The Red Dominion →
Golden-Era Talanese: the crown land, red for its iron
Sumendar's long western coast, the Golden Empire's old crown heartland, and a homeland won back for a people who mostly live at sea. The emperor's fleet sailed from Saegate at the breach of 1321, and for eight centuries its people were the Hafra's carriers; from 2135 they came home and broke their hulls into ship-towns roofed with upturned boats, black isiler and pit-red. Every house is entered on a ship's muster roll, rank is office, and the Admiralty rules at Saegate under the Admiral. The frontier runs through the Vaota toward Hyseat, the sealed city.
Naval stratocracyThe Ship-TownsThe Quarters
Burdineyja
Basque burdin (iron/metal) + Icelandic eyja (islands), "Iron Islands"
To be defined in the future.
TBD
Haraour Eliza →
Court Tongue: the church of the valley water
The Goblin heartland: a ring of mountains closing a valley that is one great garden, planted before any record and gone wild, most of it deadly unless prepared right. Guests walk in through the Alaloa, a day of tunnel beside the river from the palace Jaurei at Pukawai, eat at the inner mouth, and float out asleep. The keepers of the record at the Eliza clear the Garden one plant at a time and certify its cooks; the Paapuka holds the gate. Every table keeps the cook's bite.
Gate crownThe GardenGoblin heartland
No Man's Land →
Plain Talanese, meant literally
A country of fires that start. Ruled by no one: ore-strikes become rush-camps, and the camps that stay become cinders, communes that burn whatever looks like rule at the Apprentice's Fire each midwinter. Houses Eldara. The Ash-Binder broke out of its badlands in 2524 and fell there in 2527; its slag, bindstone, has drawn the greatest rush the country has seen.
Houses EldaraUngovernedThe Cold Furnace
Order of Steam →
Modern English (kingdom-guild hybrid)
Industrial kingdom-guild hybrid controlling the volcanic belt's manufacturing. No noble bloodlines, no divine patron, run by elected councils of master craftspeople and engineers. Volcanic-powered manufactories produce Arcanotech at a scale no other region matches: Magitrains, airship engines, regulated heavy machinery. The Order grew up around an Elden-tech excavation uncovered at the end of the Dark Era. It did not invent Arcanotech (the Lost-Era kingdoms had been reverse-engineering Elden ruins for centuries, and the Golden Empire was very good at it), but the Order brought industrial scale and the continental rail network: the Order invented the Magitrain and remains its main producer. House Eisenhart is the highest-prestige dwarven engineering lineage within the Order.
KingdomIndustrialMagitech heart
Tahu Tangata →
Reahi: the burning people, the kin people, or the people of the senior line
The great plain of Sumendar's south-east, and an old people who renew their land with fire. Each field keeps its own clock: farmed until a neighbouring house's elder reads the ground tired, then sown with puahi, the fire-plant, and burned on a burn-night, when the district's kapa whirls the singing purehua and carries the fire across the field at a walking pace. Two rulers sit at the Huipapa in Ahika: the Tahu for the ground and the Kaiahi for the fire. The country feeds Eldara by rail and sells slowgold, the oil that burns gold.
DiarchyThe BurnEldara's granary
Dragon's Reach →
The site where the mothership reached Talan
Capital of Dragon civilisation on Talan, the city built from the largest surviving piece of an intergalactic mothership that broke apart in atmosphere ~4000-4500 years ago. Civic life runs on the purist–pragmatist debate over what the Gods'-Era gods stripped from them (immortality) and whether it can be recovered. Age-weighted vote tilts purist. Cordial-formal / complicated-practical relations with the Order of Steam.
Dragon CapitalShip-BuiltPurity-Seekers