Acrozatarim/Gazetteer

The Drakkath Gazetteer

Being a guide to the realm of the former Drakkath Empire, and surrounding lands.

Several centuries ago, the Younger Gods and the people of the world were victorious in the Dawn War, casting down the Elder Gods and scattering their armies of servitors. Victory had come at a great cost, however. Gods, spirits and men alike had perished in great number, and continent-spanning wounds from the war had wrought immense destruction.

It is still not known, even to the wisest and most clever of scholars, just how many years the Dawn Era spanned - indeed, some have hypothesised that time itself was still mutable and uncertain in the earliest stages of the Elder Gods' reign - but over that era, several great powers rose and fell in the Drakkath area, such as the Umbrals. The Drakkath Empire itself was the last and greatest of polities to rise in this part of the world, forged under the stewardship of a line of Emperors and Empresses who claimed right of rule through infusion with elemental energies, supposedly a gift from the Great Elementals themselves. The Empire's reach stretched far beyond the central Drakkath region, its aristocracy reaped the luxurious rewards of their vast realm, and its armies numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Even in the shadow of the Elder Gods themselves, the Empire was one of the greatest powers in the world.

By the closure of the Dawn War, the Empire had fallen and the lands it once claimed had been wracked with disasters, both natural and arcane. The Imperial Family were dead, the great cities ruined, and wild servitors and monsters roamed the land. The shattered provinces and satraps regressed into autonomy as men and women struggled to retain any semblance of the civilisation that had once ruled the Drakkath; farther holdings happily tore free of the threadbare Imperial reins to reestablish their own independence. Warlords and opportunists rose and fell. So much was lost - incredible works of art, vast edifices of magic, storehouses of ancient knowledge and heirlooms of the people themselves. The victors of the Dawn War wept to know that Drakkath, glorious Drakkath, with its great bejewelled throne, its towers that reached the clouds, its insightful cloisters of monk-diviners secluded in their glittering sphere-fortresses... all lost. All ruined. All gone. The passing of an Empire.

Some would say, of course, that this was truthfully no bad thing. After all, the Empire rose under the auspices of the Elder Gods; their workings were vital to its operation, their corrupting influence threaded through its very being. When the Dawn War erupted, did not the Empire falter and flinch? Did not its rulers at first dissemble? Did they not answer many of the Elders' demands in those early decades of strife? That which came of the former age had to be torn down so that a new era, one born on the back of mankind's own efforts, might rise true and untainted. More than that, of course, for all its glories the Empire is said to have spawned horrors too. The Panopticon Fortress that stared into peoples' minds to root out treachery, slaying suspects where they stood - and which was infamously misused under corrupt Overseer-Ministers. The vast slave-mines that tore the elemental treasures of the earth forth to gild the Imperial residences. The harnessing of furious elementals just to salve the pride of the Imperial Family, who of course claimed right of rulership over such elemental beasts themselves due to the Great Elementals' gifted infusions. The welcoming of a myriad of some of Hashrukk's most heinous servitor-spawn, just because they were useful tools in keeping the lower orders in line. The sacrifice of the entire city of Kunlai to the waters to appease fell Shauku, thereby guaranteeing the rest of the Empire great bounties from the cold southernmost waters in return for thousands of lives.

For all its light and all its darkness, though, the Empire was a great force and one that has shaped the landscape even today. Indeed, understanding claims to the Imperial mantle and the inheritance of the Drakkath Empire are key to understanding Drakkath regional politics. Many of the nations that have grown up from the shattered Empire's corpse seek such title and claim; and through such a unifying concept, conflict between them is born.

Today, the Drakkath remains a divided land. Several of the nations that have risen in the past centuries can be identified as roughly mapping to old Imperial provinces or divisions; others are entirely new, rooted in religious or political movements that have emerged since the Dawn War. However, much of the Drakkath remains a wild and dangerous land, with national claims over farther-flung regions being tenuous at best. Scars from the Dawn War still wound the land, and servitors are known to gather and lair in the great expanses beyond the grasp of civilisation.

Whoever would seek to reunify the old Empire and restore its past glories has a very great task ahead of them.

Geography of the Drakkath

This gazetteer addresses the lands of the Drakkath along broad divisions - the Huronese provinces of the north, the three nations of Carthagia, Naseria and Grum-Tarath in the West, the vast swathe of the Drakkath heartlands, and finally the borderlands to the south where can be found High Kyros and Ascaria.

In broad strokes, it is accurate to speak of the Drakkath as a very varied landscape. The region discussed stretches for hundreds of miles from the frigid mountains of High Kyros to the arid Myrmec. Several great mountain ranges split the region apart, and the great Marble Sea serves as an eastern border.

