U is for the Unmoving Watchers

Although it is not unique to this area, the best visibility to the Unmoving Watchers is from the island of al-Qazmir itself, and the Golden Peninsula.  They seem, in fact, to be hovering in the sky directly above Noq Qundi Bay which separate the two.

What are the Unmoving Watchers?  They seem to be three stars, located in the pattern of a small equilateral triangle.  However, unlike the rest of the stars in the night sky, these do not rotate around the North Star, nor do they rise and set.  In fact, even during the day, when they are mostly lost to the bright blue of the daytime sky, keen-eyed observers can faintly see them, still sitting there patiently in space, never moving, always watching.

At night, everyone can see them, and they tend to be among the brightest stars in the sky.  On clear nights, it is also apparent to most that there is a vaguely different color to each of the stars.  The topmost star is a yellowish gold color, not unlike a small version of the sun.  The right hand base star is a cooler white/silver, while the left hand base star is a more reddish gold.

City of Gold

In reality, the Unmoving Watchers are not stars at all, they are small satellites in space, tidally locked and always over the same location in their orbits.  Each is a city, and behaves unusually (from a scientific standpoint) since they have regular atmosphere and gravity.  The large blueish white disc of the world is suspended in their skies always, taking up, in fact, more than half of the visible sky.  These three cities in fact make up three of the Near Realms to the world.  This begs the question of what these Realms are.  Some claim that they are extradimensional places, but in this case, they clearly seem to be within the regular dimension, just too far away and unreachable by any earthly means save magic (since space shuttles do not exist in DARK•HERITAGE.)

The first city is called the City of Gold, and it is, in fact, mostly made of Gold, which is why it offers a shining golden facade down on earth.  Its inhabitants are angelic beings of radiant light and beauty, and it is from them, in fact, that myths and legends about angels come (in d20 terms, creatures like trumpet archons and devas.)  The City of Silver, on the other hand, is a cold place, full of genies and sylphs and other creatures of air.  The cities of Gold and Silver have been at war with each other for many, many years.  The angels were ordered to attack the genies for some sin by the Voice Which Commands.  Their leader, Iblis, refused, and along with many of his sympathetic cronies, was thrown down from the City of Gold, becoming the first and greatest Fallen Angel.  The city of Gold is ruled by a council of seven archangels today.  Although the entire seven is unknown, the existance of Michael, their warleader, as well as Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel is relatively well established.  The City of Silver, on the other hand, is ruled by a genie sultan named Masud Barham Shah.

Surtr, Sultan of the City of Brass

The City of Brass is the last of the three cities, and it is made up mostly of creatures like ifrit and fire giants.  It's ruler is the Sultan Surtr.  The City of Brass often sends mercenary companies to fight in the wars between the cities of Gold and Silver, and also serves as a hotbed of intrigue when open warfare has calmed somewhat, but they otherwise stay strictly neutral and are more involved with other affairs than in entangling themselves with the affairs of the other two cities.

Surtr and his court also seem to take the most interest in the affairs of mortals on earth.  Perhaps this best explains the descendents of some of his people mingling with mortals and creating the race of the jann.

Q is for Qaserum

Located on the border between the Baix Pallars hill-country and the Sahir savanna, on the shores of the Nijat River, Qaserum is a far-flung outpost of the al-Qazmir nation, and the furthest (so far) that their control extends formally to the south and west.  Far from the population centers of the Golden Peninsula and beyond, until very recently, it was a rather sleepy outpost town, with a small fort and a military contingent made up of a handful of out-of-favor soldiers who were exiled to the butt-end of nowhere for falling out of favor elsewhere.  This started changing about thirty years ago when the fur trade starting passing through Qaserum from the green mountains and forested hills beyond.  But in the last five years, this change became rather dramatic when veins of gold and silver were located beyond Qaserum.  Suddenly growing to boom-town status, merchants, soldiers, and more from al-Qazmir have flooded the poor, dirt streets of Qaserum.  Quickly constructed buildings and crowds of both the unwashed and the professional now rub elbows throughout town, and the poor garrison has seen a dramatic increase in recruits stationed here (and the garrison commander is no-longer an out-of-favor cast-off, but a highly trained professional who commands the ear of the sultan of Masqutan, the nearest (although not near by any objective measure) major city, beyond Qila Safah Lake and the Chaman Hills.  Only the great difficulty (and distance) in crossing the Sahir savanna (and all of the intervening region in between) has kept Qaserum from becoming even more flooded with entrepreneurs and con artists looking to make a quick fortune in precious metals.

