Plains of Avarice
The Front Lines
Battlemaps set in this location
Fadma's End
The Great Fadma is a world-spanning race from one end of the Plains of Avarice to the other, and as its name implies, Fadma’s End is the final checkpoint. This giant tree, growing along the coast of the plains along the edge of the Mox Oilfield, became the sacred final stop of the Great Fadma. The nomadic people once believed this coastal region marked the end of the world, the furthest place they could travel where they would be able to meet the god of journeys. Today, they have learned the world is larger than they previously expected, but the name remains.
Fadma's End serves as a graveyard for lost Totemic caravans, with a hill of cairns and flags to remember their honored dead. Twice a year, caravan families gather to witness the racers pass this checkpoint and to celebrate, wed, and honor the dead at every major stop of the race, and none are more culturally and historically significant a stop than Fadma’s End even as the war creeps ever closer to this sacred site the totemic caravans.
Mox Oil Field
The Mox oil fields are a vast reach of ever-churning pumpjacks and oil derricks, all pulling precious fuel for the diesel machines of the republic. Its dirt roads are lined with trucks moving like train cars to and from the derricks, steel mills, and back to the heart of the republic. This oil is the lifeblood of the war effort and has proven to be a critical weak point for the nation of palaveir. The supplyline out of the oil field is under constant assault by their enemies, the brazen crusaders and the near constant bombing of their artillery from the Castle of Cannons. Being at the edge of the great gorge through the center of the plains Palaveir has created a chokepoint on the route to the fields and reinforced the hills there with pillboxes and gun emplacements, one of the most brutal and contested regions in the wart. Soldiers like to call the region the “God’s Meatgrinder”, for all the seemingly endless waves of crusader regiments that have charged the hill only to be cut down by Federalist machine gun fire almost daily.
Felstead Airfield
Named for the legendary airship pirate Archer Felstead in honor of his role in creating the republic. Felstead Airfield is an important military outpost in the war between Dawnfire and Palaveir which also operates as a testing ground for new and unconventional airships. All manner of skybound vessels are pushed to their limits and studied scientifically here. Generally, this knowledge is applied to the war effort, but it also serves the growing industry in Crudilex of colonizing the world’s skies.
The recent discovery of the Manderwind, a Ley Line powered air current of the Auran essence has revolutionized air travel. The people of the world have started to explore a whole new world biome above, creatures, plants, even land masses that exist up in the clouds. Floating over Crudilex are untouched and unexplored wonders that have been out of reach for centuries.
Felstead Airfield has become an important staging ground for Aeronauts and expeditions into the high-skies. While excited, much of society considers it a shame that such an exploratory effort is mainly being performed as part of yet another war effort.
Federalist Republic Of Palaveir
Formed in the wake of the Colloran Civil War twenty years ago, the Federalist Republic of Palaveir is a militarized state actively colonizing the Plains of Avarice. It has established a key trade route between Hark and Dawnfire and was focused on eliminating lingering Royalist resistance and remnants of Collora's secret police called “The Unit”. The Republic is widely known for its disciplined, heavily armed military and prominent infantry, unique Gunboat mechs like walking tanks, and soldiers clad in ancient, retrofitted powered armor called Hellcages.
Today, Palaveir is locked in a stalemated war with the nation of Dawnfire. What began as border skirmishes has slowly escalated into full-scale conflict following the mysterious disappearance of a Dawnfire princess and the retaliatory assassination of a Palaveirian admiral. This ongoing conflict has come to define Palavier's brief history, pushing the republic ever deeper into the warlike path from which it was born.
Strunveld
A small, quaint town of tall brick buildings, twisting gardens, and ivy-covered walls, Strunveld is famous for its chocolate makers and candy shops. It is a relic of a simpler time in the Plains of Avarice, before the grasslands were plunged into war. Untouched by the fighting so far, it remains a peaceful and quiet place. It is among few places in the region welcoming to travelers attempting to cross the warzone, even to outriders and marauders, so long as they respect the town’s peace. But Strunveld hides a dark secret: at its center lies a gateway to Wilder, the mythical lands of beasts. This particular gateway belongs to the Court of Veils, a mysterious circle of doppelgangers, spies, and saboteurs who infiltrate political societies and dismantle them from within. Their subtle tradecraft has remained in high demand amid the long, grinding stalemate between the two powerful nations now vying for control at Strunveld’s doorstep.
