King's Crown
The highest layer of Highhelm and the largest by population, King's Crown is also the highest in the metaphorical sense, serving as the home of the upper levels of dwarven society. At the very pinnacle of the mountain city are the High King, the Goldhilt clans, and the wealthiest merchants. The district then descends through the social classes, through merchants, artisans, the Silverhilt clans, and various skilled professionals. With a few exceptions, even the lowest resident of King’s Crown appears, at worst, middle-class and respectable.
Of course, being respectable and appearing respectable are two different things. Both power and money dwell here in King’s Crown, and those draw the ambitious and the corrupt. Here, one can still find conspiracies and cults, spies and criminals. King’s Crown isn’t known for its common crime—few footpads, few burglaries, little in the way of drunkenness and public disturbance—but it makes up for that scarceness with its uncommon crimes, strange secrets, and curious, shadowy corners.
Highhelm’s government is located within King’s Crown, mostly in the neighbourhood of Helmskeep, in the layer’s Inner City—the part within the mountain, as opposed to the Outer City crowding the exterior. Most of the Inner City’s governing takes place in the Stonehall, the ancestral residence of the Kings of Highhelm, but sprawls out into other buildings as well. A small army of dutiful clerks and bureaucrats keep the city-state functioning, tending to the fees, licenses, taxes, regulations, courts and inspections that every government maintains. A penumbra of spies, diplomats, and interested parties accretes around all this governmental weight like barnacles clinging to a ship.
Highhelm’s second major business is, in fact, business. Like most every city, Highhelm relies on being a regional centre of commerce to survive, and that means taking in food and providing various goods and services to the rest of the region. These commodities include concrete goods like metalwork or masonry, less concrete but much more delightful goods like brewing, and abstract concepts like “rule of law”, “good governance”, and “standardized weights and measures”. Many of these industries are concentrated in King’s Crown, especially those that don’t involve many dubious smells or unexpected explosions.
In fact, culture is considered one of King’s Crown’s major exports. One can find the song makers and shield painters of the region here, where people go to add a little bit of beauty to an otherwise humdrum daily existence. The dwarves of King’s Crown very much believe in beauty and have decorated their layer with statues, carvings, and engravings. Furthermore, Highhelm is well-known for its institutions of learning, from the Academy of Lore to the many libraries and archives of Helmslore.
All the people involved in Highhelm’s prized industries need their own support networks. At the end of the day, the weary stone carver has little desire to trek all the way down to the city’s lower reaches, instead turning for a modest home along the South Face of Emperor’s Peak or toward a rented room above the rowdy streets of Helmsborough. There will be grocers to feed them, tailors to clothe them, and petty merchants happy to sell them a book, box, or bushel of carrots.
All in all, life in King’s Crown is good. The people here are mostly healthy, and even if they aren’t all wealthy, most certainly aren’t poor. Some might grumble and whine about their lot in life, but their complaints often lacks the acid bite of the truly disaffected. These days, King’s Crown mostly works, and lives roll by with a semblance comfort and security for its residents. Conspiracies and cults and spies aplenty lurk about, but they rarely ever touch the common citizen’s life—at least, for now.
Demographics
The current population of King’s Crown is just a hair over three‑eighths of the city, a grand total of 15,652 registered residents (as in, the number of people on the city’s census rolls in 4723 AR). The residents of King’s Crown are overwhelmingly comprised of dwarves, roughly 15,000 in total. The remaining residents are various non-dwarves: about two‑thirds are human, and the rest are elves, gnomes, halflings, kobolds, strix, and other ancestries.
Supplementing these local residents is a motley assortment of temporary visitors, mostly merchants from nearby cities—they also skew towards dwarves, though far less heavily than the permanent residents. Their numbers fluctuate with the season but usually hover somewhere around 500.
Districts
King’s Crown is typically divided into the Outer City, which runs in a thin strip along the outside of the mountain, and the Inner City, which is actually inside the mountain proper. The two are further subdivided into a series of neighbourhoods, the most significant of which are listed below.
