ANEXOS

The Knights of the Rose & Cross received an influx of new recruits after the Golden Liberty, but few of the new nobles had money to offer by way of benefactors.

They did, however, have horses.

Horses in the Sarmatian Commonwealth are a funny thing. The most popular breeds have long legs and undergo training to take riders through diffi-cult terrain; for their facility navigating marshes in particular, they are nicknamed “swimmers.” All these would-be knights had swimmers, and when a passel of them met in Budorigum they considered delivering long-distance messages. After all, carrying messages under the right circumstances seemed quite Heroic, with all the frozen marshland and narrow mountain passes, but as it was, only the rich could afford riders to carry letters and well, that wasn’t fair, was it?

And thus the Most Noble and Ancient Order of the Post began.

The name started out as a joke; none of those in the original Post had been nobles for more than a month.

But the service they offered was not a joke, not when people began to count on them to carry medicines to isolated outposts, seed corn into snowed-out towns, family heirlooms to far flung relations and deeds and wills that people were willing to kill for.

Out of necessity, the Post became cartographers:

many of their current routes started out unmapped.

They now possess the world’s most detailed maps of the Commonwealth, in itself technology many kill for:

they have sent copies to the king and a few others.

They used to make woodcuts of the maps, print them by the hundred and sell them on the cheap, but after a copy of the maps let a bandit gang effectively terrorize the Sarmatyzn River for a month, they started keeping their newer maps secret.

They have also started helping coordinate and orga-nize other Knightly Orders, facilitating town-to-town communication to help networks of villages catch brigands, repair bridges, build roads and the like. It helps that nearly every village has a Knightly Order of its own: in Rzeczpospolita, the Sarmatism craze swept the rural areas hardest, and those in Curonia refuse to call them Knightly Orders, but many towns have militias that serve the same purpose.

Favor with the Most Noble and Ancient Order of the Post

The Most Noble and Ancient Order of the Post is concerned with reviving chivalry in the Sarmatian Commonwealth. Some do this by performing their duty of letter carrier with the utmost respect for privacy and discretion. Others do this by making a general call to the people to perform knightly service in the Nation. Either way, the ultimate goal is to prove that honor and gentility is alive and strong in the Commonwealth.

Heroes who belong to the Order of the Post may earn Favor in the following ways:

• Delivering an important message in a timely fashion is worth 3 Favor, especially if no one was the wiser of your delivery, other than the sender and recipient.

• Helping a new Knightly Order is worth 4 Favor. This could be to help them organize, solidify their code, secure a place to meet or any other activity that furthers the goal of organization.

Heroes who belong to the Order of the Post may spend Favor in the following ways:

• Requesting aid from a Knight costs 3 Favor. A Knight is typically Strength 5 and possesses the Dueling Academy Advantage in any school of your choosing. If you spend an additional 2 Favor, the Knight you recruit can have an additional Dueling School of your choice.

• Access to a letter or otherwise private missive costs 2 Favor. While normally the honor of the postal carrier involved is of utmost importance, sometimes the information contained in a letter takes precedence.

Gaining access to such information may require the Hero to offer to take the letter to its final destination in order to preserve the honor of the original postal carrier.

Rzeczpospolita

Neither Rzeczpospolita nor Curonia has yet violently contested the Commonwealth’s unity, since their unification in the mid-1500s. This is remarkable, particularly given that even now, Rzeplitans and Curonians grow up speaking separate languages—

though a century ago a wise enough Sejm mandated that nobles, at least, needed to learn both, though few bother to use Curonian. How this will play out now that the Commonwealth’s entire population has been ennobled remains unclear. That said, Commonwealth conventional wisdom has it that Curonians are much more likely to call for the Commonwealth’s dissolution than Rzeplitans are. This is for a few very valid reasons.

