Feorreard V0.5 - Setting; Geography of Feorreard

Chapter 6 Geography & The Feorreard

6.1 Realms of Feorreard

As far as the civilised northern continent is concerned, the great central forest lies at the centre of their world. This enormous, dense forest divides the northern continent down the middle into the Kingdom of Lorsasce and the Republic of Alderice - the twin rivals for position of the dominant nation in Feorreard.

6.1.1 The Kingdom of Lorsasce

The Kingdom of Lorsasce covers the fertile lands to the east of the great central forest, bordered to the south by the high mountains of the dwarves and to the north by the infertile scrub of Prydain. It's people are mostly a practical sort - farmers and craftsmen living in small villages governed by the village councils. Tradition and order are seen as the most important virtues in Lorsasce, with most people happily accepting their king as the rightful head of the country. The village councils are where most power lies, and so long as their tithes are paid, the crown mostly stays out of the affairs of the commoners. There are hundreds of religions in Lorsasce, usually focusing on harvest-gods or weather spirits and mostly dating back to the ancient tribal villages from before Lorsasce was unified by King Lawrence the Great in -1200 U.T., year 0 in the traditional Lorscatian date system. This has resulted in almost every village having it's own quirks and traditions, from the ritual sacrifice of a goat on the third Wednesday in the third month and never letting outsiders into the chapel cellar in Dolerais to forbidding green hats in summer and always eating the pips of apples in Brot.

The capital city of Lorsasce is Avon, built where two rivers meet and one of the largest ports in the world. Grain, fruit, crafts, cloth, clothing, pottery, furniture and coal come down the river Avon, and Iron and steel come down the river Brapt from Steadley, all congregating in warehouses in Avon docks, waiting for a cargo ship to come up the Avon estuary to take the goods away for trade with the Dwarves to the south or for the long voyage around the northern end of the continent to Drevnya in Alderice.

Avon is a bustling metropolis, filled with folk from all over southern Lorsasce who have left their sleepy villages to seek a faster life in the city. Most find hard but honest work in the docks and their supporting infrastructure, while many become entangled in the seedy underworld gangs or become part of the elaborate power plays of rival dukes and barons. Some unfortunates find a life faster than they can handle, and it becomes much shorter than they'd like.

Most other cities in Lorsasce are just expanded market towns, where people come from all across their region to sell their harvest, replace items that would be impossible to repair in the villages and see the county fairs. Every town in the country has a large area of common land reserved for travelling fairs, markets and performers, with the Volnar fair having a reputation for it's comedians, performers and travelling magicians.

6.1.2 Republic of Alderice

Alderice is a far more technologically advanced place, It's people never content to follow in the steps of their grandparents and always pushing forwards in the name of progress. This spirit is most clearly seen by comparing transportation in Lorsasce and Alderice - In Lorsasce, horses or boats are the only options, and boats can only be used if you are travelling along a river or the coast. In Alderice, canals allow boats to travel overland between cities, automatic carriages can carry people around quickly and without horses and airships, the icon of Alderic invention, fill the skies and make travel between every city in the country cheaply available. Ever since the revolution of -7U.T., the Aldric parliament has been directly elected by the populace, with universal suffrage. This, and the availability of cheap travel across the nation have brought the Alderics together into a much more cohesive nation than the Lorscatians.

The republic of Alderice has a population of around half that of Lorsasce, with more of it's populace living in cities and a slightly larger land area, so large tracts of Alderice are uninhabited wilds, with only isolated smallholdings in the expansive areas between the cities. The availability of air travel has meant that towns occupying an important geographic position like the meeting of rivers or the entrance to a mountain pass have not developed into cities as they did in Lorsasce - airships can bypass their tariffs and carry cargo more quickly. This has lead to only the largest cities expanding ever further while the country's rural population dwindles. There are few who pine for the old ways - the march of progress is a concept modern Alderice was founded on.

