Gel'Brida (gehl-bree-dah)

As the oldest of the dwarven cities in Luuxinor, Gel'Brida has a special place in dwarven culture and maintains a strange arrangement between honoring the past and looking forward to the future. There are entire areas of the city that have remained almost unchanged for the entirety of Luuxinor's 1,485 years where people live in ancient houses and get their water from wells that have existed for centuries. At the same time, this is the city where Brida Ore was discovered, and as such it became the epicenter for the birth of the dwarven arcane age. The grand academy - impressive in its own right though not the largest or most prestigious among dwarven cities - sits in an area of the city directly adjacent to one of the ancient districts, creating a direct juxtaposition for citizens and travelers to observe the city's diverse cultures.
Most of Gel'Brida's history has been taken up by conflict with its northern neighbors, the city of Alloro and the nation of Tralizza to which it belongs. In fact, the Tralizzan town of Fiumezzo was founded in 140 specifically to halt or limit the territorial expansion of the dwarven city, as most of the early Grafs tried to wage wars to expand the city's territorial influence. The Brida River was a major trade route for the dwarven city, and Alloro's presence at the river's mouth created a barrier to trade and enterprise. Because there were no other nations or peoples nearby, the people of Gel'Brida had to become self sufficient to hold their own against Tralizza. For centuries, the two entities existed in alternating time periods of intense conflict and frigid stalemate, with the dwarves not able to claim more territory to the north but able to prevent the humans from founding any towns on Lake Brida which would have threatened the city even more.
Since the creation of the Dwarven Union in 1228, Brida's relationship with Tralizza has been far more cooperative and friendly, as the two focus on fostering trade and business for the region. The Doges in Alloro has recognized that Gel'Brida provides many raw materials and worked products that his nation just does not have access to, and the Grafs of Gel'Brida have recognized that selling their goods through Allorese ports makes them more money and provides a much broader customer base than previously available. The dwarven city has also been gradually building its friendship with the other dwarven holds since the Union was created. Recent years have seen the beginnings of a project with Gel'Starke to unite the two cities through a subterranean rail line. And the somewhat recent rise of arcane proclivity thanks to Brida Ore has led to Gel'Brida creating a network of teleportation circles for government officials and wealthy business owners to use to get around other dwarven holds.

Demographics

Until the last two centuries, Gel'Brida was almost entirely dwarven, and that homogeneity was enforced militantly for most of the city's history. Due to the ongoing wars with Tralizza, the Grafs viewed anyone who wasn't a dwarf with intense suspicion and sometimes outright hostility. Even the elves, who lived further away and were not directly involved in either side of the conflict, were greeted with icy receptions in the dwarven city. Since the Dwarven Union was created and relations with the outside world became more cordial, the city has begun welcoming other peoples into its caverns. Today, the city is roughly 70% dwarven and 20% human, with a variety of other races and peoples making up the remainder. Most citizens live in the caverns underneath the mountain, but expansion in the last century has seen suburbs arise on various parts of the shores of Lake Brida.
The city has a diverse economy, with a variety of industries and income levels. Miners are other laborers make up by far the largest portion of the workforce and can command anywhere from lower class to middle class income depending on their expertise levels and the specific jobs they do. Smiths and craftsmen make up another sizeable chunk of the city's workforce, and they tend to be somewhere in the middle class stratum since they provide invaluable services to the miners and other critical industries of the city. Traders, including boatmen and caravan operators, take the city's raw and refined goods and get them to markets in Alloro or along the Great Trade Road. The remaining workers of the city are employed in industries such as brewing and tavernkeeping, agriculture, fishing on the lake, and other supportive or service endeavors. Interestingly, with the city's recent push toward the arcane, fostered by the discovery and use of Brida Ore, the menial civic labors such as street sweeping or sewer cleaning are performed by automatons with little to no sapient supervision.

Government

The city functions as an autonomous community, with the Dwarven Union mainly used to coordinate trading/economic matters and mutual responses to international concerns. Within the city, the Graf and their advisors hold complete power and rule over all aspects of the city's governance. There are no laws for how many advisors a Graf may have or what areas they cover, so the specific makeup of the "cabinet" changes with every Graf and occasionally multiple times within one regime period. The Graf is a quasi-hereditary position with the successor being specifically named by the acting Graf before they die. Usually, the successor is chosen from among one's children or close relatives, but on several occasions through history the title has passed to a page of the previous ruler or a child of one of the advisors. A small number of succession crises have occurred throughout history, as the children who feel they were snubbed have protested and threatened civil war if they were not given the throne. When the appointed leader was accepted by the people, and the pretenders saw they didn't have the support of the city, they would fall in line and support the new Graf through gritted teeth.
The Graf also serves as the highest judicial officer in the city, with three other judges presiding over lower courts. Cases only reach the high court of the Graf if they involve violent crimes, significant property claims, or if there is an appeal that the lower judge may have been unduly prejudiced against one side of the case. The latter scenario is quite rare, with only three recorded instances of such appeals being lodged and all three accepted and overturned by the Graf's court at the times. The three lower courts consist of two civil courts that represent different geographical halves of the city and a criminal court that hears cases such as theft, burglary, and public drunkenness.

