Seawell

X Worldbuilders:

GM James R

James Ryan

About

Seawell

Type	Town
Government	Mayoral
Location	Amusa
Inhabiting Race	Human

• They operate the Seawell Lighthouse which brings ships to their port
• Owns a small militia
• Typically prone to lizardfolk attacks
• Where Zugs and Anema first met
• There is an over abundance of children running in the streets (because of no orphanage)
• Ren Atherton and his family are from here
• Stonebucks was founded here

The Seawell Lighthouse

The lighthouse was built by Tiberius Stone in ancient times. It stands at 100 ft tall and is a beautiful work of black and gray stone, built before the standard red-and-white pattern became common. Some fires have damaged the structure over the years, but the city has repaired and maintained it well for generations, maybe even centuries. The cornerstone marking the year it was built has since faded away, but most scholars believe it was built in the first century PR, presumably as shipping became safer after Tiamat was banished.

Surnames were far from universal in the area at that time, but Tiberius Stone was one of the first prominent stone masons in the region, so he received the moniker "Stone" for his skill with the material. His wife Corrina Lonato was a shipwright and sailor who set out to trade with other regions in the decades of relative peace following the long war. In those times, Seawell's main exports were stone from their local quarries, as well as staple foods like wheat and barley, so those made up most of the ship's cargo. To ensure a safe return for her, Tiberius built a lighthouse himself, working all day every day for a year, which was just enough time for Corrina to return safely from her voyage with oranges, spices, and preserved meats new to the area.

With the funds raised from a successful voyage, Tiberius and Cornelia were able to hire and train more workers to built docks and develop a harbor, making Seawell a modest but thriving port city, one of the first in its region.

Over the following centuries, Seawell's lighthouse has guided thousands of voyages to its shores, including a few ships that unfortunately crashed over the years due to rough weather. In the rare event of a shipwreck, the city would welcome the stranded sailors for as long as they needed to stay and repair their ship. Many decided to stay permanently, bringing their cultures from distant lands.

Notable Families

There is stark economic inequality in Seawell. Save for the Atherton family and a few employees at the forge and the community college, nearly everyone is either a noble or barely making ends meet, especially as real estate has become more valuable around town in the last decade. Many children are orphans, and there is no formal orphanage, so orphans hope to be adopted by some family they happen to meet, or otherwise need to survive on their own.

House Lonato

While Seawell has a mayor and is technically democratic, Baron Benjamin Lonato is the feudal lord of the small port city and its surrounding farms and villages. Unlike most lords however, he does not impose a large quota on the famers in his lands, and is generally seen as kind, at least as nobles go. Unfortunately though, even with his wealth, he has not had an easy life. His wife passed away in a great plague 10 years ago, and five years ago, his biological son Cristophe was executed for his alleged role in an assassination plot against the archbishop of a corrupt regional church.

During the plague 10 years ago, soon after the passing of his wife Trisha, an orphan broke into his manor. While still grieving, the baron caught him. The boy's name was Andrew, and instead of turning him over to the city guard, he decided to adopt him and raise him as his own son as a younger brother to Cristophe.

Because of the pain of losing his son, Lord Lonato extended the ban on the death penalty in Seawell, much to the annoyance of certain other nobles.

House Lonato has had much grief over the centuries. Near the founding of the city, a powerful mage named Claudia Lonato lost her son to spiders when he ventured into the Spider Swamps for wood to repair a ship. Grieved, Claudia learned to control the weather in the three miles around the city, clearing much of the swamp for its current farmland. The city's residents were unanimously grateful, making her family the feudal lords.

The Bluth Family

Splitting from House Lonato a few generations ago, the Bluth family had some money to invest into various business ventures, especially construction and real estate. Through various shady deals with the mayors, some comedic timing, and extreme luck, the Bluths happened to acquire about a third of the land in the Seawell region by the start of the Wicked Wilds campaign. Rent has increased dramatically over the last few decades, leading to poverty and many orphans. However, they have recently begun falling from grace as David Bluth, longtime head of the family company, was embroiled in scandal for making deals with cruel nobles in enemy regions against the mayor's approval.

