New Tyr

New Tyr:

With a population of a mere 600 souls, primarily human, this small squat in the Hive Ward isn't much to command respect among Sigilian terms, but the will and fortitude of its stalwart citizens make it a formidable community in the wild Hive.

The citizens seem to have mostly entered Sigil through a small portal, since closed, that for a time connected their mother city with the City of Doors. At the time, the city of Tyr was dominated by a ruthless dictator, and the portal was a guarded secret among a group of wizards calling themselves the Veiled Alliance and other members of the persecuted underclass. Over several years they smuggled families through the portal, a few at a time, well aware that any sudden exodus would alert the ubiquitous spies of their hated ruler.

Then the door closed, as Sigil's portals do, as suddenly as it had appeared, becoming a portal to the Plane of Fire instead. The 500 or so Tyrians in the City of Doors were stranded, saddened that they were unable to bring any more of their people in, but grateful that they were safe at last. Since then their numbers have risen slightly, mostly through childbirth, but they have also allowed a few outsiders into their closely guarded community, most of them fellow refugees from the Tyrians' native world who had come to Sigil through some vastly more round-about means.

The community of New Tyr is mostly built from mud brick, tediously gathered from ooze portals and baked in kilns. It has five major parts:

1. The Traders' District is a market open to travelers from elsewhere in the Cage; the people of new Tyr provide arcane and clerical services and wares of textile, silk, ceramic, iron, and glass, commonly importing fruit, wood, and rice.

2. The Preservers' District is the oddly-named home of New Tyr's wizards. They're a reclusive, suspicious bunch even in New Tyr, but they're generous to the people of their community, most of whom they smuggled to Sigil originally.

3. The Warrens are the tangled, dusty residential district. Except for the odd building materials used and exotic style, they look much like the rest of the Hive Ward, sharing a similarly crowded, mazelike, haphazard feel. However, there is a pronounced lack of homeless and crippled, as the people of New Tyr care for their own. In the same vein, there are no corpses left on the streets for Collectors to gather, and little in the way of garbage or rats. Finally, the buildings are much newer and lack the decay seen in most of the ward.

4. The Brickyards are a largish area where the locals create their favored building material. The Brickyards surround a few large ooze portals, prominently marked.

5. The Free Gardens are the greatest treasure of New Tyr, a high-walled set of tiered gardens, startlingly lush and green in a way that should be impossible in Sigil, filled with flowers, food crops, and even young trees, and carefully kept cleared of razorvine everywhere except on the walls themselves. When asked how they managed such an oasis in grimy, polluted Sigil, much less the Hive, the New Tyrians smile grimly and say that the City of Doors is a gardener's dream compared to the land they came from.

Although the people of New Tyr are nominally under the control of Sigil's greater government, they keep a Council of Advisors of their own, three citizens representing the wizards, the free citizens, and the craftsfolk respectively (a male human, a male half-dwarf, and a female human). The Council helps organize New Tyr's defense, settle disputes, and handle other things the people need in a government. In the wild Hive, there is little help to be had from The Lady's Ward in any event, but they seem to prefer to do things themselves.

New Tyrians commonly wear turbans or other light headgear along with cotton tunics belted colorfully at the waist. They seem poorly dressed for Sigil's climate, but no one has ever witnessed any of them complain.

There is a rivalry between New Tyr and a group of tall elves from Pelion who dwell elsewhere in the Hive Ward. New Tyr's constabulary recently drove off a group of magic-hungry humanoids called reggelids, who retreated into the Chaos District where the folk there apparently adopted them.

There were no genasi among the New Tyrians when they first came to the Cage, but they had an affinity with the elements even then. Their clerics, who worshipped the elements, found that the elemental spirits dwelling in the City of Doors recognized them somehow, and intermarriages with both Cager elementals and those on the other side of the door to the Plane of Fire, which had once been a door to their homeland, became commonplace. In particular, the tribes of elemental humanoids called ruvoka found common cause with the people of New Tyr.

A clan of halflings from Athas have also somehow ended up in Sigil, though they have not made common cause with the people of New Tyr. They were driven from the Clerk's Ward after spending a short time in the neighborhood called Curly-Foot, and now gangs of feral Athasian halflings roam the Hive, occasionally raiding New Tyr.