The North of Vulsa, looking out over the Fangs of the North
Vulsa lies in the east of Vandyrus, a continent of black rock and silver snow, where the mountains seem to breathe fire beneath the ice. It is vast, its northern crown large enough to swallow whole nations. High above the laws of civilization stretch the Fangs of the North, serrated, ice-sharpened ridges that divide the continent’s ruined core from its more habitable south. The ascent through those peaks is lethal. The wind cuts skin like knives, avalanches roar without warning, and the air itself freezes the blood. Wolves dwell in those highlands, taciturn, self-contained, but not cruel, and the few who cross the passes into their domain seldom return unchanged.
The Ruination of the Central Kingdoms is the stuff of Dark Legend
Below the Fangs lies central Vulsa , a land forever broken. When the world buckled in the Cataclysm, its heart was torn open, and the scars never closed. Whole ranges sank, rivers changed direction. What was once a broad interior now sinks by degrees into frozen black marshes, fissures of ice, and deep, killing snows where the remnants of old kingdoms drown a little more each year. Villages drift southward on rafts of half-frozen mud, while ruined keeps stand like teeth above the mire. Even the wind moves slowly, heavy with ash and memory.
The nations of the Southern Kingdoms are by no means warm, Snow is replaced with driving rain, Endless cold by infinite grey and Frostbite with rot & rust
South of the wastelands, the land softens into the civilized forges of Volsa, its snow giving way to black volcanic soil and the strange, shimmering craft of the Vulsan smiths.
Here stands the last light of their civilization. The continent’s interior remains wild, much of it unmapped. Ancient craters from the Cataclysm pock the landscape, many believed to be sites where skymetal once fell. Settlements cling to trade rivers or to the smoldering forges themselves, leaving vast tracts of wilderness where only wolves, spirits, and scavenger bands roam. Culturally, Vulsa sits between ruin and revelation. It is a land that remembers the gods’ wars in its ore and carries both the genius and the madness of creation in its veins.
To outsiders, it is a kingdom of cold mercenaries and unbreakable metal. To those born beneath its ash-stained skies, it remains the crucible of the world, where craft and sorcery, memory and metal are one and the same.
Combined with Roedon and Tymere, the Kingdoms of Vulsa make up what the rest of Vandyrus refer to as the Triskelion nations.
Once the western mirror of Vulsa’s greatness, Roedon now lies in half-light and ruin. Its keeps are black with smoke and lichen, its folk live amid cracked pillars and moss-eaten vaults where kings once feasted. The wind from the Drael coasts carries the stench of raids, and from the north come the wolves of Zhuru, burning and stealing the few young left to enslave.
The *Roedans are a hard folk—thick-furred, grim-eyed, and proud in their suffering. They remember the age when Roedon and Vulsa were twin realms of iron and ice, bound by shared blood and rivalry. But while Vulsa endured through faith and fury, Roedon broke beneath its own winters. The priests fled, the citadels fell silent, and now each valley shelters its own chieftain, each ruin its own petty god.
Unlike the sunken reaches of the Vulsan marshlands, Roedon has not drowned—but it is freezing, bleeding, and starving. The raids from Drael never cease, the Zhurians press from the frost, and even the dead seem restless, wandering the moors in packs. Yet in the ruins of Thryne and the haunted markets of Den’Rydan, old blades are still traded, and old tongues still whisper of the Day of Return—when Roedon’s warriors shall ride again, howling beneath banners stitched from wolf hide and sea salt.
*Roedans – An archaic term meaning both Northern Ro’Edyne & Southern Roedoni immigrant populations.
Varduun is a land cursed twice. Once by fire, when Drael fell and split the earth, vomiting up vents, ash rivers, and poisoned plains. Again by its folk, for the hyenas claimed the land and made it theirs.
It is a land of cracked savannah, fever-swamps, scorched plains, and wasted rivers. Disease prowls through its camps as easily as raiders do. Unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and deaths in childbirth are common; the alleys swarm with half-starved pups and abandoned ferals. Life here is cheap, short, and cruel—and the hyenas laugh at the cruelty not because it is funny, but because it is all they know.
