Balinwell

WORK IN PROGRESS.

Early History
In its earliest days, Balinwell was a small fishing village. It underwent rapid expansion in the early 1200s when beds of lumenoysters were discovered below its traditional fishing grounds. Although the new glowpearl industry was extremely lucrative, it presented numerous logistical and legal difficulties. Lumenoysters can take decades to mature enough to begin secreting glowpearls, and range freely over their territory. Since piercing the thick coat of mucus surrounding a lumenoyster kills it, branding did not prove practical for establishing ownership of individual specimens. These factors, in combination with wrangles over ancestral fishing rights, resulted in ever-expanding lawsuits that frequently dragged on for several lifetimes. Even the establishment of the Mollusk Courts did little to expedite the resolution of the most intractable cases. Many of these legal battles were still unresolved in 1755, when the Balinwell lumenosyter beds became the site of one of the intricate monophibious operations of the Shoals War: the devastating raid by mercenary Engineer/Admiral Dieges Wolumbaatu's fleet of robot submarines.

Association with Harrican Syldanade
It is a commonplace that everything associated with Harrican Syldanade is a source of controversy and rumor. This is most empahtically not the case with of his place of birth. Not a shred of evidence admissible in any court where members of the BALLS are licensed to practice has ever emerged to show that Syldanade was born anywhere other than Balinwell.