Fairmarket

**Fairmarket**, also known as the **City of Wind**, is a city in the region of Lomark, within the Kingdom of Aedirn. Central to the movement of goods across the Northern Kingdoms, Fairmarket is a bustling city of most trades and intellectual pursuits. Built against the perimeter of the Bramblewood near the base of the great mountain Gatshadow, the city is an easy beacon to see from quite a distance. Among the aged cobblestones and every busy roadways, you can often hear music from vagrant bards and nearby taverns mingling with the nearly ever-present winds. The city is a hub of knowledge and learning, housing the world-renown Cobalt Reserve and home to the primary headquarters of the Arcana Pansophical. The city guard keep the peace, and all arrests and social unrest is immediately brought before the Court of Avandra, a combined temple and justice hall.

## City Layout

The city is broken into 6 areas, known as wards: the Scholar Ward, the Temple Ward, the Opal Ward, the Residential Ward, the Market Ward and The Underwalk Ward.

### The Scholar Ward

**The Scholar Ward** is Fairmarket’s northwestern ward, and is home to the Cobalt Reserve, Albion's largest library and repository of information. This vast archive is defended and maintained by a live-in monastery of the Scholar-worshiping monks known as the Cobalt Soul. Across the way lies the comparably small College of the Savvy, a school for the arts founded by the renowned bard and champion of intuition referred to only as the White Duke. Beyond the Reserve, the Scholar Ward also holds the primary headquarters for the Arcana Pansophical, a cabal of arcanists and philosophers.

### The Temple Ward

**The Temple Ward** is a small, southern ward where all people are afforded free worship within various sanctuaries. Though the most important gods Velen are the Lawbringer, the Wildmother, and the Traveller—and they certainly have the Temple Ward’s largest shrines—the residents of the Temple Ward welcome all faiths. Fairmarket’s smallest temple is the Defiler's “Empty Socket,” maintained by the handful of orcs in Fairmarket, and its largest is the Lawbringer’s “First Bastion,” an opulent temple supported by a steady influx of gold from the local government. Whilst his shrine within the Temple Ward is of no unique significance, the Scholar is worshipped extensively by the city's intellectual elite.

### The Opal Ward

**The Opal Ward** is the center of the city and the heart of its law and governance. The ward has no residential housing, but is home to Fairmarket’s Keep, the Hall of Reason, and the public square. Fairmarket’s Keep, an opulent castle that houses the Lord of Fairmarket, is buttressed against military barracks and housing for Lord Eskel Rynderian and his family. The Hall of Reason is a beautiful courthouse in High Elven style, and bears a gilded marble statue of the Traveller, patron deity of Fairmarket, before its steps. The public square is a forum for public gatherings and bears a fountain depicting Palest Fairmarket, the founder of the city, atop an onyx horse.

### The Residential Ward

**The Residential Ward** fills the northeastern section of Fairmarket, and is the city’s most densely-populated— some would say overpopulated—ward, housing over two-thirds of its population. There are no major locations in this ward, though countless petty criminals make their homes here, and the Shields are stretched too thin to properly deal with them. Unlike in the Temple Ward, free expression of religion is frowned upon here, even within the privacy of one’s own home. Though the Lawbringer, the Wildmother, and the Traveller are all benevolent deities, many of their Fairmarketian followers are not particularly tolerant of other faiths.

### The Market Ward

**The Market Ward** is Fairmarket’s southwestern ward and contains the majority of the city’s businesses, trade stands, and production warehouses. It is currently in fashion for store owners to live in a second story above their shops, though less scrupulous businessfolk have turned their residences into gambling dens, black markets, and illegal brothels. The most significant building in this ward is the World Market, a marble-walled auction house where hundreds of vendors hawk rare and unusual items from across Albion, particularly from Exandria.

### The Underwalk Ward

**The Underwalk Ward** is the city’s newest ward, an extension of the residential sprawl built from repurposed sections of the sewer system. The Underwalk was initially built during the invasion of Thordak in hopes of keeping the populace hidden, but it has now been largely abandoned except for those either too poor to return even to the Residential Ward, or by those humans and monsters who would prefer to go unseen. Every day, new and unsettling rumors of many-headed monstrosities prowling the Underwalk’s shadowed roads spread to the surface, keeping even Fairmarket’s bravest mercenaries from exploring the den of sorrow and evil beneath the city. The most wellknown entrance to this subterranean labyrinth is a single inauspicious manhole in the Opal Ward, topped with a metal cover emblazoned with the crest of Fairmarket.