Bowl of Waves

Imagine a vast bracing wind tracing across a world of unending sea. The wind blows dust, nourishing rain and undeniable storms, enriching and ravaging this world by turns. Caught in these blowing torrents are adventuring sailors and merchants, explorers and marauders. These brave souls challenge the unknowable expanse of ocean, with its unpredictable tides and lurking denizens. Even upon a fresh shore, the danger does not end. This world is home to quarrelsome states, kingdoms and empires, each with exacting customs and ambitious designs upon one another. Traders and travellers be ware. This is the Bowl of Waves, and whether you depart from the glittering shores of the Feathers, an archipelago of isolated but fertile islands or the heavily settled bluffs of the Blistered Continent in the south you can't help but be drawn toward's Oro's eye, a great island in the shape of a broken circle surrounding a smaller twin, its rising mountain home to one of the wonders of the world, the Pupil of the World. This vast urban complex is the source of all higher technology and craftsmanship, centre of scholarship and former capital to a vast empire spanning across the entirety of Oro's Eye, a land mass several weeks sail from South to North, and even longer from North to West. Such grandeur is long in the past. Oro's Eye is now home to numerous powers, some great, some less so. The two great powers are the Zoba in the south, an empire in her own right, ruled by a monarch known as the Glorious Seer. This Queen commands vast resources of gold and copper, her cities are teeming with craftsmen casting cannon and haqubs for her armies and her aristocrats ride clad in fine armour at the flanks of her force, astride horses, elephants and rhinos. Zoba pushes out in every direction, grinding her rivals under hoof. As she does so wealth continues to flow into her high stone capital, a miraculous soaring acropolis of unmortared granite. To the north and on the opposite side of the Inner Sea and Pupil from Zoba looms the ever expanding Kibel Gansarkate, an unpredictable revolutionary power. Ruled over by the Kibel a nomadic dessert people who have pushed themselves to the forefront in their world of dessert and ocean trade, and subjugated the rich cities of the Coasts and Rivers. Both these powers now eye the still impressive City of the Pupil, a deeply splintered population no longer able to resist outside interference. On the periphery of this rivalry are the Pelrai, the Fdovecali Highlanders, the Fierce Principates and numerous independent towns and cities eager to avoid being the next to be devoured by these circling sharks. Beyond the island more distant powers watch this balance of power hungrily, at first opportunity they may reach out to settle ancient scores.