The City of Shells

In one of the D&D campaigns I’m playing in, we started by building the city that the game would be set in together. The result was The City of Shells (or just “Shells”) – a desert city of religious importance to the Empire but that is controlled by a puppet government installed a few generations ago, and just recently replaced entirely with a new Satrap under Imperial law.

Shells was built up over a number of ruins of previous cities that came before it and was originally built in times of constant warfare and raiders, so many city walls have been built over the ages and then outgrown. Shells is at the largest it has ever been now, with fine outer walls to keep it safe (and even specifically to contain new growth – food is grown in a series of valleys upriver of…