The Known World of Otherlore

There exist places safe from both the dangers of empires and monsters in the Known World of Otherlore. Today, we'll look at two.

Carsconny

A city state on the northwestern coast of the Continent, protected by high walls, natural cliffs and an impressive harbour chain gate known as the Hullcracker. It was once a much bigger place, a walled cosmopolis on the sea for the nobility, with a wretched sprawl spreading out beyond the gates into the inland approach to the city. This changed very quickly after the Sundering, when the former peasant militia, the last defenders of the city, drove off the remaining scattered and confused Xin adherents before sweeping through the city itself, very quickly overthrowing the remaining Secular Nobility that remained after the Holy left to begin their Crusade for the Thronelands. Those that surrendered were exiled, those that fought and were captured were put under Le Petit Coiffeur, which today still sits as the monument of People’s Square, where the blade his held at rest with heavy locks, the keys of which are entrusted to the houses of their Common Council. For now, the blade stays down. But those locks can come off any day the Council decides one of its members feels they’re getting to entitled to the privilege of their position.

The sprawl has been razed, either turned to farmland or returned to the wild. The lavish town homes and mansions of now long dead (and much shorter) nobility were converted into flats and apartments for the people. Carsconny, once known as a place that made the quiet resignation of desperate poverty at the hands of nobility the de facto philosophical model for Good Peasantry, became known as a place where revolutionary violence was once the predominant form of entertainment. You know, once they fixed the plays to not be in praise of the Nobility, Holy or Secular, and once they raided the mansions to relieve the wealthy and dead of their artwork. There’s an equal chance here that when people are talking about Claret, they’re either talking about the wine they’re famous for making in the region, or the act of bloodshed for good. Sometimes, they’re talking about both. A Carsconian at large does have a tendency to mix business with pleasure.

Once a seat of the Holy Nobility of the Luciel to the west of the Holy City, the freed peasants took to audacious and libertine heathenry at almost reckless speeds. Once a staging point for many ultimately doomed campaigns to the Innis Mordha to ‘bring holy war to the shores of the pagan miscreant’, Carsconny now has its own Bronze Hall of the Knights in Tarnished Armour- Innis Mordha’s own guild of those opposed to All Evil. The Common Guard’s famed Couturière long gun, capable of hitting the eye slot on the helm of a Throne Knight’s armour at 500 yards, is traditionally loaded with nails taken from the disassembled Lucielite churches that once peppered the cities quarters when repelling uninvited Holiness- have your religion back, we have no use for it. Similarly, the three dozen cannon that defend the walls, custom built by the Iron Collective during the famed Challenge of Steel and Shot, fire projectiles cast of lead reclaimed from those same churches’ shingles in the same circumstances. It is in fact this spirit of audaciousness that have led many to believe that the city itself, through sheer belief and Faith of it being worth fighting for to keep free, has become a god, a bacchanal and charming spirit of revelry and resistance. There is no proof that this has actually happened, though this has not stopped many from professing themselves the Prophet of an Awakened Carsconny. Despite a potentially dicey sectarian situation, these prophets more or less mutually regard each other as individuals looking for an excuse to bless anything and everything with a toast of holy libations. This is a common theme in Carsconny, the wine. It would be a mistake to assume, despite appearances, a Carsconian drinks like a dandy; they are in fact most likely 2 glasses in at all times, and just that good at maintaining.

Padagrade

Sometimes a foundation is built on good intentions, idealism put into action. Sometimes, enough is enough and it’s time to move on to better things. It’s the latter, not the former, that made Padagrade. In the rolling foothills and craggy mountain passes of the inland to the northeast of the Midden Sea, the people of this multicultural city state make their homes. It’s a place of hard work in raw weather, where every day requires a quiet boldness and a wry sense of humor. It’s a place of great richness, that nonetheless doesn’t give itself over without effort. Padagrade proper sits nestled on a mountain overlook, a stately gateway to rugged mountains, dark and mist-laden woods and the farther-beyond strangeness of In Between. It’s a stonewalled home that erupts suddenly from hard country, where common comforts are entitled to all who enter it with good manners.

You’d never guess this place was built by a warlord.

The grave of Radek Szevek is humble, and sits in a small lot on a corner of the city’s streets; the location was unimportant, only that it was in Padagrade mattered to the man. Szevek is an individual remembered for many deeds, a man who at first fought as was the way of his world, then later fought to save it. Tribal conflict was once rife in the region, home to a number of fragmented groups perpetually at one another’s throats. His people’s situation failing to improve with conflict after conflict, the Warlord Szevek had the epiphany to fight a war to end wars. Audacious enough, but the man actually did it, oftentimes attempting to bait opposing warlords into single combat, then binding them to an oath after defeating them to prevent further bloodshed. In time, despite whatever pride these defeated groups had tied up in their tribal identities, they all came to see eye to eye with Szevek’s philosophy: that fighting makes strong warriors, but wars do not make strong homelands. His demand to the defeated was only that outstanding needs of justice be served, and then bygones are bygone- you dare fight one tribe, all the others will rise to its defense, and if it dares fight you, the tribes will all the same rise to have your back and sides.

That Radek Szevek died on a road building expedition on a mountain trail speaks to the success of what his people built with this.

One of the gateways to the east, and a crossroads nearby to some of the Known World’s strangest places, Padagrade has been described as a place of homely comfort amongst dark whimsy- it’s somewhat like Purepool in the Venomire, except safer and less ridden with venomous wildlife by orders of magnitude. Its famed Waterfall Row, where waters from the Drowned Saints watershed drain down through the mountains into aqueducts that run beneath the city’s foundation, is a place of taverns with drinks cooled by mountain waters, inns with hearty fare and bakeries with sweet and spiced treats. These same waters have attracted many of The River’s Faithful, a group maintaining the Gentle Sect of the Watershed temple, who among the city’s improvements have contributed a unique community millhouse that captures the water as it falls to drive its stone. That its location is central to so many truly strange places in the Known World- the Venomire is to its west, In Between to its east, and the Nightmare in the north can touch quite close to the lands its peoples work -means it has become an epicenter of occult study relating to the nature of the Worldsoul. The Witches’ Salon is one of its most notable places, where individuals touched by forces some would dismiss out of hand as malevolent if not outright diabolical can meet as peers and seek understanding of the Wyrd. It also is home to a hall of the Poisoners’ Guild, a group based in the Venomire, who despite their name are mostly monster exterminators. Mostly.