A Pocket Guide to the Kingdom of Daggerfall

Being a guide to the divers

lands, towers and Men of the westernmost Breton clans,

and further their customs, chants and histories,

all owed, with each breath, to the noblest Stewards of Daggerfall

Dedicated to Their Majesties the Stewards, King Gothryd and Queen Aubk-i, under whose auspices and to whose everlasting glory pen was here put to paper, and committed to memory in their keeping; and to His late Majesty the Steward, King Lysandus, by whose keen mind the present work was first conceived, and who will be sorely missed by friend and vassal both, Arkay turn the Wheel eternal.

Penned in 3E 406, being the reign of our Revered Father and Generous Patron, His Majesty the Emperor Uriel Septim VII, saints sing his praises.

All praise be to AURI-EL, cloaked in woven glories past

All praise be to KYNERETH, celestial storm-breath

All praise be to MAGNUS, hierarchitect and light that blinds

All praise be to MARA, loving and loved

All praise be to STENDARR, advocate before the howling winds

All praise be to JULIANOS, letter of the law

All praise be to DIBELLA, soul of the song

ARKAY turn THE BONE-WHEEL eternal, until the last sidewise step.

Of the petty kingdoms of the Iliac, by proverb countless and endless, there are some that stand head and shoulders above the rest - and none more so than the ancient house of Daggerfall. Perched upon Bay’s edge, where the Iliac’s welcoming waves mingle freely with the tepid waters of the southern Azurean Sea, the Bretons of Daggerfall have forever been the westernmost of the tribes and clans of High Rock, last to glory in the light of Magnus; and hence, fated by Tamriel’s very choosing to lasting triumphs, to greatness at the end of Wheel and time, and to the long and undisturbed stretch of centuries. Such were the decrees of the first celestial councils, scribed in bone-charter and later pulled from the bedrock below by the doings of Raven Direnni; thenceforth kept as memory for all to read and know.

Yet these grand and storied qualifications might sound alien to a Heartlander’s ear. Indeed, even in our blessed age of Imperial peace, when reason and diplomacy have all but triumphed over the brutalities of war, misunderstandings stemming, above all, from a lack of knowledge, continue to plague relations both within and between the Empire’s provinces. The works of Divine Talos’ scribes - tasked so long ago with forging a literary empire, so as to ease and guide its reawakening on Mundus – have all but fallen by the wayside, rendered obsolete by the passage of time, and nary a willing quill to rise to the occasion.

In his boundless wisdom, His late Majesty the Steward, King Lysandus – Arkay turn the Wheel eternal – came to perceive all this; and further, and because it is not in the nature of a hierarch’s soul thrice-turned¹ to merely wallow in ceaseless lamentation, he came also to recognize the need for this, the present volume. And though it would not come to fruition within his lifetime – too often, the noblest among us are taken when Tamriel has most need of their virtue! - the task fell instead unto his mourning progeny and vassals, and they have seen it faithfully through to its end as a final means of honouring their lord and steward past.

Turn the page, then, esteemed reader, and peruse now the glories of Daggerfall here tallied and surveyed. If it pleases or educates, then we are fulfilled, and could ask for no greater praise or honours. If it offends, we plead only for your forgiveness, and implore you to look past the rambling failings of flawed words – failings born, above all, of zeal improperly tempered – and to the truth beneath; for its pursuit is the beating heart of mortal-kind’s eternal Julianine enterprise.

Throne of the Westerly Stewards: the Towers of Daggerfall

Seat of the steward-kings of the West, greatest of the Breton courts, and unwavering ally to the glorious Septim Empire in all its endeavours, the city of Daggerfall is the ordained throne from which the lay and destiny of Greater Betony are fixed – and such has been the way of things for longest eras, now. Perched upon the north and south banks of the River Dirne, its urban sprawl of temples, bone-shrines, guildhalls, streets, canols and merchants’ warehouses is broken only by the labyrinthine passage-walls and towers of the royal castle; a hundred thousand souls framed and given purpose by power and ambition set, literally, in stone, all striving constantly to rise towards the heart and centrepiece of everything here surveyed - the Tower of Raven.

