Tyverian Cities

Every city in the Empire is the domain of a specific maghyr family; in fact, it could be said that Tyverian cities grew around maghyr houses, and that civilization in the Easterlands is exactly as old as the practice of Blood Sorcery. From the maghyr palaces of old grew the grand city-states of the Empire, and from them the farmlands and villages under their protection, everywhere from the Glass Mountains to the southern Clotmarshes. Thus Tyveria spread across Valerna’s core.

Auga Tyveria
Variously called Tyveria City, the Jewel of the East, the World’s Palace and Where Everything Happens, among other nicknames, Auga Tyveria is the most bustling, breath-taking, vibrant, excessive settlement in the continent. Founded by Tyveris herself after the First Null War, the city is both an imposing fortress and a lavish metropolis, nestled in the rocky passes of the Glass Mountains that mark Tyveria’s Northern border.

Auga Tyveria is the site of the Imperial Palace, where Empress Tyveris lived and died, granting her blood to her descendants—the first maghyri. Today the palace is home to Adrael and his court, and the city holds the Imperial Military, the tyvalite Refineries, the Great Gardens of Tyveria and the Blood Treasury.

Surrounding the palace there are three levels of busy streets, thick walls and ornate arches, from which the largest occupied territory in the Empire stretches southward, housing over one million people from the palace to the farmlands.

Augish citizens have a reputation for being shallow and materialistic, working only as hard as they party. They reflexively mistrust outsiders, even from other Tyverian cities, and are known to be intentionally boorish or even abusive to ‘country folk’—which by Augish standards includes everyone outside the city. As the local saying goes, ‘it’s all swamp ten steps beyond the West Wall’.

Kara Gilpan
The Southern Capital of Tyveria, Kara Gilpan is home to the Dasmedi maghyr house, the remote second place below the power of the Imperial family. The city is as dark and brooding as its maghyr masters, overlooking the lush swamps to the South of the Realm.

Kara Gilpan is the oldest city in the Realm, having existed centuries before Tyveria’s founding. It was occupied several times during and after the Altanesi Empire, and it still had an active population at the time of the Blood Empress’ rising. The city still shows a mix of Altanesi and Tyverian architecture, with some buildings being older than the oldest Realms of Valerna today.

Kara Gilpan has a very active merchant scene, including the largest and best-known black market in the Empire, run by the Zumari sky dwarves, whose Emerald Birthstone floats over the seediest neighborhoods. The city’s most important product is alchemy. Kara Gilpan has the largest shiv halfling community of Valerna, and nearly all of them work at the bomb factories—called such for simplicity, although they produce many other substances, from bath soaps and expensive perfumes to alchemical acids and fungal poisons. They also make bombs, of course. And they bring in a steady revenue from the drug market, both legal and illegal; for example the Allarian Dreamless Treatment, which helps silver elves sleep like humans, is an exclusive product of Kara Gilpan laboratories.

Sehir Aldam
The industrial center of the Empire, the fortified city of Sehir Aldam was built at Guudra Gorge, right where the Scarspill begins its flow out of the Primalians, around the first tyvalite yields ever discovered in the Empire. Sehir Aldam is also the smallest of the three capitals, but only because most of its territory is occupied with mines, foundries and workshops. It is at Sehir Aldam that tyvalite ore, the backbone of Tyverian technology and military, is mined, refined and sent to the rest of the Realm.

The Sehir Aldam territory holds the Empire’s oldest tyvalite mines, which extend eastward through the Empire’s rocky hills well into Tyveria’s center. High Chancellor Varanna also resides here, having moved the Ministry of Security to Sehir Aldam to be near the Crimson Crow’s activities - as the Syndicate’s base of operations lies just outside the Tyverian Western Border.

Sehir Aldam used to be the domain of House Radjekul, the most bloodthirsty and belligerent maghyr family. After their attempted revolt and subsequent defeat at the Emperor’s hands, they were forced to yield their lands to Ulan Baryen the Chainbreaker, who moved to Sehir Aldam to establish his own maghyr house and to protect the interests of Tyverian mining collectives. Nevertheless, Aldamites retain a lot of traits from their former Radjekul masters, being the burliest, loudest and worst-tempered of Tyverian citizens.

Kara Matula
A relatively small city on the Ysvalian border, Kara Matula is quieter and more discreet than most Tyverian cities, with no buildings above one story high, no market larger than ten squares and only one, smallish monument to the Three Faces. Most other Tyverians grow restless after a few days in the city, smothered by the silence and the slow pace of things.

Matulish citizens are known (and widely mocked) for their introspective and almost peaceful ways; while they are officially forbidden from practicing religion, they are known to agree with the foreign Galadyan faith and follow some of its tenets.

Despite the relative tranquility, however, Kara Matula is a very active city, being one of the most important trade centers of the Northwest, which handle the grain and wood imports from Ysval. Matulish merchants may yell half as much, but they work at least double, and their stalls may not be that big, but their supply warehouses are among the largest in the Empire.

Kara Matula has no maghyr, being instead ruled by a small mining collective with some Odhar vampyri to keep order. The collective sustains itself first by tyvalite ore, and second by the percentage from Ysvalian supplies it keeps and distributes.

Kara Tobreg
Kara Tobreg is a small but well protected citadel, overlooking the Metkan Crags in the middle of Tyverian territory, where nothing grows and nothing thrives. The crags surround the city on all sides save the southeast exit, which leads straight into the dark Moors of Cradantes, the northernmost marshlands of Tyveria.

