This[1] is the most complete map of all Korvosa, and leaves out few places of interest to us.

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1. With gratitude to the redditor who made it.↩

Most Korvosans live crowded above first-floor stores or businesses in townhouses that share at least one wall with the neighbors.[1] Atop these conjoined dwellings sprawl the Shingles, Korvosa's unofficial eighth district: a layer of tents and ramshackle huts, thickest above Bridgefront, that add a third or fifth story to the city's walkable roofs.

You can cross the crowded city without touching a single cobbled road, and many do, Shingle running to beat the crowds or avoid the Guard.

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1. Guide to Korvosa, page 3.↩

You could look at most of Korvosa as essentially one building - a megadungeon.

Streets are connecting hallways, but rooms are also connected by secret passages, attic windows, and simple proximity. Adventurers in dungeons rely on stone shape and their Insistent Doorknockers to flummox dungeon builders, and the most hated dungeon monster is that which ignores walls. A shadow on the hunt can search every room of a townhouse within a single round.

Earth's early cities had a problem where the whole damn thing would go periodically up in cinders. This is a smaller problem in Korvosa, where they magically control the weather. Earth's cities had or have problems with rats. Again less so in Korvosa, where they enchant rodents with magic pipes and march them into the sea[1]. (Disease, though, is a problem which Korvosa struggles to solve at scale[2].) What fire has in common with rats and smallpox is that it spreads exponentially wherever humans densely congregate.

At last census, Korvosan households were broken down as follows[3]:

  d%         Encounter            Avg EL

01–04        Lives alone                1/3

05–12        Household of 2          1/2

13–25        Household of 3            1

26–40        Household of 4            1

41–54        Household of 5            2

55–68        Household of 6            3

69–00        Household of 7+      Varies

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1. Source: I made it up.↩

2. Curse of the Crimson Throne, Seven Days to the Grave.

3. Inspired by the 1790 US Census.↩

If you were a shadow and wanted to maximize the damage you did Korvosa, ideally you would swim up the Jeggare River, beneath the North Bridge, and attack Midland at the West Dock.

Ooljee was instead directed to attack at Bridgefront; shadows aren't known to be clever and the warpriest didn't want to overcomplicate things. Attacking Old Korvosa is a calculated risk: as it's separated from mainland Korvosa by the Narrows of Saint Alika, there's a chance Korvosa successfully quarantines the island. But targeting the Heights seems likely to draw a prompt and strong response, and South Shore is near to the Gray. And the Narrows are, well, narrow. He'll count on the shadows to cross it.

She isn't stupid, you know.

Agree to disagree.

I won't be disrespected like this.

We can measure Intelligence with detect thoughts and yours is objectively six.

Six of what?

It's generally accepted that INT score corresponds in some way to the thing which is measured by IQ tests, and AD&D said outright that INT and IQ were one and the same, but no edition of D&D or Pathfinder has ventured an official opinion on what it means to have 6 INT or 18.[1]

The concrete anchors we have: creatures with less than 3 INT can't learn language. And 10 (technically 10.5) is the human average. You can draw a straight line through any two points, but gamers have been arguing over how the INT curve should curve for 50 years and there's nothing like a consensus.

There are three methods with the legitimacy to mention, and happily they give fairly similar results in the case of 6 INT:

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1. If you've seen an unsourced table on d20pfsrd.com which says things like "dull-witted or slow, often misuses and mispronounces words" and have mistaken it for being from something other than a random blogger's blog, well, the table is actually from a random blogger's blog.↩

The first method was printed in the Sage Advice column of Dragon Magazine:

Multiply your INT score by 10. That's your IQ.

Advantages: this is the most official answer we'll ever get for any system of Dungeons & Dragons, not that it is by any stretch official.

Disadvantages: it is uncompromisingly batshit insane. (Also the average 3d6 person has 105 IQ.)

Using this method the average shadow has IQ 60 (technically 65).

The second method: players and NPCs allegedly roll 3d6 for their ability scores, which forms a bell curve. IQ is also a bell curve, so take the one and match it to the other, easy like Sunday morning.

Advantages: if you’re rolling 3d6 for stats, characters are as likely to have a given INT score as Earth humans from Earth are. 

