The Guild Pubs

There are six Guild Pubs in D'ni today: the Cartographers Pub, the Greeters Pub, the Maintainers Pub, the Messengers Pub, the Restoration Pub, and the Writers Pub.

The Pubs are located in an upper-class residential district of Ae'gura called J'Taeri, which according to the map in Tokotah Courtyard appears to be toward the southeast part of the island. The Pubs are circular three-story buildings that are shaped like a dome with a short, roofless cylinder set in the top. There are five pointed-arch windows set along the top cylinder. On the bottom level, there are seven alcoves. Four of the alcoves contain small rooms with the remains of fittings. One alcove is a larger room meant to be a small common library. One alcove is a short corridor leading to a balcony. The last alcove leads to a larger room similar to the common library room. Each of the alcoves is four steps lower than the main floor. The second floor is an observation gallery with a corridor with a shelf for linking books on one side, and a door leading to a room for private meetings. In the Restoration Pub, this room was expanded and converted into a puzzle by Guildmaster Kadish. The third story of the building is made up of an inaccessible ring wall with windows. It's only decorative and has no roof, leaving the structure open to the air. The third floor walls are of a smaller diameter than the lower floors, giving the building a top shaped somewhat like a bottle.

Only the Watcher's Pub / Restoration Guild / Great Tree Pub existed during the time of the D'ni. The rest appear to be different instances of the Watcher's Pub created by the DRC for the use of the modern day explorer guilds they established. Certainly, there was no "Guild of Greeters" in historical D'ni. There is a way for you to test this, if you have fully upgraded your KI device. If you link into the Watcher's Pub, you will find that your KI will give you location coordinates. The link-in point is 18270 torahns, 22 shahfeetee, -48 shahfeetee. That places the pub, and the surrounding section of the J'taeri residential district, at 105° from the zero meridian — just a little south of east — 293' from the Great Zero's center mark, and 640' below the Great Zero. The elevation is higher than the Ae'gura waterfront esplanade, which is -93 shahfeetee, or 1,240' below the Great Zero. However, if you link to any of the DRC Guild Pubs, your KI will report your position as 0, 0, 0, which means it cannot get a signal from the Great Zero.

The pub was built to be a social center for the D'ni elite, and had side chambers with comfortable seating and game tables. Currently, they are blocked off by heavy drapes and have been stripped of most of their furnishings. Here are a few pictures of some of them.

Each of the Pubs is decorated with tapestries and wall carvings, and is features the colors of the Guild to which it belongs. There is a large floor viewer in each which is usable by anyone with access to the Pub.

J'Taeri is home to a large common library for the upper classes. The district was constructed during the reign of King Ja'kreen and was named after his dead son. By the time of the Fall, it was the custom for Guild families to come to the Pubs for meetings to oversee the activities of the Guilds in lower-class districts. It was in J'Taeri that A'gaeris, as part of his plot to destroy D'ni, manipulated Veovis and Aitrus. This resulted in the imprisonment of Veovis, an action that eventually resulted in the Fall. When Atrus and Gehn rediscovered D'ni, they harvested blank books from the J'Taeri common library.

The Restoration Pub:

Downstairs:

The second floor:

The door to the upstairs room:

The common library niche:

While the earliest name known for the building is the Watcher's Sanctuary, it is also called the Great Tree Pub, the Watcher's Pub, and the Restoration Guild. The Watcher's Sanctuary is sometimes incorrectly referred to as Rolep due to a mistake in translating a passage in the the book of prophecy, the Words of the Watcher. Rolep is another cavern that the D'ni spread into while expanding the city.

The pub's common library contains a notebook about the building itself, a linking book to Er'cana, and a linking book to the Ahnonay Cathedral. The notebook was written by Michael Simpson, a Restoration Engineer who also worked on Gahreesen. He carried a voice recorder around with him for verbal notes and to save his first impressions of the places he visited, and transcribed the data to notebooks later. This is the text found in his Restoration Pub notebook.

Date: 10/7/2002 & 4/19/03 — Two trips

Okay, where to get started. The room itself is actually pretty simple and, at first glance, doesn't see to have much to it. Well, for your average explorer. There is actually much more here than meets the eye. Much more, at least as far as history. It's practically dripping off the walls. Fortunately, I dig that stuff. (Lucky for you, I'm also better than your average explorer.)

