Littleview

You start in a small walled city (really, a small town by our modern standards) called Littleview, at the edge of a tall cliff, above a deep and wide valley. The town has a ring of fields around it, and then empty scrub, and finally the edge of the forest. Littleview is a cosmopolitan town, populated by a mix of races, though dominated by hill dwarves and humans. The local economy is dominated by trade, for Littleview sits above a steep Path down the cliff, which leads to dwarven halls accessed through the cliff face. It is the only local source of fine metal goods, and Littleview is literally built on the start of the Path, so controls access and charges hefty tolls for access.

Two other, heavily used and maintained, Paths run along the top of the valley wall, one each way, which lead to local communities, and fan out further. This makes Littleview if not a heavily traveled hub, at least more heavily visited than any of its immediate neighbors. Strangers come through often and trade, or pay the toll to climb down the Dwarven Path.

The shallow parts of the forest are used for hunting, lumber, and firewood enough that they are not really wilderness, but things wander in from the wilderness often enough that most folk choose to sleep inside the city walls at night. The King, Rahm Littleview, maintains careful order and regular patrols into the forest to ensure nothing too horrible festers and that the dead are kept at rest.

Recently, intermittent bands of refugees have come through Littleview, down the Path from Millhouse along the valley wall, to the north. Some are sponsored for citizenship, if they have particularly needed skills, but most are encouraged to keep going, as the small farms around Littleview are not particularly fertile, and it is dangerous to expand them into the scrub. They continue south, towards Kingdom of Fallwash, a collection of several cities under united rule, where the valley opens into moorland down the southern Path. They carry tales of horrible battles, with too few left afterwards to burn the dead, leaving destruction and chaos in their wake after. But they say they have traveled a long way, a dozen or more Paths to arrive here, and the troubles are far away in places the folk of Littleview have barely heard of.

On a clear day, those with good eyes can see the roofline of a city on the far edge of the valley, many miles away. Sometimes, at night, there are sparks of light there as well – bonfires maybe? No one has ever figured out how to get there, as far as anyone knows! Travelers native to Littleview often take drawings of the roofline when setting out, in case they ever reach a city which matches it. What fame would come from answering questions about this place!