The Jam Gardens

Everybody get up, it's time to slam now

An island dedicated to the art of basketball -the only surviving sport of the Old World- The Jam Gardens is endless rows of asphalt basketball courts pockmarked with the occasional shower and locker room, vending machine parade, or laundromat. There's little fame or fortune to be found in the Jam Gardens, besides that earned on the blacktop, but it's a great place to work up a sweat and perhaps find some new friends and allies.

History of the Jam Gardens

- The Death of Sport via Marketing Budgets

The Jam Gardens was originally a set of islands perfectly positioned for travel to the offshore early Bezosphere launch site. The island was paved over, turned, literally, into storage yards, parking lots, and yacht docks. The larger island turned into vehicle storage, the smaller island made into warehouses for storage. A single bridge was built back to the mainland, heavily guarded. In time, when the launchsite moved to what would become the Walled Street, the islands were abandoned, and given their paved over nature, total lack of industrial docks, and the isolated nature of them lead to them being considered worthless by Czarina Tropical Agriculture and Saraswati Virtue. In time, vagrants moved in, breaking into the abandoned warehouses for survival gear, and converting the lamp posts and empty parking lots into spaces for basket ball courts

.- The Time Capsule from 1996, and The Rediscovery of Basketball

In time this evolved into a fellowship of master basketball players, the greatest of which became known as Dunkmeisters. The Dunkmeisters struck deals with various other groups, from pirates to dark-web netmasters, to broadcast their games. Some of them went out of their way, traveling to various megacities to establish new undercity games, converting abandoned megacity warehouse chambers into courts, and preserving the art of Basketball when all other sports gently vanished into the mists of history. In time, the megacorps would take notice, and attempt to co-opt this sport for their own profit, but found that it was simply too expensive, and too costly to replace the Dunkmeisters, who were, in effect, the very product they wished to exploit. The Dunkmeisters in turn leveraged their popularity into a series of contracts securing the independence of the Jam Gardens, and the lucrativity of their tournaments and games spread like wildfire across the megacities and towns of the world. Now, every holding company has at least one basketball team, and every single one of them pays a licensing fee to the JGBL (Jam Gardens Basketball League), which is run by retired Dunkmeisters for the good of the game.

Administration and Structure of the Jam Gardens

The Jam Gardens are an aberration in the corporate-run world, their administration not resembling a corporate hierarchy, but instead that of a guild or club organization. The Dunkmeisters run the Jam Gardens, with their members who are no longer able to continue to play, taking on the duties of administration and management. The territory is organized into teams, and only teams that live on the island rather than out of a megacity are allowed to have one of their coaches (the term for a retired Dunkmeister) on the league's directing council. In cases where an equitable agreement can't be made, the decision is made by the coach with the best team backing him. This might mean a simple two man match, or in cases for particularly thorny and disruptive problems, a full double elimination tournament. This model trickles down throughout all of the Jam Garden's society, and in general everything of any sort of import that can't be decided by mutual agreement comes down to a fast and dirty game between competing opinions. Initial teams are drawn up based on who supports what decision in any given community or group, and then a draft is held for the fence sitters, until two full teams are pulled together and the game held to make a decision.

Exterior politics is handled entirely by the JGBL Director's Council, with them negotiating the rules on acceptable sponsorship contracts, compensation for players, and royalty fees. In effect, they act as a 'union' for professional basketball players the world over, and use the membership fees to maintain facilities in the Jam Gardens and insure that their sport remains as accessible and free to play as possible.

Commerce of the Jam Gardens

The Jam Gardens is ill-placed for any sort of heavy economic activity. Currents and winds lead to other areas of the coast lines being safer and easier harbors, and originally it was only suitable due to it's proximity to the original, now sunken and derelict, bezosphere launch site. This lead to any arable land aboard it being paved over, and the site being abandoned as a huge parking lot and storage facility. In time, it was utterly abandoned, the valuables inside left to looters, and the facilities steadily converted to those necessary to keep the place running.

Their major income sources are as follows:

• Team Sponsorships: One of the biggest sources of income are the team sponsorships from the various corporations. These are highly limited, and the massive exhibition matches on the island's main stadiums draw in massive crowds both online and physically. Even teams that do not regularly visit the Jam Gardens except for these matches have to pay a yearly fee to the jam garden league in order to participate, or risk missing out on the biggest sports event short of the sexlympcis. Attempts to open up competing leagues have always bogged down in corporate backstabbing and assassinations.
• Sports Memorabilia: A considerable amount of sports memorabilia is sold from the island, often made elsewhere, then stolen by Calico Redistribution, and sold at a pittance back to Jam Island's gift shops, either to be shipped intercorporately, or sold to visitors.
• Ticket Sales: While live events watching is a thing of the pass, and digital passes are ridiculously easy to forge and pirate, the Jam Gardens does a healthy trade in ticket sales nevertheless. Physical sales especially come at an exorbitant price, with various corporations getting their pound of flesh from sales in their territories in the form of actual transport costs to bring the buyer to the islands for the games. League member owners also have to pay a percentage of their ticket sales gross income to the Jam Gardens league to remain members, ensuring that if a game of B-Ball is played for profit anywhere in the world, the Jam Gardens is getting a cut.

