Geography of Fane

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Geography of Fane

The city of Fane sits in the northeast corner of the Reist continent, on the shore of a vast sea of silt, and is surrounded by a great iron wall over 50 miles long, with a height measuring anywhere from 50 feet to over 100 feet in some places. The city is massive, claiming an enclosed space of over 400 square miles, and the population within is measured in the millions.

Fane itself is a defiant remnant of civilization, a gauntleted challenge to the inevitability of entropy, struggling to hold out against the forces of a world turned hostile to it. Fane is cut off from any other civilizations (assuming there are any) by its geography:

• To the north of Fane is a vast, impenetrable mountain range called the Ceu Dorsal.
• To the east of Fane is the great silt sea.
• To the south of Fane is the Black Stair, a huge staircase of black obsidian that leads down into a huge smoke-filled canyon called the Burning Mire.
• To the west of Fane is the Rot, an endless wasteland of pestilence, hostile wildlife and raiders called Wildlings, driven insane by the Rot's diseases.

Weather

In the summer, a high deck of thin white clouds covers the world from edge to edge, allowing enough of the binary star sunlight to penetrate that Fane is constantly sweltering at over 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, while allowing enough heat to escape that Fane dips down to around 40 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Rain is extremely uncommon; perhaps as much as 10 inches of rain per year fall in the area, usually in the form of about 4 brief rainstorms per year, each of which is a deluge that begins and ends with little warning.

Very little wind blows within the city, both because the air is fairly still in this region, and because the city's walls block what little wind there is.

Fane's winters are the poorly-named 'dry season,' when no storms occur. The temperatures during the day still get above 80 degrees F, and nights get down to about 20 degrees F. The high layer of thin white clouds remains, but occasionally breaks up or recedes altogether for weeks at a time. On clear nights, a single small moon (either further away or smaller than Earth's moon) softly illuminates the city, while a single river of stars which bisects the sky with a billion pinpricks of light flows to the east as the night progresses.

Foliage

Inside the city, foliage is hard to find. Naturally growing trees and plants have all long-since been harvested by opportunists looking for food, and only the wealthiest of Fane's citizens keep plants or trees in their yards or houses, as most breeds of foliage must be constantly tended to, and given a great deal of water, to survive Fane's climate.

A great deal of greenery can be found in the northern buroughs where the farming is done. These plants are hardy vegetables and grains, all bred over centuries of agriculture to prosper in bad soil with little water. Despite that, the farmlands are heavily protected against trespassers, as the water they are supplied is extremely precious.

Once consequence of the paucity of greenery in Fane is that wood is a rare and precious commodity. Only the elite of Fane can afford wooden furniture, and most would only waste the material on such a mundane use if they were deliberately trying to provoke their peers into feeling inadequate. Wood, as a construction material, is usually reserved for use in the most precious of a nobleman's treasures, such as personal magic items or business ledger books.

Water

Water is in very limited supply in Fane, not because it is absent, but because it is carefully controlled. The Water Dukes hold a monopoly on Fane's water resources and guard them jealously, meting out enough water to ensure the populace survives, but at the cost of individual liberty.

There are no open sources of water in Fane, no rivers, streams, ponds or (working) fountains. There are no public services for drinking, and even ale is not served in public places without demonstrating one's fealty to a Water Duke. Agriculture is given a great deal of water to work with, but this resource is guarded as though it were wagonloads of gold, with trespassers and even onlookers aggressively repelled.

The citizens of Fane must request their daily allotments of water from the House to whom they have sworn fealty, proving their allegiance each day in exchange for another day's survival.

The Spire

The dominant feature of the city, even moreso than the great wall, is the Spire. The Spire is a massive spike of iron which stretches upward beyond sight, taller than the high cirrus clouds which frequent the upper atmosphere. Attempts to excavate around the base of the Spire have been similarly unable to determine how deeply it penetrates the earth. The Spire is not smooth, but is scaled and segmented, like a human hair seen under a microscope, as though a thin sheet of iron was curled upon itself in a tight spiral, to form a long cylinder. The Spire appears to be solid iron to its core, and no purpose to the structure has been determined. It simply is.

The Spire, while ramrod straight, is not perpendicular to the ground. It leans about 5 degrees southwest of a perpendicular axis, its vast shadow drawing a black line over the great wall and into the wasteland beyond the city.

The Mad Palace of the Gris Varon

Clinging to the walls of the great Spire, at a height of over 100 yards off the ground, is a shifting, ramshackle treehouse of iron which makes up the mad palace of the Gris Varon. This warren of massive rooms, forgotten hallways and tunnels uses the Spire as a central support. Taken altogether, the environs of this palace are massive, over a hundred-thousand square feet of living space, spread across a mad maze of meaningless staircases, empty rooms and dizzying catwalks.

Most surprising is the complete lack of any means of getting into or out of the palace from the ground. No stairs, ladders or handholds exist between the ground and the palace a hundred yards above.

