Introduction to the Atlas

In this section, we’ll just present a listing of all of the important cities and towns in the Basin, and a few that are a little off the beaten path. We'll also include details about noteworthy landmarks, historical sites, geographical features and the like, to help add depth and flavor to your gaming experience. Feel free to use all of this, or none of it, or anything in between, to shape, guide and season your own games in the Candle’Bre world.

Before we take a closer look, a few words about the Basin in general are in order. The Basin runs about 750 miles from north to south at its widest point, and spans some 1500 miles across, east to west, which makes it close, but not quite about half the size of the continental United States. It’s a big area, to be sure, but it is also a vast prison. To this day, no way has been found across, through, or under the mountains that define and enclose the region.

Major Roads

There are only four major roadways in the entire Basin. Building and maintaining roads is incredibly expensive and with the Kingdom splintered as it is, it's all the existing political powers can do to maintain the roads that the Kings of Candle'Bre built. The major roads are as follows:

The King's Road: This is the road that basically follows the contours of the Loch, connecting all the major cities on its shores. It is the single most important road in the Kingdom and all of the powers that touch the Loch share the responsibility of maintaining it.
The Westermarch: This road leaves the Sister Cities and follows the course of the Silver River to the west. The road, and the Silver River itself were the twin means by which the West was settled.
The North Reach Road: This road begins on the north side of the Ferry, and winds through Trentare , to The City of Cerilon and Parthia .
The Old South Road: This is the road that connects the city of Suth with the rest of the Basin. Since the fall of the Eye of Kaylaar, many of the towns along this road, especially where it tracks close to The Tangles, have been destroyed, reducing them to sites where well armed caravans stop for the night.

Most recently (and most famously), just after the Great War ended, Jack Ramsey, one of the more colorful and notable heroes of the war, attempted to cross to the far side of the mountains at the point where the Dark God had “pierced the veil,” supposedly creating an opening that would allow one to escape the prison that the mountains represent. Decades have passed since his departure, and Jack Ramsey has yet to return. For more than two hundred years, the people of the Basin spread and settled aggressively, creating a sprawling Kingdom that came to encompass the whole of the Basin. Unfortunately, given their scant numbers relative to the size of the territory, much of it was only lightly and nominally held. The onset of the Great War saw a massive reverse migration, with vast numbers of people living in the outlying areas fleeing en masse back toward the more densely populated and relatively safer area around the Loch. The coming of the Eye of Kaylaar and the sudden arrival of a wide range of fantastical creatures that the people of Candle’Bre had never encountered before triggered a second wave of this reverse migration, and now, many of the outlying provinces are completely, or nearly completely devoid of human presence. There are scattered reports of odd towns and villages still trying to hold out, cut off and completely isolated at this point, but that has not been confirmed. It seems more likely that any such towns that may have existed at one point would have been long since overrun by the monsters and hostile tribes of humanoids that now call those lands home. There are a few notable exceptions or possible exceptions to this. The former province of Wyndamere, where the last King of Candle’Bre had moved his capitol to is said to have been claimed as the new Haaradan Homeland, who rule the area from the castle that King Nathanial once called home. The former province called ‘Hen’ (a derisive nickname given to it for an act of cowardice by its rulers, centuries ago) has since been claimed by a number of petty warlords that the Holy Church collectively refers to as ‘The Bandit Kingdoms, ’ and the former province of Jima, which was once a popular vacation destination for the Lords of the Realm – if any land could have survived in relative isolation, it would have been Jima given its incredibly defensible position and geographic advantages, but again, none can say for certain. No one has heard anything out of Jima for decades, and none of the current rulers can spare the manpower to mount an expedition to the province.