Dlante
“A trade city with quaint customs regarding hats.”
After a few milestones along the road indicating distances to a place called Dlante, the town comes into view. Dlante is a town surrounded by white-painted stone walls, with five pointed towers, their conical roofs painted a bright red. Banners with a white diamond on a red background fly from the tower rooftops. In addition to the five towers, a large keep forms part of the town wall. Dlante is surrounded by a moat, and the gates can be reached only across a wide causeway over the moat. The causeway ends 10ft short of the gates; a stout wooden drawbridge spans the gap.
After a few milestones along the road indicating distances to a place called Dlante, the town comes into view. Dlante is a town surrounded by white-painted stone walls, with five pointed towers, their conical roofs painted a bright red. Banners with a white diamond on a red background fly from the tower rooftops. In addition to the five towers, a large keep forms part of the town wall. Dlante is surrounded by a moat, and the gates can be reached only across a wide causeway over the moat. The causeway ends 10ft short of the gates; a stout wooden drawbridge spans the gap.
Dlante is the seat of the governor of the region of Dlante, which reaches to the border of Eastreach Province 50 miles to the east along the Wain Road. The regional governor is Azile de Palaintre, a noblewoman of Foere appointed to her post by the overking’s court in the city of Courghais. She is ill-tempered and rude to those of lower social status, but she has the redeeming quality of being less rapacious than any of the other regional governors in Aachen Province. She benefits greatly from local taxes and from her share of judicial bribery, but she keeps these sources of income to a modest sum rather than amassing whatever she can get. As a result, Dlante has managed to keep itself in good condition despite the slow decline of trade on the Wain Road. This section of the road is relatively well-patrolled, the milestones are maintained, and roadside inns are careful not to charge exorbitant prices to travelers. Dlante is well-regarded by the caravan merchants of Bard’s Gate, and they always make stopovers here to re-provision and rest their horses. White-painted stone walls surround the town, with five pointed towers, their conical roofs painted a bright red. The townsfolk of Dlante are universally heavyset, and the wealthiest of them have a definite tendency toward corpulence. By custom, the town citizens (and only the town citizens) wear blue cylindrical hats with a very slight taper, essentially a fez without a tassel. The higher a citizen’s social status, the taller the fez. Rich merchants strut around town in hats more than a foot tall, spangled with semiprecious stones and decorated with ostrich feathers, sometimes trimmed with blue-dyed fur. Ordinary laborers wear a modest fez decorated with a guild badge or a decorative copper button.
The Dlanteans
The townsfolk of Dlante are universally heavyset, and the wealthiest of them have a definite tendency toward corpulence. By custom, the town citizens wear blue cylindrical hats with a very slight taper, essentially a fez without a tassel. The higher a citizen’s social status, the taller the fez. Rich merchants strut around town in hats more than a foot tall, spangled with semiprecious stones and decorated with ostrich feathers, sometimes trimmed with blue-dyed fur. Ordinary laborers wear a modest fez decorated with a guild badge or a decorative copper button.
Visitors and Hats
Visitors to the city are cautioned at the gates not to wear blue hats, for this privilege is reserved to the citizens. However, the social status of visitors is also defined by the height of a fez-like hat and the splendidness of its decoration, as long as the hat is some color other than blue. It is quite a sight when a caravan from Bard’s Gate arrives here, as everyone in the caravan, from cattle drovers to rich merchants, produces a red or green fez and dons it before proceeding through the city gates.
Regardless of a visitor’s social status in the outside world, they find that the citizens of Dlante measure their guests by the hat. Those who wear tall, splendid hats are treated with respect; those in ordinary fezzes are treated cordially; and hatless individuals are treated as lowly peasants. Fortunately, a variety of fezzes is available to rent near the city gates, although all of them are fairly drab and short (and are not blue). The high-crowned, decorated fezzes of the upper classes are not rented, although they can be purchased in several haberdasheries throughout the city.
Interesting Places
Although Dlante is a small city, it offers temples to those who would worship, goods for those who would trade, and products for those who would buy.
