Bondar and Buntar
Bondar and Buntar are two cities on opposite sides of the Great Kozar River, with the Buntar in the Kingdom of Bevil and Bondar in the Celtic lands next to the Nation of Galletica and the Venebones tribe. Buntar's major trading partner is the Gildam Confederacy.
The cities are located immediately before the Kozar River splits into the North Kozar River and the southern branch of the river, which ultimately splits into the Pomjar River, and the creatively named the Mid Kozar River and the South Kozar River. (Thanks Jeremy Trabue.) Buntar is a freshwater port and last location for ocean going ships to dock. Only the North Kozar River is navigable to and from the ocean. The other Kozar rivers flow into and around the Posprey Swamp, and are more dangerous subject to attack from orcs and bandits from the swamplands.
The cities and their respective nations are often in conflict, but the cities have a symbiotic relationship and there are strong commercial ties between them.
Bevilian Buntar has ancient roots as a Fultonian town and fortification built on defensible hills that were not great for commerce and farming. On the other side of the river, there was flat, fertile farmland. Both of which were considered Buntar, and the town prospered for generations. The older part of town had more defensible Fultonian military / administrative outpost, more built up, with government buildings, barracks, and wealthy residents. Originally the residents of the flat town would have been welcome up into the fortress town in case of Kozar attacks.
After the Guar Conquest of Fultar, Celtic tribes conquered many areas of the ancient empire, and while they pillages and raided. However, the Celtic advance was stopped at the Kozar River and Buntar. Raiding continued further inland than Buntar, but the Celts never conquered any territory further west than the old Fultonian town. The people of Buntar are proud of their unconquered past.
Buntar remained part of the Kingdom of Bevil, the inheritor of Fultonian culture in this part of the world. In the immediate centuries after the fall of the empire, the Bevilians pushed back across the river and Bevil maintained control of much of what are now considered the Celtic lands across the Kozar River. The lands east of the Kozar River would alternate between control of Bevil and various Celtic tribes.
After the ebbing of Fultonian power the two might naturally have fallen into separate spheres of influence. While some of the Bevilians remained, the Celts conquered and absorbed and a new town, Celtic Bondar was founded. This land across the river used the land and many of the buildings of the old eastern part of Buntar, and this less defensible sprawling town that was integrated into local Celtic road nets and farms. While lacking in the same fortifications, Buntar does have smaller hills further to the east, which have forts built upon older Fultonian ruins. Now these forts, rather than the Bevilian Buntar can absorb the people of low lying Bondar in times of crisis.
The Bevilian Buntar and the Celtic Bondar have a complicated relationship and a history alternating between strife, cooperation and competition. There remains a strong stone bridge as well as ferry traffic up and down the river. The two towns are full of merchants smugglers and rogues, needing and wanting to do business with each other, but also suspicious and defensive.
Recently, there has been an uptick in activity on the Bevilian side as there is the tropical fruit, the Prosapple that grows in the swamps that has become incredibly fashionable back in Fultar. Various different pirates and merchant companies are vying in a sort of old-west-like gold rush to control the harvesting and shipping of these fruits.
Buntar has a small population of gnomes and halflings that reside in small hilly area. They include the gnomes:
Grawor Silverkind, silversmith, and Sapine Gobbledwadle and Ronfan Tinkerthread, tinkers, and halflings: Anwrick Stronghare, Laorin Fatfeet, Jonad Grandberry, Anne Riverfoot, Ariree Wiseflower, Sakath Greenhands
The forest gnome Ianver Flukefen, a forest gnome who lives outside of town.
