Gethamane
From Thirdexalt
Directly north of Whitewall, and another frequent stop in northward journeys for traders, lies the mountain-city of Gethamane, set like a gem among the Northern peaks. While the city dates back to the First Age, no one knows the origins of this ancient fastness. The inhabitants tell stories of how their distant ancestors came here a century after the Contagion, fleeing plague and starvation and beset by raiders. They named the place Gethamane—“Sanctuary” in the tongue of the Old Realm. Its large halls are covered in intricate and beautiful carvings of unknown plants and beasts, strangely designed pictures that haunt the memories of visitors. The entire city is lit with glowing crystals that brighten during the day and dim at night, so that a man can live happily within for years and never see the sun. Fortunately for its inhabitants, Gethamane is distant enough that the Realm has never demanded that it pay tribute or attempted to make it a satrapy. Gethamane consists of hundreds of twisting corridors that connect countless rooms. The only remaining traces of the prior inhabitants are the three strange temples, carved with ancient depictions of fl ying creatures, and the sunken gardens of mosses and fungi that feed the city. The temples are served by priests who are called in their dreams, answering a message that they cannot refuse. Those who make the attempt go stark mad and flee the city, seeking the snow-bound silences of the mountains instead. Beneath the city lie endless tunnels that delve into the darkness far below. These delvings riddle the foundations of the city like wormholes, black and slick to the touch. Guards watch the dozens of entrances and bar the way against the things that, occasionally attempt to force entrance. Those who enter Gethamane’s underways to seek long-lost treasures do so at their own risk.
Four hundred miles north of Whitewall, some 80,000
people live in the small city of Gethamane. Their subterranean
city grants them unmatched protection from the perils of the
North. Living in the heart of a mountain, Gethamanians
do not fear winter storms or barbarian attacks. Supernatural
gardens remove the threat of starvation. Nevertheless,
Gethamanians live in fear. The circling tunnels of their
city connect to an immeasurably vaster, deeper labyrinth
of underways beneath Creation—and from these nighted
caverns come horror. As much as anyone else in the North,
Gethamanians require constant vigilance to survive.
HISTORY
Like many of Creation’s great cities, Gethamane began
in the First Age. Its history, however, is stranger than most.
Perhaps it’s a good thing the Gethamanians don’t know it.
THE FIRST AGE
Gethamane was originally called the City of the Mountain
Gateway. The Solar Deliberative ostensibly tunneled
a city within a mountain as a trade and diplomatic nexus
with the Mountain Folk and other strange inhabitants of the
caverns far below Creation. Indeed, a great deal of contact
with the underdwellers took place there. The Deliberative
chose the location because of the Celestial Gate to Yu-Shan
lodged in the underways beneath the mountain. As a bonus,
a colony of Pteroks—a winged race of the prehuman Dragon
Kings—lived on the mountain’s heights. The subterranean
metropolis was also called Six Gates. In addition to the Celestial
Gate, the city held a black jade portal to the tunnels
of the Mountain Folk and four immense doors of jade and
orichalcum steel that led into the mountain from north,
south, west and east.
Nothing exciting happened at Six Gates for more than
a thousand years. No Solars were in town when the Usurpation
began. The Dragon-Blooded easily blocked any contact
with the rest of Creation. By the time any loyalists in the
city might have objected, most of the Lawgivers were dead.
Only the Pteroks knew what was happening, and they flew
away and out of history.
CHAPTER THREE • THE CITY UNDER THE MOUNTAIN 35
Shortly thereafter, the City of the Mountain Gateway
died. When the founders of the new Shogunate realized
that their conspirators in the city had not restored contact,
a Dragon-Blooded team investigated. They found the city’s
gates sealed but everyone gone. Not even corpses remained.
So, a group of Sidereal Exalted came to Six Gates. Neither
Charms, sorcery nor the Loom of Fate gave any clue to what
happened. The city’s past seemed as thoroughly eradicated
as its inhabitants.
The Shogunate stripped everything valuable and portable
from the City of the Mountain Gateway, then sealed
it. No one entered for several centuries and the city was
forgotten.
THE SECRET PAST
Six Gates was a lot more than a trade nexus between the
Old Realm and the underdwellers. Its true purpose was one
of the most closely guarded secrets of the Solar Deliberative.
The city’s connection to Creation’s underways, however,
brought about its doom. By now, discovering the truth would
be extraordinarily difficult.
REALITY ENGINES
Back in the Old Realm, a perceptive geomancer
might observe that the City of the Mountain Gateway’s
combination of a high peak, a connection to Heaven and
alignments to the cardinal directions appears at one other
location: the Imperial Mountain, the axis of Creation itself.
This was no accident. Deep in the highest-security areas of
the city—areas never shown on any map, hidden with the
help of the Maiden of Secrets herself—the Deliberative
emplaced 25 reality engines. These devices, the height of
Old Realm magitech, emulate the Elemental Pole of Earth
by stabilizing reality against the Wyld. If some unimaginable
catastrophe overwhelmed the Blessed Isle, these engines
could turn the mountain of Six Gates into a replacement
Elemental Pole of Earth, around which Creation could
regain its stability.
More than half the population of Six Gates was Dragon-
Blooded or God-Blooded. A great many of them functioned
as guards, whatever their official duties were. Neither the
Mountain Folk nor anyone else was supposed to know what
the small city held.
These reality engines still exist in a ring between the
Garden District and the underways. The entrances are virtually
undetectable and open only to a Solar’s anima. Further
defenses protect the vaults of each machine.
THE ULTIMATE HORROR
The second secret of Gethamane began with the Primordial
War. When the first Primordial died, its dying Essence
and alien ichor generated a new entity: a hekatonkhire, or
ghost-behemoth. Most hekatonkhires dwell in the Underworld,
but the one called Vodak exists simultaneously in
the Underworld and Creation. Vodak took shelter in the
underways. Every few centuries, Vodak woke to prey upon
the underdwellers, destroying whole cities’ worth of the
Mountain Folk and other races. When the blood of almost
300 Solars fell on Creation’s soil, the Essence-taste of its
progenitor’s killers roused Vodak from slumber.
The Mountain Folk conceived a desperate plan to trap
the hekatonkhire. As the Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals
stalked and battled the last of the Lawgivers, the Mountain
Folk captured numerous Solar offspring. They used the Golden
Children as bait, luring Vodak to Six Gates. It arrived hungry.
While the monster swept through the city like a silver ocean
of death and madness, the greatest savants and sorcerers of the
Mountain Folk cast their spells and activated potent artifacts.
After six days spent devouring the city’s population, body
and soul, Vodak returned to the depths to rest and digest its
meal—and found it could not leave.
The hekatonkhire now lurks in the deepest caverns below
Gethamane, deeper even than the underdwellers know.
When it sleeps, its dreams call to the underdwellers and fill
them with its own hunger, hate and rage. When it wakes,
the terror of its presence drives underdwellers to flee the
depths into the city. Sometimes it reconstructs past victims
from its own spectral flesh and plays murderous games with
them. Vodak refrains from invading Gethamane for now,
fearing the possibility of further traps. That may change…
especially if Vodak scents Solar blood.
VODAK AND THE REALITY ENGINES
The Mountain Folk had few options in binding
Vodak: They decided that nothing less than a city
could distract the hekatonkhire long enough for them
to cast their spells, and few cities connected to Creation’s
underways. Storytellers might decide, however,
that it was no coincidence the Jadeborn sacrificed a
city stocked with reality engines. Conceivably, the
Mountain Folk knew about the secret devices, used
Vodak’s attack as cover to seize them and re-tuned
them to supercharge their spells. Characters who
discover the reality engines and remove them to use
against the Wyld could unwittingly release Vodak
on Creation.
Storytellers might prefer instead that the Mountain
Folk did not know about the reality engines. In
this alternative, if the Mountain Folk had conferred
with the Solar Deliberative, they could have lured the
hekatonkhire into a trap: Once Vodak was between
the reality engines, these mighty artifacts would have
created a space that was too real for the spectral horror
to exist. But that didn’t happen, and Six Gates died
because of the bitter history between the Jadeborn
and the Sun’s Chosen.
Either choice presents opportunities for Storytellers.
Decide for yourself which (if either) is true.
36
RESETTLEMENT
The Great Contagion did not affect the City of
the Mountain Gateway, because nothing lived there. If
the invading Fair Folk
noticed the empty subterranean
city, they did not enter.
