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

The nascent power of the Huronese has taken root in the region that was once the northern province of the Drakkath Empire. Now, centuries later, people who were once the vassals of the Drakkath now look to make themselves its new masters. With a great swathe of land in its grasp, the Huron nation is one of master horsemen and proud warriors, their traditions rooted in their history as plains nomads. That has, of course, been changing over the long years - in the present era, Huronese cities are amongst the largest in the Drakkath, maintained roads crosscross the rolling plains and bridge the rivers, and great fields of crops grow under the sun's gaze to feed the untold thousands of the land's people.

There are two main divisions Huronese culture. The first of these are the 'Westerners' and the 'Easterners'; many families and clans still trace their lineages back to the era of the Dawn War, when the western Huronese horse-clans were forced east. Westerners are the most ardent in calling for a Holy Pilgrimage to reclaim the Wasteland and restore it to its former glory as the Huronese heartland; they mockingly characterise easterners as softer and having lost touch with horse and steppe. Easterners are those whose ancestors already dwelt in the Great Eastern Plains at the time of the Dawn War, and who are the keenest in seeking the mantle of the Drakkath Empire; in their crueller jests, they depict the westerners as less clever and more barbaric, or even as weaker immigrants who couldn't hold onto their own lands. Of course, these are only broad generalisations and many bloodlines of both Plains have intermarried and blurred old boundaries.

The second division is that of the horse-clans. These clans remain central to Huronese government and military hierarchy, as they are essentially military structures. They are also foci of Huronese culture clashes, with different clans having their own traditions, rites and grudges, and much internal unrest and struggle is down to feuding clans. However, the importance of the clans has been eroded over time as cities have grown and many Huronese become settled farmers and labourers, to the point that some clans are purely made up of a warrior-class, some are many thousands strong and others are mere hundreds. The Lord Commander, supreme ruler of Huron, is ritually elected from amongst the Clan-Lords to serve until they retire or are removed by the Clan Council.

The Great Eastern Plains of Huron

Icons: The Lord-Commander Razheman White-Mane-Clan, who rules from Dar Urazel

The Great Eastern Plains of Huron are a large region of grassy plains and wooded hills with few rivers that has served as homeland to the Huronese since time immemorial. By the time of the Drakkath Empire's emergence, the horse-clans had entered into a formal pact with the lesser Elder God Hammasztu, a being of twisted flesh and swirling wind which is reputed to have been the Father of Horses after petitioning Hashrukk to create equine-kind. Despite the pact, Hammasztu did little to aid the Eastern Huronese during their conquest by the Drakkath, possibly due to the influence other Elder Gods; however, the seventeen great lakes that dot the centre of the plains are known as 'Hammasztu's Tears' that it wept to see the proud horse-steeds that died in the battles that ensued.

The Plains are today divided into many smaller administrative areas, although wider regions often retain their Empire-era province names - Jhah, Kaishan, Haunshun. The heartlands of the plains, especially those near the great cities of Dar Urazel and Garan Sen, are well ordered and bear a thriving population. Huronese roads are well maintained and patrolled, running all the way from the ports of the Fractured Coast to the Great Cliffs themselves. However, moving out of the heartlands, safety and civility becomes far less guaranteed, especially amidst the densely wooded hills and the few rugged mountains that erupt up from the alluvial soil. It is easy to stray far from civilisation on the great plains, and easy for threats to hide. The mountain ranges play home to some monstrous terrors, in particular the Longfangs in the north-east that split the coastal states there from the Myrmec - for it is there that Sharaz Longfang, a dragon matriarch who served the Elder Gods until their defeat, now lairs and broods.

The horse is the symbolic heart of Huron, and even sedentary city-dwellers and bureaucrats tend to hold the beast in a special respect. The broad plains and few rivers of the Great Plains served the early Huronese well, and in the modern day cavalry play a heavy part in their military. The breeding of steeds is a matter of pride and fine details amongst the horse-clans,and there are several notable rare strains like the precious and prestigious blood-sweating horses and the wyrdspawn steeds of Hammasztu's bloodline. So too are horses a focus of fearful Huronese tales of beasts and monsters - bizarre terrors like the mare-dopplers that shift their forms and hide amidst herds to prey upon horsemens' minds, or the ravenous diomedics that are said to hunt in packs, wolf-like and hungry for meat, or hippogriffs that make off with prized horses to mate with.

Urazel is the patron deity of Huron, and his worship is dominant. Dragon iconography is thus particularly common in Huron, especially around temples and organs of the state; the elite Dracoverr, the Lord Commander's personal troops, bear the red dragon of Urazel on their armour. A rare few dragons are known to dwell in the farthest and wildest reaches of the Great Eastern Plains, and some of these still hold to old pacts with Urazel; in theory, they might be called upon to aid Huron. The wider pantheon is worshipped in Huron as well, supported with the usual reverence of ancestors - an oddity of Huron is that certain famous horses are also held worthy of worship in this same structure, and many clans have two or three such steeds that members pay homage to as well as their own forefathers and foremothers. Ishrak and Immar are both held in reverence just below Huron; Huronese tradition holds that the two deities are actually married.

