Zuge

**Zuge** walled city state, a magocracy with open gates for spellcasters, all races, but commonly seen as a haven for teiflings.

Zuge. The nine towers. The mage city. The sphynxland. The crystalhome. For such a small nation, behind closed walls, nothing in maligon commands such attention. Its enigmatic nature is a part of this, a will to learn the unknown, but its aptitude at magic is at the forefront of what is known across the cog. Its detractors say that Zuge will be the dawn of a second cursed epoch, or perhaps even worse.

The city has a smooth white outer wall of nine capped towers, some 984 feet from the foundation to the turret roofs. There are three portcullis gates, that have been known to be magically removed when the city is threatened. The gate to the north, known as the white goat gate because of a statue, is the most likely to be opened to the rest of the continent. Its south western gate is called the gem gate, because its primary use is to receive gemstones, precious metals and other component parts of spell casting from allies, mostly those from gadprig. The dwarves of goldsreach are keen to hire mercenaries to protect these caravans who are paid handsomely for the travel. The final gate to the east is called the beast gate or the war gate, having no official name. Rarely does it open, and when shut again it is the first to disappear. The war gate is part of one of the stories of Zuge that is most lauded in some circles or most infamous in other opinions.

At the end of the last war, there were many fractious alliances and broken bonds. Labremulyor’s Soldierkings had began to spread a concept that Kalev had only been so successful because Zuge had altered perceptions around them, and that labremulyor would have won the right to build empire without this. So in the spring of the last year of the war, Then warmaster of labre Gaius Brange took 40,000 troops to march on Zuge. With siege towers, battering rams and trebuchets, they arranged themselves for a lengthy siege. Confidence was through the roof as Gaius himself had seized and orchestrated a complete surrender of the city of refuge in yoluger with a smaller, less equipped force. As the first hail of bolts and stones hit magical defences, the war gate opened. Gaius was prepared for this as well, as he had heard tell of trained beasts and summoned abominations being used by the mage cowards within his city walls. Amusement could be heard from the assembled troops when 7 humanoid figures in loose formation left the comically oversized portcullis. Not accepting a parley and girded by the fires of conspiracy and ignorant hate, Gaius ordered them to be struck down before they could spread more deceit.

All though he was expecting the magic shields to be deployed, Gaius was not expecting them to be returned to the holder of each bow. In a blink of an eye, weapons were destroyed, fire set columns of men to retreat, swathes of soldiers went blind. His troops thoroughly routed, he found himself face to face will all seven, obviously identified as the supreme commander by some scrying means. As a true Labremulyor patriot, Warmaster Gaius Brange did not yield and was struck down where he stood. The seven returned from whence they came, and the story travelled to every pub, coaching house and tavern across the continent before six days had passed. The enemies of labremulyor like to embarrass the memory of Gaius further by joking that Zuge would of fielded nine mages, to symbolically represent the nine towers of the city, but one was in the middle of reading and the other had the flu that day.

Zuge is a magocracy, determined both by the strongest magic users and the most experienced. When reality bending spells are concerned, the governance of the city state is more of a suggestion of a council than an iron fist. The current council is chaired by human Archmagospremier Dumile Mifita with its first minister Tiefing Alokia Shardborn. One needs to be sponsored by a citizen and show proficiency in various spellcasting skills before a council representative to be placed on a waiting list to become a citizen. Almost everything in Zuge is designed around magic and its practices. After the wall of nine towers, through the white goat gates leads to shops, learning institutions and some domiciles in magically enhanced buildings built into the walls. Because this outer layer is open to the sky, it is known as the starfield district, illuminated in the night by floating crystals hovering fifteen feet in air. Most of the shops of the district are open to travellers, in this the outmost layer, giving the starfield district a penchant for tourist focused industry. These shops include the curiositoriausarium, a rare treasures import shop ran by the theatrically suspicious tabaxi going by Ushioda Yoshimasa. Beckett’s protection is a magical weapons and defence shop with a focus on defeating the supernatural and undead, it was run for many years by former Zuge professor Sheamus Beckett, but he has recently disappeared. Papers is an unimaginatively named stationary shop that sells expensive vellums and parchments with leaded and heavy weighted inks for use in spellcraft and writing spellscrolls. The unexpected alure of the shop Papers is its manager, a fastidious gnome named Chatalerm Sepsook who has the remarkable ability not to understand any joke, idiom or allegory. Sjafnarsson’s is a potion shop kept well stocked by the alchemist Sumarliði Sjafnarsson. Sjafnarsson has become an expert in potion craft, as well as containing and preventing the effects of chemical explosions. The Starfield district also has a small franchised outlet of The Cogsmen corporation of Tryb, attempting to bring advanced mechanical constructs to popularity inside zuge.

Inside the next walls of Zuge are the official municipal buildings of the council of mages. Despite the heraldry of Zuge, the city has no centralized public library. Instead, records are kept of the private libraries of mages, and the position of archiver is for someone who can contact willing mages and ask for rentals on their tomes. This can cause a rather irritating paper trail, but the policy is considered preferable to the dangers of even a well guarded library of arcana. Laboratory space is made available for registered citizens. First minister Shardborn is the adjudicator of all experiments, having some power to duplicate herself across the city as needs be. If the magical prowess shows gread aptitude or great potential, Shardborn puts forward the practitioner to be elevated to an arch position. The centre of zuge is a playground for the Archmages, it is a wizard’s tower obscured by the city around it. Dimensional inconsistencies are par for the course and much of it is a dedicated interplanar crossing. The most closely guarded arcane devices of the city are kept in its tallest peak, often accompanied by Archmagospremier Dumile Mifita himself. Magic amplifiers, magic distorters and the astrolabe of Zuge have long waiting lists for experimentation. Often once a lower spellcaster sees the potential in them they are put on the path of ascending the ranks of their city state.

Zuge has no natural animals. This is not to say it is barren of wildlife though, Quite the opposite. Summoned fey creatures, demons, devils, abberations, familiars, constructs, birds of paradise and even ethereal beings run errands, sing songs and make their way through crowds.