A century after the Contagion, though, a band
of refugees fled North, beset by plague, starvation and
savage Wyld barbarians. Their God-Blooded leader,
Bethan Redeye, led
them through the Black Crag
Mountains in hopes of finding safety in some whaling
village on the White Sea. Instead they found a cave that
turned out to be a minor tunnel into the abandoned
city. As an alternative to starving, freezing or being
eaten by Wyld barbarians, the uncanny city looked
pretty good. They
named the city Gethamane—
Old Realm for “Sanctuary,” in hopes that naming
it thus in the language of Heaven might provide
a good omen.
The refugees lived off whatever game they could
catch in the mountains until they discovered the
city’s magical Gardens. Fortunately, the Gardens
are remarkably easy to operate. Within
a month, the Gardens produced edible fungi
and moss and the refugees became settlers.
Not even the
discovery of the dangers in the
lower tunnels could persuade them to leave. Bethan
Redeye worked out a system of allocating daily shares
of food from the Gardens and whatever hunters and
gatherers found outside. This system eventually became
known as the Dole. Life was still hard, though, for the
Gethamanians had little with which to work
besides wood, leather, bone and stone.
COMING
OF THE GUILD
For many years, the rest of Creation
did not know about Gethamane. That
changed when the Guild started sending
caravans into the North. One caravan
met a group
of hunters from Gethamane.
The caravan’s factor quickly realized that the
subterranean city would make an excellent base
for trading ventures through the North. He also
saw the Gethamanians’ lack of outside sources
of food, clothing and other commodities.
Bethan Redeye (then in her 70s, and still
leading the Gethamanians) traded food
supplies and animal pelts for cloth, spices
and metal goods, beginning the city’s
partnership with the Guild… but she
didn’t let the Guild know about the
buried Gardens. (The Guild found out
eventually, of course.)
To
keep the Guild from subverting
and
absorbing Gethamane, Bethan
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CHAPTER THREE • THE CITY UNDER THE MOUNTAIN 37
made the Dole contingent on labor for the city. What’s more,
she decreed that no one could stay in the city for more than
a month unless a Gethamanian family adopted them and
they entered the Dole’s labor register. Adopted citizens could
pay in jade or goods instead of labor, though. The system
discouraged Guildsmen from building strong connections
in Gethamane, and the ones who did paid dearly for the
privilege of long-term residence.
Bethan Redeye died at age 93, survived by two husbands
and a dozen children. She trained all her children in administration,
but named her second son Gerath as her heir.
The office of Master or Mistress of Gethamane has stayed
in Bethan’s line ever since.
TO THE PRESENT
Gethamane grew slowly but steadily. In time, it formed
relationships with other Northern societies, usually with the
Guild as go-between. In RY 586, this policy drew Gethamane
into a trade war with the nascent Haslanti League. On the
whole, though, Gethamane enjoyed a remarkably placid history.
Its people have no desire to conquer others—that would
mean leaving the mountain. No one else, not even the Empress,
ever found an effective way to attack Gethamane.
The disappearance of the Empress and the rise of the
Bull of the North troubles some Gethamanians. The current
Mistress of Gethamane, Katrin Jadehand, and her advisors
draw up contingency plans for situations ranging from an
attack by the Bull to a takeover bid by the Guild. Most
Gethamanians, however, figure that the city can ride out any
crisis the way it always has before: Expel any troublesome
outsiders, shut the impregnable doors, live off the Gardens
and wait a few years. They don’t like to remember that the
greatest threat to Gethamane has always come from the
endless dark tunnels underneath.
GEOGRAPHY
Gethamane does not pretend to control any territory
beyond the slopes of its own mountain, but its hunters and
gatherers see most of what happens within the nearest 20
miles or so. The hunters sometimes venture farther, out of
the mountains and all the way to the White Sea shore.
Sheltered valleys within the mountains sometimes
hold patches of taiga that the Gethamanians cultivate and
harvest with care—a tree can take 50 years to grow 10 feet
high. Tundra covers the lower mountain slopes with hardy
lichen, moss and patches of grass and herbs. The icy upper
slopes are nearly barren. This far into the North, in a direct
line from the Elemental Pole of Air, winter lasts much of the
year and the growing season is just three months long.
THE SUBTERRANEAN CITY
Everything important about Gethamane is underground.
The city consists of five layers: the Temple District at the
top; the Upper Ring below that; the central Guild District;
the Outer Ring, by far the largest sector of the city; and the
Garden District, with the Gardens themselves at the center.
Proximity to the source of the Dole makes the Garden
District the most prestigious sector of Gethamane, while the
Upper Ring’s distance renders it the least desirable place to
live in the city.
ENTERING GETHAMANE
The north and south sides of Gethamane’s mountain
hold sets of immense steel doors, a foot thick and gleaming
the distinctive hues of jade and orichalcum alloys: pale blue
in the north and reddish in the south. They are immune to
all Shaping effects, whether sorcery, Charms or the powers
of the Fair Folk. Inside, large wheels move stout bars to lock
or unseal the gates.
Beyond each gate stretches a tunnel 50 yards long, 10
yards wide and 10 yards high. The tunnel ends in a large
antechamber with heavy portcullises of orichalcum-infused
adamant at either end. Guards constantly man these posts.
They never raise both portcullises at the same time. Cunning
mechanisms, activated from the guard post, are intended
to collapse the entrance tunnels in the event of a breach.
(Obviously, these have never been tested.)
The antechamber guards record the names and brief
descriptions of every visitor to Gethamane. Free visitors must
pay a silver dinar to enter. Slaves pay half a dinar (a concession
to the Guild). Visitors short of cash can register to pay
through labor: Plenty of menial tasks always need doing, such
as cleaning passages. Slave caravans usually pay for the slaves’
entrance in this manner. No one enters the city without registration,
though. Guards quickly move in to capture anyone
who makes a ruckus, while drumbeats signal for reinforcements
and a runner races to the Guard’s headquarters.
About half a mile further up the mountain, a dozen
small tunnels lead from the icy slope to clusters of chambers
and from there to the Temple District and Upper Ring.
These passages are all well camouflaged. Over the centuries,
the Gethamanians also installed a variety of locking
cast-iron doors, false tunnels, dropfalls and other traps for
uninvited visitors. The mountainside chambers bear various
THE MISSING ENTRANCES
What happened to the eastern and western
entrances to the City Under the Mountain? They
still exist. Landslides covered them long ago, but the
early explorers soon found the passages to them. Some
settlers proposed excavating these entrances, but the
Gethamanians eventually decided to leave them hidden.
In fact, they walled off the tunnels and plastered
over the walls. Only the Mistress and members of her
advisory Council know about the spare entrances. If
something should prevent the Gethamanians from
using any other exit from the city, they can excavate
the buried gateways in a matter of days.
38
inscriptions in a script unlike that found anywhere else in the
city. Centuries ago, a visiting savant of the Realm identified
it as the High Holy Speech of the Dragon Kings, and chiefly
consisting of heretical prayers to the Unconquered Sun.
CONSTRUCTION
Most Gethamanian tunnels are square or rectangular.
The floors and ceilings are the mountain’s own dark gray stone,
plain and slightly rough. Other forms of stone or concrete
sometimes cover the walls. Smaller rooms tend to be plain, but
intricate and beautiful geometric carvings adorn the walls of
larger passages and chambers. Some rooms have stone doors;
others have new makeshift doors of wood or leather.
Gethamane’s current population exceeds that of the
old City of the Mountain Gateway. Many Gethamanians
live in apartments formed by partitioning larger chambers
or passages. Wealthy families mark their compound with
screens of metal or elaborately painted wood. The poor make
do with makeshifts such as leather, cloth, paper or scraps of
wood salvaged from a merchant’s cart.
UTILITIES
Large crystals of pale violet set in the walls and ceiling
emit a clear white light. The crystals glow brightly during the
day outside and dim when night falls. Still, the crystals stay
bright enough for most people to continue working. Guards
can patrol, farmers can work in the Gardens, merchants can
haggle and artisans can work on all but the most demanding
tasks. Gethamane stays active all day and all night. People
sleep to fit their work schedule.
Gethamanians cover the crystals if they want darkness,
but few people outside the visitors’ section ever do so. Most
Gethamanians are used to constant light: True darkness
frightens them. Damaging the crystals is a major offense.
Gethamanians learned centuries ago that removing a crystal
from its setting darkens it forever.
For water, Gethamane has at least four large public
fountains on each level. Citizens draw off water as needed.
The Outer Ring additionally has two still-working bathhouses
whose large, tiled pools magically heat the water in them.
Two others no longer function. Unfortunately, most of the
city’s internal plumbing corroded to uselessness during the
long vacancy. Gethamanians make do with chamber pots
and rather stinky non-flushing commodes.
