Tower of Ascension

Name: Greenwood
Type: Flying Island City / Leisure City / Airship Port / Former Lumber Town
Region: Moves through The Barony of Varbis and the Well Lands
Original Location: Near Greenwood Forest
Ground-Site Successor: Long Rest
Political Association: Barony-aligned, historically tied to the Line of Varbis
Key Patrons: Team Small, especially Yark and Mephisto
Primary Airship: The Greasy Weiner
Known Defenders: Lady Jessica's City Guard; usually one or more members of Team Small
Known Features: Airship docks, leisure districts, noble district, business district, magic portal, Bank of Mephisto, Glittercurd Exchange
General Character: Controlled chaos, extravagant wealth, strange magic, high security, gambling, trade, tourism, and old Team Small nonsense

From a distance, Greenwood looks like a city that should not exist. A massive shelf of stone and earth hangs in the sky, its exposed lower crust reinforced by unknown mechanisms, arcane braces, glowing tunnels, airship gantries, cargo lifts, dangling lantern towers, and dockworks suspended over open air.

The upper city is a crowded mixture of styles:

• Old lumber-town buildings preserved as expensive historic properties.
• Noble villas and business houses built after the city's rise.
• Bright casinos, theatres, inns, spas, and pleasure houses.
• Airship towers and undercroft mooring platforms.
• Marble promenades, gardens, and artificial terraces.
• Wizardly towers that may not have existed the previous year.
• Market streets where old Barony families sell to tourists, adventurers, and airship crews.
• Deep undercity chambers carved into the floating island's stone belly.

Greenwood's skyline changes more often than most cities' tax laws. New wings, impossible balconies, casino towers, and “temporary” Mephistian structures are common.

A common tourist saying is:

“If it looks unsafe, it is probably expensive. If it looks impossible, it is probably Mephisto's.”

Before it became a flying city, Greenwood was a small lumber town near the Greenwood Forest. Its economy depended on timber, forest labor, simple trade, and the practical rhythms of frontier life.

The town's earliest identity was modest:

• Lumber workers.
• Teamsters.
• Hunters.
• Woodcutters.
• Carpenters.
• Small merchants.
• Foresters.
• Families tied to the Greenwood Forest.

At this stage, Greenwood was not rich, famous, or especially important. It was a local settlement with the bad luck to become the stage for a crisis that drew the attention of Team Small.

Before Team Small's arrival, Greenwood was plagued by violent animal attacks. These attacks were believed to have been prompted by evil druids operating in or around the town and forest.

The attacks created fear, disrupted logging, weakened trade, and threatened the town's survival. Whether all the druids in Greenwood were actually responsible remains uncertain.

Important uncertainty:

Greenwood tradition usually says the druid caused the attacks. More cautious historians note that Team Small acted with little to no evidence. Team small points out that he looked sketchy, and after they “took care of it” the attacks stopped.

When Team Small arrived, the party oversaw the construction of a palisade wall around the town. This gave Greenwood immediate physical protection and helped stabilize the settlement.

Team Small then convinced King Varbis I, then ruler of the Barony, to arrest all druids inside the town. The evidence was thin, but the arrests stopped the animal attacks.

This event remains politically and morally disputed.

Later, Team Small returned. Mephisto and Yark used long-forgotten magic to lift Greenwood from the ground and raise it into the sky.

Why this was done remains unknown to most.

Possible explanations include:

• Yark wanted a flying city.
• Mephisto found a clause in The Contract.
• King Varbis I indulged another bizarre Team Small request.
• Greenwood needed to escape something beneath it.
• The town was collateral in a magical real estate scheme.
• The old druidic threat was underground, not in the forest.
• The raising was a side effect of planar defense magic.
• The whole thing began as an argument over airship docking rights.
• No one remembers because the explanation was stupid.

The crater left behind eventually filled with water and became the lake community of Long Rest.

After Greenwood rose into the sky, a vast crater remained where the town had once stood. Over time, the crater became a lake settlement known as Long Rest.

