Tinker’s Bench

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Tinker's Bench

The lordship of Tinker's Bench has been held since the raising of the Isle by the Maricel family, and is so named because of the many historically important inventors and thinkers to've been born in the lordship over the years. Geographically, Tinker's Bench occupies the far northeast corner of the Isle and is the smallest of the eight lordships, requiring very little land mass as this is the only region of Draught that produces nothing of agricultural significance. All of the territory of Tinker's Bench is wholly dedicated to the field testing of its many manufactured products be they mechanical or alchemical in nature, and the landscape is well-suited to that purpose, comprised primarily of rough, bitter moorlands inhospitable to all but the toughest of flora and fauna. Crossing the moorlands without an experienced guide is extremely dangerous. Not only does the traveler often find their compass unreliable due to strange fluctuations in the magnetic polarities throughout the region - fallout from past experiments - but the moor houses other perils for the unaware, natural perils like sinkholes and caverns as well as the unfortunate results from innumerable experiments that have left lasting marks on the geography, including a strange multicolored marsh that seems to be little more than a latent chemical bath in which mutated strains of the region's flora have somehow managed to thrive, reputedly incredibly toxic even to approach to a distance.

Tinker's Bench is also home to the Shipyards of Draught, a top-notch facility housed within the protective cliffsides of what was once a man-made stone quarry. There are only a few population centers in Tinker's Bench, primarily situated around what's casually called the Bench Proper, a crescent of populated area that circles the Shipyard and extends just slightly to the northwest in the direction of Pyria and the School of Science (with which Tinker's Bench has quite a lot of dealings for obvious reasons). There are homesteads and research facilities located further out into the moors, but travel to some of them can be difficult and typically these remote locations are used only for the development of more secretive advancements in alchemy and science.

The Geography

Tinker's Bench is a broad stretch of moorland. There are very few trees to be had on its windswept face, the largest and most dominating flora little more than oversized hedges and gorse, smatterings of bramble and heather often pouring up and out of the trough-like trenches and scrag dells of buckled shale that define much of its landscape. A ragged, desolate looking place, it nevertheless manages to preserve a sort of wild beauty that perhaps only its residents can love, the tough wild grasses that carpet its stony earth given to a dizzying variety of colors and textures, from verdant and lush greens to bloody reds and wheat golds. Bereft as it may be of denser or more vertical foliage, the area does put on a very modest bloom in the springtime, small wildflowers taking root in the cool humidity that prefaces the lordship's notoriously stormy summers.

Points of Interest

• There is a series of ruins within Tinker's Bench that dates back to the Isle's early days of infancy, a failed attempt to settle the harsh and unforgiving virgin landscape which the local populace seems to avoid with uncharacteristic superstition. Today it's little more than a huddle of broken buildings, crumbling walls and jagged foundations that are situated at the very lowest gradient in the depression of the land, looking like nothing so much as scattered and empty eggshells within the grassy nest of some great beast. After nearly four centuries of abandonment, the reclamation of nature has not progressed nearly as quickly as one might expect. The ghosts of lanes once trod down to dust by scores of feet are still visible like pale spidering veins beneath a thin scree of the wiry grass that grows in abundance even here, where very little else seems able to take root. There is a rough, leathery lichen that grows in a mottled skin on the tumbles of white blocks that were once the walls of dwellings, and the stones themselves have begun to take on a grey cast that diminishes the natural beauty of what they call the soma - the glowing white heartstone that sleeps within the black and scaly cliffs that make the region in which it's found so treacherous and so unvisited. Tradition dictates that they call this grey soma 'dead stone', and in fact it does seem as though it has in some way lost its life and deadened, the way that the brilliant pearl of a young white tooth will turn gray and murky with age and decay. The wind is sharp and cold here, and it flutes constantly through empty doors and windows, singing low dirges in the hollow bellies of what few structures remain whole. The whole village wails and moans without cease, and if it were not already a lonely place - and it is - then it would certainly be made so by this constant atonal keening.

• The Shipyard of Miller's Isle is a wonder to behold. Combining all of the foremost technologies for the swift assembly of some of the finest ships in the Empire, the Shipyard is a sight not quickly forgotten, the face of it constantly changing as new and better means to manufacture seafaring vessels are developed and implemented by the busy inventors of the region. Draught's coast is often lashed by the ocean, salt spray a constant mist on the land, and so when several of the shoreline stone quarries of Tinker's Bench reached a certain depth and breadth, they formed a naturally convenient place within which to erect the cranes, scaffolding, dry docks and other necessities involved in producing watercraft.

• More Soon (as time allows)!