Ardhmen

A generation ago, the town of Ardhmen was a fishing village built up on the rubble of a city that had flourished and fallen twelve hundred years before. Today, the fishing boats and their weathered crews still ply the waters off the Syrkarn coast, but their huts and drying racks are surrounded by an ever-increasing number of farmers, traders, guides, and adventurers. Though still a small town, Ardhmen has become perhaps the most important small town in Sarlona. Kalashtar returning from Khorvaire to Adar, adventurers hoping to cross the frontier into Riedra, and those seeking to explore the wonders of Syrkarn itself all start out from Ardhmen's stone docks.

"Ardhmen!" they called out a half-hour before, but in all that time, you've been scanning the horizon to no avail. Your passage has calmed since the ship rounded the cape and left the Sea of Rage behind, but though you can see other ships ahead, the city remains somehow obscured from your sight.

Then you realize suddenly that the reason you can't see the city is that there isn't one.

Before you, the great stone docks of the past eclipse a field of fishing cogs and haphazardly scattered neighborhoods of canvas, sod, and stone. A half-dozen wood-frame buildings along the waterfront rise to a story-and-a-half, but the remainder of the town is all single-floored huts and longhouses spread against the setting sun. In Stormreach, you remember the ruins climbing skyward from the steep shoreline, but the flatness here makes it hard to tell where the shore even begins. In Sharn, you've seen house enclaves that took up more space than this.

The Gateway to Sarlona, they called it when you boarded the ship in Regalport all those months ago. You realize now why they were smiling.

Despite its small size and almost complete lack of history, Ardhmen serves as the point of arrival for many Khorvairian adventurers and explorers bound for Syrkarn and Riedra itself. Most legitimate trade ships from Khorvaire make for the major ports of Riedra, but the Inspired allow no unauthorized vessels in their waters. Ardhmen is likewise the most common starting point for adventurers bound for Adar, since its treacherous shores offer few landing sites and little protection from the Riedran forces who besiege that land.

Passage to Sarlona from Khorvaire is a long and arduous journey by any means. Chapter One of Secrets of Sarlona discusses travel options for Sarlona-bound adventurers, and lists times and costs for sea passage from Regalport in the Lhazaar Principalities to Ardhmen, the route most commonly taken by those heading for Syrkarn.

Ardhmen was once the site of the great port city of Irsthaana in the Kingdom of Lamecha, but the magewars of twelve centuries past laid the city waste. What that arcane conflagration started, the Inspired-ordered exodus in the aftermath of the Sundering completed. Today, only Irsthaana's great stone docks remain, silent sentinels jutting out into the green-black waters beyond. Over the centuries in which human exiles and eneko tribes resettled this empty land, those docks became the site of a fishing village named for the eneko sahar who founded it -- Ardhmen.

The first Lhazaar privateers to run the gauntlet of Riedran vessels patrolling the Aventus Islands made landfall at Ardhmen shortly after the end of the Last War. However, with the dawn of a new age of exploration in Khorvaire, Ardhmen has undergone a change in strategic importance to which the town and its people are still struggling to adapt.

Ardhmen is a deepwater port on the southeast coast of Syrkarn. Within the sheltered waters between the twin capes of Syrkarn and Adar, Ardhmen is further protected by a ring of rising hills that divert the prevailing winds off the Sea of Lost Souls. The great stone docks of old Lamecha have stood here for uncounted centuries, but the town around them has arisen in a relative heartbeat.

The four hundred fisherfolk who earn their living and sustenance from the sea are the longest-standing residents of Ardhmen, and many of their families lived here when the village was new. The thousand-strong population that long ago eclipsed the fishing families as Ardhmen's primary residents are the farmers, laborers, sailors, traders, and guides who service the Lhazaar privateers plying the Sea of Rage with trade goods -- and the adventurers and explorers who travel with them.

Migrant and seasonal populations make up the balance of Ardhmen's people. This includes the aforementioned adventurers, most of whom make Ardhmen their base of operations before heading for the Tundra, Adar, or the Riedran frontier, and wandering tribes of eneko that travel the Syrkarn trade roads throughout the year.

Though the town might appear ramshackle, its construction is anything but. Syrk culture reflects a deep connection to art and architecture that extends from the days of old Sarlona. Whether stone, wood, or canvas, the shelters of Ardhmen have a kind of utilitarian beauty to them and are built to last a lifetime.

Around the docks, the newer wood-frame buildings of the wealthier traders maintain an air of whitewashed respectability amid the muck. Things get consistently more disordered as Ardhmen expands out toward the hills that separate the town from the sweeping plains beyond. Small knots of human fishing huts bump up against the raucous campfires of eneko tent enclaves. Clapboard taverns rise alongside sod-walled stables and houses of undressed stone, scavenged from the remains of ruined buildings lost beneath the wind-whipped grass.

Riedra has no official presence in Syrkarn, but its agents are known to watch that land with an unceasing vigilance. However, unlike the clandestine operatives spread across most areas of Syrkarn, the artist and sculptor Jhaazari (LN female Chosen expert 3/psion 2/fist of Dal Quor 1) is known as an agent of the Inspired within Ardhmen, and she makes no effort to keep her motives and allegiance secret.

Most folk in Ardhmen engage in honest business that they know should cause the Inspired no trouble, and they are happy to have Jhaazari report that back to her masters. Those who oppose the rule of the Inspired in Riedra and their constant eye on Syrkarn take a less charitable view of her activities, but are more concerned with discovering the identities of the secret accomplices they know she must have.

Adventure Hooks: At any given time, there are up to five mind seeded Riedran spies in Ardhmen. Three of these are a rotating crew of Thousand Eyes agents who come and go in the guise of travelers, explorers, and sellswords working the trade roads. Inspired agents returning from clandestine duty in Khorvaire often travel through Ardhmen rather than Dar Jin in order to follow and report on the activities of high-level Khorvairian adventurers.

The other two Inspired agents are among the NPCs mentioned above. The DM should determine which of the townsfolk are secretly agents of the Thousand Eyes -- and what their orders and mission might be.