Gwyndinas

The Reclamation Force's city in the Palisade and the intended new capital of Rivalon — head of all information and knowledge inside the safe zone, two hexes (one normal travel day) up the coastal road from Fort Foothold. It has 7 or 8 gates (the south gate's portcullis is currently broken), a trading card game hall, and All Saints Cathedral — near which, in a back alley, the Varian spy contact Dominus runs a tannery whose leather never changes.

Session 8

• Queen Ysolde plans to travel here by sea in the coming days; Brebo Goldfang is settling here for good ("everyone on this island plays card games — it's like my ideal place in the world").
• Thalia took on ten paid deliveries from Foothold to Gwyndinas — the abandoned postal route is big business.
• Silithane holds a city map with Dominus's tannery marked, courtesy of Figueroa.

Session 11

• First visit by the party, arriving at the Swest (southwest) Gate on the 29th of mid-spring 1396 (evening to next morning after caravan overnight stop). The Land Boat stabled at Westgate Stables (1 silver/day, paid through 12th Spring's End).
• Districts confirmed: Blue (nicest), Red (okay), Brown (fine), two half-slums. Avoid the south-side discount magic market (cursed knockoffs, per the caravan halfling).
• The city is ~6 months old — everything fresh-built. Central plaza: War Memorial, road to the Knights' Temple; mix of single-room hovels (right) and multi-storey houses (left). The Colosseum is signposted from half a mile away.
• Queen Ysolde holds the castle at the city's highest point; walled nobles' quarter around it.
• A cart crash in the central area was resolved with Draak's help and a friendly city guard who gave out signal whistles.

Session 12

• The party spent a full week here training and pursuing personal threads.
• The Colosseum detailed: viewing-stand / conscript-training / accounting tunnels (40–50k platinum wheelbarrowed behind glass), a 5-biome arena (open sand, water, trap, lava, woodland), a rookie gauntlet, and standout teams — Atollian gladiators under Duke Cephalus, the leaderless Venatori six, and the cheating Varian illusionist team. Thalia's hero The Serpent coaches here.
• The Varian spymaster Dominus runs his disguised tannery near All Saints Cathedral; he supplied 7 Palisade passes and the Ponterford abductions job, and mentioned a smiling serial killer loose in the city (Knights Guild jurisdiction).
• Anti-human social order: humans are barred from certain places because, long ago, "one human man... started killing all the gods," leaving only the All-Flame Queen (per Draak's friend Johnny). Also noted: Mystery Way, an ordinary terrace street off Johnson Street.
• Magra's mother passed through ~3–4 months ago, bought cold-weather gear, and left at midnight for somewhere snowy.

Session 13

• The party spent the 6th–7th of Spring's End running errands and then unraveling a haunted-inn mystery; never returned to the arena.
• More of the city map surfaced via a helpful guard: Eastport / Westport / Firstport ferry crossings; the Blue Top Docks by Eastport (an islander Atollian smith who works auricalcum and deep-sea metals — a lead for Lash's Prehistoric Longsword); the best weaponsmith working meteorite metals in the nobles' district (likely off-limits); Orkware's (orc goods, rough side of town); and bazaar districts.
• Magic is blocked ~0.9 miles out around the palace/castle grounds (Queen Ysolde's seat) — sensed by Thalia's Primeval Awareness; presumably an anti-assassination ward.
• The Brown district's Clapton's Hammer tavern (run by the sad innkeeper) was built ~4 months ago on a pre-Fall burial ground; its basement harbored a grief demon, since cleansed. New entities tied to this visit: the butcher Mendelin's Meats and the ancient dead Horned Skeleton and Ailendyras.

Session 14

• The party launched the Smiling Sam serial-killer investigation, surfacing the city's investigatory institutions: the Knights' Temple (the medical examiner's office; "ultimate authority" short of the Queen) and the Investigatorium (the city's detective agency, with a basement records "information brain" and lead detective Malcolm Locke).
• Civic detail added: the Treasury House / taxman (social-status records), City Hall (sewer blueprints), the Svest Gate, a large complex sewer system, and the bazaar in the red district (a 3-kill cluster).
• The killings happen only inside the Palisade, in Gwyndinas, ever since the walls went up ~7 months ago — and pause whenever the population (and Queen Ysolde) leaves.

Session 15

• The party toured the city's religious and arcane institutions chasing the Smiling Sam case. Two megachurches: All Saints Cathedral (rainbow-striped, for dead and hoped-for gods — no living god, so no real magic, with alcoves to abstract concepts and a "god of farming" vegetable shrine) and the Flamespeaker Ziggurat (the All-Flame Queen's church, a "giant cigarette," with legions of training Firebrands and a catacomb undercroft morgue where the murder victims are kept). Only the Ziggurat can do real resurrection magic, because its god still lives.
• The Mage's Society tower sits across the bay on the fancy Eastport side; it has been open only ~8 months. Walled grounds, militia + battle-mage gatekeepers, an illusory star-ceiling (hundreds of invented constellations though only ~8 real stars exist), floating blue helper-orbs, 17+ floors.
• The Rainbow Bazaar has a night street-food market. The Westport Black Market is a gated, walled-off dead-end street (stolen goods, mercenaries-for-hire, poison and human/beastfolk-leather vendors) run on the "rules of the underworld"; a rival South Wall Black Market sits outside the Ceased Gate. The slum-ish district is the Dirt Quarter (not actually garbage, just "not nice").
• Ferries run Westport ⇄ Eastport (~40 min by boat vs. ~3 hours walking).

Session 17

• The inner-city Palisade detailed: the walled inner district (Queen Ysolde's seat) is guarded by elite Inner Guards — full plate, engraved breastplates, 6×3 tower shields, and silvered weapons, a clear tier above the ordinary Rivalonian guards. It houses the war effort's most-protected: the Queen, foreign diplomats, the Mage's Society treaty registrar, and tax-paying Varian nobles. Outsiders are barred (too many of Laewendas's infiltration attempts); residents like Eldrich the Elder are reached by "house call."
• Eastport crafting: the Deep Sea Smithmaster store (a curated ~15-item shop with a back-room cold-forge for auricalcum) sits in the bustling Eastport markets.
• A pre-Fall stone building — a former chapel left undemolished when the new city was raised — now serves as the city's silversmith forge (a giant werewolf smith); evidence that scraps of the old island predate Gwyndinas's ~9-month-old construction.
• The Colosseum's Rivalon Arena is a river-themed biome (knee-to-waist streams, waterfalls, cliffs) used for the squires' training bouts.

Session 18

• The Gwyndinas Sewers were explored for the first time (their City Hall blueprints noted in Session 14): a maze of pipe halls, sludge channels, glowing light-mushrooms, crushed-through caverns and a hidden rebuilt entrance, with a big outflow gate venting dark-green liquid through a filter cube into the ocean. Currently infested with a fungal "mushroom men" colony; the party slaughtered the swarm and two drones washed downstream into the city alive.
• The wasteful experimental-potions alchemist ~10 minutes west of the Colosseum (whom Dominus flagged) was visited; he honored the discount buckle and sold a confusing line of premixed potions/poisons.