Shadizar

[Aholibamah]

That sounds like an interesting party. It is also a good idea to use the red herring...

An NPC and location I'm coming up with for Shadizar:

Markos the Slave Merchant

Markos has a reputation in Shadizar for being the man to go to when you want domestics, concubines or other household slaves. He buys from the best slavers and his agents haunt the best auction houses. His trainers are either formerly well trained slaves freed for service or else high status slaves.

However to the shrewd and streetwise in the Merchant Quarter he is also known as a man who has his fingers in many a wealthy household. After all, a concubine or porter might well have come from his establishment. He knows what domestic and more private needs some of the rich have, and while he is professionally discreet--his business depends upon it--nevertheless discretion sometimes just means not being caught. Caught in this case brokering information, slipping the wrong people into the right house, whispering the right rumor into the right ear.

Markos began life in the Desert, the maul of Shadizar. He was born to a whore and as a youth acted as an advertiser to a pimp, but growing into toughness became a slaver instead. This was hard risky work at times but he proved good at it. However better than this was his ability to use a shrewd businessman's sense to invest his wealth, make the right deals and stab the right backs until he became not quite rich but certainly well off enough to start his own venture.

He bought a group of buildings in the merchant quarter, demolished parts of them and using cheap labour and contacts built a fine establishment with bathing pools, dormitories, training courtyards, punishment cells, kitchens and so on.

Now Markos has become an almost typical at a glance plumply prosperous Shadizari merchant, with a neat dyed beard he likes to stroke as he pontificates in a fashionable tavern, but beneath this is the shrewd street rat he started out as.

 

[blackenedwings]

Excellent Aholibamah! I'll definitely work Markos into their foray into Shadizar.

 

[windman]

Our online game, Evil Trevor's Legends of Zamora, is set in Shadizar. It's right here on the Mongoose forums so you can read along and see Trevor's campaign ideas.

 

[Aholibamah]

thanks for the tip on the campaign thread--I've read some of it and it is a LOT better than most you come across. The cool thing is that it is well written on every side and the characters are well presented. It's more like reading an interactive story than a pbp game thread.

Thanks for the compliment blackenedwing.

Slave Characters

Dagombi the Bamula is a powerful young man, a hunter of the Bamulas, who was captured by Stygian slave raiders and initially sold with a coffle of laborers. He killed a slave-overseer who was flogging him and while being punished it occured to the rather devious freedman overseer in Kush to sell him to the market in Zamora where people were not necessarily picky. Attached to a coffle of specially secured 'difficult' slaves he was sent up to Shadizar to be trained as a pit fighter.

He is an impressive, lean, dark young man with a sullen air of silence about him. In fact he has been broken of his sense of tribe to some degree--though he longs for home he doubts he will ever see it again or that he will be accepted back easily. He has begun to find warring in him his barbarian origins versus a hope that as a pit fighter he might win renown enough to gain freedom. Someone who actually gave him that hope, was generous and meaningfully kind to him might with some difficulty win his loyalty after overcoming his suspicion. On the other hand he could easily fall into evil ways, learning love of drink and the various fleshly and more mysterious pleasures of Shadizar.

Elena
This lovely Corinthian girl was nothing more than the prettiest girl in her village, hoped for by her father to perhaps marry a merchant of means, when bandits struck the town during a market day, mostly after fresh horses and food as they were being pursued by Corinthian cavalry. One on impulse grabbed the dark haired beauty as she stood horrified by a well. After a humiliating bit of taunting and prodding in their camp the bandit chief realizing that she was still a virgin decided that they might as well get something out of their latest fiasco. They sold her to the first slave train they came across and called it good.

Elena was hardly gently reared, though certainly more gently than in the slave markets of Shadizar. She is somewhat torn--on the one hand she feels that to have been enslaved is a humiliation, on the other she has begun to realize that she could be living a life of absolute luxury as a bed girl to a rich merchant or perhaps a lord! She has a natural desire to experience life and while no warrior or adventurer has a great deal of courage to face the facts of life. Because of this Markos the slave trader has begun training her to be a high class concubine. Her sleek beauty and her cheerful nature make her ideal for this--moreover she has common sense enough to know when to lower her eyes and keep her mouth shut.

Elena might be encountered at Markos' or possibly as someone's expensive concubine, recently sold. She might very well snatch at a chance to get out of Shadizar, or simply find herself caught up as a victim in something beyond her reckoning.