The approach to Rochdale from land follows a road that cuts through taiga — spruce and fir pressing close on either side, the canopy diffusing light into something grey and diffuse even on clear days. The forest breaks at the city's edge without ceremony, and what it reveals is a city built as if it intended to last forever. Stone and brick, multi-story, with facades worked into cornices and moldings that would look at home in a royal district anywhere in Irna. The rooflines are steep and angular — a practical response to the winter snow loads — but someone has ensured that practicality doesn't exclude craft, and the silhouette against the bay is genuinely striking.

The canals are the city's arteries. They cut through the districts in a pattern that is clearly planned, crossed by arched bridges of dressed stone. On market days the canal traffic is constant — flat-bottomed barges moving cargo between the docks and the warehouse district, the sounds of water and commerce mixing beneath the bridges. In deep winter the canals freeze solid and the city's character shifts: the barges stop, and the ice fills with skaters.

The bay itself is always present — visible from the higher streets, audible from most of the rest. The smell of the water is in everything: salt, cold, the particular scent of whale-processing that drifts from the eastern yards on the wrong wind. It is not a city that lets you forget what it runs on.

Rochdale sits at the mouth of the Quinn River where it meets the Bay of Chornan, on the northwestern edge of Irna. The river provides the freshwater that feeds the canal system and the industrial yards. The bay opens west into open water — wide, deep in the channels, and prone to storms in the autumn months. The whaling fleet departs north-northeast into those deeper waters.

To the east and north the taiga stretches unbroken for considerable distance. It provides timber for construction and for the shipyards but is not extensively logged — the city's wealth comes from what the water provides, not the land. The terrain is flat near the water and rises gradually inland into low hills that catch the weather coming off the bay.

Winters are long and genuinely cold. The canals freeze. Snow sits on the rooftops from early winter to late spring. Summers are short and mild and the city makes the most of them.

Rochdale's population is predominantly human, with a long-established halfling community centered in the western residential district — the warmest, most sheltered quarter of the city, which suits halfling preferences and which they have made the most architecturally charming part of Rochdale. Centaurs have a notable presence along the city's perimeter, serving historically as scouts and as a kind of informal exterior guard. The relationship between the centaur community and the city proper is one of mutual arrangement rather than formal governance.

The city attracts people with something to offer — skilled sailors, craftspeople, scholars drawn to Zopha's institution — and turns away those without purpose. It is not an unwelcoming city, but it is a purposeful one. Visitors who come to trade are dealt with directly and professionally. Those who come to gawk at the noble house tend to be disappointed by how ordinary the reality is.

Two industries define Rochdale: what comes up from the water and what comes out of the kilns.

The whaling fleet is the city's oldest and most famous enterprise, operating in the deeper waters of the bay and the open ocean beyond. Whale oil lights the lamps of Irna's cities, lubricates machinery, and serves a dozen other purposes that make it continuously valuable. Whale bones go to craftspeople across the continent. The work is dangerous, seasonal, and very well paid for those who survive the apprenticeship — most of the city's wealthier families have whaling money somewhere in their history.

Ceramics came later, when clay and mineral deposits were found in the soil east of the city. Rochdale pottery is distinctive — a blue-white glaze developed by the city's artisans that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. It ranges from practical daily-use ware to pieces that end up in noble collections. There is a whole district of workshops and kilns, and the artisans there are organized, have their own standards, and are proud of the work in a way that is apparent to anyone who watches them.

Rochdale eats well by northern standards. Fish is everywhere and prepared every way. The halfling district has developed a tradition of slow-cooked stews that has spread through the rest of the city — rich broths, root vegetables, salt-cured meats, the kind of food that makes sense when there is cold outside the door. The city has a bakery culture: dark rye breads, dense rolls, pastries filled with preserved fruit. The bay provides fresh oysters and crabs in season, and these are treated as a luxury even by people who eat them regularly.

The city's signature drink is Chornan Stout — a dark, heavy ale brewed in several establishments, each with their own recipe and each claiming theirs is the original. It is drunk in significant quantity during winter. A softer fermented cider made from wild apples collected in the taiga is the summer alternative.

Rochdale values competence and restraint. People here do not perform for strangers — if you are worthy of their attention you will earn it, and if you have not you will be politely managed until you leave. This can read as coldness to visitors from more demonstrative cultures, and sometimes it is, but it is also consistent: the same reserve that seems unfriendly to an outsider on day one is the same quality that means a deal made with a Rochdale merchant will be honored without drama.

