Datria

**Datria**, the **Violet City**, was the capital of the east coast of the Danderillon since ancient times. It was a huge, populous city which had a reputation as the shipbuilding and fishing capital of the world.

## A Tour of Eras

### Dákov Village (prehistory to the 200s TE)

Sometime in the 3rd millennium pre-0 TE, the Vreigardts (native to the Danderillon) had a settlement near the modern site known as Dákov ('green village'), home of its namesake tribe. Dákov was a small settlement of wattle-and-daub huts, thatch hill-dwellings, and home to no more than 300ish Tarkasvreigardts. Verse 2 of the Djévkus Saga of the Rakkimarran raiders, written around -1800TE, is *believed* to tell the story of raiders landing in a warm green land near what is nowadays assumed to have been Dákov (or possibly a nearby village, Lupkóva), based on evidence and artifacts found in caves in the area with carvings saying 'The Crippled Wolf Was Here' and bronze axe heads in a mudbank found later on.

 —Verse 2 of the Djevkus Saga.

### Dakov-ka-terya Fort (200s TE into 1st milennium)

In the 200s TE, the The Lusken Empire landed at Dákov and used it as a staging point for their expeditions into the continent to colonise it. Dákov was razed, and where a tiny village one stood, soon a stone castle, military camp, and bustling town grew. The Luskens named the camp Dakov-ka-terya, meaning 'Fort of Dakov' in Old Euluska. As the camp grew into a castle town and soon (by the early 1000s TE) a small capital city, its name shifted through linguistic drift from Dakovkaterya to Dakterya to Dateria to Datria.

### Datria (until 1120)

Datria became the capital of the east coast for quite some centuries, one of the largest cities in the north of the world. It was famed for its ships and its fishing. The city became expanded with the addition of several sets of stone walls, quite unbreakable, and was a stopover for ships travelling from Rakkimar to the Danderillon down the coast toward Lusken and back up. It survived numerous small wars and raids by Vreigardt clans and by the Darim from the north (who historically controlled a fairly large swathe of the mountains and foothills).

### Peretigros (1120-1125)

In the year 1120, a united and incredibly huge Vreigardt army from the central lands marched on Datria and sieged it in an event known as Dead Man's Siege. The siege was quite a major historical event. Xantic mercenaries helped to defend Datria's walls whilst the city ran out of supplies (The Alderei, Vreigardt allies, sank Lusken Empire food ships bringing grain). During the decisive battle that finally broke the siege, the Vreigardt army led by Warlord Laszlo Vhander II employed the use of unheard-of ginormous cannons designed in a far off land to the southeast. They broke the walls, killed the defenders and the Xantic mercenaries, and took over the city. The city was occupied for just over 5 years by the Vreigardts, whilst many people fled, were killed, or lived in fear for quite some time. The Vreigardts renamed the city as 'Peretigros' meaning 'the great walls'. During the occupation, the Datrian Thieves Guild emerged as the main partisan resistance, and their code language East Cant (an early example of thieves cant).

### Datria (1125 until 1490)

Datria was recaptured by a spearhead invasion of the Lusken Empire and displaced Datrian generals in 1125, after a five year occupation. The attackers landed at the town of Alverosa and fought a bloody but brutal battle of a few days straight with their newfangled gunpowder muskets and firecrackers, clearing a path for ships to come in. Vhander and his generals were speared on pikes, mostly. One escaped and founded the village of Deadman's Rest. The city prospered safe and with its invaders destroyed.

In the mid-1200s, the Lusken Empire (via the city of Datria) waged a war against the Darim empire to the north of the city. This campaign was slightly unpopular after a few years but wholly successful by the ninth year - Kol Darim was ordered to pay a cruel and hefty share of its hoards of gold and rare metals every single year to Datria from now onwards. This made Datria wholly unpopular with the Darim people.

### The Violet Catastrophe (1490) & the Rebuilding (1490-1500)

   In 1490, a dire event rocked the city, which killed almost a **quarter** of the population and ruined almost **half** the city.. The Violet Catastrophe was a huge chemical weapon accident. A highly flammable and reactive violet-coloured neurotoxin gas was released from a magical laboratory by members of the Datrian Thieves Guild - it was being developed for war initially, but development had halted. A huge number of people died or were displaced in the explosion and the ensuing fires in the densely packed wooden city, especially the slums. Over half of the city was destroyed, the poorer districts disproportionately so, and almost 100,000 people died in total. It was Datria's darkest day. The city was nigh abandoned for two years after this event. Most of the workers left for Carmogan or back south to Lusken, same with the nobles. Civillians moved to Malphur, Bracken, Carmogan, or down to Brist and Lusken. The only settlement was a small suburb revived in the ashes of the old merchant district. Efforts here were led by **Pelia's Razor**, an order of altruistic dawn/dusk worshippers+knights who followed esoteric old traditions. Pelia's Razor and the politician Lucio Castaldo (once a Lusken Army Cartographer, rescued after losing an arm to bandits) led the rebuilding efforts. The unstable burnt ruins of Datria were cleared down and the city began growing slowly but surely. From 1492 to 1500, Lusken funded Lucio Castaldo and Pelia's Razor, helping to breathe life into the ruin. Oh! And the Darim were very happy because the Catastrophe stopped the levying of taxes permanently.

