The Ashlands
The south-eastern third: an alien volcanic country of active calderas, basalt flats and glowing lava tubes under permanent drifting soot. The Cherufe live in it and work it, and their glass and blade-craft is prized in every province that pretends to disapprove of them.
The Land
The ground is a treacherous crust of porous pumice, cracked obsidian and deep grey ash burying the bases of petrified spires. In place of ordinary flora there are heat-resistant shelf fungi and giant mushroom stalks feeding on volcanic minerals and thermal vents, with boiling mud pools, jagged fissures and slow rivers of molten slag cutting across the floor.
Within it lies the Obsidian Caldera, whose forge is the only one in Everdew capable of smelting titanium scavenged out of the Waking World — a fact the Kingdom finds useful and does not advertise.
The region's eastern edge is coast: the open water of the Manywaters begins where the basalt ends.
The Cherufe
Insular and deeply spiritual, adapted to soot and thermal vent, their skin like cracked dark obsidian and often hidden behind ritual pumice masks and robes woven from spun volcanic glass. They read the tectonic pulse of the earth through ancestral songlines and dwell in hollowed pumice spires and lava tubes.
With focused plasma breath and elemental bellows they shape volcanic glass, basalt and scavenged non-ferrous metal into ceremonial blades and flame-tempered armour. They sell readily and socialise almost never, and the rest of the Kingdom has decided this is sinister rather than simply preferred.
Encounters
Roll d100. Heat, glass, and the small number of things that thrive in both. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 1d4 masked Cherufe escorting a glass shipment, who will not make conversation | — |
| 10–16 | 2d8 fire beetles nesting in a vent-field, farmed, and unbothered by flame | 1 |
| 17–23 | ash fall closes the road: visibility to a stride, and something moving inside it | — |
| 24–29 | 1d6 thrips working a shelf-fungus bloom before the heat takes it | ¼ |
| 30–35 | 1d4 rove beetles in a carrion crack, chemical burns and a raised tail | 1 |
| 36–41 | a slag river changes course across the only marked path in twenty miles | — |
| 42–47 | 1d3 ground beetles with a boiling chemical spray, entirely at home here | 2 |
| 48–53 | 1d2 bark scorpions on hot obsidian, fluorescing beautifully | 4 |
| 54–59 | 1d4 camel spiders crossing the pumice flats at speed | 4 |
| 60–65 | 1d2 vinegaroons on a cooling flow, spraying acid with pinpoint accuracy | 4 |
| 66–71 | 1 cicada-killer wasp carrying prey away alive, paralysed, and awake | 5 |
| 72–76 | 1 anole motionless on hot rock for an hour, then a tongue, then nothing | 6 |
| 77–81 | 1d2 tarantulas in an old lava tube, reach Large | 7 |
| 82–86 | 1d2 deathstalker scorpions at a caldera lip | 8 |
| 87–91 | 1 praying mantis on the ash, courteous throughout | 8 |
| 92–94 | 1 fence lizard on the basalt, and the rock was never simply rock | 10 |
| 95–96 | 1 cane toad off the eastern coast strip, eating whatever moves in front of it | 12 |
| 97–98 | 1 lesser snake in a warm tube: no sound, no warning, no negotiation | 14 |
| 99–00 | 1 hawk over the caldera rim, threading the petrified spires | 20 |