Qaserum is thus nicknamed the City of Sin in al-Qazmir gossip, due to its percieved lawlessness and strong element of get-rich quick rogues.  This perception, over the last year or so, has become somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The riches to be found beyond Qaserum have also turned the Caliphate's eye to the lands beyond, Baix Pallars which is nominally (although only on paper) part of the Terrasan Empire.  This has also sparked a period of intense diplomatic activity between agents of the Caliph and the Empire, although Terrasa's de facto abandonment of the province means that effectively they don't have much with which to stop Qasmiri expansion into the region.  Nationalist sentiment amongst the Pallarans runs high, and many are turning to very questionable tactics to protect themselves from the percieved threat (see the entry on Baix Pallars for more detail.)

Qaserum is located smack dab on the Nijat River--in fact, the bulk of the city is located on a series of islands connected by a bridge right in the middle of the river (although as the town expands, the north shore as "mainland" Qaserum is where most of the growth is.)  Here are a few areas of interest in Qaserum:

• The Palace of Gilded Delights--a long-running bordello that has become a center of illicit activity in the last few years; even as its owner attempts to clean up its reputation somewhat and establish it as a "legitimate" cultural location, where opera, art, theater, and more can all be sampled.  There's as yet little to differentiate the actors from the harlots, but give it a few more years, and it may yet pull itself up from debauchery to respectability.  Arshyan Kara is the proprietor, a man who was exiled from the capital of al-Qazmir, wandered for a time in Sarabasca before getting himself in trouble, and settling in Qazerum, tyring to turn his luck around.
• The Garrison, commanded by Nizam ibn Omar, a respectable noble sent specifically to curb the percieved excesses of the populace and protect the interest of the Caliphate in the region.  He is young and cunning; and he needs to be, because he's undermanned and faces substantial challenges.  The garrison is located on a separate island from the rest of the city, after a deep channel was dug to separate it, making it very defensible.  Nizam has been petitioning for more soldiers for months now, and while he occasionally gets reinforcements, he's still not anywhere near enough to pacify the Baix Pallars countryside, which would ensure that miners and furriers could trade their wares in peace.  As the situation with the native Pallarans deteriorates, ironically, he's finding it easier to gain important ears to his pleas, which is likely to accelerate the Qazmiri expansion into the area.
• The Sacred Flame.  The reason that the Qasmiri established this village in the first place is that it has a vent to a volcanic magma chamber under the ground.  Heat, and shimmers of flame occasionally dance above this vent, and the superstitious Qazmiri believe that they can commune with the afrit through the fire.  This does mean, however, that the area is prone to occasional earthquakes, and may indeed be subject to a devastatin quake or eruption.  Since the arrival of boomtown status, this has been nothing more than occasional minor quakes which, at most, are an inconvenience, but many years ago, before it became a trading center for furriers, a major earthquake hit the area.  Fallen trees and still be seen outside of town, and a few old timers recall the complete destruction of almost all of the (admittedly few, at that time) buildings in town.  It's only a matter of time before it happens again.  And, of course, while it hasn't ever been directly confirmed by reputable sources, it may indeed be that afrits or other elemental creatures do indeed live in the magma chamber below town somewhere.
• Qaserum is surprisingly caste-driven, as the wealthy new arrivals have little desire to mingle with frontier adventurers, slaves or laborers, and the military presence is also generally cut off from the rest of society by social barriers.  Because of this, a series of walls separated Qaserum into various small districts, including the Barracks, Hightown, the Slave Quarter, Tanner's Lane, and the Market (not meant to be a comprehensive list necessarily.)

