Greater Kortos

Absalom claims all of the Isle of Kortos as its domain, but several wild regions remain outside the city’s direct control. From coast to coast, signs of the island’s extreme antiquity are evident everywhere, from the overgrown fortresses of the Immenwood to the crumbling Aeon Towers of the Swardlands. Descriptions of several important Kortos locales follow.

Cairnlands

The barren wasteland surrounding Absalom is littered with scores of siege castles— monuments to the failed invasions of 5 millennia whose near-forgotten chambers now are home to monsters, brigands, and the unquiet dead. The strongholds vary in size from the mile-tall Spire of Nex 10 miles north of the city to the tumbledown Pyramid of the Dog just outside the Puddles. Enticing rumors of undiscovered chambers and unclaimed treasures in siege castles just beyond the city walls beckon adventurers to explore their darkened depths.

Diobel

The so-called “Back Door to Absalom” squats upon a wide, wooden boardwalk at the end of a shallow harbor on the island’s southwest coast. Cargo-laden barges skim over rich oyster beds between the bustling trade town and the Trawl, a maze of steep stonework walls crusted with seaweed, barnacles, and small shellfish. All commercial traffic coming through the Trawl falls under the careful scrutiny of the Kortos Consortium, an association of guildmasters and merchant lords who control the island’s considerable mining, farming, trapping, fishing, and oyster-harvesting trades and administer Diobel’s many thriving markets. It’s an open secret that they also control a conduit for illicit goods smuggled into and out of Absalom by road without risking the scrutiny of the Harbor Guard.

The Consortium’s corruption makes Diobel a hotbed of political intrigue against the high and mighty of Absalom, inspiring a chaotic atmosphere, and while the group keeps everything well regulated, there’s a sense that this arrangement could collapse at any moment.

Dunmire

North of the Kortos Mounts, the isle slopes toward the sea and the central lowlands sink into the Dunmire, a vast bog shrouded in thick fog that reaches a human’s knees. The miasma conceals all manner of filth and disease, and isolated enclaves of kobolds, lizardfolk, hags, and criminal outcasts huddle under its cover. The First Guard’s Eagle Garrison long ago ceded the Dunmire to wilderness, making it effectively outside the legal authority of Absalom. A squalid little village called Pier’s End sits upon a deep harbor on the coast, offering cheap ferries to Escadar for the rare cross-island traveler who manages to survive travel through the swamp.

The Immenwood

The vast, primordial woodland north of Absalom has provided lumber to the city and its vassals for almost as long as it has sheltered its enemies and outcasts.

To the west, past the bustling town of Meravon— epicenter of the island’s logging trade—the magic of the Old Forest Aeon Tower once enriched the soil and bolstered regrowth. In the island’s earliest days, trees in the western Immenwood grew taller and faster than elsewhere on the island, and Kortos grew rich exporting wood to Qadira and the northern coast of Garund. The death of Aroden weakened the tower’s magic, however, and now the harvested trees replenish at the normal rate—perhaps even slower—and the lumber barons of the Kortos Consortium look to druids in hopes of restoring the forest to its previous glory. The central Immenwood is older and craggier than the outskirts, prone to tangled undergrowth, an intertwined canopy, and long shadows. The forest’s eastern reach

RELATIONS

Numerous factions vie for control over the Starstone Isle. Absalom itself claims the whole of Kortos and Erran as its political domain, but many of the islands’ wilder regions are effectively lawless wilderness. The Kortos Consortium of Diobel (technically a part of Absalom’s regional government) has generally good relations with the rugged Inlanders who dwell in the hills and deep forests of Kortos, as these hardy folk provide much of the labor behind the Consortium’s fur, farming, and lumber trades. Relations with the agents of Absalom proper—often in the form of altercations with the First Guard’s Eagle Garrison patrols— are a cause of some tension with the Inlanders, but the openly hostile threats posed by minotaurs, harpies, and centaurs are often a far more pressing concern.

CENTAUR AEON TOWERS

Aroden erected each of the four ancient mud-brick towers on the island’s western plains, as well as an identical structure on the Isle of Erran, in the first decades of the island’s settlement to house the aeon orbs, large crystal spheres that emit a nutritive radiation in a 15-mile radius. According to popular lore, Aroden liberated the orbs from a vast vault in the Darklands and brought them to Kortos to benefit humanity. For millennia they enhanced agriculture on Kortos, but Aroden’s death over a century ago damaged the divine magic that had protected the towers and kept the aeon orbs safe, and now two of the towers no longer function as they were intended.

