Kahnstadt

Whilst never considered one of the great cities of the Ocemi Empire, Kahnstadt had become something of an economic hub for the northern vestiges of Ocem. Situated a mere weeks' horseback riding from the border with Nowak, Kahnstadt was the final station of the Great Northern Road, a place where traders to outside the Empire would spend the last of their Ocemi money and pay the duty fees on their goods.

It was for this reason that the Kahnstadt Trade Company was born and became a powerful and influential feature in the Kahnwold and further south. The Church of Sol Imperii also had constructed one of their most impressive cathedrals in the north in Kahnstadt (though anyone who had spent a degree of time in the great cities to the south would have dismissed it as a drab, squat affair).

Kahnstadt's influence and wealth came to an end with Essler's war of independence. During the fighting with the Empire, Nowak invaded the Kahnwold, burning villages and farmsteads as they went. They quickly encircled Kahnstadt with the intent to starve the city out. For weeks, the city endured a monsoon of rocks as masses of Nowak catapaults let loose. Eventually, Essler and Vascas, head of the Legion which was sent north by the Emperor, arrived to relieve Kahnstadt under an uncomfortable alliance.

According to the Concerned Citizens and their their leader Harri Stellwagen, then one of Essler's lieutenants, Essler was said to have fallen during this time, heroically leading a breakthrough against the encirclement. For some months, a bloody stalemate ensued, with allied and Nowaken forces clashing from district to district at a terrible cost. This was eventually broken, but not by either side's valour -- unbeknownst to those fighting over what now remained of Kahnstadt, Falkovia's gates had been mysteriously thrown open, allowing a great orcish army now known as the Bloodmarch to rampage through Nowak and into the rear of the Nowaken enirclement.

When the smoke cleared, the city was a ruin and Nowak had all but collapsed as a nation, their great army crushed between the anvil of the Kahnwold's forces and the hammer of the orcs, who were in turn thrown back from some portions of the once-great city and settled the cathedral and the neaby steppe.

Bloodied and worn to the bone, Vascas called for a retreat to Roeswerp to rearm and regroup -- then thought to be a temporary measure, for the retaking of Kahnstadt might have been trivial for the Ocemi Legions, before the disaster at Velik.

Vascas was joined by some remnants of the Kahnstadt Trade Company's republican army, who reformed into the Roeswerp Merchant's Guild and ostensibly buried their ambitions. The rest stayed in the smoking ruins, forming a private militia known as the Concerned Citizens under the direct control of Stellwagen, who remain the dominant power in Kahnstadt and can be considered the de-facto government of the so-called free city.

In recent times, Kahnstadt has been largely abandoned after the dark, pagan magicks of the druids of the Solstice claimed the ruins and destroyed what little remained, using the infamous pirate lord Janer Gull as their patsy. While a few camps of survivors remain, clinging to a lost hope, the majority of Kahnstadt's survivors have moved for Roeswerp's Chines... or worse yet, the Underducts below.