Kingdom of Nidever

In the hills and mountains North of the Kingdom of Hain sits the frontier kingdom of Nidever. This cold, elevated, rocky kingdom is a dual frontier: its surface basically marchland against the Scouringwood wastes, which regularly flings monsters into Nidever's lands, and beneath the surface Nidever is a hub of tunnels and complex cavern systems with its own war against monsters. A particular kind of monster - Barhells, huge and monstrous burrowing prism-like insects that are quite territorial - is both a major export of Nidever and a constant source of violence.
From the great prism-hold of Tovelkarn, the people of Nidever fight relentlessly against their surroundings. They fetishize stubbornness and curate a standard of bravery that is almost idiotic. Violence and physical labor are praised as the ultimate expressions of mortal will, and a sense of hard-scrap homesteading individualism permeates the culture. Feudal control here is weak, largely limited to the arable valleys of the West; for it is the right of any Nidevan to choose to be their own master as long as they have the willpower and grit to set out with a blade to seize a scrap of land or ore from a dangerous world. 
Nidever is a landscape that inspires pride in many, but also fear. Great ruins dot the landscape, reminding Nidevans of a time when the Wasteland was on the run; alongside these ruined pillars are the fragments of centuries of broken homesteads and reclamations, failed counter-offensives that leave sedimentary traces across the landscape. Tovelkarn, while booming, sits at the edge of an ancient ruined city that is pierced by a great hole in the mountain - a wound that suggests that true grandeur has been had here, and has been struck dead. That ancient city has given its name to the kingdom; the very name of the realm is an aspirational return to the greatness of the ancient past. 
It is easy to fall into narratives of Falls or Reclaimed Glories, to cast Nidever as some sad dying vestige or a destined future power. But these are simply the stories that people tell themselves. The truth is that Nidever is simply a part of old Andrig that has never forgiven Stildane for being Stildane. Seek ye gold, seek ye glory, seek ye freedom. But turn away, should you seek peace.

Structure

The Kingdom of Nidever is a feudal monarchy, with rulers chosen by the House of Hugelma - a powerful noble house from the Kingdom of Hain. Beneath the monarch is a group of eight counts, each ruling over a different county. Nidever is more centralized than some feudal states; while each count has legal autonomy and powers over their province, the monarch has sweeping emergency powers if the matter is in any way related to security. These emergency powers are always active, but any temporary laws or changes enacted using them require approval by at least three counts to become permanent. Two of the eight counts are also elected or affirmed by local Nidevan communities, and operate more like local chieftains than traditional feudal lords. 
The current monarch of Nidever is King Yovin Hugelma, an arrogant yet forgiving man with little care for anyone's authority but his own - he quietly believes he is a genius, and everyone can tell. King Yovin is an extremely competent man when it comes to matter of trade, paperwork, and budgeting, who has made Nidever more interconnected with the surrounding kingdoms and far more efficient as a cohesive whole. He is also well loved by the commonfolk of the interior provinces thanks to his successful courtship of the local guilds, mining associations, and clans - he is an unorthodox man with a keen interest in building support among commoners and Burghers. The counts are not very fond of this, though they are more upset at Yovin's military failures. While Yovin is skilled with a sword, he is not skilled at military strategy; this is made worse by his tendency to study large-scale battles and grand war strategies rather than smaller-scale unit tactics (which are essential here). His obsession with "the big picture" has given him necessary perspective in administration and economy, but constantly undermines his army, and he is too proud to change tact. His frontier losses have worried many in the outskirts, where he is generally unpopular among noble and commoner alike.
King Yovin may have solid working relationships with the local nobility and commoners, but he is hopelessly blundering when he tries to get involved in politics outside Nidever. This is a problem for him, since his ultimate dream is to reshape policy for House Hugelma and even the Kingdom of Hain. Yovin is deeply envious of his cousin, Elector-Prince Olgar Hugelma, who was chosen over him to become House Prince and with whom Yovin has often disagreed; Yovin feels he has been given his role only to keep him out of court, and he may be right.
Yovin and his family have also been sent an heir to train to be the next monarch (as the title is managed by the house, not by direct inheritance). This designated heir is Lady Karnava Hugelma, a child who was (like Yovin) banished with a promotion here. Karnava is a skilled duelist with a deep curiosity for magic in all its applications and forms, who is both very stubborn and very cynical in her worldview. Her moods shift between a deep melancholy when not engaged in the things she loves, and a bubbling excitement that seems to never tire. She has been deeply desensitized towards violence since a young age, and Yovin has become concerned about her unhealthy relationship to violence since she became his ward. Karnava finds excitement and danger to be thrilling; when she is in an active mood, she seems to turn towards danger-seeking behavior out of habit. It was this that got her de-facto exiled from Hain (after she deeply humiliated her parents and almost brought shame upon the Elector-Prince). Here, however, her thrill-seeking and her fixation on the study of magic are both rewarded. Her bravery on the frontier has been noted by the counts, and she is unlikely to face resistance from them when she takes the throne one day. Whether she will become the monarch Nidever needs, or whether the ambient violence of the realm will lead her down a path of brutal militarism, is yet to be seen. Lady Karnava and King Yovin have a tense relationship at times (they both have problems listening), but they are growing closer with each passing year - she has become part of his immediate family, that seems to care for her more than her own.

