Crunchy bits

About the vicinity

I was triangulating mountains, interesting medieval towns, the Camino
de Santiago (which gives us an excuse to introduce characters from
absolutely anywhere in medieval Christendom), and the presence of a
Jewish community (because you kinda have to have one to be a
semi-religious Jew, and I have this character concept, y’see). The
best candidate I’ve come up with is (somewhere outside) the town of
Estella, constructed in 1090 by King Sancho atop the Basque village of
Lizarra and featuring plenty of “suburbs” by 1220. It’s smack on the
pilgrimage route with lots of trade and cultural interchange, features
a gorgeous just-completed Cistercian church practically next door to
the juderia, enjoys regular waves of Frankish immigration (if there
aren’t Cathars hiding out there in 1220, I’ll eat my yarmulke), has a
really spiffy Navarrese royal palace, and looks to be in just the
right sort of countryside which would hide an entire covenant with
ease. A couple of links with pictures and other info:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

What do y’all think? I’m completely open to other places as long as
they have a Jewish community somewhere within a day’s travel—Tudela
and Pamplona are obvious, I suppose—but Estella seems like it would
leave plenty of room for storytelling.

Adrian’s original design ideas

Currently my draft for the Covenant has us in an old-growth hardwood forest at the foot of, or just on the mid-slope of, one of the many mountains of the region. Consequently, a mine should be very do-able.

Our Covenant’s protection rating is high for the rear due to the steep slope sitting at our backs, but we are along a moutain pass road so we will get a curious visitor, say, once a month or so. We’ve spent negative points in dampening the magical aura of the place so that what visitors we do get don’t actually realise that we’re a Magi Covenant. We have also spent negative points in reputation. We can thank Suhayla for this, since she was the one who negotiated for the land and buildings we currently hold as the Covenant Grounds. Being the people person that she truly is she made a wonderful impression on the noble we purchased the land from and the workers we hired to fix the minor faults in the buildings. We will, no matter what, have to spend points to have room for 10 Magi and an equitable number of servants and so on, and we also, unfortunately, have to spend points to pay for Suhayla.

Since we’re just starting I thought it might be best just to stick with the average amount of stockpiled Vis and the annual Vis income (100 Pawns in the stockpile and 30 pawns income per year), but that we might want ot have a slightly higher than normal Silver income per year. This can be explained away either through proceeds from the mine (which, if we do have the mine as a working thing, we may have to have room for extra Specialists and/or Grogs and pay for them too), or that one of our Magi comes from a minor or major noble family and so have a stipend from them that they generously contribute to the general cash pool.

Talking about pools I had an idea for one of our sources fo Vim pawns. We could have a nearby magical mountain spring from which we can get Aquae Vim pawns… just an idea….

Edit this page

  1. Tue, 05 Oct 2004 16:42:39 +0000 – cavlec : Added headings, rule, link to final covenant stats [ Current ]
  2. 2004-09-2913:50 – cavlec : Trying to fix some links [ View | Diff ]
  3. 2004-09-2913:44 – Adrian : weird, the preview showed that there was a link there, but it dissapeared upon posting. Oh well, try again… [ View | Diff ]
  4. 2004-09-2913:41 – Adrian : Putting in the design draft [ View | Diff ]
  5. 2004-09-2511:36 – mcw : Descriptions of Monrroyo – without editing. Others will reconcile & reify [ View | Diff ]
cavlec @ Tue, 05 Oct 2004 16:42:39 +0000

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