On the continent of Orulon. The area that was once, long ago, the Ironian Empire.
Dozens of warring city-states dot the landscape of the Ironian Badlands on Orulon. In ancient times Orulon was home to an empire that rivaled the power of the Clorencian Empire. Now, Irone is home to little more than an empty landscape of scorched earth. The people of Irone are uncivilized and savage, showing little of the vast civilization and intelligence their empire once possessed.
In the wake of the Accordance War, bloodthirsty sorcerers have seized power in almost all of the city-states. These Mage Tyrants subject their citizens to slavery, tyranny, torture, and oppression. The terror and suffering inflicted upon the people of the Ironian City States by their elementalist overlords is well known across the Great Republic, and serves as a warning of why 'unnaturals' are outlawed.
In addition to the savagery of its inhabitants, Irone is crawling with dangerous beasts. While the strange creatures of the wild have been all but exterminated from civilized lands, in Irone they are perhaps more common than men. Beetles that range in size from large dogs to cattle are common, and grotesquely enough many have been domesticated by the Ironians for use as pack animals or meat. It has been documented that large, crustacean-like creatures hunt the wastelands of Irone, as well as lizards with eight legs and emaciated, spined carrion birds that have learned the taste of men. The National Museum in Clorencia City holds the remains of a giant worm that was found on an expedition into Irone, as well as photographs of the fossils of a reptile that was over 1,000 feet long. Museum officials are currently working to arrange an expedition to unearth the skeleton, and return the bones to Clorencia. Local warlords are hindering the plans.
Many Ironians have left their hellish homeland, and settled in the Free Islands to the far west, or the Great Republic to the far north. They often congregate together, forming neighborhoods that are gang ridden, downtrodden and insular.
Thorton is Ironian, and there’s a major Ironian neighborhood just to the northwest of the Bronze Gardens, just north of the Rookery. The local Ironians dislike Thorton, seeing him as having sold out to the man. Lukov’s gang was made up primarily of Ironians, even though he’s of Kauldish descent.
GM Notes[]
Despite the rest of the world being in relatively decent shape, Irone is essentially post apocalyptic. Take your Mad Max, add your Dark Tower, throw in a bit of Dark Sun, give people some rigged together and second hand steampunk tech, and you’re good to go. Why was Irone hit hardest by the Cataclysm and other ravages over the centuries? Why did the Ironian Empire collapse so thoroughly? These are questions that will have to wait to be answered. What caused the Cataclysm anyway?