Girwood

The **Girwood** is a vast, uncharted forest covering the southeastern corner of the Ship, between the Valley of Fire and the rolling hills of Engineering. It is the home of elves - exclusively elves, in fact. Non-elves are not permitted, and half-elves only on sufferance.

The capital of the Girwood is Orthond, the secretive elven capital, which travellers claim to be beautiful beyond imagining. Built into the sides of huge, towering trees, filled with magnificent art and graceful people, Orthond is the spiritual home of all elves on the Ship. Even amongst other people, elves describe places by their distance from Orthond.

The name appears to be an example of elven simplicity - "Gir" being the ancient word for "ship", leaving "Ship-wood" or "Forest of the Ship".

## History

The Girwood has existed as long as the Ship, being part of the original construction, and elves were involved in that, as designers, architects and providers of magical knowledge. Legend has long said that the Girwood stands over untold riches, planted there by the ancestors who built the Ship.

During the War of 1995, while little history of it survives, the elves sealed off the Girwood and refused to engage in the conflict - or to permit refugees to shelter under the trees. Local legends vary as to the nature and cause of the elves' attitude, but it seems that the isolationism of the elven people dates from this time.

The Girwood was badly affected by the Delving Disaster of 4553 - while trees are resilient to radiation poisoning, they're not immune, and neither are the inhabitants. Despite repeated entreaties, the elves refused to accept any help, and still hold the dwarves responsible for the disaster.

The Great Plague of the early 8000s didn't affect the elves as badly as the orcs and humans - whether because they are naturally resistant or because their isolationism protected them remains unclear. What is clear is that the elves did not seize the opportunity to expand, which has caused some commenters outside the Girwood to claim that there must be some internal problem the elves aren't revealing.

## Geography

The Girwood is mostly forested, principally with deciduous or broad-leafed trees such as oak and birch. While most of the territory is reasonably flat, it rises slowly towards the south and east as it approaches the Sternwall and the southern Tarburds. One of the main cisterns is located near Othrond, and rises to the surface as Lake Maieth (meaning Eternal Water, or the Water of Eternity). From Maieth flow the three rivers of the Girwood, each named after a now long-forgotten elven deity of the Old World - the Sashelas, the Sehanine, and the Celanil. The rivers wind their way through the Girwood until they empty into a different region - the Sashelas heads west and becomes the Green River in Engineering, the Celanil flows north through an ancient aqueduct under the southern ridge of the Valley of Fire to become the Millrace, and the Sehanine flows northwest until it finally empties into the Central Lake.

## Climate

The Girwood is a temperate broadleaf and mixed forest, containing large numbers of oak, beech, elm and ash, along with stands of pine and fir, especially in the south and east. Average rainfall per year runs to about forty inches, and the temperature is usually about 15-20 Celsius. In the south and east it's a little drier and a little colder, but not significantly.

The Girwood is rarely wracked by storms, since most of the unpleasant weather systems form at the other end of the Ship, over the heat-imbalance of the Foksells.

## Government

The Girwood is an absolute monarchy, but an elven one. Which means that the king of the elves is the unquestioned ruler of all elves, every one of whom will obey him without question, *provided* he never actually asks them to do something they don't want to do. The king does not actually rule over Orthond, which is the location of the Royal Palace. Orthond, like all elven cities, is run by a noble appointed by the king (or the descendants of a noble appointed by one of the king's ancestors, is more common).

Elves don't appear to have much interest in democracy - the general opinion is that government should be more of a hobby than a career, since elves chafe under bureaucracy and flatly ignore autocracy, the approach that best suits them is a sort of free-wheeling anarcho-syndicalism with a overlay of feudalism. For any other people it would be crushingly autocratic, since there's no effective way to protest the actions of the local lord. But for elves, with both a cultural bias and a strong religious drive toward individual liberty, it's a pleasant and efficient form of leadership - the local lord is responsible for representing his vassals to the next rank up, and in turn receives their support. Taxation is very low as the government requires little in the way of support - most of the local lords have sufficient personal wealth to provide for their own operations, without needing to lean on their citizens.

## Culture

Elven culture is driven by their philosophy of personal independence and communal interdependence. Elven settlements rarely have a baker or a butcher - elves do not wish to specialise to such an extent, and there is little use of currency inside the Girwood since the majority of interactions is driven by barter rather than gold. This reduces the efficiency of the elven economy to a point that would be crippling if it had more than token trade with the outside world.

In a society driven by barter and faith in an individual's word, the entire elven economy basically runs on trust, which is one of the reasons they don't like to trade with other races, except maybe the dwarves. An elf's reputation might last a thousand years - no matter how scurrilous or honourable the human, they'll be dead in a few decades and you have to start again with the next one.

## Foreign relations

Limited, since the rest of the Ship has very little the elves want. What trade does go on mainly passes through the dwarves, since elves find the dwarves slightly less detestable than the rest of the inhabitants of the Ship. Most of the very largest settlements on the Ship have some limited diplomatic contact with the High King at Orthond - except the orcs. For an orc or half-orc to pass into the Girwood is automatic, sudden, instant, and even immediate death.