Long Rest is sometimes treated as Greenwood's shadow, reflection, or abandoned footprint. While Greenwood became wealthy, mobile, and excessive, Long Rest became rooted, watery, and haunted by the memory of what was taken into the sky.

Potential Long Rest hook:

On certain nights, bells can be heard ringing from beneath Long Rest's waters in the same rhythm as Greenwood's current harbor chimes.

After its ascension, Greenwood expanded rapidly in the image of Team Small: chaotic, wealthy, indulgent, and only barely governed by reason.

Massive amounts of coin poured into the city, much of it through the reckless spending of Team Small, especially Mephisto. Inns, casinos, spas, pleasure houses, guild halls, banks, airship services, noble villas, and business districts grew around the original town.

The original inhabitants of Greenwood became wealthy almost by accident. Many families who once owned lumber yards, carts, taverns, or modest homes suddenly found themselves holding prime property in one of the strangest and richest cities in the Barony.

This created the Old Greenwood Families, a local upper class whose wealth often rests on deeds, air rights, docking contracts, or buildings that were simply in the right place when the town rose.

Greenwood is aligned with the Barony of Varbis, but its exact legal status is complicated by several factors:

• It moves.
• It predates its transformation.
• Its ground-site became Long Rest.
• Team Small may hold old rights over parts of the city.
• Mephisto may hold financial or contractual claims.
• The city operates in both Barony and Well Lands airspace.
• The Greasy Weiner may have special dock privileges.
• The original town deeds may not have contemplated vertical relocation.

Most legal disputes are handled pragmatically. Greenwood obeys the Barony when necessary, negotiates with the Well Lands when convenient, and ignores everyone when Team Small is in residence.

Despite its chaotic reputation, Greenwood is relatively safe. The city maintains a well-equipped and well-trained guard force capable of keeping local criminals, dock toughs, gamblers, smugglers, and tavern violence under control.

The Guard benefits from several advantages:

• Wealthy city funding.
• Airship patrol experience.
• Regular exposure to adventurers.
• Defensive infrastructure built into the island.
• Practical training under Lady Jessica.
• The knowledge that Team Small may be nearby.
• Strong incentives to prevent tourists from dying too often.

Greenwood justice is usually fast, theatrical, and designed to keep the city moving.

Lady Jessica is the Captain of the Guard of Greenwood. She took over the role thirty years ago and is now forty-nine years old. She loves her job, the troops under her command, and the city she protects.

She wears full plate and prefers to fight with a relic bow. She has a low platinum-blonde ponytail now streaked with grey.

Lady Jessica is often described as the city's real center of gravity. Team Small may be more powerful, and Mephisto's Bank may be richer, but Lady Jessica is the person most residents trust to keep the streets livable.

Potential hook:

Lady Jessica has kept Greenwood safe for thirty years, but a new threat has learned to exploit the one thing she cannot control: where the city moves next.

Greenwood is known to move with purpose. How it does this remains unknown.

No public authority has explained whether the city is steered, commanded, persuaded, or simply followed after it decides to drift. It is also unknown whether its movement is intentional, contractual, defensive, wild magical, or part of the original forgotten magic used to raise it.

Known facts:

• Greenwood moves around the Barony and Well Lands.
• It does not simply drift at random.
• Its travel can affect trade, diplomacy, and airship routes.
• The city appears able to position itself near areas of interest.
• No one outside a very small circle understands how this is controlled.

Popular theories:

Old Greenwood is the preserved core of the original lumber town. Many buildings here began as simple homes, mills, taverns, storage yards, and workshops.

After the city rose, this district became historically prestigious. Families who owned old properties suddenly found themselves wealthy. Many now maintain a careful balance between rustic authenticity and aggressive rent collection.

Common features:

• Old timber houses with expensive additions.
• Former lumber yards converted into inns.
• Historic taverns with inflated prices.
• Family shrines to ancestors who “went up with the town.”
• Small museums about the animal attacks and the raising.
• Old palisade remnants preserved as civic monuments.