East End
Located on the eastern face of Emperoro's Peak, the East End receives all the sunlight and boasts a stunning view of Mount Kla and the Verduran Forest. Here, the dwarven nouveau riche gather—such as merchants, artisans, and forward-thinking engineers.Gatebreach
Just inside the eastern gate, Gatebreach is the centre of Highhelm’s local economy. The great merchant caravans mostly stop in the East End, but for those wanting to buy a chicken, pair of shoes, or a good pickax, they go to Gatebreach.Helmsborough
Helmsborough is like the South Reach, a bit more down market than the rest of King’s Crown. In this raucous district, one can find smithies, taverns, mercenary companies, retired soldiers, more taverns, rowdy muleteers, and, lest one forget, taverns.Helmskeep
Up against the northern cavern wall of the Inner City, Helmskeep is the oldest and most respectable part of Highhelm. Here, one finds the Stonehall and the Hollow Temple as well as the clanhalls of particularly venerable clans.Helmslore
The quiet, sedate Helmslore is home to many of Highhelm’s professional classes—engineers, bookkeepers, doctors, and lawyers who work in the city.South Reach
Relatively poorer compared to the rest of King’s Crown, the South Reach is still an eminently respectable district, home to clerks, artisans, soldiers, and all the other folks who keep the city running.West Face
Located along the western face of Emperor’s Peak, this area gets little sunlight. Nevertheless, its location outside the walls makes it convenient for traders, merchants, and guilds that can’t quite afford the prices of the East End.Points of interest
Aringeld Hall
Clan Aringeld is the clan of merchants and traders and traditionally numbered among the Steelhilt clans. Over the last century or so, with considerable planning and preparation, they’ve advanced their candidacy to the Goldhilt clans, and nowhere is this more evident than in Aringeld Hall. The original hall was built well over a thousand years ago, and those who know where to look can still spot traces of ancient masonry and rough-hewn stone. They would have to look very closely, however, as the current hall has become a gallery of statues and tapestries, gilded furniture, and artefact-covered plinths. Aringeld Hall has been home to near constant construction in recent decades, Clanleader Henthe Aringeld being quite intent on the clanhall looking the part of a high Goldhilt hall.Breakiron Crownhall
Unlike most dwarven clans, Clan Breakiron maintains a clanhall on each of Highhelm’s levels, probably under the same principal as the idea that one shouldn’t put all one’s eggs into a single basket. A noble and respectable Goldhilt clan, Breakiron is dedicated to the advancement of alchemical science, production, and general innovations—vital activities for dwarven life in the mountains but also decidedly dangerous at the best of times. Their clanhall in King’s Crown is a good example of the thinking that goes into each of their laboratories. The hall consists of six separate “zones,” each of which is surrounded by enormously thick walls of stone and packed earth—it’s fair to say that the Breakiron Crownhall is one of the most impregnable structures in Highhelm. The inner walls, however, are made of cheap wood, and the roof is light and easily replaced. When something inevitably explodes, turns noxious, or attempts to eat the resident alchemists, it can be contained to a single area while the force of the blast is channelled harmlessly into the air. Such a blast might even take down the ceiling of the cavern, though anything strong enough to do that will render King’s Crown a bit of a lost cause anyway. Set off to one side from the much-reinforced laboratories is a cozy little complex of offices and residences. These spaces are practically indistinguishable from those of any other clanhall, except for the numerous signs and runic inscriptions threatening dire consequences to anyone who takes their work home with them.Cloudspire Embassy
Built a hundred years ago to replace the ad-hoc building put up after the expulsion of the Droskarites from Highhelm, this grand, rounded-off building was constructed in the Mbe’ke style, with a huge open amphitheatre and two wings flowing off on either side. The Sky Citadel of Cloudspire does a great deal of trade with Highhelm, and it falls upon Ambassador Jkarissend Softongue to make sure that everything flows nice and smoothly and that everyone makes plenty of money. His other job, of course, is to make sure that all the various Mbe’ke citizens in the Five Kings territory stay out of trouble, whether doing so means protecting them from the locals or protecting the locals from them. The embassy also serves as a sort of home-away-from home for various visitors from Garund and puts on all manner of cultural events (concerts, story-readings, and the like) to try and make nice with their neighbours. Probably the most distinctive of these visitors is Mharsilekinass the Jewel, a young cloud dragon dispatched ostensibly to provide for the embassy’s security—who’s insatiably curious about basically everything in the Five Kings Mountains.Firecask Hall
Dwarves have traditionally taken alcohol very seriously, and so it’s no surprise that Clan Firecask’s clanhall is one of the older and more respected of the clanhalls in King’s Crown. Big and blocky, the aboveground portion of the clanhall consists of what are popularly referred to as the Front and the Back. The Front is akin to a traditional pub or tavern, albeit a bit larger and more well-appointed than most. Here, Highhelm’s dwarves can go for a taste of whatever the Firecasks are brewing at any given moment, and any dwarf brave enough to try one of the more “experimental” drinks even receives a discount. The Back, meanwhile, is where the actual brewing, aging, and distilling takes place, all under the watchful eye of Clanleader Perhill Firecask, a master spirits distiller of considerable ability. Though people don’t usually think of it that way, brewing on the scale that Clan Firecask engages in is an industrial operation in its own right, and the back of the hall is a maze of giant vats, powerful furnaces, and pressurized pipes.The Fishmarket