Baix Pallars

Far to the southeast of the main Terrasan lands is the little country of Baix Pallars.  Nestled in the hilly land between the southerly cool lodgepole and cedar dominated Follà Forest, the Nijat River, the Azar Shahr mountains, and the Sahir savannah, Baix Pallars is an island of Terrasan colonial culture amidst pristine wilderness and encroaching Qazmiri interests.  Like Calça, the so-called "lost province", Baix Pallars has been abandoned by a Terrasan administration unable to cope with colonial holdings so far away from the center of gravity of an increasingly ponderous realm.  However, rather than being so remote as to be virtually unthreatened by any outside power, as Calça is, Baix Pallars is smack-dab in the path of expanding al-Qazmiri interests, and has it's back to a wilderness wall with al-Qazmir breathing right in its face as it is.  While jann are still rare in this area, culturally Qazmiri humans are common, and many of the names of local features are more commonly given in Qazmiri than in their Terrasan forms, and the bustling river town of Qaserun is nearby--and nearly as populous as all of the scattered villages and hamlets of Baix Pallars in their entirety.

Many of the Terrasans of Baix Pallars don't really care; Terrasa has abandoned them--mostly for the best--they add, and they're far enough away from any major Qazmiri administrative center that their is little expectation of a heavy hand if they decide to annex the hilly region.  But others find the very notion of a Qazmiri yoke intolerable, and these have increasingly been stirred up by radical and desperate elements.  Some of them have taken to preemptive guerilla strikes, ignoring the advice of others who suggest that their actions are more likely to cause the Qazmiri to pacify the region rather than prevent it.  Others are increasingly fleeing deeper into the mountains or the forest, as small groups of families or friends.

And others are turning to dark powers.  Entire hamlets and villages have turned to the worship of Hastur, Nergal, Iog-Sotôt or others, and frightening and disturbing occult activity has turned Baix Pallars into a hotbed of seething intrigue, sacrifices or worse.  Savvy travelers have started avoiding the area entirely, and lone travelers frequently go in but fail to come out.  This has hastened the flight of the decent and respectable members of the area into the picturesque mountains or forests, which hastens the fall of Baix Pallars itself into complete degeneracy.

Dark•Heritage: Haşhaş

Haşhaş (the ş is a Qazmiri letter that is pronounced like a really thick, whistling S or sh sound), also rendered in Terrasan as hash-hash or hashash, is a plant native to the nation of al-Qazmir, but which grows well in the Golden Peninsula. More frequently, however, when a Terrasan uses the word hashash, he's referring to the drug that is made from the plant, which can be boiled as a bitter tea to induce mild hallucinations and euphoria, or other dissociative behavior, along with signs characteristic of drunkeness, such as slurred speech, and clumsy uncoordinated use of limbs. When dried and smoked in a pipe or hooka in suffucient dosages, the effects are much stronger.

Here, the drug causes, at a minimum, a severe dissociative "out of body" experience, hallucinations, suicidal or violent tendences and paranoia. Frequent users can develop severe mental illnesses, including persistant schizophrenic tendencies, violent or suicidal lingering behavior, severe dissociation with reality, and paranoia.

While most physicians and others understand this to be an effect of the chemistry of the dried and treated plant, there remain people, occultists and other fringe members of society, who believe that the drug is a conduit to an altered state where humanity can perceive reality as it truly is; seeing the spiritual as well as the physical at the same time. The paranoia and violent or suicidal tendencies, they explain, are caused by fear of spiritual entities and daemons which surround us at all times out of sight. Because hashash users are aware of these threats at all times, they say, the paranoid behavior is entirely understandable.