Culture

Nidevan local culture is unusually individualistic and rebellious, as Andrigan cultures go. Individual stubbornness, often backed up by a willingness to fight, is the measurement of a "good Nidevan". Open displays of fear are associated with shame. If you don't like your place in life, get a sword and march off into the world to take what you want from life. Be stubborn as stone. Your word is your honor and a statement of your intent; don't bandy it about carelessly. Those who make an oath or a boast should stand by it. 
All of this comes together to create a "pioneer culture" that idealizes the homesteader and the explorer as the peak of virility and power. To live by one's own labor is romanticized and idealized. Physical labor is seen as necessary for a moral and dignified life. Living by the generosity of strangers is shameful. This is not 'pure' individualism, though. Small-scale self-sufficient communalism is a quiet part of this loud ideal individualism; it isn't a Nidevan alone that stands tall, but one with their kin and their companions. Oneself and one's labor is partially blended with one's small-scale group; an insult to one villager is an insult against all. To live by the aid of strangers is shameful, but living by the aid of your neighbors is a sign of mutual trust and shared bonds. It is the difference between a perceived one-way dependency (childlike), and mutual aid and support (adulthood). Reality rarely accommodates these clean lines between the "in group" and the "out", and this is often a source of tension (especially in the big city of Tovelkarn). 
Nidevans often see themselves as at war with the world; the underground teems with monsters, and the strange beasts crawl in from the Scouringwoods to haunt the countryside. Sometimes, wasteland-residents are romanticized into the ultimate pioneers; other times they are witches and aligned with this nebulous Enemy. It depends largely on whether the wastelanders are seen positively in the moment or not.
Nidevan food is big with either mushrooms or minerals. Some traditional dishes that are appealing to humans would be: rosti (shallow fried potato pancakes), herdsman's macaroni (pasta with potatoes, cream, cheese, onions), and beuschel (a lung and heart ragout).

History

Ancient History (200 - 700)

Nidever's history goes back to the early days of Stildane, when it was one of several major prism sanctuaries during the Cursed years of the 200s ME. The region was named after the dominant city-state of the region - the grand undercity of Nidever, sanctuary of the Andrigan prisms. In 444, the isolated kingdoms of Nidever were conquered by the Empire of Andrig, and it was integrated into the broader surface world through imperial roads and ties. The surface of Nidever was secured by imperial outposts and settlements, and the prismholds gave iron, copper, and lead. From 444 to 500, Nidever reached its peak in terms of population and general safety; there are Andrigan outposts in the wastelands North and East of Nidever that are still inhabited and have never been reintegrated into any state since. 
In the 500s, the first Kivish Scouring destroyed Andrig and plunged Nidever into chaos. The Scouring Kivish  armies never succeeded in occupying or completely seizing Nidever, but they did sweep over the surface and use Ederstone weaponry on Nidever's largest prismholds. This weaponry created a persistent monster problem and drove the previously-concentrated prism settlements to spread out into the great caverns of the great mountain. Eventually, new leadership brought the monster problem under control and crowned themselves the new monarchs of Nidever, but it would take centuries for the prism kings to truly spread their influence across these lands.
While the monarchs worked to try and restore power across the surface, their former subjects who scattered into the caves flourished as an alternative society. These prisms became mobile and nomadic in a way few prisms have embraced, and reproduced extremely quickly in what can only be described as a perceived sense of duty to settle all of the possibly infinite cavern system here. Half-prisms and half-prism hybrids, such as dwarves and kilnfolk, grew to be a larger and larger percentage of the population, as their less-resource-intense children were valued as "the vanguard of the people". While the monarchs above slowly absorbed the denser prism 'homesteads', they did not bother to tax or control the blossoming fringes - they valued the mineral wealth of expansion too much to risk it with over-management. The cavern prisms subsidized the return of Nidever to power, and allowed them to survive the Second Scouring in the mid-to-late 600s. Around the same time, the cavern prisms discovered something extraordinary: that the caverns of Nidever connected to a larger cavern network!

