Four great cities
Where you will live
Today every new character wakes up on the Island of Destiny. When the world opens, you will leave the island for one of the four great cities and call it home.
StatusAll four cities are designed (districts, landmarks, houses) and the design was approved on 21 October 2026. Building starts with Kingsport. Screenshots will appear here as each city rises.
The human capital
Kingsport
Kingsport sits on the same plain it always did, between the sea and the moat, with the Temple of the Dawn and its square at its heart. The old royal line died out in the War of the Two Crowns; since then a Regent of House Thorne has ruled from Lion's Keep, the old castle turned seat of government.
The temple square was rebuilt after the great fire: wider, paved, with the fountain and the founder's statue, and from it run the streets to the depot, the harbour, the keep and the gates. The wooden jetty became Crown Pier, with its crane, fish market and harbour office, because the city lives off trade with Queensmere, Fenmarket and Elderbough.
Two places have not moved in three hundred years, and the city keeps them like relics: the tavern, The Old Lion, and the Ironhand Forge. The houses changed most of all: fewer than before, but large, two storeys of stone or timber, each with a walled garden and, in the biggest, a trophy hall. They are the houses players buy: handsome outside, empty inside, waiting to be filled.
Places
- Temple of the Dawn
- Lion's Keep
- Crown Pier
- The Old Lion
- Ironhand Forge
- Market Hall
The garden city of the druids
Queensmere
Queensmere was the rebel city: a city-state of queens that broke away from Kingsport, with a women's guard and small houses packed between the river and the palace. The dynasty continues (the present queen is the fourteenth), but rebellion became custom and custom became treaty: the two cities trade by packet boat and nobody remembers the war.
The druids brought the great change. When the river plague half-emptied the city, their order took charge of the water: they cut the stone-edged canals that cross the city today, planted the lime avenues and the apple orchards of the north, and the queen gave them the old market ground for the Glasshouse of glass and brass, the most-seen building in Queensmere and the reason it is called the garden city.
Pale stone and timber, blue slate roofs and water everywhere: the river Mere, Willow Beck, the druids' moat and the temple pond. Only the palace has a wall. Every house plants a tree, by order of the queen. Under the city the tunnels of the rebellion are still there, and the first way down is four paces from the temple: Queensmere is gentle above and dangerous below.
Places
- Temple of the Green Mother
- Queen's Palace & Glasshouse
- Mere Depot
- The Gilded Lily
- The Athenaeum
- Stone Pier
The merchant port on the marsh
Fenmarket
Three hundred years ago Fenmarket was a swarm of stilt houses and narrow walkways, built by merchants fleeing the taxes of Kingsport. The Great Flood took half the old walkways and the Merchants' Council rebuilt the city in the air: the Boards, wide walkways on oak piles and stone bridges from islet to islet, following the water instead of a grid.
Fenmarket has no king and no regent: it has contracts. The Council sits in Compact Hall, under the clock tower that rings the hours of the market and the tide. The Temple of the Still Waters stayed on its islet in the middle, and the city built it the square it never had: Temple Square, the only place in Fenmarket where you can sit without hearing water underneath.
The harbour in the north grew into the richest on the continent, with its cranes, its locks and the covered market hall. The houses were always huge here and still are: two storeys above the Boards and, instead of a garden, a plank terrace over the water. Below everything the marsh is still toxic: snakes, worms and marsh trolls prowl the banks. Fenmarket lives upstairs because downstairs you cannot.
Places
- Temple of the Still Waters
- Compact Hall
- Fen Market Hall
- Fenmarket Vaults
- The Drowned Rat
- Harbour Pier
The elven city among the trees
Elderbough
Three hundred years ago Elderbough was a camp of the three elven castes in the trees, its shops scattered on the ground. The war with the trolls of the western and northern burrows, who are still there, forced the Trailborn to gather the houses: the first tree-house blocks grew around the thickest trunks, because one giant tree well defended is safer than ten scattered huts.
The Boughborn, who lived in the crown of the Great Willow, laid the first wooden platform to link their tree-houses without touching the ground: the Willow Ring. Within a century every giant tree had its ring, and the city now has two levels of street: earth paths below and walkways above. The Rootborn stayed underground, with their forge, their jewellers and the council's Deep Hall carved into the rock.
The sanctuary did not change: it is still open to the sky on its islet in the east, around the sacred tree of the Elder. Under the lake, the Circle of Rune Stones links Elderbough with the other cities. Elderbough sells its houses to anyone who wants to live among the trees, always with a hedged clearing behind, because here a garden is a piece of tamed forest.
Places
- Sanctuary of the Elder Bough
- Giant Willow
- Hollow Spire
- The Lantern & Leaf
- Hunters' Hall
- Market Green