THE UNDERWAYS
At least a dozen tunnels descend from the Garden District
and the Outer Ring into deeper layers, called the underways.
Rounded tubes and irregular caverns replace Gethamane’s
square corridors and circular or rectangular chambers. The
rock darkens from gray to black. The highest layers of the
underways continue the concentric circular design of the
city, but the deeper reaches become twisting, apparently
random tunnels and caverns with no limit ever discovered.
The underways have no light crystals.
People do not live in the underways, but horrible and
deadly creatures sometimes emerge from them to attack
the people of Gethamane. Every entrance to the underways
has a gate of iron bars—but that doesn’t stop every
potential intruder.
Despite the danger, people sometimes come long
distances to visit the underways. Sometimes they return
with treasures: strange artifacts, jewels—such as vibrantly
violet diamonds—and rare ores hacked from the walls of
distant caverns. Explorers even find small quantities of
soulsteel. Sometimes, of course, explorers do not return
at all. Gethamane’s leaders permit these explorations, in
return for half of whatever valuables the explorers bring
out of the underways.
SOCIETY
Gethamane is one of Creation’s most orderly societies.
The security of the Dole keeps Gethamanians in their city,
but organizing the production and distribution of so much
food from a single source requires extensive control of people’s
lives. Gethamanians register their occupations and record
every hour of labor to justify their daily ration of fungus
from the Gardens. What the clerks don’t know, spies must
discover, for Gethamane cannot afford any disruption. Any
civil unrest could not only leave people starving, it could
leave the city vulnerable to invasion from below.
Like most societies, Gethamane has its divisions of class,
wealth and occupation. It has a literally stratified society.
The wealthiest Gethamanians live nearest the all-important
Gardens in the city’s lowest level. Middle-class citizens
chiefly dwell in the Outer Ring. The Upper Ring receives
Gethamane’s poor.
Six great divisions of labor, based on activities vital
for the city’s survival, provide an alternative set of social
LOST MAGITECH
For an Old Realm metropolis, Gethamane shows
a distinct lack of Essence-powered conveniences.
Only the light-crystals and the Gardens remain,
for only they were both durable enough to resist
Vodak’s passage and impossible for the Shogunate
to remove. (In the centuries when the city was
sealed, creatures from the underways might also
have scavenged the city.)
Nevertheless, the city is woven with hidden
Essence accumulators and conduits, which all still
function. Of the tens of thousands of jade-alloy plugs
that once dispensed the Essence, only a few hundred
remain (mostly in the Temple District and Garden
District). These can still power any magitech device
capable of connecting to them, as if each was a onedot
hearthstone. Essence-channeling people cannot
use the plugs: They function only for devices.
CHAPTER THREE • THE CITY UNDER THE MOUNTAIN 39
classes or interest groups that cut across divisions of income.
The farmers maintain the magical Gardens. Hunters and
gatherers bring additional food and other commodities from
outside. The Guard preserves civic order and defends against
the monsters of the underways. Artisans fashion the tools
and implements needed for daily life. Merchants trade with
the Guild and other outsiders. A large administration of
clerks and bureaucrats keeps everyone else working together
efficiently—or at least tries. Gethamanians often follow the
same occupation as their parents.
THE PEOPLE
Gethamanians do not look like other Northerners.
At least half the people never go outside, giving their skin
an unnatural pallor. Only the hunters and gatherers, who
must spend much of their time outdoors, show color in their
cheeks, roughened skin or other signs of exposure to sun
and weather.
A hundred yards of insulating stone and the heat of
80,000 bodies keep Gethamane warm. Within the city,
SECRETS OF THE UNDERWAYS
The underways are not entirely natural. The
Mountain Folk used to inhabit the upper layers, and
someone familiar with the Jadeborn can recognize the
workmanship of these tunnels and chambers. (Incidentally,
this is why the Gethamanians cannot simply wall
off the underways: The City of the Mountain Gateway’s
air circulation system extended to the Mountain Folk
districts of the city. Sealing the tunnels would disrupt
that system, eventually rendering the entire city uninhabitable.
Early Gethamanians learned this the hard
way.) Many of the artifacts found in the underways are
Mountain Folk workmanship.
Races and creatures of which humanity knows almost
nothing, such as the centipede-like and savagely
bestial cthritae and the eldritch underfolk, shaped other
parts of the underways. Most of these “darkbrood” are
more or less hostile to humans while entities such as
the Leech Gods are utterly malignant. Vodak’s presence
subtly draws the most malevolent of these creatures and
inflames them with hatred of Gethamane; but most of
the gems and ores found by explorers come from mines
initiated by underdwellers. Some of the creatures that
attack Gethamane, however, are underdwellers slain
and reconstructed by Vodak. The hekatonkhire itself
created the soulsteel found in certain underways, as the
intensity of its necrotic Essence transforms veins of iron
ore when it passes.
Scroll of Fallen Races is the principal source of
information about the Mountain Folk. See also Dreams
of the First Age: Book Two—Lords of Creation, pages
118–121 for brief treatments of the Mountain Folk and
underfolk, while The Books of Sorcery, Vol. IV—The
Roll of Glorious Divinity I describes the monstrous Leech
Gods on pages 69–70.
40
Gethamanians dress lightly. Most citizens wear cotton or
silk robes or tunics and trousers. Guards wear tunics and
trousers under their armor, though they also wear boots
instead of the usual soft slippers. Farmers wear simple
brown robes. Hunters and gatherers, of course, need heavy
wool, fur and leather when they go outside. Regardless
of occupation, Gethamanians prefer deep colors, grays,
black or brown. They reserve brightly hued clothing for
the bedchamber.
FAMILIES AND ADOPTION
Family and class intertwine in Gethamane. The prosperous
folk of the Outer Ring and Garden District generally
belong to clans who number in the hundreds and occupy
large sectors of tunnels and chambers. The poorer folk of the
Upper Ring still manage to live as extended families with
dozens of aunts, uncles, cousins and kin all together. Quite
simply, it takes a degree of wealth to acquire enough space
for a family to stay together; but a family that stays together
can also economize through hand-me-down clothing, stacking
relatives in bunk beds instead of renting more space and
similar expedients. The truly poor live in whatever disused
corners of the city they can find. Their children are lucky if
they can stay with their parents until adulthood. Many waifs
make their own way in the city because their parents are too
poor to care for them.
Gethamanians reckon descent through the female line,
though a woman’s current husband is legally the father of all
her children. Families often adopt children too, a custom that
began as a way to make sure that orphans—future workers—
would survive and to provide childless couples with heirs to
care for them in their old age. Now the custom has a life
of its own, and most large families include a few adopted
members. Adoption ends all ties to the former family, legally
and (Gethamanians hope) emotionally.
Gethamane doesn’t treat unions between cousins
as incest but forbids unions between adopted siblings.
Constant adoption prevents serious inbreeding, but many
tragic plays deal with youths who fall in love with adopted
siblings. (Such plays usually end with murderous rampages
and suicide, or one lover nobly choosing exile. Comedies
end with one lover adopted into a different family, making
their marriage permissible.)
When a Gethamanian of humble birth shows great skill
and dedication, a wealthy and socially prominent family may
adopt her. Not only does this provide Gethamane with a
unique form of social mobility, it prevents the leading families
from becoming stagnant and complacent.
Most citizens are known by their personal name followed
by a family name. For extra formality, Gethamanians give
a person’s name followed by “of the such-and-such family.”
Distinguished Gethamanians add a descriptive epithet, the
way Bethan was called Redeye or the current Mistress Katrin
is called Jadehand for the martial prowess she showed during
her youth as a Guard.
LEISURE
Citizens who perform sufficient labor to earn their Dole
can do whatever they want with any spare time. Respectable
pastimes include quiet exercise, productive crafts (the current
fad is carving imported driftwood), watching morally uplifting
plays and writing pastiches of barbarian epics about honor
and virtue. Gethamanians also enjoy music, favoring wind
instruments or soft string instruments. Music never includes
drums: Such instruments are reserved for the Guard’s use.
Lives constrained by tunnel walls, crowded families,
dependence on the Dole and vigilance against invading
horrors result in many Gethamanians feeling the need for
stronger and stranger release from tension. Behind closed
doors (or pulled screens) they take a wide variety of drugs,
from imported opium and qat to hallucinogenic local mushrooms.
Casual sex, quite outside of marriage, is also common.
Some Gethamanians seek pain instead of pleasure, leading
to private sessions of torture between consenting (or paying)
adults. Scarification is currently fashionable, sometimes
undertaken using drugs to intensify the pain.
