Compared to the rest of the Continent, the northwestern reaches of Tahuum Itaqiin are arid, hot, and at times forbidding to overland travelers. (Notably, Tahuum Itaqiin is located in its planet's southern hemisphere, so the climate is generally hotter the further north one goes.) Its vast coastlines provide the chief havens of its greatest cities and polities, as desertification has struck a number of the fertile river valleys which once served as the cradles of the region's first settled civilizations.
The Crusade and the Reconquest, a roughly 80-year war in which mysterious invaders from the far north landed on the Continent's shores, established their own
theocracy by force, and then saw their holdings seized back from them by a reinvigorated native resistance, was arguably the single most pivotal event in the history of the Northwest. Although the Crusaders were eventually driven away, the destructive internecine war that led to this outcome ravaged the land immensely, plunging it into a centuries-long Grim Era defined by warlordism and rampant piracy. After a few city-states and petty kingdoms managed to eke out a stable existence among their warlord neighbhors, the Grim Era eventually gave way to the Revival Era, a cross-regional renaissance of science, magic, urban development, and maritime travel that seems ripe with potential. Now, the main drama of the Northwest—further discoveries in magic aside—is the contestation of political, economic, and sometimes military power among the city-states and other polities of the Haifatneh Sea and the northern coast.
Themes, Mood, and Inspiration
Progress and the Myth of Progress: The Northwest is a place full of contradictions, best embodied in
the Free City of Andaen. An immense and rapidly developing city, Andaen features vaguely Venetian economic power and cutthroat politics in a setting like that of coastal Libya during the reigns of the Arabic caliphates there. Here, a council of merchant-princes diligently seek out trade and commerce opportunities to protect Andaen's status as the greatest economic powerhouse of the Continent; the city's economic growth brings veritable legions of migrant workers and other opportunity-seekers to the city, some enjoying its growing wealth and others struggling to get by at all. Meanwhile,
the fabled University of the Esoteric Arts and Lore functions as the current center of innovation in a developing discipline of magic with near-scientific rigor and precision, quite unlike the witchcraft or religious magics of old. Unfortunately, all of these developments have led the city's leaders, and those who are enjoying similar progress elsewhere in the Northwest, to develop a certain arrogance about their place in the world and the security of their futures.
Exploration, Myth, and Lost Knowledge: The ancient civilizations that once ruled Takhet Alay and the river valleys feeding into the Haifatneh Sea left behind milennia-long legacies which have not entirely been lost to the passage of time. The deserts and badlands of the Northwest have preserved numerous ruins where esoteric knowledge waits to be uncovered, and the intellectual leaders (and some hobbyist archaeologists and opportunists) are more than eager to see what can be recovered from the ravages of the Crusade and the Resistance and the Grim Era that followed it. Further, as phenomena of eldritch magic and its wielders quietly creep into Tahuum Itaqiin, a number of those facing novel threats to their world will wonder whether the answers to protecting their future lie somewhere in their past.
Exploration is even in the name of the Continent: While its human inhabitants are not entirely sure of the etymology of Tahuum Itaqiin, they know at least that it refers to some kind of "frontier" in the language
the Shadrusun, a sorcerous race of whom little is known to them.
Simmering Tensions and Unresolved Feuds: The nascent peace that is flourishing in the aftermath of the Grim Era has been hard-won and is sometimes a matter of mere pretense. For one, the political and economic security of the Haifatneh Basin has resulted in no small part from Andaen's assertive hegemony over politics in the region, won and maintained through brutal anti-piracy campaigns and cutthroat political chess. Domestically, Andaen's security and economic vitality come at the cost of heavy-handed governance of the masses and serious socioeconomic disparity. Vast Takhet to Andaen's northwest and Saukkan-Ghat to its east both knew glorious pasts, and now some of the more ambitious leaders in those places are contemplating clawing back the power and glory which their ancestors once enjoyed. Inter-ethnic resentment is a continued source of tension as well: The Haifatnehti polities of the present were built upon the ruins of the Crusaders' old theocracy, and the descendants of all of those groups who fought in the Crusade and the Reconquest hold on to some of their ancestral grudges. A prominent example of unease underlying peace lies in the relationship between the human cultures of the Northwest and the Shadrusun, a reclusive, seemingly alien race of sorcerors who fought bitterly against the Crusaders' attempts at conversion and grew to distrust humanity as a whole as a result. While the Shadrusun were a great asset to the anti-Crusader Resistance Coalition for their magical prowess and skill in subterfuge, their presence has always unnerved the humans of the Northwest, even their old Haifatnehti allies. Emergent eldritch phenomena in the Northwest only give its human inhabitants further reason to distrust the Shadrusun as they wonder whether those reclusive sorcerors hiding in their ziggurats and underground strongholds are somehow behind these developments.
Worldbuliding Goals
For
Andaen and the Haifatneh Basin, I mainly aim to develop the cityscapes and other settlements in which the main characters of my first novel will carry on with their fact-finding and intrigue. It will also be important to develop the surroundings to an extent so as to contextualize the mini-worlds of Andaen and these other settlements.
Saukkan-Ghat, too, will prove an important backdrop for some of the later plotting and character development of said novel.
Vast Takhet (particularly the central mountain range of Takhet Alay), parts of
the western Haifatneh Basin, and
the Southfold all play host to hidden ruins and reclusive peoples which hide quite a few secrets of the past. I aim to develop these places to give life to the history of Tahuum Itaqiin, as well as design settings for short stories and possibly even tabletop RPG adventures someday.
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