Razina is the place where the action always starts in a Kael campaign for some reason. Razina has changed as Kael has evolved in my mind, but the kernal of it is always the same.
At the moment, I've got Razina located as a port city on the Strachina Peninsula; a body of land comparable in size to the Grecian or Italic peninsulas, extending from the north edge of the Mezzovian Sea southwestwards at roughly a 45° angle. Razina is large and important enough to sway or influence, where it doesn't outright rule, the entire peninsula, and they have traditionally thought of the eastern half of the Mezzovian Sea as "their" Sea. However, their primacy here has recently been seriously challenged by the expansionist Komewan Empire, who's armed barquentines have been challenging their claims. Since Razina is a city built on commerce and trade, and its merchant marine is insufficient to answer the Komewan challenge, Razina has issued more letters of marque in the last few years than any other power on the Mezzovian Seas and privateers that ostensibly serve her interests are on the rise.
One of the prime exports of Razina is coal and peat. There are beat bogs just to the north of the city, and caravans and river barges from the nearby Parete Mountains come to Razina, and from there spread throughout the Mezzovian main. Those who don't farm the wetlands nearby for food either harvest peat, or spend weeks away from their families in the coal mines. Consortiums of merchants and nobles bring these workers up in rotating shifts in caravans and keep them for weeks at a time. The backbone of Razina, therefore, is soul-grinding hard labor, and the majority of the populace is poor, sooty, and live in desperate straits with husbands off earning meager coin, and gambling or drinking most of it away before they arrive back in Razina. Most of the poorer citizens live in a vast burrough called Bricktown, made up of stark brick tenements. Uncounted years ago, the Razine nobles tired of seeing and hearing the constant human misery, roofed over the narrow streets and alleyways and today Bricktown is enclosed, effectively making it a single gigantic building.
The law does not go into Bricktown, and the streets are ruthlessly controlled by organized criminals. A shantytown of tents and worse has sprung up on the rooftops of Bricktown, of the most destitute, perpetually drunk or drugged citizens, who can't even abide life inside. Life in Bricktown is brutal and mean, and the only way out is joining the laborers in the peat bogs or the coal mines, so many children leave as soon as they are big enough to be taken and join this workforce. Others turn to crime, or to the sea as a way of escaping their bleak prospects. (This is the Charles Dickens influence, if that isn't obvious.)
The nobles and wealthy merchants, on the other hand, rarely deign to acknowledge that Bricktown even exists, even as they exploit the denizens as ruthlessly as possible. They live a gilded life higher in the hills, away from the docks and situated such that the prevailing winds keep the sooty stamp of neverending coal fires from Bricktown blowing a different direction. Razina is ruled by The Apostate, a hereditary title taken when they threw off the yoke of a former theocratic imperial pretender. Razina rejected their religious observances of treating the Emperor like a god who demanded human sacrifice from his subject people, hence his title. The Apostate today, Esteve Gregorio de Galdames de Rossolló, has not been seen in public for many years, and a number of rumors circulate around town about that, ranging from him adopting the religion of the former Empire of Mnar and sacrificing Razina's children to preserve his youth (which would ironically make his title of Apostate obsolete), to the notion that he's been dead for years and the Arch Heretics have been running the city in his name ever since. Certainly that last seems to be true, but the Arch Heretics are a fracteous bunch of nobles, with different goals and designs, and intrigue and backstabbing are their daily bread and butter.
More to come...
