Grünvik

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Grünvik Docks at Night

The oldest settlement of humans in Sarapadia, the City of Grünvik is Capital of the Northmen.

As described when the party first entered the city:

"The morning sunlight breaks fitfully in shafts through the cloud cover to highlight a system of glacial runoff rivers pouring like fountains over the edges of the massif and into the crevices below, their mist pouring a rainbow fog over the edges of the city and into the pathways nearby, all of them driving overshot water-wheels at their clifftop edges to provide their energy to the grain mills to grind their coarse winter wheat harvested from the Dakhân Plains nearby, or to power the trip hammers of the Grünvik Forges, designed by Dwarves and Men together, or to run the waterway sluices under the earth to provide running water to the parks and homesteads of the farms nearby. Bridges connect pathways carved from the living cliff faces to make multilevel streets and terraces, filled with planters and vegetable gardens sporting all manner of root vegetables, even hardy cabbages in the middle of winter due to the warmth from the earthen structures themselves. For a league to the north you espy a massive lumberyard the size of a town, and north of there to the sea coast is a shipyard of equal size where men and dwarves together fashion sea vessels and river vessels of all manner and sizes. A fleet of ships over a score in number dot the shoreline in dry dock, as though awaiting a call to duty.

The center of town is on the third terrace from the top level, the two levels above being clearly filled with watchmen and machinists and guards keeping an array of well-maintained siege equipment including massive ballista, catapults, and trebuchet. Grünvik keeps its back to the Ekartu Peak, the last of the Skyrend Mountains in their northeast, while its belly faces southeast toward Vesuva, whose Spear can be seen from here, with the sun glinting off its silvered peak 90 miles away.

The parapet wall around the third level appears carved from the living rock, and forms a massive balcony around a quarter of the mountain itself, the residences hollowed from the very rock with store houses as caves inside, and the smooth hewn ground upon which they walk fashioned to appear as fitted dwarven granite, when its is indeed simply carved form the mountain itself. The four levels below grow increasingly wider and less defended, being quite open at the bottom with stables, livestock, and warehouses for hay and for fish and other dried trade goods, a huge market sprawling along the road to the east, trailing off as it nears the West Greenwood March Road. The inner passages and roads leading inside the mountain include massive elevator systems powered by the waterwheels above, through sealed stone sluices powered entirely by ancient hydraulic systems that were once common in the ancient Dwarven Empire. Nearly half the area of the city is inside the mountain itself, and that Grünvik remains the oldest and most successful settlement of Men and Dwarves in all of Sarapadia. The fourth and fifth (counting from the top, as Dwarves do) levels house most of the residents of the city, the third level being for the local administrators and the residence of the king and his family. Each level is separated by terrace edges and walls and some crops, and sits between 80’ to 120’ apart in each step."