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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4414117" data-attributes="member: 2205">Why did I ruin the imagery of my nice, Martian-like desert to plop a big inland sea down right smack in the middle of the action?  Pirates, of course.  The Mezzovian Sea is notoriously rife with them.  Most of them are independent scalawags, but some are privateers with letters of marque from relatively respectable city-states like Iclezza, Razina, Sènt-Andriu or others.  Some, however, come from the island nation of Carcosa.  Carcosa is a jagged group of islands huddled close together that is nearly impossible to invade.  Its shores are steep and rocky with few natural harbors.  Jungle-covered fjords make up the coastline, and nestled deep in one of these on the north shore of the largest island is the city of Terrassa, a haven of pirates, cultists and worse.  A sorcerer rules the island in name, but is rarely if ever encountered by its inhabitants.  Be that as it may, when his clanking leuitenants, steam-powered biomechanical monstrosities leading hordes of mindless automatons constructed mostly out of rotted corpses and rusted iron come a'calling, the "regular" inhabitants either flee as quickly as they can, or do exactly what they're asked.As dark as the reputation of Carcosa is, the blasted plateau of Leng, many miles to the north of the Mezzovian Sea, is perhaps even more cursed a name.  The inhabitants of the areas near Leng are twisted and cursed by the very presence of its malevolent evil; first their eyes turn black and empty, like those of a shark.  With time, even their skin and hair turn as dark as obsidian and their flesh shrivels and dessicates like that of a mummy, while the poor souls still live.  At this point, either their neighbors kill them or they slink off up onto the plateau itself, where they become mindless cannibals, their only commerce with other living creatures to gnaw on their freshly killed bones.  Rumors abound of a society amongst these savage beasts, though---capable of returning their cunning and intelligence, if not their humanity.  Ash clouds hover perpetually over the plateau, and the dead ground is covered with gray ash and frost.  The only thing that can grow here are fungus and other lifeforms that survive by feeding on decay and death.  Some of these grow to enormous size, forming massive mushroom forests deep on the plateau.  It is unknown what mechanism could possibly cause this ash cloud to remain in place.  However, from beyond the plateau itself, the more clever stargazers have determined that a single bright star remains in place over the plateau, a star that doesn't move like the rest of the night sky but remains always directly overhead.  It can't be seen through the ash cloud, of course, but from just beyond the ash cloud, it can be spotted low on the horizon by the sharp-eyes, especially if they're looking through a spyglass.More still to come...Comments, as always, welcome.</blockquote>

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