Plateau of Thay
The Plateau of Thay includes everything within the First Escarpment, a long line of sheer cliffs surrounding the interior portion of the country, although the lands above the Second Escarpment—High Thay and the Thaymount—are distinctly different. The distance between the First and Second Escarpments ranges from little more than twenty miles on the western edge overlooking Nethentir to nearly 200 miles in the southeast and northeast reaches. The First Escarpment guards Thay from attack and has daunted many who contemplated invasion. The natural walls are a better defense than any army. The cliffs are honeycombed with tunnels, barracks, and fortresses carved directly into the rock, highlighting the difficulty of challenging Thay on its own turf. In fact, the escarpment was one of the reasons the wizards of Thay were able to fight off their Mulhorandi overlords during their war of independence. Even though the Thayans were disorganized and divided by vicious feuds, the Mulhorandi army had a devil of a time getting up and over those cliffs.
The plateau itself is a naturally arid, rolling plain with occasional dusty mesas. Centuries ago, the Red Wizards crafted great weather-controlling spells to bring rain and moderate temperatures to this upland, and now vast tracts of former savanna are densely cultivated cropland. In the southern reaches of the plateau, every bit of land is put to use. Slaves tend the fields and orchards, planting and harvesting crops, felling timber, and picking fruit. Cotton and grain are the major crops, although citrus and olive trees and the occasional vineyard grow between the fields. Tax stations and the estates of noble Thayans and Red Wizards dot the land, along with small villages that sprout up around them. North of the Second Escarpment, the plateau is much less densely populated. The valleys of the rivers Gauros and Thay are heavily settled, but much of the rest is empty scrubland, inhabited only by goatherds, shepherds, and stonecutters.
Nearly 3 1/2 million people live on the Plateau of Thay. Of these, about 2 1/2 million are slaves or the evil humanoids who guard them (mostly gnolls and orcs). Both slaves and warriors live in squalor in massive barracks. The Thayan economy depends on slaves, a constantly replenished source of cheap labor who are routinely worked to death under the watchful eyes of cruel overseers and guards.
The Thayan merchant fleet ships surplus cotton, grain, olive oil, and citrus fruit all across eastern Faerûn. Thayan grain feeds Impiltur, Chessenta, and the Vast, as well as the cities of the Wizards’ Reach. The success of this trade led to the current strategy of exporting more valuable goods—namely, magic items—to other lands. Thayan merchants already knew the trade routes and had demonstrated for decades that Thay could be a successful trading partner.
The entire plateau is impervious to scrying magic. The Red Wizards have set up an elaborate shield of overlapping wards that prevent such spying. Any spell with the scrying descriptor that targets a person or point within the First Escarpment fails automatically. Divination of other types usually works, but many Red Wizards screen their activities with additional defenses such as mind blank or nondetection. These wards interfere with the Red Wizards’ own scrying spells as well, making it difficult for them to magically locate intruders. However, the patrols usually do a good job of watching.
Guards both human and gnoll patrol the plateau in the settled areas, on the lookout for escaped slaves and foreign spies. Despite the opening of trade agreements with many nations, few foreigners spend much time in the Thayan countryside. Most are issued passes permitting travel to only one or two cities along a specified route.