Class structures exist and are acknowledged rather than hidden. The difference between the whaling captain's house and the sailmaker's row house is visible and not apologized for. Mobility happens — skilled artisans build real wealth — but it is acknowledged as slow work.

The centaur community occupies a particular social position: respected for their historical role as protectors, largely self-governing in their quarter, and present at city functions as a matter of tradition rather than integration. Relations are cordial and practical.

On the morning the whaling fleet leaves for the deep bay at the start of the hunting season, the city gathers at the docks — not a formal event, but the accumulated presence of most of the population. A priest of Thulgard says words over the fleet. The captains receive small ceramic tokens, produced by the kiln district for this specific occasion, that are said to bring the fleet home. Whether or not the tokens work, the tradition has held for over two centuries and no captain leaves without one.

At summer's height, the ceramics district opens its workshops to the public for three days. Artisans demonstrate technique, pieces are sold at lower-than-market prices, and the district's narrow lanes fill with people from across the city and beyond. There are competitions — both for artisans and, humorously, for first-time participants whose results are judged not on quality but on character.

Music in Rochdale tends toward the spare and harmonic — sea chanteys and working songs are the foundational tradition, adapted over time into a folk style that favors multiple voices over instruments. In the taverns, a good group of voices will earn more appreciation than the finest solo performer.

The ceramics district is where the city's visual art lives. The work ranges from purely utilitarian to genuinely beautiful, and the artisans resist the separation of those two things — a well-made bowl is art, and a beautiful object that does not function is a failure. The blue-white glazework that is Rochdale's signature required generations of accumulated knowledge to develop and is treated as the city's defining cultural achievement.

Thulgard, the Hearth Guardian, is the deity that makes the most sense to a city where winter is real and the sea is dangerous. His temples are wide, circular structures with a central hearth that burns year-round. They are gathering places as much as worship spaces — open in the evening, warm, practical. The clergy manage the poor relief and the winter support systems. In a city where a bad season at sea can collapse a family, Thulgard's network is not abstract piety but a real function.

Zopha, goddess of knowledge, maintains a significant institution in Rochdale — partly a library, partly a school, partly a place where scholars are left alone to think. Her presence here reflects the city's long history: when you have been a seat of power as long as House Irna has, you accumulate records, and records require a goddess of knowledge to properly tend. The artisan community is also deeply devoted to Zopha, seeing the refinement of craft as inseparable from the pursuit of understanding.

The halfling community maintains a quiet devotion to Echo — unsurprising given Echo's themes of peace and stability, which suit the temperament of Rochdale's halflings. There is a modest shrine in the western district that serves the community without making claims on anyone else.

Nothing confirmed. The city's constabulary is aware that the whaling captains have their own sea-facing superstitions and minor observances that don't map neatly to any recognized deity. So far this has been treated as sailor eccentricity rather than anything requiring attention.

Rochdale was founded by the Irna family — the same family that now rules it — making it one of the oldest continuously governed settlements in Irna. The first settlement was a fishing community on the Quinn River's northern bank, chosen for the bay access and the river's freshwater. It grew into a trading post, then into a city, over several centuries. The Irna family's claim to nobility is rooted in this place — they were here before nobility was a formal concept in Irna, and their title and the continent's name both derive from this same origin.

When a Rochdale captain pushed his fleet into the deeper waters of the Bay of Chornan rather than hunting the coastal shallows, what he found changed the city's economy permanently. The deep bay population of large whales was extensive and largely unhunted. The expedition returned with more oil than the city had seen in a decade of coastal fishing. The Quinn Yards expanded within a generation to support a dedicated deep-water fleet, and Rochdale's identity as a whaling city was set.

A construction crew digging foundations in the eastern district encountered clay deposits of unusual quality. A local potter named Marisol Quinn — no relation to the river — recognized what she was looking at and spent the next ten years developing what became the blue-white glaze formula. She died without noble title and with considerable wealth, which she distributed among her apprentices. The ceramics district considers her the founding figure of their tradition and there is a portrait of her, painted from a description, in the Artisan Hall.

An unusually wet spring broke the river's eastern bank and sent water through the lower commercial district. The damage was extensive. House Irna funded the rebuilding in full, at a cost that the family spent the following twenty years recovering from. The decision was not financially wise and everyone knew it. It was politically wise in a different way — the city's loyalty to House Irna, which had begun to feel like obligation, became something more genuine. Lord Aldric's grandfather made this decision, and people still mention it.

