The Cannibal Coast: Part 4
First post is here, the second here, and the third here. Just one really big hex today. Enjoy.
17-353 Meerschaum, Alabaster City
A circular white-plaster ring-wall, two miles in diameter, sits at the centre of a vast expanse of irrigated paddies of grain and corn-rice and legumes. Closer to the city are vine-fields of trellised tomatoes and orchards of olives. Roads snake betwixt the crops, leading to the two gates, named Sunrise and Sunset.
This is Meerschaum, the Alabaster City. Within these walls, between these two gates, is a settlement of serenity. The warmth of the sun bakes the flat roofs of Meerschaum's buildings, uniformly rectangular and uniformly made from the same chalky pumice-like stone. The matte construction of each dwelling or grocer or coffee-house is accented along doorways and windowsills with filigrees of milky alabaster. The plazas and cool alleys are paved with interlocking circle-and-four-point-star tiles.
The Pearl Highway, which passes straight between Sunrise and Sunset, is paved with pure sheening porcelain, continuously cracked by carriage-wheels each day and carefully repaired by crews of handy-women each night.
The civic colour of the city is pastel blue: the people of this place wear shawls and fly flags and eat from plates of this colour. The civic food is koshari: an oily mix of fried rice and boiled dough strips and chickpeas topped with garlic and tomato and vinegar. The city-guards wear scarves and arm-bands of azure over their brigantines of tan-leather riveted with rods of rock-hard meerschaum-stone.
This is a city of farmers and architects and artisans. It takes much work to feed everyone so finely, and to mix and lay such fine plasters, and to spin and sculpt such fine ornaments. Here are but a few things you can do in the Alabaster City:
- Carouse and luxuriate on the shaded roof-top evening-shisha-bars of the coffee-houses, listening to the far-gathered poetries of the singers hired by the beautiful Lady Magpie, who hides her powdered face behind her night-sky-blue fan.
- Commission sets of Porcelain Lamellar for 4000gp each, a special crustacean-like carapace that redistributes the force of even the heaviest bludgeon with the elegant clatter of a wind chime (Medium Armour; 4 AC).
- Peruse the El'Din Market in the south of the city, where one can pick up any manner of fine trade good, be it olive oil (300gp/crate; heavy) or sun-dried tomatoes (150gp/crate; fragrant) or bone-porcelain crockery (500gp/dozen-stack; fragile).
- Go to the Alabaster Palace and prostrate yourself before the box-bed of the powder-faced Empress of Meerschaum, young and frail-bodied yet powerful-soul'd, and be tasked with the collection of Shalkin Heads, for each of which she will grant a stick of silver tied with a turquoise ribbon (40gp). After a dozen she will knight thee a Dervish of the City and permit the open carrying of arms within her walls.
- Attend the hazy El'Gub Incense-Court of the new City-Mage, an eighth-level White Magic-User named Gallegos the Bare, tall and spry and tanned and bald, adorned in white-toga with blue-trim, who holds audience for purposes of spell-trading and artifact-purchasing.
- Follow shady sorts down dark and chilly alleys to the smoky sewer-lair of the Scrivener, a fat and blue-silk-veiled crime-lord and lottery-runner (1-in-6 chance of six-times returns). From within his jewelled palanquin he offers rich-folks Meerschaum Pipes, briar-wood and white-rock implements that make any tobacco taste ten times as good (and can be blown to conjure illusions from white smoke 1/day), for just 3000gp each.
- Watch the elderly play backgammon in quiet concentration amidst the mists of the fountains of the El'Bine Plaza, and learn to understand their determination (spend a week to gain expertise in patience and board-game-playing).
- Be hired as paid mourner (25gp) or pallbearer (500gp) for the departed City-Mage Randi the Gold, who despite his services and salacious-style was poorly liked for his spiteful wit. His funeral service atop Holy Mountain is in four days time and is foreseen by the soft-hearted Gallegos to be poorly attended to a disreputable degree. Pall-bearers will escort his pumice-rock coffin from the City to his pre-dug grave atop the peak without it touching the ground once (a set of folding briar-wood stilts are provided for evening rest), along the way getting attacked by 2d6 Shalkin.