In 2017 I needed a small fortified community for a game set on the Manticore Peninsula. A small fortification that looks down on the ocean to be the first sign of civilization for those arriving to explore the ancient ruins in the deep forests further on to the peninsula.

This became Saryer’s Overlook which I quickly doodled together in 2017 and which I’m revisiting today as I needed it again for a more recent game.

At first the name of Saryer’s Overlook applied only to the small castle and the walls thereof – occasionally called Salyer’s Fort on some maps of the local area. Over the last fifteen years the structures have expanded twice, extending new curtain walls to enclose various structures including guild halls, a church, and mercenary quarters. When the locals learned to tame the giant jungle bats, they built a watchtower down by the docks that serves as a landing area and roosting place for the town’s small number of air cavalry scouts. The tower where the giant bats roost is the tallest structure in the community – rising as tall as the castle towers at at the top of the hill – is ringed with platforms for saddling and training. At dusk the bats wheel out and the older townfolk call to them by name.

The Saryer Market is in the inner ward of the fortifications, behind church. The market is small but lively, with stalls selling preserved fish, salted hides, and crude maps annotated with warnings. Smoke from hearths and the tang of brine mix in the air, and at night the battlements are lit by steady lanterns that mark the town’s slow, watchful pulse.

Farm plots fan out from the walls into a cleared ring of fields where hardy vegetables and barley grow in soil turned by teams of oxen. Farmers bring their harvest to the gate and trade for iron tools and cloth. Children run errands between the keep and the fields, and veterans of the peninsula sit on low walls to trade stories and point out routes through the forest. The town’s defenses are practical rather than grand, built to hold out long enough for relief to arrive and to give travelers a place to gather their courage.Most adventurers coming to the Manticore Peninsula arrive by boat and land just downhill from the fortified town in the small dockside community of Sirenhearth Docks.

Aside from the watchtower and bat roost overlooking the docks, the construction in the Sirenhearth Docks is entirely of wood because the they are only minutes down the hill from the safety of the Saryer walls.

The people who live at the docks are a mix of teamsters, fisherfolk, farmers, the owner of the Sirenhearth Inn, and a few folk who try to make a living “assisting” travelers coming through the settlement on their way to and from the Manticore Peninsula.

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