The Mwangi Expanse is a verdant region and a source of legends, tales, and rumors both inspiring and dire, but its inhabitants are not well known in the rest of the Inner Sea region. The Expanse is rich in beauty, art, and scholarship, and its people toil hard and develop cunning strategies to thrive in an oft-hostile environment. It is a land where disparate cultures regularly cross paths and diverse peoples thrive even amid the region’s many dangers.
The Mwangi is a region so bountiful and resource-rich that few are ever left hungry or wanting. Ready access to food, water, fiber, and precious materials enabled many of the first Mwangi people to establish their own communities, cities, and even nations in complete isolation from the wider world. The city-states and countries presented on this wiki are but a few of the most well known; many more communities exist in this immense jungle, some of which have gone a considerable time without proper contact with the rest of the Mwangi Expanse, let alone the larger Inner Sea region.
Kibwe
The city of Kibwe is a bastion of trade nestled in the jungles of the eastern Expanse. Since time immemorial, traders from the coast have met here with caravans coming through the Ndele Gap from Nex, Katapesh, and other nations to the east, exchanging goods in Kibwe’s sprawling markets and trading news of far-off places. As a result of this mingling, Kibwe has grown not only large and prosperous, but also wildly diverse, with humans, elves, and gnomes rubbing shoulders with giants, lizardfolk, kobolds, and other uncommon peoples in the name of commerce. Bargaining is the highest form of art in this city, and as the old saying goes, “If you can’t find something in Kibwe, it doesn’t want to be found.”
No one alive today can say for sure who built Kibwe’s towering granite walls, though all agree that they predate Holy Xatramba, the lost nation that controlled the city centuries ago before falling to demons. Rising thick and impregnable from the surrounding jungle, Kibwe’s walls slope inward, their faces covered with thousands of ancient and often indecipherable runes. Inside, the city is a tangle of neighborhoods organized by nationality, ethnic group, or belief system, with firsttime visitors sometimes complaining that the predominant language changes every time one crosses the road. Fortunately, the same ancients who built Kibwe’s walls
also provided a valuable navigational aid: the Pillar-Watchers, soapstone statues and idols perched atop high columns. Often taking bizarre shapes—tusked tigerpeople or featherless humanoid birds, always armed with swords and shields—the idols are said to stand guard over the city, ready to come alive in the residents’ time of greatest need. While locals differ on how much they believe the stories, all can agree that the Pillars act as valuable landmarks in a city where street signs can change languages a dozen times in an as many steps.
Kibwe maintains a strict neutrality in political affairs in the interest of greater trade. The city-state is governed by a council of representatives appointed by various clans and micro-communities. Public debates are common in the Adayenki Pavilion, a sacred and petal-strewn common space walled off from the bustle of the market by hanging tapestries and animal hides. This representative approach to democracy has resulted in a raucous but stable government.
Bloodcove
Organisations
Aspis Consortium
One of the Chelish Empire's richest and most powerful trading companies operates throughout the Mawangi Expanse, Their mission fairly simple: To get as much of the bountiful natural resources of the expanse, and ship it back to Cheliax. This involves intermingling (and interfering!) with the politics of settlements, obtaining rights to mines, battling natives, establishing colonies and a great deal of slave trade.
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