Oxbow  Oxbow is a village of twelve-hundred people in the foothills of the Alsatian Mountain Range on the eastern coast of Fiana Province in the Kingdom of Penamharik . Oxbow takes its name from the Oxbow River that runs south from the snow-capped mountains. There is a single uncovered stone bridge that connects Oxbow to not just their half-mile of cleared, tilled fields, but the market town of Clearbrook seven miles southwest. Weather Just off the coast, the Penamhrikan continental shelf falls off to the deepest parts of the Southern Ocean , which causes that chilly deep water to circulate up, creating freezing fog.   The Clero Current runs up the coast from the southern polar region at a frosty thirty-four degrees. The entire barony’s weather is slave to these two chilling conditions.   Summers are short and mild. Winters are long and snowy. Life in Oxbow Vegetables and cereal grains are scarce due to the short growing season. The town thus relies on the crude harbor they’ve carved from the cliff that leads to the Southern Ocean, and the brave men who steam out into the ocean to fish.   The frigid waters of the Oxbow River also yield some fish to those brave enough to stand next to its swift, icy current. Recent advances in agricultural science have led to the development of a pale, almost tasteless tomato farmed all up and down Fiana’s eastern coast. The Clero Fog tomato, boiled with local barley, wheat, legumes, and skirrets form the area’s culinary cliché, the pastie. Carlin Pease Porridge serves as breakfast or any other meal when supplies run thin. Pease Porridge Hot Pease Porridge Cold Pease Porridge in the pot Nine days old. Cherry and apple trees thrive in the numerous chill days and plentiful water provided by Oxbow’s location, but it’s a race to even get early-season apples in before the first frost. Everyone in town has helped pick apples from the time they could climb a ladder. Rice from the warm temperate fields of Pamhia Province , imported by the general store, serves as an expensive break from the local fare. Cattle, sheep, and goats roam the coastal foothills to the north under the watchful eyes of riders and shepherds. Most everyone works at least part of the year or part of the week for the local Knight and Dame of the Order of Clearbrook . There isn’t enough surplus after everyone eats to pay the cost of transportation to Clearbrook’s everyday market. Foresters guard copses of coastal forest, preserving the lumber for building.   There isn’t enough on-going construction, however, to justify a modern sawmill. Most homes are built of the local fieldstone and roofed with thatch over a wattle of hazel wands. Every bit of wood has to be hand-chased and bucked, skills most people in town develop from the time they’re ten-years-old. Technology Oxbow has running water and green-cube sanitation, which are the universal amenities of life in the Kingdom. They have roads, mostly road-grade gravel, as provided by the Baronial bureaucracy. They have access to traveling utility thaumaturgists who monthly visit to collect the fee to keep the heat and the lights on. A short-line railroad ends at Clearbrook that carries agricultural goods from the barony to markets to the south and west. Oxbow, like most villages, has a public bathhouse .   There is a local newspaper, the Oxbow Weekly , usually no more than sixteen pages long. Most homes have a utility stove, roughly the equivalent of a modern gas range, and “ steam heat .” A stagecoach runs once a week from in front of the Shire Courthouse to Clearbrook, a trip that takes about four hours: the same pace one could make walking there. Other than these conveniences, life hasn’t changed much in five centuries. Animal power and water power are still the predominant ways to get things done in the village.   The fields and gardens of the shire are free of invasive foreign species thoughtlessly imported to other more-northerly shires since the last century. Though inter-continental travel is common and facilitated by a network of Fold Points , no one in Oxbow other than Sir Nigel Sharkey, his family, and their soldiers have ever been farther away than Clearbrook. Though firearms exist, it’s against the law for freemen (non-nobles) to have them. Everyone in the barony still hunts with bows. The fishing boats in the harbor use a magical form of steam power paid for month to month like the utilities. The nearest livery stable is in Clearbrook. The only horses in the shire are the four hackneys, and two sumpters owned by Sir Nigel Sharkey and loaned to the farmers of the shire for plowing and harvest. Sir Nigel rides a fine courser , and Dame Emma Sharkey rides a three-year-old jennet. Horse loans are handled by the Sharkeys’ Marshall Ryan Albemarle , who isn’t bothered by making a little coin on the side for “priority” loans. Education Everyone in Oxbox who is thirty years of age or younger went to and graduated from the Marwbrite Preparatory School in town. Attendance was mandatory. They’ve been trained in a trade by their parents. They’ve absorbed the ability to make crude structures out of found materials; how to make money at a business; and how to garden.   Prep School is good for something. They’ll be able to generate cash in downtime activities.   What ’ s Going On Here? Although it’s illegal, a modest trade in stolen lumber exists five miles to the north and east across the provincial border in Princess Feliciana’s sparsely-populated Marquisate of Arderry.   Isolated farms and homesteads have popped up along the east and west sides of the river, some of them within the shire and some outside of it. The Princess is off completing prep school in Eoisle, Arghentia and her seneschal Antonio Toquemada never leaves Dungarven except to take the train north to Alsae. Banditry is uncommon , but bands of raiders still occasionally get lost and wander into the shire even though there’s not enough in Oxbow to steal. Sir Nigel , Dame Emma and their section of troops are paying their annual service of forty days to the Crown. The Empress sent them to earthquake relief efforts in The Democratic Republic of Ogala , a thousand miles to the east across the ocean.   Their service ends soon, but steaming against the prevailing currents, it will take the Sharkeys months to get home. Their seneschal Glenda Rowland is the acting Shire Reeve until the Sharkeys and Delta Section return around mid-winter. She’s handled the administration of justice and the harvest for each of the past five years while the Sharkeys meet their feudal obligations. Rowland is a straight-shooter with a pragmatic view of law enforcement and jurisprudence. Locals try to hold their lawsuits until summer when the more button-down and by-the-book Sharkeys depart. The Brain Drain: Nobody who is smart, capable or imaginative stays in Oxbow for long. But the travel laws keep people from outright leaving their shire.   Even to go to Clearbrook, the characters would need passes from Seneschal Rowland or the Sharkeys. But other knights, barons and even the marquis are always on the lookout for the best and the brightest.   Superior nobles can thus “headhunt” the shires for capable people.