Arrival:
Travelers from the Viking lands and Sinann experienced their arrival at Buntar and Bondar as: The Party proceeds downriver, with Emer the Boatwoman and her daughter Enid Mac Cuhail, and their boaters: Sinead Mac Tiar (short, strong, broad shoulders, red hair) and Aiden Mac Cuhalin (tall, black hair with an Adam’s apple). As you turn the bend in the river, you see the great hill with the fort Budatar to the left. Then two towns spread out before you. To left, is the great Bevilian town of Buntar, with its impressive Royal Castle with the town spread out beyond it with its many round towers. Beyond those walls you will be subject to the Bevilian Emperor's jurisdiction. Here reside the Emperors's officers, in the castle on the northeastern perimeter. Here is a place of rule and order. The high circling walls, the great round towers, the Castle and an immense temple collectively impress you with their sheer strength. To the right, is the Celtic town of Bondar across from Buntar with a single bridge separating the two towns. Bondar is smaller, less impressive, but still has a number of towers, and strong and sturdy protective walls. The skald, Druid, forest gnome and Cormac the ladies man wonder, How were these walls built? By giants maybe. How do the towers and buildings not fall down? It must some sort of magic. Next that is seen the desiccated remains of criminals left hanging on gallows at a windswept crossroads leading into town, and three emaciated men in a metal cage looking forlorn as your boats pass them by. You can see other travelers arriving and departing, most of whom are peasants from the nearby villages and hamlets. Most traffic is on foot with artisans in bright colored tunics and hose, women in gowns and mantles their hair covered wimples, merchants in fur trimmed coats, and priests in drab habits. Honking geese fulter under the hooves of horses, and cats, dog and pigs run rampant. Along the Bevilian side of the river are the tombs and sepulchers of their esteemed dead. In Bevil, almost everyone was buried beyond the limits of the city, which is thought to have been a disease-reducing practice. The Bevilians keep their private burial spots along the roads . The sepulchers might contain bones and ashes, but are also monuments to the dead. No tombs or sepulchers can be seen on Bondar side, as the Celts bury their royalty in great burial mounds and the common people in smaller graves or burned in funeral pyres. And then you notice the smell. A brook empties into the Kozar River. As you look along the banks you see piles of refuse, broken crockery, animal bones, entrails, human feces, and rotting meat strewn in and around the bushes. In some places the muddy banks slide into thick quagmires where townsmen have hauled out their refuse and pitched it into the stream. In others, rich green grasses, reeds, and undergrowth spring from the highly fertilized earth. As you watch, two seminaked men lift another barrel of excrement from the back of a cart and empty it into the water. A small brown pig roots around in the garbage. It is not called Shitstream for nothing. You have come face-to-face with the contrasts of a town. It is so proud, so grand, and in places so beautiful and yet it displays all the disgusting features of a bloated glutton. The city as a body is a caricature of the human body: smelly, dirty, commanding, rich, and indulgent. As you your boat pilots toward the docks of Bondar, the contrasts become even more vivid. As you dock, a group of boys with dirty faces and tousled hair run towards you and crowd around, shouting, "Sir, do you want a room? A bed for the night? Where are you from?' They pretend that they know your family or are from the same region as you. Their clothes are filthy, and their feet even filthier, bound into leather shoes which have suffered the stones and mud of the streets for more years than their owners. Welcome to a place of pride, wealth, authority, crime, justice, high art, stench, and beggary. Arriving involves an assault on all the senses. Your eyes will open wide at the great temples and towers, and you will be dazzled by the wealth. Your nostrils will be invaded by the stench from the sewage-polluted watercourses and town ditches. You will find the odors of this garbage and animal and human dung mingle with the pleasanter aromas from cookshops and houses. The most pungent smells will come from the fish merchants, line makers, butcher and, worst of all, the tanners. After the natural quiet of the country river the birdsong, and the wind in the trees, your hearing must attune to the calls of travelers and town criers, the shouts of laborers and the ringing of temple bells. You will find yourself being jostled by the crowds who come in from the country for the occasion, and who live it up rowdily in the taverns. This is a bewildering and extreme sensory experience. When entering Buntar itself, the Party had the following experience: As you arrive, you will find the heads and limbs of traitors on display. There are the blackened heads of criminals stuck on poles above the city gates, their eyes plucked out by birds. Legs and arms hang by ropes, each the relic of a conspiracy or crime, now riddled with maggots or covered with flies. These remains remind you of the power of the Emperor, a greater and more ominous shadow behind the immediate authority of the Duke, the city