Welcome to the Gaming Site
Introduction
Background
At a perfumed arcade known as the Emporium, Governor-Mayor Lanod Neff rubs shoulders with common laborers awaiting an appointment in the Veiled Corridor. In an adjoining antechamber, snakes and exotic dancers gyre to a sonorous weave of cymbals and seductive pipes. A floor below, a gaggle of grasping miners press against the windowed door of a darkened cell impatient for a glimpse of a two-headed calf.
Out in the street, a gang of rowdies scream obscenities at a crumpled Halfling, kicking it as it scrambles for a ball. Their drunken laughter echoes off shuttered windows and bolted doors.
In a tower-flanked fortress across the shadowed square, filthy men with nothing to lose shout hymns to St. Cuthbert, clutching to their idealism and principles like cornered animals. Their wild-eyed chief minister smiles as he draws a cat-o-nine tails across his bare back, awash in their adulation and the spirit of his god.
But it’s just another night in Diamond Lake.
Diamond Lake is a lively mountain village east of Free City. Most of Diamond Lake’s inhabitants are miners and laborers, serious folk who spend most of their lives toiling below ground. In the hills surrounding the town, hundreds of laborers spend weeks at a time underground, breathing recycled air pumped in via systems worth ten times their combined annual salary. The miners are the chattel of Diamond Lake, its seething, tainted blood. But they are also Diamond Lake’s foundation, their weekly pay cycling back into the community via a gaggle of gambling dens, bordellos, ale halls, and temples. Because work in the mines is so demanding and dangerous, most folk come to Diamond Lake because they have nowhere else to turn, seeking an honest trade for labor for subsistence-level pay simply because the system has allowed them no other option. Many are foreigners displaced from native lands by war or famine. Work in a Diamond Lake mine is the last honest step before utter destitution or crimes of desperation. For some it is the first step in the opposite direction: a careful work assignment to ease the burden on debtor-filled prisons, one last chance to make it in civil society. When not working, the miners celebrate along the Vein, a seedy road lined with alehouses and brothels. Most residents of Diamond Lake can be categorized into 2 groups: those with nowhere else to turn and those who have come to exploit them. Desperate fold toil in lightless depths for a pittance while corrupt mine managers live in relative largesse, ruthlessly scheming to undermine one another and protect their piece of the action.
Iron and silver from Diamond Lake’s mines fuel the capital’s market and support its soldiers and nobles with the raw materials needed for weapons and finery. This trade draws hundreds of skilled and unskilled laborers and artisans, all hoping to strike it rich. In ages past, Diamond Lake boasted an export more valuable then metal in the form of treasure liberated from the numerous tombs and burial cairns crowding the hills around the town. Those days are long gone, though. The last cairn in the region coughed up its treasures decades ago, and few locals pay much mind to stories of yet-undiscovered tombs and unplundered burial cairns. These days, only a handful of treasure seekers visit the town, and few return to Free City with anything more valuable than a wall rubbing or an ancient tool fragment.
A garrison of sixty militia soldiers stands ready to defend the mines from bandits and rogue lizardfolk from the southern swamps. Rival cults share the same flock of potential converts only because the timing is not yet right for outright war. They muster their forces for the coming battle. Things are not safe in Diamond Lake, and a right-thinking person would have every reason to want to get out of town as soon as possible.
Overall, the village is a sooty, sullen place prone to unpleasant bursts of violence and passion. But Diamond Lake holds plenty of opportunities for adventure, for the uplands, on the lakeside opposite the village, are rife with ancient tombs that for centuries have named them the Cairn Hills.
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Out in the street, a gang of rowdies scream obscenities at a crumpled Halfling, kicking it as it scrambles for a ball. Their drunken laughter echoes off shuttered windows and bolted doors.
In a tower-flanked fortress across the shadowed square, filthy men with nothing to lose shout hymns to St. Cuthbert, clutching to their idealism and principles like cornered animals. Their wild-eyed chief minister smiles as he draws a cat-o-nine tails across his bare back, awash in their adulation and the spirit of his god.
But it’s just another night in Diamond Lake.
Diamond Lake is a lively mountain village east of Free City. Most of Diamond Lake’s inhabitants are miners and laborers, serious folk who spend most of their lives toiling below ground. In the hills surrounding the town, hundreds of laborers spend weeks at a time underground, breathing recycled air pumped in via systems worth ten times their combined annual salary. The miners are the chattel of Diamond Lake, its seething, tainted blood. But they are also Diamond Lake’s foundation, their weekly pay cycling back into the community via a gaggle of gambling dens, bordellos, ale halls, and temples. Because work in the mines is so demanding and dangerous, most folk come to Diamond Lake because they have nowhere else to turn, seeking an honest trade for labor for subsistence-level pay simply because the system has allowed them no other option. Many are foreigners displaced from native lands by war or famine. Work in a Diamond Lake mine is the last honest step before utter destitution or crimes of desperation. For some it is the first step in the opposite direction: a careful work assignment to ease the burden on debtor-filled prisons, one last chance to make it in civil society. When not working, the miners celebrate along the Vein, a seedy road lined with alehouses and brothels. Most residents of Diamond Lake can be categorized into 2 groups: those with nowhere else to turn and those who have come to exploit them. Desperate fold toil in lightless depths for a pittance while corrupt mine managers live in relative largesse, ruthlessly scheming to undermine one another and protect their piece of the action.
Iron and silver from Diamond Lake’s mines fuel the capital’s market and support its soldiers and nobles with the raw materials needed for weapons and finery. This trade draws hundreds of skilled and unskilled laborers and artisans, all hoping to strike it rich. In ages past, Diamond Lake boasted an export more valuable then metal in the form of treasure liberated from the numerous tombs and burial cairns crowding the hills around the town. Those days are long gone, though. The last cairn in the region coughed up its treasures decades ago, and few locals pay much mind to stories of yet-undiscovered tombs and unplundered burial cairns. These days, only a handful of treasure seekers visit the town, and few return to Free City with anything more valuable than a wall rubbing or an ancient tool fragment.
A garrison of sixty militia soldiers stands ready to defend the mines from bandits and rogue lizardfolk from the southern swamps. Rival cults share the same flock of potential converts only because the timing is not yet right for outright war. They muster their forces for the coming battle. Things are not safe in Diamond Lake, and a right-thinking person would have every reason to want to get out of town as soon as possible.
Overall, the village is a sooty, sullen place prone to unpleasant bursts of violence and passion. But Diamond Lake holds plenty of opportunities for adventure, for the uplands, on the lakeside opposite the village, are rife with ancient tombs that for centuries have named them the Cairn Hills.
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