The Factory
Shrouded in a dense fog of smoke that plumes above like a dark, endless storm and buried beneath a blizzard of falling ash, The Factory, is the sole source of nearly all mechs and automata across Crudilex. It’s a monolithic concrete structure with towering smokestacks belching black clouds into the sky. Within millions of engines of destruction are built. The foreman of The Factory, Caspian Lark, is a reclusive figure who never ventures into the world. In his stead, two loyal construct Dukes oversee the region surrounding the Factory:
Duke Halmer: A rotund, spider-legged construct businessman who dons a top hat and oversees commerce. He manages all profit and barter, selling war machines to the highest bidders across the world.
Duke Maestro: A golden marvel of a construct, his crescent moon-shaped head and one-man-band-like body are like a living, walking performance. Maestro governs creativity and design, ensuring every machine that leaves The Factory is on the bleeding edge. Though the two Dukes loathe one another, they are both wholly subservient to Caspian Lark and unwavering in their loyalty to The Factory.
Gold Ward
Home of the most famous musician in all of Crudilex, Duke Maestro, a golden construct of unbelievably ornate design. Sculpted from gold and brass, Maestro looks like an orchestra came to life. He was created by Caspian Lark to serve as the creative and artistic mind behind the construct designs born of The Factory. Gold Ward, much like its Duke, is a brilliant, gilded city of gold filled with artists and creatives all dedicated to their craft. The Gold Ward treats inspiration as a commodity, buying and trading brilliant minds to come and work for Lark.
Famously, the center of Gold Ward houses a great and terrible machine of destruction that rivals the ancient Colossus of Riddles itself: Maestro’s masterpiece, Crescendo. Designed like a monster of prey but sculpted to perfection, it serves as the central marker of the ward to challenge any faction that might get foolish aspirations of laying siege to The Factory.
Grey Ward
Grey Ward is the industrial heart of Crudilex made up of towering factories rising along the edges of sheer cliffs that plunge into deep, ever-expanding quarries of The Factory. The air is thick with ash, and the streets are patrolled by eerily synchronized construct guards. The few non-mechinized citizens are forced to wear breathing masks or slowly poison their lungs. Grey Ward is brutally efficient. Its people are strong and rewarded handsomely for their labor. They consider their toil necessary and honorable, a vital contribution to the factions of the world. Presiding over Grey Ward is Duke Halmer, a construct like his rival, Duke Maestro. Where Maestro lives for beauty, Halmer was built for coin and conquest, a capitalist warmonger and ruthless business mogul. He is perhaps the most hated figure in all of Crudilex, a shameless war profiteer who sells arms to all sides of every conflict, trading suffering for gold. Yet, his creator, Caspian Lark, seems to have made him that way on purpose, as if believing the world would need someone like Halmer, whether they liked it or not.
Red Tango
Located along the coastal road of the Triton Sea and the Sanroko train tracks, Red Tango is a notorious bar and inn that serves as the natural grounds for all the outriders and marauders. Inside, the bar is alive with drunken brawls, rowdy singing, and the chaos of patrons letting off steam, but the main reason they come is the black market fragment trade.
The Fragments are black-iron spheres, etched with ancient eldritch glyphs, formed from the blood of a dying god of creation. These objects hold vast magical potential, capable of warping and mutating anything living they touch. These spheres are carefully contained within mana batteries that are embedded within mechs to power their systems and weapons. The near endless power allows them the power to perform extraordinary, even near impossible, feats.
The Fragments are highly sought after with the outriders, marauders, scavengers, and outlaws willing to kill to steal them. Red Tango serves as the marketplace where these precious relics are brought to be fenced, exchanged, and traded. Afterward, the outlaws drink, gamble, and spend their hard-earned loot before venturing back out into the warzone in search of more.
Reliquary Graveyard
A vast stretch of ruined machines, lying still and gleaming like golden shipwrecks in the grass seas of the plains. Too sacred to salvage and too powerful to destroy, they remain where they fell, like a war monument. This place is now called the Reliquary Graveyard. Along the western warzone, where Dawnfire clashes with the Palaveir Republic and its mechs from the mox oilfields, the Reliquaries are deployed en masse. Each is protected by at least two Consecrationist detachments, elite support troops dedicated to preserving the machine’s sanctity in battle. Even these protections sometimes fail. If a blow lands directly upon the elemental conjured to pilot the golden mech it is rendered inert, unsalvageable, like a body with no soul.