First, historically, Dominykas Dega, the Curonian king who put together the Commonwealth, famously favored Rzeczpospolita over Curonia. Not only that, but he was inordinately tactless with his favoritism:

for instance, not only did he reorganize Curonia

those Curonian Księstwa Rzeplitan names (this is why various Curonian Księstwa have names like

“Gancarz”). He also mandated that Rzeplitan be the official language of government, the language of education and the only language spoken in the Sejm.

Dega knew Curonia lacked wealth compared to Rzeczpospolita and believed the Curonians could be pacified with money. Though in a sense true, the ever-pragmatic Curonian nobles, rather than wasting time taking offense, simply took their places in the Sejm and passed a slew of bills appropriating Rzeplitan money and recruiting experts to build infrastructure in Curonia—hospitals, highways, universities, all the things Curonia could not afford as a destitute sovereign nation. Dominykas Dega ended his reign with an empty treasury, its money poured into building up Curonia.

A powerful patriotism has grown up, though, in the wake of Golden Liberty, and perhaps that

Places

80

ï

Budorigum has remained stubborn, many Rzeplitans from outside the capital have spoken up in favor of moving or perhaps rotating the Sejm. Followers of Sarmatism, especially, have thrown themselves behind it. What started, some say, as a silly trend has led to some very serious talk about national unity. Several members of the Izba Poselska have even spoken up in favor of all votes being done by mail, with the Post or other Rose & Cross members hired to carry written communications.

Rzeczpospolita boasts the Nation’s capital city, trade borders with Ussura and Vodacce, the Nation’s largest universities and hospitals and the largest stretches of fertile land. Rzeczpospolita also feels the first impacts of war with other Nations, and the Księstwa have larger debts due to this.

Szablewo (Księstwo Drajewicz)

Some call Szablewo “The First City”—they say it was built in Numanari times and continued through the Empire’s fall and as the Commonwealth rose up around it. The Numanari ruins, buildings and tombs amidst the city seem to support this. Others call it the “Endless City” or the “Crystal City” for the subterranean crystal caves found below—white limestone and crystal corri-dors run underneath the streets, geodes, hollows and drops for explorers hungry for glory and eager to die.

But most call Szablewo “University City,” the name synonymous with education. Forty-three colleges are located there, with all Senat an alumnus of one of these institutions. The colleges admit members of the sixteen and their families, and, after that, the children of the wealthy. Occasionally colleges offer scholarships, but mostly they do not court the brilliant: as the Domagała are fond of saying, they make the brilliant.

Małgorzata Domagała, Queen Consort and Księżna Drajewicz, controls Szablewo. The vast majority of citizens are her loyalists, and no wonder she made their great city even greater. As Stanisław’s proxy in the Sejm, she pushed through the “University Tithe”—currently, ten percent of all Crown revenue

is earmarked for higher education. Before the Sejm enacted the Tithe, the University struggled with debt;

now, all the colleges operate in the black. Conveniently, the Księżna’s work with the Invisible College has prompted Castille’s outlaw intelligentsia to immigrate en masse to the city.

The University of Szablewo

The Colleges have names, but are referred to as “The University” or “Szablewo University” as a whole.

Built of the city’s bright white limestone, in a mix of Numanari and Gothic styles, the Colleges are a sight to behold—especially when you step inside.

Six observatories, a to-scale orrery, depicting the six known planets and their positions around the sun, and the largest library in eastern Théah grace the halls.

Because of their dependence on the University Tithe, the Colleges have the most to lose from Golden Liberty; already, the Sejm talks of reallo-cating the Tithe—to the Church, classically, or to the Most Noble and Ancient Order of the Post.

Many who dislike Małgorzata resent the Tithe for its associations; they say (and not without some truth) that she forced the bill through the Sejm with no regard for the democracy of even the pre-Golden Liberty posłowie.

Moreover, many deputies, loudmouths in the lower house, have made it clear they view the University as a privileged palisade and wish to tear it to pieces as punishment accordingly—as a result, many Szablewo citizens stand with the queen against those who want to cut the Tithe. A popular opinion in Szablewo has it that the University should at least be restricted to non-criminals who can read, in an effort to keep those loudmouths out of the system.

