An overview of the major settlements of Dracomere. Each entry links to a dedicated file with full detail.
Once the prosperous trade hub and capital of the Weohstannuk Empire, on the Caern River near the Blue Vale pass through the Drakespire Mountains. After the Maygus brought down the empire, Caernguard survived -- a major city today, much reduced from its imperial heights.
Caernguard was originally re-founded by descendants of Weohstan as a focal point for cultural rebirth after the Time of Nightmares. It became the centerpiece of the human-dwarf alliance that became the Weohstannuk Empire, and it has outlasted that empire by an indeterminate number of generations.
Today: Commercially important, historically significant, and politically complicated. The Weohstan bloodline maintains a presence here. The Orders of Wizardry have a Tower within the city. The Blue Vale is a day's travel away.
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The largest and most established settlement of the Eastern Plains. Ravensburg sits roughly at the center of the plains and functions as the closest thing the region has to a capital -- though anyone who called it that within earshot would get an argument.
More organized and settled than the surrounding plains culture, with permanent structures, functioning markets, and something resembling consistent law. Disputes are settled bluntly, strangers are sized up quickly, and the line between merchant and opportunist is blurry at best. It draws traders, mercenaries, Tribesmen coming in from the plains, and anyone else who needs a real city without the scrutiny of the Settled Lands.
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The largest permanent settlement in the Eastern Plains and one of the few places in Kyrell where Eastern Tribesmen, dwarves, half-orcs, and Minotaurs all move through with regularity and without the social friction each generates in more civilized cities. Built around the site of the traditional seasonal **Moot** -- a tribal assembly held annually for over four hundred years. Loud, direct, occasionally violent, and deeply practical.
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The Order of Vembryl's fortress-city at the narrowest point of the Blue Vale pass through the Drakespire Mountains. Not a city that grew -- a city that was built, deliberately and over generations, to be exactly what it is: a fortified crossing point garrisoned by an order capable of holding it against any realistic threat. Population of ~12,000 permanent residents; everything in it exists in relation to the gate it guards.
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The capital of the High Elven Elysor Reaches, at the heart of the Forest of Slumbering Dreams. A city of living wood grown -- not built -- into towers, canopy bridges, and open galleries above the forest floor, surrounding the Life Tree itself. Few outsiders have seen it. Those who have report it as the most beautiful place they have ever been, and note that they spent the entire time feeling they were looking at something they were not quite meant to understand.
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The largest and most prominent of the Mage-Council city-states, at the crossroads of the central Settled Lands. The most deeply Order-integrated city in Kyrell: four of seven council seats are held by Order-affiliated wizards, contracts are magically enforced through the Arcane Registry, and the city's primary selling point is that agreements made here are kept. Orderly, prosperous, and unsettling to visitors in ways that long-term residents have stopped noticing.
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The capital of the Kingdom of the Hart, in the northern Settled Lands. A city built by people who expected to be attacked and intended to make it not worth the effort -- its walls are among the finest military fortifications in Dracomere, and the Forge Cathedral of Vorathem at its center reflects a craftsman's ethic that runs through the city's architecture, institutions, and culture. Has never signed an Order-jurisdiction compact. Intends to keep it that way.
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The largest port in the Coastal Confederacy, on a deepwater natural harbor where the major coastal trade routes converge. Governed by a Harbor Council of the five largest trading companies, with law covering harbor operations and commercial disputes and essentially nothing else. The most genuinely open city in the Settled Lands -- cosmopolitan by necessity, indifferent to origins, and home to one of the largest established Velkhrun communities anywhere on the continent.
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The imperial capital of Kajima, on the Shirekai Plateau. Where the Varek governs, the Sun Emperor resides, and the Great Houses maintain their primary compounds. Not the largest city in Kajima but the most important: every thread of Kajiman political life passes through it. Breathtaking and bewildering to the rare outsider who reaches it -- designed not around commerce or defense but around ceremony, hierarchy, and the visible expression of order.