Ariaris-Mal

The Great City-Dam Of Scholars And Artists

Town— Sprawled across the great Ariaris river, Ariaris-Mal is the oldest and largest city in the world. A wild place of eccentric inventors, unshackled artists, and a thousand schools.

The People

Every day a festival, every night a party, every street an art gallery, and every home a sanctuary. The people of Ariaris-Mal are a cultural whirlpool, constantly pushing their skills and honing their arts in public displays of splendor. Every single day, some confederation or another will lead a procession across the entire span of the dam, showing off some new idea or artistic flair and challenging the city to respond.

Ariaris-Mal is also a place of great education. On the corner of every street is a school of some kind, teaching anything from needlemaking to theoretical astronecromancy. If you need to learn something, there’s a good chance there’s a school hidden down an alleyway just waiting to be discovered.

Local Monster

Once, Ariaris-Mal had a guardian Monster. Who else could have lashed the great steel ropes to its back and crossed the raging rapids of the river below? Who else could have set the foundation bricks, 200 of them each the size of a small city themselves? Nobody knows why it left or where it’s gone now. Nobody left alive even remembers its name, though many seek it.

Notable Sublocations

  • Doctor Paligachi’s Inventatorium—A free museum dedicated to “useless” devices invented by the artist, Doctor Paligachi. Many of these tools and gizmos are beautiful, and the museum has expanded significantly in the last year to include other useless devices.
  • The Monster Care Squad Postal Service Hub—A good postal service is the backbone of any wide society. The Monster Care Squad allied with the Postal Worker’s Confederation to create this enormous building that hangs precariously off the edge of the dam. It handles all the mail within the MCS.
  • The Grand Library—Not the biggest library known to Ald-Amurans, but unless you can get to the moon, this is probably the biggest one you’re going to get into. The basement is rumored to have a section dedicated to books written in dreams.
  • The Square—Right in the center of the city is the Square. Half the time, it serves as a communal meeting place, full of dancers and artists and trade stalls, but on occasion it must be emptied, and the city split in half, to allow floodwaters or arks through the lock.

What Happens When You Arrive

  1. The lock is stuck, and three massive arks are headed toward the city.
  2. Three different parades are scheduled on the same day, a mistake unthinkable for the city’s scheduling committee.
  3. All the schools have vanished, along with their students. Empty spaces on every street corner.
  4. Earthquakes have rocked the dam every day for the last two weeks. They are getting worse.
  5. The river is dry. There is a city down there on the cracked riverbed.
  6. Duu-sta has returned, bearing on his back tattoos that hurt to look at for too long. He is leaking a viscus, sickly gold into the river.