The Great Expansion (700 - 1100)

After the Second Scouring, the Kingdom of Nidever began to turn downwards instead of bothering with the surface - the Scouring had ended with the Kivish breaking down the last real trade routes out, and Nidever's surface settlements had taken the most damage in that war. There was a possibility of an underground road system and empire now, anyways, a world where the Kivish did not exist. But the underground towns were not eager to pay taxes or submit to authority; many wars of subjugation followed. In the late 700s, a federation of deeper townships known as the Udrenshen formed to try and oppose the "Shallows" at any cost. This federation was poorer, less organized, and less populous, but was excellent at guerilla warfare and tunnel navigation. The Udrenshen turned towards the strange ecosystem of the tunnels for an advantage, and found a secret weapon: huge insects with a biology similar to prisms that were expanding the tunnels. These insects, named the Barbossfen, produced valuable gems and mineral ore in their bodies, were great at sniffing minerals, and were great at persistently carving through stone. The Udrenshen captured as many Barbossfen as they could to farm them for ore, carve new tunnels, and generally give them an easy source of minerals while their populace went to war. The Nidevan kings immediately wanted these insects for themselves; the war escalated, and the monarchy seized as many Barbossfen as they could. Both powers escalated in production and in how they used the beasts - some were bred for aggression, tracking, and subterfuge.
The monarchs of Nidever won the war, but inherited a growing crisis down in the tunnels: some escaped Barbossfen that had made it to the tunnels had returned with friends. While these newcomers had initially been nonhostile like the first Barbossfen, they began to transform into new, armored forms accompanied by an extremely aggressive attitude. These transformed bugs had pushed into the caverns and spread their strange transformation to the "domesticated" Barbossfen. Even worse, these "domesticated" bugs began to mutate further after eating their former masters - taking on new forms with new tools. The mutants and transformed bugs became known as Barhells, and they turned the lower caverns and tunnels into a nightmare. Now, the Nidevan prisms had a monstrous foe organized against them and crawling through their infrastructure, turning the loosely-controlled network of settlements against them.
Nidever turned inwards, fortifying their position while providing periodic support to deeper townships. They focused their own soldiers mostly on their main shallow settlements, but still encouraged anyone who wanted to form expeditions into the deep to exterminate the Barhells and carve a new home for themselves. Over the 800s and 900s, these expeditions had great success - the Barhells were culled, but never fully eliminated, and some expeditions wandered even deeper into the tunnels than the old settlements went. Unfortunately, this quickly led to new problems - the expeditions went out with a mindset that unfamiliar life was inherently hostile, and found new enemies down in the tunnels. Starspawn groups and new fauna both turned on them, and the tunnels became a source of new problems. The Barhells bounced back as the deep townships struggled again. A string of misfortune combined with a civil war in the shallow kingdom in the mid-900s essentially led to monsters infesting critical roads in the deep. The townships were unable to extract them, and the Kingdom was too busy with its own civil wars to help. A new Nidevan regime in 1010 ME, after losing a terrible battle trying to reclaim the paths below, basically decided to retreat and let it "die down". The deep townships took this as a bitter betrayal, and began fortifying as well.

