LOST LORE OF THE REALMS #33

I'm back from filming the epic conclusion of LEGACY OF WORLDS, with Devin Wilson as our Dungeon Master. Check out this long-running epic, wherein a band of adventurers tries to save all the worlds of the fantasy multiverse: Elisa Teague as Elise, the runaway bride of Victorina Von Mordenheim (Ravenloft), Keith Baker as Baron Merrix D'Cannith (Eberron), Tommy Gofton as Loholt Lynnvander (Imaria), me as Elminster of Shadowdale (the Forgotten Realms), and our many friends and allies, including Luke Gygax as Melf (Greyhawk), on the Six Sides of Gaming channel on YouTube.

So now that I'm home and the laundry is underway, it's time for another Lost Lore!

Here we go...

Under Tantras, Or Underground Nearby

The city of Tantras possesses fragments of a sewer system. That is, it has lots of center-gutter street runoff down into the harbor (in some cases passing through pipes laid under the wagon-ways right along the docks to prevent stormburst ‘rivers’ from sweeping wagons and all into the harbor), and it has various small and often-flooded sewer systems emptying into the harbor from various western parts of the city. The problem is seawater flooding back in (when winds blowing to the east augment the tides) and washing everything ‘back up whence it came,’ so to speak.

This problem has never been solved, but attempts were made to lessen the severity of the ‘backwash’ by hollowing out increasingly large water-chambers (rooms) along the network of sewer pipes, and by enlarging those pipes. Part of Tantras stands on solid rock, and part of it’s built on layers of ooze, so much of the sewers are lined with stone blocks or large sections of round tile (and extensive cellars are thankfully few). Gratings are fitted over most of harbor-mouth sewer outlets to prevent the tides bringing large objects (that can become wedged, and created blockages) into the sewers. However, the tidal back-and-forth flows do a fairly good job of sluicing out the sewers.

Some of the largest sewer water-chambers have been fitted with bucket-run chains (not pumps, but something akin to the way some primitive water-wheels work: literally, a string of buckets that dip out water and then are carried aloft when the circuit of chain is moved). These mulepower chains lift (filthy sewer, not drinkable) water into silo-like water-towers located in the eastern reaches of the city, which are from time to time drained in a ‘flushing rush’ (gravity-powered flood) through the easternmost sewers, to carry the reeking dung they contain out into the fields immediately east of the city (where, as you can imagine, there are some rather noisome marshes). The presence of these wetlands is one of the reasons Tantras has been slow to expand in that direction (with most new contruction outside the walls planned, if the current city-defense decrees forbidding unbridled building sprawl ever change, for the south).

Drinking-water enters Tantras through pipes (pumped by mules or oxen traveling around and around capstans) from springs well to the northeast of the city (building on or near these springs is forbidden, and the city maintains guardposts over them).

In severe winter weather, of course, most flowing liquid things freeze, and the sewers of Tantras are no exception. Human waste generates its own heat, but still: things get hard and won’t readily flow anywhere. The upside is, cold air cuts down on the smell, and insects that can carry diseases from dung to people are largely or wholly absent.

So in winter, Tantras does what a lot of places do: uses nightsoil-wagons (that ‘pick up’ along each street from residents shoveling middens and dumping chamberpots) to carry wastes away (unless heavy snowfalls prevent travel—and all of the nightsoil-wagon owners have built huge, heavy, multi-runner sledges that can be slid under wagons to allow travel in deep snow). It’s during the winter months that wastes get spread over many farm fields all around Tantras (instead of getting dumped in the swamps).

Drinking-water gets brought in in large wagons (metal tanks sitting in trays in which small fires are built and tended, to keep the tanks warm, said trays resting on massive crosstimbers, on flatbed wagons) from the springs, and men use pickaxes and hammers to keep the springs and their plungepools free of ice. The pipes that bring water to the city in the warmer months are opened up in several places to allow for ice expansion (so the pipes won’t burst in other, much-harder-to-reach spots).

Catacombs: there were many in the early days of the city, but almost all of the older subterranean ones got flooded repeatedly and have either been abandoned with their dead inside (ahem, quite possibly undead, by now) or emptied and the second sort of catacomb used: networks of narrow passages and burial niches within the thick walls of the largest, grandest buildings. There are only about a dozen of these networks known to still exist inside Tantras.

Above-ground crypts (“little stone houses for the dead”) were popular in the early days of the city’s expansion, but all were soon overtaken by the growing city and eventually destroyed, with the remains moved well outside the walls to, yes (as you surmised) a cemetery—or rather, three burial-grounds: one, a little south of due northeast, is Rosestones, a tiny ‘village’ of stone crypts (now shunned and overgrown as a haunted place, but grand stonework under all the brambles and briars) where the wealthiest families interred their dead; another (a little south of due east from Tantras, and closest to the city of the three cemeteries), Raindance Hill, is a windswept hill on a sheep farm where paupers were buried in simple, unmarked graves; and the third, Auntar’s Rest (“Auntar” is pronounced “AWN-tar”), is a drystone-walled, rambling field of vine-choked trees and many, many leaning headstones, still in popular use today, where the bulk of dead folk of Tantras lie. The Rest has grown to take over six farms a good way southeast of Tantras, and will probably swallow more soon.