Nin’s Trench
Nin’s Trench is a gouge in the earth. A vast pit that cuts the warzone in half right down the middle a massive fissure serving as the border between the two trench outcrops of both factions. The gorge drops thousands of feet into the darkness of Crudilex’s Sunless Sea, and rifle fire is traded back and forth across from triple reinforced positions. Grappling cannons, airships, and ziplines have become the weapons of choice for those attempting to rush this cavernous no man’s land and the thousands of failed attacks have littered the gorge's stone cliffs with cord and ropes. In the flickering firelight of night artillery, crusaders say the fissure looks like a gash with torn sinew, red under the glow of war: a vast wound upon the world.
The Castle of Cannons
The Castle of Cannons is a cathedral-fortress belonging to a chapter of Brazen Consecrationists, a militant sect of Dawnfire crusaders who worship artillery. These warriors make war as holy sacrament. Their doctrine teaches that anything reduced to ash is returned to essence, becoming one with their goddess of fire, Raiza. Traditional Dawnfire scripture venerates fire as a purifier of both body and spirit, and the Castle of Cannons extends this belief to an extreme. To them, each foe struck down by a blade is a soul lost, wasted in purgatory. But a being obliterated by cannonfire is delivered directly to the goddess by sacred flames. Their heresy is turned to ash and left behind. Their purest essence folded into the divine cause of Dawnfire. Less extreme members of the brazen church believe the
purified dead may return during the phantom storms, strange weather events that cause specters and visions to drift across the trenches. These spirits are said to whisper to their surviving comrades in the Palaveirian ranks, urging them to lay down arms and end the long, senseless war. Whatever the truth, Palaveiran soldiers are rightfully terrified of the Brazen Consecrationists. They fight with an unsettling calm, to these Consecrationists, the drum of the castle’s artillery is a religious sermon. Every shell they fire is a prayer guided by the hand of Raiza.
Automata Scrap-city
Along the western edge of Nin’s Trench is an unaffiliated territory controlled by marauders and independent mercenaries loyal to neither side of the war. A sprawling junkyard metropolis where Automata mechs are as common as horses. A rusted maze of broken war machines, salvaged armor plating, and makeshift dwellings welded together from the skeletons of giant long-dead constructs. Smoke curls from chimneys built into old missile pods. Streets are carved between the legs of toppled titans. This is a place ruled by scavengers, tinkerers, and war profiteers, those who thrive on the leftovers of the stalemated conflict. Its main street is a market of retrofitted and repaired systems that buzzes with barter. Every fallen automata shell is worth something, either as a home, weapon, or scrap. Nothing metal in the Scrap-City stays dead for long. If it could walk when it died, it walks again.
Enginesow
An overgrown and wind-blown valley just south of The Factory’s outbound supply lines, Enginesow is a battlefield in slow motion. Outriders, marauder bands, and bandits lurk among the grass and trail banks, waiting for the moment to strike. Their prize: freshly-forged automata en route to the warfront. The ground is littered with burnt-out husks and twisted wrecks overgrown by the grass from failed convoy ambushes. Smoke trails mark recent convoy skirmishes, and the echo of long-range cannonfire is a constant drumbeat in the air. Enginesow is where the desperate risk it all and test their luck against the unstoppable, hoping to wrest even a single machine from The Factory's grip.
Cult of The Black Sphere
Born from prolonged exposure to the Fragments of Iv, the Cult of the Black Sphere is made up of Iv-warped mech pilots. Those who survived being bathed by blasts of essence flooding from ruptured mana batteries within their mech. Each has spent too long bonded to the eldritch cores housed within their machines, and none have emerged unchanged. The cult worships the Fragments as divine seeds of the dying god Nin-Iv, whose body melted away and become the black-iron spheres that once littered the plains. According to the cult, every mech is a “womb of rebirth,” destined to transform the pilots into cultists like them. When a mech is destroyed in battle, the cult descends upon it and often kidnaps the pilot off to their lair on the outskirts of the warzone.
The Fragments of Iv
Out In the plains powerful artifacts called Fragments of IV can be found, and at first seem unassuming; if one were to stumble upon one without prior knowledge, it would appear to be an iron ball no bigger than a balled fist, marked with runes. Yet a constant war of attrition is being waged in those hillsides over these artifacts.
The horrible truth about the Fragments of IV is that they hold near-limitless arcane potential, and a trained magic user can draw on them as a focus to accomplish virtually any task. However, the tragedy for those who seek these artifacts is that they are doomed to a single fate. Those who draw from the power of a Fragment of IV are changed by it in equal measure; the greater the task, the further they stray from recognizable humanity. IV-warped aberrations roam the hills, forever starved for the same arcana that transformed them into monsters.
These beasts, both loathed and feared, are pale and twisted. Only a trained eye can recognize what race they once belonged to. Most adventurers know to give them a wide berth if their paths cross.