Patrie

Neat rows of terrace coffee farms surround the road into the valley. The stones in the road are new, especially compared to the well-loved trade routes they branch from. The city ahead is like a great wheel, with each of its spokes leading to the heart of the teeming urban center. A divine blueprint transformed this Broken World ruin into a home for the brethren. 

Doorstep of the Pilgrimage

Twelve years ago, the goddess Pirhoua pulled the last human city in the Broken World from its roots and dropped it into Bluebell Valley. After its arrival, the queen took a parcel of land from each surrounding barony to form a new one: Patrie. Allemance cooperated with the human Shamans to get the city on its feet. Today, it stands as one of the most powerful cities of the Lupine Kingdom. 

The Queen of Allemance granted Patrie to an officer who defected from the Invader army, a human named Diana. She was given the title of Baroness and became the first noble-blooded member of the species. To legitimize the claim, Diana married the canine Indigo, a son of a neighboring barony. A gaggle of their precocious coyote and brethren children now roam the grounds of Jacquet Hall. 

The city of Patrie has the largest population of humans in the Beast World, a living relic of their former home. While surviving in the Broken World was brutally difficult, brethren work hard to preserve the city to show future generations their origins and history. 

Colors of a Dead World 

Patrie is governed by twelve wedge-like districts called quartiers, radiating from its center between the main thoroughfares. Each quartier is inhabited by one of the former Broken World communities that settled in Patrie after the Pilgrimage. The concrete of the city’s buildings is painted with loud colors. Banners with wild patterns and unreadable script hang across the streets. Some are even made of material from the Broken World, scavenged and restored. 

Louvain adapts the brethren zig-zags of pink and acid green for runways and upscale boutiques, but Patrie’s look is gritty and authentic streetwear fashion. In recent years, the exclusive fashion house Beauté Amère made waves when it moved its main studio from Louvain into Patrie. It now operates from a gleaming, three-story glass building in the city center. A vicious rivalry is brewing between designers in the two cities. 

The Old Third 

Patrie was once an abandoned metropolis in the Broken World, and it has far more space than was needed to hold the last of humanity. It was a ruin when the brethren gathered inside it for the Pilgrimage, and they’re still growing into it. Maintenance and gradual renewal is overseen by the historians studying the Broken World known as the Shamans. 

The empty quartiers of Patrie are quiet and deserted, save for the birds and occasional curious wanderer. Grass and weeds push through cracks in the asphalt road, and concrete walls are an ivy-covered haven for urban wildlife. This section of town makes up about a third of the city, known as The Old Third. 

Ruined roadways and fallen walls hinder movement through these neighborhoods. Sinkholes down to disused sewers swallow the street’s old pavement. For the past twelve years, the Shamans have been making their way from building to building, restoring interiors, repairing walls, and smoothing roads. 

An offer stands to scavengers traveling to the Broken World. Baroness Diana gives a reward to anyone who brings the city usable building materials. Since its posting, dozens of scavengers have filled The Old Third with steel beams and chunks of gray and black stone. They sit in neat piles for the restoration of damaged buildings. 

Portals and Beans 

When jackals emerged from the shadows of hidden places to aid the world’s newest kin, most beasts had never seen one. Many considered these tall, otherworldly creatures to be a myth. The effort to establish the city of Patrie was world-shaking, but it wouldn’t have been enough without their alliance. The jackals predicted some problems a metropolis from nowhere might face, and offered two gifts to kickstart its growth: one great, and one small. 

A New Brew 

The first gift was a seed. The long-lived jackals have a cultural fascination with how plants and animals inherit traits. Through crossbreeding and a little nature magic, jackals created a coffee plant that would thrive in the conditions of Bluebell Valley. When roasted, the beans of this “Bluebell Nip” have a distinctive minty aroma. 

Coffee has become a part of the region’s identity. Strange roasteries dot the city, tucked away in alleys, on rooftops, and underground. The immortal and enigmatic jackals tinker with new brewing techniques in these coffee shop laboratories, and they’re the most likely place in Patrie to find one. 

The Junction 

The jackal’s larger gift brought the world closer to the human city. They used powerful magic to erect the Junction, a black stone ziggurat in its center. Brethren are eager to visit the distant corners of an unfamiliar world, and the Junction gives them a permanent means of instant travel. When the jackals revealed the building’s purpose, they demonstrated a rare moment of levity. The jackal Lyneferti told the humans, “We didn’t trust the Allemagnians to manage the logistics of a Junction, but you humans seem to grasp the concept of punctuality.” (Queen Sophia was not amused.) 

A thousand glassy faces shimmer like the inside of a gemstone within the Junction’s yawning interior. Stairways and scaffolds grant access to facets covering every surface, each a portal to its shown location. The surreal sight of the Junction’s interior allows one to view the sands of the Beylik and the frigid peaks of Oria at the same time. Visitors travel through the facets of the Junction day and night. 

