7 Points of Geography for Terrasquestone

1. Shipwreck, Shipwreck, Shipwreck

The castle, the dungeon, the city, and the region are all colloquially known as Terrasquestone.

2. Cantons

The region known as Terrasquestone consists of a number of small cantons, and administrative districts that are based around agricultural organization. While moderately self-sufficient, most of these cantons are organized to produce a surplus of some mundane product and send it to the city. The most common products are wheat (beer, bread, flour) flax (linen, paper, flour) general garden produce, honey, grapes, and livestock. The city has a healthy appetite for beef, pork, chicken, and other protein. Dairy goods are also very popular.

3. Stonerows

The cantons are demarcated by escarpments and stone 'hedgerows'. These are not natural and were created centuries before Terrasquestone was established. Part was to create non-contestible borders for administrative purposes in the Imperial Capital of Palisander, and part was to make the approach to that city more difficult. There are roads, of course, but they are not straight, and the stonerows, along with natural terrain features present what looks like a broad grassy green land. In actuality, functions like a series of logistic impediments. Armies cannot move broadly and quickly, instead being forced into narrow defiles. Towers can see long distances, gates are easily placed between strategic points, and so forth. A force attempting a conventional land invasion is going to spend a good deal of time burning through its resources, and the strength of its soldiers meandering through irregularly shaped cantons, breaching minor strongholds, and finding tunnels and bridges cut in front of them.

4. Water, What Water?

Terrasquestone doesn't have any major rivers, and what bodies of water they do have are stock ponds for ornamental fish and watering livestock. There is not a river through the city, or near the city, and there isn't a lake either. Thus, fish is a luxury, water is a tad bit of a commodity, and anything that comes into the city has to come on a wagon, sled, or carried by some other manner, no barges, no merchant river ships.

But where does their water come from? What about sanitation? Disease?

Terrasquestone could also be known as a city of wells and fountains, so they have water that ... just shows up. As for sanitation, cunning design of the streets, ditches, and erstwhile canals ensure that during rains the streets and sluiced clean, and all the waste water and organic debris is washed into bottomless cisterns, strange grottos, and into the Devouring Deeps around the city and under the major buildings.

The Dungeon feeds

5. Walls, Walls, and Walls

The center is the castle, a great and ragged looking structure, ideally looking like a fusion between the Segada cathedral, Godzilla, and the Red Keep, though most of the stonework is orange. Most of the stonework is made of an iron/clay rich type of marble. This makes the occlusions in the white stone mostly in the orange range. This same iron clay rich mineral base is also present in orange metaquartzite, or sandstone that has undergone geologic stress from sedimentary to metamorphic stone.

The castle is made of the best grade of orange marble, and where there is metalwork, dragonbrass has been used more than all other metals combined.

The inner wall encircles the castle grounds, and the inside is faced in orange marble, but the wall and its core are metaquartzite.

The middle wall encircled the inner city, where the wealthy, the nobles, and the centers of higher non-marital learning. This wall has multiple mini-forts in it, gates, gate towers, and so forth. It is made of orange metaquartzite, and there is little to no orange marble. Dungeon iron is more common than dragonbrass, but the metal is all functional, and almost none is ornamental.

The outer wall encloses the middle city, where the working class mostly live and do almost all of their business. The palazzio model is the most common, a ground floor workshop craftspace with residential space above it. This wall is the newest and large sections of it are lower grade 'rock'.

As the city grows, the layout and planning is ever changing and updating, and most people do not notice it. The walls are maintained, and after a battle the lords might have people start working to repair them, but sometimes and entire section of wall might change its cladding, with metaquartzite turning into orange marble, gates going from iron bound to gleaming dragonbrass.

6. The Oriaste, Car-Carosach, and the Cairrags

The Oriaste is the flat plain that surrounds the city around its southern, and western sides. It is larger than all of the other cantons of the region and has hosted invading armies, mass migrations of refugees, and otherwise been a common green large enough for gods to picnic and go lawn bowling.

Car-Carosach is the composite woodlands/fens/badlands that extend around the northern edge of the city, and is host to the majority of the Devouring Deeps. Most people know to stay out of the Car-Car.

The Cairrags are a series of miniature fortresses scattered in loose rings around the city. They do not provide a continuous defense, but they allow for soldiers, mercenaries, and heroes to have a fastness to harass enemies. The individual Cairrags have 'day jobs' and are not full-time fortresses stocked for a siege. Most are also mills, monasteries, or even roadside taverns. Many of the Cairrags aren't even known as being fortresses to the average resident and certainly not to visitors.

7. The Numinous Road and the Gygaxian Gyre

The Numinous Road and the Gyre do not have a healthy relationship. The Gyre has managed to hammer the road down into one place, leading to one of the major gates of the city, where it brings new people, things, ideas, all that jazz. The road can sometimes be perilous going to the city because, like a snake nailed to a deck, it's trying to break free and cannot. Sometimes caravans end up in a nearby canton, or instead of a bridge, they find a tunnel. This is just accepted as a local quirk and the residents of the region blame it on Puithno Lefn (then spit on the ground).

Puithno Lefn is a butchered mouth sound that basically means 'Fucking Elves' typically referring to the ancient High Elves who named almost everything, broke a bunch of things, created dungeons, monsters, and other sentient races, and then vanished. Colloquially, it can be used in place of Who Knows, I don't know, I don't care, and depending on inflection, either apathy or disgust.