The Great Rift
A titanic wound of a valley running south-west to north-east, plunging thousands of feet between unscalable walls of red sandstone and black basalt and separating the other two Veldt regions. At its floor lies a boiling inner sea, and around that the Yumbo feast, sing, and welcome anyone who can get down.
The Land
The inner sea's surface is cloaked in a permanent warm miasma of sulphur and salt spray, churning above active volcanic vents and magma fissures. Far from sterilising the water, the abyssal chimneys pump mineral heat upward and feed forests of calcified tube-coral, chemotrophic shelf fungi and glass-shelled micro-molluscs that carpet the seafloor in shimmering constellations.
Confined in this pressure-cooker, life has diverged: winged fauna have traded high-altitude flight for heavy heat-shedding gliding fins that ride the superheated updrafts, and blind amphipods and venomous eel-wyrms hunt along the scalding hydrothermal shelf.
The Rift is the reason the Veldt has any large settlements at all. The Round, the provincial capital, is a natural amphitheatre cut into the cliff wall; Belltown sits on the northern lip; Underchord is dug entirely into the rock.
The Yumbo
They live in earthen hollows worked into the cliffsides, and their whole social life happens outdoors above the steaming water, at night, in song. Hardy enough for the heat and humidity, and possessed of a deep and entirely practical respect for the power of the earth beneath them.
The Rift is genuinely dangerous to traverse and the Yumbo know it, which is exactly why a traveller who manages the descent is received the way a returning relative is received. Yumbo clans will take in anyone who arrives, eager to hear their stories and to give their own back — in the form of song, naturally, at length, and starting immediately.
Encounters
Roll d100. A pressure-cooker with its own evolution. Almost nothing here has a cousin anywhere else in Everdew. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–10 | 2d6 Yumbo receiving you as a returning relative, in song, at length, immediately | — |
| 11–18 | 1d4 descent riggers working the cliff route down to the Round, short-handed | — |
| 19–25 | a sulphur surge off the inner sea; the miasma thickens and the lower terraces clear | — |
| 26–32 | 2d8 glass-shelled micro-molluscs carpeting a vent shelf, and singing about it | ⅛ |
| 33–38 | 2d6 blind amphipods along the scalding hydrothermal shelf | ¼ |
| 39–44 | 1d4 heat-gliding fauna riding a superheated updraft, and cargo strapped to them | 2 |
| 45–50 | 1d3 tiger beetles on the black basalt cliff terraces | 2 |
| 51–56 | 1d4 fire beetles in a fissure field on the cliff wall | 1 |
| 57–62 | 1d3 ground beetles in the chemotrophic fungus shelves | 2 |
| 63–68 | 1d2 bark scorpions on the warm rock above Underchord | 4 |
| 69–74 | 1d4 diving beetles, heat-strain, in the shallows of the inner sea | 4 |
| 75–79 | 1d2 venomous eel-wyrms hunting the hydrothermal shelf | 6 |
| 80–84 | 1 giant water bug at a Round landing stage | 7 |
| 85–89 | 1d2 tarantulas in the cliff hollows, reach Large | 7 |
| 90–92 | 1 bat through the Rift airspace, for which the noise is an advantage | 10 |
| 93–94 | 1 crayfish, vent-strain, armoured against water that would boil you | 10 |
| 95–96 | 1 greater eel-wyrm off the vent field, blind and enormous | 14 |
| 97–98 | 1 cane toad on the shore mud, indiscriminate | 12 |
| 99 | 1 heron at the inner sea's edge, standing in water nothing should stand in | 24 |
| 00 | the vents surge, the water turns, and the whole shore is the encounter | — |