After a long night's sleep recovering from my grueling trip across the lake, I awoke in the dim orange of mid-whenever that is ever-present here in D'ni, turned on my lantern, and did some of the exploring I'd wanted to do last night.
The City's structure is interesting. Seeing it up close like this really gives me a better understanding of the D'ni's approach to city planning. There are hints of it in the neighborhoods and Ae'Gura, but the City really lays it bare. Whereas human cities tend to be sprawling grids or tangled knots of criss-crossing streets with buildings filling the empty areas between them, the D'ni City is much more structured in a way. There are large courtyards scattered across the terrain around the harbor, each with a cluster of buildings and access paths radiating out from them a short distance, seemingly limited in reach by the surrounding landscape for the most part. The courtyard areas are all connected to each other with broad, clear avenues, and navigation posts sit at the junction points indicating where various important landmarks are located.
The harbor level is marked by a collection of water-level docks and service buildings – again with attendant courtyards – arrayed around the rim. As on Ae'Gura, broad, steep staircases climb the rough terrain away from the shallow slope of the immediate harbor area to connect with larger courtyards at higher elevations. In other places where the separation is more cliff-like, broad stair-cased tunnels are carved through the rock to connect these two levels. At the center of the harbor's arc is a large round courtyard that sits a little higher off the water's edge than the docks, and is ringed by an ornate fence that serves to prevent it from being used as a pier. It looks distinctively ceremonial, and based on its alignment with Kerath's Arch, I'm going to guess that it's positioned along the line of the Great Zero. There's some sort of large sculpture in the center of it, but I don't have a context for what it might represent. It connects directly to a smaller circular plaza at a higher elevation, which is itself connected by a long flight of stairs to a huge structure that sits astride a peak in the terrain. I suspect it's the original Temple of Yahvo built by Ri'Neref and his followers when they first arrived here.
Despite roaming around this area for an hour or two looking for a suitably undamaged place to settle in for the night, I never felt lost. The layout of the area makes it easy to keep your bearings using environmental landmarks, and for the most part traffic was designed to be funneled along the major avenues that connect all of the courtyards, with only limited extents of side-paths and back alleys branching off to navigate the surrounding clutch of buildings, so getting from place to place is a relatively painless affair.
Farther back from the harbor, the levels of the City begin to climb quickly, and it rises sharply from the surrounding rock in tall, thin arcs of heavy yet delicate construction. The island of Ae'Gura looms in the distance across the way. With the aid of a pair of binoculars, I can make out occasional shapes moving on the Great Stairs and around the Library courtyard area, but more often than not, the Island looks desolate, save for the glow of the firemarble lamps.
I think I've found a good base of operations in my explorations today. I wanted to find a place that was not only stable, but relatively obscured from sight when looking from Ae'Gura. I'd rather not attract any attention, and the glow of a firemarble, flashlight, or campfire would certainly manage to draw someone's eye eventually. Finally, I came across a small tavern-looking structure in one of the smaller courtyards, about 300 yards from the cliffs that drop into the harbor. It can't be seen from Ae'Gura due to a taller structure located across the plaza, between the tavern and the lake. I can also cover up any lake-facing windows, just to be safe.
From what I can tell, the structure is reasonably stable, or at least is in no danger of imminent collapse. It's close enough to the harbor that I can get there quickly, but far enough away and secluded enough that I doubt someone will stumble upon me, should anyone decide to be foolish enough to just start bumbling around the City. There is ample room for storing supplies, and further exploration indicates that my initial assessment of the purpose of this structure were correct: it's a tavern or bar of some sort, or at least it was. I found several store rooms, one of which was stocked with rotted-out barrels of something that thankfully lost its stench decades ago. The floor there will probably never be clean again, and I'm inclined to avoid storing my gear and other findings there until all the other rooms are full. There were also shelves of glass bottles which I dared not open, and a collection of overturned tables and chairs were strewn around the large main room. It wasn't a large establishment by any means... more of an out-of-the-way dive-type place. There is also a second floor to this building, though I'm not exactly inclined to push my luck by trying the stairs. I suspect that the second floor is full of bedrooms, and that this place was also a rest house for those who worked the ships of the D'ni merchant fleet.
