Sleekfront is one of the few cities in the northern lands
that have been around for a long time. Despite its high walls, parts of the
sprawling city have been smashed and rebuilt after demolition by floods,
earthquakes, marauding dragons, and the occasional accidental dimensional rift.
For this reason, much of the city is built on and around layers of the past.
Much is more than what it seems, and around each corner often lies an uncanny
juxtaposition. These things seem to make it popular with the adventuring sort.
Outdoor bazaar: This large open-air market has just about
any of the goods you could want to buy. Or at least, it probably does. Or
maybe, it seems like it does. Few goods are sold by those who made them. These
wares are often of unknown provenance, and uncertain purpose—it is a city where
adventurers are always offloading goods, and gods only know where they come
from in the first place. Counterfeits are liberally mixed among the real deal,
sometimes without the purveyor’s notice, sometimes intentionally. Deals abound,
as merchants might not know what they’ve got, but Buyer Beware, almost nothing
is what it seems. Redacted redacted redacted thieves guild redacted redacted
Shrouded Owl redacted redacted redacted redacted. The place is bounded by the
low ruined walls of a once-great coliseum. The idea that negotiations are
battle by other means will not be lost on those who visit the market.
Ogershok’s Meadhouse: An upscale bar and on-site brewery is
built around what used to be a livestock market. The seats for patrons in the
front are nice, like a normal craft bar, complete with hipsterish brewsnobs.
Open the door to the back room, though, and you come across a pit where boxers
and monks compete: the old livestock trading floor. The raucous crowds generate
the heat that keeps Meat Market Mead fermenting at hot temperatures—the bottom
of the vats are suspended above the fighting pits, and are spattered with sweat
and blood from years of bouts. Supposedly, quaffing a brew made on the night of
a particularly epic fight confers benefits of strength and perseverance. All
the bottles sold here are labeled with the names of the Headlining bout the
night they were brewed. Discerning customers know the great victories of the
preliminary ticket, and will snap up vintages of inspired upsets and last
hurrahs of amateur fighters. Beware, though, no drinks are allowed in the fight
area! The ghosts of angry cattle that pop up when mead and blood mix on the
trading floor can clear out a night’s crowd, but the excitement of the fights
is enough to draw patrons back night after night. Drinking, though, is reserved
for the club boxes and the bar. Among those in the crowd are often gamblers and
occasionally patrons of the fights. Patrons tend to be among the city’s wealthy:
usually dragonborn nobles are the sponsors of fighters, paying for their
training and promoting the matches. The fighters are almost universally elves
from the city’s lower class, most of whom lack a patron—patronage is received
ambivalently, a sign of respect and admiration from the noble class, an easier
life between fights, and a sense that one has betrayed the proud elven race by
allying with their political enemies within the city are conflicting
motivations. Redacted Redacted thieves guild Redacted Redacted. The bar is run
by a Erik Ogershok, a hill dwarf with an intensely broken nose from his own
fighting past and a loosely tamed brown beard, often speckled with the foamy remnants
of his last pint.
The Forest Battlefield Temple: The citizens of Sleekfront
are predominantly devotees of Pelor, god of light, music, and growth. The
latter is particularly important to their burial practices, and helps explain
the rapid growth of the forest to the city’s immediate south. After a massive
battle during the most recent dragon wars, there was a massive sapling-planting
amongst the corpses. The trees grew at a prodigious rate. Bits of skeletal
remains, weapons, and armor are frequently seen among the trees roots and
incorporated into their trunks. The blessed trees are believed to absorb the pain
and misery of battle, transforming it into green life and cool rest. As the trees
are fueled by the dead, the trees themselves initially continue the battle
between sides as they grow-this results in trees whose trunks grow this way and
that before the magic of the forest takes hold and turn them upright. The woods
grew at an inordinate rate, the rich diet of nutrients from the fallen warriors
must have helped. Now, only 15-20 years later, the canopy is as tall as an old-growth
forest. At night, the forest’s magical spirit is watched over by roots and
vines that have wound their way into bodily form by inhabiting the corpses of
warriors, and these benevolent, if grotesque, guardians tend to the trees and
point them toward the sky. They are rarely seen during the day, but their
antagonism towards any axe-waving in the forest is well known. The twisted
trees make poor lumber anyhow. A mist often covers the ground, flowing towards
the temple to Pelor that stands in the center of the woods, where the corpse of
a red dragon behind the main hall is said to provide the focus for the magical
spell absorbing the pain of spirits of the dead. Devotees of Pelor are buried
amongst the new growth of the forest, and most pious among them are the basis
of the straight, noble trees that grow at the forest’s edge and near the
temple. The temple itself consists of a long low hall of worship, and behind
the altar is a second, larger enclosure that surrounds the half-excavated
hillside grave of the dragon at its center. Four trees grow from this
dragon-veined hill, and have sprouded such a network of twisted vines that a
planked boardwalk and scaffolding were built to allow the priests of Pelor to
reach the reliquary surrounding the dragon’s skull, which emerges in a hollow
of a tree bent into a makeshift altarpiece. Carlin Watch is a quiet, peace-loving
young human priest of the temple, and tends to it night and day.