The mighty Storm mountains and their lesser fingers of crag and peak serve as a southern border to much of the Drakkath. High Kyros itself, huddled on the coast of the Marble Sea, sits amongst the valleys of the Storms; to its west, the mountains eventually level out into the taiga of the southern Drakkath and the rolling Ascarian tundra. Here, lesser mountain ranges wind through the tundra, as well as many terrible scars and canyons torn by Dawn War weaponry.

The White Bay serves as the heart of the coastal Drakkath regions, a great gouge into the continent around which several city-states cling to the water's edge. The sea itself is pockmarked with islands around this region. Around the Bay stretch the Western Drakkath Plains, turning hilly to the north and south while eventually reaching the Central Drakkath Basin to the east; here, marshlands and fens dominate. Farther east and the Drakkath is greatly forested and hilly, with sporadic mountainous regions; to the south, where the Storm and Sarokean mountains sweep away, the landscape eventually becomes taiga. To the east, the way is blocked by the Sarokean mountains themselves.

The northern Drakkath is low hills split apart with regular crags and badlands, as well as great forests that spill on for leagues. Sukumvarang is a peninsula that forms the northern limit of the White Bay, extremely hilly and mountainous where it meets the mainland but rolling down to flat coastal regions.

Eventually, continuing north, the northern Drakkath accedes to the Eastern Huron Plains, the great swathe of land where the Huronese people live. This land is, broadly speaking, plains and forests with several mountains jutting up throughout its length; unlike the Central Drakkath Basin and Western Drakkath Plains, the Huronese Plains are split with few rivers, serving that peoples' reliance on their horses well. To the east, the Great Cliffs mark the border between Eastern and Western Huron Plains, although the Western Plains are more commonly known by the Huronese as the Wasteland in this day and age. Further north from Huron, the land becomes more arid, eventually turning to the Myrmec itself. The desert here is so wide and inhospitable that it is effectively a barrier; instead, land trade comes down the Marble Sea coast, where a series of small autonomous provinces are shielded from the worst of the Myrmec by the Longfang Mountains.

To the west of the Drakkath itself, over the Sarokean mountains, the rolling plains of Naseria stretch from mountain range to the edge of the Malachite Sea. North of Naseria, the Carthagian mountains and highlands rise; to their west, a thin strip of forests and hills edges the south of the Wasteland and the Malachite Sea's north coast.

Beyond the Drakkath

The world is a vast place, even in the scope of mighty empires such as the Drakkath. The nations of this region would fare poorly without trade and migration from farther lands.

Across the Marble Sea to the east, there lies a continent known as Ara. Little is known for certain of most of Ara, although you can find any number of scholarly hypotheses on such things based on rumours and travellers' tales. The northern coastal regions are the home of a clannish people known as the Ironjacks, thaumaturgical engineers who dwell upon strange, Dawn-era rigs in the shallow waters; beyond the coastal regions it is said that there are several sorcerous magocracies. Most importantly, the southerly reaches of Ara are the lands of the Kamuri Conglomerate, a powerful trading polity whose ports play host to innumerable merchant vessels from lands both western and eastern. Beyond Ara is the archipelago nation of Great Amun and the coast of the small continent known as Vekath, where the Bright Empire and the Storm Clans dwell.

In the Marble Sea itself, the Rift Islands are a snaking chain of volcanic lands that play host to a few small ports and that sit adjacent to the Rift itself, a strange mid-sea phenomena created by Ishrak during the Dawn War.

The northerly lands of the same immense continent which the Drakkath is part of are largely inhospitable; beyond the Myrmec, there are mountainous plateaus and blasted lands that may have been the original Carthagian homelands. Civilisation keeps to the coast before eventually reaching the verdant northern coastal plains where several states hold sway including the marvellous Scriptorium of Ashenay, the Librarian-Republic; beyond them, an arid peninsula connects north to the mountainous southern reaches of Lower Hunam, where the great towers of the chitinous Eretreni are said to stand, the Hive-Kingdom of the Anansi. Little is known of northern Hunam.

West, the Malachite Sea is a great many-tongued expanse of waters that reaches deep into the continent, both north and south. The Ascarian tundra eventually accedes to the Munerik tundra, sparsely populated with a different people with different traditions; north of the Munerik, the Masked Kateni people host several city-state republics along the southern edge of the Malachite Sea, practicing strange rites and politics that are said to be unfathomable to outsiders. West and north of the Wasteland lies the greater Ashen Desolation of Gilam, and the fell city of Baalshegarath is said to survive at its heart still. Beyond the Desolation lie the mighty many-rivered kingdom of Irgut, where men and women dye their skin strange colours, and the mountainous Tavashti lands where the Zenith Union rule. Beyond even they are the patchwork nations of the Irminsa, and the great and terrible Steel Consulate that is said to still hold to worship of the Elder Gods and provide many and potent biothaumaturgists.

Beyond these lands, even less is known amongst the common people of the Drakkath, although scholarly works and travellers' texts can be fine sources of greater enlightenment.

The Northern Lands of Huron

Back to main page