Aquaculture is a thriving industry in Highhelm, where it constitutes an important part of the nutrient- and water-reclamation cycle that enables the dwarven kingdom to be almost entirely self-sufficient in times of siege. Not only does the kingdom maintain a network of aquaculture farms and subsidize private fishponds as civic infrastructure, but many private households do the same on a smaller scale. All of those cultivated fish, snails, and freshwater pearl mussels are sold at the Fishmarket, a wonderland of water, ice, and commerce. The market has scores of freshwater pools set up in giant metal or stone basins, many of them connected by small waterfalls to maintain proper water circulation. Dead and prepared fish are sold from atop layers of crushed mountain ice brought down from neighbouring peaks. A small but thriving side business exists in selling wild-caught fish as well, from mountain streams or deep underground lakes, along with the occasional stranger and rarer catches dredged up from the deeps. Unsurprisingly, the market smells entirely of fish.Grakodan Galley
This luxurious building in Gatebreach is the most elegant and high-profile restaurant in Highhelm. The city’s movers and shakers come here to dine beneath the antique Grakodan tapestries and to indulge in the most interesting food available locally on reproduction-Grakodan gold plates. Elhi Mulgass, the proprietor, part-owner, and chef of the Galley, is simultaneously a keen amateur genealogist (he traces his own bloodline back to one of the kings of Grakodan, albeit a cadet branch), and an avid experimenter in the culinary fields. As large as the dining hall is, the kitchen is larger still, stocked to no end with peculiar and exotic ingredients. Indeed, it’s well known that Chef Mulgass is more interested in making recipes than actually serving them, and the clientele has come to expect a certain degree of eccentricity—like the time Mulgass served steaks infused with elemental air that threatened to keep floating off the plate. To his customers, it’s just part of the Grakodan Galley experience, and powerful and important dwarves tolerate antics from Chef Mulgass that they would from no one else. Mulgass’s idiosyncratic approach to cooking also means that he’ll buy any strange plant, animal, or alchemical reagent and try to feed it to people, with a surprising amount of success. Quite a few petty alchemists and hunters do good business keeping the Grakodan Galley in stock.The Hollow Temple
While the Forge of the Nine in King’s Heart serves as the centre of faith in Highhelm, the Hollow Temple acts, at least in part, as its main place for religious celebration. The Forge of the Nine’s dedication to multiple gods made it difficult to create a space for celebrations and rituals that all nine faiths could agree upon. While Torag’s family are generally amiable, their mortal faithful can sometimes be less agreeable. As a result, Taargick offered a solution: a temple dedicated to no single faith, used only for rites and celebrations as needed, resulting in the Hollow Temple. Celebrations for the dwarven pantheon typically begin in the Hollow Temple and proceed to flow out into the city and down the connecting way into King’s Heart before finally reaching the appropriate temple. Today, the Hollow Temple serves not only the dwarven pantheon, but those of most any other faith within the city. When celebrations aren’t being held there, Plavinn Overhill (halfling priest of Pharasma) maintains the temple. Plavinn serves as a neutral party, mediating schedules for celebrations between the worshippers of the dwarven pantheon and those of other faiths. He allows worshippers of various deities to come and use the space for prayer as needed, and the temple now features small nooks with shrines dedicated to Pharasma, Sarenrae, Gozreh, and other gods.The Iron Archive
The Iron Archive has the dubious distinction of being the only archive in Highhelm, and probably the only one in all of the Five Kings Mountains, to need round-the-clock security. Such precautions aren’t because it contains a wealth of blackmail material or rare occult lore. No, the Iron Archive is simply a repository for maps, land deeds, mine claims, and other territorial records. It has been acting as such for thousands of years, and if one believes the archivists, it even contains maps that were consulted by High King Taargick just under 10,000 years ago. Yet, even that isn’t the reason for the Iron Archive’s security. Most dwarves take things like maps and mine claims very seriously, and so a very long time ago (perhaps as far back as Taargick’s day), it was decided that mere parchment was an unsuitable medium. Stone was better, but stone was hardly a convenient medium for records. Instead, the most precious dwarven documents are etched on plates of fine steel, which are then plated with gold so as to remain untarnished and incorruptible against the march of the ages. There are maps showing ancient paths that are as crisp as the day they were scribed, even as the original stone peaks they depicted have changed. Gaining access to those maps is another story. High Archivist Kagri Breakiron is nicknamed “The Dragon” for her protective attitude toward her charges, and she only shows the oldest maps by royal command. When the Droskarites took Highhelm, the ancient archive was hidden by its keepers, who refused to share it even under torment, and the High Archivist is determined to show no less devotion.Stonehall