Reconnection (1100 - 1400)

In 1116 ME, the Kingdom of Verzavek conquered its way to Nidever and rode in to "liberate" the land. The militant isolationist regime attacked these Kobolds on sight, and were eventually conquered after Verzavek's diplomats and spies sponsored a coup in 1142 ME. Nidever became a vassal state, and trade was opened with the outside world once again. Unfortunately, right as trade was firing back up, a strain of Mageplague affecting prisms rampaged through Stildane. The shallow kingdom of Nidever witnessed mass death, as the prisms of the realm had no experience at all with handling disease in any way. Many panicked and fled downwards. The main kingdom, greatly weakened, clung to Verzavek and Hain for aid. The medical teams that responded carried a new developing new religion with them: Uvara. Nidever embraced early Uvara as a symbol of social renewal and survival; they eagerly participated in the Starlight Assembly (the official gathering intended to create a united Uvaran religious dogma) and pushed for their vision of their patron Goddess, Kragen, as the "official one". While Kragen had taken a more "harvest, war, and hierarchy" dimension in Hain representing the hard edges of the garden system, Nidevan representatives urged for a more cthonic and prism-based version that better related to their own history with her. The Nidevans were supported by prisms from across the Uvaran community, and largely prevailed - and in doing so, attracted attention and trade to the small state.
While the Shallow kingdom sought new direction in renewed trade, external ties, and Uvaran religion, the Deep townships found identity in a radical rejection of the surface. These townships had a moment of prosperity in the mid 1100s, as the Mageplague hit the Barhells worse than it hit them - as the monsters of the tunnels died from disease, the isolated townships had breathing room to expand and thrive as long as they kept a healthy distance from everyone else. As these Deep townships expanded over the 1200s, they either opened themselves up to trade (and therefore plague exposure) and declined or they doubled down on social control to try and isolate and police their members. Entering the 1300s, these radically domineering Deep-states were starting to get sick with derivative prism illnesses (which were still rather devastating with a lack of medical knowledge), but they had managed to avoid the Mageplague entirely. These states conquered the reduced townships that had gotten Mageplague, and expanded through the tunnel systems - their growing population and centuries of confined space had combined with their frontier spirit to become a series of militaristic political cults. The conquests were also a way to try and stave off the growing dissent that was consuming these tiny states from within - the more radical they became, the more their people resisted. In the late 1300s, conquest wasn't enough - the deep towns began to face rebellions and protest. Most of these states responded with violence, and some of them collapsed. But the full reckoning or reconstitution of that subterranean order was never given time to finish on its own.

Death (1400 - 1440)

In the 1400s, Nidever was destroyed. In the late 1300s, the shallow kingdom was desperately trying to deal with the annexation of their liege, the Kingdom of Verzavek, into a new Empire of Kizen; the deep townships were having their civil wars. And then Kizen exploded into Ederstone-fueled sectarian conflict, one so large that all of Northern Stildane would face the fallout. Nidever was hit particularly badly: in 1423, a Kobold known as Karlana the Mad Prophet appeared in the tunnels through an unknown means, leading a radical sect of Kobolds with horrifying warbeasts and weaponry. Karlana unleashed her most devastating weapon on Nidever - a stolen Liberated Path "Angel" that had been further tormented and grown into a beacon of flame and destruction. This was a weapons test, plainly put - the Kivish were uncertain what this would do. It was also a reading of the omens, a kind of augury-by-fire that would allow these extremists to read the entrails of the kingdom like a slaughtered pig. The Angel chose to die during this test, incinerating itself in a column of magma that tore through the mountain, leaving a perfect hole from the mountain's base to peak that exists today. This explosion incinerated Nidever's royal guard and political leadership, and carved a perfect entrance for Karlana's troops to storm the city. Nidever hadn't been expecting this at all, and most of their warriors were out in the field securing the surface. 
The Deeptownships that marched on Karlana's forces had no experience fighting Ederstone, nor were they prepared for a threat like this at all. Shallow and deep alike were blasted apart. Karlana's forces captured many and while they let many go after light experimentation as a way to keep the group complacent, many others were fused with animals from the deep tunnels to create new war machines for Karlana's "Exalted Path". Karlana's forces held Nidever's defenses against the surface armies that had returned to retake their home city. And then, in 1424, the siege was interrupted by a huge monster known as the Tarrasque. It seemed solely intent on murdering the Exalted Path at first, who made a daring escape through the tunnels (this had not been their first run-in with the beast). The liberating Nidevan army even cheered it on, climbed on it, and mistook it for an ally sent by Ustav. Once the Exalted Path was gone, it entered a rage that did not discriminate - it demolished the great city of Nidever, the largest of prism-holds, and scattered the army and civilian populace that it did not consume. For three weeks it rampaged through Nidever, alternating between a mournful weeping and moaning and sudden unprovoked bouts of aggression. And then, it was gone. Nidever was gone. 

