Jence

The Last City

Any road north or east ultimately leads to Jence - and no further. As a major city it should not exist. It lies 2 weeks journey north of Tokmor, a week north from what is considered the far northern border of the civilisation of the Starfall States. It harvests barely enough food to keep its citizens from starvation from hillside goat ranches and underground mushroom farms and relies on imports from Tokmor for most of its luxuries. The ice captured in the local glaciers cannot be melted down and made drinkable without considerable efforts to remove toxic salts. The land provides hides, but local hunters must compete for them with wolves, bears, dragons, giants, monsterous burrowing worms, and ice demons. The veil between the Prime Material Plane is thin enough here to permit easy access to the Astral and Lower planes, so much so that even students and children can summon minor extraplanar entities by accident - and they frequently do.

There are two things that Jence does have in abundance. The first is natural resources. Iron, gems - particularly diamonds - and silver can all be found in plenty here, although harvesting iron does require it to be seperated from the deadly gas-heavy 'kobolt ore' that appears to be the most common mineral of the region. Vast deposits of coal and other organically-originated materials lie not far below the surface along with the bones of vast prehistoric creatures, including wingless dragons larger than any that live today. No miners guild dares to create any permanent encampment north of the Jence Wall lest it attract the attention of the local wildlife. What is common are week-long 'snatches' where a group of miners will target a rich node and frantically harvest all they can before they begin to feel tremors from underground, often ending with the members fleeing for their lives on horseback with some runic colossus they've disturbed in hot pursuit. There is little demand for donkeys or slow draft horses in this region - anything that can't flee at speed will die sooner rather than later, although use of a cheaply aquired lame horse or goat as a decoy is a common tactic.

The second resource Jence has is skilled soldiers and mercenaries. For whatever reason, every (over)confident, capable or foolhardy adventurer in the land of Elanora that doesn't pick up a shield token eventually journeys here to challenge themselves against the region's local wildlife, to pursue treasures and knowledge into other planes of existence, or to plunder the ruins of ancient and lost fortresses dug deep into the northern mountainsides along the edges of the vast glaciers. The Little Warriors Adventurers Guild has provided an alternative source of adventure and employment for several of the past centuries, and there's little love lost between the rival adventurers guilds - to head south answering the call of the central guild is referred to as 'selling out to the warmies'. Despite the competition, the Jence guild has endured and even thrived on the plunder of rare relics (and body parts of various monstrous creatures) from the wastes of the north.

See also - the Northern Wastes

Whisper's Guild report - 0.7.6 agf - The right answer

Important locations:

• The Jence Wall
• Stonehead Quarter
• The Tower of Reason
• The Underfarm
• The Great Arena
• Cloudguard rookery
• The Mount of the Dreamer

• Blue: something just happened here
• Violet: something's about to happen here
• Green: something might happen here
• Grey: something happened here a long, long time ago...(at least 2 weeks)

Elanora north-east

Open full size

History

Jence began as a temporary barbarian settlement built accidentally on a series of mineral deposits the dwarven Stoneshaft clan was actively mining. Initial encounters between humans and dwarves here were tense. The dwarves smoothed things over by helping the humans build permanent defences that grew into the Jence Wall, but the two peoples have never learned to fully trust each other.