The citizens of Szablewo most upset about the Sejm’s burgeoning hostility towards the College system are the new immigrant Castillians, who have seen this sort of thing before. Esteban Verdugo and his allies excel at presenting what they do as popu-lism, good at creating mobs when convenient, and masterful at turning popular sentiment against the privileged elite when it suits their purposes.

All the situation needs now is the charge that intellectualism is somehow ungodly, that the elite are anti-Vaticine. Plenty of fuel for that fire starts with Szablewo’s rivalry with Budorigum’s Three Sisters University and ends with rumors that the queen is a losejas. Szablewo has never been a fortress town, but sooner or later, they may have to start defending themselves.

The Crystal Caves

No one has mapped the Szablewo caves, not entirely.

They change too fast, chambers cracking and collapsing from underground earthquakes that never quite reach the surface, leaving behind their only evidence: ruins for returning spelunkers and new crystal corridors to explore.

The caves are white limestone, smooth to the touch and highly reflective—light from entrance shafts bounces throughout the corridors, giving an illusion of ethereal illumination. The larger caverns contain soda lakes, water bitter to the taste and totally lifeless, save for strange silver fish that live nowhere else.

The underground hides secret churches, dating from the days of Numanari persecution, pre- Vaticine shrines and altars of mystery cults and odd

skin-eating sarcophagi with jewel-clad skeletons trapped inside.

Amethysts grow like thistles in the caves, climbing the limestone walls and then descending as purple crystal chandeliers. The caves are deadly and every college forbids students from exploring. Students inevitably spelunk anyway, hoping to see what no one has ever seen before: a river new-revealed by an earthquake or a cavern about to be sealed.

They have even begun trying to leave evidence of their own presence, hoping another spelunker will find it, checking back later to see if it’s missing. In the most stable parts of the caverns, small graffiti markings declare a student’s name or a symbol she has chosen to use to denote herself. Every now and then, a newly unearthed room might hold the mark of someone who came before, the chamber lost and resurfaced through the ever-tumultuous earth’s passing.

Ever pragmatic, the Explorer’s Society provides a rough map of known sites (frequently updated and deliberately unfinished), and the group advises spelunkers not to steal semi-precious stones or jewels from skeletons. New sites are to be reported to the Explorer’s Society immediately; an individual who finds one gets discoverer’s credit and amnesty from the University.

The Cloth Hall & Guild Houses

Once upon a time, the University was not the only industry in Szablewo.

The Cloth Hall held tailors, spinners, weavers, wool-combers, scutchers, retters—the list goes on (every-thing but dyers—Szablewo has always bleached its cloth with lime). In the hall, they sold what they made, the finest pieces for the highest prices. In the Guild Houses, a block to the west, workers trained and packed cloth and goods stamped for export. Cloth exported from Szablewo always received a stamp with bright white wax embossed with the Drajewicz twelve-pointed star signifying its excellence—or it did, until a series of disasters happened.

First, the linen manufacturers began experi-menting with fungus-assisted retting. This seemed like a good idea at the time—it meant the retters no longer had to stink up the river—but created linen which, after some wear, was revealed to be of relatively poor quality.

Unwisely, the manufacturers decided to export the fungus-retted linen anyway, perhaps believing Szablewo’s reputation could absorb the hit—and maybe, in another year, it could have.

But that year, clever counterfeiters decided to forge the Szablewo stamp and add it to their low-quality cloth, which they then used to flood the market—the end result, of course, destroyed the reputation of Szablewo’s textiles.

The industry still has not recovered and the Guild Houses are sad shadows of what they used to be—it is a rare apprentice who comes in wanting Szablewo certification anymore. Most of the clothiers who used to live in the area have moved to other cities, and people talk of selling the Cloth Hall itself, ghostly and half-abandoned now, to one of the colleges.