### Pelia (1501-1519)

In 1501, just after the turn of the century, the city emerged once again with a new name, the same stone walls, but a smaller shadow. Pelia, led by Governor Lucio Castaldo for its entire eighteen-year existence, grew close to its former glory in only just under two decades. The Lusken Empire reneged control and sparked up the shipbuilding industry once again.

### The Datrian Military Republic (1519 to Collapse)

1519 saw the Fall of the Lusken Empire. Quickly explained as such: The city of Scarossar (modern day Halcyon) declared independence from the Lusken Empire, Around the same time, a group of freedom fighters started a revolution on the colonial island-continent of Lakay that led to the overthrow of the colonial government. This new free administration, the Lakayan Federation, allied with the seafaring Vortic Mercatorium. When The Lusken Empire sent a military expedition north overland to reclaim Scarossar, the Vortics and Lakayans sent a combined assault on the capital, Lusken. They took the city, killed the last Emperor, and the empire shattered overnight. It splintered into very many successor states and factions; some were happy to be free, others declared themselves the 'true heir' of the Empire, etc.... The relevant part is that the military expedition, when they received news that their empire had collapsed whilst they were on their way to convince Scarossar to un-independence, were now soldiers of no nation. They turned east and entered Datria instead. Here, they brokered a deal with the hopeless, leaderless nobles and formed a small independent stratocratic (military) republic, the Datrian Republic. Noble and ignoble figures alike hailed from this great military republic, like Francisco Leon Disforza-Adler and Mortimer Ramsay Campbell. The Datrian Republic was the place where the history and tradition of the Lusken Empire was kept strongly alive, whilst other places decolonised and moved on. It was full of rich history and a reverence for the past. Its military was legendary. The Datrian Republic survived until the Collapse (outcome of the God Wars) in the 18th century.

### The Violet Republic (Collapse to 251c)

Some decades after the Collapse, the people whose ancestors truly called themselves 'Datrians' lived in the crowded and bustling city of Datria once more, as its highly oligarchic Violet Republic lorded over the city and its environs. Once, violet was the colour of Datria's most bloody day. Now, that had been forgotten, and was worn and depicted as a colour of national pride, its pink-purple dye extracted from the bounteous rock snails that lived in the saltwater of the city's bay. The city was rife with wealth inequality and a government that largely went unchecked with runaway capitalism based on a 'blue blood' system of nobles with familial surname claims and other weird esoteric family ties.

### The Datrian Revolution (Late 251c-)

The tensions came to a head in the winter of 251-252c. Up north, the nation of East Rakkimar fought a war with the Xant over the polar island of Sattviul for rare earth metals discovered beneath the permafrost. Since the Collapse, Datria had allied with East Rakkimar due to their proximity, bordering each other to Datria's north/ East Rakkimar's south. Rakkimar was too cold for large forests or logging, so it relied heavily on Datria's shipbuilding and carpentry for its war effort. Datria profited greatly from this. However, Datria began pouring its resources into funding its ally at the cost of its citizens' wellbeing. So that meant higher taxes on the poor, longer working hours in the shipyards, more extensive and destructive logging operations, and more dangerous work as they try to finish things in quicker time. Couple this with an unusually bad harvest for Datria because the fishermen are being conscripted to become shipbuilders, and this clearly was a perfect recipe for mass civil unrest. Datrians began protesting and later rioting in the streets against the wealthy government which fattened its pockets at the expense of its citizens' bellies.

## Geography

It was an east-facing large harbour city. The southern side of the city rose much higher than the north side, with beautiful chalk cliffs. Two rivers flowed into it, the Triao (norther) and Olea (souther), both coming in on the west side. The rivers were the boundaries of historical city districts. On the north coast stood the lighthouse and slums, whilst the south hill was home to the guilds, nobility, and government buildings. In the bay were several small islands, including one called Freemason's Light, where an unfinished old lighthouse once stood, with a small island district. There were catacombs and tunnels beneath the city that connected many of its landmarks - the Datrian Thieves expanded most of this network in the 1120s during the occupation.

Datria sat near the Pearwood Forest, a huge woodland to the west of sturdy, reliable trees. These trees were light but tough, and formed the basis of the city's shipbuilding industry. Datria's borders throughout the ages extended as far as Nisos and Taros to the west and Alverosa and Malphur in the north, broadly.