Azlanti Ruins

Inner Sea legends often place any sufficiently marvelous location in the ruins of Azlant, and the truth is that even after millennia of degradation, the actual sites uncovered by explorers are every bit as magical as their legends. Much of the Inner Sea region’s initial knowledge of the lost empire came from famed Pathfinder Durvin Gest. Delving into an Azlanti sea stack temple called the House of Aeons, he discovered not just a vast trove of magical aeon stones but a giant metal book called the Infalabulum that described many of the empire’s wonders and their locations, guiding both Gest’s future explorations and those of the Pathfinder Society.

The most marvelous of Azlant’s ruins is its former capital, the City of Golden Gates. Said to be literally the perfect city, granted by Abadar as an example to the Material Plane, the hillside metropolis was destroyed by a direct strike during Earthfall; its Imperial Palace and Throne of Glass shattered, and much of the city sank beneath the waves. Today, the underwater portions of its ruins are guarded by jealous alghollthus— the intelligent ichthyoid monsters who rule the deeps—while dragons and formerly bound demons stalk the dry portions.

One of the few cities to survive Earthfall—after a fashion—is Acrolan, the first of the Seven Secret Cities crafted as havens for the psychic Ascended Adepts.

IRIM

Though Acrolan’s towers and palaces of colored glass were smashed, the secret truth is that the ruined land was only ever a monument to the real city, which lies behind it on the Ethereal Plane. Warped into hateful wraiths by the trauma of their civilization’s end, the Ascended Adepts who once populated Acrolan still wait within the broken temples for those who can pass the tests to ascend to the true city and battle its masters for their vast wealth.

The temple-city of Bilith-Vel is ruled by the undead monstrosity Rezallian, a lunar dragon who was horrifically warped by the death of his liege Acavna, the Azlanti goddess of the moon and battle. Acavna’s death during Earthfall left Rezallian to oversee the dregs of the city’s population: Azlanti degenerated into morlocks or risen as draugr, and giant, tentacled flatworms from the far side of the moon. Bilith-Vel’s towers and statues to the dead goddess are sunk halfway under the waves but are still connected by soaring bridges.

Yet not all of Azlant’s most notable sites are haunted by survivors. Aroden’s Rock was one of Azlant’s tallest mountains prior to Earthfall, when it was reshaped into a mere island; there, Aroden and his followers built ships to sail east and start a new civilization. Today, the island teems with the murderous fey who opposed Aroden then, ruled by Ugurskogg, a terrifying entity from the planet’s earliest days. And unmarked on any map, the fabled Towers of Heaven that were once Azlant’s secret route to reaching the stars still stand dry in their salt-flat desert, guarded by a mu spore who hopes to harness their power to return home to a distant world.