The original palisade wall built under Team Small's direction no longer serves as Greenwood's primary defense, but parts of it remain preserved.

The Palisade Ring is now part historical site, part promenade, and part tourist trap. It marks the boundary between the original town and later expansions.

Potential hook:

A section of the old palisade bleeds sap during thunderstorms, and animals on the city become violent when near it.

The Noble and Business District expanded rapidly after the city rose. It includes villas, counting houses, investment firms, private clubs, merchant halls, high-end inns, embassies, expensive restaurants, legal offices, and arcane consultancies.

Many of the district's oldest families are descended from ordinary Greenwood townsfolk who became wealthy through land ownership after the raising.

Common features:

• Elevated villas.
• Airship-view balconies.
• Private casinos.
• Contract houses.
• Wealthy Barony residences.
• Visiting Well Lands trade offices.
• Noble spas and bathhouses.
• Mephistian real estate offices that may not legally exist.

The Leisure District is the public face of modern Greenwood. It is loud, bright, profitable, and constantly reinventing itself.

Known for:

• Casinos.
• Inns.
• Spas.
• Theaters.
• Music halls.
• Bathhouses.
• Pleasure gardens.
• Restaurants.
• Rooftop drinking terraces.
• Adventurer lounges.
• Legal and semi-legal gambling.
• “Team Small Historical Dining Experiences.”

The Leisure District is also where visitors are most likely to mistake Greenwood's chaos for lawlessness. The Guard watches this area closely.

The Undercroft Docks were added beneath the floating island after Greenwood became a major airship destination. Suspended under the city, they are a maze of gantries, chains, lifts, cargo platforms, lantern towers, drydock bays, customs posts, and private mooring arms.

This is the primary port infrastructure for:

• Airships.
• Cargo skiffs.
• Noble pleasure craft.
• Military couriers.
• The Greasy Weiner.
• Maintenance crews.
• Smugglers who think they are clever.
• Very nervous first-time travelers.

The Undercroft is also where the city's rocky underside meets its most advanced magical and mechanical systems.

Potential hook:

A cargo lift descends from Greenwood with no crew, no cargo, and an entire missing hour recorded in its dock ledger.

The Greasy Weiner, Yark's personal airship and casino airship, uses Greenwood as its primary port of call.

The ship's dock is both famous and infamous. It is part customs zone, part party district, part gambling pier, and part emergency hazard.

Common sayings:

“If the Greasy Weiner is docked, sleep somewhere with insurance.”

“If Yark is aboard, check the sky. If Jericho is aboard, check your spouse.”

At some unknown time, a magical portal was added to Greenwood for unknown reasons. It is modeled as a major civic mystery: a public or semi-public magical threshold whose true origin, destination, and purpose remain unclear.

The Portal House may function as:

• A dungeon entrance.
• A planar pressure valve.
• A failed transportation hub.
• A controlled adventure site.
• A tourist attraction.
• A magical dumping ground.
• A forgotten defense system.
• A direct result of Mephisto's planar mitigation work.

The Portal House is heavily watched by the Guard, Mephisto's agents, and adventurers with poor risk assessment.

Potential hook:

Every time Greenwood changes direction, the portal opens for exactly nine seconds onto a different place.

The Bank of Mephisto is headquartered in Greenwood. It is often described as a chaotic mirror to the Bank of Gurkel.

People who deal with the Bank of Mephisto generally seem to make their money back. How the bank itself profits remains unclear.

The bank loves real estate exchanges, complicated instruments, improbable loans, obscure clauses, and deals that make accountants weep.

Possible services:

• Real estate speculation.
• Air rights.
• Flying collateral.
• Magical mortgages.
• Portal-adjacent insurance.
• “Temporary” bridge loans that last generations.
• Conversion between gold, gems, favors, and improbable assets.
• Investment products named after clauses in The Contract.

Common warning:

“Never sign a Mephistian deed below the third line unless you brought your own wizard.”

