Aetrimonde

Today, I’m going into more detail about the Unclaimed Reaches, homeland of Ipki Chainbreaker, the goblin Inquisitor who I’m building as a fourth sample character. The Unclaimed Reaches aren’t one of Aetrimonde’s major polities (in fact, they’re not even a minor polity…), so they won’t be getting the full two-parter treatment like the Dwarven Federation and Caras Elvaren. But there’s plenty of material here to flesh out Ipki’s background…

As a reminder, there’s a poll up to determine what kind of Divine magic Ipki will be using. If you haven’t voted yet, let me know your preference now!

Geography

The Unclaimed Reaches stretch from the southern borders of Waystone and Caras Elvaren, all the way to the southern tip of the continent. Most of the Reaches is arid prairie, with the exception of a few mountain ranges, which are instead arid and rocky. The soil is moist enough for some crops near rivers, but for the most part the land is better suited to ranching than farming. The land grows drier and less fertile toward the south, partly from mere reasons of climate, but also because of the ecological devastation surrounding the ruins of Gobol Karn.

History

As the name helpfully explains, the Reaches are unclaimed by any major or minor polity, for the simple reason that there isn’t much of anything worth claiming. Which isn’t to say that the Reaches are a wasteland: they just aren’t productive enough for any of the major polities to have put in the work to settle and build them up. The soil is just a little too poor and too arid to make for good farming, the mineral resources are too dispersed and low-grade, and what timber there is is sparse and slow-growing.

The Reaches were settled slowly and haphazardly over time, and mostly by people who were fleeing somewhere else and didn’t have any ties back home. This led the Reaches to become a patchwork of tiny, isolated villages, without much in the way of roads or other infrastructure tying them together. The only towns worth speaking of formed near mineral deposits or stands of timber, and lasted only as long as the resources did before turning back into ghost towns once the deposits were mined out or the timber clear-cut.

While there are still no serious plans for the major polities to annex the Reaches, the invention of the railroad and the semaphore have allowed mercantile concerns to take a more active hand in the region in recent years. During the Wars of Steel and Smoke, the Kingdom of Waystone constructed a railway line into the northern Reaches for logistical purposes (and to deter southwestern expansion by the Novan Imperium…). After the wars, the railway was sold off cheaply to Coastal and Southern Rail, which now makes a tidy profit carrying livestock, ore and timber from the northern Reaches to Waystone’s markets, and some manufactured goods back. As a monopoly, Waystone and Southern charges whatever rates the market will bear–meaning that the Reaches’ small ranchers, miners and loggers see very little of the benefit from selling their product in parts north–but larger conglomerates, based in Waystone and other major polities, can negotiate for bulk rates, and as such have been buying up land and setting up business in the northern Reaches for some years now.

Political Situation and Current Events

Most of the Unclaimed Reaches has no politics beyond the extremely local level: outlying villages and small towns aren’t well-connected enough to have common political interests. There is some political activity in the northern Reaches, particularly around Hayward’s Point, where the rail line from Waystone ends. Here, there are efforts at putting together some kind of cohesive political entity that can counterbalance the economic power of the railway and other foreign interests–efforts that said interests spend a fair amount of money thwarting.

Further south, the situation is more dire: villages and towns are even more sparse, and by and large they must stand or fall on their own. The southern Reaches are at the mercy of raids by goblin tribes and outlaw gangs alike–and in recent years, there has been a rise in foreign “robber barons” employing mercenaries to forcibly seize control of productive land, creating company towns where the locals’ only options are to work for the company at pitiful wages, or be turfed out with only what they can carry with them. In many cases, the distinction between robber baron and outlaw gang is very narrow…and there are rumors out of the far south of the Reaches that some robber barons aren’t content with just wage slavery.

One industry only possible in the lawless southern Reaches is Karnish tomb-robbing: the ruins of Gobol Karn and its outposts are rumored to still contain some of the ancient goblins’ alchemical secrets, even after centuries. And indeed, every once in a while some expedition or band of adventurers comes back from the ruins with some scrap of papyrus, sample of alchemical goo, or unnatural hybrid animal that proves valuable to scholars. (Plus, well-preserved goblin cultural artifacts fetch a good price to the right kind of collector…) So, the expeditions continue, and a few Reacher towns on the routes to and from the ruins do a healthy trade in supplies for adventurers planning to risk their lives in pursuit of treasure.

Adventure Hooks

• (A classic, with apologies to Akira Kurosawa…) A contact, old friend, or distant relative of one of the PCs sends them a desperate plea: their village in the Unclaimed Reaches is being extorted by bandits, and it won’t be long before they can’t keep up the payments. They need some adventurers willing to train the village militia and help take on the bandits.
• The PCs are contracted by a merchant house to guard a caravan that will carry supplies and workers to their mine in the southern Reaches, and bring back the load of ore mined there. The merchant house’s factor neglected to mention that these “workers” would be wearing manacles. Are the PCs daring and clever enough to take on the entire mining camp full of slavers, and the robber baron backing them, or will they have to content themselves with merely freeing the slaves from the caravan?
• A prospector staggers back to Hayward’s Point bruised and bloodied, and before falling into a coma recounts how he dug into what turned out to be a sealed, intact Karnish ruin…unleashing some kind of creature that had been sealed in there. Shortly after, farmers from outlying steads begin fleeing into town or going missing, with the survivors telling tales of strange creatures. It might be time for a good old-fashioned monster hunt…

Campaign Hooks

• The PCs resolve to build the Unclaimed Reaches, or at least a part of it, into an actually prosperous, free, and safe nation. Needless to say, this will require them to fend off bandits, make peace with the local goblin tribes, break the power of foreign interests…and do all of this while retaining the support of the Reacher locals that they’re nominally doing this for.