Most hashash is grown in al-Qazmir; either on the island itself, or on plantations and farms in the so-called "Golden Peninsula" immediately to the west of the island. The Golden Peninsula has been largely "Qazmirized" but still retains relicts here and there of the civilization that lived there before it, which was distantly related linguistically and culturally to the more westerly Terrasans. The Qazmiri government themselves, however, forbid the use of hashash. They are more tolerant of the growing of it, as long as the crop is shipped overseas. Hashash plants are also grown as ornamental plants in some places in al-Qazmir, although in such cases the harvesting of them is negligible to non-existant.

The Terrasans have also forbidden the trade of hashash, and attempted to stop or at least limit the degree to which it spreads through the empire, although state-sponsored trading of it to non-Terrasans is not unknown. As with the Qazmiri, the dangers of the drug are the reasons for the its restriction, but selling it to foreigners, or brokering trade from al-Qazmir to other nations (such as city-states from the Baal Hamazi lands, or Kurushat, or barbarians who don't form nation-level polities) is a perfectly acceptable way to bring revenue to the state and a weakness to potential enemies.

Because of this restriction of the legal use and trade in the drug amongst local potential users, hashash is most likely to be found in black markets, smuggled in from vessels that hail from Porto Liure or Sarabasca, or even sponsored by the sinister Union of the Snake. The trade in hashash has become inseparably connected to elements of crime, especially organized crime (although small-time smugglers are hardly unheard of still) in the major urban centers of Terrasa, al-Qazmir, and elsewhere.

Curiously, possessing, or even using hashash is not illegal or restricted in Terrasa, only the sale and transport of it, which is heavily regulated to keep the drug away from the citizens of the nation who is making the regulations. Because of that, some people, especially wealthy users, occasionally openly flaunt their use of it, at least in tea-form. Smoking hashash is still done privately, both because of the danger to the user (and others nearby) and because it is socially very frowned upon as openly flaunting the norms of society.

Sarabasca

The exotic jann have a powerful island and coastal state in the caliphate of al-Qazmir, but it mostly exists outside of the Mezzovian Sea region. The Golden Peninsula is more and more becoming an important part of the caliphate, and it does have at least one major Mezzovian port city in the form of Qarizaq. The island town of al-Marraq is the westernmost seafaring settlement of al-Qazmir, but it still falls well beyond the sphere of inluence of any Terrasan city, even Sènt-Haspar. Nevertheless, that wasn't always true, and Terrasan influence used to stretch all along the coastline of the Mezzovian, reaching to the Shipwreck Strait and beyond to the northern shore. The farthest east major settlement of the Terrasans was Basarabeasca.

Basarabeasca was only reachable by ship, since the vampire nation of Tarush Noptii cut it off from the mainland on the north. Because of that, it was only ever at best a fairly wild frontier region, and not heavily settled. The natives of the area spoke a language that was obviously closely related to Terrasan, but difficult if not completely impossible to understand for the Terrasans. Under the influence of Terrasan traders, soldiers, and even settlers, many of these "East Terrasan" speakers found their language gradually migrating to something more similar to standard Terrasan, as it picked up loan words and even loan structure from its relative. But by and large Sarabascan exists as a separate language, still common in the far eastern region of the Mezzovian, especially on the north shoreline. On the south shoreline, it's being rapidly replaced by Qazmiri, as the jann's kingdom expands that direction.

As the Terrasan Empire's might faded, far-flung areas that were under its influence found themselves left to their own devices. Calça is the most notorious of these areas, earning the subtitle of the Forgotten Province, but the far eastern lands were abandoned even earlier. Technically, they were never incorporated into the Empire in the first place; they were merely areas that had some Terrasan influence, trade, settlers, or perhaps they gave a nod of recognition to the Empire in Terrasa without surrendering any actual local authority. Basarabeasca was the most important and largest of these north shore cities, but several neighbors sprang up over time as well.

