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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felix" data-source="post: 1011178" data-attributes="member: 3929">The Cracked IceThe Cracked Ice is the name of the northernmost continent as well as the name of the vast expanse of permanently frozen tundra in the northern regions of that land. People still eek out a living on the tundra, and a few coastal cities exist as well. Their technology is geared towards one thing: keeping warm. Fortunately, many large mammals survived the Fall and filled the ecosystem with enough fur and hide to keep the indigenes well supplied.Humans are not indigenous to this land; they came as part of colonization efforts made by the pre-Fall empires. The first came on ships, so they have retained something of a shipbuilding sector, although it usually makes fishing boats unfit for long voyages. (Icebergs roam south during the summer and many rivers freeze in the wintertime. Most of the population came through portals, promised a new life by the empires; it was an attempt to simultaneously acquire more resources and remove the less desirable elements from their home cities. It worked fairly well, the mines were started, and exportation of goods was about to commence with the building of a return portal, but the Fall rudely interrupted that.During the Fall many mines were lost and coastal cities were flooded. But not all was lost. To support the local population without a drain of food on the mainland the first settlers were farmers and hunters. They set up a very successful irrigation system pulling the runoff from the mountains southward where agriculture was feasible. Many of those farmlands survived, if not all of them, and they feed the locals.After the farmers came the miners and engineers to delve the virgin mountains for gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, among others. What they found was better: truesilver. Stronger than tempered steel and lighter than tin, truesilver became the status symbol back in the Empire as wizards were tasked to teleport some back. It was also terribly difficult to forge. The dwarves were intrigued by this new metal and many volunteered to go to this wild land to shape truesilver for the glory of their clan, and for dwarves. They founds something completely different under the frozen mountains. (more on that later…)The colonization process had gotten underway successfully. The exploitation was just beginning. Skirmishes between the Imperial colonies, often more savage than the fights on the mainland, had flared up, each trying to find larger veins of ore. The Fall changed everything.No one had crossed to the Cracked Ice by boat in 200 years. The portals into the lands didn’t function. The portals out hadn’t been finished. The repeated earthquakes racked the world and buried the mines under the mountains. Icebergs the size of which had never been heard of were seen drifting south having been freed from the arctic drifts. Irrigation systems were damaged. Competing colonies blamed each other, and they all blamed magic. And yet, they survived. Hunting bands were formed and sent north to return with all the food they could find. Merchants previously hawking forged goods now trafficked in dung: the only thing that would burn in a virtually forestless land.Over time, the old ties to the Empires were forgotten, although the animosity between the newly arisen cities was not. The ingenuity of the mining engineers was well repaid; towns developed recessed into the ground where they were safe from the arctic winds that blew down from the Cracked Ice. (This also saved them from hunting for wood to build their dwellings.) After a few hundred years stonemasons began quarrying the mountains for stones with which to build, although only the dwarves had the courage to begin delving the mountains to look for the old buried dwarven mines. Only recently have these searches produced any fruit. Truesilver has been found. And contact with… something dwarven… has been made.</blockquote>

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