Tibrai

Rising like a defiant cancer from the centre of Tibrai, jagged peaks grasping for the sky, stand the Thundercrown Mountains. They are enormous. Covering an area of five hundred square miles, the highest peaks are more than five times the height of Norandor's Mount Korvas. The entire mountain range is in the grip of a perpetual thunderstorm that lashes the area with such force that no mortal is said to be able to approach within fifty miles of the site and live.

The full extent of the life that dwells in those mountains is unknown, and it's probably best if it stays that way. Bards always have a song of woe to do with the Thunderers and tell tall tales of storm giants, corrupt wizards, undead and a race of perverted dwarves who dwell nowhere else in the world. Most of all there are the tales of the dragons. Within the Thunderers, it is dragons that seem to be the most common race; oft told is the tale of the traveller who passed within two days of the peaks and within the space of setting and rising of the moons saw fifty dragons in the sky, and no two the same colour. The origins of the Thundercrown Mountains are lost to history, but there is a legend that on one story night one of the many doorways above the world open and through it fell a seed. The seed landed in the centre of the Relkimas Plain where it was watered by mistrust and nurtured by chaos. In one night it grew into the Thundercrack Mountains and thousands perished in the conflagration that followed.

The presence of such dire danger in the middle of the continent has meant that almost all the humans live around the coast of Tibrai, seldom venturing in land. In fact, because Tibrai has the advantage of an entirely navigable coastline, trips through the interior are very much unknown. As a result evil has flourished here, and even the lands far from the Thundercrown Mountains are far from safe. The chasms that cut of Tibrai from the rest of Urova are widest to the west. It is over this impenetrable border that the first of the Unknown Lands resides. No one is known to have attempted the crossing, and those that have, have never returned.

To the north, on the coast of the Central Sea is the small human state of Borrovar, the centre of civilisation throughout the land. Borrovar consists of seven heavily fortified walled towns, surrounded by the Chalstatan Wall, an incredible feat of engineering attributed to the Hadradans that is almost five hundred miles long and dotted with tiny fortresses. It was almost certainly built to keep out the horrors from the centre of the country, implying that Tibrai was a dangerous place even in Hadradan times.

The enclaves of Tibrai are little more than fortified city states. Each state may hold as many as 10,000 people but the states are isolated from one another. There is much fear and prejudice among the humans of Tibrai. Each state thinks that the others are better off than it is and are refusing to share their secrets and their wealth. The resulting situation is a land full of frightened people who would let every other state perish one-by-one without lifting a finger to help, and then accept the grim inevitably of defeat when the forces of darkness turned to them.