David has been held in the local jail since the scandal broke last year, and officially control has been passed down to his children: Mark, Bob, and Suzie. However, Suzie has left the family to forge her own identity, and Bob (Billiam Omar Bluth) is irresponsible, so it has fallen on Mark to try to hold the company and family together. However, while the well-meaning Mark is theoretically in charge of the company's finances now, his mother Lucretia is actually still in charge from the shadows.

Although she has no noble title, Lucretia Bluth - David's wife and Mark's mother - is 70 years old at the start of Wicked Wilds. She is a powerful socialite in the city and surrounding region, with only the mayor and Baron Benjamin having comparable power. At the start of her career, she successfully lobbied against the construction of an orphanage to keep local property values higher, and she has generally kept this news from getting out for over 50 years now. In her supposed retirement since David's arrest, she has put Mark in charge of the company in name, while hiding any actual financial documents from him.

They are controversial in town for helping to clear some land in the Spider Swamps for new housing, but they also destroyed various beloved trees and rerouted some streams in the process. This flooded some neighborhoods permanently, forcing some people to buy new houses from developers like the Bluths themselves. Lucretia and David know this; nobody else in the family knows that this was their plan.

After feeling pressured when the Lonatos adopted an orphan, the Bluths adopted an orphan too, mostly to look like they care, which only some of the family seem to.

The Bluth family also founded the holiday Cinco de Cuatro.

House Stone

Tiberius Stone married Corrina Lonato, a daughter of the local baron of the time, before the city's founding. The two of them founded the city by building the lighthouse and raising money through successful voyages and trades.

For the first few centuries as the city was growing, House Stone was generally kind to the citizens, opening orphanages as needed. Eventually they closed the orphanages in the mid 500s when there had been no orphans for a generation, a condition largely attributed to their investment in healthcare and education of the people.

However, more recent generations have forgotten their humble beginnings as stone masons and sailors. After inheriting wealth gathered from hundreds of years' worth of port fees, many members of the family began spending lavishly on themselves instead of on the people. Still, small business owners were happy to see luxurious spending as long as went to their businesses, so most did all they could to win the favor of the Stone family. This led to changes in economic policy within the city in the early 700s.

The city would impose lower taxes on ships using the port, as well as on local businesses, with the idea that this would encourage more ships to go here instead of elsewhere, and to keep businesses happy. This was popular at first, but soon the city ran low on funds for their schools and hospitals. Before, the city would hire bards, wizards, and artificers to teach their skills to the children, as well as clerics and paladins who could heal the sick. Instead, the Stone family kept a larger cut of the smaller port fee for themselves, returning less to the community.

A drought struck the land over the following years, and the city no longer had any savings since the ruling family had squandered it. For the first time in generations, a non-Stone mayor was elected. Tiana Bluth, a shipwrecked sailor who decided to stay in town and who married a second son of the Lonato family, brought new ideas to revitalize the city - namely, return to governing and funding infrastructure and services for the people. This was so popular that the next generation of House Stone decided to keep these policies, skimming only a little for themselves.

The next few generations of House Stone kept some city services but refused to open orphanages, claiming they were unnecessary. They made sure to be less obviously lavish in their spending, claiming that "old money" that they represent is of higher status than "new money" that the Bluths represent.

Recently winning election to a sixth term, Matthias Stone has been Mayor of Seawell for over twenty years. While Seawell is officially democratic, eight of the last ten mayors have been part of House Stone, as they own and operate the Port of Seawell. Like the last few Stone mayors, Matthias has changed little, but kept a positive enough image to not be defeated like some of his ancestors. While there have been rumors that he is actually corrupt, news of this has generally been suppressed as he is popular in town, especially with those with influence and the port workers, one of the rare groups who actually get a decent wage.

Stonebucks Cafe

Matthias Stone also founded Stonebucks Cafe about 30 years ago, when coffee was successfully harvested in the Spider Swamps. It quickly caught on with the nobility, and with tired workers alike, opening several locations in the relatively small city. A few locations even exist in Galik by the time Ren joined the Tempest Brothers. Matthias used his profits to fund his campaign for mayor and cover up any political scandals.

