IceAndWave/Coral

Coral

A military dictatorship where the dictator is elected by popular vote and advised by the 32 richest men in the state, Coral is an island realm of pirates and raiders, where money can buy anything, even justice, and bribery is not merely accepted but expected. Comprising a couple dozen large islands and uncounted (or uncountable) islets, rocks and shoals, Coral has very little to recommend it as a place to live, and yet more than 200,000 people do just that, and at a relatively high standard of living, bought in blood by a thousand thousand pirate attacks.

The northernmost of the chains of islands that comprise what little land that there is in the West (although tales speak of isles farther North and deeper West), the Coral Archipelago is the only one of the major island nations that has true seasons. The fact that these seasons are often severely wracked with storms is considered by many others in the West to be the true reason for Coral’s sponsorship of piracy – anywhere is better than home to those raiders.

Azure

The capital of the Coral Archipelago and seat of the Sea Lord and his council, Azure was built on the largest of the archipelago’s islands, and from its humble beginnings as a hidden pirate port it has swelled to a population of almost 15,000 (25,000 if one includes the large transient contingent). The Sea Lord rules from the Grand Palace, one of the few all-stone buildings in Coral, an imposing edifice of red granite that is also home to the military-bureaucracy that implements the Sea Lord’s edicts and manages the army of Coral. The majority of the remainder of other buildings in Azure are of wooden construction, the sheltered bay with its high promontories protects the city from the worst ravages of the frequent storms that make Azure one of the wettest cities in Creation (it rains, on average, four days a week).

Something that surprises many visitors to Azure is the lack of pirate bars, brawls and general dissolution – at least compared to the stories that have spread regarding the city. That isn’t to say that there is none of this kind of activity in Azure, but rather that over the years the city has matured and the pirates and raiders who dock here generally confine their antics to the eastern edge of the harbour, near the poorer part of town. Merchant ships dock at the west side, closer to the warehouses and the city proper, where the local traders can exercise their notoriously tight-fisted idea of commerce on the visitors.

One of the major draws for travellers is the Diving Sea Snake, a casino on the northern edge of Azure’s harbour, constructed so that half of it is actually beneath the waves, allowing for spectacular views of the harbour sea-life. This feat of engineering was only possible because of the influence of its patron, Plentimon of the Dice, the God of Gambling, who used Heavenly labour to construct something not seen on Creation for centuries. Plentimon himself plays here occasionally with his games renowned for both their scrupulous honesty and their extremely high stakes, people win and lose years of their life, skill at swordplay or art and other, more esoteric, qualities.

Mantaville

If Azure is surprisingly mundane, Mantaville is the stereotypical pirate town. Loud and rowdy, with brawls every night (and often during the day), a place where anything that isn’t said at a shout is unlikely to be heard at all over the racket of the revellers, prostitutes and other unsavoury denizens. The local drink of choice is a nasty brew known as skarrot that unwary imbiders are laughingly informed contains everything from maiden’s water to rat’s blood, but is actually fermented and distilled from a variety of seaweed.

Possibly the most famous building in Mantaville is the Maiden’s Crotch, a coarse name for a coarse establishment. Originally a fairly small tavern, it has grown and expanded over the last eighty years or so, swallowing the adjacent buildings until it became the monster it is today. Alcoholic beverages from every part of Creation can be found here, and this quantity of booze together with the general rowdiness of the clientele means that it is a rare night that doesn’t require the barkeep to haul two or three corpses out into the street when the Crotch finally closes at approximately three hours after midnight.

Siakan

As recently as twenty years ago Siakan was a thriving port town on the southernmost island that is officially recognised as being part of the Coral Archipelago. Then, one day, a wanderer came to the town and, as was the local custom, variously cheated, robbed and generally taken advantage of by the duplicitous inhabitants. His revenge was a subtle and terrible one.

Late at night the entire town was awoken by a deep rumbling sound, and out in the harbour the sea seemed to boil and bubble - the event lasted almost an hour before passing. The locals shrugged their shoulders and went back to their beds, not realising that a death sentence had been passed upon their town. The next morning, all five ships that tried to leave Siakan foundered on a vicious set of rocks and shoals that lay just below the water's surface. The port of Siakan had been closed permanently. Within a year everyone who could leave had, and now the town is home to criminals, thieves and outlaws, the dregs of a nation of pirates.

Other Locations

Blue Mountain

One of the northern islands of the archipelago has a single peak at its centre. This peak is renowned across the West for its beauty and symmetry and artists from as far away as Lookshy and Chiaroscuro have been known to make the arduous journey. Its name come from the colour, a startlingly pure deep blue that almost seems to glow in the sunlight, but the reason behind this colouration has never been discovered – every attempt to climb the mountain in recent history has ended with the climbers dead, their broken remains discovered at the foot of the peak one morning.