There are two types of facets in the Junction. Major facets are more affordable to travel through, connecting with stone buildings at populous destinations around the Beast World. The Junction doesn’t lead to anywhere in Al’ar, as the homeland’s people refused the excavation and construction of a reception building. Minor facets are smaller and more numerous. They lead to hundreds of disparate pockets of the world, but their operation is more temperamental and prone to error, so special permission is required to use them. 

Traveling Through a Facet 

Travelers can purchase tickets to travel through the Junction’s major facets. A special delving crew rate covers a wagon and up to five occupants: a one-way ticket is 20 gp, and a round trip costs 30 gp (the return ticket is valid for one month). 

Major Facet Destinations

The price to traverse a minor facet is much higher, starting at 300 gp per traveler. Special permission is required, and most minor facets are too small for a wagon to fit through. One notable minor facet leads directly to Littfeld’s Portal Wagon. Permission to use it can be obtained from the caravan’s chief. 

Some Major Players

The Dungeon Brigade

Allemance’s Dungeon Brigade is the crown-appointed authority that opposes the Dungeon within its borders. The Brigade has its own scouts and delvers, but its main purpose is protecting the crown’s interests from a big-picture perspective. They track the number of dungeons appearing in Allemance, levy taxes on Alley delvers, and keep a register of the crew and caravan with which they roll. 

The Brigade usually hires outside help through scouts, but crews can occasionally sweet-talk one of their members to pay them directly for their aid. After all, when a den of giant centipedes appears in a crowded neighborhood’s sewer, the danger is far more immediate than when it appears in a remote cliffside. When time is of the essence, rules become negotiable. 

Brethren scouts and delvers from any homeland eventually get an offer to serve a tour of duty in the Brigade, and those born in Patrie are required to serve for one year at the age of 18. A subject of hot debate is how other Allemance-born humans will serve in noble levies. Twelve years on, the honeymoon is over and humans are seeing more responsibilities as subjects of the crown. 

The Light of Self

When no longer clinging desperately to survival, one has an opportunity to stop and breathe. Once given time to themselves, some brethren turned their gaze inward on what it meant to live as men or women in the Broken World. Time and introspection lead these brethren to question their fundamental identities, and to seek the purest way to express themselves. Each left a life behind in that dead world, and their old name died with it. 

Some of Aubade’s devout joined these people in a squat little house in the 6th quartier. They formed a new sect called the Light of Self to shout their true selves at the sun and sky. This circle of the Sun Bull’s less ferocious followers help anyone coming to the realization that they’ve been portraying an incorrect self, sometimes since before the Pilgrimage. Some who shed this ill-fitting identity come to express the opposite gender, while others end up somewhere in between. 

Lights of Self combine monastic training with transmutation magic, but there’s no requirement to fight as long as one shows commitment to seeking their true self. This tiny group of transgender Aubadians is hard at work developing a new type of magic. This nascent thesis is a combination of self-mastery and Arcana: permanency. 

The Stargazers 

A hexagonal brick building with the world’s largest spyglass mounted on its roof sits on a quiet hilltop ten miles south of the city. Its precisely-engineered curved mirror is based on the Heaven’s Eye observatory at Broadgate University. 

Beasts take the reliable nature of the sky for granted, but for brethren and bats, the stability is still a bizarre novelty. Members of the two species obsessed with Beast World star maps formed the Patrie Stargazer Association, and their quest to record the position of every star in the sky has piqued interest in astronomy among other species as well. 

Recently, members of the Association have been bickering over time with the spyglass. A minor schism has split them—half want to use the device to predict the future and channel divination magic, while the other half want to prioritize the creation of accurate star charts for navigation. 

Demitassian Revelers 

Bluebell Nip is popular, but for this club of connoisseurs, it’s not enough. After a misadventure in a Vinyotian ooze dungeon altered a bag of Bluebell beans, the crew delved for 48 straight hours without pause from the coffee it produced. (Then they slept for three days straight.) 

Leaflets with the Revelers’ insignia have appeared on café notice boards in Patrie. In exchange for “mystical rewards of unimaginable majesty and power,” they request a bag of Bluebell Nip subjected to a variety of rare and dangerous Dungeon conditions. 

Points of Interest

Junction Gate Hall 

The Gate Hall is where Patrie manages transportation. The Hall is like an improvised city square that never closes, servicing hundreds of people as they wait to move through. Incoming vehicles are periodically inspected for contraband by the city guard. Anyone purchasing tickets to travel through the facets receives a wooden badge bearing their teleportation departure time. A tiny, passionate community of transit hobbyists has even begun collecting the badges. Their first convention is as soon as they can sort out their leadership structure. 

Merchants bringing goods into the city must declare them with Patrie authorities if they are worth over 100 gp. Incoming delvers must declare any magical luggage, but the power and function of the items remains the delver’s own business. The public safety implications of this policy are a hot topic in the baroness’ hall.