Famous as “the only place on Golarion where you can teleport across the world by walking a city block,” Absalom’s Foreign Quarter is a rich, diverse, and occasionally chaotic patchwork of immigrant communities pushed together by the city’s longstanding practice of taxing foreigners exorbitantly to live in any district except this one. Merchants in Absalom are also permitted to demand higher prices from non-citizens for all manner of goods and services. These restrictions are lifted in the Foreign Quarter. As a result, while wealthy individuals may be able to afford houses in Westgate or the Ivy District, communities of people driven from their homelands by instability or persecution have been able to congregate primarily in the Foreign Quarter. Here, they thrive, and have collectively created one of the most vibrant and colorful parts of the city.

The mosaic of the Foreign Quarter encompasses both large and small communities. Entire blocks of the district appear to have been lifted from other lands, with buildings of distinctly Chelaxian or Osirian character filled with expatriates and their descendants. Qadiran bells sing the Dawnflower’s praises from high minarets, just as they would in golden, glorious Katheer. Every night, the children of drowned Lirgen gather in their star-marked squares and raise verdigris-ridden long-glasses to the constellations in hopes of finding the secret to unraveling the Eye of Abendego, as they have for over a century without success.