1414

## ***Mageweave Barony:* the first elevations to Stonehearth Nobility**

### **1414 DR: House Stonehearth elevates 5 families to the first nobility of the Marquisate**

There were 5 close-knit families: 3 Halruuan, 1 Cormyran and 1 Baldurian, that were key contributors to the SMC arcane research and development efforts. It had been intimated for some time that their families were in line some kind of tangible, generational reward and Stonehearth had proposed baronies.

While a tremendous honor and something they were ready for, the families didn’t want to be spread to far winds – their progress had been contingent on close contact in the same Stonehearth labs, and all the communication that went with that.

While keeping them together wasn’t as useful in a political sense, they worked out a compromise among themselves that was acceptable to Stonehearth: the agreement for a rotating executorship of a barony.

### **The 5 families are elevated to baronets of the *Mageweave* *Barony*.**

The name reflects the five arcane-oriented houses and their collective specialty.

The Barony is located about 20 miles upriver, around the bend of the Winding Water River.

Each family became a recognized House.

* **Sidd** (Halruaa)
* **Cantrix** (Halruaa)
* **Danaan** (Halruaa)
* **Fordham** (Cormyran)
* **Spaeth** (Baldurian)

Each House was charged with management of a support hamlet for a central baronial tower. The Barony would bolster the defenses of the eastern path to the highlands. Each House chose where their hamlet was, and the hamlet was named after the family. One chose to be riverside, two more were nestled in the steep hills, one was on the edge of the highlands above the tower (which is about halfway up the rise).

The seat of the barony was named after Viks Volkerburg, a dwarven wizard who’d been instrumental nearly a century prior in creating *sub-weave* casting. Viks had grown rich in his association with Stonehearth and hadn’t any heirs – so he bequeathed his money to build a school of magic.

That would be honored, in the new baronial seat, which would also be named after him.

### **A sense of bloody history**

Just two years after the Troll Offensive, the Mageweave Houses took their defensive role very seriously.

Within a week of the baronial charter, they’d broken ground on five hamlets and a central tower in a defensible area. Their initial defense started with classic measures like arcane-constructed earthworks and palisades until they build more durable, permanent structures.

They were granted shares of 17.9 square miles, and that area was carved directly out of the marquisate’s own original claim. It didn’t significantly reduce the arable land of the marquisate (only dropped to 206), but did drop the overall footprint to 380 square miles

There were other measures, too – but half of them weren’t visible to most eyes. Especially not to troll eyes…

### **The formation of Stonehearth Parliament**

The Stonehearth Noble Court had been the forum for business of all sorts. With five baronets in the marquisate, there was now official nobility answering to the Coronet of the marquisate.

This was a planned event and there were Debate measures in the charter that guided the process. More than just court discussion, formal parliament went by strict set of reasoning rules, where if a party was found to be advocating or utilizing fallacy or misdirecting arguments, they received temporary censure. Stonehearth leadership did not suffer fools…