Cranberry Bay

**Cranberry Bay** is one of the greatest cities on Aerb, home to the Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh. It's located in the Monarchical Democracy of Esplandian.

## Geography

Cranberry Bay's layout loosely resembles that of the San Francisco Bay on Earth. The city occupies the tip of a peninsula which forms one side of the namesake bay. There's an island in the middle of the bay with a maximum-security prison, and while there's no Golden Gate Bridge, there are piers jutting out into the water from either side of the bay which mirror it. The city itself is hilly and divided into "colorful" districts. The city's namesake cranberry harvests float up from the bay each year and are collected with nets by a fleet of ships. (Juniper is uncertain whether cranberries work differently on Aerb, or it's simply a similar plant that was mistaken for cranberries at some point.) Unlike most cities on Aerb, it has no city walls.

The city is one of the more beautiful ones on Aerb. It's larger than e.g. the ruined Silmar City. The population is heavily multicultural, especially in the Athaneum, where humans are outnumbered by nonhumans,[*citation needed*] although it's not quite as diverse as a major tourist destination like Headwater. However, bright colors and mock entads are less common than in Caledwich.

The city is dominated by the Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh. Four if the city's five tallest buildings are there, making it easy to locate from anywhere in the city, including a pair of artfully ramshackle-looking castles. Thanks to the Atheneum's presence as a center of medical knowledge, the Penndraig Memorial Hospital in Cranberry Bay is considered among the best in the world.

Cranberry Bay is located at one end of the Lion's Mane, and a train line runs from there to Headwater at the other end. The city is approximately 10,000 miles from Anglecynn and the Risen Lands.

## History

### Earth

Cranberry Bay was the site of Juniper's very first RPG campaign, "Pilgrim's Promise", which was quickly derailed when the party sided with the villainous necromancer. He designed the setting when he was 9, which is why it's based around a complete misconception of how cranberries work. As originally concieved, the plot involved cut-throat guilds who competed over the cranberry trade, but these aren't present in the modern-day Aerb version of the city. There was no equivalent of the Atheneum.

A year later, Cranberry Bay formed the basis for his "Cranberry Guilds" campaign; which was set in a world the city had been magically transplanted into, leaving it as one of the few points of light in the wilderness. This campaign focused on building up an Adventurers' Guild in the face of competition from the other guilds of the city.

### Third Empire

The Tuung Princess Emomain studied for ten years at Bone and Flesh, living in Cranberry Bay, before returning home on the same train as the party (see below).

The Party travelled there, hoping to find a cure for Amaryllis' Rat Rot and Junuiper's boneitis among the collected medical knowledge of the Atheneum. After completing her research, Fenn won an archery contest, which the DM had secretly arranged for her by paying off a Water Mage to delay it with bad weather until the party arrived.

Over the course of their adventures, Cranberry Bay served as an occasional home base for the party, frequently visited via teleportation key. Once Juniper had unlocked Essentialism, Cranberry Bay was the site where he and Fenn talked a random man into sitting still while Juniper copied his bones. Juniper also visited Cranberry Bay to get tailored clothes for his date with Fenn, and the pair returned there for the date itself (a showing of Uther's Star Wars cycle of plays.) During and after the date, the party hung out in a safehouse in the city the group had procured, a fairly ordinary middle-class house secured with wards by Grak.At some point, multiple, disposable safehouses in Cranberry Bay were set up. The party used Cranberry Bay as their starting point on the train journey to the Boundless Pit.

When Amaryrillis was pregnant, the party planned to travel to the world-class medical facilities in Cranberry Bay at a moment's notice, which ended up happening.

At some point, Juniper tested communicating with Amaryllis through their soul link by making her obsessed with Cranberry Bay. This led to her quickly plotting to defeat Juniper as step one of her plans for the glory of Cranberry Bay; a failure mode that led to them agreeing to use less intense pulses of emotion in future.