Gethamanians are quite strict, though, that indecorous
amusements not leave a mark or disturb the neighbors. Even
the young who want to shock their parents keep their scars
or welts hidden beneath clothing, so they can show a placid,
pale and unmarked face in public. Likewise, Gethamanians
only complain about a neighbor who copulates with imported
goats if he doesn’t keep the noise down. The great unwritten
law of Gethamane is simply this: Don’t make a fuss. Don’t
disturb the functioning of the city. And, don’t be loud. Many
ears are listening… and no matter what you do or where you
do it, you want to hear the distant alarm-drum or the nearby
hiss or scuttling that means the horrors are loose and you
must run or fight for your life.
FOREIGNERS
While Gethamane has its poor, people from outside
the city form the true underclass. By law, foreigners can
stay in Gethamane for just one month a year, and they are
strongly encouraged to stay in the Guild District. (Visitors
who wander soon find Guards asking, with edged politeness,
if they are lost. Visitors who wander near the Gardens find
Guards drawing steel on them.) Shopkeepers overcharge
them. Other Gethamanians treat them rudely. Even the
beggars who smile and plead for coins then sneer and mock
when no outsiders watch them. Foreigners stand out. They
lack the subterranean pallor, the clothes, the accent and ways
of speaking that characterize a Gethamanian.
The only way a foreigner can stay indefinitely in
Gethamane is for a native family to adopt them. Even
marriage does not suffice: Gethamane does not recognize
marriages to outsiders. Someone must attest that she takes
the foreigner as a son or daughter. The adopted outsider
then must register for the Dole and turn in timesheets that
prove her daily labor, just like every other citizen. Such
adopted citizens still endure chaffing and snubs for a while,
CHAPTER THREE • THE CITY UNDER THE MOUNTAIN 41
but they eventually learn to fit in and other Gethamanians
learn to recognize them.
Very few foreigners win adoption into Gethamanian
society. Families reserve adoption as a reward for outsiders
who make themselves truly beloved or who perform
extraordinary services for the city. The Guild has tried for
centuries to get agents adopted into Gethamane. So far,
the result has been not the subversion of Gethamane but
the disgrace of any family the Guild bribed or deluded into
performing the adoption.
The harvest goes to depots where the farmers issue
the Dole. Minor administrators check the identity of each
claimant and issue the requisite amount of food for the
citizen’s family. Several Guards stand watch at every depot.
These parts of the Garden District stay constantly busy, with
queues of people waiting for the Dole and actors, musicians
and other entertainers hoping to make a bit of silver by
amusing them.
The core of the Gardens holds a knot of small, oddly
shaped caves with a pedestal in the center. The fungi overflow
the trays here to cover the floor and walls, though never the
pedestal. Glyphs engraved on the pedestal make the Garden’s
basic operation obvious to anyone who studies them. Back
in the first Age, a Dragon-Blooded manager of the Gardens
wrote these instructions using the Craft Icon Charm (see
The Manual of Exalted Power—The Dragon-Blooded,
p. 130). Advanced procedures (involving alchemical treatments,
special lighting conditions and the like) enable the
Gardens to produce any sort of vegetable matter, but these
are scribed on the walls in ordinary Old Realm script—and
bioengineering jargon that few people in the Second Age
could possibly understand.
Over the centuries, the Gethamanians figured out that
this cave is a powerful manse (Earth ••••), whose power is
entirely devoted to fueling the Gardens’ magical fecundity.
It has no known hearthstone.
GUILD AMBITIONS
In case it needs to be said, the Guild wants Gethamane.
The Guild already uses the city as its hub for
commerce in the Far North. The residency rules, however,
inhibit factors from building long-term business
relationships. Over the centuries, many factors have
drawn up plans for using the secure location and food
supply of Gethamane as the anchor for a commercial
empire in the North. For instance, one plan calls for
using troops from Gethamane to secure the bay to the
North and turn it into a home port for an ice ship fleet
that could contest Haslanti dominance in the White
Sea. Such plans remain idle fancies, however, unless
the Guild can bend Gethamane to its will.
MAKING A LIVING
However strange Gethamane seems to outsiders, its
people still need to eat, craft tools and otherwise secure their
livelihoods—even if they do things a little differently.
FARMING
The Gardens occupy a complex of long, dark caves.
The entrances have light crystals, but the Gardens themselves
are dark except for faint luminous streaks that mark
the edges of paths and growing fields. Various sorts of fungi
grow in shallow, bathtub-sized trays set in the floor. Only
a few trays are cracked and no longer function. The entire
circular array of chambers is two miles wide—probably the
most productive acreage in Creation. The dung and offal
that the farmers dump in the trays are wholly inadequate to
sustain the mushrooms and other fungi that grow with unnatural
speed to feed tens of thousands of people every day.
Despite the unsavory fertilizer, the farmers keep the rest of
the Gardens swept and scrubbed spotlessly clean.
The farmers do not speak much as they work. Some
farmers push barrows full of dung through the narrow
paths between trays, then spread this fertilizer over the
chosen beds. Other farmers add bits of the fungi they
intend to grow or add water from wheeled tanks. A few
hours later, the farmers trundle past with a new set of
barrows for the harvest.
THE FARMER CULT
The Gethamanians do not realize that the Gardens’
manse is damaged. It hasn’t suffered any sort of power
failure, but spending too much time in the Gardens
can affect a person’s mind. Affected people become
obsessed with providing the Gardens with… richer
compost. A secret cult among the farmers conducts
human sacrifices. Now and then, a criminal sentenced
to work in the Gardens suffers a “fatal accident” that
leaves him spread-eagled over a tray, bled dry and
emasculated before the body is discovered.
Only senior farmers participate in the cult. The
Mistress and several other leading citizens know about
the cult but choose not to get involved. The older
farmers believe they must propitiate the Gardens and
the gods of fungi in this manner. Other Gethamanians
believe the farmers and fear to change any of their
traditions. An expert in geomancy or Craft (Genesis)
who examines the Gardens’ instructions can tell that
the sacrifices are completely unnecessary.
HUNTING AND GATHERING
The hunters and gatherers supply far less food than the
Gardens, but other Gethamanians value their contribution
a great deal. The Gethamanians could live exclusively on
42
fungi from the Gardens (and have in the past, for years at a
time) but the hunters and gathers supply flavor. The hunters
bag reindeer, ducks and other game. The gatherers collect
edible lichen, berries, bulbs from winter-hardy herbs and
other foodstuffs. Hunters and gatherers can keep a fifth of
what they bring to the city, to feed to their own family or sell.
The rest goes to the Garden District depots for distribution
as part of the Dole.
Over the centuries, the hunters and gatherers absorbed
just about every trade that involves bringing raw materials
into Gethamane. For instance, Gethamanians consider logging
a form of gathering.
Some Gethamanians keep sheep and goats. During the
brief summer, their herds graze on the mountain slopes.
The animals spend the long winter inside the city with
their owners, though. Gethamanians usually pen these
animals in sections of the Upper Ring, among the poor.
Their owners harvest huge amounts of hay to feed their
beasts over the winter; as a result, animal husbandry is also
treated as gathering.
Five large warehouse-chambers, spaced around the Upper
Ring, are kept cold with ice brought from outside. The
city owns these chilled warehouses. Any Gethamanian can
store food here, at a cost of one-twentieth the food’s value
(or of the food itself). Hunters and gatherers often use this
option, since keeping large amounts of valuable meat or
vegetables in one’s home invites thievery. Plenty of Guards
patrol the warehouses to protect their contents. The corridors
near the warehouses bustle with merchants, beggars,
hunters, gatherers and other citizens trying to strike deals.
Wealthy Gethamanians can enjoy fresh reindeer steaks with
cloudberry jelly. The poor hustle for suspiciously overripe
snowshoe hare carcasses. It’s no accident that the poor folk
of the Upper Ring suffer rates of food poisoning much higher
than in the rest of Gethamane.
Mining, too, is considered a form of gathering. Gethamane
operates a few small mines for copper, salt and mica.
The Guild operates several more, and Gethamane still gets
most of its metal from the Guild.
COMMERCE
Guards direct all visitors to the Guild District of Gethamane,
the site of most of the city’s commerce. Each of the 20
passages to this district has a Guard post. Three large central
caves hold the principal markets. The next rings out serve
as warehouses. Beyond them lie accommodations for visitors
and whatever Gethamanians (chiefly merchants and artisans)
choose to live near the places where they trade. The Guild
claims a large sector for its own caravans. Lesser merchants
and miscellaneous travelers rent rooms from the Guild or
from Gethamanian owners. Some visitors just camp in the
warehouses or disused corridors.