Rebirth (1440 - 1680)

The city of Nidever and the old kingdom were gone. But people remained, wandering through the wreckage of their broken places. One large group secured a less-destroyed part of the city - the Southern reach and copper mines - and decided that this would be where they rebuilt. As the legend goes, they constructed a massive series of drums near the every tunnel they could, to beat at the same time. The drum beat travelled through the tunnels, a sonic pulse that prisms can see travelling. The prisms and half prisms followed the direction of this pulsing all the way to the refuge. This became Tovelkarn, the modern capital and grand prismhold of Nidever. Tovelkarn was not just a return to the old Shallow Kingdom of Nidever - it was also founded by rebellious refugees from the deep townships. It was a reforging of Nidever that transcended the divisions of the old kingdom, mixing their cultures and their hierarchies. Tolerance and individualism was the new Nidevan answer to the old wounds and feuds; much of modern Nidevan culture traces itself back to this reconstruction effort. Of course, Tovelkarn was not the only prism hold that survived 1424. Many other refugee settlements formed throughout the caverns, often their own alloys of shallow and deep. Unfortunately, all of these settlements were struck hard by disease and monster attacks, but most survived in a weakened state.
From 1424 to 1680, Nidever fought to survive and return to what it had. The monsters had been made worse by the Exalted ravaging. The Scouringwoods wastes to the North were becoming hyper-aggressive and were actively attacking the surface territories. The population of Nidever had been brought incredibly low, and even with half-prisms becoming the demographic norm, they still recovered more slowly than human or dryad lands. Tovelkarn built a federation of mutual assistance with the surrounding settlements, a coalition of local lords with immense autonomy bound by common enemies. The lords of Tovelkarn also sought aid abroad. Hain was slow to offer aid (as they had been deeply wounded by the last Scouring was well) but was happy to trade. The Hainish House Hugelma married into the Tovelkarn royal family in the mid 1600s, and began escalating trade and aid relationships along with renewed Uvaran missionary work. With their help, Tovelkarn established a dominant relationship over the rest of the federation of Nidever. 

Overlord to Overlord (1680 - 1730)

While most places suffered more from the Fifth Kivish Scouring (1680 - 1750) than the Fourth, Nidever was an exception. The Kizen  general, Salvda Kianem, recognized that tunnel warfare was a good way to waste resources, and Nidever was not symbolically important enough for her Truthful Path Kivish superiors to demand she attack it anyways. Nidever was attacked, but was essentially offered a loose protectorateship: be neutral, sell metal at cheap prices, don't harbor Hainish troops, and accept some overseers into Tovelkarn to make sure that the deal was being enforced. Nidever's monarchy, married into Hainish House Hugelma, did try to slyly violate this rule, but the Kivish overseers were able to manipulate local politics in 1702 to see the monarchy of Tovelkarn replaced in a palace coup. In a moment of Nidevan shame, the new regime of Kivish collaborators went so far as to trade metals for surplus Kivish slaves ("it will spare them the Ederstone atrocities and heathen cruelty to have good Uvaran masters"). Modern Nidevan and Hainish narratives places the blame for collaboration solely on one prism, The Traitorous Malmain (a name now synonymous with cowardly betrayal), though this perhaps sanitizes the historical truth. 
Regardless of who did what, Nidever prospered more than perhaps any other state during the 1680 - 1730 period; peace, access to cheap slave labor, and selling weapons to both sides of a multi-decade conflict will do that. In 1730, Hainish warriors rode back into Andrig and the heir to House Hugelma rode with their warband to Tovelkarn to avenge their kin slaughtered some 28 years ago. The city rose to aid the prince (they knew where the winds had turned) and the ruling regime were dragged to the surface and executed with their children in a bloody purge. The old slaves were freed, and encouraged to become homesteaders. And the Hugelma prince gave their younger brother the crown of Nidever, to rule this land as their own. 

