A’Teran
Cities in the Sky, A’teran, the Wild City, the vine strangled ancient stones of forgotten dungeons, reclaimed and reawakened. Occupied again like they were in ancient times. jungle and civilization exist in tandem, ruled by the mighty ape king Daj and teeming people of many cultures and ancestries. Built atop the bones of a lost Aarakocra city now occupied by awakened apes, infernal imps, pirates and smugglers. With no true government beyond the strength of its beast-king, A'tearn is a wild beauty held together by fear and fragile truces.
Home of the A’teranian people, a multicultural lot of Tritineese communities all from various individual islands, all converging in the larger city. The primary groups found here are Awakened Apes and Aarakocra, as well as some smaller populations of Orcs and the parrot-like Hagjaw Kenku, with very infrequent humans.
Battlemaps set in this location
Shrine of Afi
One of three ziggurats dedicated to the elemental gods of ancient Triton. Each a personification of a realm of being. Afi represents the land, and his temple in A’teran is home to the Furnace of Afi: a steel bowl suspended from the ceiling at the center of the temple, the material inside a magma said to have been kept in liquid form since A’teran City was new. The burning rock inside is believed by his shamans to have been spilled from the Earth Father himself.
Little Din
A section of the city populated primarily by infernal beings, summoned by the Cult of Hell that once resided in the city. Having opened and maintained a portal to the burning realms of Hell, the cultists used this doorway to make deals and conjure powerful minions. However, when the infernal realms were destroyed, legions of imps, devils, and demons poured through every portal they could find in Crudilex, many escaping to here. They brokered peace with A’teran and were given leave to stay if they offered power to the chief of that age. Today, they have become a common fixture in the city—imps in particular are a common sight, fluttering between tasks and masters on their bat wings above their quarter of the city, which has come to be called “Little Din” after the great city of Hell that was obliterated.
The Golden Gardens
The hanging gardens are a series of tiered structures filled with spilling vegetation. Huge, colorful climbing plants tended by master druids. The gardens’ gilded towers surround the Altar of Lagi the Storm Mother, whose ziggurat acts as a drainage canal, sending waters from the frequent rains of Triton down through the Golden Gardens in glittering brass-lined gutters and sandstone channels.
The Golden Gardens are primarily used as a communal farm for foreign and rare alchemical plants and reagents. The science of bending the laws of nature with alchemy requires very precise measurements of specific plant material, and it is very easy to get wrong—meaning locations like A’teran that rely on alchemical druidism go through materials extremely quickly.
King Daj and Mogumogu Palace
The King of Apes, Daj, is a gigantic ape-like creature with huge limbs that hang with long mats of red-black fur. He is the lord over all of A’teran, and by right, therefore all of Triton. He holds court in the Mogumogu Palace, a giant golden pyramid at the center of the city, lined with terraced gardens and crowded with the strange birds, like silver swallows, that are always seen above the city wherever Kong Daj ventures.
Daj is one of two of his species that remain. Royal apes from ancient times. He has seen the dawning of four ages and the trading of power between person to person. At long last, the Age of Beasts has returned to Triton, and he claims the throne, securing a wild A’teran.
Shrine of Lagi
One of three ziggurats dedicated to the elemental gods of ancient Triton. Each a personification of a realm of being. This temple was built to honor the elemental god of the sky, the Storm Mother Lagi. It’s devoted to practicing cloud-reading divination and attempting to understand the patterns of the wind as it blows through the thousands of chimes, bells, and stone whistles of the temple.
They also help provide water from the frequent rains—the gifts of their storm goddess—to feed the Golden Garden and provide the plants used by the city's alchemists.
The Rootbound Tap
Rootbound is a tavern built into one of the crumbling temples of A’teran, held together by the vines and roots of a giant treant who also serves as the tender of the tavern. The treant is a kindly old spirit who took a liking to the mortals of A’teran a few hundred years ago, becoming fast friends with an alchemist and bartender who owned the original tavern. They took the treant in, and it lived among them for a very long time until ultimately dying of old age.
The treant was left with the tavern, and seeing how the stones of the temple were slowly degrading with time, crumbling on themselves, it decided it would untangle its roots and hold the tavern up for the rest of its eternal life. Making sure the place that had become so important to it would live on with the memory of its old friend.
Today, the Tap is a central feature of A’teran, and the friendly treant insists on making its concoctions free, so long as the locals continue to supply it with the means to brew them. It merely enjoys the company of mortals and sees the brews as like attracting pollinators by producing fruit.
Buckleswash Harbor
For many years, the pirates of Keelhaul Falls and the apes of A’teran warred with each other for control of the big island. King Daj loathes the pirates completely, but eventually, it became clear there were greater external dangers and threats to his rule. So, the pirate kings and the giant ape of A’teran came to an agreement: they would each control as much of the jungle as they reasonably could, and each would have a territory within the other’s capital.
For the pirates, they got a safe harbor all their own within the bay. Buckleswash Harbor has since transformed and grown, taking over much of the inner bay on the northern side of the island. Buckleswash is known for being a place to secure large amounts of stolen goods, cargo, and crew—a place where pirates come to offload their hauls, get blackout drunk, and cause trouble.
