Malfa
Demographics
The population of Malfa is quite diverse. Before the city was founded the peninsula wasn’t occupied, being mostly unapproachable from inland before the river was created, so everybody who’s there has come there in the past few hundred years.
The city is an oligarchy, whose ruling caste is a mixture of half-sea-elves, humans, and a few other ancestries. The rest of the population is mostly human, but with people coming to trade or to make money off traders, the spread of people is quite diverse.
The city’s main inland trading partners are a mysterious dwarf clan-nation who call themselves the Hewellen. Malfa calls them Okunnen, “strangers”. They are the dominant culture in the Forges, the volcanic mountain range inland from Malfa. The mountains are inhabited mostly by underground peoples— dwarves, gnomes, orcs. These people too sometimes come to the city.
Government
The Maveren still think of Malfa as a Maveren settlement/stronghold, where some other people happen to live also. Those other people now make up about 80% of Malfa (not counting thralls), but that’s not a very important detail to the Maveren.
Accordingly, there is no central city government per se. There are nine founding households; thus there are nine holdings in Malfa, which work more or less like counties. Each holding has its own guards, judge (husman), and bailiff (rettman). Each holding polices its own area, and tries criminals (each holding’s court meets six times a year per holding). General Malfa infrastructure is agreed upon by all Maveren (about 350 total), who meet and vote on every issue. Technically, no Maver has a government position; all administrators are thralls.
See Maveren and their thralls and Thrall roles for more.
Everything that isn’t organised or patrolled by the households (quite a lot) is generally overseen by a series of guilds/neighborhood protection groups, which are generally called “benevolences.”
Infrastructure
The Maveren aren't much for public works, but they have occasional waves of enthusiasm for it. Two of the earliest public buildings in Malfa are the Piscatorium, which is still in use, and the public baths, which are not. Many other things in Malfa are done on an ad hoc basis by whoever sees they need doing.
Districts
Only eight of the founding Malfa households(article:0e040119-68e0-4ec1-869e-3d1f51068354) have currently active holdings. @[Valdas Holding hasn’t had any members of its household in Malfa for decades; Valdas’ estate lay fallow for so long that the other founding households took over its purviews, and then its estates. The remainder of what was once the Valdas holding is called the Liberty , a small area of the city that no other holding has claimed, and that is therefore technically lawless. The the Furthermore, a.k.a. the Great Guest House of Malfa, is in this area.
Guilds and Factions
The Maveren. Malfa was first founded by the Maveren, a Viking-like group of seafaring traders and raiders. The Maveren who settled on the peninsula still control the mature city, and still consider themselves to be the only real citizens, even though many other people now live there. The original Maveren were mixed-race human/sea elves; there were very few of them, which is partly why they accepted oth- er peoples as Maveren.
Thralls. These are people still directly in service to the Maveren, often for generations. They’re mostly, but not entirely, human. There are thralls in government, in the trading houses, etc., seemingly with a lot of power. Some minor government ministers are thralls.
The Hewellen. The Maveren’s inland trading partners; in Malfa they are called "Okunnen," strangers (including by other dwarven peoples). They are the ones who created the river, enabling access to the interior (or from their point of view, the coast). They are a clan of hill dwarves, with a strong strain of tiefling amongst them—there are some demon ancestors back there. Not many Okunnen come to Malfa, but they have a lot of influence.
Inlanders. A blanket term used by the Maveren and their thralls to mean everybody else, even those who came over the ocean, or were born in Malfa. It’s like saying “landlubbers,” though the times when Maveren spent most of their lives at sea, trading and killing, are long gone.
Portsiders. Dockworkers, and also the criminals and smugglers who work the docks. “Portsider” is the kind of term that can mean a specific criminal gang, or criminals generally, or poor people generally, or non-Maveren generally—“lowlifes.”
History
The Malfa peninsula was originally a stopover for trading/raiding Malveren; they might winter there if the weather was especially bad. From there it became a cargo/storage dump, and from there a trading post, and well, so on. As a settlement, it was originally almost entirely thralls, with a handful of Malveren to manage them.
Gradually Malfa became a permanent trading centre, wth port-houses along the harbour. The town was still relatively small until the inland Hewellen, who are famous for magical artificing, came to Malfa and created the Deeping, a massive magical artifact that turned the marshy lowlands at the base of the peninsula into a navigable river, the continuation of the inland Tennerill river. This enabled Malfa to trade with the inland (especially the mountain societies), and population exploded with newcomers, neither Maveren nor their thralls.
Geography
The peninsula juts out at a place along the coast where rocky hills slope down to meet marshy wet- lands. The peninsula itself was mostly split between these two terrains, until the creation of the river drained the wetlands, creating some arable land and more places to build in the southern and eastern parts. “Malfa” means “mallow;” mallows used to cover the southern part of the peninsula.
The climate is about that of Tasmania. The hills are covered with evergreens, with scrubby oak and other smaller trees on the peninsula. The city is mostly on the east and south, with the western hills and the northern end of the horn mostly uninhab- ited. It never gets cold enough to snow but winters are pretty chilly.
Type
City
Population
9000
Included Locations
Related Tradition (Primary)