The Yeltenzols (1730 - 1956)

The newly crowned king of Nidever, Yelten I, ruled Nidever for nearly a century and began the Yeltenzol line of the Hugelma family that ruled Nidever from the 1730s to 1956. Yelten himself was a curious figure who set the stage for his descendants: he found Nidever to be a brutish land and never forgave it for its betrayal, and yet he worked hard to unify it underneath himself. Yelten had little time for local traditions or autonomy, and was quick to lead troops to bring other settlements to heel. He encouraged outsiders to settle the more fertile parts of Nidever, and bent the land into a more-or-less traditional feudal state through raw force. He was more fixated on mortal threats than monstrous ones, though - his new military structure was often inflexible and failed to reliably secure the borderlands or the caverns. 
While Yelten himself was competent enough to personally keep the monsters from reaching the interior, his successors found that impossible to sustain. In the 1820s, monster attacks in the underground and the frontier broke critical defensive positions. Political tensions rose as people no longer felt that the ruling family was doing a good enough job keeping them safe. A young and inexperienced monarch who took the throne in 1871 was ousted the next year after failing to immediately prove her ability to secure the countryside. Her replacement, her older aunt, was an adequate military candidate with some clear oncoming succession problems. The family fell into infighting from 1877 to 1956; in 1956, the Yeltenzol line of succession was entirely compromised and a civil war broke out. The main line of the Hugelma family intervened, and imitated the response of the Savadan family in the neighboring Kingdom of Dovenar: to remove the local line's ability to pass the title through direct inheritance, and to make it a family decision instead. The Yeltenzols do continue on, though, as the counts of Oppertosh. 
All this political and military turmoil brought a sharp decline to Nidever's fortunes. The surface agriculture was improved and the political order was consolidated, but Nidever lost ground and substantially slowed production.

Modern History since 1956

Queen Irika Hugelma was the woman who resolved the crisis of 1956 who then proceeded to rule Nidever from 1956 to 1995. Queen Irika was a humble and often exhausted woman who quickly came to resent her new kingdom and romanticize her old land of Hain. She aggressively promoted Hainish culture among the elites, and basically built Nidever's jousting arena and culture of courtly poetry by hand. Irika was good at taxation and short-term problem solving - she knew how to skillfully balance budgets and solve one problem with another - but she never had the care or energy to look forward. The frontier was kept defended and the kingdom was stabilized, but the infrastructure was left neglected and avenues for expansion were left to private actors. In her later years, court intrigue became rampant as the private actors that flourished in the wake of her neglect seized power. While she did manage to break up some of these power bases, it cost her her life; dissenters were able to burrow close enough to her to convince her own husband to murder her in 1995. That particular bout of intrigue is especially messy and nasty (involving affairs and deep personal flaws largely kept from the public eye). Hainish elites in Nidever consider discussion of Irika's murder to be taboo, while local Nidevans love to talk about it and often make up stories about what their family members supposedly saw or did in that intrigue to spin further gossip.
Irika's replacement, King Yovin, was sent in to clean up the mess in 1995 - and he did a great job of purging the court and propping up his own local actors to tear into the petty lords who had murdered his predecessors. Unfortunately, while Yovin has touched up the infrastructure and solved many of Irika's old problems, he has lacked her skill at frontier management. The outskirts are growing rough again.

Demography and Population

About 30 to 40 thousand humanoids officially live in Nidever, though many wasteland tribes seasonally move through Nidever to trade and hunt.
Of the 30-40 thousand permanent taxpaying residents, 20,000 - 25,000 live in prismholds and 10,000 - 15,000 live in villages or towns entirely on the surface. Near-everyone here is a starspawn, with those in the prismholds being prism-descended typically.
An unknown number of unofficial residents move through or live under Nidever - Wasteland tribes and unintegrated prism townships.

Territories

Nidever is a small kingdom, roughly 52 by 52 miles across. 

The kingdom is divided into nine counties. 

