Goldbar

Gold Mine Town by fine_plan

A small prison mining community high in the Crown of the World Mountains, Goldbar is located on the easternmost edge of the Crown of the World mountains and is the furthest south town in the Northern Kingdom.
It is well known both for the large amounts of gold that is mined from the mountains where it is located and for the hard labor mining prison that supplies the miners for those mines.
Goldbar produces most of the gold used to mint coins in the Northern Kingdom and is the location of the primary gold coin mint in the Northern Kingdom. Heavily guarded wagons travel from the area once a month to take gold coins, bars, and nuggets to the Crown City where the gold is either stored in the royal vaults or processed and distributed by the royal treasury.
In addition to being a mining town and home to one of the main mints in the kingdom, Goldbar is home to the largest hard labor prison of the Northern Kingdom and is the last stop for anyone that has been sentenced to a life of hard labor in the mines.

Population

Goldbar has a fairly even mixture of humans, dwarves, and hauflin that either oversee the mines or work in the mint and other businesses in the area.
There are 27 structures in the area, including private homes, a blacksmith shop, the royal gold mint, a guard barracks, a miner's barracks, a healing temple, a prison, and a trading post.
22 families live in the area 8 children attend the local school 204 prisoners work in the mines
There is no predominant religion in the area, but most homes have small shrines to one or more of the mountain deities of the various pantheons.

The Mines, the Gold, and the Hard Labor Miners

The men that work in the mines are criminals that have been sentenced to lives of hard labor. They begin their work day by being assigned the tools that they will need for the day, then set off into the tunnels that have been dug into the mountain, following the veins of gold. The tunnels often end at shafts that drop hundreds of feet down. Miners descend into the depths on ladders, the gold and dirt hoisted out by buckets and dumped into tailing piles where it is sorted again and sent though sluice boxes or panned for any gold that might have been missed by the hard rock miners.
Mining work is difficult and it is not uncommon for men to fall and die, particularly when they are climbing back up out of shafts at the end of a long work day.
At the end of each day, each man is searched to make sure that they did not hide a tool or any gold on their person, then taken back to the prison barracks for dinner and to sleep.

Type

Town

Location under

The Northlands