Draazstone

Draazstone mines, and it forges, and it was doing the first of those before it was a town at all: the mountain was a mine serving the Mól Empire, and the settlement is what grew on top of the workings after the empire fell. It is itself an old fortified ruin, difficult to storm and impossible to burn. Its sewers are old enough that a smith raised there, walking a Mól tunnel for the first time in her life, recognized the work.

Where it sits depends on who is asked. The mountains west of Loshev, by one account; the mountains north of it, by four others. No count of its people has been made, no founding year given, and the name of whoever rules it is nowhere written down.

The company have never been inside. They reached its outer perimeter once and got no further, and everything they know past the wall was told to them by somebody else: a guide going home, a councilman weighing a trade, a soldier with contacts, a smith who trained there and left.

Government

It is a place of martial law, and there the accounts part company. One has it ruled by an autocrat, an archon rather than a council, over a town that trades widely and is regarded as morally loose. The other has an unstable crown that juggles between two families, whose holders lose the crown quickly and their minds not long after, and whose shifting laws have wrecked more than one trade agreement before it could be signed. Neither informant had been in the room. The two families are not named, and neither is the archon.

What is not in dispute is the arms. By regional pact the towns of Idir keep only reasonable guard forces and a standing army is forbidden, and Draazstone is the single exception. It is the only town in the region with one, and at a Loshev council table that fact has been worth more than anything else anyone can say about the town.

Infrastructure

Walls, and defensive posts well beyond them. The old Mól-Empire travel roads that run toward the town are held by fortified rest-stops, towers of stone and wood with a ballista apiece and hobgoblins around a fire, and a traveler pays a fee to shelter at one. Caravans running to and from the town go under Draazstone’s protection and are largely left alone. Past that perimeter, nothing: no street, no building, no gate and no skyline has ever been described by anybody who came back.

Law and Custom

The justice is symbolic and it is severe. A man who has divided his attention where he should not have loses an eye, on the reasoning that the eye is what split. Thieves lose thumbs. Convicts are called ringbearers, are chained, and spend the sentence making the ring mail the town sells. Outsiders are treated leniently by comparison, which still leaves jail and banishment on the table.

Outsiders are the standing problem. They are legally tolerated and culturally unwelcome, and the advice given to anyone going there is to be wary of those with authority and of anyone friendly with it. The culture demands dedication to a single craft, and a visitor must arrive as one thing or the other, the warrior or the trader, never both, and dress the part he has chosen.

Mól coin passes there as a currency of favors rather than as money. And the town looks down on the Mól-descended of Idir, on the grounds that the offshoot up in Vala genuinely kept the old codes while Idir’s kept the blood and lost everything else. That is the whole mechanism by which Torgun Kurvroc, who wants Draazstone’s approval more than he wants most things, will never have it.

Its people pray to Drozom the Frozen, and mark the winter with a grave-water rite said to strengthen the soul. Their accent is distinctive enough that a hobgoblin band without it can be identified as coming from somewhere else.

The Forges

The smiths of Draazstone are held to be the finest in Idir and possibly in Erôth, and the town’s reputation is built on them rather than on its ore. Two of them matter here. Trugs came down to Loshev and reforged a warped rapier that mattered to the man who owned it. Hinta came down to Loshev and has spent her life since trying to put Mól weaponsmithing back together, and it was in Draazstone that she trained, at the forge that makes the silver and silver-lined weapons the Muharib carry.

What it sells is less glamorous. Molded steel weapons, durable enough for training or a short campaign and not much beyond it; ring mail off the convict benches; bucklers, heavy crossbows, wagons. Ore, sold west into war-torn Yovincia. There are distillers there, and huntsmen, and talk of lumber and wyvern eggs. There is also the giant-eagle egg trade, which is what keeps the wyverns in check, and which the company disrupted without understanding what they were touching.

Campaign Updates

The first the company heard of the place was as the origin of a hobgoblin alchemist who fancied himself Mól and was kept by Beltran Grayeras. The first Draazstone they actually met was Rakhzan’s patrol: four trained warriors in reinforced brigandine walking the mountain edge and the goat path, who guided them toward the Valley of Doom and briefed them on the town they were nearing. They got as far as a perimeter tower, warmed themselves at its fire, and turned back.

Trade with Loshev had collapsed decades earlier over a contract dispute, somebody having tried to squeeze out extra coin, and hobgoblins hold a grudge for a long time. Reopening it took a season of work: a promise made to Rakhzan’s band on a mountain, a pitch to Yullen Gemsmith, a price paid to Nathan Fox in the form of exclusive rights to the ore, and Leon Yaegar to carry it through, since Leon had supplied armies out of Draazstone before and knew how to stand in the room. The Loshev council approved it very nearly unanimously. The goods went up and the weapons came back, enough to arm fifty men properly and a hundred badly.

The price was paid by somebody else. Rakhzan had traded the company stolen eagle eggs, was found out for it, and lost an eye, his freedom and his family’s good name for it. The trade exists because of him. He remains imprisoned there. A return visit to the town was promised for the spring and has not been made.