Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

=The Central Lands of the Drakkath=

There was a time when the Drakkath was the heart of a mighty Empire, an orderly land carved into administrative Prefectures amongst which the populace dutifully laboured for the greater glory of the Imperial Family.  Now, though, this great landscape is a shadow of its former glory.  Most of the great palaces have toppled into rubble and dust; ancient roads have been left to decay; once-mighty cities are utterly lost to the wilderness, or harbour a fraction of the population that once dwelt there.  One might think that such a picture portrays a lifeless place, a land of decline, but the opposite is in fact the case.  The Empire was shattered, but from amongst the pieces a new and vigorous growth of nations has emerged, young peoples who seek new glories and future victories; there is much space in the Drakkath for them to expand into, great swathes of land to flex their strength over, true treasures of the lost Empire to clash and battle for.

The Prefecture of Sukumvarang was the original heart of Imperial rule, but major cities stretched from the eastern coast to the western reaches; the land was tamed and mastered from the Great Sarok Expanse all the way to the Northern Hills.  Although often referred to as the Drakkath Empire, it was more correctly a series of three dynasties, each laying claim to a particular elemental bloodline for its legitimacy - chronologically the Rangkun, Laisrean (notable as a Suruni-dominated dynasty) and Khaiman dynasties.  The Empire was originally founded at the order of the greater Elder God Gilam, who had decided that the lack of structure and hierarchy in the region (apart from whatever was left of Umbral civilisation) was offensive.  It genocided thousands of humans and other species of particular ethnicities or breeds who had migrated out of the zones that it believed they should be confined in; this cleansing done, the first Emperor, Rangkun Yun, was instructed by a draconic servitor to raise up a new civilisation with those who had survived the Elder's mild irritation.  It is believed that the cause of the instability and lawlessness in the region prior to the first Emperor was due to a squabble between Shauku and Gilam in the first place; the former used some sort of chronological weaponry to delete most of the organisations that contributed towards civilisation in the area from ever having existed.

The ethnicies of the Drakkath are distinct from the Huronese to the north.  The Drak, as the people of the region are generally called, span a variety of appearances but also share common features due to the long years of Imperial unity.  The most notable differences are between the Sukumh and the Suruni, the two eastern-most ethnicities.  The Sukumh are perhaps overly prideful of being the heart of the old Empire's bloodlines and thus being somehow purer or nobler by simple nature, but it is the Suruni who dominate further south down the coast and who still maintain quite different traditions of naming and culture.  The Suruni were originally a people from an entirely different area of the world, but were transplanted to the Drakkath by Hashrukk for some unknown reason and passed Gilam's incomprehensible test for who should and should not be in the region; these days, intermarriage over centuries has led to them being a true Drak ethnicity, but they still hold on to notions of difference, including a sense of identity as smarter, wilier and generally more quick-witted than the Sukumh.

Further west, the melting pot of Drak ethnicities blurs lines further with regional cultures and traditionals, odd little enclaves and a general patchwork of all sorts of different people falling under the banner of 'Drak', largely identified as 'not being Huronese'.  Most Drak would consider themselves to belong to the Sukumh, Husaara or Ganjesi peoples, but such groups mean less these days in the face of rising nations and divergent cultures.

(''GM's Note:  For naming conventions etc, think of it roughly thus:  The Sukumh and Ganjesi are Chinese/South-East Asian, the Husaara are Gallic/Saxon and the Suruni are Gaelic/Mediterranean.  These are of course all just blurry ethnicities with lots of variation, sub-groups etc etc'').