Calydon
City of the Broken Hunt
"Oaths are etched in stone, and the forests remember every lie."
Overview
Tucked deep within the southern wilds of Aetolia, Calydon is a city half-grown from earth and half-shaped by memory. Veiled in twisting woods and marsh fog, it pulses with the echo of a divine punishment: the legend of the Calydonian Boar. To outsiders, it is a place of old griefs and older pride. To its people, it is sacred ground, where the forest remembers, and forgetting is the true sin.
Calydon does not shine like marble cities of the south. It breathes, groans, and grows. Its bones are stone and timber, antler and fang. It is a city where the wild and the divine intertwine, where every ritual scratches the surface of something deeper—and perhaps still waiting beneath the trees.
Culture
Core Values:
Loyalty, ancestral memory, endurance through wildness.
Customs:
- Oathcarving: Life-changing vows are carved into sacred trees or stone obelisks.
- Tattoo Songs: Stories are sung as tattoos are inked, weaving memory into flesh.
- Festival of the Tusk: Annual rite reenacting the hunt of the Boar in mask, drum, and fire.
- Hunting Scars: Earned at adulthood, worn openly, sometimes ritually cut.
Art & Music:
- Emphasis on carving (bone, wood, stone) over paint.
- Music is percussive and breath-heavy: hollow bone flutes, skin drums, chant-laments.
Language/Dialect
Terse, metaphor-laced, and reverent. Silence often carries more weight than speech.
Religion
Primary Deities:
- Artemis: Worshipped as the unforgiving Wild Huntress.
- Hades: Honored as the Guardian of Ancestral Truths.
Sacred Sites:
- Shrine of the Tusk: Built around the fang of the Calydonian Boar.
- Echo Stones: Scattered grove altars where the dead are consulted through stone-touch.
- The Grove of Scars: Site of hunting initiation rites, where youths receive their first marks.
Government
Structure:
Ruled by a Circle of Horns—a council of war-elders, hunt-priests, and seer-mothers.
Justice
Trials held beneath the Hall of Antlers. Oaths are binding. Oathbreaking is punished by exile or symbolic sacrifice to the Boar.
Politics
Rarely interfered with beyond Aetolia. Fiercely local. Occasionally aligned with Thermon in times of religious or regional crisis.
Defences
Natural Defenses
The forest and mist. Outsiders often get lost before reaching the gates.
City Guard
Known as the Hollow-Wardens: masked, antlered warriors trained in ambush and beastcraft.
Districts
City Structure
Spread across sacred clearings and moss-slick stone rises. No outer wall—only concentric rings of trees and ancestral standing stones.
- The Hall of Antlers: Center of governance and gathering.
- Huntward: The hunter's district—tannery halls, bone-shapers, and tusk-traders.
- Fangroot Hollow: Oldest district, partially swallowed by roots. Sacred burial caves beneath.
- Shrinevale: Houses the Shrine of the Tusk and hidden groves of Artemis.
Other Notable Locations
- Bloodroot Crossing: Marsh bridge where a past hero turned back the boar at cost of their life.
- Shrine of the Tusk: Sacred temple encircling the Calydonian Fang. Rumored to pulse under moonlight.
Guilds and Factions
- The Hollow-Wardens: City defenders and beast hunters. Live apart from the city center and maintain sacred watch over the boundaries.
- The Fangbinders: Oath-keepers and historians who tend to sacred carvings and tattoos; they record oaths and deaths in both stone and skin.
- The Blood-Singers: An order of chanters who guide the Festival of the Tusk .
- The Rootbound Circle: Spiritualists who commune with ancestral spirits through root-altars and bone relics.
History
The Calydonian Boar Hunt
When King Oeneus of Calydon failed to honor the goddess Artemis with offerings, she released a terrifying boar on his land. The king's son, Meleager, assembled a group of renowned warriors to slay the beast. Several of the huntsmen were killed or maimed before Meleager finally defeated the boar. He presented its head as a trophy to his beloved, the huntress Atalanta
Geography
Location
Southern Aetolia, near the mists of the Ghostwater Vale and the fringes of the Mistwood.
Terrain
Deep woods, river-fed marshes, and ridgeline overlooks; thorny, irregular trails winding into forest depths.
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