Darnema

There is no clear boundary to Darnema, no clear approach. Approaching from the West, sailing in across the massive Lake Ezoto, the city is all sprawled across the horizon in an uneven mass. Black smoke billows from the North, towers jut periodically across the horizon, and the city is a great wall of lights framed against the black lake water. Lakeboats wind through a labyrinth of garden-islands, on which tiny houses and docks nestle cozily. Small personal river-ferries and large barges alike wind these crowded waterways, often carrying great bushels of maize, lines of caught catfish, barrels of oysters, or even the hanging bodies of alligators.
There is no main dockyard for Darnema, but a mass of diffused traffic along the miles of coast. Many who seek the delights and majesty of the city head for the Old town docks. They are a sight to behold: a huge blackwood pier dangles from the elevated stone foundations of the city, swooping down into the water like a great mess of wooden vines. Throughout this canopy is a tangle of shops, peddlers, and even homes all hanging some fifty feet above the lakeside. Beneath the skeletal framework of these suspended docks are massive stone slabs, with huge crevices pouring fetid water and muck into the lake. Those crevices not pouring muck show signs of habitation, even commerce, with buckets and barrels moving to and fro from them by rope pullies.
Ascending the wooden docks, one enters Old Darnema. The guard presence is huge, with great entry arches funneling newcomers for checking and processing. Before and after these checkpoints are bustling market squares. The stench of rotting fish and sewage is replaced by the smells of peppers, wood fire, roasting food, animals, salt, and stone. Emerging on the other side of the checkpoint, the market square is enormous: a great sea of temporary stalls and shops over a massive cobblestone plaza. Three huge pyramid-like structures sit at the three sides of the plaza around you: each of these temples a massive stone half-pyramid platform hundreds of yards across with three stone pyramid tops, and an obelisk at the center. The green stone of these massive temples is decorated with paintings of mythic scenes in vibrant color. Huge banners hundreds of yards across are suspended across each temple, flags of the Gwalan Republic.
Along with these three massive pseudo-pyramids are statues of animals lining the plaza, each as large as an elephant and painted fantastical hues. Beneath the watchful eyes of these grand monuments, the bazaar is alive with singing, dancing, bartering, and dining. Interspersed through the plaza are food dispensaries, serving citizens free of charge. You can track them by the perpetual flock of opportunistic birds hovering above them, the sound of the joyous work hymns, and their distinctive smell of wood-roasting salt. Each is a show in itself, where a squad of cooks prepare great batches of food for all species in massive iron pans 7 feet across. Be it sizzling slag, corn mulch, chicken-and-fruit, acorn gruel, or corn-and-pepper, the chefs have the component ingredients always cooking to be mixed and matched according to the guest's needs, to be tossed into a steamed corn husk as a custom tamale. A priest in flowing robes overlooks the process and leads the work hymns, through which the customers bow in deference and call out their orders in organized ritual song.
Beyond the grand plaza, clusters of imposing government buildings and specialty luxury shops cling to the edges of manic daytime commerce. But the city quickly opens up into a massive grid of tower-like apartment manors, each dirt plot far from one another and divided by massive lines of stone. Along these lines of stone are great canals, with great commercial ferries slowly taking citizens to and from the market. The apartment manors are a curiosity of old-style Sunekan cities: each has a small field, and each apartment opens up to a hanging garden. Fruits trees line the edges of the plots, providing a modicum of privacy and delineating the dirt horse paths from the fields. It is a blend of urban and rural, where each residential compound is a village unto itself.
While idyllic near the old town center, the system shows some gaps as you press away from it. The canals grow fetid, often drying up into massive stone chasms. Improvised stairwells and tiny gardens indicate life in these old canals, an entrance to the same ruined undercity that poked out under the docks. Darnema is built on an ancient engineered hydraulic system, intended to be a revolutionary fusion of sewer system, canal system, and irrigation system that would allow massive amounts of lakewater to be moved with precision. Those ancient hydraulics were never finished and are now irreparably broken, providing a space for those who have nowhere else. These dimly-lit stone passages open up into black markets and dens of deviancy, which Darnema has simply given up on properly repressing. Gem-plague lepers and exiles congregate here, forming their own tiny republic apart from the world.
Where the canals stop working, the old town begins fading into the new one. The manors become less cookie-cutter, less pristine. Some lack enough space for their own food production and instead work with other compounds to tend to large full-fledged rural fields built on now-abandoned and demolished compounds within the city walls. On the edges of this mid-town, the compounds get stranger: only a few of them seem occupied during summer months. These tend to be around the factories: massive workshops with huge artificial canal-rivers, bearing water wheels and billowing black smog. Past these, the suburban sprawl fades into rural living with no clear boundary but the old earth fortifications- basically artificial hills dotted with stone watchtowers.

