Absalom

For more than 4,000 years, Absalom (pronounced AB-sah-lahm)[1] has been the City at the Center of the World, a metropolis-sized showcase of the greatest treasures in all Golarion. The importance and influence of Absalom upon the Inner Sea and the whole of Golarion can not be overstated. The city not only holds a key strategic position for both commercial and military endeavors in the region, but encompasses the site of the ascension of four deities and claims to have been founded by none other than the Last Azlanti, the god Aroden. It is not without reason that the passage of time throughout the Inner Sea region is counted in Absalom Reckoning.[2]

Government

64% human, 11% halfling, 8% half-elf, 7% gnome, 5% dwarf, 2% elf, 1% half-orc, 2% other races

Districts

Ascendant Court Shortly after raising the Isle of Kortos, Aroden used his newfound divine power to erect the Starstone Cathedral, a bewildering, ever-changing series of trapped passages and confounding chambers meant to thwart anyone who might follow in his footsteps. The cathedral perches upon a lonely tor at the center of a seemingly bottomless chasm at the heart of Absalom. Enormous, ostentatious temples to the great gods of Golarion ring the chasm and the ancient neighborhoods stretching out from it, flanked by lesser churches and shrines dedicated to deities mighty and forgotten. The district’s oldest temple of Aroden—the first of its kind in Absalom—is among the architectural triumphs of the Inner Sea. As perhaps the best symbol of the fall of Absalom’s founding father, the earthquake-damaged edifice now serves as the Embassy of Cheliax.
Azlanti Keep Aroden himself designed and erected this multitowered fortified keep, and the structure’s traditional ancient Azlanti style has been widely imitated throughout Absalom and the Inner Sea region over the ages. The keep is the headquarters for the First Guard—Absalom’s army that polices external threats. The keep’s Grand Vault once served as a refuge for the city’s entire populace in dire emergencies, as it did during the First Siege, but although the vault is immense, the city’s population is now too great for all to shelter there. The vault also holds the huge tablets containing Aroden’s First Laws of Absalom, the foundation of its civic government.
The Coins Much of Absalom’s mercantile activity takes place in this sprawling hive of crowded streets and teeming markets. From dawn to dusk, hawkers tout their wares to streetwise customers, haggling in a hundred languages amid bleating livestock, performing musicians, and the grind of wagon wheels on cobblestones. The city’s largest market, the Grand Bazaar, is said to contain nearly any object a buyer could ever want, provided they take the considerable time to search through the plaza’s hundreds of brightly flagged stalls and semipermanent shops to find it. By night, many of the district’s seedier neighborhoods become havens of violent crime, as pickpockets and thieves from the Puddles and the Docks wander north in search of heavy purses. One of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the Coins was once one of its most lucrative: an elevated stone platform known as Misery Row, the center of Absalom’s now-outlawed slave trade. Today, the neighborhood is the center of a run-down slum avoided by the district’s famously corrupt watch (known cynically as the Token Guard). The squalid chambers within the raised causeway, formerly known as the Slave Pits of Absalom, are today inhabited by some of the city’s most desperate and depraved criminals.
The Docks Absalom’s teeming waterfront is a district of taverns, flophouses, and warehouses echoing with sailors’ chanteys, barking dockworkers, and the trundling of wagons carrying cargo through crowded streets. Hundreds of ships from all over Golarion dock in Absalom’s harbor every day, and goods from scores of nations flow through the Docks to the city’s markets. A maze of half-sunken ships called the Flotsam Graveyard guards Absalom’s harbor from invasion by sea, as do detachments of the city’s navy and hippocampus-mounted Wave Riders, who patrol the Bay of Kortos and the waters around the Starstone Isle from their base in Escadar.
Eastgate It sometimes takes 2 hours or more to get from Eastgate to districts on the far side of town, but most residents find the long commute a fair exchange for the relative safety of Eastgate’s cozy neighborhoods. A few manor homes of minor nobles peek above the thatched roofs of this district, which houses many more workers and artisans than hobnobbing members of high society. The Low Azlanti enclave of Gilltown—the city’s largest gathering of this ancient line of aquatic humans—is also found here, situated out of sight of major roads behind a row of inexpensive housing for the district watch, laborers, and clerks. Eastgate’s verdant Green Ridge neighborhood is home to the Grand Holt, the oldest and largest tree on the Isle of Kortos. This multi-trunked fig tree spans several city blocks, with buildings demolished or modified to account for its increasingly fecund growth (especially in the last decade). Even as blights like the Tyrant’s Grasp and the Welt seem to rob Kortos of its vitality, the Grand Holt grows stronger year after year. A fanatic cult called the Circle of Stones cares for the tree, as well as for Iolanthe, the immortal dryad queen who dwells within. The Holt provides a refuge for nature-loving adventurers like druids and rangers, whom the cult hires to tackle all manner of adventures designed to further Iolanthe’s influence in the city and Greater Kortos.