Aasor holds a position of particular import in Huronese society; rather than widely being venerated, his priesthood officiate over the area of oathes, duty and binding agreements, especially over warriors who wish to form blood-brother bands and those who swear themselves into the service of another. This appears to stem from the chain-cults that grew up around the Eighteen Cold Pits in the north of the plains, a series of deep sinkholes that lead to strange Elder confinement devices; ancestors of the modern Huronese are said to have sworn a pact, apparently overseen by Aasor itself, with the weird and inhuman creatures that once lived in the Myrmec that they would forever keep eighteen terrible beings locked away beneath Huronese soil, the bindings refreshed regularly with Huronese blood. Most Huronese have some business with the Aasorian chain-priests at some point in their lives but, overall, leave veneration of the deity aside from their worship and offerings to the wider pantheon.

Seeing the vast tracts of ordered farmland and irrigation that cover the heart of the Great Plain is a surprise to those who think of the Huronese only in terms of their horse-warriors; moreso still are the massive edifices of city and stone that the Huron people have erected over the centuries. Engineering on a grand scale, often centred around old Dawn-era structures of the Empire, the bastions and major settlements of Huron are usually wrought from distinctive red sandstone carved out of local quarries. These cities have ensured a certain amount of stability in the otherwise tumultuous inter-clan bickering of Huron; their defences are far beyond the capability of most horse-clans to actually capture should there be a civil war. They have also been key in the continuation of a form of currency still based on the Drakkath Imperial Measures, and have served as a home to the merchant classes of the nation throughout turmoil and conflict in the wider land.

The people of this land are mostly Huronese humans, with a smattering of genasi amongst them - most commonly air genasi. Aasimar and tieflings are both very rare but not unknown. There are a number of gnoll tribes that live in the wilder regions, some of whom are an active menace and hostile to humans; others have long traditions as nomadic mercenaries, serving whichever clan-lord is willing to pay their fees. There is something of a tradition of gnoll janissaries; punitive raids against the gnoll tribal federations at the edges of Huron include demands for young gnolls to be handed over as compensation for gnoll marauders' attacks. These young gnolls are then brought up by the government to serve as elite, extremely loyal slave-soldiers under the Lord-Commander's authority; some are also tithed to the Urazel church for a similar purpose there.

Zhatan and the Great Cliff

During the latter stages of the Dawn Era, the Elder God Gilam tore the once-unified Great Plain of Huron into two. The Leviathan of Flame and Scale shattered the ground at the centre of the Plain, causing a vast cliff to rise up and seperate it into what is now known as the Great Eastern Plains and the Great Western Plains.

Now, the Great Cliff serves as the bulwark between Huron and the Wasteland, serving as an eternal wall against the beasts of the wastes.

The Cliff runs hundreds of miles, stretching from Carthagia in the south all the way to Myrmec in the north. It is by no means impassable - many gullies, ravines and valleys pierce its barrier - but the massive height of the cliff face does mean that anyone wanting to enter Huron from the west must travel through these passes - and most of the major ones have Huronese watchtowers overseeing them. These watchtowers, perched atop the Great Cliff, can see for leagues out across the desolate landscape beyond. Unfortunately, there are also cave networks that run into and through the system of cliffs; there is no way for Huron to fully plug every gap in this natural defence.

The landscape of western Huron, east of the Great Cliff, is extremely rugged and broken, far wilder than the heartlands of the Eastern Plain; this is dangerous country where the threat of Wasteland intrusions is a regular worry. The provinces of Jaghatun and Oghatan also serve as home to many clans and families that still remember their traditional Western Plain roots, and desire for a Pilgrimage to retake the Wasteland is higher here than in other regions of Huron. In a culture where a military hierarchy and tendency towards authoritarianism only goes so far to counter a tradition of independent clans and internal conflict, the western reaches are also one of the most troublesome and unsettled areas of the Huronese people.

The apogee of this can be seen in the great fortress of the Black Tower of Zhatan - both it and the surrounding city are commonly just referred to as Zhatan - which dominates the surrounding region and stands in defiance of the Lord Commander's authority. Some say the Black Tower is the greatest fortress of this age, standing tall at the edge of the Great Cliff; the surrounding landscape is made up of broken terrain and twisting ravines, while the Tower itself is a marvel of engineering and defensive architecture. Even the city that has grown up in its shadow would be a challenge for any attackers, made of cramped, twisting streets and sloping terraces. Apart from its reputation as a bastion, though, Zhatan also serves as a centre of trade for those caravans skirting the Wasteland, and its Silk-Hooded Markets are notorious as places where almost anything can be had for a price. Zhatan has actually started minting its own currency, based on the old Western Huronese trade-coins.