1. ↑ There were some taboos against going around armed and armored, but few nations had laws against it, and Cranberry Bay (part of the Monarchical Democracy of Esplandian) was not one of them. - Chapter 38: Don't Split the Party
2. ↑ “Last month, a man matching your description got in an altercation with Prince Larkspur Prentiss, who was, at the time, Foreign Security Director of Anglecynn,” said Finch. “This happened in Cranberry Bay, at the Athenaeum. That was when I was called in. As you know, the Kingdom of Anglecynn is quite some distance from the Monarchical Democracy of Esplandian, and as you might imagine, the altercation raised some eyebrows. I use that word, altercation, because it’s unclear whether it was a direct assault on the FSD, or whether it was in some way provoked. There are discrepancies in the eyewitness accounts.” - Chapter 101: PPROM
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 I was in Cranberry Bay, the site of the very first adventure I had ever written.

Cranberry Bay was (very) loosely based off of San Francisco. It was built up on the tip of a peninsula that made up one side of the bay’s mouth. There was no enormous bridge spanning the bay here, but there were piers jutting out into the cold bay water, an island with a maximum security prison on it, and steep hills divided into colorful districts. - Chapter 38: Don't Split the Party
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Every year, cranberries floated up from the depths of Cranberry Bay and were scooped up with large floating nets, to be gathered and sold around the world.

(What’s that you say? Cranberries don’t work like that? The reason cranberries can be seen floating on cranberry marketing material is because the process of wet harvest involves flooding a cranberry bog, agitating the vines, and then collecting the floating cranberries? Yeah, well I didn’t know that when I was nine years old, give me a break. I assumed that in Aerb, cranberries worked differently, or the fruit that was collected from Cranberry Bay was named something else and had only looked and tasted similar to early explorers.) [...] I could see that we were just in time for the cranberry harvest, because the bay was tinged red and big ships with white sails were dragging nets behind them. - Chapter 38: Don't Split the Party
5. ↑ We strode forward, until we came to the familiar walls that every city so far, save for Cranberry Bay, had up around their borders. - Chapter 46: The Market of Blood and Bone
6. ↑ The restaurant we’d come out of was at the top of the hill, meaning I had a wonderful view of both the city and the bay. It took my breath away a little bit. I had so far seen Silmar City, a lifeless, uninspired place that seemed like it had taken notes from Wichita, and Barren Jewel, which was nothing too spectacular to look at from the outside and a hive of scum and villainy from the inside. Cranberry Bay was different. Where Barren Jewel seemed to be limping along through inertia, Cranberry Bay was a city in the prime of its life, a clear festival of commerce and culture. - Chapter 38: Don't Split the Party
7. ↑ Headwater itself was no metropolis, nothing like Cranberry Bay or even Silmar City, though it was large enough that a few prominent buildings gave the suggestion of a skyline. - Chapter 86: Headwater
8. ↑ I was fortunate that all three people I had seen were pretty distinctive, even by the standards of the multicultural wonderland that was Cranberry Bay. - Chapter 39: Strategic Reserves
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 *I am Princess Emomain, fifth daughter of Esunouninuol, current monarch of the Boundless Pit. I am aboard the Lion’s Tail on my return trip to the Boundless Pit, following ten years of intensive study at the Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh, where I specialized in medical procedures which are either necessary due to ethical concerns about the use of magics, or due to the impossibility of using magic for whatever reason.*
*When I return to my ancestral home, I am likely to be sorely lacking in the multicultural companionship that I had grown accustomed to in Cranberry Bay, and during the two days of travel it will take to get to Headwater and the Boundless Pit, I’ve decided that I shall have one last hurrah.* - Chapter 83: The Familiar and the Foreign
10. ↑ “No,” said Fenn. She took out the invitation and handed it to Amaryllis. “She uses the word ‘multicultural’ twice. I think half the reason we got an invitation is that I’m a half-elf. Maybe more than half the reason. If you were her, and you thought that your days were going to be spent at court, surrounded by other tuung, and you wanted to have all the variety and mishmash of different stuff that a place like Cranberry Bay had to offer, you wouldn’t want to stack that party with, no offense, boring old humans.”
11. ↑ It was interesting, certainly, to see the mix of people, cultures, and customs, more even than in Cranberry Bay, because this was a place explicitly *meant* for people from far away to visit. - Chapter 102: The Adventures of Valencia the Red
12. ↑ The clothing of the people I saw going by was likewise bright and colorful, more than in Cranberry Bay or Li’o, and it might have been my imagination, but a fair number of people seemed like they were wearing mock-entads, pieces that had the out-there styling common on entads, but without actually being magical. - Chapter 177: The Erstwhile Manor
13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Other than the titular cranberries, there wasn’t that much to suggest the place that I’d built. This city was too dominated by the athenaeum, and it wasn’t really that much of a shipping city at all, not like I’d drawn it up, because teleportation magic meant that with a few exceptions, it didn’t make any sense to send things across the world by boat. The ships in the bay didn’t even have the colors of the Cranberry Guilds on them, which meant that the whole plot about cutthroat cranberry trade wasn’t in play. I didn’t have time for a quest like that one, but it was still a disappointment. A lot of the potential hit of nostalgia had clearly been removed, and I wondered whether that was by intent.

The Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh wasn’t hard to find; four of the five tallest buildings in the city were on its sprawling campus. There was no unifying architectural style to Cranberry Bay, but two of those four buildings seemed like they were meant to be a matching set. Both were giant castles, fifty or sixty stories tall, and at least on the exterior they looked like they had been built by mad wizards who had been told that they could build whatever rooms they wanted so long as they never tore anything down. I had never seen a building that large which still looked ramshackle, and I was immediately suspicious that it was all just aesthetic, a facade meant to look quirky but which hid an interior of straight, clean lines. - Chapter 38: Don't Split the Party
14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 “We have a companion back in Headwater that we need to retrieve, at a minimum. If something goes desperately wrong, then we’ll probably go back to one of the safehouses we have set up in Cranberry Bay, so that Amaryllis and Solace can get emergency medical attention.”

(I was really hoping that it didn’t come to that, but the athenaeum produced some of the best healers Aerb had to offer, and the hospital there was first rate -- by Aerbian standards, anyway, which were better than Earth's in some ways, but worse in others. For the most part, healing someone with a fully healthy soul was easy street, but if the problem couldn’t be fixed by resetting the body to the soul’s image of the body, or through enhancing the body’s natural processes of homeostasis, you had problems. Purely physical injuries were generally easy to heal, unless you let them go long enough that the injury became a part of the soul. Diseases, poisons, cancers, disorders, and things like that all had various ways of being dealt with, but they weren’t surefire, and there was a lot of variance when you got into the specifics. Maternal mortality, according to Amaryllis, was slightly worse than in the United States, though the distributions were different.)

“You have other houses?” asked Zona. She frowned slightly.

“Places to lay low,” I said. “They’re not secure, and we assume that we’ll have to be ready to move at a moment’s notice, given that we have a few enemies.” - Chapter 99: Enough Rope to Hang Yourself
15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 “Labor needs to be induced, because it’s been twenty-four hours without it happening on its own, and the baby is going to be preterm, which means she’s likely going to need special care. On Earth, it would be about one in fifty chance of infant mortality, but I think higher on Aerb. In my estimation, this is beyond our capabilities. We’ll be going to the Penndraig Memorial Hospital in Cranberry Bay to get me checked in as quickly as possible.” - Chapter 101: PPROM
16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 In the morning, we teleported to Cranberry Bay, where we boarded a train that would take us along the Lion’s Mane until we reached the Boundless Pit. - Chapter 81: Musings on the Elder God
17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 The train started to move, and I was treated to a rapidly receding view of Cranberry Bay. For certain stretches of our trip, the train would be going more than a hundred miles an hour, tracing the Lion's Mane, a geographical feature that looked a little bit like a lion's head if you squinted and tilted your head a bit, water making up the face and land making up the mane, with enormous islands making up a few features of the 'face' -- eyes, nose, mouth, and archipelagos that might have been whiskers. You really had to squint though. - Chapter 82: Aboard the Lion's Tail
18. ↑ “Did you know that Anglecynn drops people into the exclusion zone as a form of punishment?” I asked.

“Ugh,” said Clara, “Yes, I’m well familiar with that bit of barbarism. So someone made it back, got inducted into the Host, but contracted a disease along the way?”