Promenade Portal
At the center of the city, built by the Aarakocra, this is among the very first structures built and the only one of that time still operational. This massive Rift Gate is a series of brass and gold rings that spiral around each other like an armillary sphere or orrery. When activated, the rings close together to form an archway, opening a portal connected to another identical portal somewhere else—as though the archway led directly to that location.
Only a handful of these portals are well known in the world, the most public of them all being this Promenade Portal in the center of A’teran.
The Flooded Ruins
After a devastating tsunami struck A’teran and the government of King Mogu collapsed, much of the city was left to fend for itself. During this time, hunger and sickness drove many of the citizens to band together in smaller groups all over the city, leaving the ancient sites to the rising floodwaters. Today, the bay’s banks and the river delta have permanently shifted so that most of the ancient ruins on the western half of the city are completely submerged.
This ancient city, now occupied by the people of Triton, was once a settlement of Aarakocra, avian humanoids who mastered the skies and built these magnificent structures that have lasted many thousands of years. Today, their descendants are still present in the city; however, their numbers have dwindled and their history has been eroded by the flow of time.
The flooded ruins hold many secrets to their past, and while they have been reoccupied in modern times, a community of Aarakocra scholars are studying many of the structures their ancestors built, gathering fragments of their history and making regular expeditions into the underworld below the flooded ruins to recover what they can.
Temple of Briar
On the western edge of the city, pushed right up against the dense, overgrown jungle that flanks the city, is a crumbling ancient structure with a shattered roof through which sprouts a giant sickly tree. Long ropes hang down to the flooded ruins below, lined with small grey, green, and black flags filled with prayers and requests for aid to the patron of the temple.
Druidic alchemy is one of the primary magical arts performed to maintain the wild city of A’teran, used to clear back jungle, grow crops, and produce all kinds of unique medicines and tinctures only possible in the city’s unique climate. The practitioners of this alchemy gather at the Temple of Briar, an altar dedicated to the Dryad personification of the Season of Blight.
It may seem out of place among the jungle, as the season is most well known for the rotting and decomposition of plants. But the verdant jungle is where the Dryad was first created. This very temple was the location where the tree that spawned the Arch-Dryad Briar was planted and nurtured into the new season.
Today, this quasi-deity returns the kindness shown to her in those times by the alchemists who helped her become. By using a portion of her power to grant boons to those loyal to her and who maintain her temple.
Filthfather Embassy
The embassy of the dwarven master smuggler Docker Filthfather, the richest man in the world and airship trade mogul. Filthfather does enormous amounts of business all over the world, but in A’teran, he seems largely interested in keeping the wild city wild, reducing governance and lowering the amount of law and order the city maintains, which as of modern times is extremely little.
Filthfather also buys huge amounts of stolen cargo from the Buckleswash pirate harbor and occasionally can be seen there doing business with pirate kings, seeking very specific artifacts of power outside of usual legal channels and away from prying eyes.
Bako'rok Arena
Along the bay at the southernmost edge of the city is a giant ruin of an arena. Built long ago for a forgotten purpose, it has now been reclaimed by the jungle and the wild city as the center of gatherings and city-wide events. Its stone bleachers fill with all sorts whenever some great meeting needs to be called or some glorious show of combat is to be put on.
A’teran is ruled by a titanic ape king—an animal. While he may have the ability to speak, his morals are still completely those of a beast. As such, the city is devoid of any governance outside of might and strength. When great offenses to the king are made, sometimes he has to remind the people of the city that where might makes right, there is no might greater than his power and the loyalty of his ape brothers. Bako’rok Arena serves as the site of many an execution by combat.
Blesswater Baths
Filled by ancient estuaries and thousand-year-old gutter canals, the Blesswater Baths is a bathhouse built in the ancient city, reused for its same purpose now many thousands of years later. Deep pools of terraced steps lead down to the pond-baths.
The structure has had a collapsed roof for ages, and so the jungle has crept inside—but the druidic alchemists who work the baths keep only the safe and rejuvenating plants growing within. Lily pads with large pink flowers line the water’s edge, small frogs hop to and fro, and the water is clear and cold. Perfectly relaxing and refreshing when spending a day in the humid, hot jungles of Triton.
Grove of Mercredi
Just across the narrow bay on the hook of land that protects the Buckleswash Harbor from the tides is an extremely dense forest. Trees and ferns strangle every inch of soil, fighting for the light at the canopy from the twin suns. This place, called the Grove of Mercredi, is said to be the lair of a very powerful jaguar spirit a Ninoten called Mercredi, a ghostly personification of an ardental idea.
The Aarakocra scholars say the murals in their ancient ancestors’ temples depict the creature in those earliest ages and believe it to represent jungle nights and nocturnal predators. And many believe it to be true for while it’s never a good idea to venture through the jungle at night, in the sacred grove, that is a thousand times more true. It is almost a sure death sentence to venture into the Grove of Mercredi after dark.
Shrine of Galu
Text Talking about this location, Two paragrahps that inspire and provide reasons to explore these One of three ziggurats dedicated to the elemental gods of ancient Triton. Each a personification of a realm of being. Dedicated to the sea beast Galu, this shrine was once on the very edge of the city, but after the flood, it has become something of an island all its own. The highest reach is now all that is visible above water, and where all the servants of the god of the sea reside offering boons and enchantments to the cannons and pirogues that sail past fishing along the coast, or the larger ships coming in and out of Buckleswash Harbor.