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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tristissima" data-source="post: 8118453" data-attributes="member: 6162">Furthering Nidal’s theme of collecting long-lost knowledge, Pangolais features an entire district dedicated to recreating an image of what Azlant might have been like before the aboleth dropped a meteor on it. Called “New Calignos” as it is a haven for the caligno, it lies a good third of a mile down a road from the outskirts of Pangolais. Honestly, that distance from the city might be a good argument to call New Calignos more ghetto than haven.New Calignos looks nothing like the stately, delicate Pangolais proper. The architecture here is given to swooping curves and ornate tiles. The noir monochrome of Pangolais is interrupted here as sprays of star-of-Azlant burst from window boxes and plinthes, white petal-tips surrounding brlliant purple hearts. Their subtle scent plays peek-a-boo with the nose, hiding beneath and around the smell of little leaf-shaped cakes filled with torani nut paste and decorated with (no doubt candied) star-of-Azlant flowers and the savory steamed dumplings called duvai that grandmothers cook for their grandchildren on their namedays. The child gets one duvai for each year of their life.I am an absolute sucker for culinary details from fantasy worlds. Chalk it up to my Italian and Alabaman ancestors, and maybe reading too much Tolkien when I was young. I do wish we’d gotten some idea of the various fillings and spices of the duvai, beyond every grandmother’s recipe being unique, but I adore the detail of their number. Now I want to play a gluttonous caligni who has continued this nameday feast tradition into their adulthood, tucking into a meal of two and a half dozen duvai at some point in the campaign as their partymembers look on in awe.The taste of the torani nut is also a mystery, absent of description. This sent me on a bit of an internet dive, trying to construct an idea of what it tastes like. Based on the Torani brand of drink additives and a random reference to “torani” being an Indonesian word for “flying fish”, I have decided that it is oily and exceptionally high in sugar, choline, lecithin, and L-carnitine (the last three are responsible for the body producing trimethylamine, which is the chemical responsible for the “fishy” smell). Pistachio has the highest sugar content of any nut, so start from a slightly sweeter pistachio as your base and then give it the oiliness of a peanut and a fresh umami reminiscent of a soybean. That is how I imagine torani nut tasting!Though caligni scholars (which perhaps might be the occupation of that dark glutton I just described) delve endlessly into ancient records for new scraps of understanding what Azlant was like of old, the antediluvian empire stretched over multiple continents, and it is almost certain that the piecemeal nature of the available sources, even in Nidal, have resulted in a blend of disparate Azlanti cultural elements, inclusion of mis-identified practices from other cultures, and flat-out inventions built on a flimsy scaffolding of vague allusions. This hardly matters, though, as the myth of caligni culture being a recreation of Azlant has more importance in giving a society of orphans the feeling that they have a history and a past and an ancestry. Even more vital than that is the simple comfort of having a unified culture with touchstones that most caligni share.Orochel House plays host to most non-Nidalese who come visiting Pangolais, offering the benefit of the ever-present subtle spying that any foreigner can expect in this dimmed land. It’s a manor, but with the same dark stone and gray glass as the rest of the city. There’s a difficulty with the very atmospheric shades-of-gray Nidalese aesthetic evident here. With the pressure of word limits in most of these entries, the descriptions of the buildings too often seem to be an exercise in creative repetition. The visual I imagine of Pangolais is dramatic and wonderful, but it doesn’t translate too well into text.Orochel House’s prices are noteworthy for not being noteworthy in either direction. Neither cheap nor expensive, its accommodations and staff all seem to be just a little bit higher-quality than the cost would lead one to expect. This, plus its reputation as the foreigners’ inn and the Umbral Court encouraging other innkeepers to charge foreigners extra or require particularly gory Kuthite devotions from foreigners who want to rent a room when they’re not just outright refusing foreign money, is what keeps it full of its homogenously heterogeneous clientele.Pangolais is known for its particular glass-making technique, which uses the ashes of the Uskwood’s black-leaved trees to get a gray tint that splits light into a complexly mottled pattern of dense shadows as it passes through. This shadowglass is quite valuable to collectors and those making magic items involving shadows and illusions, going for 50-500+ gp (which would have the cultural weight ~ not equivalent value or buying power ~ of approximately $10,000-$250,000 or more). The majority of the world’s shadowglass is produced in the riverside workshop known as the Shadeglass Foundry in Pangolais.The final location in Pangolais is the Shrine of Convocations, where twice a year the Umbral Court issues its proclamations, preside over disputes, elevate new members, and hear reports from agents foreign, domestic, and academic. As the only times when the Court is in session in its entirety, they also spend much of their time in discussion about the nation’s direction in the next half-year. The Black Triune is present as well, implacably silent the way only people 10,000 years old can until the rare occasion that something grave enough for them to take control comes up.We are told that the Court’s discussions always have a clear response (no split decisions) because they are under a divine mandate to set aside all their scheming and other interests to come to a decision in Nidal’s best interests. Cuz, y’know, that always works.A member of the Court that doesn’t attend the convocation is killed by order of the Black Triune, so one of the most common ways for people to eliminate their rivals on the Court is to covertly prevent their arrival in Pangolais at the appointed time.</blockquote>

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