The Hyenalands are no kingdom, no empire. They are a trinity of strongholds and hordes—Gorzanth, Zarnack, and Krothuum—locked in endless rivalry. Only when all three are threatened at once do they bare their teeth outward, and then the savannah burns.
And always, on the horizon, the whisper of a fourth city—Old Kartong, not theirs, not of Varduun, but a ruin that mocks them all.
In almost complete contrast to the hyena wastes of the Zhurian East stand the Realms of the Doglands — a loose constellation of citadels and town-states nestled between the ridges of Izhura and the guarded frontiers of the Lions’ territorial dominions.
Where the hyena tribes thrive on terror, filth, and frenzy, the folk of the Doglands labor toward the illusion — and perhaps the first true experiment — of civilization. Their walls are high, their gates fortified, their plazas swept and sunlit. Within, sandstone towers rise over clay-tiled streets; bazaars spill with spice, silver, and textiles traded freely among breeds once enslaved.
The population itself is a breed-born refuge of runaways and freed thralls, their collective memory steeped in the hunger for autonomy. Every law in their realm speaks to the preservation of the self — and the punishment of those who would erase it. Execution and treason are the two pillars upon which their justice rests, and mercy is measured not in pity, but in restraint from cruelty.
Yet for all their civility, they remain a young and precarious nation. The Dogfolk abhor conscription, reject state labor drafts, and refuse to bind service to punishment. Their armies are few, their militia undisciplined, and their reliance on coin and contract makes them slow to rally. They are merchants before soldiers, architects before conquerors, and in that inversion lies both their nobility and their doom.
Still, their hatred of both Jackals & hyenas runs hotter than any forge in Vandyrus. No treaty, no creed, no trade route is ever permitted to cross the filth of those carrion plains. To the Dogfolk, coexistence with Wolves is a cautious truce; with Horses, a mutual respect. But with Hyenas — only eternal war, declared in silence, and fought in every child’s bedtime story.
For mistakes, even noble ones, do not require frequency to accumulate ruin. And the Lions across the western sea, in their cruel provinces of Gamandor, have long delighted in watching fledgling nations stumble — savoring, with almost culinary patience, the pleasure of playing with their food.
Ajeros exists because it must, not because it should. It is a city pressed into service by geography and history alike, a hard knot of stone and wet iron driven into the southern edge of Yir’s long shadow. Though counted among the holdings of Izhura, it is an outland city in every meaningful sense: distant, inconvenient, and perpetually half-forgotten by those who live in safer latitudes.
The routes that reach it do so grudgingly, slipping through vine-choked corridors and old jungle descents that once flowed south from Yir in elder ages, when the land was wilder and the borders less certain. Even now, those jungles have not fully released their claim. They cling. They creep. They remember.
The city itself is civilized only by constant effort. Stone streets exist, but they are never fully dry. Walls stand, but they are webbed with roots and lichen, their mortar forever tested by moisture and slow green pressure. Rain is not an event here; it is a condition. It seeps into roofs, beads along beams, and darkens cloth until even the poorest can tell by touch alone whether a garment has ever truly dried.
Homes are built with this knowledge carved into them. Windows are screened not for comfort but survival, their metal meshes fine enough to bar the bird-sized mosquitos that rise from the low green reaches at dusk, drawn by heat, breath, and blood. To leave a window unguarded is not negligence but folly, and folly does not live long in Ajeros.
Yet for all this, Ajeros is not lawless. Its merchants are Izhuran by custom and reputation, their measures honest, their contracts respected even by those who grumble at the city’s isolation. Trade here is practical rather than ambitious. Goods are moved because they must be, not because fortunes will be made.
The guards are much the same—strong, disciplined, and unromantic about their duty. They do not posture as heroes. They stand watch because the watch must be stood, and because everyone in Ajeros understands what happens when it is not.
For the truth, known to every stonecutter and shopkeeper, is that Ajeros is not merely a city. It is a warning bell. It is the northernmost civilized finger extended toward Yir, and the first knuckle that will be broken if something terrible decides to move south.
