The broken world

Once, the empire of Eritania, born from the ashes of the war of sins, was at the peak of it's power, it's industry built railtracks through the Eongrowth and beyond, it's alchemists short of figuring the secrets of the flying cities, it's priests able to hold of the terrors of both the abyss and from hell, it's armies powerfull enough to learn even the abominations of the no mans land and the Subterraneans fear. Then the great war began. The empire had found it's equal within the eastern Iestaria. This war now lasts nearly three centuries and neither is there any end in sigth nor can anyone remember why it started in the first place. All Ressources of the empire are spent for the war, the government consists now, through war-emergency-laws, only of hig-ranking members of the military and the effictive control of the government is now just over the region around the frontier and the industry centers nearby. The Backlands are only officially part of the nation, but are actually lawless land, in which the highest authorities, not controlled by the government at all, control a whole city at most. Of the once great knowledge about alchemy and technology remain, aside from the disciplines necessary for war, the only ones, where progress is still made, only small remnants, in the backlands even that isn't true, some places there are even back to development like centuries before the war and the last bits of arcane knowledge are getting more incomplete with every passing down and the occasional still working pre-war-machine or outdated technological trading stock from the frontier are pooly understood artifacts. But even they are not spared from the grasp of time and even the best engineer there has at best superficial knowledge. The only contact to the government are the occasional supply squads, which, forcefully if necessary, confiscate supplys, money and citizens and most of all everyone, who has even the most basic understandig of alchemy or technology and kill everyone, who has committed the crime of sorcery. They are little mor than sustained raids. Travelling is dangerous; Bandits and deserters lurk at the streats, magical mutants and the mythical beasts of the Eongrowth roam the woods and you can never be sure, your destination wasn't destoyed by a raid of the Subterraneans or by a fallen ethero-golem.