It is the Tower that is the wellspring of all greatness here, and all civilized enterprise; and matters were much different before its time. The primeval Nedes first to settle in the territory of the modern city of Daggerfall found it a land already soaked through with aetherial energies, though at that time chaotic and untempered - bursting up from the Wheelbones as springwater and deep-rooted wyrd trees. Their earliest villages all sprung up around such and similar semi-sacred sites of power – scattered and diffuse though they were - and the conquering Elven sorcerer-princes of Summurset would find the region already carved up into countless covenments propped up by little more than some primitive form of Conjuration: tenuous treaties with the pettiest of the petty lordlings of Oblivion. Needless to say, these Nedic witch-polities proved easy prey to the advanced magics of the Elves. Soon – by way of slavery-patents, outright war and, above all, liminal concordats with the High Princes of the Daedra – the future Bretic West was theirs; and it would remain tightly in their grip until the dawning centuries of the First Era, and the advent of the First Empire of the Nords.

Though the first of the Nordic raids to ravage these shores appear to have laid utter waste to any and all ancient city-states as may have risen here during the long ages of the Merethic Era – ages now lost to us in all but vaguest detail, – they served also as the foundation from which Daggerfall’s future glories would spring; for sometimes, the Bone-Wheel so turns that all must burn to make way for new growth, born of old seed. Then, too, the Nordic records sang proudly of a terrible slaughter, and of a bulwark built at the edge of the world to guard against those clans and covens that yet remained unsubjugated. This would be the terrible ordering of the West for over a century hence: a bloody clockwork of transgressions and punitive wars that need not here detain us at length. Yet, through it, a Daggerfall once conceived as a hedge against the much-maligned “elf-eared Nedelings” of the untamed interior was transformed instead into a point of contact – so that, by the time the Clan Direnni rose in Balfiera and the Elven princes returned to reclaim their once-rights and once-lands, they found it night impossible to distinguish between the few northblooded warlords and their subjects, Nedo-Nordic chieftains taking witches for their clevermen and worshipping wyrd trees as Kyne’s windchimes. As once the Nords had conquered and ordered all to their liking, so they were now conquered and ordered according to the whims of the Direnni: gathered into one chosen canton to live and work their Nordwise thinking, but now with a tower imposed overhead and over-mind.²

Whatever the designs of the first Direnni logicians to survey the West, however, they were soon deemed insufficient by a figure far more illustrious: the famed sorceress and enchantress, Raven Direnni. Her schemes were secret and deliberately lost, and even the few surviving fragments seem all but impossible judged against current laws; all that we might glean from them, and from the result that survives them, is that Raven did not impose, but instead drew from. The Tower she produced is native to these lands, bedrock below given voice and form above by means sadly beyond our understanding – to think, how much greater might the blinding glories of the Septim Empire be with such talent at its disposal!³

Raven’s Tower was the first and tallest of many, a first without equals. Its stones are power, and have since those days inexorably drawn the energies of the Bretic West to its foundations, gathering all around it in much the same way a great liege attracts worthy followers. The city now sprawled around it is largely the product of these alchemagical processes, and also of the deeds and reign of the first among Daggerfall’s tower-stewards to take the title of king – Thagore Sheorsbane. Here it becomes all but impossible to separate historical fact from the fancies of fiction, yet what we can say with certainty is that the lifetime of that fabled majesty saw the city of Daggerfall irrevocably changed. By pact with Kynereth and, as the chants hold, with the aid and friendship of a stalwart drake of Her choosing, Thagore wrote his kingship upon the land, and forced its many disparate chieftains and witching-lords to turn their eyes and bend their knees to his divinely-sanctioned might – by casting great chains, and dragging their towers before his own to face mute judgement. Those towers that were allowed to survive remain to the present day a most prominent part of the city’s skyline, a monumental reminder of the glories of the ancient masters – and that even they broke when faced with the unwavering strength of legitimate rule.

Countless new strongholds, subcastles and bastions have been added to the city’s tapestry over the eras to follow, reflecting its unfailing allure to the nobles of the Bretic West. Thagore left Daggerfall the greatest city on the Iliac, a position it has not since relinquished – though it has been challenged, first by Sentinel across the Bay, and then again by Wayrest at its eastern extreme. The oldest parts of the city, those closest to the Tower of Raven and the royal courts, are a continuous weave of walls and wizard-spires, with the abodes of the worthiest of the commonry – the craftsmasters and craftsmistresses of the royal guilds, and the servants and aides of the great nobles and magocrats – squeezed in between, or clawing their way precariously up the fortifications that surround them. But a crowded and richly decorated square across from the stewardly palaces, the pillars of the Kynaran Cathedral reach ever skywards – the mundal reflection of Kynereth’s astral and celestial court, where the ruling goddess is venerated in Her full splendour as Hierarch and Stormbreath; chapterhouses and knight-covens cluster round it, seeking the beneficence of their patron deity. Near here, also, one might find the ancient guildhalls of the Guilds of Mages and the Royal Enchanters; for though nobility in the Bretic West has long ceased to be the sole province of mages and thaumaturges, the arcane arts are still highly venerated, and many of the kingdom’s greatest and noblest are counted also amongst its foremost wizards.