Demographics

Of the humanoid population, 30% is Dryad, 20% is Human, 20% is Hybrid, 10% is Prism, 10% isKobold, and 10% is Vesper. 
The 15,000 - 20,000 population range is to account for seasonal influxes of ~4,000 consistent part-rural workers. While temporary, the success of the water-wheel workshops has led to more and more of the population permanently settling in Darnema.

Government

The city center is home to three governments: the Central Government of Gwalan, the regional government of Asarum, and the mayoral government of Darnema. The three are theoretically distinct but intermingle in practice. 
The City is dominated by two joint leaders: the Minister of Darnema, appointed by the Governor of Asarum, and the popularly-elected mayor. The mayor is elected by members of the official Darneman communities during the summer (temporary workers are specifically banned from voting in this). 
Both the Governor and the Mayor are directed by the Congress, which meets in the Assembly building near the Old Town Plaza. 
Not all of Darnema's rulership is top-down, of course: community blocks are all led by deputy-priests, who report to their community priests. The mayor derives much of their authority from cooperation with these community priests, and much of the city's functioning involves their participation.

Defences

Darnema has few external defenses. The great walls it once sported and its ancient fortress were both destroyed utterly by the Calazan occupiers in the 1880s and have not been rebuilt. New efforts in security have focused instead on internal 'defenses': guard checkpoints and barracks, often manned by a small portion of the standing army to police the populace (especially temporary workers and newcomers).

Industry & Trade

Darnema is a mixed manufacturing and production city, producing a large amount of its own food while also home to a robust trade and factorial center. The outskirts of the city are particularly industrial, with three main industries: pottery and ironworking in the North, textile manufacturing in the East, and woodworking in the South. All three use canals and natural waterflow to power the great workshops. Massive iron smelters in the North process the great volumes of raw ore produced by the Northern provinces as well as slag and clinker (smelting waste that is incorporated into Prism recipes). The coal that is also shipped from the North also powers the nearby pottery kilns, which produce large quantities of good quality pottery from the lake's great clay beds. The Eastern textile factories use water-powered mills to mass manufacture cotton and wool garments. Perhaps the most rudimentary of the industries is the Southern lumber factories, where rudimentary hand-worked assembly lines mass assemble furniture, boats, carts, and construction planks. Water-powered mega-mills on the city fringes also work to process wheat, maize, and other crops from the countryside.
On top of these great industries, household crafts produce a large amount of small luxury items and manufactured goods for sale in the market: communities make their own dyes, grow their own flax and peppers, press their own paper, and weave together to raise money for local improvements and luxuries.

Infrastructure

The original city of Darnema, built in the 1100s ME, was designed as a utopian example of Gwalan's adherence to the Suneka. It was hyper-engineered and involved monumental effort, laying a massive stone foundation that itself could serve as a world wonder and allowed for a complex hydraulics system.
That system is only partially functional, and the city has far outgrown it. But it has created a standard for Gwalan: stone roads for foot traffic, dirt roads for animal traffic, and canals wherever possible. Beautification efforts in the 1980s saw the expansion of the canal system into the new and mid towns, as well as the standardization of the stone pathways into new areas.
Huge watermills also intersperse the residential areas. These are typically operated by the priest's families in conjunction with community elites. These watermills also operate as voting stations and are usually nearby temples, schools, or shrines.

Guilds and Factions

The Council of Crafts is the great commercial authority and decision-making body of Darnema. They decide tariff policy, suggest changes in production quotas, and manage outside labor requests. Led by the Patriarch (a title-gender that essentially denotes hyper-mercantile specialization that could be best understood to outsiders as "double male"), the Council is the middle bureaucracy between the Artisan Guilds and the government. The Council of Crafts also gives merchant commissions and operates commercial forums for private groups to organize their own merchant commissions.   Guilds are not powerful in Darnema, but are subservient organizations that are carefully regulated by both the Council of Crafts and the local priesthood. Guilds typically are broken up by-district, and while these districts are usually divided by trade this can mean that multiple guilds exist for the same trade. Each guild is bankrolled and organized by a joint-group: essentially a group of elites involved in the trade who jointly own land for the guild headquarters to be built on and who can be held accountable for the guild's actions. While guild advancement has little do to with individual skill, particularly skilled craftsmen can be scouted by the Council of Crafts and sent off for prestigious specialty work. These specialty groups typically form "Guild Lodges" - groups of master specialists from across the region who have earned high-brow specialty commissions. 
Increasingly, though, the decentralized patchwork of local guilds has consolidated behind the scenes. After the Great Invasion of 1870 to 1900, a small group of landholders were able to consolidate a great deal of property. These landholding cliques also held significant assets in major industries in other parts of the country. Their power only grew over time, and they have bought out or subjugated many Guild Joint-Groups to streamline their control. The most powerful of these are:

• The Ruktu Group, rural landlords who run much of the food transportation and milling 
• The Tuluki Group, former rebels who were granted mostly-unoccupied forests for their leadership in the war. They now run the lumber and assembly factories. 
• The Teztinwipa Group, who control much of the iron imports and run the kilns and smelters in the North
• The Toyotoht Group, which operates the textile factories

While these groups are not monoliths and do have internal divisions, their leadership is far smaller than the old, decentralized system.

