Menboko

The State of Menboko

A dwarven state whose capital shares its name. There was never a need for a second one.

Menboko is both state and city, a single dwarven stronghold carved into the northern mountains, governed as its own capital. Its Stone Council oversees the clanholds, among them the Rockbashers of Clan Cutten, whose kin also found their way as far as Wyrdal generations ago. Above the Council sits Emperor Krulyn Faederdwerg, 57 years old, and still visibly a dwarven youth of maybe sixteen, a fact his subjects have long since stopped remarking on out loud.

The stronghold was only ever meant to be underground, but Menboko outgrew it generations ago, the city now spills out onto the surface around the original entrance, and what's grown up there is a genuine melting pot. Still mostly dwarven, the way America is still mostly white, which is to say, less and less every year, and not something anyone in Menboko bothers arguing about anymore. The surface city is ringed by a massive wall with a double gate, built after Menboko learned the hard way that a stronghold carved into a mountain can still be reached from above. Passage through that gate is not casual: papers and travel permits are strictly enforced, and a visitor caught without the right documentation, or a valid exit visa on the way back out, can find themselves conscripted into labor until they've earned their passage the hard way.

That lesson came from a Flesh Colossus, a horror stitched together on a scale the surface rarely sees, that broke against Menboko's wall in living memory. The battle is still sung about in the city's taverns as "When Flesh Becomes Stone." It's also the battle where a young Sir Quith Abinor first earned the name Rockbasher fighting alongside Clan Cutten, the reason his name still means something in Menboko today, dwarven or not.

Just outside the surface city, on a nexus where the mountain's ley lines cross in the open air, stands the Silverrose School of Magic, no relation to the older school of the same name in Citavas, on the far side of Voir, whatever the coincidence of the name suggests. This one is younger, and entirely Taven Havc Silverrose's own: founded roughly two centuries ago, after he set down his adventuring gear for good, on land granted by the Emperor of the day, two rulers before Krulyn Faederdwerg, after Taven petitioned personally for the right to build over the nexus.

Houses, Lineage & Rank

• House Polire
• House CuttenThe Rockbashers
• House Dijk
• House Stuere
• House Ceorfan

← Back to Voir