• Boginchol is the largest and richest county in Nidever, and home to the great underground city of Tovelkarn. The royal seat of power is in this county. Highly mountainous and forested.
• Eizindoss is the farming capital of Nidever - a large mountain valley with clean springwater and fertile soil. The most traditionally feudal part of the kingdom.
• Yeinshtag is a strip of hilly marchland, populated by migrating hill tribes tied to the wasteland and a single small underground settlement - the Lone Mountain. Yeinshtag is mostly self-governing, and is a haven for anyone who would rather fight monsters than pay taxes
• Kaffsker is a wide swath of hilly terrain mostly inhabited by shepherds and small-miners, with a few isolated valleys occupied by homesteaders.
• Arskevsha is a small valley and surrounding mountains, a kind of 'last stop' outpost with a semi-self-sufficient township. Hardly a county in anything but name, but a useful base for Questing Knights.
• Kofferdech is a mix between forested hills and pockets of farmland
• Lossfine is a long, winding valley with forests, farms, and small-mines
• Yunmosh is a tall plateau known to be challenging to access - an isolated flatland in the sky. Largely self-governed by a local federation of villages, who give tribute and military aid to the monarch in exchange for being left alone
• Oppertosh is a relatively farmable, open area connecting Nidever to the neighboring kingdoms. Commercial, somewhat bustling, and mostly normal for Andrig. 

Military

Nidever's formal army is a small but centralized bureaucratic apparatus, with one main force led by the monarch or appointed general and eight regional garrisons commanded by the local counts. The regional garrisons all regularly work together and have a clear chain of command to prevent any group from roaming off on its own. Supporting this focused standing army is a large number of local militias and warbands. Some of these warbands are pulled together by aristocrats, others are mercenaries. Recently, the Nidevan army's greatest problems have come from its excessive centralization and inflexibility; the King has been too restrictive of the local garrisons and has hindered independent offensive actions. This has been a good thing at maintaining the general peace with the surrounding wasteland communities, but has been bad at dealing with roving individual monsters. 
The wealthier counts bring armored knights to the field; the poorer ones stick to light infantry and skirmishers. The prismholds contribute heavy infantry, and most infamously prism greatweapon berserkers. This all comes together to create a hammer and anvil with a very small hammer, a small anvil, and reasonable bulk of supportive skirmishers. It works astoundingly well against less-disciplined forces, but isn't particularly geared towards facing other established powers. 
Within the prismholds, the hard defense common in militaristic prism societies is backed up by a sucker-punching offense. Heavily armored footknights, hardy tunnel-fighting underground rangers, and terrifying berserkers work together in harmony to make the most of enclosed spaces. The greatest warband of the underground are The Merry Havoc Company - a group of explorers and mercenaries who focus on delving as deep as they can into the underground and extorting endangered homesteads for coin in exchange for protection.

Religion

Nidever is a mostly Uvaran kingdom, with plenty of local religions or "pagans" coexisting alongside the Uvaran majority. While this is not a secular kingdom, it is not one preoccupied with policing religious expression or worship. Uvaran religion is politically dominant and protected by the full force of the law, but you can have as many other gods or religious beliefs as you'd like. So you will face legal punishment for insulting the God Ustav or desecrating a shrine, but there is no punishment for wearing a Kivishta star, Lunar moons, or Ederstone-worshipping star-seed symbol. 
Local religion is mostly centered on the Goddess Kragen, the Queen of Steel and Relentless Survival. Kragen is believed to be mother of all Prisms and prism hybrids, and is often pictured with the ancestors of major local clans. She is also a harsh goddess of pragmatism, law, duty, and resource extraction (typically mining or harvesting). She offers plenty, but demands great labor and dedication to get it. Kragen is not worshipped to the exclusion of the other Gods, but local Uvara places her much more on the level of Ustav (the main "King of Heaven" or "Chief God" of the Uvaran pantheon). Sometimes, she is even depicted as wife of Ustav, with the two operating as a single head divinity with two bodies; their children, Rugon and Ertinar (fertility and rain), are often also embodied as a "couplet" in this style of worship. 
Ancestor veneration is also not uncommon here. There is a belief that worthy souls who go to Paradise do not "go silent in eternal sleep" like other souls after a period of time, but instead are reborn as earth spirits to protect or govern a place associated with them in life. These spirits are very much place-locked and will continue to protect that place as long as their descendants maintain worship and offerings to them. If a tunnel, road, well, or cave contains a maintained shrine to someone's ancestor, it is seen as pious and wise to give a small offering as well. 
Dozens of minor local religions also exist, inherited by the ancient "Deep towns" and the tribes of the chaos wastes. It is not uncommon to run into someone who worships a God you've never heard of here.