The Tower is also famous for the thaumineering that has gone into its structure and, most of all, for the Black Knights, the Urazeli templars whose arms and armour are works of incredible arcanomechanical artifice. The Tower has stood watch over the largest breach in the Great Cliff for centuries, and is actually named after the Dragon-Saint Zhatan, First of the Disciples of Urazel, who commanded its creation in the Dawn War to protect against the servitors of the Elder Gods. The Black Knight Commander is the absolute authority in this city; a predecessor in her role, several generations ago, took advantage of weak Lord Commanders who could not enforce their own control of the area to break Zhatan away into an independent state. The secession was fuelled by the old rift between Easterners and Westerners; the templars of the Tower see it as the holy duty of the Huronese to retake the Wasteland and finally tear down Baalshegarath, and see the ongoing obsession of the Lord Commanders with becoming new Emperors as a diversion from their true duty.

The Fractured Coast

The easternmost edge of Huron is the Fractured Coast, pulverised during the Dawn War into a mess of coves, peninsulas and islets. Several major Huronese ports are nestled amidst the wracked coastline, and it is a major region of shipping and trade; but the rugged cliffs and hidden bays also serve to hide many sins, from sea-raiders to ancient, shattered relics of the War. Lighthouses, often called 'Urazel's Fires', are common and much needed for vessels to avoid the treacherous reefs and shoals that are a feature of the entire coastline.

The Fractured Coast saw a great deal of bloodshed and destruction during the Dawn War; the original coastline was probably ten leagues or so further out to sea, coming to its current reach after being pounded by mountaincracker munitions, earthquake spells and the raging fury of deities made manifest. Even now, detritus from the raging battles can still be found rusting and mouldering in great piles amidst the ravines that stretch for miles inland, and it's no secret that eerie servitors and still-active sorceries make the region dangerous. Zones of safe control have been scoured around the Huronese ports, and there are a few fishing villages dotted here and there, but much of the Fractured Coast remains untamed.

Kura Tun is the greatest of the Huronese port-cities, and also the site of an Elder-era shipyard; much of the vast, arcing skeleton of metallic struts and bones is no longer operational, and only a few of the remaining mechanisms are understood by the thaumineers who attempt to use them, but nonetheless the Kura Tun vessel-birther is a major boon to Huronese efforts to maintain a significant navy. The past century has seen increasing amounts of ship design experimentation by Huronese naval architects, and two years ago the first experimental 'metal-clad' was floated, a regular ship with metal plating over its hull; unfortunately it sank in stormy weather a month later. The recent arrival of Ironjack refugees from Ara will likely fuel a new push in naval technology.

The relics of the past are plain to see along the Fractured Coast. Most of the Ward-Towers, immense old bastions from the Dawn that lined the coast, are no more than shattered piles of rubble now, but in a few places the alien architecture of that era still stands; and, in certain remote areas, some structures that are believed by scholars to be Umbral in design. The dead hulks of innumerable weird Dawn War vessels litter the beaches or lurk just below the waves out to sea. The greatest of these, the Chariot of Light, is an immense city-ship that lies broken and ruined along the Alabaster Shore; the Chariot, once the personal transport for an Elder God, remains undisturbed even after all these centuries due to the truly terrifying defensive weaponry that is still active aboard it. When triggered, the Chariot emits some sort of accursed energy that turns all living matter within a mile into alabaster limestone; tormented shapes litter the surrounding beaches, and each wave fills the air with a great clattering as all the petrified fish and other sea creatures rattle against one another on the sandy floor of the shallow sea.

Myrmec

Myrmec is the name of the increasingly arid landscape north of the Great Eastern Plain; the southern, hilly reaches are now provinces under the control of Huron, but the Lord Commander's authority only reaches as far as the slow-moving expanse of the Usma river and the green belt of arable soil around it. Beyond that, the habitability of Myrmec rapidly reduces further; barren hills, rocky badlands and, ultimately, the unforgiving Myrmec desert itself.