Observatory: The wizards academy in Sleekfront supports many
endeavors dedicated to enlarging knowledge. One of the most unique in the
norther territories is the powerful telescope and observatory maintained by the
astronomer Forvish Mastline. Mastline is a thin, eccentric elf with bright blue
eyes, a smattering of freckles, and a thin, close-cropped beard—a very uncommon
feature for city elves that speaks to his advanced age despite his youthful
appearance. He sports a long black robe embroidered with silver stars, where
gold thread connects the patterns of the most well-known consteallations. The
Astronomer’s observatory is lit by sunlight streaming in from a window. No
matter what time it is. Things, like light and vision and the occasional tiny
animal, occasionally get stuck in the air in the observatory, because it is at
the center of the old campus of the wizards’ college, whose buildings
mysteriously all disappeared a hundered years ago, all but this building. Fragments
of the past seem to pop up from nowhere, and pieces of the present tend to get
stuck. When the astronomer wants to read in his office, he just grabs the
sunlight streaming in on a summer day decades ago, and pulls it along with him
like a torch. Likewise, no matter what time of day it is, the telescope in his
observatory always see the night sky, allowing him an incredible view of the
stars even at noon. To study a celestial formation, he can place an herbal
concotion—the recipe is a closely guarded secret—in a chamber inside the
telescope, light it, and inhale the fumes: exhaling a cloud that takes the form
of the vision through the telescope. This allows him to move in and among the
stars, seeing the universe from angles unknown to earthbound astronomers. It
also makes him incredibly un-focused, giddy, and prone to vacuous philosophical
nonsense. When the moon is close,
he can get a good look at the earth by inhaling it, turning it around, and
taking a finely ground magnifying glass up to the image of the earth seen from
the moon. He supports the glass-blower’s guild’s finest artisans, and in turn
gnomish artificers are always eager for lenses that have passed through his
observatory, since these provide raw materials for many fabulous eyewear
inventions.
Inner Arbor:
One corner of the hub of the city, the inner arbor is a
large patch of heavily maintained forest within the city, essentially
Sleekfront’s only official park. It is frequented by all the races, though the
elves in Sleekfront tend to gather there more often than in the city’s bars,
churches, or other meeting places. While much of the arbor is cultivated for
relaxing strolls, there are places in its rambling interior that have been
disguised from the casual park-goer by magical illusions. Here, in these hidden
grottoes and clearings, meetings concerning the future of the Sleekfront elves
take place outside of the eyes of the dragonborn nobles and the other races.
Since many of the elven settlements in the surrounding areas were devastated
during the dragon wars 20 years ago, elves have taken up residence in the city,
often nearby the arbor—a neighborhood that had been abandoned for some time.
Being newcomers, they have had to bond together and form their own networks of
trade, manufacture, and sustenance, and have created an insular community that
springs outward from the northeastern corner of the arbor. The blocks in that
direction are unusually tree-lined, and the buidligns are supported as much by
the elves’ new growth of trees as by the crumbling buildings that were
available to them. They’ve transformed this old slum into what, from the crow’s
eye, appears to be a snaking extension of the arbor.
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