Momly
The river city in the north where the ore comes out of the hills and the tax goes somewhere else, known in Idir by its goods and by nobody who has been there
Momly stands on the Peren River at the foot of the hills that climb to the Giant’s Rest mountains, which is as well placed as a city gets in that country: everything the region makes can go downstream from here to the rest of Peredhel and on out to sea. Peredhel’s own account of its provinces files it under Vala, counts 6,362 people in it and calls it a small city. Idir has it as a town, very far to the north-east of Loshev and far north of Veren, and gives no province at all. The two placements were never reconciled, and both are in use.
Demographics
| People | Share |
|---|---|
| Peren | 32% |
| Half-orcs | 29% |
| Humans | 27% |
| Mól | 9% |
| Other | 3% |
The River and the Tax
The river made the city and then stopped paying for it. Momly once took a good living off the docks and off everyone who used the water, and that living now goes south: under a new jurisdiction the profits are carried to the lands of Kess Dogal, the prince of Duin, whom nobody calls anything but the River King. What has followed is not a catastrophe but a slow settling. Houses and businesses cost more to keep than the people holding them can find. The quality of what is made and sold has dropped and gone on dropping. The guard has all but given up trying to keep traveling adventurers from being as rowdy or as destructive as they please, and morale in the city is low enough that Peredhel’s own account of the province says so plainly.
Government
Two names answer for the city. k’Joao Mette-hina holds the civil office, and the name he carries in place of a surname is the rite’s, which means the man running Momly has not yet earned one of his own. Beside him is Commander Li Krangal, a rank Peredhel’s order does not place: Master of War and High Commander are named in it, and what stands beneath them is not. Neither man has money. The takings that would have paid to secure the province’s river roads went south with the jurisdiction, bandits work what moves along them, and Tarumbar Vórima has answered the losses in her third of the country by taxing Vala’s prince for them, which takes the shortfall out of the same purse a second time. The city’s war has gone on through all of it: active, with daily fighting on the north-eastern border.
The prince of Vala keeps her home in Momly. Should the city tip over into open disorder, Krasoi Ojak may be found incapable of holding her province and stripped of the title years before she would otherwise have set it down, a black mark against her and against the province both.
Industry
For metal it is still the place to go, unworked, smelted or fully fabricated. The mines around it give iron of middling to good quality and give it steadily. What is not steady is everything else: a cache of mithral or of mol’entite turns up in the region now and then, and what follows is an alloy rush, claims staked in haste and the find worked out almost as fast as it was made. Between rushes both can still be bought in Momly, at a price that is staggeringly different from the rush price.
Campaign Updates
Idir’s dealings with the city run one way and at a distance. Phillipa buys Darkwood in bulk at Momly, off the Eldamar shipments that come down into Vala there, through a contact who gets her a fair price (S3E33). She deals with the place at the length of a road and has never described it.
The name turned up next in a ledger. The Ebon Ledger, Ebon Ink’s own book of jobs, recovered from the cache of a dead band of explorers, listed a town in Vala on the main caravan road among the outfit’s past work, on the same pages as a job of caravan sabotage in the province laid to Rena “the Destroyer” (S5E55). Nobody reading it recognized the town.
Then a stranger said it out loud. In Haudh-Gwenn, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, a man there to buy Idiran horses asked Koa whether he had heard about Rena’s siege on Momly (S6E68). He had not, and neither had anyone with him: the name of the city meant nothing to any of them. An officer under Barbara Barnes, met in the same city, had said only that the woman had besieged a city, and had not said which. Whether Momly was besieged, held, or fell, no word of it has reached Idir.