Fannimel

Surrounded on all sides by vast ocean, the continent of Fannimel is a wild & rugged landscape. Great plains, icy tundra, dense forests, barren deserts and scorched badlands make the wilds a dangerous place, but civilization thrives despite these conditions.   A collection of city-states have been unified under the banner of the Syrellian Empire, which has aligned itself with a radical and controlling religious group, the Envoys of Enos. The Envoys use fear to collect monthly tithes, which goes directly to the Syrellian crown (a well-known fact, though no one dares to say it publicly) and funds the Empire's expeditions and battles in the East. The capital of the Empire is located on the southwestern coast of Fannimel.   There are four immense mountains that are referred to as "The Maws". This is due to the fact that at the base of each is a massive cave entrance that leads to the Underlands, a network of caves and tunnels that many experts suspect. While these caves contain vast mineral wealth (which has led to the construction of large villages surround the entrances), they are also incredibly dangerous due to the numerous creatures that live in the caves. Mammals like cave wolves and cave bears live closer to the entrances, but deeper inside the caves live Themorae- large, centipede-like creatures with razor sharp claws. These Themorae are nearly blind, but rely mostly on their scent, hearing and heat vision to detect their prey.   The strangest thing about the Maws, however, is that occasionally a villager will wander into the caves and disappear without a trace. Most believe that the villager simply became lost or was attacked, but in rare cases people claiming to be the lost villager have shown up days later, hundreds of miles away, at the entrance of one of the other Maws. They are always in a state of madness, they always die within a days of their return, and they are always found dead with the same mysterious images & incoherent scribblings surrounding them. These notes consist of random strings of letters with strange glyphs scattering them, and the pictures are of long, thin, skeleton-like figures. Normally these would be written off as hallucinations and delirium caused by madness, but the similarities are too apparent, and the one thing that ties each note together is the last sentence written: "Beware the Veldt."   Is the Veldt a place in the Underlands? How do these missing villagers end up on the other side of Fannimel? What do the glyphs mean? All these questions are unanswered, and none would dare to venture into the Maws to find out themselves. However, lately reports of strange sounds and animals behaving strangely in the caves have become more frequent. Perhaps some kind of dark power is growing in the Underlands, or maybe it is simply stabilizing. Regardless, if the someone doesn't act soon, there won't be time to react...