Spotlight: Ravenia

Ravenia is the name of the region which lies along the eastern border of Ioropa, abutting Rus to the northeast and Ba'al Turath to the southeast. As such, this forbidding mountainous region forms the front line in the long, grinding war of civilizations between the Turathi and the Ioropans. Its vital strategic significance goes a long way in explaining why the Church of Bahamut, which otherwise abhors necromancy, is curiously silent on the subject of the vampire nobility of Ravenia and their tradition of undead servitude.

Since time immemorial, the lords of Ravenia have levied a grim labor tax on their serfs. Necropolises grow alongside the hamlets huddling uneasily in the shadows of the grand castles, and there the dead lie uneasily by day. As night falls, the people retreat to their homes, lock their doors, and close their blinds, as the night shift rises to do the bidding of the lords of the realm.

Although deeply conservative by nature, the masters of Ravenia have been dragged sulking and snarling into the 16th century. Advances in military power by their hated neighbors the Turathi have prompted the application of a twisted sort of science to the shambling armies of Ravenia. The result is a new and terrible creation: the abomination. These hulking constructs, formed of dead flesh reshaped and reinforced by metalwork and alchemy, are the vanguard of Ravenia's armies of the night.

The undead are not the only things that go bump in the night, however. The halflings, traveling in families and clans in their distinctive ox-drawn cart-houses, have been steadily sidling across the eastern borders of Ravenia for centuries. Claiming ancestry from far-off Arindia, they are regarded with suspicion for many reasons: their willingness to travel the roads by night, their passage through Turathi lands, their curiously tiny proportions, their strange language, their mysterious religion and sorceries, and whatever other reason the justifiably paranoid Ravenians might come up with. Nevertheless, although no one admits to it, everyone visits the halflings for one reason or another.