Might be getting ahead of myself. Structure. Circular room with a number of doorways leading off in each direction. Large staircase, might need some support work, leads to an upper level. Okay, this doesn't work without knowing some of the history and story behind this place. I gotta start there.

I've done some translation and talked with Watson, this is great stuff.

Alright, the tree of the balcony. (I did do a little walking around). I can't see it well — dark — but it's an old tree — don't know exactly when it was created, although certain style and material elements suggest as far back as the early 2000's, long before a guy called The Watcher came around. And it's the Watcher that the place was created for, renovated for, and dedicated to from the time it was built in the late 4000's, until the Fall of D'ni.

The Watcher lived during the mid 4000's and spent most of that life on hidden, secluded Ages. He wrote a book called Words — a prophetical book. Nostradamus type guy. Strange. Though it doesn't seem his prophecies caught on real well at first, through a variety of events — you can ask somebody else if you want to know them all — the guy became more and more popular again. You know the deal. There was always a core group of followers, but the overall population wavered, I would imagine depending on how accurate they viewed his visions. Over the course of time a whole lot of copies of his books were printed. We've found plenty of them.

As I mentioned, the tree (which I still don't know how to actually get to) was built long before the Watcher. No one at the DRC seems to know exactly what it was for — best guesses are that the tree was built early on as a representation of the D'ni that had come here: the new tree. They definitely had a thing for trees.

So, the Watcher comes along and writes some prophecies. They end up becoming pretty popular, and they do deal quite a bit with the tree (as much of D'ni prophecy does) and an unknown guy builds this building with the tree as its "focus." Seems like the building was an upper class lounge or sitting room, pub something along those lines. The intellectuals come and discuss the philosophies and politics of the day, although there was some homage being paid to the Watcher and his thoughts and ideas.

This "sanctuary" or whatever you want to call it, stayed successful even while ownership changed — it seems it changed frequently as the philosophies and religious views of the people. It wasn't until Kadish came along, yes our good friend Kadish, that the thing really took off. Unfortunately, right before the Fall. I've just realized that I haven't moved in the past few minutes. I'm standing in a building giving an analysis of it without moving. Gotta love history.

So back to it. Nice little coves in this place. Wouldn't be bad at all with a cigar and— Okay, Kadish and the Fall.

Kadish was the last guy to own it and it seems he did some renovations. This is where history and current day setup get interesting.

The Watcher spoke quite a bit, in Words, about someone known as the Grower. The Grower is prophesied to do a number of things, and it seems there were numerous interpretations of the Grower: some saw this person as little more than a great Lord or King, while others saw this person as a superhuman miracle worker, god-like conquering time, space, and dimension and everything else. The views on The Grower were as varied as you can imagine.

What's important is that Kadish viewed himself as the Grower; as the one the Watcher had prophesied about. As a result, he modified the pub to honor, not only the prophet, but himself as well. He seemed to be intent on fulfilling as many of the prophecies as he could. So he built this puzzling "path of the shell" to the tree, brought the Er'cana book here (Kadish was the engineer behind its construction), brought the Ahnonay Book here and claimed that it allowed him to travel through time, back to the D'ni home world as it was, as it is, and as it would be (Kadish claimed he wrote the Book). All of these things to fulfill the prophecies. Even the times of D'ni were significant because the Watcher claimed to see visions of the past, present and future. As a result, he wrote what he saw, never knowing if it would occur in the future, had already occurred in the past, or was occurring as he wrote.

People flocked to the place. Not only was it the only way to travel through time, but Kadish himself was the only one who could solve the spiral path of the shell and access the tree. In fact, he would demonstrate his ability to anyone who wanted to come and watch. Nightly challenges were held to see if anyone else could access the room. IT seems no one ever did, further confirmation of Kadish as the Grower.

Kadish bragged that the Watcher clearly spoke of how to solve the room in his prophecies and that anyone could find the solution there. Easy to say when you did build the thing maybe I don't get something. Either way good luck reading through all of those and figuring out anything, let alone the solution to some kind of weird D'ni puzzle.

