Clerkburg

Clerkburg’s residents are a mix of educated professionals: sages, clerks, wizards, advocates, and retired adventurers turned scholars. There is a prevailing sense of hierarchy—measured not by wealth or nobility, but by intellectual achievement. Titles like “Professor,” “Archivist,” or “High Correspondent” are respected as much as "Lord" or "Captain."

This is a district where gossip circulates in footnotes and where insults are delivered in highbrow verse. Students often live in shared housing, wearing faded robes and debating until dawn, while senior administrators enjoy stately townhouses guarded by magical wards and legal contracts more binding than steel.

Crime is rare but clever—cons, forgeries, and information theft are more common than mugging or brawling. Those who cross the wrong sage may find their name quietly erased from official records, or their assets legally entangled for years.

Magic is everywhere in Clerkburg, though often subtle and scholarly in nature. Floating candles light reading nooks, enchanted chalkboards clean themselves, and minor illusion spells are used to annotate lectures or provide visual aids. Ward spells protect valuable buildings, and magical constructs sometimes serve as messengers, guards, or even librarians.

More secretively, some suspect certain professors and archivists are part of clandestine arcane circles—or even ancient conspiracies—using Clerkburg’s resources to search for lost truths, dangerous relics, or pre-cataclysmic lore best left buried.

• The University of Magical Arts – One of the premier arcane institutions in the Flanaess, this stately compound dominates much of Clerkburg. Its stone halls and spired towers house lecture theaters, laboratories, alchemical gardens, and spell libraries. Students of every stripe—wizards, illusionists, and scholars of the planes—study here under strict but renowned masters. Magical experiments occasionally result in localized oddities, but the university’s prestige keeps complaints to a minimum.
• The Hall of Records – A sprawling bureaucratic center where citizenship papers, city ordinances, taxes, property records, and civic laws are maintained and reviewed. Civilians dread it, lawyers thrive in it, and politicians use it like a weapon. The Hall is notoriously difficult to navigate without a guide—or a bribe.
• The Great Library of Greyhawk – An unofficial but revered institution, the Great Library is a multilevel repository of knowledge, maps, arcane theory, history, poetry, and suppressed texts. Certain sections are restricted or require special clearance—some say even time itself behaves differently in the deepest stacks.
• The Quill & Cauldron – A famed tea house and intellectual salon where scholars, wizards, and administrators meet to gossip, debate, or recruit adventurers for esoteric research. On any given day, a conversation might veer from trade treaties to necromantic ethics.
• Scrollmarket Square – A public plaza with booths and kiosks offering scrolls, books, maps, enchanted parchments, and magical contracts. Visiting scholars and arcane merchants from across Oerth do brisk business here, especially during exam season or before major spell duels.

Clerkburg is a district of clean, orderly streets, stone buildings with high windows, and walls lined with ivy and plaques. The air smells faintly of old parchment, beeswax, and pipe smoke. Bells chime the hour from administrative towers, and well-dressed clerks walk briskly to and from offices, libraries, and lecture halls, clutching scroll tubes and ledger books.

Street vendors here don’t sell meat pies or weapons—they peddle rare inks, writing quills from exotic birds, and mnemonic potions for better memorization. Street performers recite epic poetry rather than sing bawdy songs, and the graffiti tends to be in ancient Suloise.

A kind of hushed urgency defines the atmosphere. Debates spill from university courtyards, heralds shout official proclamations, and scribes hustle to copy documents before deadlines that may shift the city’s political tides.