The Guard watches the Guild District closely. Guards
at each entrance keep careful records of everyone who enters
and leaves, and what they bring to the city. In daily sweeps
through the district, the Guard seeks and removes people
who overstay their one-month welcome. Guards also remind
visitors who have a day or two to go that they should prepare
to leave soon. The Guild District sees a constant turnover
as traders come and go.
THE THREE MARKETS
As its name suggests, the Food Market sells food, in
bulk or retail. Many enterprising citizens have set up snack
bars and cooking stalls. The large stalls for imported raw,
processed or preserved foods occupy the center of the cave.
Further out lie smaller stalls for cooking services or luxury
foods (including wine and beer). The northern end of the
great circular chamber holds stalls for drugs and medicines.
The largest stall belongs to the city of Gethamane itself. It
sells food from the fungal gardens at a low price to undercut
most of the other food stalls, and bring more revenue to the
city government.
The Metal Market deals in goods made of metal or
stone, both raw materials and finished products. Naturally,
weapons and armor make up a good bit of the business.
Some artisans set up shop in the market itself to forge
items to order, keeping the market both smoky and
noisy. The Metal Market is also the traditional spot to
sell treasures recovered from the underways, even in the
(admittedly rare) cases when such items are not mineral
in nature.
The Wood Market began by selling timber, firewood
and furniture. It then branched out into cloth and by now
has become a catchall for any commodity or service that
doesn’t deal with food or metal. Knowledge is the Wood
Market’s most distinctive trade: petty thaumaturges,
charm-sellers and diviners, guides to the city and the
surrounding countryside, books, and of course “true and
verifiable” maps to the underways. The Guard turns a blind
eye to such frauds, as Gethamanians believe that anyone
stupid enough to fall for such a scam deserves whatever
happens to him.
In contrast to Gethamane’s usual mania for control, the
city lets merchants hash out for themselves who parks their
COOKERY
Much of the Dole is simply washed, sliced,
spiced and eaten raw. Living underground limits
Gethamanian cooking: The ventilation system
cannot handle a lot of smoke. People often stir-fry
their food using dried grass for short bursts of intense
heat. They also pack slow-burning, nearly smokeless
fuel such as dried peat within a heavy crock and
place a smaller pot within it. Gethamanians often
freeze-dry foodstuff on the windswept mountain
heights, then reconstitute it by stewing it in such a
“Gethamane oven.”
CHAPTER THREE • THE CITY UNDER THE MOUNTAIN 43
stall where. The Guild naturally has the largest stalls in the
best locations. All stalls are made of wood. Some trading
groups arrange to use a stall in shifts as they enter and leave
the city, so they can keep a good location. Some stalls stay
in the same location for decades, which brings considerable
respect to their owners.
TRIBUNAL CAVE
The most opulent chamber in the Guild District is
reserved for consultations between Guild factors and local
officials, or any merchants whose wealth or power earn
them the Guild’s respect. Ornate gilded tables, chairs and
divans, costly silks and brocades, ornaments of porcelain
and jade and other fripperies serve to impress visitors
with the Guild’s wealth. Costly liquors and exotic drugs
impair a visitor’s judgment in other ways. The Guild can
also bring in superb courtesans or anything or anyone else
needed to bedazzle or befuddle a target. Meetings range
from staid discussions of tariffs and commercial law to
wild debauches—with a contract and pen offered at a
strategic moment.
The Guild uses its own mercenaries to protect Tribunal
Cave, and keeps the city Guard away as much as possible.
Naturally, the Guard takes every excuse to search Tribunal
Cave. Indeed, the Guard takes any chance to ransack Guild
quarters in search of incriminating documents or other evidence
of misbehavior.
RELIGION AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Most Gethamanians are not very religious. They leave
such matters to priestly professionals. Gethamane’s own gods
make few demands—they haven’t even given their names—
and other gods show little interest in the City Under the
Mountain. Worshipers of other gods can set up shrines in the
Guild District. The city sets aside several rooms for visitors
to dress in whatever temporary temple trappings they want.
Only Immaculate shrines are not allowed—a centuries-old
holdover from an encounter with exceptionally high-handed
missionaries that went badly. Shrines are forbidden elsewhere
in the city (though the Guards ignore portable traveler’s
shrines unless they want an excuse to harass a visitor). As
long as worshipers do not break Gethamane’s civil laws, the
city government turns a blind eye.
TEMPLES TO UNKNOWN GODS
Gethamane’s temples consist of three spacious rooms near
the top of the mountain. Their walls bear jewel-encrusted
carvings of mountains and strange flying creatures. (The
decorations include tiny quantities of moonsilver, starmetal,
orichalcum and jade, but extracting a useful amount would
take days of very public effort.) Blue-white Essence fires burn
above the three circular altars.
People who enter the temples feel an eerie sense of being
watched, but no deity has ever manifested. Those who sleep in
44
a temple experience vivid, confusing dreams, often of frantic
searching or desperate flight. Some dreamers find answers to
questions that bothered them. This is the chief reason why
Gethamanians visit the temples. More likely, dreamers spend
the next few nights in sleepless anticipation or dread. A few
feel called to serve as priests. A very few wake in screaming
terror. They cannot remember their dreams but cannot bear
to spend another minute in the city. Gethamanians know
that such people may injure or kill themselves if kept from
escaping. Fortunately, they seem to recover their wits once
they depart and can no longer see the mountain.
Gethamanians do not become priests deliberately. The
priesthood began early in the settlement of Gethamane,
when a few loners who slept in the temples then told Bethan
Redeye that they had to serve in the temples instead of doing
other work. The first Mistress of Gethamane acquiesced. All
subsequent priests have been similarly dream-called. Priests
receive a share in the Dole equal to that of a mid-ranking
Guard or farmer.
Priests abandon their old lives. They offer flowers and
animal blood on the altars. Late at night, the priests cover
the temple floors with complex designs drawn in ink, colored
sand or, occasionally, their own blood, while chanting in an
unknown tongue. The priests cannot explain either their
mandalas or their liturgies, but they feel driven to perform
both. Afterward, they clean and polish the temples.
The acolytes themselves have no hierarchy. The Master
or Mistress of Gethamane appoints a High Priest or Priestess,
just so the city’s Council has a single person with which to
work. Gethamanians call the other priests Father or Mother,
regardless of their age.
In addition to propitiating Gethamane’s nameless gods
and assisting people who want to dream in the temples, the
priests act as exorcists. When Gethamanians feel that some
malign influence affects their lives, they call in a priest to
conduct banishing rituals. These ceremonies involve lots
of community participation. When the malign influence
is a grudge between neighbors, the shared ritual can help
ease the conflict. Yet, some priests study the thaumaturgical
Art of Warding and Exorcism (see The Books of
Sorcery, Vol. III—Oadenol’s Codex, pp. 141–144) in
case the malign influence is a rampaging demon or other
supernatural horror.
THE DEAD
By law, Gethamanians cremate their dead in the
Essence-fires of the temples. Families keep the ashes in small
ornamental boxes, scatter them on the mountain slope or add
them to the fertilizer for the Gardens. Some families do not
want to relinquish the bodies of their loved ones, however,
leading to a small industry of illicit embalming and taxidermy.
These families bribe suitable bureaucrats to attest to a body’s
cremation, then actually have the corpse preserved. Now
and then, an embalmed (or stuffed) corpse is discovered in
a hidden room or secreted in a family’s quarters. This always
leads to a search of the area for other bodies and the arrest of
everyone involved. No one knows the full extent of mortuary
crime, but it is especially common among the rich families
of Gethamane, who can afford the needed bribery and have
the space to hide their ancestors.
Despite this illicit ancestor reverence, Gethamane has
no true ancestor cult. This is because Gethamane has no
ghosts at all. Gethamanians accept this as normal.
SECRETS OF THE TEMPLES
The source of the chants and mandalas is obscure
but not unknowable: The liturgies are in High Holy
Speech, the language of the Dragon Kings. The temple
walls portray members of the Pterok breed of this
ancient, nearly extinct race. The inscriptions found
in the chambers used by the hunters and gatherers are
likewise written in this obscure tongue. The priests’
mandalas, however, come from the practices of the
Mountain Folk.
Each of the three temples houses a god of air, sky
and flight. The Solars who built Gethamane recruited
these three small gods to circulate the city’s air and
keep it fresh. When the City of the Mountain Gateway
died, the gods lost all their worshippers; the gods
found no help in Yu-Shan, for the other gods were
preoccupied with the Usurpation and losses among
their own worshipers. So the three gods waited in their
temples, alone and slowly going mad, but continuing
their duty.
