Daoda Peninsula

The city of Ixthos is the gateway to the Daoda Peninsula. It lies at the mouth of the Flyssa River and controls a sheltered harbor in Sylva Bay. There is a reputation of Ixthos as a home port for pirates. I’ve spent some time there, and there is some truth to this.

This port city has made its money on peace. At sea, a pirate captain and the owner of a merchant schooner might be trying to slice each other’s throats. In Ixthos, you could find them singing an old shanty together in a tavern. The city insists on peace within its walls, even if that is kept at the cost of justice for crimes on the high seas. So long as people come to the port to trade—and pay their dock fees to the town collectors—there is no problem.

It all comes down to an old saying in Ixthos: grudges are bad for business. Beyond Ixthos is the main part of the peninsula. This was the home of the old capital of Chai-syl, with the famous crystal tower. You may hear that the Commonwealth is hostile to outsiders, but I would say that unwelcoming is different than hostile. In my travels in that land I was never attacked or harassed. Neither was I offered a meal or a place to sleep. The orcs I met want to be left alone to raise their flocks and crops in peace among the ruins of the empire they destroyed.

It’s not just orcs in the Commonwealth, though due to a fearsome reputation few others have been brave enough to settle there. I found no elves, of course. The orcs have a few villages, but the most common living situation is a farmstead: an extended family living in a small grid of houses. The family tends to the surrounding farm, and trades with villages or other farmsteads for what they don’t make themselves. If you can earn their trust, which is no easy feat, you might be able to pay to stay with them. Coin is hard to earn in the Commonwealth, and it’s necessary for certain items that can only be purchased from Ixthos, but they’re proud and distrustful of outsiders. Life on a farmstead can seem rather quaint and pastoral. Then one night over drinks you might hear the story of the chink in the back wall. That was the place the family’s great-great-grandmother drove a pike through the head of the elf who once owned this house. That’s followed up by stories of the abuses that elf applied to this matriarch, and her great patience in enduring it for years, and praise for her strength when responding to Remiah’s call for uprising.

The people of the Commonwealth are not inclined toward violence and oppression, but their stories are. I suppose in that they’re no different than anyone else.

You can stroll the streets of Chai-syl, even walk right up to the shattered pieces of the crystal tower. Orcs don’t live in the ruined capital, but neither have the elves nor anyone else ventured to re-inhabit it. I’m not sure if the orcs would oppose them if they did, but I suppose given what happened before no one wants to find out. So you can browse long-closed shops and sit at cafes that served their last drinks a century ago. Parks grow wild, and herds of deer graze the grassy streets. It’s so beautiful in ruin, in its full glory it must have been quite something to see.