Unsurprisingly, the entire disaster has led to an upswing in town versus gown rivalry, as the remaining clothiers resent the University sitting pretty on the Tithe while the less-prestigious workers of the city suffer. The Colleges’ tendency to respond to this complaint with “you brought this on yourselves” or some variant does nothing to help.

82

ï

Budorigum

Before it became the capital, Budorigum was famous for beds of red clay suited for brick making, which lay not far from the riverbanks. The first brickmakers were Crescent migrants, imported en masse by Książę Cieslewicz in 1333 AV; these migrant workers gave Budorigum’s culture a notably Crescent bent, and today the city’s architecture appears mostly Crescent in design.

Crescent, that is, except for the bricks: in a brick-making town, every building sports brickwork, even the enormous triple-domed mosque in the center of the city. Along with brickwork, the city became known for its brilliant glassworks when a cadre of converts discovered the sand that lined the Sejm could be mixed with small amounts of clay to produce a multitude of stained glass hues. Even to this day, most windows in the city contain stained glass of some sort—a point of pride for Budorigum’s residents.

In 1442 AV, Budorigum became the capital; the Sejm was built in six weeks. Townhouses for traveling nobles were built on the blocks around the Sejm, and the demand for clean water quickly led to aqueducts and drainage canals. The migrants had collected water in great brick cisterns and dumped their waste directly into the Sejm. Noble families flaunted their wealth by building parks, public squares and elaborate brickwork fountains; a cadre of aristocrats fond of horse-racing even went so far as to build a racetrack next to the Sejm which could seat 100,000 people.

This was rather over-ambitious; to this day, the stadium has never been filled.

A second migration into the city began directly post-Golden Liberty, with scads of “New Nobles” eager to live near the Sejm. Predictably, this has driven Budorigum’s real estate prices through the roof and the Sejm currently debates what, if anything, should be done about that.

The Sejm

The original Sejm was ugly; a great brick building slopped together as a sort of irregular rectangle.

Various improvements have done nothing for the overall aesthetic, with the possible exception of one: in 1593 AV, seven parallel corridors were built to attach

the Sejm to the stadium.

Originally, this allowed the ruling sixteen to make public announcements efficiently. However, when Golden Liberty began, the corridors gained new purpose: namely, the stadium (which by this point had failed as a business) was declared the meeting place of the Izba Poselska, the “house of deputies” or

“the lower house,” where the New Nobility vote.

The Senat still maintains the power to decide the timing of votes, though the Izba Poselska has put some limitations on this. First, the Senat and the Izba Poselska must vote simultaneously, which is meant to prevent the Senat from scheduling the Izba Poselska’s vote at times when people could not—or would not—

make it, such as public holidays. Second, a member of the Senat must announce, on the stadium floor, when they schedule a vote to happen, with at least four hours’ notice.

This, in theory, allows at least the Budorigum-based members of the Izba Poselska ample time to arrive at the Sejm. After the Senat announced two votes at midnight to an empty stadium, the Izba Poselska began posting a 24-hour watch in the stands, volun-teers charged with raising a cry should the upper house announce more votes that are inconvenient.

Given that the Commonwealth has more than 100,000 citizens, it is possible that one day the stadium might fill beyond capacity. In that case, the Izba Poselska has set up a protocol for the creation of polling stations and has passed a bill disallowing the Senat to end voting until 12 hours after calling the vote. The stadium has never overfilled yet, but the Izba Poselska likes being prepared.

Duelist’s Square

Duelist’s Square is exactly what it sounds like: a public square surrounded by swordfighting schools.

Ennio Vespucci, the Princess Consort’s brother, initiated the setup of the square, representing all well-known styles of sword fighting (though Ennio gave Ambrogia, his favored style, the best of the bordering buildings). The circular mosaic at the center of the square displays two duelists clashing;

the circle itself is the perfect size for exhibition matches, and every Sunday afternoon at least one school puts on a show.

The swordmasters are imported, promised prestige and subsidized by Ennio. In the capital, the phrase

“getting Ennio’s attention” has become synonymous

“getting Ennio’s attention” has become synonymous