Maelris

 The Known World 

 The Dawn Countries 

 Edrask  [Rated M for Manly – this is your setting on testosterone – Vikings with a bone to pick, and then shove through your neck]

 The Great Western Dakylsthas  [The rock-skinned indigenous people are nice. The dragons are not.]

Kerlonna [Imagine if Rome had been destroyed by orcs instead of Germans and Huns. Now imagine the shape that Europe would be in two hundred years later. Yes.]

 The Sea of the Sun  [Pirates, sharks, and fish-men: who will eat you first?]

 Taresani  [Either you’re a lowly farmer, or you’re a crazy survivalist badass. Whichever you are, it’s a toss-up whether the winters or the orcs will kill you first.]

 The White Thirst  [What if you took away Islam’s redeeming features and replaced them with venomous snakes? The resultant nightmare theocracy takes over the desert. Luckily, we have freedom fighting gnomes! … who committed genocide for undisclosed reasons]

Races of the Dawn Countries:

Dragons

Duhumor [gnolls]

Dwarves

Elves/half-elves

Gnomes

Halflings

Humans

Kobolds

Krolgashi [stone giant/human hybrids]

Nyadegtaan [silver half-dragon humans; a race that breeds true]

Orcs/half-orcs

 The Lands Between 

 The Dahlimi Steppes  [Eurasian steppe, pre-Genghis Khan: I hope you like clan warfare]

To the west of Idroslekh, beyond the Great Western Dakylsthas, lie the steppes. Here no mountains stand, nor trees, nor cities. Broad, shallow rivers snake for thousands of miles across the pastures of aurochs, gazelle, and horses, stalked in turn by wolves and lions. This wind-swept land has both bitterly cold winters and scorching summers, with so little rain that farming is impossible. Its more poetic name is well-earned: “the lands of endless sky.”

 Across the vast grasslands range the steppe-folk, the Hundred Nations. It is from these people that the Qãnvilu broke off when they crossed the mountains into Kerlonna. The steppe-folk have dwelt in their lands for untold thousands of years, their history all unwritten.

 The Emerald Sea  [An ideal Caribbean-esque sea, except for the sea monsters]

 Grikhtnyr  [Alaska is full of feral gnomes who worship a magical nuke]

A desolate and dangerous wilderness to the north of the Dahlimi Steppes, Grikhtnyr is a vast cape jutting north into the Last Seas. As one approaches the cape, the land gradually becomes crumpled and ruffled with hills, covered with ancient boreal forests that have never known the bite of iron axes. However, Grikhtnyr is not uninhabited. It is, in fact, the homeland of a particularly reclusive and wild sub-race of gnomes, the Nyr.

 Vrashtpkelya  [Fantasy version of Brave New World run by nefarious reptiles]

A vast swampland fed by waters from the Estumkrer Mountains, Vrashtpkelya is a land enslaved to the will of the Slezdenodh, a cunning race of lizardfolk. Through the use of a narcotic drug known as peitolmyrk, the Slezdenodh have created a social order that is utterly dependent upon their guiding influence. The humans of Vrashtpkelya (known as the ‘Myrktvil’) are addicted to peitolmyrk, which makes them too sedated and passive to consider independence or rebellion.

 The Llonwan Clans  [The Shire, but with eldritch goings-on in the background]

 Rùisge’îv  [Cross Lothlórien with Redwood National Park, and make it the size of Texas]

West of the Dahlimi Steppes and north of the hills where the Llonwan Clans dwell lies the largest unbroken stretch of virgin forest in the northern world. The trees are so vast as to be beyond belief: most stand well over four hundred feet tall. Redwoods, sequoias, and firs form a wilderness with more living matter than any jungle of the south; but all of that life is contained within the trees. These leviathans are all coniferous trees, and so the animal life is not nearly as diverse as it would be in a deciduous forest. However, the natives of this forest have learned to manipulate the wilderness to their fullest advantage, while protecting the harmony of its ancient ecology. Rùisge'îv is one of the elves’ greatest strongholds, and despite the seeming lack of resources (other than wood), they are astonishingly numerous within the titan forests. Those outsiders who enter Rùisge'îv in search of the elves, however, will have a difficult time finding them, since the elves are nowhere to be found on the forest floor. The elves here have largely abandoned life on the ground and created not just villages or towns in the canopy above, but actual cities: the largest, Dhìmvaera, is home to no less than thirty thousand elves. These cities sprawl through the canopies, using a complex system of platforms, ropes, and counterweights to disperse the weight without putting undue strain on the trees. The forest floor is where the elves do their hunting and fishing, and they have avoided interfering with it overmuch, giving it the illusion of uninhabited wilderness. Because so much of the forest’s light is captured by the trees, the elves have taken to nurturing crops in the upper canopy: they do not grow grains, which demand huge amounts of space, but instead berries, vegetables, and, most astoundingly of all, fruit trees (only with the elves would one find one tree being grown on top of a bigger tree).

