D&D Setting Sketch - Solano

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Solano

Less than three generations ago, the Spring Empire looked to have a prosperous future of expansion and discovery. In your grandmother's and grandfather's time, however, the promise of the empire turned sour. Bitter rivalry and open conflict in the Imperial House led to bloodshed and rebellion; the Chosen Heir was murdered by her brothers, her brothers were cut down by her sisters, and her sisters betrayed by the captains of their forces. When it was over, the Water Palace was destroyed and the Imperial House extinguished.

Your home, Solano, was in these times a frontier of the empire. Now it is perhaps the last village within three days' ride to preserve something of a civilised way of life - though, as you no doubt tire of hearing from your grandmother and grandfather, life in Solano today is so very far from the proper ways of the Spring Empire.

Solano was originally founded as a mining town, in a dry gulch near promising veins of iron ore. After the empire collapsed and its once faithfully-maintained roads fell into sad disrepair, only a few brave merchants dared the stretches of forbidding wilderness between Solano and the remaining towns further east. The mine is still worked today by a few men and women with the skills to do so, but most of what they extract is used in Solano itself, with only a little traded to the occasional merchant caravan.

Instead of mining, Solano today largely supports itself through farming and forestry. Refugees from failed villages came to Solano in years past, and most claimed farming land that lay untouched while the empire exploited the iron mine and could afford to bring in food for the workers. Miners who stayed when the empire fell did the same, or turned to forestry alongside the carpenters who had worked on the mine.

You and your companions may have grown up in the town, but your fate doesn't lie in the mine, the fields, or the lumberyard. When the Spring Empire was strong it built Solano to support its exploration of and expansion into the lands to the west - lands that once, or so the tales of your grandmother and grandfather have it, were the heart of the legendary Winter Empire. Perhaps that is just a tale told by the venerable, but anyone with eyes can see the remnants of some civilisation in those western lands. There is no telling what might be lying out there waiting for young men and women with brave hearts and skilled hands to find.

Besides, Solano no longer enjoys the protection of the empire. The magistrate still governs, but her authority comes from wisdom and experience, not imperial sanction; the village still has its militia guards, but they are few and do not venture far from the walls. The lands to the west - and some in other directions - harbour threats against the village, threats which must be averted or defeated.

You were gifted girls and boys who grew into skilled and capable women and men. The path fate has drawn for you seems obvious.

 

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Surrounds

Solano occupies a dry gulch in the highest foothills of what the locals call the Sunset Range. There is a lake above the town to the west which presumably fed the stream that once ran through the gulch, years if not decades before it was settled, but now an aqueduct constructed by imperial engineers provides Solano with its water.

The Sunset Range was more properly known to the cartographers of the Spring Empire (and to certain traditionally-minded members of your grandmother's and grandfather's generation) as the Black Emerald Mountains, owing to the deep greenish black of the pine forests which carpet the eastern side of the range. On the western side, in the rain shadow, the foliage is more sparse.

The iron mines lie immediately north of Solano, in a smaller canyon slightly enlarged by the original imperial mining operations. The original operations were fairly extensive, but in the absence of experienced overseers and engineers the miners today work on the galleries closest to the entrance. There are rumours and superstitions concerning the spirits and demons that haunt the deeper reaches of the mines, but the truth of them remains to be seen.

Ranging further from the town, there are a large number of cave systems on both sides of the Sunset Range, some showing evidence of occupation in previous times. No-one in your lifetime has ever explored them extensively enough to see if there is a subterranean passage through the mountains, though rumours persist that more thorough surveys were done in the days of the Spring Empire, and there may be records of these explorations somewhere in the archives of the magistrate.

To the east, the crumbling roadways of the empire lead to small enclaves of civilisation where it manages to hold on. Forests are reclaiming land cleared in generations past, though there are still some natural grasslands. A wide marsh begins about two days' travel northeast of Solano, though there is little reason to travel in that direction.

 

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The Tea House

The Tea House is a perfectly respectable name for an establishment which, unfortunately, serves very little tea. It is Solano's only inn, featuring six double rooms surrounding an open-air courtyard on three sides (the fourth side being the front wall and entrance). The courtyard can be covered by a yellowing canvas shadecloth in wet weather, and a tall pink-blossomed cherry tree fills one corner with its spreading branches to provide a little shade even when the day is dry.

The Tea House is owned by a brother and sister pair, who inherited it only recently from their mother when she retired. Since their mother, whose real name was Lin, was called "White Blossom" by all her patrons, some clever inebriated type nicknamed her stocky son Hull "Broad Leaf" and her dark-haired, dark-eyed daughter Carolina "Black Petal".

The Tea Shop does serve tea, if you ask for it, but the vast majority of patrons drink rice wine or malted barley whiskey. Naturally, most of the alcohol served at the Tea House is brewed by Broad Leaf and Black Petal themselves, but they occasionally have a bottle or two of more rarefied liquors available, depending largely on the whims of trading caravans.

The Tea House's lodgings are spartan but well-maintained, available for 6 silver per bed. The rooms are generally available for the asking except when a merchant caravan has come into town; they are definitely a sideline to the Tea House's business.

 

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The White Shell

The White Shell is the closest ruin of the Winter Empire to Solano. From a distance, the sun-bleached dome of the structure, with a curving gash in its side, resembles the coil of a seashell, hence the name. The dome lies in an almost perfectly round depression, suggesting that the whole site was excavated to serve as a setting for the building.

