Tokaal

Tokaal is a city, but it is also a creature. Apparently formed to protect it's inhabitants by a conclave of mages after a great calamity befell their plane, it has been moving over the surface of other planes shrouded in it's own pseudo-plane, Cankeree, destroying everything in it's path and absorbing the residue. Few of the inhabitants are even aware that there is a world remaining outside the fortified walls of the city.

Description and Construction/Physiology

For inhabitants of Alusia the city is bizare and confusing place; it is almost ten miles in diameter, the population housed in tennaments the height of castle walls and divided by dead-straight radial Avenues intersected with circular Roads. The buildings are made of a uniform sand-stone coloured material that is tapped as a liquid from veins beneath the surface and channeled into molds to dry. While there are large sections given over to a farms, a great deal of cultivation takes place on the top of the housing "Blocks", the water fed from the street level by channels within the wall of the buildings themselves.

Guild members with the Healer skill have been able to sense the life in the stone and it's single Aura is that of a living, though not entirely sentient, creature.

Magical Features

Magic is used extensively in the city (even for very petty things such as illusionary street markers, lighting, and decorations on building, the way some might use paint) but the mana has a taint that produces an unpleasant metallic taste in the mouth of newcomers until they acclimatise to the local conditions. This also seems to provide a new arrival with an elevated level of resistance to native magic, to the extent that the signs and lights are initially very faint and hard to discern.

The cities attendant planar storm appears to be a more than adequate defence against most outsiders (be they hostile or not), the Vardis Gate does allow some entities to pass through and reassemble themselves within the city. However, the process is psychologically and physically devastating and often what arrives a warped and quite insane parody of the original creature. The regular and unexplained appearance of these has done nothing to reassure the inhabitants that horror that engulfed the outside world has abated.

Experiments with creatures and Avatars summoned by Guild Members into the city have met with similarly disastrous results.

Social and Political

The city is currently controlled (politically in any case) by six Virtues who were once mages but are something more and are in some fashion part of the city, that run the six "quarters" of the city and mark their followers with a tokens to mark their allegiance. Each commission that the Guild has taken regarding this plane has been from one of the individuals.

While these beings clearly powerful, there number has changed several times in the 1200 years of recorded history (of which there is suspiciously little remaining from before Tokaal's establishment) leaving Lady Patience as the only remaining original member.

While most of the people are free men by Alusian standards, there is an under class that was formed by the fragments of a former Virtue that was "fragmented" into somewhere in the region of 10,000 physically identical but mentally diminished copies. They are collectively know as Laars and until Lord Fetter extended his protection to them they were brutally worked, savagely harassed, and causally killed until only about a half their number remained. They are slowly becoming part of the society, but are still treated as slaves in many respects.