A Catch-Up Guide For My Useless Junior Reporters
by
Robert A. Pratt
Chief Editor of the Port Vermil Gazette
[First things first. We use the Magisterium’s official style guide for all reports and referencing sources. I don’t want to hear some sob story about how “the Trent school makes more sense for editorial publication”. I know the arguments and I’ve heard them all before from people more far compelling than you. Learn the style guide, use it, and shut up.]
The Imperial Royal Family
Ulithien Carimet Mindaris III is high emperor of the Radiant Dynasty. He’s reclusive as far as direct political influence goes, rarely sticking his nose into the business of other Alfir noble families, let alone their lower client families. However, don’t mistake his aloofness with ignorance. The Emperor is a shrewd politician with a deft hand for manoeuvring the pieces on his board. When you’re watched the game for as long as I have you start to see a pattern emerging. Perhaps if all of you can get your heads out of your own arses long enough to uncross your eyes, you might start to comprehend it as well.
The Crown Princess, Elmira Vesta Mindaris, is perhaps the most pursued and surveilled woman in the empire. Every family with even the slightest grain of ambition has been sending their male heirs to try and catch her eye, with no luck so far, and she’s followed by a retinue of handpicked and loyal elite bodyguards who have fended off at least one assassination attempt and helped to keep any scandals she’s been involved in well and truly covered up.
A decade back there were some suggestions that it was the Emperor himself who sent the assassins for his daughter. I need to make a clear statement here. Such allegations are treasonous and completely disproven… I hope I don’t need to explain myself any further on that point. The Crown Princess is politically progressive and favours a return to social development and infrastructure, over militarisation and an aggressive foreign policy with Garrel and Saltcrust. This makes her popular with the young and educated, and very unpopular with the rest of the high nobility who have financial investments in maintaining the status quo, even to the detriment of the empire as a whole. She reportedly annoys her father on a daily basis, but considering that the Emperor could live for another hundred years, she’s not likely to inherit and change things around here any time soon.
The Emperor has three younger sons, barely into their Alfir adolescence. Markil, Aramir, and Lorien. He favours the youngest, Lorien, and dotes on him over the others, which frequently leads to family spats. The princes’ misdeeds are fair game for reporting as long as you don’t go too far. Keep it speculative. Keep it light.
And take note my little Juniors; If it wasn’t already completely evident, I advise you not to get on the wrong side of the Royal Family. If you fuck up and piss off a prince, or, sullied truth, the Emperor himself, you’ll be shipped off to a correspondent posting in coldest and most monster infested corner of the Unbound Mountains before you can say “journalistic integrity”. And trust me, it’ll be in your best interest to go. I don’t want to have to find any of your bodies in an alleyway down by the docks. I’m being very serious. Don’t piss off the wrong people. If you have any doubts or reservations about any leads you've turned up, come and run them past me or one of the senior reporters, they’ve had their own close calls and they know how to navigate this viper’s nest of a nation without getting themselves bitten. You could all stand to learn a thing or two from them.
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Some Families Of Recent Note In The Heartland
The Illisar Family
The Illisar Family has recently lifted themselves out of a long period of strife. Their family’s Sunblade was lost during the Forgotten War, which seriously damaged their prestige and social standing in Vostrel. After several failed attempts to recover the weapon, including one which recently claimed the life of their Patriarch Malvaris Illisar who perished crossing the Ashram Desert, the heir to the family, Corundum Illisar, was able to finally locate the Illisar Sunblade in the jungles south of the Ashram Desert and restore the honour of the family.
The Emperor, in recognition of his achievements and admirable military and duelling record , promoted young Corundum to Captain of the Bleakfort northern garrison. The Emperor also supposedly supports the notion of a match between Corundum and the Crown Princess, which has annoyed several of the major heartland families.
[You’d know all about this already if any of you all just bloody listened for once!]