The Glittercurd Exchange is a trade building owned by the cheese-mongers of the Glittercurd family or tribe. It manages formal trade deals while also hosting tastings of cheese, wine, spirits, and luxury goods from around the world.

The Exchange is one of Greenwood's most socially acceptable centers of excess.

The Exchange is used for:

• Trade negotiations.
• Merchant banquets.
• Cheese tastings.
• Wine and spirit samplings.
• Diplomatic receptions.
• Noble matchmaking.
• Quiet business between people who pretend they are only there for the cheese.

Potential hook:

A wheel of Glittercurd reserve cheese is stolen from a sealed vault, and the ransom note is written in the same shrinking Elvish script as The Contract.

The Team Small Quarter is not an official district on most maps. It is a loose term for properties, taverns, old houses, vaults, private docks, airship offices, reinforced rooms, and inexplicable structures associated with Team Small.

Some of these holdings are active. Others are sealed, abandoned, rented out, or impossible to enter because Mephisto lost the key and then legally proved the key never existed.

Likely features:

• Yark's old drinking rooms.
• Jericho's guest suites.
• Mephisto's contract archive.
• Veratio Glittercurd's holdings.
• Old Team Small trophy rooms.
• Airship access passages.
• Sealed vaults containing things that were almost eaten.
• Plaques describing events in ways that avoid liability.

Greenwood's economy is built on extravagance, mobility, airship trade, old property ownership, tourism, banking, and the lingering effects of Team Small's spending.

Major economic pillars include:

Greenwood has a reputation for making people rich, ruining them, or doing both in the same week.

Greenwood's culture reflects Team Small's influence: loud, indulgent, practical, unpredictable, and suspicious of anyone who takes themselves too seriously.

The city is chaotic, but not usually cruel. It has a functioning guard, profitable institutions, wealthy residents, and enough legendary defenders to deter most threats.

Common values include:

• Enjoyment.
• Wealth.
• Spectacle.
• Practical safety.
• Personal eccentricity.
• Airship pride.
• Property ownership.
• Tolerance for adventurers.
• Mild distrust of druids.
• Deep distrust of boring people.

Greenwood's original inhabitants became wealthy after the city's rise. This created a strange aristocracy of former lumber families whose old cottages may now be worth more than noble estates.

Old Greenwood families may be proud, defensive, and extremely aware that outsiders see them as accidental aristocrats.

Common old family saying:

“We were here when the ground still was.”

Although Greenwood is wealthy and indulgent, it has not entirely lost its common roots. Many citizens still remember that the city began as a lumber town, and Team Small's own reputation includes a strange but consistent reluctance to harm ordinary people.

This gives Greenwood a rough civic ethic:

• Do not cheat locals too openly.
• Do not endanger the city for private amusement unless you are Team Small.
• Do not start fights the Guard must finish.
• Do not bring hostile druids, angry celestials, or unpaid Mephistian contracts into public spaces.
• Do not threaten the airship docks.
• Do not ask too many questions about how the city flies.

Greenwood is one of the most important places in the legacy of Team Small. It is not merely a city they visited; it is a city reshaped by their intervention, wealth, recklessness, magic, and long-term presence.

Possible public monument:

The city maintains a statue group called The Raisers, showing Team Small in heroic poses. Locals argue constantly over whether the monument is respectful, insulting, inaccurate, or too flattering.

Greenwood's safety rests on three pillars: the City Guard, the city itself, and Team Small.

Lady Jessica's Guard handles ordinary threats:

• Theft.
• Smuggling.
• Dock fights.
• Fraud.
• Tavern violence.
• Gambling disputes.
• Airship safety.
• Noble disturbances.
• Portal House incidents.
• Unauthorized magical experiments.

There is generally always one or more members of Team Small present in Greenwood or nearby. This alone makes the city safer than its chaos would suggest.

Each member of Team Small is powerful enough to defeat threats that would give even large cities pause.

This does not mean the city is safe from Team Small.

