The Flan is littered with ruins of past civilizations. Of which there are *a lot*. Practically every town and city is built on the ruin of something or another, and you'd be hard pressed to find a mountain that hasn't been hollowed out for a dungeon.
You won't find any large sprawling forests on the Flan south of the Highlands, as they've all long ago been cut down. Instead, there are a fair amount of smaller woodlands peppering the lands, each one protected by a some local supernatural power or another. The Highlands supply most of the Flan's wood, as the Highland lords long ago brokered a pact with the Parliament of Trees, the group of local guardian powers--they can cut freely as long as they follow certain protocols and the land taken to farming is kept within strict limits. This has kept the Highlands more sparsely populated than the lands in the south and you won't find many farms close to the forests.
The last big civilization to rise on the Flan were the Netheril, a human magocracy. They dominated the entire Flan as well as Thabos, the lands West of the Flan, for over a thousand years.
The Netheril Empire collapsed from a mixture of internal strife and war. A lot of factions at the time were expecting the Netheril to self-destruct in apocalypse-level shenanigans, but it just kinda crumbled in on itself with a whimper.
It was the turmoil following the fall of the Netheril that opened the door for the Giant takeover.
The Flan hasn't really seen the rise of a big powerful state since, although there have been a few attempts down in the Lowlands.
We had a session last night. It was short, less than three hours of play, and we had problems focusing on the game in front of us, so we kept going off on tangents. We were thus not able to finish off G1 as expected, but it produced a few tidbits on the wider world:
After defeating the Giants, the Moon Elves retreated back to their habitats while the Humans and Halflings were effectively stripped of their culture, leaving the Dwarves as the main cultural influence of the era. The Flan is pseudo-medieval-germanic in style, whose trappings were adopted from the Dwarves. In the centuries since, each locality has developed their own spin on the style, of course, but there is a clear Dwarven feel to the Flan.
The same goes for moral attitudes on the Flan, which are very tribal and somewhat nordic-lutheran--a person's moral character is measured in his work-ethic and his dedication to his "clan" (whatever form the "clan" may take), and a person is expected to project a demeanor of exaggerated sense of honor yet personal humility. Any extreme gluttony or decadence is frowned upon. There is some sense of gender roles, but more as a default expectation than anything enforced by society, while sexual attitudes are liberal as long as any shenanigans are kept private.
There is a certain pseudo-roman-renaissance strand of style among the more wealthy of the bourgeoisie, which is a fashion callback to Old Netheril.
Flannish Common is a form of Old Netheril fused onto a simplified Dwarven grammatical framework, peppered with words from various local dialects.
The greatest known wizard on the Flan is The Great Albus, Mayor-for-Life of Golem City, headmaster of the School of Conjuration and President of the Flannish Beard Appreciation Society, the highest authority on Beards on the Flan. He's very old, very powerful--both in the arcane arts and politically--and wields a beard to die for.
The best ale is from Blöde, which is the only big city in the Highlands. Blöde is pretty far south, though, and it's true Highlanderness is commonly disputed among the people of the Barrier Kingdoms.1
But the best and most expensive wines come from the Savage Coast, the southernmost part of the Flan (south of the Lowlands and the Steppes).
The Savage Coast's Freeholds are seen as the epitome of crime, corruption, gluttony and moral decay in the rest of the Flan. The Freeholds were never taken by the Giants--relatively few giants ventured this far south--so they still retain a lot of their Netheril identity and it's more liberal, gluttonous and decidedly non-Dwarven attitudes.
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1 The Highland-snobbery was all provided by the players, who went on a rant among themselves against those wimpy southerners with their nuanced beers and puny weather.
Giants consider Humans and Halflings to be absolutely delicious. In fact, it was the main reason for their original invasion, which they call the Great Feast. They never really expected it to last forever, but it was still totally worth it while it lasted.
Human-variants like Tieflings and Aasimars are considered a delicacy--like something marinated in exotic and rare spices.
They do not eat Dwarves or Elves, though. Giants consider Dwarves their kin, albeit a puny idiot cousin to be rightly bullied and ridiculed, but still... you don’t eat kin. Elf meat, meanwhile, is distasteful to Giants and rumored to make you fart glitter.
The younger Giants have grown up with the stories of the Great Feast and are eager to get their own, even though the Flan is currently not in the same fragile state that allowed the previous Giant takeover.