The most curious thing about the White Shell is that the depression it sits in is completely free of vegetation. The trees and scrub in the area seem to grow in a completely normal manner outside of the basin, but inside is nothing but bare earth - not even a blade of grass will grow there, despite the fact that there appears to be no obvious difference in the soil inside and outside the depression.

There are relief carvings on the exterior wall of the White Shell. No-one in Solano is quite sure what they represent - certainly humanoid figures can be identified, but they lack clothing or other accoutrements that might identify them. They appear to simply be neutral humanoid characters, apparently engaged in ritual activity judging by the repetitive poses and lack of depiction of anything resembling daily life.

No-one in your lifetime has been bold enough to enter the White Shell itself.

 

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Inhabitants

As a frontier town, Solano has always featured a more diverse mix of races than the norm for the Spring Empire. Life on the borders, despite the conservative grumblings of the traditionalists of your grandmother's and grandfather's generation, had always been more concerned with what a person can do than with what that person's ancestry might be.

Most people in Solano are humans, tieflings, or half-elves, representing the three major races of the Spring Empire. There are several families from other races - elves, dragonborn, gnomes, halflings, shifters, and gnolls - in greater proportion than would be found in a town of similar size further to the east, in the empire's former heartlands.

As noted before, the majority of Solano's inhabitants are farmers, growing rice (in paddy fields flooded by channels connected to the old imperial aqueduct) along with other grains. Some farmers raise pigs, allowing them to forage in the fields and forests east of town down in the foothills; these swineherds also often grow fruit and root vegetables on their family lands.

Members of the minority races are over-represented in non-farming trades. Many of those who still work the mines are dragonborn or shifters, while elves and gnolls are prominent woodcutters and gnomes are actually the bulk of the carpenters. Most trade in Solano is based on barter, but there is a steady trickle of genuine coin brought in by traders, the odd visitor, and members of the gallant fraternity of adventurers.

 

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The Magistrate

In the days of the Spring Empire, the magistrate in each town and village was appointed by the prefect of the region. There is, of course, no prefect in these days; your grandmother and grandfather can remember the last magistrate so appointed, but when he died there was no one to name a replacement except the people of Solano themselves.

The current magistrate was not exactly appointed democratically. The most respectable and well-off members of the community gathered in the magistrate's villa to discuss which of their number should be elevated to the post. In a small irony, however, it soon became apparent that none of them enjoyed the favour and support of a majority, and the respectable men and women of the town were forced to settle on a compromise candidate - the quiet and devout priestess Zhao, a tiefling woman now in her late fifties.

Zhao is a woman of few words, speaking plainly and without the flowery courtesies of an imperial traditionalist but also without the uncouth mannerisms of a farmer or a miner. Her skin is dark, a brown-black that makes her seem in stillness like an ancient wooden carving; her teeth, horns, and nails are a dull red-brown like dried blood. She is devoted to the Virtuous Way of the Spring Empire, but does not condemn or begrudge the other faiths of the town.

The only real complaint anyone in Solano has about Zhao's tenure as magistrate stems from her religious convictions. While the Virtuous Way was never a pacifist faith, there was always a strong current of such sentiment among some adherents, and Zhao's personal faith derives from teachers of that tradition. Some of the most well-off ladies and gentlemen of the town fear that Zhao's lack of enthusiasm for the recruitment and training of the town militia will have severe consequences sooner or later; she has governed now for so long and so well in all other respects, however, that they could not replace her. Without the magistrate's encouragement and support, enthusiasm for militia service has dwindled - barely more than a dozen men and women still regularly practice the prescribed drills. Zhao herself remains quietly sure that the Virtuous Way will protect her people.

 

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The Shrine of the Five Stars

The Shrine of the Five Stars would be an almost wholly unremarkable place of worship, were it not for a secret dating back to Solano's founding. The shrine follows the pattern of such buildings in towns all across the lands of the Spring Empire: a small, rectangular structure of whitewashed wood greying in the sun, oriented south with the altar parallel to the equator according to the best imperial calculations. The gallery containing the icons of the Five Stars looks down upon the altar, with the cone of the shrine's tall spire above pointing to the Heavens.

Priestess Zhao lives in an austere one-room home near the shrine. The only concession she has made to her lifestyle after becoming magistrate is the simple canvas awning erected at the front of her home to provide shelter from the sun and rain to those who wait outside on petition days.

Few in Solano - even those of your grandmother's and grandfather's generation - recall what lies bound and sealed beneath the altar of the shrine. When the first shaft of the mine was driven into the walls of the canyon, evil spirits were released from the earth; this was expected, and the usual imperial priests were on hand to deal with them. What no-one foresaw was the much greater terror that would emerge from the depths more than a month later, a terror that was only defeated after the loss of eleven lives.

Plans to build the town shrine on the rim of the gulch were quickly abandoned, and the new location chosen so the altar would sit atop the terror's prison. Priestess Zhao and a few descendants of the men and women who put the terror down in the earth are the only people who know what lies beneath the shrine now; even as obedience to the Virtuous Way falters in this uncertain time, they remain the core of the faithful, renewing with their observances the power that keeps the terror locked away below.