Small town; one of the last outposts of civilization on the western edge of Donaille.

Drylake is a town of about 2,000, perched on the eastern edge of a bowl-like valley which once held a large lake (hence the town’s name). The shallower eastern slope of the former lake-bed now houses a dense cluster of farms, where crops of all sorts are grown. Two trade roads meet at Drylake; the travelers, pilgrims, and merchants along these roads are the town’s primary source of income.

Drylake is the western-most settlement which is formally held to belong to the Illustrious Kingdom. Of course, one would probably be hard-pressed to find anyone in Stavronne, the kingdom’s capital, who could locate Drylake on a map. Still, some of the older townsfolk remember the king’s tax assessors visiting the town within their lifetimes; so Drylake pays its taxes diligently. (The lack of raids from orcs or bandits within living memory must be taken as evidence that the people’s tax money is well spent.)

At one time, before the lake dried up, there was no town here, but only a scattering of fishing communities huddled all around the lake’s shore. Then the water level began to drop; eventually, what remained of the lake wasn’t enough to support even a meager fish population, and the locals faced a real threat of starvation. It was a stroke of tremendous good fortune that the lake’s receding waters left behind soil that (unlike much of the surrounding steppe) proved extraordinarily fertile. The fishing villages were abandoned, and the eastern slopes of the lakebed became farmland (the western part of the lake being too rocky or steep to be settled). Some enterprising residents of the newly unified community built a trading post on what was once the lake’s eastern shore, where travelers on the road that passed just alongside the lake’s edge could buy food and supplies. Soon a town had sprung up; “Drylake” was the name that stuck.