 Although the elves are dispersed across the world, in many ways Rùisge'îv is like a racial homeland for them.

 Dhìmvaera  :

 Therai  [City founded by ex-slaves in the name of brotherhood, liberty, and racial tolerance. You can tell that this place is begging to be attacked to by an evil overlord.]

A city made up almost exclusively of half-elves, Therai sits on the northeastern coast of the Emerald Sea at the mouths of the Ulaangöm River. Its role in travel across Maelris cannot be understated, since it serves as “the Doorway” between the east and the west. Its main trading partners are the ports of Barduy, and it is the Therai’in navy that keeps much of the Emerald Sea free of pirates and slaver ships.

Races of the Lands Between:

Dragons

Dwarves (this group lives exclusively underground at tremendous depths, and contact with the surface is very rare)

Elves/half-elves

Gnomes

Halflings

Humans

Lizardfolk (‘Slezdenodh’, a highly intelligent and civilised subspecies)

Tritons [like mermaids, but with actual legs instead of a tail]

Orcs/half-orcs

 Rvaiyn 

Beyond the wastelands of the White Thirst and the turquoise waters of the Sea of the Sun lies Rvaiyn, the southern continent. The only means of accessing Rvaiyn by land is along the Scorpion Highroad through the White Thirst, which leads from Taur’Sutij and the Dahlimi Steppes to the northwesternmost of the Border Cities. Sailing across the Sea of the Sun is hardly an option, since the last time that means was used, it was to allow the passage of a Kerlonnic army which laid waste to northern Zresskeilt. There are ships which sail from the Barduy Reaches across the open sea to reach the ports of southwestern Zresskeilt, but that is a journey of thousands of miles, and one that is usually only made by slaver vessels.

 In Kerlonna, Rvaiyn is referred to as “the dreaded country”, a mysterious land of abominations and fell magic. Of the various continents of the world, Rvaiyn is likely the one over whom the gloom of evil hangs heaviest, since it is home to dark elves, chromatic dragons, and vast armies of the undead. Most of its human inhabitants have been enslaved by the dark elves—the drow—for thousands of years, and the dwarves of the far south are a ragged and barbaric race whose civilisation was laid waste by war.

 Cyrutaj  [Evil Dragontopia: think Jurassic Park if the dinosaurs were terrifyingly intelligent and also magical]

Quite possibly the most hostile wilderness in Maelris (not counting the Shadow, of course), Cyrutaj is the homeland of the chromatic dragons. Its landscape has been magically altered over the course of millennia to provide the environments that the chromatic dragon-flights find most hospitable: huge, noxious swamps and marshes for the black; parched volcanic deserts for the blue; teeming malarial jungles for the green; gigantic volcanoes for the red; and even, most astonishingly, a plateau covered with glacier and tundra for the white. At the centre of Cyrutaj lies a ring of volcanoes that belch out vast clouds of poisonous gas, in which lightning constantly forks. The land atop those volcanoes is lethally hot or else deathly cold, and the few passes through the mountains surge with rivers of acid strong enough to strip flesh from the bone. This ring of volcanoes is known as “the Ruinous Teeth”, and it was created by the chromatics to keep safe their most precious stronghold: Vaukhuzmräg, the city of the chromatic dragon-flights, which sits in a beautiful and fertile valley that seems completely incongruous with the alien and hostile mountains surrounding it. Here, all chromatic dragons are welcome, no matter their offenses or crimes. The city was built by half-dragons, but with the size of true dragons in mind, giving it a colossal scope.