The traditional residence of the King of Highhelm, the Stonehall has all the things that one might expect of a grand dwarven royal hall. The royal hall proper, with its vaulted ceilings and carven walls, is adorned with grand relief sculptures of great scenes from myth and legend, a many‑coloured marble accented with gold leaf. Here, High King Borogrim the Hale meets members of the Crown Council as well as holding scheduled, private audiences in his court. The building also contains the royal crypt, where the kings of old are interred beneath stone slabs bearing their likenesses, guardians supposedly enchanted to rise up and defend their old domain. In the council hall, Highhelm’s government meets and debates the issues of the day. The fate of the city and its environs are decided in soft whispers as often as furious shouts. And there is, of course, the royal treasury. Highhelm isn’t as wealthy as certain other dwarven holds with a less tumultuous history, but it harbours enough treasure to tempt any thief. However, ingenious traps and equally unfriendly guards ensure that ambitious rogues can very rarely act upon that temptation. Behind the public-facing rooms and chambers of ritual or civic importance lies a vast warren of offices, archives, meeting rooms, and all the minutiae that keep a government running.Tolorra Sparring Lawn
Here, one sees something on the Tolorra Sparring Lawn that’s hardly found elsewhere in Highhelm, or indeed in most dwarven cities—grass. Once upon a time, this place was known as the Tolorr House, the respectable home of a family of dwarven prospectors and mine-engineers. However, the current lady of the house, Krigo Tolorr, always had a taste for a life of excitement, or at least excitement that didn’t involve listening to the ominous creaking of mining joists and wondering whether this particular lode would prove rich or bone-dry. So, with the family’s not-inconsiderable wealth, she turned the boring plaza around her home into a sprawling duelling ground with actual grass and even some tough mountain shrubbery to add a natural element. A cabal of amateur druids known as the Blade Tenders, led by Chief Gardener Forgald, keeps the place in one piece, and miscellaneous swashbucklers, duellists, knights, and other warriors congregate here to train and test themselves in something that at least resembles natural surroundings.Weaverswell
Traditionally, clothing in Highhelm was heavy on wool, leather, and fur, these being the materials that one could actually get while living atop a mountain. As Highhelm grew richer, there came a demand for more, and so many years ago, an adventurous Keleshite merchant set up shop by this well and started selling fine silks and linens. Later, more merchants set up businesses there, and in time, it became a great cloth market. Traders of other goods, noticing that the dwarves who bought silk were the ones with the most money, started setting up shops to sell various expensive and exotic goods. Today, the Weaverswell is Highhelm’s main market for luxuries and imported goods. Here, one can buy books, scrolls, spices, musical instruments, historical artefacts, sparks of magic, and anything else that a merchant might think to sell. You can also still buy cloth here, from great bales of cotton to delicate silks from afar—Kobal al-Utirin, descendant of that first Keleshite trader, still operates a roaring business in foreign textiles. The well was covered long ago, and now the shops and stalls look out at a glorious fountain of dwarven nymphs and heroes. Popular legend holds that the carved statue of Kols the Oath-Keeper will bang his hammer against the stones and then point it at frauds and cheats.Natural Resources
Local Flora
Like any major urban centre, King’s Crown abounds with gardens, parks, and plant-strewn promenades. Given that King’s Crown is also mostly underground, these areas feature flora particular to the local environment. The most popular civic plant in King’s Crown is the einnermoss, a springy, deep-green moss that adapts quite merrily to the dimly lit conditions of Highhelm and requires minimal care or attention. In places where surface cities might have lawns or parks, dwarves prefer to strew irregularly shaped stones and then encourage the moss to cover them entirely—there’s actually a fashion among Highhelm’s aristocrats to throw a few old weapons, helmets, or even a suitably decorative plaster skull into the mix to get that attractive “forgotten battlefield” look. For the more ambitious gardener, painter’s lichen can be induced to grow into very precise shapes and take on green, blue, or even a lovely sunset pink tone. Producing representational scenes using only artfully grown lichen is considered a high art among dwarves.Local Fauna
Few animals are as iconic in Highhelm as the humble augdunar. A city like Highhelm requires some kind of animal-powered transport in order to function smoothly, but neither horses nor oxen take well to the thin air and subterranean environment. Enter the augdunar. King’s Crown is filled with muleteers offering augdunars for every budget. Also common in King’s Crown is the royal mole, an enormous, soft-furred rodent roughly the size of a badger. Originally bred for fur (especially fine hats and coats), today, many a fine Highhelm dwelling houses a velvety pet mole with a colourful collar. In recent years, a Garundi entrepreneur has brought a few litters of domesticated Mwangi greater golden moles to Highhelm, and there’s currently a very polite debate over which mole is the superior pet.
Inhabitant Demonym
Crowner
Location under
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