Sea of Soot

The Sea of Soot is a black expanse of powder-fine ash that lies west of the Hellforge Peaks and south of the Zuhlaut Mountains. Legend has it that this once-fertile land was long ago the home of the mighty Zuhl Imperium which was destroyed by the Blight of Black Fire.

Very little is known of this region and the little that is known of this place comes from the songs of bards and a few ancient texts. There are many tales of explorers and adventurers heading off to find a path through the mountains to this place of legend. But there are no credible stories of any that have found their way beyond the Hellforge Peaks and returned. Of those that attempted to cross the mountains and lived to share their accounts -- their stories are much the same: the Hellforge Peaks are impossibly rugged and teaming with hideous and hungry abominations.
The descriptions of the Sea of Soot considered by many to be the most credible come from the Sage Tyraevon Galnaris in his scrolls Accounts of the Twin Calamities completed about a decade after the Blight of Black Fire was said to have occurred. The texts, written in ancient Zuhloise, compile the first-hand accounts of 27 survivors of the legendary disaster who found their way to the eastern lands via a system of caverns beneath the Hellforg Peaks. The entrance to these caverns supposedly lies in the Hold of the Sealords, but the numerous expeditions that have searched for the entrance to the caverns described have come up empty.
Galnaris's scrolls describe a land that was scorched completely, leaving behind a fine-powdered soot that hot, fierce winds churn into choking clouds. The Sea of Soot is said to be a land of intensely bright sun and boiling heat -- bereft of water and scarce of life. At the edge of the sea there are rocky and mostly-barren islands of refuge. In some places, small patches of vegetation can be found crowded around scant sources of water. These harsh shores of the Sea of Soot lie near the foot of the Hellforge Peaks where the infrequent rains that fall in the mountains collect and channel water. Small settlements of survivors are hinted at in one of Galnaris's scrolls.
About a third of Accounts of the Twin Calamities is devoted to describing many bizarre changes to the nature of magic that seem to have resulted from the Blight of Black Fire. Catastrophic side-effects, deadly backfires, mana deadzones, and roving wild mana storms are rumored to plague the lands in and around the Sea of Soot. Along with numerous descriptions of predatory, mutated abominations Galnaris's texts paint the Sea of Soot to be a deadly-dangerous and inhospitable wasteland.