 The draconic homelands are distinguished from the rest of the world in that within them, dragons are not only allowed to beget half-dragon offspring, but it is even encouraged. In the homelands, half-dragons fill the roles of servants and agents for individual dragons, but the Unshakeable Oath (the ancient compact between the chromatic and metallic dragon-flights) requires that such offspring be forbidden from leaving the homelands. As a result, the only half-dragons found outside of Cyrutaj or Aujiregul are the Nyadegtaan of Kerlonna, and individual runaways. Draconic law further stipulates that half-dragons may not beget their own offspring—a measure meant to keep their population under control—and therefore they remain firmly bound to their individual draconic parents.

 The Border Cities  [As World War II-era France was to the Nazis, this is to the dark elves]

The Border Cities are a nominally independent patchwork of city-states that form an arc around the western frontier of Zresskeilt, forming the buffer between the wildernesses of Cyrutaj and the White Thirst to the west and north, and the Obsidian Empire to the east. Their inhabitants are largely human, although there are significant minorities of half-drow and pureblood drow defectors from the Empire. Six hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the Marches of Smoke, when a Kerlonnic human and elven army laid waste to the northern provinces of Zresskeilt, tens of thousands of refugees fled westward to escape both the fighting and the iron grip of Zresskeilt’s racially segregated society. They founded the Border Cities on principles of racial equality, republican government, and political autonomy. The Obsidian Empire, militarily exhausted from the Marches of Smoke, agreed to recognise the Border Cities as independent states, but it has spent the last few centuries reversing this. Today, the governments of the Border Cities are very much under the sway of the Empress of Zresskeilt.

 Otkudistvra  [Angry homeless dwarves: a race of Jobs]

Beyond the southern borders of Zresskeilt lies a major mountain range, and it is home to the shattered remnants of a highly advanced dwarven civilization: Otkudistvra is a name for both the civilization and the mountains, and the name comes from Distvra, who was the mythical forefather of the local race of dwarves. The dwarves of the range today call themselves Vzekh: “the Orphans”. The dwarven nation was destroyed three thousand years ago by the drow in a cataclysm known as “the Silencing of the God,” when all dwarven divine magic became abruptly impossible, leaving Otkudistvra helpless before a genocidal drow invasion. The dwarves of Otkudistvra once had a monotheistic religion remarkably similar to that of their Kerlonnic cousins, but since the Silencing of the God, they have become an atheistic people, repudiating the Faceless God as an uncaring and incompetent creator. The Orphans are a race of survivalists: they range in the high mountains and along the far southern peninsula, where the climate is too inclement and resources too negligible to attract settlers from Zresskeilt. Vzekh dwarves eke out a living from hunting and gathering, the cultivation of tubers (potatoes are their staple), and scavenging from the wreckage of their glorious past.

 Vemeratli  [Home base for the incipient zombie-apocalypse]

Wasteland of plagued fungal forests, perpetually shrouded skies, massive rifts in the earth—densely inhabited with undead creatures of all types, including varieties unknown in the outside world—at the centre there is a necropolis of abominations, with an emerald pyramid housing a super-powerful lich who is the master of Vemeratli. Feared and despised by all who know of it, even the drow, since the undead aim to assimilate everything into their obscene state, including Zresskeilt.

 Zresskeilt  [If Ancient Egypt had been run by eugenicist dark elves and taken over most of Africa]

“The road to perfection is paved with the bones of the spoiled and the weak.” – Chant of the Spider 4:17

The Obsidian Empire of the drow is as colossal as it is ancient: its capital city is over fifteen thousand years old. Silthilar in the forests

Races of Rvaiyn:

Dragons (half-dragons only in Cyrutaj)

Drow/half-drow

Dwarves

Halflings

Humans

Kobolds

Silthilar [friendly aberration hive-mind swarms; from Lords of Madness]

 The Ancient West 

Beyond the fens of Vrashtpkelya, the depths of elven forests, and the hills of the Llonwan halflings lie the Estumkrer Mountains, the tallest mountain range in Maelris. The fatherlands of the giants, the Estumkrer are impassable, a massive wall of stone and ice thousands of miles long. To the south of the mountains lies a great peninsula known as Barduy, a strange land of towering dunes that are covered in trees with long, spidery roots, and forests inhabited by bestial races of lizard-men and elves. The coasts, home to the descendants of the human kingdom of Old Barduy, are the only link between the rest of the world and the Ancient West. It is impossible to sail north of the Estumkrer, for to the northwest of those mountains is Aujiregul, the realm of the metallic dragons, whose coastline no sailor would dare approach.

