White Barrens

The White Barrens are a stretch of sparsely-occupied badlands in northern Ardheim, between Dreihaus and the central Grey Country, and the White Country administered from Weissgard. In the days of the God Queen it was a part of the north and the domain of the White Baron, who was said to have populated it with monsters created by his experiments.
A long road through the Barrens connects Dreihaus and the White Country. This road and the land around it is known as the Corridor, a narrow strip of something approximating safety and civilisation. Fortified towns and pickets - protective pallisades where travellers can camp with some shelter from hostile intentions - provide waystations along the road, and do their best to protect travellers and control the Corridor. In the south, Stoneholt sits in the adminstrative jurisdiction of Dreihaus, while Whitewatch represents the extent of Weissgard's direct influence in the north. In the centre of the Corridor, Darkstadt is an independent town with ambitions of creating a fourth major adminstrative region covering the Barrens. In addition, a thriving settlement has grown up around the Fourth Picket, north of Darkstadt.
To the east of the Corridor lie the rolling hills and woods of the Woldland, a wild region, home to many bandits and outlaws, in particular a sub-culture of halfling raiders who bridled at the social pressure to abandon the road. While green and lush, much of the vegetation is tough scrub grass, and the Woldland makes for poor farming and hard grazing. Around the towns there are efforts to cultivate the Wold, although many of these are in fact drug farms, rather than arable land.
While the Woldland is hard, the land between the Corridor and the Spine is pure murder. The Fellmire is a mixture of rocky outcrops and low-lying swamp. It contains some of the most valuable mines in Ardheim, and by extension in the Sacred Republic, but also the highest concentration of monsters, including trolls and feral gnolls, and more undead than anywhere outside Zeryskaia. It is largely unpopulated, with the exception of fortified mining communities.

Type

Badlands