The badlands above do not loom merely in distance but in intent, a region whose ferocity eclipses Ajeros not just in violence, but in scale, in logistics, in the simple capacity to endure and deliver ruin. Ajeros knows this. There is no delusion here of matching Yir blow for blow, nor of holding against a true descent. Its purpose is earlier and bleaker: to see first, to bleed first, and to send word while there is still time for others to prepare.
This awareness shapes the city’s character more than any charter or banner. Ajeros does not indulge in grand monuments or idle excess. Beauty exists here, but it is the beauty of persistence—of lantern light reflected on wet stone, of vines cut back each morning only to be cut again the next, of rooftops patched so many times they resemble quilts of iron and tar.
Izhura stands as a battered but enduring wedge of territory carved out of the chaos and competition that defines central Zhuru. Unlike the realms that rise and fall with seasonal tides or the city-states that vanish into mud and memory, Izhura endures, neither the most powerful nor the most desperate, but a constant presence where so many others have flickered out.
On a map, the realm is a long, crooked lance of grassland and border, reaching north toward the thick, haunted forests of Yir, sloping south until it meets the restless surf of the Craterian Sea.
It is surrounded on all sides by realms that are either richer, wilder, or more dangerous—Yir’s uplands and poison woods to the north, the mires and uncertain loyalties of Gunran to the east, the crowded guild-dominated coast of Elder Ruselon to the south, and the rough dog-lands of Bantos to the west. The horse folk of Izhura have survived not by outshining their neighbors, but by learning the virtues of patience, adaptation, and, when the time comes, sudden, blinding action.
For outsiders, Izhura often blurs into a single patch of green, a corridor between more exotic realms. But for those who live on its soil, the land is divided into three major territories, each shaped by history, climate, and proximity to other powers: Uyarin, Vessara, and Elleas.
These divisions are not just political—they are environmental, cultural, and psychological, with boundaries that run deeper than any border stone or old decree. The grassland spine that links them is both a blessing and a curse. It binds the realm together, but it also exposes it: armies, caravans, raiders, and rumor all travel the same broad corridors.
DANGER: Yir is virtually unexplored & almost completely unmapped in any reliable way. The known “Cities” lie in crumbling vine- haunted ruins that haven’t been reached by anyone sane or returned in generations.
Ghu
Anar
Rakka
Yir is a kingdom of vapor perched high above the world. Cold rainforests sprawl across shattered uplands where the land itself rises in broken cliffs, thousands of feet above the grasslands below. Mazes of mangroves knot with drowned forests, and black pools yawn like mouths between their roots. Paths vanish overnight, swallowed by shifting waters, and the cliffs themselves bleed waterfalls that vanish into the mists beneath. To descend from Yir is near suicide. The plateau was not meant for escape, only endurance.
The folk of Yir are scattered and sparse. Small mammals dart through the undergrowth, preyed upon by tall, sharp-beaked bird clans who prowl with spear and arrow. Between them stalk the lizard-folk, chameleon-skinned and silent, hunters who thrive in ambush and camouflage. None bend to any empire, and all live uneasily amid ruins far older than themselves.
Everywhere in Yir rise the shattered remains of temples—stone long claimed by moss and rot. Their carvings are worn, their rites forgotten, but still the swampfolk whisper of the beings once worshipped there. The old priests promised change, spoke of transformation as a gift. Yet the stories linger of shapes half-formed, of folk who shed their skins endlessly, never complete, never at peace. In the black pools, the locals say, something still waits.
Conflict festers even in isolation. The Bird–Civit Wars rage, tall hunters clashing against nimble arboreal fighters in ambush and reprisal. In the drowned forests, the Arboreal Kingdoms feud endlessly, their skirmishes as frequent as the storms.
For Yir is a land that breeds no peace; its folk are too busy surviving one another, too busy fearing the return of whatever once ruled here.
Zhuru is not merely a continent but a scar across the center of Vandyrus, a land defined by fracture, memory, and the unending contest between predation and endurance. Its surface, vast and wild, is a collage of grasslands, deserts, shattered cities, tainted rivers, and haunted highlands—the living record of every cataclysm that has scoured the planet since the age before written memory. Here, the myth of civilization is always provisional. Kingdoms rise, bleed, and collapse into dust, each era layering its own ruin over the last.