Foreign Quarter Absalom’s Foreign Quarter boasts whole neighborhoods that take on the character of distant lands. Taverns, hostels, and inns crowd the streets nearest the district’s largest thoroughfares, attracting those who come to Absalom by road or by sea to rest a while among cordial strangers chattering in a symphony of languages. Foremost among the district’s attractions is the Irorium, an immense coliseum that hosts gladiatorial combats, mock sea-battles, religious festivals, historical pageants, and more. The largest open-air arena on the Inner Sea, the Irorium boasts multiple public battles each day, and its gladiators count themselves among the city’s most influential celebrities. The imposing structure takes its name from Irori, and that deity’s clergy administers an influential temple and fighting college in the arena’s understructure that draws combatants from all over Golarion.
Not far from the arena is the Grand Lodge of Absalom, the worldwide headquarters for the Pathfinder Society adventurer’s guild. Beyond a massive gate bearing the Glyph of the Open Road lie seven ancient fortresses, each with its own function related to the Society’s worldwide affairs. Adventurers set out from the Grand Lodge on missions through Greater Kortos and far beyond, with all Pathfinder agents invited to return home to the Lodge every year for the order’s Grand Convocation, a boisterous occasion for information-sharing and engaging in friendly competition.
Archaic Wayfinders Discovery of the ancient Azlanti aeon stones , and their subsequent reverse engineering to create wayfinders , counted among the first triumphs of the Pathfinder Society. Over the centuries, wayfinders have taken on a homogenous design, with the vast majority being virtually identical copies of one another, meticulously crafted to an exact formula by the Society’s artificers. Things were not always so orthodox, however, and examples of archaic wayfinders can still be found at the bottom of forgotten pit traps and in the collections of wealthy Pathfinder agents across the city.
Ivy District Absalom’s center of art and culture, the Ivy District boasts gorgeous manor houses, beautiful gardens, and equally alluring residents. Theaters, performance halls, and concert venues with worldwide reputations crowd the ivy-lined streets that give the district its name, as do dozens more with less savory standing. Performers and artists scrape by on the patronage of nobles, and bardic schools like the White Grotto train the next generation of performers. Perhaps due to its natural beauty, the Ivy District is particularly popular with elves and half-elves.
The Petal District The wealthiest district in all of Absalom looks down upon the city from its perch on Aroden’s Hill. Brick-framed medians upon the district’s broad avenues stand lush with colorful flora, giving the district its name. The richest noble families and the most powerful merchant lords and guildmasters keep manors in the Petal District, ever striving to outdo one another with the ostentation of their estates. The city’s oldest academy of magical instruction, the College of Mysteries, is tucked among these wealthy mansions and caters largely to the youth of Absalom’s nobility. The irezoko, the enigmatic full-face magical tattoos of the college’s master students, are a badge of honor in the Petal District equal to the finest and most luxuriant of gowns designed by the city’s master tailors.
Precipice Quarter Twenty years ago, a terrible earthquake sheared the cliffside district of Beldrin’s Bluff into the harbor below and collapsed many of the grand structures of what had been a carnival-like quarter of soaring pavilions, penny museums, cacophonous menageries, and stately manors situated around the three-towered demesne of the long-dead archmage Beldrin, a major figure of Absalom’s early years. In the wake of the catastrophe, the Grand Council effectively abandoned the district, leaving it to become infested with monsters and criminals. Acting Primarch Wynsal Starborn, himself a retired captain of Absalom’s First Guard, has rejected his predecessor’s laissez-faire attitude toward the district, and for the past 3 years his office has sponsored expeditions aimed at reclaiming the quarter. The efforts have met with some success, but among the reclaimed greenhouses and galleries are cursed mausoleums, flooded schoolyards inhabited by undead children, and other horrors. The Precipice Quarter is on its way to redemption, but considerable dangerous work remains to see the job through.
The Puddles The slum district known as the Puddles has always been prone to flooding, but in the last decade things have grown increasingly desperate, with water now covering the majority of the district’s streets to the height of a human’s thighs or deeper. Those residents who refuse to flee (including no small number deliberately hiding out from Absalom’s city watch) have taken to building makeshift bridges and ramps between the district’s notoriously close-packed buildings, resulting in a vast and confounding network of skyways capable of delivering brave travelers with a strong sense of balance from one end of the district to another.