The gods try to touch the minds of sleepers and
help them with their problems, but they aren’t very
good at it. Some dreamers catch a bit of the gods’
insanity and feel compelled to serve as their priests.
Others receive the gods’ memories of the First Age
city’s extermination by Vodak. This drives them mad
with the need to flee.
GHOSTS IN GETHAMANE
Few of the materialistic Gethamanians become
ghosts after death. They never last long if they do.
Vodak spawns numerous smaller versions of itself that
sweep through Gethamane’s counterpart in the Underworld,
and immaterially through the city in Creation.
Those with Essence senses (such as All-Encompassing
Sorcerer’s Sight) occasionally see a wash of silver move
swiftly through a room or corridor. The rush affects
nothing in the material world, but any immaterial
creature is most likely doomed. In the Underworld,
Vodak’s spawn devour any ghost within minutes.
CHAPTER THREE • THE CITY UNDER THE MOUNTAIN 45
THE EXALTED AND OTHER ESSENCE WIELDERS
Gethamanians do not much like the Terrestrial Exalted,
chiefly because of high-handed Immaculates and Dynasts. They
also know the danger of showing such dislike. The Dragon-
Blooded rarely stay in Gethamane for long, though. They have
bad dreams as the maddened gods clumsily try to warn them
and, through them, the long-dead Solar Deliberative.
The people have no experience with other Exalted—that
they know about—so they base their opinions on stories.
They fear the Lunar Exalted as patrons of the icewalkers and
other barbarians. The Bull of the North is distant but sounds
dangerous. Of course, Gethamanians have no knowledge of
the Sidereals. Other Exalted are too new for Gethamanians
to know about them. Any Exalted who visit Gethamane,
or Exalt among them, could determine how the people feel
about their kind for centuries to come.
Gethamane’s hunters and gatherers occasionally encounter
the Fair Folk. The tales of the survivors ensure the
Gethamanians’ thorough hatred and fear of the raksha. Fortunately
for Gethamane, the local Fair Folk have no desire to
enter a city that gives them the creeping horrors—not even
fae who normally might relish such a strange and dramatic
emotion. Fair Folk blame this aversion on the city’s jade
and orichalcum gates, not on quiescent reality engines or
an instinctual sense for Vodak’s presence.
Demons rarely enter Gethamane—most likely summoned
or sent there on a mission by a sorcerer or thaumaturge.
Gethamanians abhor demons as much as most people do.
Demons also seem to loathe Gethamane, and do not linger
even when they have the chance. They feel something immensely
darker and more dangerous than themselves lurking
nearby. Gods and elementals avoid the city for the same
reason, though none of these spirits can find the ultimate
source of the terrifying Essence.
Gethamane’s limited contact with supernatural creatures
means the city has almost no God-Blooded citizens or other
half-breed channelers of Essence. Gethamanians rarely try to
enlighten their own Essence either, due to their cultural isolation
and lack of any institution to encourage this practice.
The Guard wants to recruit thaumaturges for the enchantments,
talismans and alchemical medicines they can
provide. The city has few skilled thaumaturges, though.
Thaumaturgically proficient outsiders who want to join the
Guard can easily wangle adoption into a family with strong
traditions of Guard membership.
DISREPUTABLE FOLK
Most Gethamanians like to think of their society as
prosperous and orderly, controlled and smugly secure. Nevertheless,
the city has its poor, its discontented and indeed
its actively criminal.
THE JADE HOSPICE
Not far from the temples lies Gethamane’s largest charity
hospital, the Jade Hospice. Citizens who volunteer as a way
to earn their Dole, and minor lawbreakers who pay their debt
to society as unskilled labor or nursing staff, assist the staff
of priests and healers. The hospice sees a constant stream of
sick and injured poor people from the Upper Ring. The Jade
Hospice does not have the best-trained staff of Gethamane’s
hospitals, but it currently has the most reliable funding. Its
director, the matronly Enath Daur, comes from a leading
farmer family. She also holds a Council seat, where she works
to improve the lot of Upper Ring folk, or at least make sure
they are not further marginalized.
THE JANISSARY VAULT
Not everyone in Gethamane relies on the Guard for
their safety. The Janissary Vault, located in the Outer Ring,
supplies warriors, bodyguards and assorted muscle for hire. Its
owner, the melodramatically named Vaultmaster (and yes,
he goes masked) says that his service would never consider
doing anything against the laws of Gethamane. Nevertheless,
a sufficiently discreet client can arrange for any sort of
thuggery short of murder. Many people suspect the Janissary
Vault is a front for the Guild (mercenaries being one of the
Guild’s core businesses). The Guild would like to own the
Janissary Vault, but the business has stayed independent
since it began 50 years ago.
The Vault’s mercenaries are about evenly divided
between outsiders who managed to wangle adoption into
Gethamanian families, and Gethamanians who were expelled
from the Guard or who found its standards of courage and
discipline too difficult. Janissaries receive little respect, for
they are not duty-bound to run toward monsters. Gethamane’s
government does not accept Vault employment as any sort
of service to the city, greatly limiting their Dole ration.
Mistress Katrin and the Council would like an excuse to
shut down the Janissary Vault, or at least force it to register
every job and client.
THE PHILOSOPHY CELL
A collection of public meeting rooms in the Outer Ring
hosts an informal club of amateur intellectuals and pseudointellectuals.
Members range from young people who want
to pick up some radical ideas with which to shock their
parents, to careful scholars of Gethamane’s many mysteries.
In between are unlicensed thaumaturges, drug addicts,
devotees of self-created religions and people who just want
to argue. Most members are harmless and frivolous. A few
regulars are serious and capable savants, varying widely in
their ethics—from Serret of the Bethanites, a painstaking
amateur historian of the city, to the alchemist Tazar Pellan,
who tests his concoctions on people who want “mystical
experiences,” to Damaithe Yarni, a thaumaturge and closet
demonologist.
THE RAT’S NEST
A gang of juvenile thieves makes its clubhouse in an
abandoned, junk-filled storehouse in the eastern sector of
the Outer Ring. Most of the children come from middle- or
46
upper-class families and think that their “Society of Thieves”
is all a grand game organized by their leader, Jaxar. The
children commit petty thefts, pull pranks and generally
cause mischief.
The children know that Jaxar isn’t really a fellow child,
but they don’t think of her as really a grown-up, either. Jaxar
is a dwarf with a preternaturally youthful face… and she works
for the Guild. The children do not realize that the gossip
they pass to their young-old playmate goes to the Guild—
or that exposure of their naughty deeds could disgrace their
families. Jaxar watches their parents to gauge who she could
blackmail through their children’s misdeeds. She expects
to build a cadre of citizens in Gethamane’s upper class who
serve the Guild to avoid disgrace.
SEVENTH HALL
Despite their poverty, the Rasri family of dung-carriers,
sweepers and garbage pickers have held this set of chambers
in the Upper Ring for many years. They now use the Seventh
Hall as the meeting place for a conspiracy of other poor and
discontented Gethamanians. The conspirators are angry
with the city’s government and want to replace it with the
Guild. They imagine that they would get rich if they could
own slaves to do the drudgery they currently perform, and
that the Guild could make Gethamane the mightiest nation
of the North. Family patriarch and conspiracy leader Yftar
Rasri seeks Guild support for his conspiracy. So far, the Guild
rejects his advances as obvious attempts at entrapment.
Contents |
GOVERNMENT
Administering the Dole requires a small army of petty bureaucrats, who monitor every citizen’s activities to make sure that she deserves her share of the fungus gardens’ bounty.
In some ways, however, Gethamane’s government remains that of a small town. At its heart, the city’s government consists of a leader, an old, rich and powerful extended family, and a small group of cronies.
THE RULING CLASS
The descendants of Bethan Redeye still rule Gethamane. The city’s monarch, called the Master or Mistress, chooses a successor from the Bethanite clan—usually a son, daughter, niece or nephew, but sometimes from remote cousins. The monarch always must have a designated heir, though the designation can be changed at whim. In Gethamane’s only recorded coup attempt, the disgruntled Mineko Threebrand of the Guard tried poisoning all the then-Master’s close relatives. The Master quickly adopted three leading Gethamanians (all remotely descended from Bethan Redeye) as his offspring to replenish the clan. Today, the Bethanites number more than 2,000—all of them potential heirs. Most Bethanites work as administrators, magistrates, accountants and scribes. They form much of the city’s civil service. Bethanites often undergo basic training as guards or farmers as well, the better to deal with those important institutions. Indeed, custom holds that a Bethanite who wants to administer some aspect of city life should have practiced it as well. Most of all, though, Gethamane needs educated clerks and shrewd negotiators to distribute the Dole and deal with Guild. Some members of the clan choose occupations ranging from painter to swordsman, but they all start by learning arithmetic, reading and writing.