The north and east are carved by the territories of Yir, a vast and ancient upland raised by forces long lost to time—mist‑shrouded plateaus and drowned forests perched impossibly high above the plains, haunted by sharp‑beaked bird clans and spirits older than any living tribe. Konara, a realm of brooding woods and forgotten shrines. Gunran, a prehistoric mire where the land sinks into warm, primordial swamp, birthing traders, raiders, and scavengers hardened by humidity, hunger, and the slow rot of the wetlands. Izhura sprawls across the wild high plains, ruled by barbarian horsefolk famed for their stamina and pride, their matron‑lords trailing veiled caravans and rumors of orgiastic feasts.
In the west, Bantos is a crossroads of riotous celebrations and tangled kin‑lines—a land where rut, barter, and blood feud set the rhythm of the seasons.
At the heart of Zhuru lies the Yorozh Basin, a wind‑flattened expanse once dreamt of as the cradle of empire, now reduced to a graveyard of grass, bone, and ambition. Here, the sun‑blasted remains of Kartonga sprawl—a land of ruins and skeletal forests watched over by wolf packs and scavenger‑birds that outlive every banner.
To the south and west, the Rakwi hills rise: deep valleys harboring clans who trust neither outsider nor kin for longer than a season, and where the old oaths are traded and broken by dusk.
Across these contested landscapes, the cervine kingdoms maintain their proud, antlered dynasties—holding their own councils and rites, colder in temperament than their equine rivals but no less driven by the lures of trade, war, and desire.
Beyond the great plain, elk and red‑deer lords brood along the forest fringes, dreaming of a day when their lineage will eclipse the horsefolk, but for now, power is ceded only as far as survival demands.
To the east, Varduun marks the dry‑rotted borderlands—parched grass and cracked land, haunted by hyena clans whose laughter is as much threat as warning. Old strongholds crumble in the sun, and every traveler is measured first by the weight of their purse, then by their nerve. This is not a land for the soft or the lucky. It is a proving ground for the desperate and the ruthless, where every promise lasts only until the next betrayal, and even the wind carries the rumor of violence.
Beyond the last fever‑swamp and the ragged edges of the southern grasslands rise the ivory kingdoms of the elephants—a living wall north of Panjar, the infamous sea‑delta. Their caravans bring ivory, gold, and wisdom to the southern courts, and their wrath—when roused—is slow, absolute, and catastrophic.
Panjar itself is a collection of bloodthirsty, disciplined sea‑kingdoms whose mastery of naval warfare and piracy holds the rest of Zhuru hostage. Here, violence is calculated, never random; raids are planned, vengeance is codified, and the line between commerce and war is thinner than a razor. Panjari fleets sweep the Panjarian Ocean and straits, controlling trade, collecting tribute, and launching campaigns that keep the continent’s softer interiors in check. Their discipline is legendary; their cruelty, a point of pride. And to the far south, across the restless water, the jungles and hidden strongholds of Djandar glimmer—sometimes as an ally, more often as a lurking threat, their power never spoken of lightly by any who traffic along the coast.
Each of these regions—Yir, Konara, Bantos, Izhura, Gunran, Varduun, Yorozh, Kartonga, Rakwi, Panjar, and Djandar—is a nation unto itself: at war, in alliance, or in ancient feud with its neighbors, yet all bound by the great wound that is Zhuru.
Beneath all this, Zhuru is a graveyard of ambitions. Every tribe, every city, every would‑be dynasty carries the scars of the Cataclysm—craters still smoking, ruins that refuse to be swallowed by grass or mire, legends of lost empires whispered only in the low tongue of slaves and exiles.
War is not a chapter here but a drumbeat; rut and conquest, feast and betrayal, all are recurring acts in a theater that never ends. Even the most beautiful rites—the fertility feasts, the public couplings, the displays of power—are always set against a backdrop of hunger, rivalry, and old wounds reopened.
To survive in Zhuru is to accept that every strength is provisional, every alliance temporary, every lover a potential traitor. The land gives nothing for free. But for those who endure—wolf mercenary, horse matron, hyena usurper, lion prince—there is no greater prize than to outlast, to outwit, to claim one more season of power in the oldest, greatest contest that Vandyrus has ever known.