Further outwards, the city spills out seemingly without rhyme or reason – reflecting a thousand years of near-constant layering and reconstruction. This is the home of the lesser guilds and the Zenitharine crafts, and temples to the God of Commerce in all his forms abound. Craftsmasters herd their apprentices and serfs from one project to another, while colourful house-flags and banners flutter overhead – the seals and coats of arms of the city’s rooted hereditary nobility; some streets wholly the province of a single house or family, others a patchwork of guildlaw and the individual holdings of disparate aristocrats. Elsewhere, knightly orders reign, vested with authority by Crown and sainted artefacts, and the humdrum of everyday life is occasionally interrupted by the clamour of a party of knights hunting after the ubiquitous streetwitch covens that fester in every which crack and alley left unsupervised. Bone-shrines to the saints dot the urban sprawl, housing the skeletal remains – or scattered parts – of sainted figures, and sometimes forcing a chapel or chapterhouse upon a street right in its middle; diverting traffic elsewhere out of sheer respect for tradition, if nothing else. By the River Dirne, the carved and set banks of the Royal Reserve - with its great docks and warehouses - give way, in the west, to the rickety wharfs and piers of the Dirnean bargees, where those peculiar riverbound nomads come ashore to do business with the land-dwellers; in the east, past thirteen rivergates and locks, it turns into the stonebound Dirnean Canol, which winds its way to the Iliac beyond.

Places of Interest

The Tower of Raven

The seat from which the steward-kings of Daggerfall pass judgement and the geomantic heart of Greater Betony, the Tower of Raven is the physical and mytho-mystical axis of the city around it. A great bastion hewn of dark living rock, the Tower is said to have been ripped whole from the very foundations of the world – by means that must, regrettably, remain a mystery to modern scholars, for too much has been lost since those fabled days. Flanked on all sides by countless lesser palaces and strongholds, it is an overawing reflection of the power of the stewards who rule here - and also, of the strength of the ancient mind that willed it into being. Within reside many of High Rock’s greatest wonders, including the joined twin-thrones of Daggerfall’s kings and queens, and the sprawling Vault of Ledgers: a whole palace of winding halls and corridors unto itself, all filled with historical record, legal documents and stacks of arcane scrolls.

Kynaran Cathedral

Once by tradition divided – as is the way of Breton things – between a number of priestly colleges, cults and benevolences, it was only with the last turn of era that the spires of Daggerfall’s great Kynaran Cathedral were finally united to the guidance of a single religious figure: one of the provisions of Daggerfall’s unbreaking treaty-alliance to the Septim Throne. The Episcoparch Bishops of Kynereth who now walk and preach here have, by and large, been the enlightened sons and daughters of the Imperial Heartland – and their tenure has done nothing to diminish the glories of this elaborate astral-celestial reflection, and much to uplift it. Many of the old cults survive to this day, though joined now in harmony to form the Temple of Kynereth, and each retains the ancient privilege of keeping knights in its service.

Aldsaints Bridge⁴

Largest of the three crownbridges to straddle the River Dirne, the gates of Aldsaints Bridge regulate the flow of water between the Dirne and the Royal Reserve. The bridge itself is a most peculiar place – once shouldering the bulk of merchant traffic between the north and south sides of the city, this duty has since shifted largely to the relatively newer Bridge of Their Heavenly Ladies’ Favour; not least because crossing the Aldsaints⁵ traditionally involves passing first through a royal tollgate, and then navigating the domains of at least three separate knightly orders. As such, it has been surrendered almost in its entirety to the urban sprawl, and is by now all but synonymous with the city quarter that has grown over and about it. Houses, shops and knight-barracks lean precariously out over the river, interrupted only by a remarkable number of saintly bone-shrines from which the bridge takes its name – and which, jutting out from every older crack or corner, allegedly stretch all the way down to its lowest under-arches. The scent of incense lingers constantly in the air, and the holiest of places are all littered with clusters of devotive candles and magelights.