So, it seems that Kadish ran the sanctuary up to the end. Obviously, at some point we know he died. We've all seen the remains of the poor guy. An odd end for a guy that seemed to have so much — had a Book right there but didn't use it. But that's another story.

Okay, history out of the way and I guess I should finish with this spiral path room. I'm not a big puzzle guy, but the room seems very confusing. A switch closes the door and turns on the light and some mechanism releases the ball back to its starting point. There are numbers scratched into the walls of the maze as well. Enough of that. I can see myself going crazy in a place like this. Ah, the D'ni.

Oddly there is no physical access to/from the city that surrounds the building. We know that building is up in J'taeri — a nice district — but there is definitely no way to get in from the outside and vise versa. Not sure if Kadish sealed it up or if it always ways, but I bet the second idea. Makes it handy to limit access — if you don't have a Book you're not getting here. (And that would explain why the Books here were never destroyed or taken.)

That's it for now. I'll probably get back here again after checking Er'cana and Ahnonay.

One of the niches on the lower floor leads to a balcony that looks out on a large spherical room that contains an artificial tree. The tree predates the rest of the Watcher's Sanctuary, possibly going as far back as the 2000s DE. Some time after the Watcher wrote his book of prophecy in 4500 DE, the pub was built in his honor as an upper-class salon where intellectual and political issues could be discussed. The tree is a representation of the Great Tree of Possibilities, a conceptualization of multi-universal theory favored by the Garternay and their descendents on Terahnee and in D'ni. The Great Tree motif appears in artwork around D'ni, such as the floor design in the Hall of Kings and the tracery down the center of the Great Stairs.

The Great Tree, bridge, and interior. The lights around the periphery are projectors, and originally had a few atmospheric themes they threw onto the walls of the sphere. Currently, they are showing nothing.

However, in the past, they showed a star field and the tree seemed to be floating in space.

Space tree

This is the suspension bridge from the tree to the stairs up to the pub's second floor. The balcony overlooking the tree from the first floor can be seen to the left.

This is the interior of the tree. It's unknown what Kadish used it for, since no one but he ever managed to get here during his lifetime. Yeesha used the spiral as a link to K'veer in the early days of her Path of the Shell quest. After a time, she disabled that portal and began using the current method.

The last owner of the pub was Kadish, who proclaimed himself the Grower and constructed one of his puzzles in the upstairs room, and designed it so that only he could access the tree. He then scattered hints to the puzzle in the Ages of Ahnonay and Er'cana. His claim of being the Grower resulted in a popularity boom for the pub, and people thronged to visit Ahnonay and to see if they could solve his puzzle. None succeeded before the Fall ended such pastimes forever.

One of the puzzle rooms, with stairs down to the bridge. Note the Ahnonay crest:

The Guild Pubs:

The Guild Pubs all have identical floor plans to the Watcher's Sanctuary, but are decorated with their Guild logo and colors. Back during their heyday, the Pubs were intended to be places for new DRC sponsored guilds to meet, but also for their supporters to use. Anyone who collects a T-shirt for a guild from Kirel can access the matching Guild Pub in their Nexus and leave messages and photos in the viewer there..

The Cartographers Pub:

The Greeters Pub:

The Maintainers Pub:

The Messengers Pub:

The Writers Pub:

The J'Taeri district:

These pictures are a view of J'Taeri as it can be seen from the Watcher's Sanctuary, if you could venture outside or climb up through the top of the third story. J'Taeri is a sprawling district that mostly consists of homes built into the sheer walls of Ae'gura island around the pub, although there is also a section of it built above ground near the Guild Hall complex. Most of its "streets" are tunnels.

Across the lake you can see a fairly clear view of building districts along the walls of the cavern. The pub itself is above the water level of the lake. The Great Tree sculpture is in a spherical chamber carved into of the interior of Ae'gura island.

This picture shows a view of a residential or industrial district across the lake, in the side of the cavern.

In this picture, there appears to be a pond at the base of the pub, which is separated from the lake below. The pub's coordinates place it about 600' above the cavern lake's water level.

These pictures show some of the homes of the J'Taeri District. In the first one, you can see the top of the Pub building under my feet:

This view is from a landing outside of the Pub. I was unable to find a direct access route from the district into the Pub, but that doesn't mean one does not exist.

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