AEON TOWER touches the Tyrant’s Grasp, where blighted trees grow warped and twisted by the necromantic corruption left by Tar-Baphon’s defeat, and the clearings are haunted by undead wretches and sinister cultists of the Whispering Way.

The Immenwood hides many ruins and lost settlements, along with several active fortresses. The wooded foothills of the Kortos Mounts hold mines, both active and inactive, almost all of which have inhabitants of one kind or another. Patrols of the First Guard’s Eagle Garrison range the trails connecting the forest’s settlements, which often fall prey to outlaws. The centaur tribes that dwell in the forest are more hospitable than their violent, xenophobic cousins of the Scrape, but they’ve suffered terribly at the hands of Absalom in recent years, and tensions remain high.

Kortos Mounts

The soaring mountains of central Kortos loom large behind Absalom’s skyline when viewed from the sea and are as identifiable to sailors and islanders as the Absalom Lighthouse, Eastgate’s Blue Tower, and the Spire of Nex. Several large mountains, some capped with snow and ice, cut distinctive enough silhouettes against the sky as to take on cultural significance even to folk who never leave Absalom. Most notable are Mount Ganog, Arazlant Mox, and the Weeping Grandfather, each of which has its own legends, tavern songs, and folklore. Twisting crevices and sharp ridges make travel through the region a treacherous proposition, to say nothing of the vicious harpies who roost in secluded defiles and crude villages at the tree line’s edge, or the drakes, wyverns, and dragons who lurk nearer the rocky peaks.

The Scrape

When Voradni Voon’s Brazen Arch thrummed to life as a magical portal at the center of the isle’s eastern plateau, the warlord called his armies from a continent away, and a seemingly infinite horde of minotaurs, harpies, and centaurs burst onto the Isle of Kortos. The plateau thundered with the hooves of 10,000 centaurs, whole tribes surging in vast interlocking circles to unleash a terrible earthquake upon Absalom, just as they had brought upheaval to so many of the ancient cities of Casmaron. Aroden reversed their seismic magic back upon them, killing Voradni Voon and shattering the Brazen Arch into a dozen jagged fragments. Countless centaurs toppled into deep rifts as the landscape cracked and seethed in violent destruction. After the rending of the Brazen Arch, the devastated eastern plateau became known as the Scrape. Most of the surviving minotaurs fled into the Riven Hills, where they harry Absalom and its allies to this day from their settlement at Hazrak. Voon’s feral harpies, the last to give up the fight, fled to the highlands of the Kortos Mounts, and they have grown no more hospitable over the centuries.

Swardlands

Kortos owes its great bounty not just to the fertile fields of its western reaches, but also to the enormous Aeon Towers and their aeon orbs that have magically sustained its flora since antiquity. Unknown parties stole the aeon orb near Willowside a decade ago, leaving its tower a crumbling cenotaph incapable of holding back a strange environmental devastation known as the Welt, which grows from the western edge of the Dunmire by a mile each year. The Old Forest Tower near the lumber town of Meravon once ensured the health and regrowth of the western Immenwood, but its powers grow weaker and weaker each season. The other three Aeon Towers still function for now, but their caretakers look on uneasily and wonder how long they—and the famous agricultural prosperity of Kortos—can endure.

Tyrant’s Grasp

The site of the Whispering Tyrant’s defeat is a blasted wasteland of necromantic corruption stretching nearly 15 miles across the plains, forest, and hills northeast of the Spire of Nex. The lich seemingly perished in a tremendous blast of magical energy that wrenched the undead lord’s right hand from its bony wrist, and the skeletal hand remains there still, unwilling to loosen its grip upon the Isle of Kortos. Cultists of the Whispering Way flock to the tainted land, seeing it as the most likely beachhead for their lord’s inevitable return to claim his hand and the Starstone. The First Guard has annihilated three attempted settlements by these dark devotees, but their numbers seem to be growing. Undead creatures— always a potential menace in the Cairnlands—are notably more numerous within this region.

Undead within the Tyrant’s Grasp gain the ability to sense living creatures as an imprecise sense with a range of 30 feet. They also gain resistance to positive energy equal to their level.