Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

=The Great Western Plains of Huron (The Wasteland)=

'''Icons''': Baalshegarath

What can be said of the Wasteland?  For one, it is nothing like how some southern poetic descriptions of it - or indeed the name it is commonly known by - would have one think.  Much of the Wasteland is not desert, nor lifeless desolation; it is as the Plains were before the Huronese left, albeit far, far wilder.  Old signs of human habitation have mostly long since crumbled; it is the markings of Elder mastery and the detritus of the Dawn War that still stand, but even these are mostly bereft of any particular activity, left to slowly collapse and rust.

Much of the Wasteland is given over to wild beasts and the occasional servitor being, but it would also be wrong to consider it as uninhabited by any form of civilisation.  Goblins are the most common sentient creature found here; their fiery red skin is supposedly an indication that they were an early attempt by the Elder Gods to make true life from fire elementals, but they have established an often quite sophisticated, albeit highly quarrelous, society of clans and tribes that spread across the wastes.  More worryingly for the Huronese are recent tales, only spanning the last two hundred years, of a new form of goblin-creature that is emerging; one that stands taller, like a man, and possesses more of a grey hue to its skin.  These creatures, sometimes called immuru or great goblins, seem more organised and intelligent than other goblins, but their origin and their agenda remain a mystery beyond a strange claim by a monk that 'immuru are the stone, raised up by Grumand'.  As well as goblins, a far greater terror stalks the Wasteland - giants, immense aberrant servitors of the Elders now fallen into barbarity.  Even Zhatan and the Lord Commander forget their animosities when giants attack the Great Cliff.

The sheer massive expanse of the Wasteland means that it holds many mysteries and hides many features from human knowledge at this time.  A few savage gnoll tribes roam the plain, and it is from their accounts that much current knowledge is gleaned.  There is almost certianly a hekatonchiere fastness in the Wasteland, and the farther west one goes the more extreme the signs of the Elder Gods and the Dawn War become.  The Iron Mountain is a vast edifice that ripped up from the ground beneath where the last, defiant city of the Western Huronese once stood.  An actual lake of blood is probably where the Great Wolf was terribly wounded by Ephras and bled out much of its immanent spiritual energies.  Elemental weather phenomena are more common than elsewhere across the entire region.

And the further west and north one goes, so too do more and more signs of another, darker level of organisation emerge.  Patrols of draconic creatures that enslave or oversee the goblins and even the giants of those areas; wandering, autonomous spellwraiths that observe and watch; red-winged sky creatures that trail tentacles and drip oily ooze as they pass by on rapid, planned paths through the air.  Perhaps, if one went far enough, past where volcanic activity rips the landscape and great clouds of smoke and ash reach to cloud out the sun, one might find fell Baalshegarath, the Pit City of the Elders.