Argoria
Argoria (The Shattered Sand)
"The maps of Argoria show a world of endless gold and blue. The reality is a landscape of glass and screaming winds where the distance between two dunes might be a thousand miles or a different dimension entirely."
— Rift Chaser Field Note
Overview
- Classification: Pre-Fracture Empire / Active Dimensional Hazard
- Biome: Vast deserts
- Governance: Dominated by two major empires. Only one has naval capacity to reach other continents — all knowledge of the second empire is filtered through the first empire's perspective, making it inherently biased.
- Leader: A Genie
Geography & Features
Vast desert terrain inhabited by unusual creatures. The land is riddled with random portals to other dimensions and planes. The portals are almost entirely unpredictable in destination.
The Fey Trade: Fey nobles and their guides run high-risk, high-reward trading operations through these portals. The guides are unreliable, but profits are large enough to attract merchants regardless.
Resources: High-value survival goods requiring deep desert knowledge to harvest — magical sands, magical figs and dates, medicinal grasses. These command enormous prices elsewhere precisely because reaching them is so dangerous.
Current State (Post-Fracture)
The dimensional instability has turned the portals into maws that swallow cities. The Genie-led navy is largely wreckage. The second empire is likely lost to a dimensional fold.
Relationship to Iskavell
Indirect hostility. Argoria is allied with an enemy of the Settlers' home cultures, or is the enemy of an ally — there is no direct war, but the alignment creates friction.
Argorian refugees occasionally arrive at Iskavell via wild portals, carrying magical figs now rare as delicacies. Most arrive disoriented, with no idea where they came out.
How Argoria Views Iskavell
A chaotic wasteland of dimensionally unstable magical sands and dangerous portals — essentially, familiar but worse. Argorians who know Iskavell recognise the rift instability from their own homeland and want nothing to do with it. Those who don't know it see it as a rumoured source of rift essence worth harvesting.
Open Questions / GM Notes
- The second empire: what do they want, and are their agents already in Iskavell?
- The Fey trade routes — do any of the random portals connect to Iskavell directly?
- Any Argorian refugees currently in Oakhaven?