“Something like that,” I replied. “So I’m here, trying to at least figure out what kind of disease it is. He’s got about a week left to live, which I hope explains why I didn’t want to take the tour.” And if she asked about the distance, which was on the order of ten thousand miles, I would just tell her that I got my orders by radio. - Chapter 38: Don't Split the Party
19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 **2009**
**Pilgrim’s Promise** - First actual campaign, where the party made friends with a necromancer and he sent them on missions, despite my best efforts. They kept ignoring the fact that he was playing them like a fiddle. Eventually they destroyed the world by accident, though I gave them a lot of outs before the asteroid hit. Amateurish and derivative in a lot of ways.

[...]

**2010**

[...]

**Cranberry Guilds** - Set in Cranberry Bay, which was fantasy San Francisco; it originally appeared in Pilgrim's Promise, then was refined here and transplanted to a different world (also the literal, in-universe explanation, part of the backstory to justify the 'points of light' setting). Focused a lot on guilds, which weren’t all that well-designed, but provided a lot of differently-styled fodder for the group to rip through. Their Guild was the run-down Adventuring Guild, which they eventually built up into a juggernaut. - Chapter 105: Notes
20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Cranberry Bay was home to the Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh, and given that my personal problem was a bone one, and bone magic was the primary healing magic in the world, it seemed likely that we could find the solution to both our problems there. The catch was that we didn’t have a great point of entry; Amaryllis had visited Cranberry Bay, but she had been young and not on the lookout for hidden spots she could arrive at with a key without alerting anyone. Rat rot rating: ★★★★☆, Dry bones rating: ★★★★★, Danger rating: ★★★★★ on entry, ★★☆☆☆ after, Nostalgia rating: ★★★★★

[...]

“Welp, looks like we’re going to the Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh then,” said Fenn. “I’ve always wanted to see Cranberry Bay.”

She wasn’t the only one. Cranberry Bay was one of the places that I created, and it was special to me, for a very simple reason: I had made it when I was nine years old, in the first campaign I had ever run. It was a simple, innocent place, and the only question was what the lens of Aerb had made of it.

- Chapter 36: In Which Juniper Stares At His Character Sheet
21. ↑ “I nudge things, here and there,” he replied. “I fudge things, sometimes, when I don’t think it will be too obvious to you. There wasn’t going to be an archery contest in Cranberry Bay when you were passing through, but I looked ahead a little bit, and saw that I could help Fenn to have a little adventure by paying a water mage to produce some inclement weather a few weeks prior, which made the contest committee move the date up, and from there it was just a matter of having her hear about it, which took another few nudges.” - Chapter 79: Rule Zero
22. ↑ Chapter 74: The Mouth of a Long River
23. ↑ Chapter 76: Date Night
24. ↑ We walked through the hallways of the safehouse; she knew the place better than I did, since I had been out and about far more than her, either helping to set up the other safehouses, helping Fenn gather up supplies, or training somewhere that would allow me a lot of room. The Cranberry Bay safehouse (really just a house, but Grak had at least given it modest wards) was pretty ordinary by the standards of Aerb, close enough to modern middle America that you could be excused for having missed the differences. The electrical systems were probably the more noticeable, with thicker cords, heavier light switches, and bulbs that seemed both fragile and weighty. I missed LED bulbs.

The paintings on the walls had come with the house, and I was half-tempted to stop and look at them. Instead, they passed me by, scenes of the cranberry harvest out on the bay that were probably iconic, if you weren’t a stranger in a strange land. We went into the room I shared with Fenn, which was warded against sound for obvious reasons, and I pulled a chair out from behind the roller-top desk so that she could sit on the bed. - Chapter 77: Lies and Damned Lies
25. ↑ In a worst case scenario, Juniper could do short-term extreme values pumping as a method of communication. They had tested it twice, and both times, Amaryllis had found it extremely unpleasant. One moment she was normal, the next she was hyper-focused on Cranberry Bay and the ways that she might be able to go there and protect it, knowing that it was Juniper’s remote manipulations but not actually caring. She’d gone into what she’d termed an adversarial spiral after not much more than thirty seconds, wanting to stop Juniper from changing her soul back as a first step toward the eternal glory of Cranberry Bay. Thankfully, he’d reversed what he’d done very quickly, and they’d agreed on a shorter, less intense pulse, which was unnerving, but not actually dangerous unless she was in the middle of something. - Chapter 185: Mirror Room