Rochdale is stable and proud, and those two things are slightly in tension. The city has not grown substantially in two generations. The whaling fleet has not expanded. The ceramics district is healthy but not revolutionary. House Irna carries a name that means something across the continent, and increasingly the city feels the gap between that prestige and its current scale. Lord Aldric is aware of this and has begun looking at trade route development and possible expansion of the Zopha institution as paths toward growth that fit the city's character. Whether the city's temperament — essentially conservative, proud of what it is — will accommodate change is the open question.

House Irna's authority is the oldest unbroken noble claim in Irna. This is both their greatest asset and, in some ways, their burden — they are the standard against which other noble houses measure their own legitimacy, and maintaining that position requires a particular kind of dignity that allows little margin for error. They govern Rochdale directly, without the council structures common in some other cities. The Earl's word is law. The relationship with the Emperor in The Crown is one of loyalty expressed through tribute and military cooperation, but House Irna does not take instruction lightly from any authority and this has occasionally created friction.

Human, Male — late fifties

Aldric Irna is lean and grey-haired, with the posture of a man who was made to stand in front of people and has been doing it for thirty years. He does not look like the storybook version of a great noble house's heir. He looks like someone who has spent a long time managing an inheritance that was easier to receive than to maintain.

He is careful, formal in public settings, and surprisingly direct in private ones. He has no patience for flattery and considerable patience for honest disagreement. Visitors who expect ceremony get it — House Irna knows how to perform its own history. Visitors who expect that ceremony to substitute for substance are generally disappointed.

His central preoccupation is the gap between what House Irna was and what it is now. He does not discuss this publicly but it shapes most of his decisions. He wants to leave Rochdale larger and more significant than he found it, and he is not entirely sure how to do that without compromising what makes it worth preserving.

Human, Female — mid-fifties

Seren Irna manages the considerable administrative work of the city that her husband delegates — not because he cannot do it but because she is better at it. She maintains the ledgers, handles the correspondence with other noble houses, and is the one you speak to if you need something that cannot wait for Lord Aldric's schedule. She is warmer in manner than her husband, more willing to be charming, and entirely capable of making a decision that looks like a social courtesy and functions as policy.

She and Aldric have two daughters. Neither is positioned to inherit in the traditional sense, which is a succession problem they are managing quietly and have not resolved.

Rochdale's city guard numbers about eighty, commanded by Captain Wyn Daveth — a human woman of considerable experience who came up through the whaling fleet's security work before transitioning to the city force. The guard is professional, reasonably well-equipped, and accustomed to the particular policing challenges of a port city: maritime disputes, cargo theft, the occasional violent disagreement between sailors and locals. The centaur patrols of the outer perimeter are separate from the city guard and operate under their own command structure, coordinating with Daveth through an arrangement that has worked for decades without being formally codified.

Rochdale follows standard Irna law with one notable addition: maritime law cases are adjudicated separately by a maritime court that operates under Irna law but has developed its own precedents over two centuries of whaling-related disputes. Getting the two systems to agree on jurisdiction in edge cases is an ongoing project that keeps the city's lawyers employed.

Human, Male — early sixties — found most mornings at the Quinn Yards
Voss is the informal coordinator of the whaling fleet — there is no formal admiral position, but the other captains defer to him and have for fifteen years. He is heavy-set, weathered to the point of appearing carved, and has strong opinions about everything related to whaling and almost nothing to say about anything else. He is the person to see if you need deep-bay passage, information about what the fleet has seen out there, or the kind of referral that opens doors with other captains.

Human, Female — forties — the large kiln building on Chornan Lane
Maeve runs the oldest and most prestigious kiln in the district and considers herself the keeper of Marisol Quinn's legacy (she uses the same surname as a deliberate choice, though there is no confirmed lineage). She is exacting, fussy about process, and genuinely excellent at her craft. She has trained most of the district's current working artisans and takes credit for their successes and blame for their failures with equal readiness.

Human, Male — seventies — the Institution's upper reading room, mostly
Thane has been at the Zopha Institution for forty years and is the closest thing it has to a permanent resident. He is an expert in early Irnian history — specifically the period before The Crown was established, when Rochdale was the continent's primary seat of power. He has opinions about this period that some people at The Crown find inconvenient, and he does not make efforts to soften them. He is very old, very sharp, and genuinely interesting to talk to if you can keep him on topic.

Halfling, Female — middle age for a halfling, so perhaps a hundred — the western district commons hall
Petra is the elected representative of the halfling community and manages its relationship with House Irna with a skill that involves making both parties feel like the arrangement was their idea. She is sociable, sharp, and knows more about what is actually happening in Rochdale on any given day than anyone except Seren Irna. She and Seren have lunch together once a month, which no one is supposed to know about.