Steam

Lacking a natural wealth of crystals, Steam has found another way to keep relevant: tech. The city is known for its gruff edges and shiny metals: anyone lacking magic talent but brimming with ambition somehow finds themselves here. The streets are crowed with buggies; the buildings seem to whir and click, covered in gears and valves. Even Steam's people are techy: whole limbs mechanized, amour equipped with tech you can't hope to understand. Magic users beware: this is the techies' city.

As they are struggling to compete with prevalence and uses of magic, the artificers of Steam have come up with an alternative to magic: guns. Magic lets you attack from a distance, placing any sort of swordswoman at a distinct disadvantage. The creation of ranged weapons would definitely help level the playing field.

Their tech also bleeds through to the people themselves, creating a part-human-part-construct creature. They've essential "upgraded" themselves. One artificer might create an arm bracer with a spring blade, eliminating the need for carrying a sword or a pair of  legs that grow and shrink, eliminating the need for step stools or walking quickly.

Imagine the city as that one second cousin no one talks about until they need a favour done. The people of Steam don't fit in with magic, with the rest of the Dragon Basin. The city is dirty and sooty because it's thriving off of steam contractions. Its elites are the brightest engineers and inventors. The buildings themselves are covered in gears and valves, hissing and clicking at all hours. Whole sections of the city rotate as the buildings slide past one another on massive gears at regular intervals. (This is mainly just to screw with any of the outsiders who come to the city.  They don't play nice.)  However, Steam is covetous of its tech; it's all it has. They keep to themselves, content to let the rest of the world fall to magic. Steam will be there longer. Ships for exploration are not a priority: people come to Steam, Steam doesn't go to them. Any advancement in travel tech is in the form of buggies used on the roads and along the buildings.

The city is grungy in that it's never clean; there's just too much tech spewing pollution everywhere. There's a common saying: "Never trust anyone who doesn't have soot under their nails". Foreigners or visitors to the city often find it hostile: many a magic user has found himself shunned in the city. If they're smart, they keep their magic to themselves. The city lives off of a precarious combination of determination, creativity, and intelligence.

For the most part, the city is relatively free from corruption. The people are too proud of overcoming the use of magic to risk wrecking it.