The Delles Family
The Delles family, led by Haldor Delles, is a financial giant in the Radiant Dynasty. They own over half of the vineyards in the Heartland surrounding the Wine Sea, and it has made them wildly wealthy, with immense influence over the economic state of the empire rivalled only by the Royal Family itself, and the reclusive Mountebanks of Trent. There have been suggestions that the Delles are deliberately destabilising the economy and working against the interests of the Emperor, to bankrupt the Royal Family in a bid to seize control at some point in the future. This is downplayed in public. Haldor and the Emperor regularly meet to play chess and make a show of being firm friends.
Haldor Delles has the unfortunate habit of infidelity, which is *politely* not mentioned in high society, but widely known about. He has sired nearly two dozen bastard children throughout the Dynasty, and likes to play them off against each other as disposable pawns who fight for his affections and the chance to one day be named legitimate. Who knows if that will ever happen. The proprietor of the Lost Love Lodge in Loverlock, Luvellia Presemis, is rumoured to be one such child who has done very well for herself. As bastards, these children are not protected by the family, and scandals related to them always make juicy tidbits for our articles.
Beyond that, I advise you not to make yourself an enemy of the Delles family. They have a reputation for holding grudges. One of the family’s cousins who schemed against their business dealings ended up getting himself excommunicated from the family and banished to the frontier town of Utred’s Rest, where his son, Baron Llewn Tvoorst, now administrates, still bearing the weight of the Delles scorn for his father’s misdeeds.
The Sable Family
Some of you will probably know this as it has been prominent news in recent years. The Sable family, as most of you have probably heard has suffered a string of embarrassing failures that have nearly bankrupted them, and in just a few years they’ve gone from being one of the most influential families in Vostrel, to cast offs who are likely to have to sell their Heartland villas and move to the Outerlands within the next five years. Their patriarch and his wife, Garret & Louisa Sable, made a string of poor business deals, some of which went afoul entirely out of their control. They heavily invested in horse ranching out on the Luddish Grasslands, sinking most of their money into Albrick, and Longdune, only to have their prime stock of horses butchered by raids from monster packs that went unculled by the Radiant Dynasty for too many years. The Sables had been banking on fulfilling a huge contract with the Emperor to provide warhorses for his armies. Their failure to meet the contract nearly bankrupted them by putting them in debt with the Emperor, ruining their reputation, and shutting them out of future business deals.
The Dynasty military has to be held partially responsible for this *do not repeat this to anyone* because if they sent armies to cull the monster population as they are supposed to every few years, the packs wouldn’t have grown out of control and become the plague that is decimating Outerland agriculture and horse breeding. What’s more, those horses never arrived, which means the Emperor’s armies are facing a chronic shortage, weakening them further.
But perhaps the saddest part is what happened to the two daughters, Telissa and Darrowfig. After the warhorse contract disaster, the Sable family planned a match between their eldest daughter Telissa Sable, and Kiran Jacszil, the heir to the Jacszil shipping fortune. It was a match that would have joined the two families in perpetuity, and saved the fortunes of the Sable’s two daughters, at the cost of their parents’ pride, which I hear was a cost they were more than willing to pay for their children. Unfortunately, Darrowfig Sable, the younger daughter, ruined the whole thing. Apparently she didn’t much like being a noble lady, and she’d been training fencing and archery with her family’s Rossak stablemaster in secret. She cut her hair short and disguised herself as a young country nobleman to enter the Emperor’s duelling tournament, hoping to win the considerable prize pot and coveted Hummingbird Rapier for her family. She also stole from her family coffers and bet on herself to win the matches, building up an ever-increasing pot of winnings with every match she won. She was, admittedly, a talented fencer, and everything went well until she went up against Corundum Illisar in the semi-final bout. Illisar was the superior warrior by far, and he beat her in embarrassing and dramatic fashion, inadvertently destroying her disguise and revealing her as Darrowfig Sable in front of the entire royal court. Not only was this a terrible embarrassment for the Sable family, but by losing, Darrowfig also lost all of the winnings she had bet on the match, worsening her family’s financial situation as they were forced to bail her out of her now immense debts. The cherry on the cake was that the Jacszil family broke off Kiran and Telissa’s engagement to avoid association with the Sable family following the incident. It turns out Darrowfig hadn’t known about the deal and had inadvertently ruined it. Her family disowned her and told her to leave Vostrel. As we all know she’s now a travelling adventurer and duellist of some renown in the Outerlands, living from contract to contract and forbidden from returning home. Such a shame. But very good for us! Our articles digging into the scandal were the talk of the town for weeks and our sales were certainly far healthier than the Sable family’s finances. Let me use this as an opportunity to remind you all that gambling is a terrible idea.
