THE WASTED WEST
Perhaps no region inspires more terror than Midgard’s ruined western reaches, a once-verdant land permanently ravaged by the Great Mage Wars.
For centuries, tyrannical arcanists dueled over the ley lines under Midgard’s western lands. Tremendously powerful mages built and abandoned baronies and even kingdoms as the fickle ley lines shifted, and the constant magical strife among the nine rival magocracies slowly drained the life from the land. Only the bones of these cities remain today, their tumbled stones and spires covering a ravaged landscape pockmarked by acrid lakes and stunted trees, a sour, magic-blasted land devoid of normal life.
This is not the whole of the magocracies’ legacy, however. Worst of the surviving relics are the colossal, unimaginable alien creatures summoned during the war’s desperate final years. They now slowly sleepwalk across the horizon, held outside of time by the spells that finally halted the wizards’ eldritch arms race.
Violent, rag-wrapped dust goblins, their minds obsessed with the artifacts of past days, haunt the blighted ruins and salvage lost items of power. Weary pilgrims plod cautiously over the Bone Road to the Seat of Mavros while trying to avoid aberrant horrors. Undead wizards work in crumbling towers to awaken slumbering monstrosities. Oasis-like forests beckon in the wasteland, only to prove more dangerous than the dunes. To the south, dead-eyed giants haunted by the ghosts of their ancestors wander the land, and deadly sentient plants clamber over a great wall to devour those who might cross them.
Somehow, civilization continues. Midgard’s most acclaimed magic users thrive in Allain. White Knights from Bourgund offer protection from the badlands. Far Barsella supports an entire economy devoted to explorations of the Western Seas.
From across Midgard come those who would pluck fame, wealth, and fortune from the shriveled corpse of these dead lands—and others who would threaten the world with magic best left undisturbed…
