A brief history of Morgan Maska
There's a song known to the working classes of Morgan Maska, particularly precious to the halfling population, known as The Dear Green Place.
The city was founded by Vicar Kentigern, a retiring halfling cleric, and Knight of The Road, over a thousand years ago. Kentigern's given name was Mungo, and upon his death a decade after the founding, the burg was renamed Mungo City. The word "city" was more an affection, as there were no walls, and the settlement meandered along the riverside for quite a ways. Travellers often quipped that one could never tell when one was in town, but could always knew they weren't quite there.
For the first 300 years or so, it was your standard halfling settlement, with a minority population of other races, which grew over the next 150 years as it became a trading centre, primarily dealing in textiles. Each spring, the Shearling Festival would bring marketers from leagues in every direction to hawk their wares. Given the halfling base to the population, the annual council of Grandmothers would meet at this time.
It was the finding of iron in the Grey Hills by Tarquin Creegan, one of the Stoneborn halflings, that brought the Marlow (halfling) and Gulnyr (Dwarfen) families to Mungo City. Within a halfling generation, the population had more than tripled, and the city had changed from a peaceful, agrarian community, to a much harsher, dark, industrial centre, primarily trying to compete with the mines of the Lossenor in production of raw iron and alloys. It was in this time that the name was changed to Morgan Maska, as the Dwarfen tongue took hold, as the halfling populous was pushed out of power.
So quick was the economic turn over, that in a scant 220 years, iron production of the Grey Hills slowed to half of what it'd been a century before and the region began to decline. In a desperate attempt to keep the economy going and to take their city back, a group of industrious halflings of considerable wealth but questionable licit standing began to convert the old fields to the production of tobacco, and bought old factories for its mass processing and distribution.
As a then-partner in a pipe leaf plantation in the Caledonian Peninsula, I can tell you that the market for all but gourmet tobaccos has never recovered. It's obscene how low a price an individual farmer continues to get for a years crop.
Today, the tobacco trade has also dropped somewhat, and Mungo City struggles to find its place in the world. Some sections of town have recovered, and there is an increasing vibrancy to the older downtown areas. It's widely believed that the old adage "What is good for the G and M, is good for Mungo" no longer holds true. What this will mean for the future, few can say.