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The Mountebank Family
The Mountebank Family rules the city of Trent on the east coast of the Wine Sea. They scoop off the top of the horse racing that happens there and have their fingers in the pies of every business in the city. They own or are major shareholders in practically everything. For all that, nobody knows who they are!
For the sake of Truth itself, if any of you can dig up anything at all on the Mountebanks, send it to me directly and pat yourselves on the back for the massive raise and promotion you’ll have coming your way. Since records began after the Forgotten War, I haven’t found a single instance of any of them being seen in public, and their compound in Trent is locked up so tight that nobody has been able to get an agent in to even get a glimpse at the family itself. They only seem to interact with the world through lawyers, accountants, and an army of very efficient middlemen who act as the faces of the family in all of their dealings. They pay their taxes to the Emperor and run a very successful and efficient city. But to be honest, the whole thing creeps me out. Being private is one thing, but nobody keeps up a level of secrecy like that unless whatever they’re hiding is awful.
The Barbitus Family
The Barbitus Family made their name building infrastructure for the Radiant Dynasty. They built the wonderful roads of the Heartland and charged merchants to use them. Their current heir is Baron Falenar Barbitus, who presides over the settlements of Loverlock and Fellow along the southern border of the Berabrick Forest. He has caused some embarrassment to the family recently by falling deeply in love with Luvellia Presimiss, the proprietor of the Lost Love Lodge, the famous casino and resort hotel in Loverlock. Whether this affection is returned is doubtful, but that hasn’t stopped Falenar from making daily forays to the square outside The Lodge to serenade Luvellia in front of the whole town, which he has been doing without skipping a day for several months now, to apparently no avail. I would say that Luvellia has him wrapped around her finger. Which is dangerous considering how much the Barbitus family fortunes rest upon the infatuated man’s actions. His father, Arkitep Barbitus, has apparently sent multiple letters to his son demanding that he stop the ridiculous behaviour, which have all seemingly gone unheeded.
[Let me give a shout out to junior journalist Norm Elting for the fantastic idea to publish excerpts from Falenar’s lyrics into a daily humour column. I recently saw a whole wagonload of travellers holding up copies of the Gazette and chuckling along as someone at the head of the wagon sang the lyrics out loud. You can be sure that I felt a great swell of pride at the sophisticated wit of my Port Vermil brethren. Well done Norm. Anything to get papers in hands, people!]
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The Lovers’ Festival
Let me remind you that the Lovers’ Festival is fast approaching.
Every year we are blessed in print journalism to see the noble objects of our attention all flock to a single resort town where they consume large amounts of alcohol and make fools of themselves in public.
The the watchword is this, document everything. Every detail, every slip of the tongue. You do not necessarily know what is going to be the nugget of gossip that will blow open an entire juicy scandal for us to feast upon for months to come.
Also, I've heard some worrying reports about some of my reporters getting rather too liberal with their narcotic use during the Festival over the past few years. We all need space to cut loose every once in a while, and I respect that. I myself may consume a few too many tipples of rum at my desk on a late shift to start pointing fingers. Still, I must express that I'm fed up of having to explain to the organisers why it keeps being my journalists who have to get fished out of Lake Allura when they lose all sense of ego and decide to try being aquatic for a change. Please remember that you are there to do a job, not to go on a two week bender financed by the Port Vermil Gazette's admittedly meagre Per Deim. I'm looking at you Mr Weeks. Keep it under control.
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And finally a note about our oft abroad friend Mr Dorian Darling.
This is a peculiar subject, and I'm not sure quite how best to broach it, but it essentially amounts to a word of caution.
While Mr Darling's articles have struck with a certain readership and they bring in a good about of sales, a matter about which I am loath to complain, I feel it is my duty to warn some of our newer staff members that the man is insane; clinically and certifiably insane. I say this as someone with a great deal of experience, and who has met Mr Darling on several occasions.