 The Ancient West is so-called because it is home to the first human civilisations in the world: Lenduu and the Kingdoms of the White Tiger. Knowledge of these lands is extremely sparse in Kerlonna, but what is known about them is almost fantastic. They say that Lenduu is ruled by a manifest deity and has numberless inhabitants, while the Kingdoms of the White Tiger are ruled by noble giants who draw power from the ritual sacrifice of warriors in battle. Both of these lands struggle against a realm of corruption and evil known as the Shadow.

 Aujiregul  [Good Dragontopia: however, just because they’re nice doesn’t mean they won’t eat you if you don’t have a good reason to be here]  The homeland of the metallic dragons, Aujiregul is a realm whose geography has been distorted by eons of arcane magic. The northern coastline is a maze of thousands upon thousands of islands, lashed by storm and wave, where the bronze dragons dwell. In the east, in the shadow of the Estumkrer Mountains, lies a desert in vivid colours of white, red, and gold, which is the home of the brass dragons. Running from the Estumkrer is a secondary chain of mountains, the Kunzahi, which runs along the boundary of the Shadow and eventually turns northward, cutting off Aujiregul from Lenduu: on the heights of those mountains abide the silver dragons. In the craggy foothills of the Kunzahi, split with canyons and rifts, are the copper dragons. In the very centre of Aujiregul is a temperate rainforest of ancient and mossy trees, where the gold dragons live. There is one city, but it’s a floating one about a mile above the ground, and is where the eldest of the metallic dragons live and keep their lore: Ulmievisraak.

 The draconic homelands are distinguished from the rest of the world in that within them, dragons are not only allowed to beget half-dragon offspring, but it is even encouraged. In the homelands, half-dragons fill the roles of servants and agents for individual dragons, but the Unshakeable Oath (the ancient compact between the chromatic and metallic dragon-flights) requires that such offspring be forbidden from leaving the homelands. As a result, the only half-dragons found outside of Cyrutaj or Aujiregul are the Nyadegtaan of Kerlonna, and individual runaways. Draconic law further stipulates that half-dragons may not beget their own offspring—a measure meant to keep their population under control—and therefore they remain firmly bound to their individual draconic parents.

 The Barduy Reaches  [Spice ports, slave markets, and gallant elf-knights riding sand-worms]  The Barduy Reaches is the crossroads between the Ancient West and the rest of Maelris, for it is only through this peninsula that the lands west of the Estumkrer Mountains can be accessed. Its northern coastline, along the Emerald Sea, is dotted with ports that do trade with Therai and Vrashtpkelya. The Reaches were once a united nation, from which they take the name of Barduy, but nowadays the various city-states are usually in direct competition with one another for mastery of the trade routes. The eastern coastline is much less populous than the north, in part due to the threat of slave-ships, both native and from Zresskeilt across the sea.

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> Barduy has a strange desert landscape, where hardy trees grow in dunes using their roots to anchor the dunes in place: these dune-forests are home to a breed of elves that are unusually xenophobic and distrustful, especially of humans. In the deep desert, these trees cannot grow, and the landscape is far more hostile, consisting of barren sand, lonely mountains, and only the occasional oasis. Crossing the inner desert is almost impossible without the aid of its inhabitants, and of those, only the elven ashworm herders are likely to help; the reptilian Whisperers are more likely to eat any outlanders that they find.

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"> The Estumkrer Mountains  [The yetis have taken over the Himalayas, except for the bird-guys and isolated Shangri-Las.]

This gargantuan spine of rock runs from the northern coastline of Aujiregul in the north all the way to the western borderlands of the Barduy Reaches in the south, and, at its widest, is as nearly long from east to west as the entirety of Kerlonna. The Estumkrer are the homelands of the giant race and, according to some myths, the tengu, a race of prophetic raven-men who dwell scattered across the mountain ranges of the Ancient West. At the southern end of the range lies a tremendous plateau more than two and a half miles above sea level, scarred with lakes and winding rivers. This plateau was once the cradle of the giant races, but thousands of years ago, the frost giants drove away their cousins, the cloud, death, stone, and fire giants: an event that was to have repercussions across the world, but especially in the Ancient West.

