Mithrendain
- Growing from the forest floor like a copse of towering trees, the fortress city of Mithrendain glints with copper, bronze, and gold in the amber rays of fey sunlight. Here, time drifts by as gradually as the first tentative falling leaves of autumn.
- As an inhabitant of the Autumn City, you are accustomed to the slow passage of time. Mithrendain has no clocks, sundials, or magic timepieces, and you live your life as if ageless, basking eternally in the golden afternoon. In the light that glimmers through the russet boughs above, your people work toward the slow perfection of everything they touch. In a city without time, there is no hurry, no project left forever incomplete or abandoned, and no sense of early, late, or never. You consider it rude to place expectations on timeliness except in the most dire circumstances, such as war or invasion, and this attitude frustrates alienated mortals-especially impatient humans.
- The results of the Mithrendain perspective show in the sheer artistic perfection that surrounds you at every natural angle. As a resident of the Autumn City, you have grown accustomed to this point of view, regardless of whether you embrace it, and you appreciate any task that is carefully and flawlessly executed.
- A legend told in Mithrendain speaks of an age when time moved more quickly. In fact, it moved so quickly that it formed a wide, deep hole in the Feywild from which issued fomorians, draw, and all the evils of the Feydark underworld. According to the tale, seven eladrin wizards placed seven powerful seals on the hole and built a brooding fortress around the maw, in the spot where the golden Citadel Arcanum stands today. Then this council of wizards banished time from Mithrendain so their wards might remain ever new, thrumming with the magic that courses through every leaf, rock, and timber of the plane. Everyone in Mithrendain knows this legend, but few, if any, know whether it is true. Nevertheless, its legacy remains in the customs and traditions of your home. Timekeeping devices are considered ill fortune, and at every grand festival in Mithrendain, an hourglass is shattered before the crowd, its sands scattered to the winds.
- Once a great fortress of Cendriane, Mithrendain has blossomed into a beautiful eladrin forest-city whose buildings seem to grow naturally around the trees. However, Mithrendain has a dark secret: The central sections of the city are built atop a now-sealed tunnel that leads to the Feydark. Armies of the fomorian kings once invaded the surface world through this passage, which now lies sealed beneath the majestic Citadel Arcanum, a golden edifice riddled with secret passages and underground chambers.
- Its name is derived from the elf phrase "wall of the fortress", but has since become synonymous with the beauty and longevity of the Eladrin.
- Mithrendain is a timeless city bereft of clocks, sundials, or other methods of tracking the passage of time. A secret police force, called the Watchers of the Night, patrols the idyllic city. The Watchers, who can ignore the city’s magic wards that prevent creatures from turning invisible, remain vigilant for signs of infiltration by the fomorians and their agents— subterranean menaces searching for the means to break through Mithrendain’s defenses and reopen the great passage into the Feydark.
Demographics
Mithrendain is populated almost entirely by eladrin, and most of the inhabitants are happy to keep it that way. Mithrendain’s population is mostly peaceful, and society moves at its own pace. The denizens of the Autumn City take their time with everything, and they rarely are in any kind of hurry. To the long-lived eladrin, each day can be taken at one’s own pace. Two eladrin might agree to meet “after lunch,” which could mean that their meeting is any time from right after lunch to just at sunset. Since most artisans work from their homes, there are no business hours; if the artisan is in, the shop is open for business. Everything takes place at a casual pace, which can be frustrating to outsiders. Many a visitor has commissioned an eladrin-made sword, only to find that the blacksmith’s definition of “soon” and his own are different. As a result, inhabitants of Mithrendain see outsiders as too tightly wound, and prefer not to deal with the exasperating, impatient visitors. Outsiders visiting Mithrendain might find themselves taken aback by aspects of the Autumn City’s society. The eladrin inhabitants frequently consider outsiders to be novelties or curiosities. In a society obsessed with beauty, a race that doesn’t share their smooth aesthetics is practically hideous, and many eladrin cannot help but gawk at visitors from the World. The eladrin of Mithrendain operate on their own schedules and yet seem obsessed with maintaining the beauty of
their society and their city, two aspects that can combine to frustrate visitors to the Autumn City who need something from one or more of its inhabitants.
Defences
The primary defenders of Mithrendain is members of the city guard, who are volunteers who patrol the streets day and night. These are supported by the Watchers of the Night, a secret police force.
There are two magical defense mechanisms:
- Revelation Spheres: Each revelation sphere radiates a 20-square aura (and is blocking terrain). Powers with the illusion keyword can't be used within the aura, and powers with the illusion keyword end upon entering the aura. Revelation spheres provide full overlapping coverage in the city.
