Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

==High Caldera==

High Caldera is a mystery - a vast, fortified city besieged by trolls, its inhabitants completely unknown to the outside world.  The city is the actual rim of a caldera lake that fumes and steams with chemical mists; the entirety of the ridge around it has been sculpted and carved into a huge defensive position, presumably protecting underground galleries and chambers wherein the defenders dwell - if any still live.  From the reports of travellers and Naserian scouts, the valleys around High Caldera play host to a great number troll clans, some of which dwell in settlements wrought from the shattered husks of similar, smaller structures to High Caldera.  These trolls are said to undertake irregular and futile assaults on the city's massive fortifications, never gaining any sort of purchase or breaching the vaults within.  There is no sign of any military force sallying out to fight them; whoever was within, they are either dead or utterly reliant on the impregnable bastion in which they dwell.

The background of High Caldera is disputed.  At first, travellers who discovered this dangerous location assumed it to be a Grum-Tarathi settlement cut off from the kingdom, but the Tarathi themselves deny this and the style of the fortress is unlike that of the Tarathi.  Another tale has it that the caldera is where one of the corrupting fragments of Hashrukk's carcass came to rest, and this was the cause of the creation of the trolls; that whoever dwelled in High Caldera were the precursors to troll-kind, utterly warped into the monstrous creatures that now roam the mountains.  This, however, does not explain why the trolls are besieging High Caldera.  Some accounts indicate that, like the Iraji, the people of High Caldera were a small civilisation that buried itself away during the Dawn War, utterly isolated from the outside world but, unlike the Iraji, successfully surviving.

A very, very few tales of people who claimed to have entered High Caldera exist, mostly presumed fictitious (especially as they regularly contradict each other).  Stories speak of galleries of gold and jewels, of a strange human people dwelling within who breath smoke and fire, of some sort of 'noble troll' species within, of massive Elder machines or of crude, primitive caverns covered in paintings, of thick flows of tar and ooze channeled through the city like canals; one fanciful story, probably entirely the creation of a playwright, has it that High Caldera is the domain of the Mephit-King, to whom all mephits pay homage (ask a mephit about the Mephit-King and they're likely to be utterly bemused, though that's not much different from the usual mephit state of mind).

The region around High Caldera is incredibly rich in minerals and the wealth of the earth, but the trolls here are well organised and watchful.  Naserian nobles would direly love to claim the region, drive the trolls out and profit from the industry that would follow, but the military might needed to achieve such a goal would be massive; hard to justify with the looming threat of Carthagia.