The City's structure is interesting. Seeing it up close like this really gives me a better understanding of the D'ni's approach to city planning. There are hints of it in the neighborhoods and Ae'Gura, but the City really lays it bare. Whereas human cities tend to be sprawling grids or tangled knots of criss-crossing streets with buildings filling the empty areas between them, the D'ni City is much more structured in a way. There are large courtyards scattered across the terrain around the harbor, each with a cluster of buildings and access paths radiating out from them a short distance, seemingly limited in reach by the surrounding landscape for the most part. The courtyard areas are all connected to each other with broad, clear avenues, and navigation posts sit at the junction points indicating where various important landmarks are located.
The harbor level is marked by a collection of water-level docks and service buildings – again with attendant courtyards – arrayed around the rim. As on Ae'Gura, broad, steep staircases climb the rough terrain away from the shallow slope of the immediate harbor area to connect with larger courtyards at higher elevations. In other places where the separation is more cliff-like, broad stair-cased tunnels are carved through the rock to connect these two levels. At the center of the harbor's arc is a large round courtyard that sits a little higher off the water's edge than the docks, and is ringed by an ornate fence that serves to prevent it from being used as a pier. It looks distinctively ceremonial, and based on its alignment with Kerath's Arch, I'm going to guess that it's positioned along the line of the Great Zero. There's some sort of large sculpture in the center of it, but I don't have a context for what it might represent. It connects directly to a smaller circular plaza at a higher elevation, which is itself connected by a long flight of stairs to a huge structure that sits astride a peak in the terrain. I suspect it's the original Temple of Yahvo built by Ri'Neref and his followers when they first arrived here.
Despite roaming around this area for an hour or two looking for a suitably undamaged place to settle in for the night, I never felt lost. The layout of the area makes it easy to keep your bearings using environmental landmarks, and for the most part traffic was designed to be funneled along the major avenues that connect all of the courtyards, with only limited extents of side-paths and back alleys branching off to navigate the surrounding clutch of buildings, so getting from place to place is a relatively painless affair.
Farther back from the harbor, the levels of the City begin to climb quickly, and it rises sharply from the surrounding rock in tall, thin arcs of heavy yet delicate construction. The island of Ae'Gura looms in the distance across the way. With the aid of a pair of binoculars, I can make out occasional shapes moving on the Great Stairs and around the Library courtyard area, but more often than not, the Island looks desolate, save for the glow of the firemarble lamps.
I think I've found a good base of operations in my explorations today. I wanted to find a place that was not only stable, but relatively obscured from sight when looking from Ae'Gura. I'd rather not attract any attention, and the glow of a firemarble, flashlight, or campfire would certainly manage to draw someone's eye eventually. Finally, I came across a small tavern-looking structure in one of the smaller courtyards, about 300 yards from the cliffs that drop into the harbor. It can't be seen from Ae'Gura due to a taller structure located across the plaza, between the tavern and the lake. I can also cover up any lake-facing windows, just to be safe.
From what I can tell, the structure is reasonably stable, or at least is in no danger of imminent collapse. It's close enough to the harbor that I can get there quickly, but far enough away and secluded enough that I doubt someone will stumble upon me, should anyone decide to be foolish enough to just start bumbling around the City. There is ample room for storing supplies, and further exploration indicates that my initial assessment of the purpose of this structure were correct: it's a tavern or bar of some sort, or at least it was. I found several store rooms, one of which was stocked with rotted-out barrels of something that thankfully lost its stench decades ago. The floor there will probably never be clean again, and I'm inclined to avoid storing my gear and other findings there until all the other rooms are full. There were also shelves of glass bottles which I dared not open, and a collection of overturned tables and chairs were strewn around the large main room. It wasn't a large establishment by any means... more of an out-of-the-way dive-type place. There is also a second floor to this building, though I'm not exactly inclined to push my luck by trying the stairs. I suspect that the second floor is full of bedrooms, and that this place was also a rest house for those who worked the ships of the D'ni merchant fleet.
I intend to spend the next week or more exploring the harbor area, determining which buildings are safe for further investigation and putting together a map of the area. I will try to have something worth posting soon, but I can't promise that. I've got a lot of other priorities and exploration targets to get to, and more work to do getting the rest of my gear back. I still have yet to inspect the boat I found in the boat house on the harbor-front; I woke up much later than I intended to today, and have spent most of the day thus far exploring the City and investigating the tavern.
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