History

Darnema was commissioned in 1080 as a monumental passion (or perhaps vanity) project of Imperial Tlakra Koqui of the Gwalan Empire. Koqui commissioned the city as a monument to Gwalan's healing from the corruption of the past and its commitment to republican virtue. The city was mostly finished by the time of its official opening in 1120. Efforts to finish the expansive hydraulics system were continually delayed as money was diverted elsewhere, but the city was mostly a monument to imperial greatness until the collapse of the empire in 1200. The city was targeted by the invaders and sacked in the same year, and the great houses that had begun to settle into the artificial paradise fled to safer countries. Darnema languished untended, its hydraulics system broken, for centuries. 
Periodically, other powers would claim Darnema for their own, but few wished to properly invest in the city. Even without outside assistance, Darnema slowly lingered in recovered, and its location as a status symbol largely protected it from looting by larger states. In the 1500s, a resurgence in local lake-gardening and investment by a scholarly clique saw the city rise back to prominence. When the region became independent again in 1600, Darnema was the (largely symbolic) capital of the local republic. 
In the early 1800s, Darnema became a hub for populism and mysticism, a symbol of a glorious past that attracted fringe thinkers and artists. The populist reforms the republic levied were mostly aimed at Darnema and the other large towns. As life improved more there than the surrounding countryside, communities petitioned to migrate into Darnema. The influx of workers opened up opportunities for major workshops. Darnema began to boom for the first time since 1200.
The 1872 occupation of Darnema was a sudden jolt to the city. Its defenses were destroyed, its treasury looted, many of its priests were killed. Populists attempted to lead a grand revolt against the invaders in 1877, but the revolt only saw the city pay in blood. The old institutions were razed, and the occupying garrison began to confiscate land and power for themselves. As they intermingled with the locals, a Nediran occupying elite formed. By the time that liberators finally arrived in 1898, the urban elite had become a curious fusion of Calazen and Gwalan. 
This new order was subsequently purged and the city was reorganized from the ground up in 1903. For the new republic of Gwalan, Darnema would be restored at any cost. Money flooded in from the greater Suneka, as did population. The old hydraulics system was mostly fixed in 1940, leading to feasting across the city and proclamations of religious victory across the Sunekan heartlands. This new order was to be one of industry, power, and monumental construction. Policing and industry escalated as the city became a preoccupation for Gwalan's elites. The 1980's beautification campaigns saw much of the infrastructure of the old town expanded into the newer suburbs and reshaped much of Darnema into what we see today.

Tourism

Tourism into Darnema is firmly directed into the center of the old town, where pilgrims and foreigners alike are housed in temples, inns, and taverns. Food and lodging is free for any Sunekan, though better food and lodge is reserved for communities that are of high status or send money to the city. 
Due to the image of Darnema as an ancient wonder, tourism is not uncommon here. Local communities have picked up on this and often sell tour packages, either by foot or by cart. More daring tourists can even be taken illegally into the tunnels below Darnema to view the undercity, which has developed certain "safe routes" that get a cut of the profit in exchange for keeping the halls tourist-safe. Most tourists and pilgrims stick to the great monuments, temples, and museums surrounding the plaza, though.

Architecture

Much of Darnema is a mixture between Old Imperial style Gwalanan architecture and newer styles that mimic this. The old imperial style was marked by spires, domes, and arches- a very round, organic style that sought to mimic clouds and trees. While this gets more variant the further out one gets in Darnema, the 1980s beautification campaigns created standard styles that are applied to even the most decrepit corners of the city.

Geography

Darnema sits on a peninsula of the same name that springs from the eastern coast of Lake Ezoto. The city sprawls for miles along the coast, incorporating lagoons to the South as well as a tiny atoll of marshy islands near the coastline.

Founding Date

1120

Type

City

Population

15,000 - 20,000 humanoids, 200 cats

Inhabitant Demonym

Darneman

Location under

Gwalan Valley

Owning Organization

Gwalan Republic

Characters in Location

• Tlakra Ginzin Banoko