Westgate This sleepy, largely safe residential district is home to mid-tier merchants, common shopkeeps, and up-and-coming citizens who can’t yet afford more expensive accommodation in the upscale neighborhoods of the Petal or Ivy Districts. Businesses mix with townhouses and flats where the district abuts the Foreign Quarter, but Westgate gets more residential as one approaches the city wall, with smaller homes giving way to modest manors and stately villas.
The Wise Quarter Absalom’s reputation as a center of learning in Golarion dates back to its earliest days. Famed institutions like the Arcanamirium arcane school, Blakros Museum, and the great library of the Forae Logos contribute to Absalom’s academic pedigree, drawing knowledge-hungry students from all over the world. The Wise Quarter holds these institutions and scores more, and its broad avenues throng with students and instructors alike. The district is also home to Absalom’s civic government, including the ancient, monolithic meeting palace of the Grand Council and the honeycomb array of administrative buildings that serve its vast bureaucracy.
Greater Kortos  Absalom claims all of the Isle of Kortos as its domain, but several wild regions remain outside the city’s direct control. From coast to coast, signs of the island’s extreme antiquity are evident everywhere, from the overgrown fortresses of the Immenwood to the crumbling Aeon Towers of the Swardlands. Descriptions of several important Kortos locales follow.
Cairnlands  The barren wasteland surrounding Absalom is littered with scores of siege castles— monuments to the failed invasions of 5 millennia whose near-forgotten chambers now are home to monsters, brigands, and the unquiet dead. The strongholds vary in size from the mile-tall Spire of Nex 10 miles north of the city to the tumbledown Pyramid of the Dog just outside the Puddles. Enticing rumors of undiscovered chambers and unclaimed treasures in siege castles just beyond the city walls beckon adventurers to explore their darkened depths.
Diobel  The so-called “Back Door to Absalom” squats upon a wide, wooden boardwalk at the end of a shallow harbor on the island’s southwest coast. Cargo-laden barges skim over rich oyster beds between the bustling trade town and the Trawl, a maze of steep stonework walls crusted with seaweed, barnacles, and small shellfish. All commercial traffic coming through the Trawl falls under the careful scrutiny of the Kortos Consortium, an association of guildmasters and merchant lords who control the island’s considerable mining, farming, trapping, fishing, and oyster-harvesting trades and administer Diobel’s many thriving markets. It’s an open secret that they also control a conduit for illicit goods smuggled into and out of Absalom by road without risking the scrutiny of the Harbor Guard. The Consortium’s corruption makes Diobel a hotbed of political intrigue against the high and mighty of Absalom, inspiring a chaotic atmosphere, and while the group keeps everything well regulated, there’s a sense that this arrangement could collapse at any moment.
Dunmire  North of the Kortos Mounts, the isle slopes toward the sea and the central lowlands sink into the Dunmire, a vast bog shrouded in thick fog that reaches a human’s knees. The miasma conceals all manner of filth and disease, and isolated enclaves of kobolds, lizardfolk, hags, and criminal outcasts huddle under its cover. The First Guard’s Eagle Garrison long ago ceded the Dunmire to wilderness, making it effectively outside the legal authority of Absalom. A squalid little village called Pier’s End sits upon a deep harbor on the coast, offering cheap ferries to Escadar for the rare cross-island traveler who manages to survive travel through the swamp.
The Immenwood  The vast, primordial woodland north of Absalom has provided lumber to the city and its vassals for almost as long as it has sheltered its enemies and outcasts. To the west, past the bustling town of Meravon— epicenter of the island’s logging trade—the magic of the Old Forest Aeon Tower once enriched the soil and bolstered regrowth. In the island’s earliest days, trees in the western Immenwood grew taller and faster than elsewhere on the island, and Kortos grew rich exporting wood to Qadira and the northern coast of Garund. The death of Aroden weakened the tower’s magic, however, and now the harvested trees replenish at the normal rate—perhaps even slower—and the lumber barons of the Kortos Consortium look to druids in hopes of restoring the forest to its previous glory. The central Immenwood is older and craggier than the outskirts, prone to tangled undergrowth, an intertwined canopy, and long shadows. The forest’s eastern reach touches the Tyrant’s Grasp, where blighted trees grow warped and twisted by the necromantic corruption left by Tar-Baphon’s defeat, and the clearings are haunted by undead wretches and sinister cultists of the Whispering Way. The Immenwood hides many ruins and lost settlements, along with several active fortresses. The wooded foothills of the Kortos Mounts hold mines, both active and inactive, almost all of which have inhabitants of one kind or another. Patrols of the First Guard’s Eagle Garrison range the trails connecting the forest’s settlements, which often fall prey to outlaws. The centaur tribes that dwell in the forest are more hospitable than their violent, xenophobic cousins of the Scrape, but they’ve suffered terribly at the hands of Absalom in recent years, and tensions remain high.