Temple of Sefagreth
The god of cities and trade possesses the most significant of Dlante’s temples. Priests assigned to the temple are not granted citizenship, so most of them wear medium-sized yellow fezzes with the god’s holy symbol embroidered on the front. The temple is a circle of buildings around a small courtyard where the city’s gem-traders and moneylenders congregate during the daytime hours to conduct business.Temple of Zadastha
The temple of the goddess of love is Dlante’s other major temple, although it is smaller than Sefagreth’s fane. Virtually all of the priestesses are originally from Dlante, and visiting priestesses are granted honorary citizenship for the duration of their stay, so all of Zadasha’s priestesses wear the blue fez of a citizen. The temple is a walled courtyard with three delicate towers. One tower is for the secret rites of the goddess, one is for the priests and priestesses, and the third contains a number of private trysting rooms where secret lovers can meet away from the prying eyes of other citizens (and sometimes, their actual spouses). All the citizens know that the temple has three tunnels leading to it from other nearby buildings that are used by the Zadasthan priestesses to smuggle couples into the temple unseen. Unless the priestesses of Zadastha are particularly entranced by a tale of love, which does happen frequently, the rooms in the trysting tower are usually reserved for wealthier couples who can make substantial contributions to the temple.Street of Sumptuaries
The Street of Sumptuaries is a broad avenue that runs from the gates to the city center. It is Dlante’s main market, lined with booths, shops, carts, bales, and cargo. Most of the wares sold in the street are either foodstuffs or caravan cargo; more specialized goods are sold in the shops. Dlante produces excellent brandies and cordials, in addition to high-quality marionettes, beautifully tinted paper, and highly decorated cloth items from elaborate surcoats to fabulous (and very expensive) pavilion tents suitable for all strata of the nobility.Mystery of the Secret Contraption
The Guild of Embroiderers is the city’s most-prominent organization, and the art of embroidery is heavily regulated here. Many of the city’s workers are employed by the guild in some capacity or other in the process, and good embroiderers are well paid. In addition to hand embroidery, there are two “contraptions” owned by the guild, large wooden machines that allow fast but slightly inaccurate embroidery of large surfaces of cloth. The “contraption embroidery” is generally sold to merchants traveling far from the city, and is considered a far inferior product to the hand embroidery prized by the guild and sold for much higher prices, usually by merchants on their way to Vermis or Bard’s Gate. Recently, word came from Vermis that a large quantity of supposedly hand-embroidered cloth was actually contraption embroidery pawned off by some merchant in Dlante onto an unsuspecting buyer. The Guild of Embroiderers is in a quiet furor about this, suspecting that there might be an illicit embroidery contraption operating somewhere in the city walls. They might definitely engage a group of outsiders to track down the criminal operation, knowing that any citizen knowing of such a thing would have reported it. They offer a reward for finding the source of the illicit embroidery, and a large additional bonus if the contraption is recovered undamaged, for they would like to have a third one.
The secret embroidery contraption does indeed exist in the cellar of one of the city’s cloth warehouses. The warehouse, and the secret operation, are run by a merchant named Giles Wallen. The contraption-embroidered cloth is smuggled out of the city by agents of the Wheelwrights Guild of Bard’s Gate, and generally sold in Vermis without mentioning that the embroidery comes from Dlante; the Wheelwrights are usually careful to not leave a trail behind them. However, two cargoes of embroidery were accidentally switched while they were being loaded into caravans for departure, and the buyer of some handmade embroidery ended up with several bolts of the illicit contraption embroidery instead. The difference would not ordinarily have been spotted in the markets of Vermis except for the fact that the merchant advertised his wares as hand-embroidery from Dlante, which several of the Vermisian merchants could immediately spot as untrue. The merchant was hanged as a fraud, and the city of Vermis sent a strongly worded letter to the Guild of Embroiderers in Dlante about the episode.
If the characters investigate the situation, they might uncover or realize several things:
First, they might learn that one of the embroidering contraptions requires a source of power. At the guildhall, the two legal contraptions both run on wind power. If the characters comb through the city looking for windmills in the wrong places, they most likely find that Giles Wallen’s warehouse has an inexplicable windmill built onto the top of it.
Secondly, they might inquire whether anyone who might have known how to build a contraption has disappeared recently. The answer is that no one has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. The only two guildsmen who have died recently drowned in a fishing accident a year ago in a lake to the south of the city near a hamlet called Surlywood. The peasants of Surlywood did indeed find the blue-hatted bodies of two skinny fishermen in the lake, and buried them, sending the hats back to the Embroiderers’ Guild (based on the badges on the hats). The Guild agreed that the hats belonged to their missing guildmembers, and mourned the loss. The characters might exhume the bodies, or even take note that “skinny” is not an adjective ordinarily applied to guildsmen of Dlante. The only major citizen of Dlante who was away during that time, other than on a known caravan trip, was Giles Wallen.
Wallen enslaved the two Guildsmen, and still keeps them in his deep cellar with the contraption. He is assisted by three Vermisians, all of them hired by the Wheelwrights Guild, whom he passes off as “assistants.” Each of them is a fighter of 5th level, so a fight in Wallen’s cellar could turn dangerous.
Settlement
Dlante, Town of
Type
Town
Owning Organization
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