The Alderic capital city is Touralna, the seat of the parliament and a shining jewel of technology. Just outside the city limits, a squat, round tower reaches into the sky, the gigantic crystals at it's top drawing the winds of magic out of the æther and harnessing them to power the cities network of street lights. Similar towers exist outside every major city in Alderice, sapping the power of mages and giving it to the ordinary people. Better off inhabitants of Touralna have recently started having their own complimentary crystals installed in their homes, giving them access to on-tap power for all kinds of household appliances, and a parliamentary act currently being debated suggests free installation of a complementary crystal for every citizen close enough to an æthryc pump. This has fuelled a recent spate of inventions designed to run off the magic supplied by complementary crystals, from water boilers to devices which store sound and play it back at the flip of a switch.

The people of Alderice do not tolerate incompetent or despotic leaders and anybody in politics for their own gain will quickly find themselves voted out of any position. Idealists hold almost all the chairs in the parliament, with the two largest parties being The Populists, who want a kind of socialist welfare for the working classes, and The Progress Party, who promote free trade and support individual inspired entrepreneurs and inventors. Most of the population lie somewhere in the middle ground.

Technology and high value crafts are the exports Alderice is known for, and they trade all manner of devices with the dwarven nations in exchange for ores and precious metals. The Alderics mostly use the profits from this trade to purchase food from Lorsasce, and very little food is actually produced in Alderice's damp climate. Lorscatians are by far less keen on technology, but they still import enough household items like oil lamps to make the return journey the sea traders carrying Lorscatian food highly profitable.

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6.1.3 The Dwarven Nations

Sometimes people are born with a rare genentic defect which affects bone development in children. These unfortunates rarely grow to be taller than 4'9” (145 cm), and are usually referred to as “Dwarves.”

6.2 Time, Currency and measurements

Standardisation

In the year 0U.T., representitives from Alderice successfully negotiated a standardised system of measurement of time, distance and weight with civil servants from Lorsasce, and the Universal System was born. Prior to the Universal System, there were thousands of different systems across the land. The Universal System is now the only one used in Alderice, but there are still countless regional variations across Lorsasce, and the Dwarves have only just begun updating their records to the Universal System.

6.2.1 Alderice

Alderice used to use similar arbitrary measurements to those found in Lorsasce, but they completeley switched to the Universal System after their revolution.

6.2.2 Lorsasce

Lorsasce's fragmented nature means that each villiage has it's own units. Most villages nowadays have a board outside the village hall with local measures compared to U.S. measures, but the locals generally only ever refer to the local arbitrary units.

The Lorscatian national system is now U.S., but a few years before standardisation, a national system was introduced, which while now obsolete, many Lorscatians know it better than U.S. measurements.

6.2.3 The Dwarven Nations

Since the time of the first settlers in Vár Kiid, dwarves measured length in Qubits - the length of a dwarf's forearm. Since some dwarves have arms in proportion to their bodies, and others have much larger arms, a Qubit has a highly variable length. A dwarf will refer to his own Qubit, but maps and directions give Qubits and the name of the dwarf who measured it. In each settlement, there is a tome containing the names of dwarves, the locations of their tombs, their family trees and the length of their Qubit. These tomes, however, are often incomplete, or contain erroneous data, so it becomes necessary to travel to the dwarf's tomb to measure their bones. Each dwarf's tomb has an engraved map to the tombs of their parents, siblings and children, so a dwarf's tomb can always be found by visiting the tombs of their ancestors, but it can take several months travelling to find a tomb a few generations old.

6.3 History & Politics - lára

6.3.1 The Dwarves

At some point in the past, hundreds of years before Lawrence the Great unified the eastern lands, a large band of dwarves gathered together and founded their own settlement where they could escape from the ridicule and persecution they found elsewhere. The town flourished and became a city in miniature, rumoured to have been famous for it's crafts. One day, however, a host of “big people” attacked the city, and the dwarves were driven out.

The displaced dwarves wondered the lands, travelling from village to village doing odd jobs and putting on performances, living hand to mouth. After a little time like this, a sect formed among the dwarves who believed that they were naturally better than the “big people” and that they should find their own homeland away from them. This group grew to represent the majority of the dwarves, and the nomad band began searching for a land to call their own.