Gethamane’s current ruler is Katrin Jadehand, a woman in her 50s who has been Mistress for 10 years. She was both the previous Master’s choice and a popular favorite. Katrin spends a great deal of time pondering how best to assure her city’s stability and survival. While she pragmatically realizes that Gethamane might need to ally with some greater power, she would rather avoid this—and she will try not to accept any alliance that she cannot afford to break later.
THE INTELLIGENCERS
Everyone in Gethamane knows that Bethanite family members pass information to the city’s Mistress. To learn what citizens and visitors don’t want the government to know, the Mistress has spies called Intelligencers. Undercover informants are difficult to recruit, though. Adopted outsiders can’t pass for native Gethamanians, and the strong tradition of family loyalty means that few Gethamanians would serve the Mistress ahead of their own kin.
The Head Intelligencer, a man called Shakan who poses as a Deputy Almoner in the Dole administration, solves this problem through blackmail. His agents all watch for criminal activity. Shakan then threatens the criminal with exposure and attendant disgrace to her family. Once a blackmail victim works as an informer, she is caught: Gethamanians despise the Intelligencers, so an exposed agent suffers worse ostracism than she might have received from her original crime.
Shakan has agents throughout Gethamanian society. He has no agents among the priests, whose religious obsessions sever them from most aspects of mundane life. The Head Intelligencer has a few spies among foreign merchants, but he does not trust them very much. Shakan very much wants to recruit informants within the Guild, as he does not trust the merchant princes one bit.
THE COUNCIL
The Mistress of Gethamane appoints a committee of 15 advisors: three each from the city guards, the farmers, the hunters and gatherers, the artisans and the merchants. Bethan Redeye began the custom and now no one would dream of challenging it. The Council meets three times a month, though the Mistress can call for special sessions.
These advisors have no official power, but serving as the voices for their occupations gives Council members great prestige and influence. Any member of their interest group who wants to lobby the Mistress does it through his delegates. On the other hand, a shrewd Mistress knows that she must keep the five great factions happy, and so treats her Council with respect. Mistress Katrin often acts more as a mediator between the delegates than as an autocrat (and some past Masters and Mistresses became virtual puppets of powerful Councils).
Council members hold their posts until they die, resign or are fired by the city’s Mistress. When a faction loses a delegate, senior faction members offer the Mistress a list of possible replacements. The Mistress then selects a new Council member from the list. Vacancies on the Council result in a frenzy of politicking from the faction in question, from other Council members seeking the appointment of allies and from the Guild. In the event that all three of a faction’s posts fall vacant, the Mistress can appoint new delegates without consultation, as the city most likely faces an immediate crisis.
THE ADMINISTRATION
All of Gethamane’s government offices occupy the outer circles of the Garden District. Each location actually consists of several large rooms and corridors. Here, clerks keep the Dole lists and records of visitors to the city. The Council meets in one large chamber, adorned with portraits of past Masters and Mistresses. Citizens can visit the Hall of Records and Hall of Maps to check on property lines. (Outsiders can consult these records as well, for a small fee.) Magistrates resolve civil disputes and try criminal cases in the Courthouse.
Children who receive any education beyond basic literacy and arithmetic go to a school connected to the City Library.
Bethanites staff many of the government posts but at least a third of the clerks and officials come from other families.
Even more than the rest of Gethamane, the administrative areas stay busy all the time. Each shift of functionaries simply takes the desks vacated by the shift before them.
Children attend school in shifts as well, and mobs of children surge through the tunnels at each shift change. Only the Council doesn’t work around the clock, though sessions may last for days as members debate especially knotty or contentious issues.
The Garden District includes the rooms and offices of Gethamane’s ruler, passed from Master to Mistress for centuries. It’s a point of pride to change as little as possible from Bethan Redeye’s original sparse furniture and belongings.
LAW AND CRIME
Gethamane’s law centers on the Three Rules set down by Bethan Redeye. Both civil disputes and criminal trials often hinge on whether or how one of the Three Rules was broken.
THE FIRST RULE
Blood pays for blood, but it must serve the city: All crimes of personal assault shall be paid as debts to Gethamane, and Gethamane shall reimburse the victim in turn.
The First Rule covers all assaults on another person, from public brawling to rape or murder. Minor assaults are punished by fining or a period of forced labor. Half the proceeds go to the victim and half to the city (or all to the city when both parties are culpable, as when a quarrel escalates to a public fight and no one can prove who started it). Maiming, accidental death and rape result in major fining, a long period of hard labor, exile or some combination of the three. Murderers are condemned to permanent hard labor, exile or execution. A dead victim’s share of any restitution goes to her family. In cases of homicide, proof of self-defense or extreme provocation can reduce a sentence but not eliminate it completely: Gethamane cannot tolerate the loss of any citizen’s labor.
THE SECOND RULE
Jade pays for jade: All crimes of theft or other trespass on another’s goods shall be repaid twofold, once to the victim and once to the city.
This law covers all forms of theft, including forms of fraud such as giving short weight or delivering goods of lower quality than promised. Damaging a person’s possessions (including slaves) also falls under this law. Under the Second Rule, it’s a crime to charge outsiders less than a citizen of Gethamane — this is stealing from the city’s prosperity as a whole. The city’s magistrates and accountants measure losses to the last grain of jade and insist on precise repayment, though transactions use the Guild’s silver more often than jade.
THE THIRD RULE
What we have, we hold: All crimes of trespass on another’s domain shall be paid for by a gift of land in turn, or the Dole shall be remitted and the trespasser cast forth to starve.
If people who dislike each other cannot escape each other’s company, their enmity can escalate to murder. Gethamanians, therefore, value privacy as much as life and property, and trespass on another family’s territory becomes a serious crime. Gethamanians treat malicious gossip about another person’s activities as a form of trespass.
When two disputing parties share a property line, the penalty usually consists of moving that boundary by a foot or two to give the victim a section of the trespasser’s territory.
This results in many instances of two families sharing a room, with screens set up to give them an illusion of privacy. It can, indeed, be grounds for lawsuit to respond to anything one hears on the other side of such a screen… though noise of a sufficient volume (or sufficiently disturbing nature) that it cannot be ignored is also an offense. When disputants do not share a boundary, the city confiscates part of the trespasser’s property, then allows her family to “buy it back” and pays the resulting silver to the plaintiff’s family. Gethamanians are strict about privacy and property, but not insane.
The Guard can go anywhere in pursuit of a monster from the underways, and people fleeing a monster likewise have a right to cross another family’s property. (Indeed, a civic defense crisis trumps all questions of privacy and territory.) Families usually forgive trespass by children when a game of hide-and-seek gets out of hand (though their parents might be notified). Persistent trespass by older children can result in lawsuit, though, and the child’s family suffers significant disgrace.
Trespass becomes treason where the Gardens are concerned. Any citizen who helps outsiders enter the Gardens commits a crime comparable to murder, for they endanger the city itself.
TRIAL AND PUNISHMENT
Trials take place in the Courthouse, a set of variously-sized chambers. Three magistrates hear every case: a professional judge who is usually a Bethanite, a senior Guard and a senior farmer. The accused and the plaintiff both state their cases to the panel of judges. If a plaintiff cannot speak on her own behalf, a relative or Guard can become her advocate (the latter usually in cases of homicide). Gethamane’s courts accept information obtained by magic or bound demons. The three judges deliberate on the evidence, consult precedents and deliver a verdict and sentence. Any attempt to influence a judge, whether by bribery, threats or magic, is a major personal assault and punished accordingly.
Judges reserve execution as their ultimate sanction.
More often, a murderer, traitor or other major felon is blinded, branded and condemned to work in the Gardens for the rest of his life. (Which might not be that long, as such convicts become favorite victims of the farmer cult.)
Judges actually regard exile as a merciful punishment, and often use it to punish crimes of passion. An exile can even serve his sentence in Gethamane’s mines, and so remain loosely connected to the city. Temporary exile usually lasts five years. After that, the criminal can resume his place in the city and among his family.