Most temples in Tantras inter priests under the floors and within the walls of their ‘holy stones’ (building walls); the temple of Torm is large and grand enough to have alcove-like side-chapels whose walls are entirely given over to filing-cabinet-drawer-like (all stone) burial niches filled with stone coffins. Lesser shrines may inter the bones of priests in stone coffins sunk into the shrine floor, but send their lay worshippers and staff for burial in the aforementioned public burial-grounds.

So if you’ve been envisaging a huge network of dungeon-like sewers linking every corner of Tantras underground: no. Not unless you’re a really small snail or amphibian. Flooded attempts at establishing such a large system: yes.

Time To Talk Festhalls At Last

“Festhalls” (Jeff Grubb’s word, substituted for my “brothels” for TSR Code of Ethics reasons) vary in customs, but the more elaborate ones are indeed “a cross between a private club, a casino, and a brothel.”

This is due to the fact that many folk in Faerûn can readily couple with someone (on a rooftop or behind a midden in crowded cities, and ‘out in the woods’ or in a nearby thicket or hollow in a distant pasture, in a rural setting) if mere sexual gratification is all they want. What they go to the brothels for (and yes, some of these establishments are private clubs, particularly those specializing in BDSM, mate-swapping, or inter-species congress) is for ‘added fun.’

By this term, I mean: striptease performances, playacting and dressing up in outlandish costumes (“Hah, my pretty, I’m not merely Rorold the fat butcher from down the street—I’m Ravagar Wanderglar, dread pirate of the Serpent Seas!”), the chance to gamble (betting one’s body, temporary freedom, or items of clothing) or gambol (yes, dance), make love to music, have access to situations visitors wouldn’t dare try outside a club (mock rape of a priest or priestess or ruler or other authority figure), making love on a tomb, crossdressing, eating food off the bodies of strangers, and so on), and the chance (particularly in masked revels) to enjoy someone else in a small community who’s married to someone else—to ‘find’ each other in public, or even be seen heading off to a tryst, would cause a scandal, but going to the brothel separately and getting up to all manner of hijinks there, even (in some cases) if observed by fellow community members, is ‘okay’ (the brothel is accepted as ‘outside’ normal society, a safety valve in which folk can temporarily set aside their usual public manner and status).

I see the popularity of brothels in the Realms as based on the Faerûnian love of play: as in our real world, children lose many opportunities for playing as they grow up (unless they can shift into participation in a sport, or acting, or performing and use that as an outlet), but brothels offer a place to go on playing, lifelong.

Some people never engage in a sexual physical act at a brothel, but visit them often. Some of these go to watch the fun (ogling), some go for the chance to flirt or make lewd suggestions they’d never dare utter elsewhere, and some just like to chat or play cards or drink with others while naked, or while crossdressing, or while pretending to be of a race or profession (example: the pirate above) that they’re not. Some folks frequent festhalls to play tag, or blindfolded tag, or all sorts of other games that again, are play but not necessarily sexual.

(And then of course there are also brothels that are ‘simple whorehouses,’ particularly in ports where sailors make landing after long voyages without access to ‘fresh faces,’ or caravans disperse ditto.)

One such, in Shadowdale, exists purely because of the many caravans that stop there. It’s one of countless small festhalls found in most caravan stops throughout the Realms, no matter how small and rural they are (desert oases of course excepted).

A “feasthall” (as opposed to ‘festhall’) is a room or event of temporary dining and debauchery, situated in an establishment that doesn’t offer such amenities the rest of the time. (Real-world equivalent: “Friday Night Wings” offered at a drinking-spot where a patron can’t get any food on other nights.)

So when a tavern offers “something more” for a limited run engagement of travelling ‘professionals’ (an arrangement that usually means said ‘pros’ avoid paying full taxes because they ‘move on’ before a tax collector can ever get to them, and the establishment pays little taxes on the extra coin generated because they ‘forget’ as many nights as possible of the extra takings), they’re running a “feasthall.” The term of course is a contraction of “feasting hall,” a name applied to a large room whose purpose is allowing larger numbers of folk to sit down and dine together.

Three Archliches

Malithra Undra Shalrin Rallyhorn, who in life was a noblewoman of Cormyr (she appears in the short story Moonrise over Myth Drannor, published in the video game rule book for Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor, by Strategic Simulations, Inc.).

Lady Alathene Moonstar, proprietress of The Blushing Mermaid inn, tavern, and festhall in Waterdeep, also a friend to that city’s Lords and the Tel’Teukiira (she appears in Volo’s Guide to Waterdeep, and is mentioned in Cloak & Dagger).

Sharangar Szeltune (she appears in the Spelljammer supplement Lost Ships).

The Names Of Five Known Baneliches

Clarth Hornhaeld

Harlrhys Moksoun

Haursar Rhallowglas

Khorvan Jaeleth

Laumbur Yuthlekh

....and there's just one "wouldn't fit" tag this month, this one because it's too long for the field I have to type the tags into:

#Malithra Undra Shalrin Rallyhorn

Ta da! And there you have it, another Lost Lore...enjoy, I hope!