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> Cloud anchorites are a monastic order of recluses who believe that life in the harshness of the mountain heights is the key to unlocking the secrets of immortality. Their order is thousands of years old, and originated in Barduy. Today, their monasteries are now scattered all throughout the Estumkrer range: however, these hermitages are extremely difficult to find, since all of them are found in the high wilderness of the mountains, beyond where trees can grow. Uninterested in the affairs of the lower world, the cloud anchorites are a multifarious lot: among them are lowlanders who have come in search of immortality, mountain-dwelling tengu and frost giants who have withdrawn from their respective societies, and mages from disparate corners of Maelris who have come to study the strange magic that the cloud anchorites practice.

 Jitasura  [Ruined megalopolis: full of treasure, snow, and ancient killing machines]

 “So howled out the heavens for to name them: 

 And lightning shivered the night-sky; 

 And blue shone the snows that entombed the dead gardens 

'' Where once the children took joy. ''

 Black now the trees with the iron of winter 

 And silent the markets, the temples, the houses, 

 Silent the streets and silent the towers, 

'' As if the wind dared not draw breath. ''

 The city cried out for its people  : 

 The thunder alone gave reply.” 

Jitasura is a cold, uninhabited peninsula jutting northward from Lenduu. It was once home to the civilisation of the cloud giants, but nobody has settled there since the armies of Lenduu laid waste to the cloud giants over twenty-four centuries ago. The entirety of Jitasura was once a single glittering metropolis, a perfect combination of mundane technology and arcane artifice: even the mountains were sculpted and shaped according to the purposes of the cloud giants. Now it is a desolate, silent wilderness, a dead city the size of a nation. The war between Lenduu and the cloud giants destroyed large areas of Jitasura, and severely disrupted the arcane flow of energy that the cloud giants used to power their technology. Although not all cloud giants were killed during the war, their race fell into a precipitous decline due to genetic bottlenecking and despair, and in the course of several centuries became completely extinct. Nowadays, Jitasura is empty of any sentient inhabitants: dense boreal forests and cold grasslands have taken the place of crystal spires and courts of stone. The ruins are still patrolled by colossi, the ancient constructs created by the cloud giants to protect their cities, and each is a potent and deadly opponent to any would-be interloper. The people of Lenduu dare not enter Jitasura, and bar others from it: they speak of it in superstitious tones as “the Farthest Land,” and many believe that beyond it lies the edge of the world.

 The Kingdoms of the White Tiger  [Glorious civilisation hit by magical fallout. Death-powered giants provide magical lead. Thus, human sacrifice through war-sports]

Heavy mix of Indian and Mesoamerican influences. The Kingdoms of the White Tiger are so named because in the myth of their race’s origin, they were born from the coupling between a human woman and a white tiger disguised as a man. During the wanderings of the giants, the death giants came to these southern lands, where they were greeted with terror and dread. However, the death giants proved themselves in the eyes of the people when the Shadow fell over the U Khaew. As the Taint threatened to spread and lay waste to the Kingdoms of the White Tiger, the death giants raised up a great veil of pale violet mist, full of softly whispering voices: the Taint was halted, and the Kingdoms were safe. However, the death giants were only able to create this veil because of the energies released from those who had recently died. If they were to maintain it, death would have to continue. Human sacrifice is now widely practiced, so as to support the powers of the giant overlords.

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"> Lenduu  [China without dynastic cycles, due to being ruled by an actual god: Confucius’ dream country] “Men are dust: the Principle endures.” – Maxim of the Lenduun military

The largest single nation on the planet in both size and population, the Principle of Lenduu is home to over a hundred and ten million humans: more than four times as many as are found in the entirety of Kerlonna. Its ruler is an incarnate deity known by a cacophony of names: His most common title, in every language, is “the Sovereign God.” Despite its gargantuan dimensions, Lenduu has had surprisingly little influence on the world beyond, largely due to its isolation: it is bounded in the north and west by the Last Seas (and the desolation of Jitasura) and in the east by Aujiregul and the Shadow. The northern coastline is very sparsely inhabited and only tenuously controlled by the Principle: most of the northern barbarians are devoted dragon-worshippers who barely even know that there is a Sovereign God. Therefore, the only significant contact that Lenduu has had with the world at large has been via the Kingdoms of the White Tiger and the Barduy Reaches beyond them. For most people outside of the Ancient West, Lenduu is the ultimate fable, the land where the sun goes to rest by night.