After around 100 years of searching and having found nowhere, the group decided they would have to live in the inhospitable mountains to the south. However, they calculated that their numbers were too low to successfully establish a settlement in the mountains, and they began snatching other dwarf children from villages they passed through. When this proved too slow, they began a breeding program whereby all dwarves capable of bearing children were made to have as many as they could, resulting in most dwarven women mothering around 30 children each, despite a quarter of all dwarf pregnancies resulting in a still birth. After a couple of generations, the dwarven leaders, who now fasioned themselves as priests, deemed their numbers were large enough to found a city in the mountains.

The mountains were harsh and barren, and many dwarves died from cold or starvation in the early years, but the dwarven religion promoted breeding through hundreds of rituals and “sex festivals,” keeping their numbers fortified. The dwarven engineers deemed that extending a system of natural caves deeper into the mountain was the best way to found their new city, since they could take shelter from the harsh winters while they built.

The first dwarven city of Vár Kiid grew, boring deeper and deeper into the mountain. The priest caste now had a totalitarian grip on dwarven society, and they created a whole culture from scratch, designed mainly to be different from that of the cultures of the “big people.” A distinctive style of art and music sprang up, and the dwarven language was created from scratch - a constructed language which even today most dwarves are reluctant to teach to “big people.”

The breeding program ensured that the their numbers increased exponentially. Around the same time as Lawrence the Great began his campaign to conquer the eastern lands, the priests of the dwarves decreed that a new city should be founded, and half the population of Vár Kiid headed west to found a new city, Várfiyd. The two cities continued their expansion, and a tunnel was created leading all the way between the two cities entirely underground so that the rich mineral wealth of Várfiyd could be transported to Vár Kiid, and wood sent back in return. As the dwarven population increased, the priests sent out bands of settlers in groups of seven to find good sites for new settlements. Many of these bands were never heard from again, or tensions in the new founded cities led to social collapse, but eventually the priests deemed enough cities had been founded. They were founded and linked together with a network of tunnels, so that goods could be traded and the priests could maintain a cohesive religious canon.

Great riches were found in the roots of the mountains, but food was always scarce, a problem compounded by the priests' insistance on ever increasing their numbers. In some cities, hunger became such a problem that the dwarves rebelled and murdered all their priests and declared themselves independant from the dwarven civilisation. They sealed up their links to the other dwarven cities to prevent them from sending more priests or taking them back by force, and sent letters to other cities overground encouraging them to do the same and help them in their fight for freedom.

There was relatively little violence in the dwarven civil war, since it was almost impossible for armies to travel overland through the mountains and it was trivial for cities to block themselves off from the tunnel network. One by one, the cities overthrew their priests and joined the “Free Dwarves” until only Vár Kiid remained. The Free Dwarves sent an armed force to take the dwarven capital, but upon entering found that without support from the other cities, most of the population had starved to death, and those who hadn't had resorted to cannibalism to survive. The invading force quickly became a humanitarian effort, ferrying supplies through the tunnels to save as many lives as they could.

In the centre of Vár Kiid's main plaza there now stands a wooden cart completely coated in gold leaf as a memorial to those who carried supplies, and those for whom the food arrived too late.

Shortly after Vár Kiid was saved, the new democratically elected ruling council decreed that they would make contact with the “big people” once again. The scouts they sent found the world very different from what they had been taught - the big people wer not so ugly or cruel as the priests had told them, and they swiftly arranged trading contracts with the king of Lorsasce; he would provide them with food, and in exchange they would sell precious ores and the fine jewelery and arts the dwarves had created.

Not long after, the dwarves recieved an envoy from the Alderic empire, who suggested a similar contract. With their bellies full, the dwarves produced masterpieces of art, song and the stage, and thousands of dwarves left the mountains to see the “new world” of the big people.

Nowadays, dwarves are fairly common in all the major cities of the northern continent, having integrated themselves into the ways of the big people with great enthusiasm, and they are known for being hard workers, shrewd businessmen and excellent airship pilots.

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