Disadvantages: by this method a wolf has like 50 IQ, and if the upper end of ability scores aren’t as completely nutty, wizards can still get 220+.

Using this method the average shadow has about 80 IQ.

Method three: average INT is 10 which mostly corresponds to 100 IQ, NPCs have less variable ability scores than they’d get from the 3d6 method (I'm not sure whether this applies to printed monsters, who for unmodified stats use an array with three 10s and three 11s), every point of INT is about half a standard deviation along the bell curve but INT doesn’t particularly track intelligence especially as you get into the tails.

Disadvantages: this doesn’t square with any in-game construct.

Advantages: it often gives less nutty answers than the two above and is the convention on glowfic dot com.

By this method the average shadow has IQ 70 (77.5?).

So shadows have an average of 70 IQ, abouts. Or a little higher.

What does that mean?

It's hard to say.

When humans think of stupid people they think of children, else adults with brain damage or severe disabilities.

Adult chimpanzees have better working memory than adult humans[1], let alone a human with enough brain damage that it isn't clear who has the higher Intelligence. Wolves are dumber than human toddlers across many dimensions, but seem faster to process their surroundings and have far better pack tactics. 70 IQ children from demographics that do poorly on IQ tests are socially more adept than 70 IQ children from groups with average 100 IQ[2].

Shadows are not human children. Nor disabled human adults. They are adult shadows, with racial bonuses to Wisdom and Charisma. Shadows are slow learners, and bad reasoners. In humans that correlates with slurred speech, emotional incontinence, poor impulse control, poor communication and leadership ability, an inability to keep track of one's environment, to react quickly and decisively.

Shadows aren't geniuses at grand strategy. (At least, not most of them. Some are eighth-circle wizards.)

But they aren't at all hurting for solid horse sense and the ability to work well in groups.

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1. https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/chimp ↩

2. https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1712174161521496434 ↩

Okay, fine, whatever.

If after opening the Bridgefront front you have the presence of mind to swim up the Jeggare and attack the West Dock, I won't stop you. But do Bridgefront first.

Understood?

Ooljee arrives unnoticed; she made her approach beneath the surface of ink-black water, and she is a shadow.

The attack will begin at midnight.

The decaying remains of Fort Korvosa still stand atop Garrison Hill of Endrin Island – rising above the slums of Old Korvosa.

Today the island is home to the city's poorest and most criminal.

Sidelined in 4489 when Magistrate Remsey Ornelos moved the civilian government of Fort Korvosa across the Narrows, irrelevant since losing the Cousin's War, the district clings to fastidious Korvosa like mold on a cheese. Those of Old Korvosa rarely burden themselves with such trifles as legality, morality, or compassion, and the Korvosan Guard is seldom welcome there...

Thankfully, as the Korvosan Guard keeps no vampires on the payroll it doesn't much matter whether we're welcome or not.

With all other noble families expelled from the Old Korvosa after the Cousin's War, the district belongs to sinister House Arkona, and their clandestine agents the wicked Cerulean Society.

I am a philanthropist.

The Korvosan Guard doesn't police Old Korvosa so much as occupy it. And even that can be touch-and-go. They patrol the streets, investigate crimes that disrupt day-lit civic order or spill across the Narrows of Saint Alika, and leave administration in the capable hands of competing gangs, vile House Arkona, and the Thieves Guild.

(So long as the registered crooks tally their ill-gotten income and testify under truthtelling that they’ve payed the city its dues. Externalities get taxed, Korvosa’s not running a charity here.)

Alkdjf;aksjf;dsklfas/i AM running a charity here!!!!

I object to this entire characterization.

Sure, the island is the poorest district per capita.

Have you ever thought that maybe that might have something to do with how now it's illegal to be poor where King Eodred can see it and get pissy? Effectively ban tenement halls outside Bridgefront, and poor people move to Bridgefront! And/or live illegally in a five story layer cake of teetering shacks and palpable misery! Who'd have seen that coming? Surely not House Arkona, I for one can't recall loudly and insistently predicting this exact thing.

I can't recall you predicting it either. You would have been a child at the time.