mayor, and aldermen, local lords and sheriffs. You are met by the City Guard, who wear chain mail, purple and black cloaks, helmets with purple feathers, and embroidered vines and grapes on their surcoats. They are armed with shields, halberds, and short swords with separate light crossbow men (no shield or halberd). The City Guard is tasked with defending the walls, patrolling outside of the city, and protecting the outlying villages and farms. Officially, this is the army of the Emperor, and only the Emperor’s men may wear the royal purple. Inside the city, you see the City Watch, they are responsible for internal policing and security. City Watch wear studded leather armor, red cloaks, helmets with yellow, green and red feathers distinguishing rank, and surcoats with embroidered yellow, green and red flowers, and their primary weapons are the spear and club, with some crossbowmen. The city is so alive, so full of busy people, that within a short while you have forgotten about the decapitated criminals and traitors. And Shitstream's stench is no longer in the air. You see great stone and metal statues in the city of the warriors, priests and rulers of over thousands of years of the first Fultonian Empire and now the Bevilian glory which has added to this great history. These tell in both words and visual images the great mythology and history of Fultar. There are cats, pigs, dogs and geese, a cacophony of overwhelming noise, little shops with their wears. You see servants shoveling up horse dung from the area in front of their master's house. As you walk towards the center of the city, you will encounter more traders' shops tightly packed together in small street-front premises- sometimes tiny rooms of less than forty square feet--but all with their distinctive projecting signs to tell the illiterate their trade. Some are paintings depicting the items on sale, such as a painted knife indicating the shop of a cutler. Others are three-dimensional objects: a bushel on a pole, showing that freshly brewed ale is available, or a bandaged arm, marking a surgeon's premises. At the top of the street of the smiths which leads down to the river, you can hear the clang of blacksmiths hammering away at their forges and shouting in guttural voices at their apprentices to fetch water or bring coal. Others in the same street are setting up stalls, hanging out ironwares such as scissors, rushlight holders, and knives to sell. The languages and accents you hear in Buntar give it cosmopolitan air to the place. Foreign merchants are regularly to be found and, while Bevilian is spoken in the street, there is Celtic, Fultonian, Kozar, Arabic, Nubian, and Henarrian. Travelers of all sorts- -clergymen, merchants, messengers, Imperial's officers, judges, clerks, master masons, carpenters, painters, pilgrims, joined by travelers and businessmen from all the corners of the known world. So many of them are dressed in fine velvet, satin, and damask that all you can do is gawp at their finery as they swish into this shop or strut out of that one, attended by their servants. There is an extraordinary range of costumes, from russet-clad peasants to richly dressed merchants and esquires and their wives, and maybe even a knight or nobleman. Their traveling cloaks might hide the colorful hues of their clothes but, in this sunlight, the rich reds, bright yellows, and deep blues are shown off, trimmed with furs according to social rank, but so many of them are dressed in fine velvet, satin, and damask that all you can do is gawp at their finery as they swish into this shop or strut out of that one, attended by their servants. You pass a public square, with a baker in pillory with loaf around his neck, and a man tarred and feathered. Over the hubbub of the morning's business you hear the town crier, calling from the crossroads at the center of the town, you hear laughter as friends share a joke. Over it all the practiced cries of the street vendors ring out as they walk around with trays of food. There are peddlers with fruit, cheese, wine, milk, and meat pies. There are smells in from different areas of the city mixed with that of waste and food. The stench and obstruction of the animal dung, vegetable rubbish, fish remains, and entrails of beasts present problems of public sanitation. Such is the level of detritus, especially in the town ditches, that it is also infested with dogs and pigs. You learn that there are frequent attempts to eradicate the wild pig population, but each one bears testimony to the failure of the previous effort. If you cannot get rid of the pigs, what hope is there for eradicating the rats? A little farther on you come to Butchers Row where the counters of the shops are laden with meat lying exposed in the sun, with joints and carcasses hanging from hooks in the shade of the shop behind You can listen to the thunk as the cleaver comes down and strikes the chopping board, and watch as the leather-aproned butcher lifts the red meat onto the scales, balancing it carefully with metal weights until he is satisfied that he, at least, is getting a good deal. Streets have tubs of putrid water positioned here and there, supposedly in case of fire but more often than not full of decaying rubbish.
Smuggling and other illegal activities are common between the twin cities.
The Hill Fort of Bondar, which is lies a half a mile east of the town of Bondar.