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"> The Shadow <span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"">[A Mordor wherein pure evil takes the form of radioactive fallout] <p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"> The Shadow is the most noxious and dangerous region of Maelris. It is a shattered and tainted land that was ruined by war between the fire giants and the Unspoken Ten (Khaew Chanimun), who were evil wizards ruling over a powerful and wicked confederation of magocratic states, known as the U Khaew Hinrayya: the inhabitants of this civilisation were a race of humanoids known as the hinrayya. During the battle between the Ten and the giants, the U Khaew was laid waste: its farmlands and forests razed by the giants, its cities horrific slaughterhouses of human sacrifice to fuel the spells of the Ten. In the end, the Unspoken Ten were driven to such insane desperation that they brought down the Taint, transforming the U Khaew into what it is today: the Shadow <span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"">. Thus it is that the war that ended the U Khaew is today known throughout the Ancient West as “the Nightfall War.” However, the Ten had not foreseen the consequences of their mad actions: their bodies were blasted by the magic, leaving them nearly dead with horrific burns that refused to heal. Yet at the same time, they were immortal, thanks to spells they had cast long before. Therefore, wracked with endless agony, the Ten lay in their shattered palace, and still lie to this day, spreading corruption and hate and renewing the Shadow. They have enslaved themselves to the Taint, the better to spite the world. As for the fire giants, the Taint drove them all thoroughly insane.

<p style="text-indent:.5in;tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"">The hinrayya, however, survived despite the destruction of their civilisation. Cursing and repudiating the Ten, they abandoned the ruins of their ancient cities and set out into the wilderness that had not been totally razed by the fire giants. For some reason, the hinrayya have discovered that, while the Taint has given them a fearsome external appearance, it does not actually harm them in body or spirit as it does the other creatures of the Shadow and any outsiders foolish enough to venture there. Therefore, most of them have chosen to remain under the Shadow, wandering through the wreckage of their motherlands. The hinrayya are organised into tribes, each counting its ancestry from a particular hero that aided in their race’s preservation during the Nightfall War. Endlessly tested by their native land, the hinrayya are not numerous, but they are all hardy, dangerous, and fanatically opposed to the machinations of the Ten.

<p style="text-indent:.5in;tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"">Some among the hinrayya, however, have abandoned the ceaseless struggle of survival in the Shadow, and come to the lands beyond. These “Lightborn” hinrayya are not all that much better off, however: they are treated with contempt by the outside world as a race of beggars and savages, and are often accused of failing to have stopped the Ten from calling down the Shadow.

<p style="text-indent:.5in;tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"">The Taint is a corruption that riddles the entirety of what was once the U Khaew Hinrayya: even the water and air carries its noxious touch. All non-hinrayya who come under the Shadow are subject to it, but the rapidity with which the Taint accumulates in a person depends largely on their moral fortitude: the Taint is a force of sinister, degrading evil, and so evil people are affected by it much more quickly. While good people are by no means immune, they can stave off the corruption for a longer period of time. Regardless of alignment, the Taint eats its way into body and soul, twisting both into abominations. The early effects of the Taint can often be mistaken for normal diseases, or the results of mental stress: joint pain, paranoia, or persistent and painful coughs are all common. However, if the Taint continues to accumulate, soon one sees uglier effects: fits of hysterical, deranged laughter, hair falling out, rotting gums, and more. At its final stages, the Taint becomes truly horrifying: skin peels away to reveal the red flesh beneath, necrophilia becomes a compulsive urge, or the spine distorts so dramatically that the tainted one becomes hunchbacked. Eventually, the Taint can settle so deeply that the afflicted are beyond saving: their minds are warped so dramatically that they become willing servants of the Ten. At this point, the kindest thing one can do for the tainted is to kill them, for otherwise, they will be drawn into the palace of the Unspoken Ten, where they will damn themselves with an oath of fealty to the Taint-Bringers.

