Balic, City of Sails

The wealthiest of the Seven Cities, Balic is a mercantile power known for its democratic systems, although Dictator Andropinis is the true authority in the city-state.

Population: Roughly 24,000 people live in Balic, with more in the nearby countryside. About half the population is human. Dwarves, muls, elves, and half-elves are present in large numbers. Balic is also home to small numbers of minotaurs and half-giants.

Water: A system of five public wells and extensive subterranean cisterns supplies Balic with water. Most noble villas have their own cisterns. The city-state depends on the intermittent rainfall of the months of Sun Descending to replenish its water stores. In dry years, the praetors enforce strict water rationing.

Supplies: Balic’s exports include grain, salt, olives, wine, livestock, leather, marble, and a small amount of copper.

Defense: Balic faces few threats from other city-states, but giants and desert raiders are drawn to the fields and manors outside the city walls. Five legions of one thousand soldiers each garrison the city and its fields. Most able-bodied free citizens are conscripted into the legions as young adults for three years of service.

Inns and Taverns: The Olive Tree, just off the Road of Legions in the Arena Precinct, offers cheap but secure lodgings for travelers. The Furled Sail is a rough, dangerous place that caters to the crew and passengers of silt skimmers moored in the harbor. The Thespian House in the Market Precinct, known for its bawdy productions, secretly serves as a meeting place for the Veiled Alliance.

The far-flung interests of Balic’s powerful merchant houses mean that Balican characters exist throughout the Tyr Region.

Legionary: You served as a foot soldier in the army of Balic for a time. Legionaries who finish their terms honorably gain several privileges in the city-state, including the right to own land and hold certain offices. Did you complete your enlistment, or did you desert?

Patrician: You were born into one of Balic’s noble families. Your family owns a large estate outside the city-state and holds a seat in the Chamber of Patricians. Perhaps you grew bored and turned to adventuring to find new challenges. Maybe you fell out of favor with your family or were disinherited. Or are you a person of conscience, determined to use your wealth to improve the lot of the less fortunate?

Silt Sailor: You spent your youth as a deckhand in Balic’s fleet of silt schooners, working the trade routes in the Estuary of the Forked Tongue, the Silt Archipelago, and sometimes as far away as the Road of Fire. Traveling the Sea of Silt is dangerous—you have fought off giants and silt horrors and endured terrible dust storms. Why did you leave your last ship? Do you hope to buy your own vessel someday?

Most Balicans regard Andropinis as a necessary evil, resigning themselves to the fact that the dictator wields supreme power and isn’t likely to surrender it. Andropinis routinely arranges the elections of templars he favors and directs the Chamber of Patricians to pass the laws he drafts. From time to time, he indulges idealists and reformers, allowing corrupt nobles or unsatisfactory templars to be indicted or voted out. However, the dictator retains absolute control over the city’s legions and brooks no defiance of his personal authority.

• Patricians
• Praetors
• Merchant Houses: Trade is the lifeblood of Balic, and the great merchant companies fill the dictator’s coffers with coin. The streets surrounding the open market square known as the Agora are home to large emporiums from other city-states in the Tyr Region, including House Vordon of Tyr, House M’ke of Raam, and House Stel of Urik. The Agora is dominated by three major Balican merchant houses and a dozen or more small ones.
• Commonors and Slaves: Many of Balic’s common tradesfolk and artisans belong to guilds of varying power. Some guilds are strong enough to force nobles and merchants to heed their demands; for example, the Potters’ Guild enforces high standards (and high prices) on Balic’s distinctive pottery, ensuring that its members earn a good wage from selling the pieces they produce. Below the common citizens are the slaves, who make up 40 percent of the city-state’s population. Slaves enjoy basic protections under Balic’s laws, but the praetors enforce these laws only in the most egregious cases of cruelty.

Balic lies near the eastern end of the Balican Peninsula, a range of arid hills between the arms of the Estuary of the Forked Tongue. The slopes of the hills are mild and verdant by Athasian standards; grain fields, vineyards, olive groves, and progressively drier pastures extend about thirty miles west of the citystate’s walls before giving way to stony barrens and brown mountain peaks. Large, slave-worked noble estates along the peninsula provide most of Balic’s food supply, but they are threatened by desert raiders and by giants who lair in the islands of the Estuary. Most travelers bound for the city-state follow the Road of Legions, the major passage along the spine of the peninsula. Balic’s wall cuts off the tip of the peninsula, running about two miles between the arms of the Estuary.

The city-state sits on a natural harbor formed by high hills ringing a bay of silt. Many ages past, the harbor was a seaport, but the water is long gone. Where proud galleys and dromonds once rocked gently in their moorings, a great fleet of silt skimmers now takes shelter. Scores of the wheeled sailing vessels call Balic home, carrying the commerce of the local merchant houses from Altaruk and Ledopolus all the way to the distant Silt Archipelago or the shores by Raam and Draj. Within the walled harbor of the military shipyard known as the Arsenal lies the pride of the dictator’s fleet—a dozen silt dromonds, light warships fitted with psionically powered helms that levitate and can navigate silt of any depth.

Balic is divided into five administrative precincts plus the Megaleneon, which is the civic center, both literally and figuratively