Cities

• Rotham is not the largest or most populous city in the world, but it is the most powerful. Teeming with immigrants from around the country and the world, tens of thousands throng the slums hoping for work at the great arms factories. It has become the most violent city in Zachon, dueling as much of a pastime as gambling and whoring. It is the center power of the Grand Duchy of Rotham.

• Arbalea was the seat of power in Zachon until the king was unseated in a civil war. Now, the city is known for crumbling castles and monastaries, a picturesque fossil of Old Zachon. The old dynasty House Sodergren still haunts their vast castle, though the King of Zachon no longer has much power outside of the walls.

• Lynnet was the last bastion of Artisian occupation lasting hundreds of years. While they now swear fealty to the Duchess of Rotham, it was only after fierce resistance. They are a very different people, with different outlook, values, and language.

• Cairn is an industry town, but once held religious significance in ancient times. Built near great henges, it is now the center of Zachon's logging industry. In an age of economic hardship few care to preserve the old stones, though some still come to study them.

• Balta is centered around ship-building and fishing, though one of the most populated places in the country the cold climate keeps the city foggy and depressed. A few brothels and bars amounts to this city's cultural life. Across the strait is Fort Skyver, the headquarters of Zachon's north fleet.

• Algern is a conquered city, once a republic modeled off Sladost. Economic reliance and a complacent elite keeps seperatist movements at bay, though independence is far from forgotten. Like most of the southern coast of the Crater Sea, there are rich clay desposits along river banks. It is these desposits from which Algern was made, an orange city of bricks.

Geographic Regions

• The Blackwater is a short but broad river draining from the Tyrsfell mountains. The river runs slow and muddy as it meanders across sparse grassland and fetid swamps, through the driest region of the country. The soil here is poor and hard, and agriculture is limited to the hardiest of plants, but it is industry and navigable rivers that bring human settlement. Close to Rotham, the waters become oily and polluted, bereft of nearly all life.

• The inhabitants of the rocky Stranger Islands speak old Artisian, not Zachonian, the remnants of an ancient occupation and invasion. They swear fealty now to Rotham, but such was not always the close. These islands were once home to pirate fleets. The great star fortress called The Shield protects Rotham from direct naval invasion, though these defenses have not been tested in many years.

• Few things grow on the salty, weather-beaten Codfish Islands and so fishing is the most prominent industry here. Cod is the currency of the land, and those who aren't fisherman man the Western Fleet based at Scarpoint.

• A narrow strait divides Skyver from the rest of the Zachon, and the coastline here is so treacherous there are more lighthouses here than the rest of Zachon combined. The island is populated mostly by shepherds and sailors of the rugged Northern Fleet.

• Scalland are nearly uninhabited islands north of Zachon, their control contested in a war with Sladost many years ago. Glaciers have pushed many of the old fortifications into the sea, so the islands are defended from Northpoint. That haunted land is home to an asylum, one of the first and oldest of its kind.