Temples of Wilmskirk

[Puckohue]

I found this statement in a convention scenario:

Quote

Wilmskirk is a small city (~2,000 pop.) famous for its temples and artisans. There are temples to all the Orlanthi gods and also many foreign deities.

Really? Temples? To all of them?

[7Tigers]

City being build around a big open air temple, I guess you can cram a lot of small temples around it!
(see S:KoH p. 240 for plan)

[Akhôrahil]

22 minutes ago, Puckohue said:

I found this statement in a convention scenario:

Really? Temples? To all of them?

Presumably most only get shrines among associated cults.

Edited January 24, 2020 by Akhôrahil

[Jeff]

16 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Presumably most only get shrines among associated cults.

Wilmskirk claims to have temples to all the gods, although that boast may be a bit of an exaggeration. The Rent-A-Shrine is really nice though.

[soltakss]

17 hours ago, Puckohue said:

Really? Temples? To all of them?

Sure, why not?

You can build a Temple, it's just a building after all. When you make it sacred and put in a Priest, it becomes a temple.

Now, it might not have many worshippers, or people from all around might flock to it on a holy day. 

What would it have? A Temple to Orlanth is fine, that would be expected. An Issaries Temple is a market, so Wilmskirk would be a market town. Lhankor Mhy has a library, so Wilmskirk would have a library. Wilmskirk would have a Hospital, which is what a temple to Chalana Arroy is. A Temple to Eurmal might be just a shrine anyway, so that might attract wandering Eurmali. I have no idea what a Temple to Flesh man or Ginna Jar would be like, as neither has a cult that has been described. Maybe Flesh Man stands in for the Ancestors among Orlanthi.

So, I can see Wilmskirk having a market, library and hospital as well as an Orlanth Temple. 

others could be shrines, or a case of keeping up with the Joneses. So, someone might build a Humakt temple because of the Orlanth temple, then someone else builds a Storm Bull Temple because Storm Bull shouldn't be left out. The rulers of Wilskirk might have built temples to reward cultists for favours they did.

[Joerg]

While I played a bit in the neighbrhood of Wilmskirk, I never got around to developing the city itself beyond a couple of kinsmen for my party's rural PCs, and an attempt at writing a short novel about an urban Sartarite from Wilmskirk.

 

Still, here's what I expect to find in less common temples:

One thing I expect to find in Wilmskirk is a small Aeolian "ghetto", or at least a place where Aeolian immigrants following the call of Wilms worship.

Wilmskirk was the first crafting center in Sartar, and may still be famous for the workmanship of its artisans and crafters. (Jonstown has its library, Duck Point has its river port, and Svenstown has the Praxian trade.)

When Sartar founded the place, the next city down the road was Smithstone, a similar crafting center in the southern part of Volsaxar. The road then parted towards Karse (then a defunct overseas port which mainly lived off its fishing and boat-building for the coastal folk, thanks to its forested hinterland) and Jansholm on the north end of the Heortland royal highway. Karse still was a logical port for western goods carried over the Mirrorsea Bay from Rhigos, but Jansholm was as well positioned for this kind of small cargo ship. The Quivini tribes had no such urban center - Clearwine and Runegate were what went for metropole regions in those days. There were established caravan trails, but no real roads. Hardly anybody traded with the ducks for anything but vegetables.

Wilmskirk sits atop the junction of both southward trade routes - the Volsaxi caravan route from Smithstone, and the extension of the River route between Duck Point and Nochet (in the time of Sartar a city just recovering from five centuries of absence of international trade - effectively, Nochet was an oversized version of a library and hospital town and a major earth temple with a wildly overgrown burial field slowly conquering formerly inhabited areas when Bruvala of House Norinel came to power.) This means that it has a very central role for the Issaries cult.

It also served as the poster city for the other Quivini tribes - look how easily the Balmyr, Sambari, Locaem and Kultain could access crafted goods of higher quality than your clan or even tribal crafters could produce. Some of those through trade, but a lot more from Wilmskirk artisans who followed Wilm's call in Kethaela to seek new opportunities in this fortified outpost in the Kerofinelan wilds.

In a way, Wilmskirk was to Dragon Pass what Hedeby was to Viking Scandinavia. And Hedeby made its king rich with all the Scandinavian demand for the products of its craftfolk. If you wanted glass or metal objects for prices that didn't have 20 road tolls calculated in, Hedeby was the place to go. And going via Hedaby to the North Sea you could even avoid the Øresund tribute of the Lodbrok dynasty by staying west of Sealand without braving the deadly west coast of Juteland which had few safe harbors to weather a storm, and lots of shipwrecks to underline the danger.

Wilmskirk brought all those urban goodies right into Quiviniland. Maybe it didn't attract the best craft masters from Heortland or Esrolia, but if one was the second or third best master of a craft in his Kethaelan home city, one could become the unrivaled master in Wilmskirk, with a generous start (housing, a plot of land in the city) provided. (Only to realize upon arrival that the runners-up from other cities may have had the same idea, and that while there was no established master of the masters here, there were quite a few people with a chance for that claim.)

The later cities of Sartar may have bled away some of these crafters, but by that time locally taught artisans could move into those workshops, keeping the local productivity up. Having a first selection at more exotic material from the south to work with ensured another advantage over artisans in other Sartarite cities. Swenstown might exceed Wilmskirk's reputation in leather working and horn crafting (e.g. combs and superior looms) due to superior access to Praxian materials, and Jonstown might have the advantage in crafts that can profit from the library, but Wilmskirk has the temple to Wilms, patron of the craftsfolk in Sartar.

I expect there to be temples to Gustbran and Minlister with sufficient attendance to work as a permanent temple, and a loom temple. There will be a Humakti hiring hall for caravan guards, and probably a Yelmalian one for horse archers in that role, too. There will be a temple to the sun horse with shrines for Redalda and her husband and the animal healer aspect of Ernalda.

Orlanth is bound to have a city temple with shrines to his crafter heroes or subcults (especially Orstan the Carpenter), even if there may be a sacred hill outside of the city for confederation-wide services.

There is bound to be a sciptorium of Lhankor Mhy, though probably not any significant library. Possibly a satellite of the Derensev Great Library to the south.

The river gods might find some worship in the propitiary shrine to Chorms.

The Lunar occupation will have brought a Seven Mothers Temple, but it isn't clear whether that could have survived. The Wilmskirk mayor sat on Kallyr's Sartar High Council in the Flesh Man role in 1613, which indicates at least some disagreement with the effects of the Lunar occupation here.

The dissolution of the Kultain in 1619 will have affected the land ownership inside the city. I expect the Lunars to have confiscated all Kultain claims to land inside the city. The Firebull rebellion among the Sambari may have had similar consequences, leaving maybe a quarter of the land within the city  without any resident of the city who had a title to it, and the tenants who rented those houses from the new Lunar owners in a weird situation. I suppose that the Lunar confiscations were confiscated by the Mayor, for the city, but that may have stirred the avarice of the three tribal kings remaining on the city ring, and that of the guilds.