As Terrasa retreated westward, many of the actual Terrasans (or their descendants) remained in the area of Basarabeasca, now shortened after decades of use to Sarabasca. Independent Sarabasca saw many of its trade relationships dry up, but to encourage the further influx of money, the ruler of the city repealed a number of anti-smuggling and piracy statutes and opened the city to trade that was perhaps gathered in more ilicit ways than before. While many Sarabascans naturally did not welcome this change, most were indifferent, and the wealthy were happy to see goods and gold flowing into the city again. Jobs were available, on the crews of ships, on the docks, or working in the growing security industry--making sure life and property weren't threatened by the rougher crews. For a time, Sarabasca enjoyed a sometimes friendly rivalry with its far western spiritual brother, Porto Liure, which was also a haven for pirates, privateers and other frequently less savory traffic on the Mezzovian Sea. Many captains who's activities ranged the entire inner sea were, of course, familiar faces in both ports. But at about the time Porto Liure was undergoing its gradual transition from lawless pirate haven to legitimate and independent city-state, Sarabasca was undergoing a completely different kind of transformation.

As al-Qazmir consolidated its position on the Golden Peninsula and founded (or conquered and renamed) the cities of Qarizaq, Tayyebat and the island port of al-Marraq, only naturally they greedily looked at the shores of the northern Mezzovian sea as well. Their armies and navies, heavily supplemented by mercenaries from amongst the eastern peoples who were similar in language and customs to the Terrasans (although never part of the Terrasan empire) thus founded the province of "North al-Qazmir." However, North al-Qazmir was never as thoroughly "Qazmirized" as the Golden Peninsula and some of the eastern islands were. A political crisis, partially brought on by the strained budget of paying this conquering army, seized the Qazmiri capital of Qattara. Finally, most of the troops were recalled, and the province largely left to its own devices. However, this compromise was orchestrated by a number of Qazmiri who remained in the area, including the sultan installed at Sarabasca (called just Sarab by the Qazmiri.) For the benefit of paying a "tribute"--not a tax, which would imply a more direct and centralized relationship than exists, al-Qazmir would leave Sarab alone.

Many Qazmiri, both jann and human, migrated into the area as all this happened, and in the years since. al-Qazmir has not made a concerted attempt to bring North al-Qazmir under direct control again, and as long as token tribute comes from Sarab and some of the rest of the major settlements in the area, that status quo has not been challenged. In fact, many of the locals do not use the name North al-Qazmir for the area at all, and many of the backcountry locals have never even heard of al-Qazmir or seen a jann in their life. The coastal regions have gradually become a hybrid of Qazmiri, Terrasan and local culture, however, and most Sarabascans speak all three languages fluently just to get through their day to day routine. The sultan of Sarab is the most important figure in the area, and he plays a sometimes dangerous political game, trying to ensure his independence and safety from reprisals of both al-Qazmir and Terrasa, and to keep the rivalry with Porto Liure from boiling over into hostilities, and ensure that Tarush Noptii keeps quiet as well.

The entire area has recently acquired the nickname of the Barbary Coast, and corsairs from Sarabasca and other cities in the region range all over the Mezzovian Sea and even beyond Shipwreck Strait on occasion. These barbary pirates are more likely to indulge in the slave trade, raiding ships and even coastal regions for captives to sell in the markets of Qarizaq or Qadat, while the pirates who operate near the Tolosas are more likely to steal ships or cargo and ransom the prisoners, or even simply leave them stranded on some lonely coast to make their way as best they can back to civilization. For this reason, they are more likely to be feared by the Terrasans who are their targets. However, the Barbary corsairs are also not as likely to be as dangerous to larger ships, as they have few square-masted vessels and much lighter armaments and smaller boarding crews.

Many pirates, of course, recognize no port as their home, and travel freely from Porto Liure to Sarab, and other ports besides. In fact, there is a growing number of expatriate Terrasans who are moving to Sarab, and occasionally even from there to other ports that are even more thoroughly entrenched in Qazmiri culture. As Terrasa's power and influence wanes, al-Qazmir's waxes, at least in the far eastern shores of the Mezzovian, in many respects there are more opportunities there than in remaining in the west.