[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by KarlKost

Question 36b
And, we also need to make a decision: is this city part of a nation? The capital? Perhaps not the capital, but most important economic center?

Or, should this city be a City State, fully independent?

I, personally, am leading more to have It like an independent Nation by itself, like Athens, Rome or Venencia of old, or Singapore today.

Answer 36b- City's Status
I thought this had been stated more explicitly somewhere earlier, but re-reading everyone's contributions, the closest was this:

Originally Posted by (E)

Answer 16 and 18
Back before the city was much more than a quiet hamlet an enterprising team of Gnomes, Humans and Dwarves built a ferry to haul livestock and ore across the Tovonduin river. Up until then the Beastfolk traders had been traveling either through the mountains to the north or the swamps to the south. Needless to say the Cat-Folk traders preferred taking the ferry to the numerous river crossings required on the mountain trail or the continual risk of immersion that the swamp provided. Soon the group running the ferry realized how lucrative the Cat-Folk traders could be and struck a deal with the elves who at the time ruled the area and built a bridge. Over time the river was made more navigable and the traders began to come upriver as well. To this day there is almost always steady work for those who choose to seek employment working on or guarding the caravans and riverboats that pass through.[B]

That, and the fact that there are wars with neighbouring renegade dwarves, clans of gnomes living higher in the mountains and monthly attacks from marauding passers-by, suggests to me that Newbridge is more of a frontier town.

The words "town" and "city" have been used interchangeably, so I don't think we've settled on a particular size, but I saw it as basically the region's largest town of note, but part of a larger polity. It's the town on the edge of the wilderness where all the mining interests in the mountains, all the caravans arriving from somewhere far off, and all produce from the small real frontier towns upriver come together as the first major centre for trade, arbitrage and general merchanting.

It can't be in the centre of civilisation, because this is the town where civilised folks try to escape from. This is the town where wandering bands of tunnel-divers set off from into the great unexplored wilderness. This is the town where surviving tunnel-divers return to to offload the loot hauled out of surrounding monster pits. And this is the town that bears the brunt of the great wilderness pressing up against more civilised lands. It'd be one far-flung outpost of the civilisation's ... civilisedness.

I don't think it'd be completely politically independent- there are far off masters of the land, so not a city-state. But it has to operate independently in most respects because of its isolation.

Originally Posted by KarlKost

Question 36: who are the neighbors of the city?

Not an answer, but a recap to expand on. We've got:
- The renegade dwarf, The Piebald Jarl, and his Huss Magpie enclave
- The Yellow Koeng's gnomish kingdom and their nearby mountain fastnesses
- Catfolk traders from deeper in the mountains and swamps
- Elves who ruled this particular area
- mountains to the north
- swamps to the south
- Orc Barrens somewhat further away
- ... any others I've missed