The Jam Gardens has special trade relations with the following Territories:

• Czarina Tropical: The jam gardens is far too small an area to support it's official population, the majority of people actually live on the nearby coastline in some of the overgrown jungles and plantations, which provide them with part of the food needs and a good port of entry for tourists. Czarina permits this on the basis of counting it as a loss leader and as a negotiating point with the Dunkmeisters for advertising.
• Calico Redistribution: Calico Redistribution has a trading deal with the Jam Gardens. Captains get free tickets to the big games, and in return the Jam Gardens gets first refusal on any and all sports equipment, foodstuffs, and other necessities for keeping the island running.
• Nazzdack: There are few things that Nazzdack would love more than to crush the JGBL and shackle the Dunkmeisters into corporate slavery like the rest of the world, but so far they've not managed to figure out a sure fire way to do it. Attempts to open competing leagues have always ended in absolute disaster, and attempts at out and out conquest are always met with swift losses of profits as rabid adventurer, pirate, and mercenary B-Ball fans are enticed with free merch and tickets to the big games to take part in corpo-cop stomping (an activity many of the defenders would do happily for free).

Jam Island also has a healthy tourism industry, but due to them wanting to make it as easy as possible for people to come to the island to learn B-Ball from the masters and keep the sport healthy and alive, they charge barely anything, and facilities such as the free showers and drinking fountains are open to tourists as well.

Prominent Races of the Jam Gardens

• Humans make up the majority of basketball players, and thus, the populous of the Jam Gardens, due to basketball having originally been designed with human proportions in mind.
• Street Elfs are the second most populous race of the Jam Gardens, with Executive Elfs and Undercity Elfs not being unheard of but rather rare.
• Nayalings are fairly rare on the courts, though they do have their own courts, with a few variants on basketball involving semi-vertical courts and uneven terrain developed for Nayaling's goatlike physiology (these variants are mostly popular in mountainous settlements of All-Gobi territories, where a flat, hard surface is hard to come by).
• Wukong make up a surprisingly large amount of the populous, though most of them tend to be migratory from the mainland. Despite their small stature, the agility of their tails and springiness of their limbs lets them compete with taller members of the other races.
• Gobbos are all but unheard of in the Jam Gardens outside of the one small district that caters to their tastes specifically, known for offering far more relaxed and casual games, usually forbidding participation by people over a certain height. The active sport simply doesn't attract the lazy, plant like race barring a few notable exceptions.
• Jerboans do not frequent the Jam Courts, as basketball is, to their minds, far too stationary a game to be of any interest to most of their octane-fueled race.
• Artificiates and Remakes make for rare visitors to the Jam Gardens, the island lacking bot automation to any serious extent, and those who can afford the Remake procedure often see it as more a hobby than a vocation, and thus not something they invest considerable time in.

Culture of the Jam Gardens

The Jam Gardens culture entirely revolves around the sport of basketball in all its various forms. From the simple game of hangman, all the way to the full exhibition play, to everything in between, including a few spin offs only made possible by modern augmentations and new races, but the unaltered form of it remains the king and primary cultural focus of the Jam Gardens. Devotion to the noble game of b-ball is the defining attribute of the Gardens, and everything is offered up on that altar. Profits are meaningless to the people of the twin islands except for that it enables them to keep playing. Competition is important, but only in that it pushes them to improve themselves. This has made charity to your fellow players a cornerstone of their life on the islands. Someone is down? You help them up, so they'll help you up next time, all in the name of fair play.

Most of the population of the Jam Gardens are visitors, temporary tourists who come to experience the heart of the greatest sport on earth. The permanent population consists of those who give their all to the sport. Those who seek the hallowed mastery of the court that comes with being a Dunkmeister. Becoming a Dunkmeister is no easy thing, and there are many trials and contests to determine if one is worthy of the title, not every one of them has to be passed, and sometimes the title has been conferred on the rare players who suck at the trials but whose obvious mastery is on the court in live play. The Dunkmeisters are considered the leaders of the island, the people who hold in their heart the true spirit of the ball. There are foreign dunkmeisters, but if you've completely sold out to the corpos, rather than living your life for the game, then it's a hard thing to achieve, and only ever given out begrudgingly to such players.

Special Locations of the Jam Gardens

The Jam Gardens are a unique place, black top covered islands with raised car parks (now converted into multi-layer courts) and the occasional stadium or shower hut providing a change from the miles and miles of basketball courts, benches, vending machines, and chain linked fences.