The gloomy city of Tobreg has long been a favorite source of legends and superstitions for Tyverian people. Its rulers, the maghyr house Wernega, are secretive recluses, who are rarely seen outside Castle Cradantes, their ancestral home, save when their curtained carriage sneaks off into the night to attend a Blood Court.

Despite its isolation and the practical absence of its rulers, Tobreg is a thriving city, with three working tyvalite mines, and numerous stores, brothels, inns and shiv workshops. The city also boasts one of the strongest armies in Tyveria, including the infamous Tobregian Bloodfangs regiment, whose reputation for cruelty even by Tyverian standards precedes them in battle. The brutality of Tobreg’s soldiers extends to its city guard, the Maroon Sashes, who help the people remember there is in fact a maghyr house in Castle Cradantes by enforcing their rules as viciously as the Emperor’s law will allow.

Tobregian peasants fight an uphill battle for their rights against the brutality and underhanded tactics of the Tobreg militia. It’s rare that a week goes by without local mining collectives losing a leader or a prominent spokesperson to a mysterious accident or unresolved murder. Even if nobody alive remembers seeing the masters of House Wernega, the people of Tobreg still utter voiceless curses when they look upon Castle Cradantes, there in the looming crags.

Kara Valaki
Far to the East, in the banks of the Lower Woundbend, lies the city of Kara Valaki, often called the Last Palisade for its location a few paces away from the Greater Unsailed Ocean. A remote but well-connected city, Kara Valaki is the tip of the so-called Ant Train, the tyvalite trade route that runs across Tyveria all the way from the Primalian Mountains. Most of the tyvalite that reaches Valaki has already been refined in the great northern workshops, so the city has a long smithing tradition, providing weapons and armor for half the Empire. While Tyveria as a whole is known for its world-class weapons, “Valaki blades are a cut above”, as they say.

Valaki is a windy, beautiful city of white buildings with golden domes, surrounded with open sky and the rumor of waves. It subsists on weaponsmithing, fishery, sea farming and a few shiv alchemical shops. It’s protected by twelve infantry regiments, between blooded legions and ogerron squads, as giant bugs don’t grow easily in the dry, windy territory.

The Bassara, the ruling maghyr house, are also known for their long line of soldiers - not necessarily for their famous officers or war heroes, but for always being patriotic and reliable. Valakish citizens pride themselves on being straight and to the point, candid even by Tyverian standards, and having no time to sweeten their words or actions.

The Crimson Crow operates in the city as it does everywhere else, but their Valakish chapter is almost wholly dedicated to smuggling. The local Crows have been financing expeditions into the Greater Unsailed, looking for inhabited lands to trade with in that direction.

Kara Sanjeva
The Pirate Island, the Raider City, Kara Sanjeva is the mightiest settlement of the Bloodsalt,  located in the islands just off the inner sea’s north coast. Founded by Altanesi pirate clans before the coming of the Blood Empress, Kara Sanjeva stood unchallenged and unconquered for centuries, its sea raiders preying on every ship that dared cross their waters. When they submitted to Tyveria and joined the Empire it was by choice, not by force, although it was seen as an act of cowardice from Makabios, the Pirate Lord of Sanjeva.

Nowadays, Kara Sanjeva is more of a merchant hub, its ships carrying tyvalite and other goods to the Mervar shores; but its sailors remain rugged and fierce, capable of fending off attacks from any modern pirate, including Nwoda skyships, which frequently target their shipments.

The city itself is a haven for wanderers, bootleggers and refugees from all realms and all walks of life. Even the Crimson Crow treads lightly in Sanjeva, for the maritime guilds are cunning, ruthless and all-powerful in their isolated domain.

Sanjevi people love merrymaking, drink and song, and even House Endavi, its maghyr rulers, like to add a pint of beer to their daily blood draught. Malakevi, the local dance and music genre, is very popular in the rest of the Empire, and every Tyverian bard knows at least two or three ditties from the Sanjeva songbook.

Sehir Tamur
A remote fortress in the coldest, most desolate reaches of Northern Tyveria, Sehir Tamur is a gloomy, bitter and lonely place. Used as a penal colony since before Adrael’s time, the city has always housed the Empire’s outcasts, from peasants that could no longer pay a debt to banished criminals.

While not a prison in itself, Sehir Tamur has the highest concentration of blood serfs in the Empire. The city’s main population, and also its government, is the so-called Criminal Collective, a cooperative guild of laborers that, while still dispossessed, and forced to work without pay, have joined forces and written some basic rules to live and work together. Citizens are not forbidden from leaving, nor are they helped against the deadly weather and monsters from the near frozen wastes. Tamur only protects those that stay to fulfil their sentence.

The few free citizens in Sehir Tamur are merchants or administrators assigned there as a mild punishment by their superiors. There are no maghyri in charge, but vampyri from several houses, mostly acquitted Radjekul rebels, work in Tamur as officers and overseers. These vampyri are collectively known as the Tamuran Guard, and comprise the single most feared security force in the Empire, even more than Crow enforcers or the High Chancellor’s secret police. Tamuran Guards are equally adept at hunting down escaped prisoners, torturing captured ones, or fending off the occasional hmyr raid or ygarrua attack.

Other than the Tamuran Guard, the only authority in the city are a few Radjek gangs that muscle in on the weakest prisoners, and the local Crimson Crow delegates among both blood serfs and free citizens, which run a lively smuggling network at all levels. Tamuran people, from citizens to guards, from vampyri to blood serfs, are collectively known as ‘coldbloods’, for they don’t struggle, don’t complain and don’t play.