SLAVERY IN GETHAMANE
Even though lawbreakers can be sentenced to a life of hard labor in the Gardens, Gethamane forbids individuals from owning slaves. Any labor must be hired, and hiring an outsider carries a hefty tariff. Gerath, the second Master, made this law so that citizens could find work and to forestall slave uprisings. Some merchants lobby to repeal this law, but most Gethamanians want to preserve tradition. They identify slavery with the Guild, and while Gethamanians know the Guild is necessary, they also know the Guild is not their friend. Gethamane’s law does not emancipate slaves who enter the city, however. Therefore, Guild caravans regularly bring coffles of slaves through Gethamane. The Second Rule applies to slaves within the city, and so the Guard can prevent serious cruelty to slaves. If Guards witness beatings or other mistreatment, they can and do arrest everyone in sight on charges of “damaging another person’s property.” The owner of the slaves then must testify that he was damaging his own property, or ordered another person to do so on his behalf. No one suffers any punishment in such cases, but the confusion and delay caused by the trial does not help a slave caravan’s profits or reputation.
Under the Second Rule, Gethamanians cannot claim animals that escape their pens: They must return the beast to its owner. The Guard, however, seldom chooses to help owners find slaves who escape in Gethamane. An escaped slave who is adopted into a citizen family also leaves the Second Rule’s purview, as she becomes a citizen herself.
Gethamane includes a few abolitionists who encourage slaves to escape and come to them for adoption, though the city government does not encourage this practice.
FOREIGN RELATIONS Gethamane has little direct contact with the rest of Creation. Few Gethamanians travel, and few other people want to visit this remote bastion of civilization. No one can conquer Gethamane, and Gethamane cannot threaten anyone else. Most Gethamanians know very little about the rest of Creation. Gethamane’s Mistress and Council now believe, however, that they must learn a great deal more about their neighbors… particularly the Bull of the North.
The Realm never troubled Gethamane. Dynasts occasionally visited to seek treasure in the underways, and far-traveling legions occasionally bought provisions at Gethamane, but the city never paid tribute. The Empress once commissioned her strategoi to evaluate Gethamane for conquest: These worthies concluded that the feat was possible for the Dynasty but not worth the trouble. Past Masters and Mistresses did not flaunt their defiance of the Realm, so the Empress never felt the need to make an example of the city.
Since the Empress’s disappearance, no one in the Realm pays much attention to the remote subterranean city. Whitewall is the closest that Gethamane comes to an ally. Neither city has many other neighbors (that are human, at least). Gethamane’s leaders cultivate merchants from Whitewall just to remind the Guild that they can be replaced; and it’s often cheaper to buy Whitewall’s metalwork directly than through Guild intermediaries.
Gethamane has an unfortunate history with the Haslanti League, and Guildsmen still disparage the Haslanti. Nevertheless, the Mistress and Council now seek better relations with the League as another alternative to the Guild.
Every year or two, an icewalker tribe follows a mammoth or reindeer herd through Gethamane’s territory.
Gethamane’s hunters pick off straggling beasts, which the icewalkers do not like. On the other hand, Gethamanians sometimes trade with icewalkers for meat, furs, hides, horn and ivory; but much of this trade goes through the Guild. (The walrus-hunters along the coast form a notable exception. Gethamane’s hunters trade with these barbarians directly.)
Even the isolationist Gethamanians hear stories about the Bull of the North, and what they hear frightens the city’s leaders. They don’t credit Realm propaganda about “Anathema,” but anyone who can massacre Dynasts—hitherto the city’s standard for powerful, erratic individuals—is a danger the Gethamanians don’t want to face. Some Council members believe the city can shut its doors and defy the Bull, just as it has defied every other threat. Others are not so sure, fearing that the Anathema warlord could break the gates like a paper screen. They all agree that Gethamane must learn more and acquire whatever power and allies it can find.
THE GUARD
Gethamane has no army as such, only a Guard that keeps order and defends against creatures from the underways. At 5,000 soldiers, the Guard is quite a formidable force for a small city—but the Guard has no experience operating in groups larger than the 20-man platoons. Guards wear red lamellar armor and carry target shields blazoned with a white mountain on a red field. They favor heavy weapons such as sledges, great axes and pickaxes—the sort of weapons that can hack, pierce and crush eldritch horrors. When riots erupt in the Guild District or elsewhere, half the responding Guards carry leather-padded clubs, but the Guard never operates without the threat of lethal force and big damage.
The Guard’s overall commander occupies a Guardhall in the Garden District. Here the Guard trains, gathers to organize hunts for invading monsters and imprisons lawbreakers.
Unlike the subdued tones of the rest of Gethamane, bright red pennants mark all entrances to the Guardhall. Doors in this complex are always high-quality iron.
The current Captain of the Guard, Golden Stag, is of icewalker descent, abandoned by his tribe as a child and adopted by a poor Gethamane family. Every other sentence or so, he reminds people how he worked his way up the ranks. Golden Stag is now in his 50s, a good leader of soldiers and convinced he has plenty of time before he needs to train a successor.
Beneath Golden Stag are the North Gate and South Gate Captains. The South Gate Captain, Mindros Yami, stands out for his refusal to accept bribes from merchants.
The North Gate Captain, Gavne Wheelright, came from an artisan family but joined the Guards to avenge the death of his wife at the claws of underdwellers. A traveling Immaculate monk also converted Gavne. He lobbies (though not loudly) for the Council to permit an Immaculate shrine. These three officers command various district and shift lieutenants, and Guard posts are spread throughout the city.
Each Guard post has a large drum mounted on the wall.
In any disturbance, one soldier beats a signal on the drum to alert other posts of the nature and location of the trouble, and to call for backup if this seems prudent. In the case of major disturbances such as monsters from the underways, riots or rampaging Exalts, a runner is additionally sent to the Guardhall with a report and a request for full mobilization.
A few hundred Guards bunk in the Guardhouse at all times, ready to go wherever they are needed.
Despite the high death rate that Guards suffer in monster attacks, the organization never lacks for recruits. In part, this comes from the high prestige of the job (and high ration of the Dole). Less nobly, Guards receive greater opportunities to meet outsiders… and collect small gifts and gratuities from them in return for assistance with the city’s bureaucracy. Golden Stag cycles his soldiers through gate duty so everyone gets a fair share. Large bribes, however, or attempts to subvert a Guard into serious breaches of the law, constitute “injury to the city” and result in the Guard’s arrest if he is caught.
SAMPLE COMBAT UNITS
All Guards are well-trained troops. Unfortunately, they have no training at fighting in larger units than a platoon—in most of Gethamane, it just isn’t possible to gather more soldiers in one place—and so cannot deploy units of higher Magnitude. When several platoons act together, an overall commander must attempt to coordinate them. So far, Gethamane has never fought an enemy that it could not defeat in this manner.
THE GUARD ENTIRE
Still… what if such an enemy did appear—an enemy that somehow could penetrate the jade-steel gates, or a major invasion from the underways? In such a case, the entire Guard might need to function as a single combat unit, against a single other combat unit of invaders. The Guard would suffer from its lack of training at large-scale tactics and inability to concentrate its forces, reducing its effective Drill. Then again, the enemy could not concentrate his forces either. The battle would consist of house-to-house (or cave-to-cave) fighting.
The Guard, however, would frequently gain the advantages of hard cover and fortification from their superior knowledge of Gethamane’s tunnels.
Gethamane’s people could also turn their partitions into engineered obstacles comparable to fields of stakes or brushwood-filled moats. For a simpler approach, a Storyteller could simply raise the Guard’s Might by one, treating its superior command of the territory as a form of special equipment. In any case, ranged combat is effectively impossible in a citywide fight.
Commanding Officer: Golden Stag Armor Color: Red; target shield bears a white mountain on a red field Motto: “Let none of them survive!” General Makeup: 5,000 medium infantry with lamellar armor and slotted helms, half carrying great axes and half with pickaxes and target shields
Formation: Each platoon has a sergeant and a relay that signals other platoons using drumbeats. All the soldiers are heroic mortals. Talismans, thaumaturgical enchantments on weapons and special training at surrounding and ganging up on foes supply the unit’s Might. While individual platoons normally fight in close formation, in a citywide battle they are effectively stuck in skirmish formation. So are their enemies, as troops scatter through the tunnels.
Notes: Gethamane pays little heed to the rest of Creation, and has little capacity to influence everyone else. On the other hand, it’s exceedingly difficult to obtain any leverage on Gethamane. The dominion’s external bonus points come entirely from its alliance with the Guild and other merchants. These points pay for Gethamane’s single dot of Awareness and a second dot of Craft. Gethamane’s bonus points go to a second dot of War and the dominion’s many specialties. Gethamane has no savants or sorcerers.
In Limit Break, Gethamane resolves its internal conflicts by returning to its principles of absolute self-sufficiency and absolute social control. The government expels all outsiders, locks the gates and forces the population to live on the Dole for at least a season, and maybe as long as a year.
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