The Exemplary Execrables in Korvosa’s ward of Old Dock burned down during the quarantine of the district. Before that devastating event, the place was a local oddity:

Refurnished with gaudy gold-colored paint and massive glass “gems”, this former temple of Aroden has found a new life as the home of a
perverse and detestable theater of all things foul, gore-slicked, and unnaturally pornographic. The theater’s owner, a repugnant sore-covered human named Pilts Swastel, employs the city’s “best and brightest” performers of unmentionable acts.

Numerous acts rotate through the theater, with any particular performer putting on a show four or five nights a week. The theater’s acts include gore-filled plays with faux tortures, false murders, fake rapes, and other fabrications meant to horrify and sicken the audience. By far the most popular act, though, is the so-called “death play”, in which a masked performer gruesomely “murders” a volunteer from the audience for all the rest to enjoy. Some spectators and officials wonder how many of the acts use stage effects and chicanery and how many might actually perform what they purport to only represent. Volunteers sometimes turn up missing after a performance, and the theater has a high turnover rate for young and pretty assistants (Swastel claims the latter is due to admittedly low wages and the squeamishness of “the delicate sex”).

Due to these and other complaints, the Sable Company has attempted on multiple occasions to infiltrate and investigate the theater, and the Korvosan Guard has called upon Hellknights to prematurely end shows more than once.

Nearly as controversial as the theater, Exemplary Execrables also offers an attached museum (with a separate admission fee, of course). The museum offers exhibits such as “Two-Dozen-and-Three Severed Heads”, “Unwanted Fetuses”, and “Instruments of Torture and Murder”.
This last exhibit, the most popular of them all, features a working guillotine from Galt, complete with an attached chalkboard counting the number of fingers lost to overcurious patrons (the current count stands at 37). All other instruments and devices in the exhibit have been disabled or blunted to hinder inquisitive fools from maiming themselves or others.