Laws

There is royal law made by the king, and then there is county law made by local counts. Both formal legal codes give some limited official power to local customary law, which is seen as valid for non-violent transactions and local self-policing. Local militias do much of the law enforcement anyways, and customary law is often most familiar with them. 
Customary law is most intricate (and most formalized) when it comes to property disputes. Local communities have very firm ideas of private property and communal property, and community status plays a major role in deciding who can access what resources on whose property. The idea of there being primary owners and secondary owners is entirely legitimate here; while a person's right to land and tools is great, there are spheres of secondary and tertiary ownership and access that complicate it. With customary law can be notoriously harsh when handling thieves, most people with status in a community won't be considered full thieves if they steal something like food or tools. Contribution of labor and sacrifice to a community and a kinship network embed a shadow of ownership into parts of that community that benefit from that labor. Outsiders who steal, even if they steal to survive, are seen as worthless creatures and parasites to be either forced into temporary indentured servitude, permanent exile, or even execution. Thankfully, indentured servants do still have some local rights and their debts are not hereditary. Customary law does not allow for the execution of thieves without royal permission, but royal courts only sometimes intercede. 
Monster-slayers, often shortened to slayers, are given special status here along with military veterans. It isn't exactly royalty, but one who slays monsters or who serves in the military is generally given a little more legal breathing room. A slayer or veteran can largely ignore laws against insulting their social betters, for example - though they often still face social repercussions if they aren't a famous warrior. A thief who is also a veteran will also be given far more leniency. 
Law enforcement on a royal or county level is handled by Vogts, or "lord sheriffs". A vogt is something of a military sheriff and investigator; they are recruited from the military, continue to hold rank in the army, and often play a military-policing or information-gathering role in military operations. Vogts can be investigated for misbehavior in military, religious, or noble settings, but are given extreme autonomy with little oversight in civilian matters. A Vogt can call a court to try someone, or they can handle it themselves if the accused is unimportant. Vogts who kill unjustly may still see consequences from their superiors, but even that becomes unlikely if they are able to find material proof of magical aberration or witchcraft involved in the case - in dark magic cases, Vogts are legally exempt from accountability as long as the accused lacks a title. The very uniform of a Vogt commands fear and respect in Nidever among the commonfolk.

Agriculture & Industry

Nidever is a big mining kingdom; it produces enormous amounts of copper, as well as plenty of iron, lead, zinc, tin, and silver. Rare mutated ore is hunted for and mined throughout the great caverns, and a unique subgroup of Monstercrafters specializing in mineral research and arcane metallurgy work here. The great city of Tovelkarn also harvests many gems, both from the mountain and from the crystalline Barhells - monstrous insects that breed below the capital city in great nests. In the last century, steel production has also begun here, now that new technologies from the South have finally reached Tovelkarn.
Halpara Mushrooms are often farmed, and the lowlands grow wheat and fruit. The highlands ranch livestock and produce wool. 
Manufacturing in Nidever is rather basic - town artisans produce an average amount of goods, with few major workshops or massive businesses.

Trade & Transport

The big formal export/import markets are held by powerful Hainish Burgher families who run caravans through the small handful of roads that connect Nidever to Dovenar and Hain. Access to these monopolies is treasured, and the ruling House Hugelma is very selective about who can access such privileges. Much trade policy and export/import business is done out of the town of Oppervolt, the surface counterpart to the capital of Tovelkarn at the border between the counties of Boginchol and Oppertosh.  
Smaller local merchants do certainly exist, but tend to mostly handle domestic trade. These merchants travel between the counties and down into the depths to the homesteads selling wares and supplies. Many of these small merchants either trade with or have married into the Wastelander merchants - small groups from the traveling wasteland communities that trade supplies between the villages beyond Nidever's borders and the villages within the kingdom. As wastelanders are viewed with some suspicion, small merchants sometimes are as well.

"Cowardice is Damnation"

Founding Date

1729

Type

Geopolitical, Kingdom

Demonym

Nidevan

Ruling Organization

The Kingdom of Hain

Government System

Monarchy, Constitutional

Power Structure

Feudal state

Currency

Sunekan Golden Lions, Silver Foxes, Copper Stars

Major Exports

Iron, copper, steel, stone, gems, monster parts

Major Imports

Mounts, grains (sometimes), wine, spices, textiles

Official State Religion

Uvara

Location

Andrig

Official Languages

• Hainish language

Related Ranks & Titles

• Graf
• Junker

Neighboring Nations

• Kingdom of Dovenar
• The Kingdom of Hain