My second submission for the RPG blog carnaval. This month's topic is Magic and the City.
The town is surrounded by water, a clear sign of its former use during the Fallen Empire's rule. Except for the massive bridge and the monolythic walls, the buildings are all shabbily made on top of ancient ruins, temporary lodgings whose use got extended for longer than intended.
What guards patrol the walls stare off into the distance, dreaming of elsewhere. Some long for home, others for places more exciting. The blacksmith polishes one of many near identical crude swords again, she gave up trying to look for new buyers years ago. Traders of various kinds spend evenings doing the math which always tells them they should have already left, even if ir meant leaving merchandise behind.
A strange absence cuts through the typical ambiance of towns everywhere. The sounds of carts, chattering locals, barking dogs, yowling cats and general busy-ness is all drowned out by a severe lack of children playing, laughing, crying, being scolded or running away from trouble they caused.
Just another day of shattered hopes and dreams in Traenendahl.
The town: Traenendahl
As mentioned in the last post, I want to experiment with disparate magic: rather than a single unifying magic system, magics are diverse both in how they work in-universe as well as their resolution. This with the goal of emphasizing magic as arcane.
The main settlement I am making for the Star's Prison thing isn't quite big enough that it qualifies as a city, but I want to use this month's blog carnival as an excuse to think of magics that are being practiced by NPCs living in the town of Traenendahl.
Traenendahl is sort of like a post-gold-rush town: When folks learned of the location of the Star Prison many adventurers flocked to it aiming to get their hands on that wish. Even more people thought they would be able to make bank off of selling shit to these adventurers. Now that the general consensus is that the prison is very dangerous, only the most daring and desperate still delve it, nowhere nearly enough people to sustain the many traders trying to sell shoddy rope, suspect rations and arms and armour that fell off a dead soldier on some battlefield.
This history means that Traenendahl has a surprising number of different magical traditions given its relatively conservative size.
These traditions are separate from the player options I am still fleshing out (this project js taking way longer than I intended...), but if a player showed the desire to I would allow them to play as any of these as well.
Magic services: local traditions
Soul forging
Hilde is one of the few dwarves born with soul sense. All dwarves can identify metals and minerals by merely being near them through their stone sense, but those like Hilde are able to sense the spirits of all things.
This allows her to forge these spirits into the things she makes. Give her something containing the essence of a creature or structure and she can make you a metal object infused with that essence. With one minor condition: Hilde doesn't like to waste her time. She only does ambitious projects and never the same more than once. Which inevitably drives up the time it takes to make her creations as well as the price she asks for them.
Wound rushing
When you are wounded and in a rush you can use the services of Mohib. He has a cabinet in which time flows faster, allowing recovery time to be cut down significantly.
There are some caveats. For one, you'll be bored as hell, as time flows as normal to the person inside of the cabinet. Second, you better not need regular care cause only one person fits inside. And finally, you have to make sure to bring enough food and water to last the time you'll spend in there.
Mohib doesn't require payment for use of his cabinet. He also hasn't aged since moving into town a couple of decades ago. So you might want to take a moment to think about how you feel about that as well.
Spirit distillation
Sometimes while exploring you require a drink with some extra oomph. Dion's spirits can give you all that and more. No one but him knows how it works, not for a lack of effort on his account though. He will keep going on about alcohol opening up the mind, the different kinds of possession, which aromatics pair well with which spirits, and probably a lot more but at this point most people have started to tune him out.
Distilation is his passion, and thus his wares are surprisingly cheap in terms of coinage. The real price for any significant amount of a particular spirit are ingredients. Offering him harder to come by ingredients makes him willing to part with even the more exclusive bottles in his collection.
Rope training
Reliable rope is important to anyone attempting to delve the Star Prison. Fnan's ropes are more reliable than any. Not only are they able to withstand a lot of weight and wear, but Fnan is able to train rope to perform specific tasks when a command is spoken.
Each rope can do only a single trick as, in the words of Fnan, rope isn't very bright. They come in a wide variety though, from rope that stiffens, rope that climbs, rope that binds, to rope that ignites. They also each have a name that they respond to.
Fnan really cares about her former protégés and will ask after them whenever she meets a former customer. If she finds out you have mistreated one of her ropes, she'll refuse to sell any more to you or your party in the future.
Also, she's an elf. Completely unaffiliated with the Fallen Empire, but given what those elves have done some might feel strongly about dealing with one.
Thoughts
I think this covers most services players would usually seek out, i.e. enchanted items, magical healing, and magic potions.
Some of these might be open to exploitation, but I think I can make all of these work at the table.
It is also a pretty decent amount of magic for a relatively smallish town and feels sufficiently disparate to me.
Some more leg work would probably be nice (some examples of trained ropes, distilled spirits and forged souls, estimates for how long wounds take to heal + how long it would take for them to heal in the cabinet), but this is all stuff players would probably only be interested in after the first delve, so I feel comfortable postponing that legwork until after I have started up a table for this game.
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