Kovia
Kovia is a region situated in the North of Crestfall, characterized by its steep mountains and wide valleys. It is known as the ancestral home of the dwarves, who comprise the majority of Kovia's population.
The capital city of Kovia is Rustport, located where the Lake of Rust meets the neck of the South-flowing Clay River. As Kovia's original primary gateway to the outside world, the vast majority of Kovia's imports and exports would flow through the city's docks; while the invention of the Kovian railway system in 890 ME shifted the flow of commerce somewhat, Rustport nevertheless remains a steady hold on the trade economy of Kovia and is often an outside visitor's first destination upon arriving within the dwarven nation's borders.
Geography
Kovia is a rocky, mountainous region, its towering peaks punctuated by flat-topped plateaus and wide, sparse valleys. Once a natural region, the land of Kovia has been highly industrialized over multiple centuries by the dwarves inhabiting the area, resulting in much of the region in the modern area being blanketed in an urban sprawl of cities, factories, and other marks of industrial settlement. Many of these cities exist simultaneously above and below the surface of Kovia, with entire city districts existing within hollowed-out mountain ranges and subterranean caverns.
Because of the heavy use of Hexstone as a fuel source within Kovia, much of the region's sky is blanketed in a thick black smog, vented from the peaks of the hollowed mountains as natural chimneys. Due to the smog's interference with sunlight and air quality, agriculture has struggled to find footing within Kovia, and as such much of the region's produce is imported from the neighbouring region of Wiegland.
History
It is said that in the prehistory of Crestfall, the region now known as Kovia is where the dwarves first emerged from their subterranean homes and caught their first glimpse of a sun-lit surface world.
For hundreds of generations, thereafter, the mountainous realm would become the seat of power for the Dwarven Empire, the first major civilization to be established on the continent of Crestfall since the downfall of the Giants. The mountains, with their rich abundance in natural resources, ensured that the Kovian dwarves had everything they needed to built a mighty kingdom which, were it not for the arrival of elves to Crestfall, may have eventually expanded across the entire continent.
For all of their fortified castles and advanced steel weaponry, the dwarves only fared marginally better against the elves' magical assault than their comparatively primitive neighbors, the humans. Their mountainous empire in ruins, the dwarves retreated beneath the mountains, remaining underground for the next one thousand years as the Millennium War began to brew on the continent's surface. It would not be until after the Fade and the end of the Millennium War that the dwarves of Kovia would re-emerge from their subterranean shelters to reclaim the ruins abandoned by their great-grandparents centuries prior.
Demographics and Cultures
Two-thirds of the population of Kovia consists of the Kovian dwarves, who have laid claim to the mountainous region as their homeland since Pre-Vancian times. The dwarves of Kovia have a longstanding tradition of master smiths, inventors and craftsmen, and as such these wares comprise a large portion of the nation's chief exports. After the dwarves, the second-largest demographic native to Kovia are the Kovian gnomes, often colloquially referred to as "rock gnomes" or "tinker gnomes", this gnomish group has taken a page from their dwarven neighbors, serving as skilled inventors and engineers in their own right; unlike the dwarves, however, who tend to favor the practical and utilitarian in their designs, gnomish artificers tend to imbue their creations with a sense of whimsy and spectacle, perhaps due in part to the gnomes' innately magical nature. The remaining population of Kovia is a mostly even split between humans, halflings, and a scattering of denizens from other races hardy enough to endure the region's oppressive, smoggy atmosphere and sunless landscape.
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