Travel a day from a city or a major trade route and you might encounter almost anything.
Of course, untamed does not mean empty. There are plenty of lost cities, haunted ruins, and loathsome horrors out there.
The city-states are dens of greed and callousness. Powerful guilds dominate cities, constantly warring with their rivals. The rich and powerful care nothing for commoners, only about schemes and intrigues to gain more riches and power. The most common tools of government are fear and opression.
The older the city, the more decadent.
Slavery exists and is widespread in some areas.
Secretive cults dedicated to dark gods lurk in shadows.
Not all city folk are bad, though.
Also, cities are where the luxuries are found.
The majority of those who could be called “adventurer” are mercenaries, freebooters, rogues, thugs for hire, and the like.
The most common motivation for adventure is gold.
Magic is inherently unnatural — it flaunts the stable rules that hold the physical world together and does so by allowing the borrowed will of vastly powerful creatures or the chaotic madness of other realms of existence to reach into the physical world and reshape it.
The practice of magic is not only dangerous, but fundamentally harmful to mortal life.
Few sorcerers die of old age.
Behind the curtain is a much darker world, filled with ancient horrors and terrible truths.