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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tristissima" data-source="post: 8049780" data-attributes="member: 6162">Nidal is a country on the continent of Avistan on the planet of Golarion, which is the setting of Paizo's Pathfinder game.  I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about it!But first!  The next, very belated installment!Kayalhi, as you might be able to tell from the name, is a town full of fetchlings who view visiting humans with wariness. It’s peaceful and as prosperous as someplace described as “hardscrabble” can be. Despite their lack of piety, and moreover their disinterest in making a show of what devotion they do have, the Umbral Court tends to leave the 175 residents of the village alone. You can send your thanks and support to Chancellor Zelvith, a LN female fetchling mesmerist 4 (yay! Occult classes!) who does make a show of things and generally don the gladhanding performance work necessary to appease the Court. She also runs a network of anonymous foreign spies, trading what they have learned for Kayalhi’s unmolested existence. Her age is catching up to her, though, so she has a need for a successor to this work.In a lovely little detail, we are told of Kayalhi’s fame and how that fame has inspired the creation of inconspicuous taverns and gathering places called “the local kayalhi” where fetchling culture and cuisine allows them to relax, gossip, support each other both financially and socially, and hold special events like weddings, new-baby celebrations, parties of all kinds, and memorial services. It’s an early version of a community center, and it sounds weirdly cozy for Nidal and for its gray-skinned oppressed minority. Next time I’m running a game in Nidal, I will have to ensure that there is, at minimum, one scene set in the local kayalhi!A Desnan cult used an occult ritual known as veil structure to hide away a secret lodge in the Uskwood where they stored many treasures and a library of Kuthite vulnerabilities. They were tracked down and destroyed or forced to go into hiding. With no initiates who could see it, the lodge was lost. The druids set up some monstrous defenses where they thought it might be, mostly a nest of deathwebs (CR 6 undead spiders from the third Bestiary) and struck it from their record books. Of course, now even the druids have forgotten it ever existed, leaving only a few scattered writings and a single memory in the Cathedral of Embodied Wisdom to be found by revolutionary PCs, which is a rather nice hook for a very interesting Leverage-or-Shadowrun-style heist.A slightly domed 25-foot-diameter crystal window overlooks Nisroch Bay from the cliffs above it, the result of a Chelish magical defense during the Everwar against a random portal to the Shadow Plane. It’s called the Moonless Mirror and it attracted the attention of Yisaothai the Oil-Tongued, a dark naga with the shadow lord template (CR 10, in total, with appreciation from me for combining elements of two different books). I seriously love the name Yisaothai, bringing together a very Kellid Mongolian sound with some serious and not-boring serpentine sibilants (I’m looking at you, Faerun). Yisaothai now rules a fiefdom on the Shadow side of the portal and continuously works to convince mortals to break the mirror blocking the portal. A young fisherman by the name of Wyldon, a lowly N human expert 1, is his most promising possibility, as he is susceptible to promises of wealth and the affections of the :local beauty” he has a crush on. Of course, erosion is wearing the cliff that holds the mirror away, so Wyldon better get on it if he wants help from the other side with his problems.A nice small story with pretty large consequences, that is. Far larger consequences than just Yisaothai’s Challenge Rating would indicate; recall, please, that they rule an entire fiefdom. I approve. We need more such things, to force murderhobo and heroic PCs alike to recognize the everyday struggles of the common people.Also near Nisroch, though hidden by very specifically planted black-leaved trees is a fortified quay called Nightbinder’s Wharf, which sees shadowcallers and other Nidalese agents (including druids with shadowy or powerful companions on paid commissions by the Umbral Court, the rich, or even foreign dignitaries, mostly Chelish) leave for foreign service. Tight secrecy is kept by the Court with the disappearance of both spies and the occasional random wanderer. I assume this is another call out to Liane’s two Nidalese novels.Speaking of “gloomy, salt-stained” Nisroch (why not “salty, gloom-stained”? More poets need to write these things <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Though its other name, the Maw of Shadow, is kinda cute if awkwardly worded; it’ll be Shadow’s Maw in my game) is noted as the most joyless and forbidding of cities. Its status as the primary port for foreigners is blamed for this depressing state, though the text notes that this is an intentional effort by the Umbral Court to discourage long-term, meddling visitors. Thus, the city is very quickly established as Nidal’s own domestic noir setting. This is only cemented by mention that the Usk River sharply divides the beautiful villas of the well-to-do from the poor hovels. It’s detailed in Cities of Golarion, so this is all we’re told.The Ombrefell stretches its branches between the Atteran Ranches and the Uskwood. This is where the Xoskerik shadow giants have made their home alongside forest drakes, malevolent fey, and a few Uskwood druids. Other entries from the gazetteer can be found here: Soth-Silir, the Fields of Pain’s Forgetting which I’ve already discussed, and the Viridian Forge.Orolo’s Quay has almost forgotten its days as a bustling seaport, coastal Varisia’s settlement having stolen its business, leaving the Chelish fortress here to crumble among the gulls and smugglers. Speaking of, I simply adore the last name of the smuggler leader, Brovos Gulltongue, a CN male Varisian half-orc brawler 6 and pirate who was forced to flee into superficial devotions to Zon-Kuthon as a way to escape the enemies he’d made from Riddleport to Magnimar. Sadly, he has named his gang simply “the Gulls” and will beat you for mocking its drabness. They tend to take food and liquor in and take drugs and oddities out, but occasionally they smuggle people if Brovos thinks it won’t be a risk to his perch in the nigh abandoned city. Fancying himself a hero of the people, he mostly does this for runaway slaves and needy old folk, though pretty ladies can flatter the ill-mannered rogue into helping them. Gifts of good stories or live fish and swigs of Riddleport scorpion rum also work. Googling “scorpion rum” mostly just turns up things about a Buffalo wing restaurant.A colony of incutilises (incutiles? However you pluralize it, they’re brain-like CR 2 nautiluses with CR 8 lords) has joined the Gulls in the harbor, occasionally kidnapping them or their cargo of people to use as zombies. No one has noticed against the background level of disappearances among the outlaws.</blockquote>

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