Do not ever travel with him, under any circumstances! I cannot stress this point enough! Every reporter who has ever tried to "adventure" alongside Mr Darling has met a horrifyingly gristly end, in circumstances which after a certain number of terrible coincidences begin to look downright suspicious.
Perhaps I should give some more context and history to illuminate this further.
We never hired Mr Darling as a journalist. That's the first hing I need to make clear. The man just started mailing random travelogues into the in-trays of various office members of the Gazette nearly fifteen years ago, completely unsolicited. We didn't publish them at first. They were hardly ready for the eyes of the public, let me tell you. Every page was riddled with spelling errors and basic grammatical flaws, and his prose was possessed of an incessant tendency to go off on long winded philosophical or introspective tangents.
[As you may point out, we only ever fixed the first two issues, and his readership has come to somewhat enjoy the erratic tangents, though I can scarcely understand why.]
In a bout of uncharacteristic goodwill, one of our editors at the time wrote back with some friendly advice, making recommendations about how Mr Darling could improve his articles, and where he might find agency representation for his writing. Mr Darling responded quite gratefully, and only a month later had secured representation with Eddie Longs, an agent my old Chief Editor once described as "Little better than a gutter crook".
The articles started flowing in with even greater enthusiasm and frequency, and they got better, never fantastic mind you, but better. People liked their larger than life quality, and Mr Darling certainly has a kind of eccentric energy that comes across in his writing. Not my cup of tea, but I can see why some people keep up with it.
We all thought he was having a laugh at first, probably writing from some cushy desk in an office somewhere. The stories just couldn't be true. So out of interest we sent, Lawrence Soaper, one of our interns out to "travel" with him for a few weeks.
Lawrence Soaper never returned to Port Vermil. In his place we got the article, The Thrilling Tale of Dorian Darling in the Land of Giants, along with Mr Darling's heartfelt condolences at the tragic death of Mr Soaper.
When we reviewed the article, we found it contained a scene where Lawrence and Dorian were captured by an ice dragon who decided that Mr Soaper's spine was the perfect size to be used as a toothpick. He dissected and ate Mr Soaper while Mr Darling was apparently helpless to resist or intervene. Dorian then apparently performed a half remembered Rattlestaff musical, I believe it was A Palace Affair, for the ice dragon in an attempt to stave off his own death by being a source of evening entertainment. He performed the musical single handedly, playing every part and singing every song without any musical accompaniment. According to his account, and against all the odds, the dragon was so impressed by the performance that it let Dorian go without harming him.
Here at the Gazette, we could hardly believe what we were reading and we arranged a meeting with Mr Darling to confirm his account, which he did, claiming it was pure fact, as were all of his articles. There was a full investigation by a private detective who determined that the broad events of the story had probably more or less happened, based on the recovered remains of Lawrence Soaper's discarded spine and the testimony of several Voros from the northern tribes, who escorted Lawrence and Dorian into the Land of Giants prior to the ice dragon attack, and then found Dorian half frozen and alone in the snow a week later and nursed him back to health.
That was ten years ago. In the time since, four more reporters who attempted to follow and catalogue Mr Darling's strange adventures have all ended up dead or missing, and all as a part of his articles. You can read Mr Darling's accounts of their last moments, should you wish to. It's a sobering experience for any journalist.
The articles keep coming. We keep sending checks, and the readership don't seem to mind that what they're reading are stories containing frankly ridiculous strings of coincidence and happenstance where everyone except for Dorian Darling himself always meets untimely ends, while the writer emerges from every near death situation with barely a scrape on him.
I don't know whether to believe the contents of his articles myself, but I've spoken to Dorian many times over the years, and I truly believe he is a madman. Whether he's making everything up, or really does live the kind of insane life he claims, I never like to spend too long in his company. I recommend you don't either, no matter how charming or friendly he may appear on the surface. There is something very wrong with that man and his adventures. The only reason I keep publishing them, is because I know he'd keep sending the article to us regardless, and they do bring in the readership.
So, please take my warning to heart, and stay away from Dorian Darling.