- Tremor Wards: Each tremor ward radiates a 20-square aura that flows into the earth. They detect a break in the ground large enough to let a small creature through, and respond by create a path of runes leading from the Citadel Arcamum to the site of the breach.
Guilds and Factions
The City Guard
The Mithrendain city guards are the primary keepers of the peace in the Autumn City. Unlike in human cities, the guards in Mithrendain are mostly lightly armored, nimble sword-wielders who rely on their speed and dexterity to take down their opponents. They wear armor made of small overlapping plates, larger than scales but offering the flexibility and mobility of most leather armors. The city guard is headquartered in the Citadel Arcanum, but smaller guard posts exist throughout the Autumn City, which allows the guard to react quickly to any disturbance. The city guard is made up of paid volunteers, most of whom are young people without families of their own. City guards serve for as long as they wish, though there is little upward mobility in the Guard. Promising members of the city guard are given the chance to train as barrier sentinels in the Citadel Arcanum, but few have the skill and experience to make the jump to the elite corps of defenders.
The Watchers of the Night
The Watchers of the Night are a secret police force within Mithrendain responsible for keeping a wary eye out for anyone or anything endangering the city. Originally established as a group of spies designed to root out anyone within the Citadel Arcanum that sought to destroy or bypass the barrier, the Watchers of the Night slowly expanded their jurisdiction to cover the entire city and the surrounding outskirts. Despite their humble origins, the Watchers have become an influential organization in the Autumn City.
The Watchers of the night are a secret police force in that they search out traitors to the city in secret. Each Watcher is given a signet ring that allows him or her to ignore the city’s defenses. Watchers of the Night can turn invisible and use illusion spells as normal, even within the range of the revelation spheres, and as a result they spend their time watching the day-to-day activities of citizens throughout Mithrendain. The Watchers are mostly unobtrusive, but many feel uncomfortable with the secret observation of the Watchers. In fact, the Watchers’ own name has something of a double meaning; on the one hand, they are vigilant against threats from the eternal night of the Underdark, but by the same token they are observers that peer at the people of Mithrendain from the shadows.
The Watchers are rarely seen, and few people in Mithrendain have ever encountered one; those that do usually keep quiet about the fact as well. Though no Watcher has ever revealed how he or she became a Watcher of the Dark, many suspect that the Watchers are culled from the ranks of exceptionally talented criminals who know how to move about the Autumn City unseen. Watchers wear leather armor that has been dyed to pitch black, and they carry ornate daggers given to them when their training is complete.History
Mithrendain was originally a citadel, built around a barrier to block a passage from the underdark. As time passed, the purpose of the fortress was slowly forgotten by all but the handful of leaders, with no attempt to breach the barrier. Newer generations continued with city growth, eventually building a city around the original citadel. Armies of the fomorian kings once invaded the surface world through this passage, which now lies sealed beneath the majestic Citadel Arcanum, a golden edifice riddled with secret passages and underground chambers.
Architecture
No city better exemplifies eladrin architecture than Mithrendain. Taking a look at the various buildings throughout the city, it becomes easy to feel like you are walking through a place built by beings with a different outlook on the world. Buildings in Mithrendain expand vertically; there are no sprawling estates in the city, and when more space is needed the owner of a building adds on another floor. Most buildings in Mithrendain are at least 30 feet tall, and almost all of them are circular towers with doors on the ground floor and stairs spiraling upward around the walls on the inside of the building. Eladrin buildings almost never have windows on the ground floor; it is too easy for an eladrin to teleport, and eladrin value their privacy. On the upper floors, well out of the range of a fey step, buildings have windows that are made of reflective glass, allowing those on the inside to see out but keeping those on the outside from seeing into the room. Wealthy eladrin pay to have disc-shaped platforms enchanted to hover near buildings they own, allowing an eladrin to fey step out of the upper floors of a building directly onto a platform and then descend to the ground by stairs without having to leave through their own front door.
Eladrin keep their private chambers on the upper floors of their building, leaving a large, open common area on the ground floors. Eladrin homes do not have bedrooms, but instead havecozy, soundproof meditation chambers where the eladrin spend their resting time. Proper meditation is extremely valuable to the eladrin of Mithrendain, and maintaining a small but plush meditation room is a matter of pride for most eladrin. Unfortunately, this means that inns in Mithrendain often have no bedrooms; those few that do (designed to cater to outsiders) have bedrooms constructed with a uniquely eladrin viewpoint. Normally, these bedrooms are small rooms with one bed and little room for anything else.
The common areas of eladrin homes are lined with bookshelves, since reading is highly valued in Mithrendain society. Eladrin store their valuables in small, underground vaults, accessed by secret doors. These vaults exist to keep others from teleporting into the vault, and the vault floors are lined with thick metal and stone to prevent anything from breaking into the building from below.
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