Aristonia

Aristonia is the capital of the Three Marches, on the eastern part of the western continent. It is a large, metropolitan city — a bustling melting pot where people of many kinds live side by side, elves and humans among them.

It is a place where the returning magic is a subject of everyday talk: one might overhear elves speaking of the world's awakening in the streets, though the deeper intricacies of the arcane are not common conversation.

Order in the city is kept by the Kingsguard.

Districts

Aristonia is a city of distinct quarters:

• The Civic Quarter — its administrative heart. A public square of white marble buildings, porticos, and ivory-veneered columns surrounds a fountain ringed with statues of lords and heroes long since dead. The offices here handle the city's records and civic business.
• Little Pandemonium — a poor, crowded neighborhood of dilapidated timber houses and crumbling limestone, packed together near the old east wall. It is home to a large tiefling population, and a faint scent of sulfur hangs over its narrow, twisting lanes. It is not a place to wander alone after dark.
• The Canal District — a run-down quarter to the south, built around canal trade and lived in mostly by humans and dockworkers. The air here smells of shellfish and wet, rotting wood.
• The Entertainment District — home to clubs and venues catering to the city's wealthier residents.
• The Guild District — a quarter of smithies and craft trades, its workshops shuttered by night.

The Machines Beneath the City

Old machinery lies buried beneath the eastern neighborhoods near the canal district, and of late some of it has been heard humming. Beneath Little Pandemonium, a sealed underground chamber was found to be a construction site of a former age: a dusty workbench scrawled with unreadable runes, tread-driven constructs resting in mechanical cradles, and geometric sigils inscribed around those cradles that drew arcane power into the machines, charging them like resting animals. The constructs there — boxy automata built to clear stone and debris — reactivated and turned violent, tearing through the walls before they were destroyed. A single round object appeared to have been taken from the workbench not long before they woke.