SISSEKAI: A Brief History of Lumberg

Prelude

Before there was Lumberg, there was a simple trading post on the banks of the River Samson, where those who sought the goods produced by the dwarven mines beneath the Winter Mountains bought them from the dragonborn that owned those mines. It was a simple boat ride up the river from the city of Apollyon Polis, and an easily defensible location, covered by the magical artillery stationed in the even more easily defensible location of Damascus, the Apollyonian colony hewn into the side of Mount Apollo itself.

Not all empires are built to last, however, and when the twin disasters of the Second Calamity and the Antedeuter Uprisings brought down Apollyon and its allies, the simple trading post was not spared; it was razed to the ground by the former slaves of Apollyon, not too small a symbol of dragonborn oppression to go unpunished. It is fortunate, then, that the Uprisings also led to the reclamation of Damascus from dragonborn hands. When the time came to turn it into the mountainside city of Amberlin, the humans and dwarves who had taken refuge there were in dire need of quality lumber--lumber that needed to be processed and brought up Mount Apollo. The great swathes of forest that encircled the great feet of the Winter Mountains were ideal for the task; and there was a perfect spot just a few miles south of Mount Apollo to build a host of lumber mills, and all the facilities and amenities that those working such mills would require.

Between Two Forests

Lumberg is nestled in the lushest reaches of the Supernum Valley. On its east sprawls the enormous Silverwood, a forest so named for its ample population of birch trees; on its west, creeping up the slope towards the Winter Mountains and the border with Badlands, lies the gloomy, ever-scarlet Russet Forest. With such a bounty of timber at its doorstep, it’s no surprise that the primary export of the city--and the good that it was named for--is healthy, strong lumber.

But the forests are not entirely a blessing. Their heavily wooded depths create the ideal conditions for a wide variety of monsters to spawn, and their histories--dating back to long before the city of Apollyon Polis was even founded--have left a few areas within them deeply scarred, turned into festering dungeons like the Breachwood and the Widdershins. It is for this reason that Lumberg has long been trafficked by adventurers and hunters, sent out by the merchants and loggers of the city to purge its surroundings of beasts, fae, and fiends. The Adventurer’s Guild branch in this city is one of its oldest and most venerated buildings, and it has grown ever greater still in prestige in recent years.

Despite these conditions, however, druids--those born in tune with the nine fundamental essences of the world, the divinities, as it were--are a rather uncommon sight in Lumberg. Though they are by no means unwelcome, they tend to find its rather mercantile approach to the forests that surround it to be misguided at best, and positively deleterious to the balance of the world at worst. Each year that passes, Lumberg and the farmlands that feed it swell, forcing the forests to recede.

Goddess of Knowledge

Perhaps the city’s most noteworthy tree, and one that no logger would ever dare to cut down, is its Tree of Caduceus. This tree has given the city a special religious significance outside of its importance as the gateway to Amberlin, and both aspiring wizards and the worshippers of Lady Tesel Caduceus travel from all over the kingdom to visit it. It is fairly young, as Trees of the Sisters go; it only emerged from the banks of the River Samson about six hundred years ago, and was tended to by the very first few generations of migrants who descended from Amberlin and the upper reaches of the Supernum to carve out their living there.

Lumberg Church, built soon after its Tree’s emergence, is therefore primarily dedicated to the worship of Tesel Caduceus herself, though naturally any soul in need may find succour within its halls. In addition to the usual services that any Church in Tiresia provides--healing, cleansing of ills, enchantment of marbles, and the standard complement of religious rituals--this church also holds a vault of inert scrolls, which adventurers of renown may borrow from for a certain fee. These scrolls have been amassed over the six hundred-odd years of the Church’s existence, collected by discerning acolytes of Tesel, following in her tradition as the Goddess of Magic and Knowledge.

In addition to the religious that flock to Lumberg, the city is also home to a branch of Drei Geldreich’s Wizard’s Guild; the kingdom’s premier organisation responsible for the training and accreditation of mortal mages. Its establishment was first recommended to the Guild’s masters of the time because of the Tree of Caduceus--the tree’s properties not only make it invaluable for the rapid acquisition of new spells and techniques, but also draw in mages and other spellcasters from all across the kingdom, in their own pursuits of the very qualities that make it so attractive to Guild mages.

The theory was that the Tree’s existence would turn Lumberg into a bustling marketplace of magical ideas, where the arcane traditions of a hundred different villages and towns and cities could be exchanged for the mutual betterment for all--and, much to the Guild’s pleasure, this has borne out more or less exactly as predicted. This intermingling of arcana has catapulted the province of Ilvergeld to the very forefront of magical research, and resulted in the invention of such indispensable items as the economical keepflame (which, in contrast to previous formulae, is far cheaper to mass-produce, allowing farms and mines to be built deeper into the wilderness than ever before) and the chillbox (an arcane icebox that cools its contents, keeping meat and vegetables fresh without the need for mundane ice).

The River Samson

A river of great import even in the days of the dragonborn, the River Samson has only grown in relevance in the centuries since. Flowing from its source in the Winter Mountains, it passes through Amberlin and Lumberg on its way to the city of Sammouth, the second-largest port city on the eastern half of the continent of Avaria. Its clear waters, though they are rife with beasts and fae alike, are not so perilous as to be unnavigable by mere mortals, especially with a hardy enough boat to carry them; and so the river links the three cities together, in what is perhaps the most crucial trade route on the continent. Metals and fineries enter via mountainous Amberlin; lumber and crops via green Lumberg; all to be disseminated across ports all over Avaria via sprawling Sammouth.

The River Samson has religious and mythological significance, too. Its waters both nourish Lumberg’s Tree of Caduceus and are used to anoint it in Lumberg Church’s annual Sparrow Parade, protecting it from the inevitable passage of time for another year. In the distant past, swimming upstream Samson’s entire length was supposedly the act of heroic willpower that blessed the founder of Apollyon Polis, Apollo Patris himself, and gave his iron scales their famous nigh-impenetrability. And before even that, it was once the home of a particularly venomous hydra, who was driven out and ripped apart by the goddess Gimel Gargantua, who went on to toss its still-living seven heads into the waters of Tiresia’s seven seas.

The Story Yet To Come

In the present day, the city of Lumberg has grown in import once again; the Nine Sisters have, in their inscrutable, unknowable wisdom, selected it as the site where all their otherworldly adventurers shall begin their travels in the world of Tiresia. Even now, they besiege the monsters that surround it, a host of invincible warriors and priests and mages with seemingly no other goal than to take on increasingly more powerful foes. The few short decades since their initial arrival have already changed Lumberg quite significantly; the memberships of both the Adventurer’s and Wizard’s Guilds have swollen to unprecedented extents, monstrous goods and wild herbs now flow into its shops like never before, and the treasures held deep in the bowels of the Supernum’s dungeons--once accessible to only the bravest and mightiest of adventurers--now litter the city’s arcanist’s shops and smitheries.

Only time will tell what this strange new influx shall do to Lumberg and the wider world around it.