Geography

Our setting is a city on a grassy plain encircled by mountains. Once the city limits reached up into the mountains, and at their peaks the richest built towering homes. Many wealthy families made their fortunes in mining the mountains' precious ores, or in making fine textiles from plants grown in the plains below.

But since a great economic disaster some years ago, the city has collapsed in on itself. The rich abandoned their sprawling mansions to return to the oldest parts of town, and their (only slightly) more modest ancestral city homes. The lower classes moved inward too, into the cheaper, denser housing of the old town. Eventually the outskirts of the city were fully abandoned, and began to crumble.

As the city's economic situation began to stabilize, stones from the outer city were brought into the old town to replace aging buildings. The old town became the new town, and a protective wall was built around the fledgling city.

Weather

Vicious wind tears across the plains in all seasons. Few trees survive outside the city, except in the shelter of ruins. Even within city walls, there's not a much tree cover, and the sun bakes the earth dry in the summer. In the winter, frequent blizzards make traveling the plains difficult and even dangerous. Certain ruins near central routes into the city have been reconfigured into road markers to help travelers find their way in low-visibility conditions. A few markers are attached to city guard watchposts, which also offer travelers shelter in the case of exceptionally bad winter weather.

Architecture

Before the collapse, the fashionable homes of the rich were built tall so they could remain visible up on their mountain peaks from the city below. Now, in the dense old city, horizontal space does not come cheap, and most commoners live in multi-family housing several stories high. The rich, for their part, have taken to buying up multiple lots to build new, sprawling single or double floor homes to showcase their wealth.

• All permanent structures are built with local mountain stone. Lumber needs to be imported, and is mostly reserved for winter heating.
• Windows have no glass. In the winter, thick tapestries are fixed to the window frames to keep warmth in and snow out. Fireplaces keep homes heated. Lower end buildings have fewer, smaller windows to save on heating costs. Biting insects have a limited seasonal run in late spring after the snow melts, then die off in early summer. During this time, windows are covered with thin textiles.