Kymal
Small City: Population 29,440 (63% humans, 24% dwarves, 13% other races)
Glitzy. Gilded. Grimy. The city of Kymal stands as the grumbling ghost of a gold-rush boomtown. These days, it’s a haven for gamblers and criminals: a city of gold built atop a mountain of mud.
Over two centuries before, the discovery of rich gold veins within the Ironseat Ridge sent a rush of eager folk to its base. Kymal began life as their base camp, and over the next century it grew into a lively, booming city. Gold and minerals came out of Kymal, and all the pleasures of home followed. Music, theater, sex, food, liquor, drugs, trinkets—if you could want it, you could find it in Kymal. Anything you could spend money on was there, and people spent money like the world was ending. The rich binged anything they could get their hands on to pretend they were important, and poor folk indulged in whatever comfort they could find from their wretched existence in a town where money meant everything.
In time, of course, the veins ran dry. Ten years after Kymal boomed into being, it went bust. The miners packed up and left. Not many of them had struck it rich; in fact, most folk were worse off than they had been before. In the intervening centuries, Kymal has gone through too many cycles of boom and bust to count. New veins of gold or mithral or adamantine have been found in the mountains, and people rush in to claim it. Or a cunning entrepreneur comes up with a scheme to put Kymal on the map—and it works, for a few years, before the con runs its course and people are right back to where they were before.
Most folk here make a modest living in rural villages surrounding Kymal’s city center, or trawling the nearby Foramere Basin for fish, and are trying to build interest as a trade center like Westruun, though without much luck. Kymal’s most recent change of fortune, however, has yet to run dry. Some seventy years ago, an entrepreneur from Ank’Harel named Calis Krishtan opened a small casino called “The Maiden’s Wish.” It started something of a gold rush of its own, one that continues to this day.
The city has grown over the past seventy years, becoming a hub of entertainment and games of chance in Tal’Dorei. So great was Calis’s revival of Kymal that the Tal’Dorei Council appointed his son (and heir to the Maiden’s Wish), Jaktur Krishtan, the Margrave of Kymal.