Ironfang Invasion: Setting Information

[Zero Prime]

Nirmathas at a Glance

Nirmathas is a frontier land of rugged individuality and  personal freedom. Repeatedly settled, lost, and settled  again over Avistan’s history, it is a place that has varyingly  played homeland to dwarves, fey, orcs, elves, and humans, all of whom have left traces behind in the forms of  strange land formations, crumbling ruins, magical scars, and long-forgotten dungeons. The modern people of the region are largely descended from Chelish and Taldan settlers, and even though this newest effort to take the region began over 200 years ago, much of Nirmathas—especially the Fangwood Forest—remains uncharted and uninhabited by modern humans.

Modern Nirmathi are notoriously difficult to govern, so much so that today they exist less as a nation and more as a collective of people with a common grudge against Molthune. The national capital of Tamran issues few edicts, rarely collects taxes, and generally leaves each community to govern and protect itself. Most social support is voluntary—a well-off farmer or town may offer grain to neighbors suffering through a bad harvest, but the state itself has no resources to provide the same.  While this freedom attracts many new settlers to the region and means that every copper earned lands straight in a laborer’s pocket, it also leaves settlements more vulnerable to bandit attacks, illness, and bad weather than most other communities in Avistan. In Nirmathas, every citizen lives or dies by her own fortunes and the generosity of those around her.

• Encarthan Coast: Of all the nations that border Lake Encarthan, Nirmathas boasts the smallest and least developed coastline. The area, known for its thick marshes and rocky outcroppings, supports several stubborn fishing settlements, but only the river deltas of the Tourondel and Marideth rivers offer safe ports for anything larger than barges or fishing skiffs. Alder, gum, and willow trees grow in thick stands among the swamps, and the only real industry beyond subsistence fishing is a cottage-level manufacturing of papyrus for scrolls and books. Because the swamps preserve just about anything that sinks into their muck, many valuable finds and ancient dangers from Nirmathas’s past—including undead bog mummies—have been dredged from the mud by careless anglers.  The coastline is sparsely populated. Tamran, Nirmathas’s largest town and nominal capital, anchors the southern edge of the region, and the next most sizable settlement—Fort Faelon—is little more than a ruined, marsh-choked, Taldan fortress hosting a rotating trader’s town barely a thousand strong.  The Molthuni navy blockades all water traffic to and from Nirmathas, leaving the nation heavily dependent on smugglers and blockade-runners to conduct any trade.
  
  

• Fangwood Forest: Nirmathas’s beating heart is the massive, primeval forest that dominates most of its terrain. The Fangwood provides building materials, food, and shelter, and the vast majority of the nation’s citizens dwell in small villages along the edges of or just within the verdant masses of oak, pine, maple, and spruce. Many strange ruins lie hidden in the unexplored depths, from both an ancient, unidentified empire and more recent, failed attempts by humans to settle deeper within the forest. Reclusive communities of druids have far more luck in exploring the forest’s depths, and maintain a variety of ancient stone monoliths throughout the region where they conduct rituals. Those Nirmathi who dwell within the Fangwood are generally hunters, woodcutters, or some combination of both, but enjoy the independence such a difficult but fertile land offers.
  
  

• Hollow Hills: Heavy clouds that blow in from Lake Encarthan drop all the rain they have to give within a hundred miles of the coast, leaving a rugged and dry stretch of land between the Fangwood and the Mindspin Mountains named for its countless natural caverns and abandoned mines—many dating back to the Age of Anguish, and still haunted by those bygone horrors.  Rolling, stone-capped hills separate the region into widely different valleys, from verdant wonderlands to rocky, scrabbly wastelands. Towns in this area support themselves by mining veins of iron, copper, quartz, and gold, as well as light farming. The rough terrain generally protects locals from Molthuni interest. Conversely, the isolation leaves the peoples of the Hollow Hills more vulnerable to bandit activity and the monstrous predators like bulettes, harpies, and wyverns that also call the region home, and the towns of the Hollow Hills are some of the few settlements in Nirmathas that rely on walls for defense rather than fleeing into the hostile wilderness. The largest towns in the region, Skelt in the north and Longshadow in the south, survive primarily by smelting and shipping their smaller neighbors’ hard work to Tamran or the Molthuni front.
  
  

• Mindspin Mountains: Marking Nirmathas’s western border, the Mindspin Mountains offer a thankfully daunting border between the young nation and ancient, shadowy Nidal. With so many natural caverns here connecting to the Darklands below, the mountains host a variety of terrible and rare creatures as well as countless orc and dwarven ruins from long before humanity’s claim to the region. While treacherous, the Mindspin Mountains boast rich deposits of many metals and minerals—including some whose presence in the volcanic range makes little sense—and a number of prospecting companies and boomtowns dot the eastern slopes.  
  
  

• Nesmian Plains: In a more community-minded nation, the Nesmian Plains would be considered the “breadbasket” region thanks to its gentle hills, fertile plains, and light forests, but the lack of taxation or infrastructure instead makes this region a well-fed but poorly defended corner of Nirmathas. Stretching from the Marideth River south to the prairies around Kraggodan, the Nesmian Plains are frequently invaded by Molthune or targeted by the southern nation’s infamous monster legions. Nesmian natives simply fall back, often burning their homes and crops when they see enemies approach, and return after the area’s bitterly cold winters drive ill-supplied foreigners out. The jagged gullies and ravines that crisscross the plains provide ample hiding places for anyone who knows them, and a number of monstrous races—especially goblinoids and troglodytes—use these features to their own advantage, preying upon human farms and then falling back into easily defended hideaways. While the Nesmian Plains provide little of the lumber that makes Nirmathas famous and lack the mineral wealth of the Hollow Hills and Mindspin Mountains, its green fields require little attention to produce bountiful harvests, and the grasslands support not only wild populations of aurochs, but also large herds of domesticated goats and sheep. Because of the constant danger of invasion, villages of the Nesmian Plains rarely grow larger than a few dozen to a hundred people, but the humble town of Phaendar lies far enough from the border that its citizens have rarely needed to abandon and fall back into the wild, and thus has become a small but important trading center alongside the only major crossing of the Marideth River for 50 miles in any direction.
  
  

• Tourondel Marches: The Tourondel Marches surround the Tourondel River and line Nirmathas’s northern border with Lastwall. The Marches contain Nirmathas’s oldest permanent settlements, some of which were established during the Shining Crusade a thousand years ago. Crumbling castles and pocked battlefields from that era still scar the woods and hills, hosting a rotating population of orcs, goblinoids, and undead that prey on locals. Much of the region cuts through the central Fangwood Forest, but heavy settlement and traffic along the Tourondel River over the past millennium has pacified most of the dangers common deeper within the woods. Thanks to both the river and the relatively open border with Lastwall, the people of Tourondel consider themselves Nirmathas’s canniest traders, and share more philosophies in common with their lawful northern neighbors than with more free-spirited fellow Nirmathi to the south, but thanks to hard winters and annual spring floods on the river, many Marcher towns still find themselves on their own for at least half the year.