Defences

The natural defenses provided by the city's geographic location are enough to provide the overwhelming majority of security for Gel'Brida. The main entrance to the main underground city is guarded by two massive stone doors with thick stone walls on either side and a robust guard house manned around the clock. The portions of the city outside the mountain have a series of guard towers, and parts of it are encircled by a wooden palisade. The port facility has two defensive towers with ballista on top, though these have rarely ever seen action and are more decoration nowadays.
The mines are perhaps the greatest source of danger for the city of Gel'Brida, and to this end the city has put in place several layers of guards and protections. A special unit of the city watch patrols the corridors, aided by a small number of guardian automatons. The rail network that typically transports workers quickly between work and their homes can also be put to use to deploy battalions of guards or soldiers when an incursion is reported. And the adoption of Gesch Crystals has allowed the patrols and forward guards to be in near constant communication with each other and the central guard keep.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure of Gel'Brida has seen vast and marked improvements since the discovery of Brida Ore in the early thirteenth century. Since that time, automatons have been created to handle some menial tasks such as streetsweeping, and there is a rail network that connects various areas of the city and the mines, making travel very quick and easy. Most roads were already paved or well-carved cavern floor before this era, but the rise of automatons to help with this work has made the quality of the streets that much higher. Brida Ore has also helped the city's forges and smelters operate more efficiently, as they no longer require large amounts of coal or wood to burn and can instead run on arcane heat generated via the ore.
In the area of the city outside the mountain, the roads are also paved and well maintained, and there is a large port facility to house and maintain the city's fleet of fishing and river trade vessels. The rail network does connect to three locations "outside" by way of a tunnel adjacent to the city's main walled entrance. The city's sewer system is also recently re-done - "recently" meaning within the last 200 years - and pulls water from the lake to run the system, which empties into vast underground caverns rumored to be in the Underdark. There are all manner of protections to keep the creatures of the deep out of the city's sewers, and regular automaton patrols also look for evidence of incursion or disruption.