Signs of the beings that once ruled the Myrmec are clear - eerie, crumbling old structures obviously not made for human habitation, worryingly insectoid images carved into rocky cliffs, clay tablets covered in alien glyphs that literally set a human's eyes itching just to look upon them. Here and there, old Elder relics slowly turn to rust amidst the arid badlands; immense black-metal girders just up, long since stripped of whatever structure they held aloft. Whoever once dwelt here, they are long gone; the Myrmecians of today are humans, albeit with an unusually high number of earth and fire genasi amongst them. These Myrmecians traditionally live in small groups of several families, bound together by a particular piece of their culture's philosophies or poetry - that is to say, the word-clan is genuinely the guardian of a given scrap of thought or text. Now, the southern Myrmecians are vassals to the Huronese, but they are grudging and often rebellious. As well as human inhabitants, so too are there a handful of wiry, lean desert gnoll marauder-clans; they have no love for the Myrmecians and helped the Huronese conquerers significantly as scouts and pathfinders, but now that Huronese conquest has slowed to a standstill, they are seen in a more ambivalent light by the new rulers of the region.

The desert proper is a strange, eerie place with a mournful air to it; ash and bone are plentiful amidst the sands and rocks, and it is scattered with the hollow, discarded, eroding remnants of past eras. Vast strange devices, immense twisted bones and incomprehensible towers break the desolation, relics of a past age that now lie forgotten. The beasts of the desert are also strange indeed, including immense, lumbering behemoths that look, from a distance, like great hills themselves. It is here that the terrible Longfang herself is said to hunt from time to time; so too are there stories of the karkadaan, the lords of the desert, mighty creatures with a myriad of pearlescent horns that are said to be the children of behemoths and elementals and which consider themselves wardens of the old, rusting Elder artefacts of their domain.

The northern Myrmecians still live free from the Huronese yoke, and their society has transformed to resist any further aggression from the south. New word-clans have formed, piecing together bits of philosophy and poetry into new, militant interpretations that are carried through by the clansmen and -women in the way they live their lives. A number of priest-leaders have risen up over the world-clans, each the guardian of a number of different pieces of text that they have combined into radical new concepts and from which they in turn take their own names and titles. It's no secret to the Huronese commanders of Usma that the Myrmecians have now fortified several ancient Dawn-era bastions and pre-human ruins in the desert, turning such ancient discarded husks into defensive positions; some claim they've seen desert behemoths turned into walking buildings, their backs holding great howdahs aloft.

Even stranger tales sometimes come from the depths of the desert - rumours of the Shining One, a sinuous, curling serpentine beast of glorious mien but sinister nature that is caught in some sort of eternal battle against demonic beings that stalk the far reaches, in a region where a Dawn War weapon turned sand to glass. So too are there stories of pre-human ruins filled with rows of sealed ceramic pots that mutter and shake, and of a great tower guarded by beings of liquid metal.

The Maritime States of the Longfang Coast

East of the Myrmec lie the Longfang mountains, lair of ancient Sharaz, and beyond that there is a strip of coastal land running north that plays host to several small maritime states. The southernmost of these, Haraj, is now a Huronese satrap; but further north the states remain independent, largely due to the Demarchy of Cosuna which presents Huron with a difficult obstacle indeed.

The Longfang mountains are utterly untamed; a few passes wind through it, offering access to Myrmec, but the foothills and peaks are only home to a few human enclaves and monasteries. As such, the maritime states here are wedged into whatever land they have available between mountains and shore - which is to say, not much at all. The Demarchy's southern border is a very wide river and delta; the state has actually fortified the entire length of it against Huronese invasion, and the bridges across the river are designed to be easily collapsed and destroyed. More than that, Demarchist mages continue to maintain an ancient pact with several watery elemental beings that was granted to them by the Storm Lady, Ishrak, and these elemental guardians render an assault by sea or across the river a very unwise idea indeed.

The half-dozen states here are largely ruled by hereditary nobility, but the Demarchy is rather different - every three years, anyone in the population of adult age can be selected at random from a lottery to gain a position in government. Rumour has it that this is, itself, another pact - not with Ishrak this time but another, unknown Younger God, possibly Pethio or Ansari, the latter being a female aspect God from further north who is probably the same deity as Naskha. What the purpose of such a pact, shaping a rather random form of government, would be is unknown.

The other notable state is the hallucinogen-fuelled government of Blue Aestus, wherein decisions are supposedly guided by oracular visions induced by seer-ministers during the consumption of copious amounts of drugs. Blue Aestus is rich from its cultivation of the great, aquamarine-blue fields of stormweep, a potent drug-flower only found to grow in the regions of unnaturally grey-white soil that are found in the state. According to religious tradition here, Immar and Ishrak are tempestuous lovers (but not married, as the Huronese believe) and they first courted during the Dawn War itself when Immar tried to persuade Ishrak to join battle; she challenged him to match her passions if he wanted her to fight alongside him, and so the (at that time mortal) Immar and Ishrak lay together for thirty days and thirty nights, the storm goddess's ecstasy wracking the land with storms and floods. The Aesti claim that this rather excessive bout of lovemaking occurred in Blue Aestus itself, and that stormweep grows where the two gods indulged their passions.

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.

The Central Lands of the Drakkath

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