Occasionally new types of coffee beans arrive in the city as different ships are stuck there.

Though the coffee is delicious, rumors swirl about the labor conditions therein.

During the intermission in The Wicked Wilds after defeating Mother, the Tempest Brothers found that their boss, Matthias Stone, had been holding rivals' workers hostage and stealing their coffee groves.

The Atherton Family

The Stone, Lonato, and Bluth families are all quite wealthy. Most others in town are barely getting by. The Athertons are one of the few families somewhere in the middle. Chadicus Atherton and Maria Allen arrived in town as many have over the centuries, via a shipwreck, though these have become less common as shipbuilding has improved over the centuries. While most people in Seawell are humans, Chadicus is a dragonborn, and Maria is a changeling, though she will usually appear as a human or elf, as her hometown distrusted changelings. Chadicus, like Tiberius Stone hundreds of years before him, arrived to this city with substantial skills as a carpenter and tradesman, even forging the occasional weapon or tool. Maria brought a countless array of songs that were new to the people of Seawell. Between his earnings as a tradesman and hers as a popular musician, the Athertons make a decent income and are able to help others financially as needed. This has stoked tension with some members of the Stone family for making them look bad, but all three wealthy families in town try to keep things cordial and not get into fights, so they try to keep such comments to themselves.

Chadicus and Maria have three children: Ren, Dale, and Lucy.

Local Holidays: Cinco de Orbraze and Cinco de Cuatro

The exact year the construction of the Lighthouse was completed is uncertain, but everyone in Seawell agrees it was completed on the 5th day of Orbraze, the fifth month of the year on the Quelmar Calendar. The city has a festival every year on that date to celebrate the success of the city - with the completion of the Lighthouse, Seawell was no longer a remote sandbar for marooned sailors, but a stable city in its own right. In an ancient dialect of Draconic, which many of the first marooned sailors in the city spoke, Cinco was the word for "five," so this holiday took the name, even though most residents primarily speak in Common now, or at least more modern dialects of Draconic.

Cinco de Orbraze had festive celebrations with colorful costumes, flavorful food from each culture that had arrived to Seawell over the centuries, and a variety of beverages. The city square would be decorated with bright colorful lights in honor of the Lighthouse that had brought the city fortune. Basically everyone enjoyed it and looked forward to it all year. Though there were exceptions:

Recently, the Bluth family wanted to develop more land, but the once-mostly empty farmland surrounding downtown was getting more and more crowded, and there were no powerful mages to clear wide swaths of swampland anymore as Claudia Lonato had in ancient times. Lucretia Bluth turned her sights on the Town Square itself for future luxury apartments. To clear people off of the square, she would need to reduce the people's excitement for Cinco de Orbraze. Thirty years prior to the start of The Wicked Wilds, Lucretia held the first annual Cinco de Cuatro event, the day before Cinco de Orbraze, in an attempt to buy all the food and decorations so there wouldn't be any left for the traditional holiday.

This backfired spectacularly however, as people then had two days to celebrate! Mages from the community college were able to craft more decorations, and a fleet of ships carrying food happened to crash ashore that day, bringing so much food it couldn't possibly be eaten in one day.

And how many ships were in that fleet on the fourth day of the month? Four, and the main vessel was coincidentally named The Cuatro. Thus, Cinco de Cuatro, sometimes called Sinko de Cuatro, was born, commemorating when hundreds more sailors arrived in town, carrying a wonderful feast for all to enjoy.

Seawell Community College

• Offers courses in shipping, agriculture, smithing, music, and magic
• Maria Allen, Ren's mother, teaches music there
• The college is small, but gather students from a few dozen miles around, as well as the occasional shipwrecked sailor deciding to take a course there in the meantime
• Many students work part-time at Stonebucks.

Behind the Screen

• Seawell and the neighboring Spider Swamps originate from the WotC Module Wreck Ashore