses and patient work hours for Guild Senate audits. Desperately overworked.
🧠 Philosophy
The Clown Hospital operates on a simple belief:
“Everyone breaks. Some people just need help being put back together.”
It rejects Serendahl’s doctrine of stillness, embracing motion and adaptation as healing principles.
Doctors and judges here share the view that punishment without transformation is meaningless.
The hospital’s efficiency has kept Harlequin Vale’s incarceration rate among the lowest in Canava — though critics argue that some patients “never quite leave,” working as orderlies long after recovery.
💀 Rumors and Myths
Some patients fake crimes just to get free medical care.
Patch’s experiments in “reversible death” have succeeded at least once.
The morgue door is built from reclaimed stage wood that creaks like applause.
The longest-staying patient is a juggler who’s been “almost discharged” for twelve years.
The Guild Senate officially calls it The Harlequin Rehabilitation Clinic — but everyone else knows it as The Clown Hospital.
🎭 Player Hooks
Trial Transfer: The party is tasked with escorting a convicted performer safely to the Clown Hospital — only for the patient to vanish en route.
The Laughing Patient: A recently discharged convict keeps breaking into performances, claiming “they left something inside me.”
Patch’s New Procedure: Doctor Patch hires the party to retrieve “raw materials” from the Menagerie Docks for an experimental prosthetic limb.
Judicial Audit: Eldric Reeve begs the party to help with an inspection after a Guild Senate auditor vanishes mid-tour of the Red Curtain Wing.
🕯️ Summary
The Clown Hospital is not a joke. It’s the civic spine of Harlequin Vale — the place where injury, guilt, and invention meet under a striped roof.
Part hospital, part workshop, part redemption engine, it embodies the Vale’s philosophy:
that laughter may not fix the world, but it keeps the world from staying broken.