The Sellen River

The heavily trafficked Sellen River is the longest and most expansive of Avistan’s rivers. With the rise of Tar-Baphon hindering trade across Lake Encarthan, the Sellen River has become even more crucial to the cultural and economic lives of the nations it connects. Originating in the Lake of Mists and Veils, the river runs south through Numeria and the eastern River Kingdoms before serving as a natural border for many of Avistan’s central nations, then spilling into the Inner Sea. Its primary tributaries—the East and West Sellen Rivers—are vital trade routes linking Mendev, the Sarkoris Scar, and Brevoy to the wealthier and more populous nations in central and southern Avistan.

The northern reaches of the Sellen River are subject to harsh winters that choke the waters with ice and lash travelers with frigid, blinding winds. As the river and its tributaries run south, the current slows and the waterway broadens, no longer confined to leaping rapids between walls of glacier-carved rock. Grasslands and rich forests unfurl on the riverbanks, and outposts become more common.

Because trade along the Sellen River is so crucial to every nation it touches, most realms maintain regulated harbors and riverside towns where travelers can enjoy a degree of safety, generally in exchange for taxes and tolls. The river is too vast for anyone to completely control it, however, and smugglers, pirates, and cutthroats flourish along its less populated reaches. An entire secondary economy has sprung up to shield travelers from these threats, but it’s an open secret that many river pilots and mercenary escorts switch sides to play pirate when their legitimate business slows.

RELATIONS

Foreign relations in the Broken Lands are limited. Brevoy and Mendev maintain diplomatic ties with each other and have a nominal presence in the other countries. Razmiran maintains small embassy-temples in a few River Kingdoms, but its other neighbors range from unwelcoming to openly hostile toward it, as the theocracy’s agents are known for undermining outside societies.

The River Kingdoms send out envoys decided at each year’s Outlaw Council, but these representatives seldom have clear direction or duties, since the River Kingdoms are too fractious to set policy as a group. Numeria’s government— never truly organized to begin with—has almost entirely dissolved following the collapse of the Technic League, and does not currently engage in formal diplomacy.

DAGGERMARK ASSASSIN