A central room, the size of an amphitheater, resides somewhere in the palace, and contains thousands, perhaps millions, of mirrors, each showing what a different Gardener is seeing at any given moment. The Gris Varon uses these mirrors to watch everything that happens in Fane, prying into the secrets of the powerful and the powerless alike.

Architectural Stylings

The buildings of Fane, while nearly all constructed of iron, are apparently exact replacements of buildings which once stood in that space. A huge variety of buildings is present, ranging from small, single-story shacks to huge 12-story high-rises. The old buildings that once stood were clearly made of many different materials, from dressed stone to brick to marble, and these materials are reflected in the texture of the iron which has replaced them. Formerly brick walls still appear to be textured like brick, with smooth mortar and abrasive bricks all made from shiny grey iron.

Even the great wall which surrounds the city, stretching nearly 50 miles in length, shows its once-stone nature through its iron manufacture. The seams from the dressed stone, and the nearly-10-foot thickness of the wall's former materials have all been replaced with a solid mass of iron.

The iron of Fane is, in most places, untarnished by rust, as the Gardeners keep the buildings in pristine condition, replacing oxidized metal with fresh iron when the need arises.

Another common architectural feature of Fane is the prevalence of chains and grated walkways. An observer will quickly realize that, despite the complete absence of water in Fane, the city was clearly built to service an aquatic culture. The grated walkways allows water to run off easily into the subterranean waterways (now empty or silt-filled), while the chains allows cargo and boats to be maneuvered between channels or into loading areas and warehouses, or ship-works.

Lower Fane

Beneath many of the iron grated streets of Fane, seen through the square holes of the grating, there exists an undercity. Lower Fane varies in design from silt-filled caverns to multi-storied subterranean cities, complete with the original stone, brick, glass and marble building materials. From within Upper Fane, sunlight illuminates only the top-most levels of Lower Fane, and only the most foolhardy of folks would ever venture into it, as the whole place is overrun with ghouls. See the Ghouls of Fane, for details.

The Boroughs

The 19 districts of Fane are called Boroughs, and are separated from each other with deep canals of silt, and connected with bridges of various styles, sizes and construction. These canals appear to have once permitted people to travel about the city on small boats instead of by foot, though the water has long since gone dry. The canals seem sealed off from Lower Fane, as though the waterways were prevented from spilling into those developed areas which were built below ground level.

A number of areas in each borough offer stairways which lead down to what were presumably once embarkation areas, and small docks, where these small boats could accept or debark passengers. The canals are only lit during the middle hours of the day, and grow dark early in the afternoon, remaining so until late morning the following day. As a result, these deep canyons of the city are usually avoided by common folk, despite being a less-crowded means of moving around the outer edges of the boroughs.

Farms

Inside the city's walls, in the foothills of the Ceu Dorsal mountains, farms are tended. The natural soil runoff from the mountains has left these foothills more fertile than the surrounding areas, and farmers have tended the lands carefully for generations. Leafy green vegetables, reedy grains and various livestock are all raised for the consumption of the people of Fane.

The farms have spread out to cover more than half of the enclosed space of Fane, over 200 square miles, and still the food is only minimally adequate to feed the population of the city. Unlike water, which is given to citizens for the low-low cost of their dignity and independence, food must be purchased, and many people in Fane lack any income other than scavenging for bartering materials. Jobs are rare and often dangerous or degrading, as slavery is fairly common and most of the 'good' jobs go to slaves.

Farmers themselves are a lower class of nobility in Fane, regarded in high esteem and always treated with the utmost politeness. While a noble would never get in trouble for mistreating a farmer, he might find his larders more difficult to fill with actually tasty food, once word got around of his impudence. Of course, if a commoner were to insult a farmer, the farmer would be fully justified in killing him for the insult.

Farmers tend to stick together in public, though centuries-long feuds over land boundaries or livestock ownership lead to constant bickering in private. While the actual land is all owned by the Water Dukes, the apportionment of each farm is rather arbitrarily handed out by those Water Dukes, which leads to confusion, frustration and bitter rivalries. Of course, the rivalries are all to the Water Dukes' benefit, which is probably why their gifts of land are so arbitrary to begin with.

Chandlery

The Chandlery is a borough dedicated to mercantilism, street vendors, buyers, traders and a wide array of services ranging from practical to carnal. From edge to edge, the borough features shops, bars, restaurants, inns, brothels, alchemy shops, armories, and magic shops. On the streets during the day, hundreds of independent street vendors set up small carts or tents to hawk their wares, created or found, or sell baked treats, cooked meats or rare nuts or berries. Every sort of purse-lightening enticement can be found in the Chandlery.

Chandlery is also home to most of the petty thievery in Fane, but if you think about it, that's just another form of purse-lightening.

Beyond the Wall

The Yard

In the immediate shadow of the Spire, just beyond the city wall is a vast scrapyard of iron and rust called the Yard.