Pathfinder 2e Roleplaying Game

Broken Lands

Pathfinder Lost Omens World Guide (Second Edition), page 24

TIMELINE

Circa –4363 ar Before the Age of Anguish, the Kellid people of Numeria witness the Rain of Stars.

4499 ar Choral the Conqueror unites Issia and Rostland as the newly founded kingdom of Brevoy.

4606 ar The Worldwound opens in Sarkoris. Demons pour forth from the rip in reality and quickly consume the entire nation, leaving only ruin.

4622 ar The First Mendevian Crusade begins.

4638 ar The city of Drezen falls to the demon horde, signaling the first crusade’s defeat.

In response, the Second Mendevian Crusade is called and establishes the wardstones as a mystical defense that tenuously contains the Worldwound’s blight.

4661 ar Razmir, the Living God, declares himself in the River Kingdoms and swiftly conquers several smaller holds, uniting them as the new realm of Razmiran.

4665 ar The Third Mendevian Crusade is called, but soon sinks into factional infighting and persecution of indigenous Kellid and Sarkorian animist faiths.

4692 ar The Fourth Mendevian Crusade is called in response to the rise of the balor Khorramzadeh.

The Order of Heralds reins in the purges of the Third Crusade.

4699 ar The royal House Rogarvia vanishes from Brevoy, and the city of Skywatch is mysteriously sealed. Later that year, House Surtova claims Brevoy’s crown.

4707 ar The Fourth Crusade ends in a stalemate between demons and crusaders, with the demons forced into retreat but the forces of Mendev too exhausted to fight further.

4716 ar Numeria’s Technic League shatters following the unexplained death of its leader. Rumors begin Scarcity defines the Broken Lands. The terrain is mostly nonarable, the cities small and scattered, the people hard and fiercely self-sufficient. Survival is a constant battle that leaves little time for less pressing concerns. Countries in this region lack the prestigious artistic, academic, and cultural institutions that the empires to the south enjoy, but they also lack the extreme inequality and social rigidity that can hobble advancement in those lands. Here, a person’s fate is in their own hands, and destiny is for the bold to forge.

Both natural climate and historical disasters have shaped these nations. The rocky, wind-scoured hills of northern Brevoy and the mosquito-infested swamps of the River Kingdoms are impossible to cultivate, while the irradiated wastelands of Numeria and the demon-haunted Sarkoris Scar are even less hospitable. Arable farmland in the region is limited to southern Brevoy, parts of the Sellen River basin scattered across Razmiran and the River Kingdoms, and tiny pockets in Mendev and Numeria. As a realm’s stability depends on keeping its people fed, the breadbaskets of Rostland take on outsize importance in Brevoy, and Razmiran’s fertile farmland is a major reason its masked god’s rule goes unchallenged.

The region’s history has unfurled against, and continues to be guided by, this backdrop of scarcity. Centuries ago, an immense starship fell from the night sky and shattered across Numeria in the Rain of Stars, seeding its land with untold wonders and dangers. In a more developed realm, those mysteries might have been dissected and cataloged long ago, but because Numeria was and is a sparsely populated land of superstitious folk, those star-fallen relics have remained largely unexplored to this day.

When the Worldwound erupted in the north and spewed demons onto Golarion, the Abyssal armies scythed through thinly settled Sarkoris without meaningful resistance. Fiends consumed that entire realm before the crusaders of neighboring Mendev, aided by soldiers from across the Inner Sea, were able to stem the tide. For decades, southern nations sent soldiers and supplies northward to bolster the crusade’s defenses, but when the Worldwound closed and new threats arose closer to home, those nations pulled their support away. Now, though the gravest danger has been sealed off, countless demons and their corruptions remain scattered across the Sarkoris Scar and the battlegrounds of Mendev, and few stand ready to face them.

Wild, perilous, and largely uncharted, the Broken Lands are filled with dangers and mysteries both ancient and modern. Civilization is a fragile thing here, and in the vastness of the woods and lakes and windswept tundra, spirits and stranger things rule.

In this section

  • Brevoy Two hundred and twenty years ago, Choral the Conqueror swept into the rival kingdoms of Issia and Rostland, welding the former foes into the single nation of Brevoy with sword and dragon flame.
  • The Lake of Mists and Veils The enormous freshwater lake that borders Brevoy, Numeria, Mendev, and Iobaria takes its name from the dense fog that steams from its surface each winter morning, burning off slowly throughout the day.
  • Mendev For well over a century, the defining fact of life in the crusader kingdom of Mendev was the Worldwound: a reality-warping Abyssal rift west of the realm that threatened to consume all of Golarion.
  • Numeria Toward the end of the Age of Darkness, a great fireball with a smoking heart of steel broke apart in the night skies above Numeria, shattering into fragments—some as small as fists, others large as cities—that buried…
  • Razmiran The oppressive theocracy of Razmiran, ruled by the masked priests of a masked god, has long been viewed with wariness by its neighbors.
  • The River Kingdoms Scattered among the forests and marshes of the Sellen River basin are the River Kingdoms: a loose confederation of tiny, independent states, the largest of them holding only a few thousand souls.
  • Sarkoris Scar The region formerly called the Worldwound is now known as the Sarkoris Scar, after the jagged, ugly gash of blackened and broken rock that runs across the land where the Abyssal rift once yawned.
  • The Sellen River The heavily trafficked Sellen River is the longest and most expansive of Avistan’s rivers.