Peek: The Mayor of Pinevale

Ah, this has always been one of my favorite places to camp, probably because we can never stay for long.  No matter how much we reassure the beastkin, a orcish nomad camp in view of one of their towns is something to make them nervous.  If the winter was harsher, they might have reason to be concerned, but it's been mild and the forage and hunting have been very good this year.  I might even get to go down there tomorrow to do some trading!

Which reminds me of another dungeon, though it's much deeper in the Principalities than the town we can see over there.  Let's get this stew going, and I'll tell the tale as it simmers.

Alright.  So, the political situation in the Principalities is always unstable.  The people are rather independent, much like us, but prefer to set down roots, unlike us.  The beastkin common folk do their level best to stay out of politics, and those who would like to seek power have learned the hard way of the power in numbers.  So long as the taxes aren't too onerous and the peace is relatively kept, the common folk are happy to leave the intrigue to the ones who somehow enjoy it.

Which brings us to Pinevale.  It's a very nice forested area, great for logging and fishing.  With how useful lumber is, those in power are always vying with each other to be in charge of the bustling lumber town.  The place is even large enough to have its own sewer dungeon.  As far as dungeons go, it's a fairly standard one.  The only thing even remotely unique about it is that it's a sewer dungeon that doesn't hate having delvers.  It will still happily kill delvers, but it's a pretty standard belligerent and doesn't have the kind of death traps or similar of the more unsavory ones.

Power changed hands, the dungeon grew, power changed hands again, the dungeon continues to grow, until the power changed hands once more.  Not long into the new regime, the dungeon noticed a drop-off in both delvers and in the typical contributions a sewer expects.  So it started sending its frog denizens out to scout the town, to figure out what was happening.

It seemed the dungeon was not the only one dissatisfied with how the new mayor was handling things.  The new mayor was decay affinity, like the dungeon, and decided he could improve the growth of the local trees by processing and spreading fertilizer himself.  He even quietly leaned on the local Adventurer's Guild to discourage delving.  Antidotes and disease cure shipments would often suddenly go missing, which upset not only the adventurers, but the merchants, alchemists, apothecaries, and more.

Now, the dungeon is not especially clever, but it recognized that unhappy delvers are not ones that delve, so it needed to do something.  It made a Voice, a great horned bullfrog, and it started wandering around the town.  Now, that of course got people curious and maybe a bit concerned, but the Voice didn't bother anyone with anything more than its presence, and didn't go breaking into houses or business.  It just quietly listened and watched.

The populace was getting more and more annoyed with the new mayor, and the dungeon heard talk of replacing him themselves, but nobody really wanted to take the job.  Everyone wanted a new mayor, but the few who might like to take his place were laughed at as being easily worse.  Still, the situation for the dungeon was not improving, so it decided to act.

As far as I know, nobody knows how it managed it, but the mayoral guards went to wake the mayor, only to find the bullfrog sitting on his corpse.  It even declared itself mayor!  Despite having guards, the old mayor was no pushover in combat, and had quite a high level, so the guards weren't sure they could just kill the Voice and get an actual mayor, so they went to the Dungeoneer's Guild to try to get some answers.

Of course, no matter how quiet they were about it, news of the old mayor dying and a new one claiming the place quickly got out.  The general reaction was surprise, of course, but then curiosity settled in.  Can the dungeon do that?  Did it expand to claim the town?  Are they all Dwellers now?  Nobody felt any different, so there wasn't a panic, but there were a lot of people wondering what the power vacuum would bring.

The Dungeoneers teamed up with the local magistrate to try to determine what would happen, and both had to come to the same decision: the dungeon can, in fact, do that.  Without expanding to claim the town, taxes would still need to be collected, infrastructure maintained, and order kept, but nothing in the law technically prohibited a Voice from being the mayor!

The townsfolk shrugged and got on with their lives, satisfied that not much would actually change.  If it's a bad mayor, someone will be along to replace it eventually anyway.  But, by all accounts, it's a very good mayor!  The ledgers tend to be a bit grimy, but they're accurate.  The sewers function properly, the woods are harvested easily, and life is smooth.

Last I heard, the townsfolk had actually commissioned a statue of the Voice to sit in the town square.  I'd like to visit some day, if only to be able to hear a large frog explain to me the finer workings of running a city.

-Onthar, Orc Bard Historian