Magadan

Magadan stands in the middle of a vast marsh in South Vala, built on one of the few islands large enough to hold it, towering over the country and controlling everything that moves through it. It was a fortress for most of its life. It is a prison now, and the most secure one Peredhel keeps.

From Bastion to Prison

For a long age it held the south for the kingdom that stood in Vala before Peredhel came. It lasted a long time when Peredhel attacked, and afterward it did the same work in the other direction, holding the new border against counter-attack from the south. Then Peredhel expanded past it. The front line moved somewhere else and left the fortress with nothing to guard, and rather than let a place that hard to reach and that hard to leave unseen stand empty, Peredhel turned the barracks into cells.

What is there now could still house an army: walls, a moat, a tower, a hospital and quarters for the garrison, alongside the works where the prisoners are set to forced labor at a foundry and a masonry. It is militarized, run under martial law, and kept by a watch with a reputation for cruelty.

The Four Wings

The fortress is divided into four. The first is administrative and holds the guards and the rest of the personnel, along with the stores, the infirmary and the offices.

The second is for political prisoners: foreign nobles with live ties still running back to their own countries, heretics, and anyone else worth more alive than dead. The third is for Peredhel’s own dissidents, for traitors and foreign spies, and for enemies of the Arcane Congress who are still holding something worth having out of them. The fourth is for common criminals of uncommon standing, the heads of syndicates and thieves’ guilds, assassins, rebel leaders, and the more famous bandits and pirates. Most of those are kept alive so that killing them cannot make martyrs of them, and so that they are to hand if they are ever wanted against their old associates.

The High Wardens

Three High Wardens administer it between them. The first is head warden and has the guards. The second is head accountant and has the finance and the logistics. The third is a spymaster of Peredhel’s, and his business is information gathering and what the fortress calls the reconditioning of its prisoners.

The Gate

Nobody is known to have escaped. Past the walls there is the marsh, and the marsh has treacherous ground and vicious beasts in it, so between the two the fortress has never had to account for a man who left. Its only road runs to a small pier where prisoners and supplies are landed, and it sits not far from the river that now belongs to the River King.

What the name means now is mostly that the place is kept deliberately secret, and that outsiders have filled the gap themselves. The mildest rumor is that it is no more than a large staging point for Peredhel’s many campaigns. The wilder ones have the Arcane Congress running a school inside it, making new magics and experimenting on the people held there.

Campaign Updates

The Valiant Few took a mercenary in a breastplate alive in Haudh-Gwenn and handed him over on sworn terms: returned to Peredhel unharmed, and his name never attached to the job he had taken. Asiya Azrak asked to keep him, and nobody in the room objected, not even her own daughter. She sent him to Magadan. The terms asked only that he be unharmed, and she is honoring every word of them.