Greenwood may also have unknown defensive systems tied to:

• Mephisto's magic.
• Yark's wild magic.
• The Bank of Mephisto.
• The Contract.
• The Portal House.
• The flight mechanisms.
• Airship dock weapons.
• Forgotten magic used in the raising.
• Something buried in the original Greenwood Forest.

Potential hook:

Greenwood's defenses activate against a threat no one can see, and the city begins moving toward the Well Lands at dangerous speed.

Greenwood does not have a single dominant faith. Like much of the Barony, it tends to be practical, commercial, and somewhat secular in its public life.

However, many gods have a presence in the city because Greenwood attracts adventurers, merchants, airship crews, nobles, gamblers, healers, and refugees from across the region.

Likely religious influences include:

Potential religious tension:

Talicite druids petition to return to Greenwood openly, arguing that the old arrests were unjust. Old Greenwood families resist, claiming the city nearly died under druidic influence once before.

Greenwood's law is more organized than outsiders expect.

Common local rules include:

• Do not interfere with airship docking.
• Do not gamble with city infrastructure as collateral.
• Do not duel in the Leisure District without a licensed witness.
• Do not feed unknown creatures near the Portal House.
• Do not claim to be Team Small unless you are ready to be tested.
• Do not ask Lady Jessica whether the city is “really safe.”
• Do not sign anything from the Bank of Mephisto while drunk.
• Do not bring unregistered livestock into the undercroft.
• Do not cut pieces from the old palisade.
• Do not shout “the island is falling” unless it is actually falling.

Unofficial custom:

If Greenwood moves while you are asleep, locals pretend this is normal. Visitors usually do not.

• A forgotten clause in The Contract claims that Greenwood must be moved to a specific location by a specific date.
• Long Rest begins draining, revealing old buildings torn from Greenwood's underside when the city rose.
• The Portal House opens into the original Greenwood town square on the day before the raising.
• Lady Jessica asks the party to investigate Guard officers taking bribes from Mephistian real estate brokers.
• A druidic envoy arrives demanding reparations for the mass arrests that ended the animal attacks.
• The Bank of Mephisto sells the same building to three different owners in three different time periods.
• The Greasy Weiner docks with no Yark aboard and no record of where it has been.
• The Glittercurd Exchange hosts a tasting where every guest signs a trade agreement they cannot remember reading.
• Greenwood changes course toward an active war zone in the Well Lands.
• An airship crashes into the undercroft, carrying cargo from a place the Portal House supposedly leads to.
• The old palisade wall begins attracting spectral animals.
• Someone starts killing members of the Old Greenwood Families in order of where their houses stood before the raising.
• A Team Small monument is vandalized with the names of arrested druids.
• Mephisto's planar mitigation matrix identifies Greenwood itself as a planar violation.
• A child in Long Rest claims the flying city speaks to them through reflections in the lake.

These items are intentionally unresolved for future development.

• Why did Mephisto and Yark raise Greenwood into the sky?
• Was King Varbis I fully aware of what Team Small planned?
• Was Greenwood raised willingly, accidentally, or under contract?
• Who, if anyone, controls Greenwood's movement?
• Is Greenwood legally a Barony city, an independent city, Team Small property, or a moving charter?
• What is the true function of the Portal House?
• What happened to the arrested druids?
• Were the animal attacks truly caused by evil druids?
• Does the Greenwood Forest still react to the city's absence?
• Is Long Rest safe, or is it built over the magical wound left by the raising?
• Does the Bank of Mephisto hold financial claims over the whole city?
• What rights does the Greasy Weiner have in Greenwood's docks?
• Are there secret mechanisms inside the floating island's undercroft?
• Could Greenwood fall?
• If Greenwood can choose where to move, what does it want?

• The Barony of Varbis
• The Well Lands
• Long Rest
• Greenwood Forest
• Team Small
• The Greasy Weiner
• Bank of Mephisto
• Glittercurd Exchange
• The Meat Emporium
• Lady Jessica
• Yark
• Mephisto
• Jericho "Muscles" Johnson
• Veratio Glittercurd
• Erik Bloodreaver
• King Varbis I