History

Gel'Brida was one of the first cities settled in the early days of Luuxinor, when roving bands of settlers endeavored to find favorable locations to set up new towns. A group of around 500 people - primarily dwarves - wandered for several weeks until they came upon an idyllic lake nestled into the mountains. Nearby was a fairly large cavern, and after setting up temporary shelters here they quickly discovered veins of useful metals. Believing this to be a sign from the gods, the dwarven settlers erected permanent houses and started building up the city, excavating areas of stone to enlarge the main cavern several times its original size. Upon deciding to stay in this cavern permanently, the citizens all held an election and nominated one among them to be the first Graf, a monarchic leader of the dwarven people. After the first Graf, however, the city's population had grown so much that it was impossible to efficiently conduct elections, and so the title switched to the quasi-hereditary role it still retains today.
With the city established and growing steadily, the Graf turned his attention externally, eyeing territory beyond the lake. Another primitively established city, Alloro, sat to the north at the mouth of the Brida River, guarding the sea where the dwarven city would have loved to establish a port for their goods. The Graf began setting up small encampments along the river, with a string of them leading toward Alloro, who were very aware of the growing dwarven hostilities. All-out war was declared on Alloro in the year 99, with a sustained campaign lasting almost a decade and culminating in a resounding stalemate and maintenance of the status quo. Smaller wars and raids were waged every few years, with the human city easily fending them off every time and occasionally launching incursions of their own, aiming to take the dwarven city in the mountains and capture the source of the precious metals for themselves.
In the year 140 the humans created a fortification along the river about halfway between Alloro and Gel'Brida, which would eventually grow into the town of Fiumezzo. Though this fortress could have been used to launch attacks at the dwarves from much closer range, it served almost entirely as a defensive outpost during the generations-long wars between the two nations. The town had watch towers along the river with chains capable of stopping the dwarven boats, and its thick walls were difficult for even the dwarven siege weapons to break through, making land attacks equally futile. This did not completely stop the dwarven Grafs from mounting raids and expeditions every few years, continuing right up to the creation of the Dwarven Union and the friendship it ushered in between the dwarven holds and the human lands.
As the city was at war with the humans, it was still steadily expanding under the mountains. Within 200 years, the main cavern was more than a mile in diameter and housed around 12,000 people. The mines stretched for many miles and had produced untold tons of iron, gold, silver, platinum, and gemstones. The miners, however, had the misfortune of delving right into a dragon's den with their tunnels, and the resulting raids of the two young red dragons killed almost half the population and reduced most of the city to ashes. Having killed the dragons, the dwarves began to slowly rebuild their city. Finding the dragons' hoard definitely helped to secure trade and funding for the civic renovations, and in some ways that made up for the setback the city had suffered. The parts of the city that were not destroyed by the dragons were celebrated as quasi-holy places, and great cultural significance was placed on all the buildings in those areas. To this day, the three ancient districts of the city are the ones that survived the dragon attacks of Year 231.
Having suffered massive casualties due to mining misfortune, the Graf at the time put several security policies in place, including the foundation of a special unit of city watch whose sole job was to patrol the mine tunnels looking for signs of danger. These mine sentries actually proved to be the city's best soldiers in the wars with Alloro, as their time dealing with dangerous mine creatures honed their skills far more than any regular training could do. The city also hired a handful of mages and priests with divining capabilities, to help determine when a tunnel may be approaching danger; these "oracles" as the miners called them were able to alert the sentries to danger at least once a month for several decades. On several occasions, the Graf had to shift attention away from the war with Alloro to send troops into the deep caverns to deal with a variety of threats such as duergar, illithids, and several other instances of dragons.
History continued much in the same pattern for several centuries in Gel'Brida: war with the humans, wars in the deep caverns to protect the miners, expanding the city's main cavern, mining as much metal and gemstones as possible, and crafting those metals into beautiful jewelry and lethal weaponry. But the tradition and routine was abruptly interrupted in 1124 by the discovery of Brida Ore, a magical mineral that was able to hold enchantments and provide its own arcane power to creations. The leadership of the city was hesitant at first to adopt this new technology, but within 20 years they had mined enough of it and had enough young inventors showing the potential uses that the city founded an arcane academy - the first among the dwarven holds, who historically had been leery of the arcane magics. Artificers quickly found ways to use the Brida Ore to power automatons, magical weapons and devices, and to fuel the furnaces of forges more efficiently than had been done before. While initially inclined to hoard this new discovery to themselves, the Bridans did decide to share it with other dwarven holds.
At this time, the dwarven holds were in the middle of a century-long process to form some sort of a political union to regulate trade and cooperate on other civic projects. The sharing of the Brida Ore technology was a sign of good faith by the Bridans and was greatly appreciated by the other holds. It was not long before the other holds began to discover Brida Ore in their mines as well, further increasing the total supply globally. The other holds also founded arcane academies and promoted innovation to discover new uses for this wonder material. Possibly the greatest of these inventions came in 1225 when a young female dwarf in Gel'Starke used the Brida Ore to create what came to be known as Gesch Crystals. The main holdup to the dwarven negotiations for over a century had been the travel time needed for the representatives to meet for discussions and then head back to their governments to get approval or changes. The introduction of the long-range communication system enabled by the Gesch Crystals allowed the Grafs and their diplomats to interact directly with one another from their respective home cities.
With this novel method of communication, the dwarven holds were able to unify their policies and finally adopted a joint declaration of union after more than a century of trying. The Dwarven Union was created in 1228 and immediately set about remedying the hostile relationships several of the members had with neighboring nations. These efforts saw Gel'Brida and Tralizza sign a formal peace treaty after being at war off and on for almost the entirety of the continent's history. This process was aided by the fact that both sides had dwindled down the aggression in the middle of the twelfth century, so there was almost 80 years of relative peace that helped lead to a rather quick treaty negotiation. Under this new cooperative relationship, the dwarven city would send its ores and fine crafted material downriver to Alloro to be either sold at market there or put on ships destined for far ports that the dwarves would never have been able to reach before. In exchange, the human city keeps a small portion of any goods sold as a tariff of sorts and also purchases some amount of ore and crafted goods directly from the city.
With the Union created and a neighborly friendship kindled, Gel'Brida began to thrive like never before, and this has continued to the present. Though nowhere near as rich as Alloro, the city's somewhat new focus on the arcane - centered around the seemingly limitless potential of Brida Ore - has given it new life and has drawn people to the city from all over the world. The city is more diverse than ever, and the dwarven rituals and traditions have begun to adopt aspects of some of the other cultures. The formerly rigid worship of The Smith (and to a lesser extent The Four) has expanded to include temples or shrines to all of the Light Pantheon, and the once drab dwarven buildings have begun to incorporate colors and external decorations - except in the three historical districts, which have remained just as they were in the very beginning of the city's existence.

Points of interest

Some of the main points of interest in Gel'Brida are the three historical districts, which have remained unchanged in their appearance for almost the entire history of Luuxinor. Having survived a dragon attack in the third century that leveled the entire rest of the city, these three districts were marked as important areas, and any changes have been mostly forbidden - with the exception of things like sewer systems and wells. Among these historical districts, perhaps the most alluring building for tourists and historians is The Old Stone, a tavern that is believed to be the oldest operating business in all of the continent. Parts of its exterior walls have crumbled away, and some of the stone still shows scorch marks from the great dragon attack. The interior has thankfully kept up with the times, with cushioned wooden chairs instead of the original sturdy but uncomfortable stone ones - of which a handful remain as bar stools in the tavern.
In general, the city's geography is another draw for people. The main city being in a massive cavern that has slowly been enlarged over time is somewhat of a marvel in itself. And the exterior portion sits along an absolutely serene lake situated in the foothills of the Eastern Mountains. The scenery in general is absolutely beautiful, and many landscape artists have chosen Gel'Brida as the source of the greatest works.

crest generated by me, using Armoria

Founding Date

Year 1

Type

City

Population

37,540

Inhabitant Demonym

Bridans (bree-dahnz)