Harmony City started out as a refugee settlement among several races after a war ravaged several kingdoms. Seeing as how no side was really capable of fighting and their survival increased with cooperation, they all had to work together in order to survive.

During this time, Harmony City managed to set up a democratic system in order to minimize any conflict that would arize from so many cultures being forced to adapt in such close quarters.

The local kingdom of Tigwir eventually got itself together enough to send a noble over to oversee and pass down edicts from the kingdom onto the fledgling city.

Needless to say, this made many people very upset.

After several nonviolent, then violent, then very violent protests, and an almost beheading, Harmony City and the kingdom came to an uneasy truce.

Harmony City would be able to continue to elect leaders as long as the nobility got a persistent seat on the council.

Needless to say, the scars from those days still linger and some grudges aren't easily forgotten.

Unfortunately history is usually told as a series of disasters and Harmony City's story is no exception.

Eventually, things picked up for Harmony. A diverse population with many skilled artisans and craftspeople as well as access to an ocean port caused the economy to flourish.

Perhaps a little too much…

As you may have noticed throughout the story, different people have mentioned a dragon attack in the city, but that was merely the needle that popped the bubble.

The thing that made things such a disaster, even eight years after the dragon attack, was the Northwest Trading Company.

Despite the name, not much trading was done by the Northwest Trading Company.

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If asked, the owner of the company would say they were simply “gathering investment capital before starting the risky business of trading”.

You see, having an investment in a trading company was seen as a smart and worthwhile investment.

Anyone who had invested in a fledgling trading company had done quite well for themselves, so many other people had decided to invest in this new company, including some people with newly acquired wealth.

Banks, of course, were more than happy to facilitate this and allowed people to borrow money using homes, inventory, and their investments in other trading companies as collateral in order to invest in the Northwest Trading Company.

The Northwest Trading Company offered promissory notes with no ledger of ownership, so people did what people do and began using these promissory notes in lieu of actual money.

Speculation ran wild and the trade of the promissory notes artificially inflated the value of the Northwest trading company.

This is when the dragon struck.

He made his way through the city like an unholy combination of a hurricane and a horde of bandits and made off with a large chunk of the city's treasury.

After the fires were put out, but not before the dead were all buried, many people began asking the very important questions of “hey, if the dragon made off with all of my gold, what can I do to recoup my losses?” and “how can I profit off of this tragedy?”

So naturally, people tried to redeem the promissory notes and quickly discovered that the gold simply didn't exist.

As if things weren't bad enough, it also came to light that the banks had recently adopted a system that we would call fractional reserve banking and that large sums of gold only existed on a balance sheet.

And finally, to make matters even worse, the Northwest Trading Company didn't have anything that could be liquidated. No trade contracts, no physical goods ready to be shipped, not even a single sailboat.

Naturally, many people lost their places of business, their homes, and even their stake in other trading companies as money quickly left the poorer districts of Harmony City, creating an area that is now referred to as the slums.

Criminal elements began to crop up including a crime family of goblins called the Skisfink.

Although that was eight years ago and things have recovered quite a bit, the economy of Harmony City still hasn't returned to “pre dragon” levels.

Perhaps a certain casino can inject some much needed money into the veins of the city?