Jalpa

Jalpa is set back several miles from the very shallow and sluggish headwaters of the "Little Flanmi," as the riverlet east is known.

Jalpa's 22,500 people are used to affluence. Even more than Kalstrand, this city is virtually central to all of Aerdy, and as such trade, information, mercenaries, and the like flow from all directions into and out of Jalpa. For this reason, the city has more hostelries than any other city in the Flanaess; some 750 in all. This is why Jalpa is no longer so prosperous. Much of that traffic has been sharply reduced, especially the Urnst, Nyrondese, and Greyhawk caravans which used to come through Almor. Perhaps a third of Jalpa's people used to make a living by servicing the needs of visitors and travelers, and many are finding it hard to scrape a living now. Many shopkeepers and artisans have boarded up their shops; they did not have the reserves of wealth which have sustained Kalstrand. Jalpa was a city of small business folk, rather than the dominant wealthy merchants of Kalstrand, and this shows.

Jalpa is also a tenser city than Kalstrand. It is closer to places such as Permanence where Ivid's supporters still hold sway, and this gives everyone greater pause for thought.

These two factors have brought more villainy to Jalpa than to other Darmen cities. Many poorer folk have taken to petty theft, mugging, burglary, and worse. More refugees from eastern lands have fled here bringing the habits of evil lifetimes with them. There are rumors of a group of necromancers of Nerull having fled here from Rauxes, and wilder versions of the tale say that they have a powerful relic in the form of a golden skeleton which can be animated at night when Luna is full, striking victims with the death gaze of a nabassu. These may be fanciful tales, but one won't hear anything like them in Kalstrand. The number of overnight disappearances in the city lends some credibility to such stories, though of course many people are leaving Jalpa to escape creditors and penury.

All this is part of the backdrop to why the urbane, conservative Prince Farland is actively promoting his nephew's claim to lead House Darmen to the malachite throne. Farland senses that if Darmen doesn't head east and strike, evils which lie east will come and strike Darmen. Farland is assiduously courting allies for his relative among free factions such as the rulers of Roqborough and Carnifand. And he is marshalling the armies of his liegemen, who have a high loyalty to the old but still forceful prince. Farland has perhaps 700 mercenary troops in and around his city, including imperial desert ers who are selected for a real hatred of Ivid and their old commanders.

Finally, despite its penury in some areas, Jalpa has an air of faded magnificence which is distinctively different from other Darmen cities. Buildings are upkept more poorly than elsewhere, but they often seem to be an embodiment of the perfections of classical ideas of architecture. Some older temples, mansions, and civic buildings are truly majestic to behold. The most famous is the eerie Polyphonium, built by a distant ancestor of Otto the mage with the same shared obsession with sound and the human voice. With its nested scalloped ceiling and roof structures, and bizarre cross-beamed internal structure (allegedly designed to allow perfect sound), the place looks bewildering. Some claim that metamagical operations and illusions using sound distortions can be most beneficially practiced and performed here, but the Polyphonium's aged—and, ironically, half-deaf—gnomish curator doesn't allow any mage meddling unless triplicate signed permits from Farland himself are presented.