Khaz Duersterkrak

Khaz Duersterkrak, dwarven for the "Dark-Kin Fortress Clan-Fort", is the clanhold capital for Clan Torserdsson of the Clans of Magnus. The small city is storied, and has a highly insular population, mostly of Dwarves (and mostly of its own clan), owing to its depth. The city is therefore strongly associated in dwarven culture with the occult, with divine magic, and with the mysteries of the Dark, the deepest portions of the Deeps. It is an impoverished city, kept afloat only in its trade for lore and proximity to deposits of exotic minerals critical to Runecrafting and other forms of artifice.

The fortress was established after Torserd Magnusson was cursed by Deepburn and founded to be a secure location from which his followers could commune with him and continue to explore the mysteries of divinity, at a site selected because of its proximity to the structures that eventually became the Temple of the Deep, now at the city's heart.

Geography

The roads of the Deeps go everywhere, but in practical matters there is no surface access to Khaz Duersterkrak. The city is essentially a domed sort of structure of circular levels, each smaller than the one below it. At the heart of its deepest level is the Temple of the Deep, a structure which is said to contain at its heart a well that peers into a deep rift below the city, and from there to the Abyss. The city's outer wards are heavily fortified due to the risk of attack from the creatures that live in the Deeps, including aberrations from the dark. Even its safest roads are not easily travelled, requiring heavy guard to traverse.

Economy

Duersterkrak remains barely-sustainable. It has no access to the surface world without great peril, meaning its citizens subsist on a diet rich in the fungi, fish, and other creatures available to them in the Deeps. Entering or leaving the city is perilous in the extreme, but the risk is weighed by many scholars (dwarven or otherwise) who make rare trips along that road under heavy escort, hoping to gain access to the theurges at the Temple of the Deep or read from the Archives of Torserd which are also maintained in the city.

Still others headquarter themselves here while prospecting the areas around it looking for Darkcoal, Adamantium, Mithril, or other rare minerals which are useful in all manners of arcane and divine artifice, trading it to settlements closer to the surface. Cured meats, beers, and other delicacies of surface life are imported under very heavy guard based in part on the economies of trade in these materials, but such goods are rare and considered highly luxurious.

Politics

Duersterkrak is the seat of power for Clan Torserdsson, who are a powerful clan by virtue of their influence on dwarven religious practices as a whole, though perhaps not as much because of the holding of Duersterkrak itself. Because the city is so isolated, even clan business is rarely conducted here. While the King holds court in this city along with other senior members of the Clan, the Thane is almost always from some other settlement in the clandhold, or at least stationed in such a place.