Kortos Mounts  The soaring mountains of central Kortos loom large behind Absalom’s skyline when viewed from the sea and are as identifiable to sailors and islanders as the Absalom Lighthouse, Eastgate’s Blue Tower, and the Spire of Nex. Several large mountains, some capped with snow and ice, cut distinctive enough silhouettes against the sky as to take on cultural significance even to folk who never leave Absalom. Most notable are Mount Ganog, Arazlant Mox, and the Weeping Grandfather, each of which has its own legends, tavern songs, and folklore. Twisting crevices and sharp ridges make travel through the region a treacherous proposition, to say nothing of the vicious harpies who roost in secluded defiles and crude villages at the tree line’s edge, or the drakes, wyverns, and dragons who lurk nearer the rocky peaks.
The Scrape  When Voradni Voon’s Brazen Arch thrummed to life as a magical portal at the center of the isle’s eastern plateau, the warlord called his armies from a continent away, and a seemingly infinite horde of minotaurs, harpies, and centaurs burst onto the Isle of Kortos. The plateau thundered with the hooves of 10,000 centaurs, whole tribes surging in vast interlocking circles to unleash a terrible earthquake upon Absalom, just as they had brought upheaval to so many of the ancient cities of Casmaron. Aroden reversed their seismic magic back upon them, killing Voradni Voon and shattering the Brazen Arch into a dozen jagged fragments. Countless centaurs toppled into deep rifts as the landscape cracked and seethed in violent destruction. After the rending of the Brazen Arch, the devastated eastern plateau became known as the Scrape. Most of the surviving minotaurs fled into the Riven Hills, where they harry Absalom and its allies to this day from their settlement at Hazrak. Voon’s feral harpies, the last to give up the fight, fled to the highlands of the Kortos Mounts, and they have grown no more hospitable over the centuries.
Swardlands  Kortos owes its great bounty not just to the fertile fields of its western reaches, but also to the enormous Aeon Towers and their aeon orbs that have magically sustained its flora since antiquity. Unknown parties stole the aeon orb near Willowside a decade ago, leaving its tower a crumbling cenotaph incapable of holding back a strange environmental devastation known as the Welt, which grows from the western edge of the Dunmire by a mile each year. The Old Forest Tower near the lumber town of Meravon once ensured the health and regrowth of the western Immenwood, but its powers grow weaker and weaker each season. The other three Aeon Towers still function for now, but their caretakers look on uneasily and wonder how long they—and the famous agricultural prosperity of Kortos—can endure.
Tyrant’s Grasp  The site of the Whispering Tyrant’s defeat is a blasted wasteland of necromantic corruption stretching nearly 15 miles across the plains, forest, and hills northeast of the Spire of Nex. The lich seemingly perished in a tremendous blast of magical energy that wrenched the undead lord’s right hand from its bony wrist, and the skeletal hand remains there still, unwilling to loosen its grip upon the Isle of Kortos. Cultists of the Whispering Way flock to the tainted land, seeing it as the most likely beachhead for their lord’s inevitable return to claim his hand and the Starstone. The First Guard has annihilated three attempted settlements by these dark devotees, but their numbers seem to be growing. Undead creatures— always a potential menace in the Cairnlands—are notably more numerous within this region. Undead within the Tyrant’s Grasp gain the ability to sense living creatures as an imprecise sense with a range of 30 feet. They also gain resistance to positive energy equal to their level.

Geography

Situated on the southern coast of the Isle of Kortos, Absalom is the largest city in the Inner Sea region and quite possibly the entire world. The ice-capped peaks of the Kortos Mounts are among the highest known in the world, stretching high above treeline.[3] Countless abandoned siege engines and constructions of war from the numerous failed attempts throughout history to take the city by force lie scattered throughout the surrounding countryside in what has become known as the Cairnlands[4] and the wreckage of armadas of unsuccessful attempts on the city from the sea all but block the wide harbor in a mass known as the Flotsam Graveyard.[5][6] A map of Absalom† The city itself is enormous: it stretches more than seven miles from the Starwatch Keep to Azlanti Keep and more than five miles from Westgate to Eastgate, and Absalom has three times as many residents as the capital of Cheliax, Egorian.[3]

Population

303900