• Public Facilities: The only place in the world with free water is the Jam Gardens, with free, public showers and drinking fountains. The charitable spirit of these facilities leads to a more charitable spirit in the otherwise incredibly competitive basketball players of the Gardens, leading to a strangely not profit focused idealism in many players.
• The Storage Bays: The top of the Jam Courts is almost entirely dominated by flat basketball courts surrounded by chain link fences to keep the balls in the courts, with the occasional stadium or gymnasium scattered about the place. Their underground is dominated not by a bunker network or datacenter like most territories, but rather an enormous set of warehouses, desalination facilities, and battery stacks powered by solar panels, tidal generators, and geo-thermal turbines. This is where the food and water of the island are carefully stored away and protected by mercenaries hired by the JGBL Directors Council.
• The Bunks: The name for the mainland settlement in Czarina Tropical Agriculture's territory where most of the population returns when they're fully done with a day. The shanty town settlement more closely resembles a Calico pirate port than anything else, but the docks are not for smugglers and pirate ships, but rather the ferries between The Bunks and the Jam Garden's southern coast, though some people prefer the marathon like jog up the century's old 6 lane bridge that once connected the islands to the mainland. Ancient toll booths and curbside stores have since been converted into sports memorabilia and health food shops.

Organizations of the Jam Gardens

The primary social unit in the Jam Gardens is the team, but other groups such as small corporations see to the needs of the basketball players or even other groups finding homes.

• The Jam Gardens Basketball League - Administrative Body: The unelected body of the best basketball players to have ever lived, retired and turned coach. They see it as a sacred trust to keep the Jam Gardens functioning and fruitful, with the thorniest of political debates being solved by the teams that they now coach.
• Jim's Kids - Guild: A group founded by the legendary custodian Bobby Joe Jim Bob Joe Jim Jimmy Jim Jim Bobson (Not to be confused with the Bob of the famous Bob's Burritos or Joe of the even more famous Eat at Joe's), the man who opened the gates of the abandoned island to the first b-ballers and helped install the first hoops. Now they draw from volunteers across the island to maintain the pipes, wires, and necessities of the Jam Gardens, so that folks can keep on playing night or day. The permanent membership is drawn from those who enjoy the sport or culture of the Jam Gardens, but for whatever reason cannot or choose not to play.

Settlements of the Jam Gardens

The Jam Courts lack anything so conventional as an actual settlement, but small shanties, coverings, and differences in the state of the various courts across the islands do lead to various districts and changes. Few of them are set up for longterm habitation, with folks instead taking naps at such places or returning to The Bunks for longer rests.

• The Jam Court: The central stadium and courtset of the Jam Gardens, designed to seat as many of the regular participants on the island as it can for the biggest and most exciting games between the teams of Dunkmeisters and their proteges. This central settlement is usually rather empty except for a few of the only permanent, non-vending machine eateries, a few hostelries of excellent repute (and far more dubious ones), and the central hub of rail lines around the Jam Gardens. Notably, all Dunkmeisters receive rooms on the upper floors of the stadium, looking down upon the hallowed center-most b-ball court. Local myth has it that this was the first Basketball Court built in the Jam Gardens, before there even was a stadium, and that it was built with materials rescued from the legendary courts of Rucker Park and Madison Square Garden. No one knows what these places were, except that they were hallowed of the game even in the old world.
• Gobbo Gardens: A town predominantly populated and run by Gobbos and their kin, with many houses being little more than open concepts and glass windows, with buildings designed to maximize tanning time. The center of the district is both a ball court and a sun focusing tanning bunker, so the denizens can catch a full regeneration during half time. One thing most should know is that among all the green and orange, there are others who prefer the gobbo kind, and it's not uncommon for celebrities with a thing for short stacks to take up basketball to keep a harem of Gobbos to spend their down time with.
• The Yard: A nickname locals gave to a particular junkyard with a concrete court, rusty hoops, and graffiti covered rims. Folks come in troves to watch the hard hitting games and fierce competition, but the players come for the Yard's special rule. The games here are ran by a local arms dealer and connection to the blackmarket, and to make games a bit more fun, all teams have to wager something of value. Mostly parts, weapons, and modifications are piled up for a game of winner take all, but info, cash, services, homes, can also be thrown into the pot. This is a place to win big, or revamp your life as a bounty hunter, if you think luck and skill are on your side. If you want out of the Jam Gardens... this might be your location.

People of the Jam Gardens

The people of the Jam Gardens are famous for two things: their fiercely competitive but charitable spirit, and their inability to shut up about anything except their favorite pass time for longer than 10 minutes at a stretch.

• Jukie
• Strawberry Thunder: The infamous remake known as Strawberry Thunder was literally made to play basketball. An avid fan on the sport before their death they spent their life savings on the best robotic shell money could buy. Their signature move both on and off the court is the the Strawberry Thunder Flying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam Thank You Mam.
• Pops: Once a court legend, Pops now owns a small sneaker shop, refusing to let Step-Bros takeover the shoe market. This human has aged like fine wine, and classic High-Tops. He's a friend to all, and will happily give advice if your jump shot is shit.

Events of the Jam Gardens

The Jam Garden's year is defined by the cycle of winter and summer games, and the fierce competitions between rival teams from around the world.

• The Draft: Once a year, when summer is winding down and the lights are growing dim, the home teams of the Jam Gardens hold their draft. Each team represents a large, crisscrossing area with overlapping courts, vending machines, and shower areas, and thus the coaches pick new players via draft drawn from those areas. Once a team member is drafted, they remain on that team for life unless they leave or are kicked off the team by their teammates

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