<p style="text-indent:.5in;tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"">The fire giants dwell in the wastelands created when their ancestors burned much of the U Khaew. Although all of the Shadow is relentlessly inhospitable, this broken expanse of burnt forests and ashen plains, known as the Char, is particularly dangerous, since there is almost no food or water to be found. However, the agents of the Ten dare not enter the Char, for the fire giants, even in the depths of their madness, remember full well who was responsible for bringing down the Taint and stealing their victory. There is an uneasy peace between the hinrayya and the fire giants: although the giants are too confused and psychotic to ever be truly trustworthy, they have often joined forces with “the little ghosts” to foil the plans of the Ten. The trouble is that the fire giants have a notorious history of turning on both the hinrayya and each other, either consciously or else due to the visions of their diseased imaginations.

<p style="text-indent:.5in;tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"">Besides the fire giants and the hinrayya, all other creatures found within the Shadow are either twisted, mutated forms of normal animals, or monstrosities of utter evil. The corpses of normal creatures or people left under the Shadow will soon rise again as undead shackled to the will of the Ten. Those people who succumb to the Taint, or who deliberately seek out and swear fealty to the Ten, twist into horrors known as the “prang sai” or the “prang sai Khaew”. Their faces ruined and, in some cases, flayed by the effects of the Taint, the prang sai wear disturbingly beautiful masks of porcelain. Some of them are little more than shambling wrecks, their bodies on the verge of complete collapse from its own corruption; others have learned how to embrace the Taint, drawing an unholy vigour and health from it. All of the prang sai retain their free will, personalities, and memories, but their minds are hopelessly perverted, and they have become slaves to the Ten, even if they were dire enemies of them before the Taint took hold. Other creatures of the Taint are more bizarre: dokufu, gigantic spiders that lay eggs in living flesh and can take the shapes of impossibly aged people; mamono, skinless one-eyed shapechangers with serrated bone blades for arms; kho buang, ape-like creatures with four arms and no legs and a venomous bite, who draw sustenance from the pain of others (it is whispered that these were once the elves of the U Khaew); and yet other, even more dreadful creatures. While the undead and the prang sai are invariably agents of the Ten, most other Shadow creatures are free-willed, even if they are relatively animalistic. Many of the Shadow creatures serve the Ten nonetheless, out of fear or respect (or both), but the majority pursue their own gruesome agendas, which may or may not conflict with those of the Taint-Bringers.

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Races of the Ancient West:

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Dragons (half-dragons only in Aujiregul)

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Giants (fire, frost, death only; cloud and stone giants dwelt here, but the stone giants vanished into the east, and the cloud giants are extinct)

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Elves/half-elves

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Hinrayya [original race]

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Humans

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Kobolds

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Lizardfolk (‘Whisperers’ of the Barduy Reaches)

<p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Tengu [mysterious raven-folk; from Oriental Adventures]

<p style="text-align:center;tab-stops:center 45.0pt"> <span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"">Beyond the Sea  <p style="tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"">The following continents of Maelris are unknown to even the most advanced scientists and geographers of Kerlonna, Zresskeilt, and Lenduu. However, some researchers have deciphered the planet’s shape and calculated its approximate size, and have thus been alerted to the fact that there must be vast spans of the world unknown to them. The dragons know these regions well, but they keep their silence: they see little need in alerting the lesser races to the fact that there are yet more inhabited countries on the other side of the planet.

<p style="text-align:center;tab-stops:center 45.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"">Atk’a 

 Šalvarag 

Homeland of the orcs who came to Kerlonna, the archipelago of Šalvarag was once a majestic wilderness of fog and rain, with towering trees and strange, dangerous wildlife. According to the orcs, however, it was laid waste by the god of deceit, Hrokdai, with a great plague descending upon the land and slaying all orcs who came in contact with it. In terror, the surviving remnants of the orcs of Šalvarag fled across the Last Seas. Nobody from Kerlonna has been to Šalvarag since the flight of the orcs, so whether it is still uninhabitable is unknown.

Races of Atk’a:

Centaur

Couatls [good-hearted winged snakes]

Dragons

Elves (a winged sub-species, apparently extinct)

Orcs

Shulassakar [human-esque relatives of the couatls]

<p style="text-align:center"> The Lands of the Iron Winter 

Races of the Iron Winter:

Dragons