Sumaren (Soo-Mar-Rin)

Sumaren is a land of massive mist-covered lakes, of vine-covered palaces and temples busting with trade and life, of Dhampire-knights and cities hidden in the rainforest. It is a land between Sonev and Samvara, and it is an island of wealth and development surrounded by hundreds of miles of tropics and mountains. 
The kingdoms of Sumaren are a religious and cultural mixture, where one person having many languages and religions is considered absolutely normal. As long as you respect someone who is considered holy or a legitimate authority locally, you should have no problem with law or religion in Sumaren. The fields and cities are made for tropical life and sometimes even integrate the local vegetation into their structures. The food here is rich with fruit and is naturally sweet and spicy. Dhampirism is considered sacred, a mark of one's calling as an aristocrat and public guardian. Wars are fought here, certainly, but strict rules against destroying cities or killing civilians restrict its importance to the world of warriors and kings. It is no paradise - wealth is unequal, power is hereditary, disease is a constant threat, wildlife can run off with unguarded children, and unprepared foreigners often perish from the climate and pathogens - but it is no hell. 
In the last few years, a new threat has arrived on the borders of Sumaren: some kind of terrible corruption. Armies of paladins have marched into the rainforest to cleanse it of evil, and have dissapeared without a trace.

Geography

Sumaren is divided between the Northern flatlands and the Southern riverlands. The Northern flatlands are tropical jungle with patches of occasional savannah. This jungle becomes more dense and humid the further North one goes. The Southern riverlands are hillier and rockier. 
The Northern flats of Sumaren are 685 miles by 810 miles across. The land is centered around six large lakes, and an enormous lake lies to the Northeast (564 by 290 miles across). To the West, the Telembita mountains reach 13,000 feet above sea level.
The Southern riverlands is 480 miles by 900 miles across. East of the riverlands are the Arkinara mountains, which stand 10,000 feet high.

Fauna & Flora

Sumaren has great biodiversity, particularly in the dense equatorial rainforest in the North. Elephants, hippopotamus, forest hogs, cobra, mongoose, crocodiles, and aardvark all call the land their home. Perhaps the region is most famous for its enormous ape variety: from gorillas to chimpanzees to bonobos to orangutans, all examples of primate-kind can be found here.

Natural Resources

Bananas, cocoa, tropical wood, breadfruit, guarana

History

Divine Era

Sumaren is part of the central Samvaran-Sonevan tropics, which are the ancestral home of all Dryads, which were created here in the earliest days of the Divine Era (making Sumaren the first site of Divine interference in the world). For millennia, Sumaren was predominantly dryad and largely inhabited by foragers: the terrain was difficult to travel through and unsuited for farming, but was full of fruit, fish, and game. Disease was a serious issue for any population that grew too densely, and so the closest things to cities were large dryad communes that existed in relative peace and tranquility.
Trade to early Sumaren was infrequent, given the landscape. The only group to consistently travel through were the Solar migrations headed between Samvara and Sonev, and these migrations moved quickly to escape rainforest (where there was limited sunlight to be fed upon). The expedition of Haru and Naram (when they were mortals) passed through Sumaren, and when Naram wandered back to Samvara he left Dhampirism behind. 
The first Dhampire in Sumaren was one of the firsts, an exile by the name of Leluna that guided Naram through the rainforests back to Samvara in exchange for the gift of Dhampirism. Leluna used this power to return to their people as a warrior, and to eventually curate a small cult of personality. Leluna's warrior-cult established themselves as divine conduits and powerful magicians, and jealously guarded the secret of dhampirism for centuries. 

Modern Era 

The first major shock to Sumarinian society was the arrival of Corpseblight in the late 200s and 300s ME. Sumaren had been spared Corpseblight for centuries thanks to the difficult to cross terrain and limited non-solar trade, but it eventually made its way in nonetheless. Corpseblight's ludicrous infection rate and destructive capabilities not only killed many, but provided a perfect entry point for other invasive fungi and bacteria to mutate and adapt to the Dryad body. The densely populated and loosely organized dryads were in a state of absolute chaos, as society was shaken to its foundations. Amidst this crisis, the Dhampiric Cult descended from Leluna began to step in as organizers and guardians. These dhampires adopted foreign ideas of urban planning and social hierarchy to try and reorganize dryad society into something more plague-resistant. 
This created a new model of society: the "Erzalesa", or Dhampire-dictatorship. By the early 400s, Erzalesa dictatorships controlled almost all of Sumaren's major population centers, and were beginning to spread across the tropics with unusual speed. But these Erzalesas were hierarchical, cruel, and militaristic - a far cry from the egalitarian pacifism of the old ways. All dissent from below was brutally crushed, but the Erzalesas began to face resistance from within their dhampiric ranks. In 523, an organized revolt by dhampires against the strictness of the Erzalesa model broke out in the small kingdom of Natekara and managed to spread to surrounding kingdoms. This revolt sowed chaos across the region and led to a century of war between revolutionary kingdoms and Erzalesa traditionalists. One of these dhampire revolutionaries, a dryad by the name of Moxima Sutia, left the land, accumulated legendary influence abroad, and returned in the early 700s to wipe the Erzalesas out once and for all. The traditionalists crumbled, and a new order of foreign-style kingdoms were created: still hierarchical and coercive, but less so than before. 
Moxima's travels also led to the opening of formal trading networks to Samvara. This trade was fairly small at first, but grew substantially in the late 700s with the creation of an easier trading route to Sonev. Half-Dryads and ideas flooded in from the South, and the North suddenly became interested in what Sumaren had to offer. 
Since then, Sumaren's been a pocket of trade, formal kingdoms, and cities in an otherwise decentralized tropical zone. It has taken centuries to adapt cities and states to a rainforest setting, and it hasn't been a steady line of progress. There was an attempt at uniting the region under one empire in 1480, but it had mostly collapsed by 1600. There was a movement towards decentralization and de-urbanization afterwards, but that too was reversed by a new order of Elemeer merchant-princes. A new empire has started to rise again in the last century, though if it is fated to crash the region again is anyone's guess.

Type

Region

Location under

Samvara