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The Confederated Empire of Kingdoms, usually shortened to just the Empire, is regnant over the eastern portion of Arebnak. Dozens of kingdoms and petty nations all owe their allegiance to the Empress and her throne in the city of High Imperia. The Empress has reigned for nearly a thousand years, and it is by her decree that her armies go forth to maintain order and peace in her realm and deliver new territory into her benevolent iron fist.
The League of Free Peoples and Nations makes up most of the western portion of Arebnak, a loose alliance of countries, city-states, kingdoms and countries that are bound together by a convoluted tangle of ancient pacts, alliances, marriages, and blood oaths that overlap and contradict, written down and codified as formally as possible by the Tenets of the Pact. Often at war with each other, the Free Peoples can nevertheless find common cause easily and offer, albeit begrudgingly, respect to each other’s cultures and borders.
The Dreadhorde are the cast-offs, exiles, marauder bands and scum that cling to the margins. Found throughout the continent, the only thing these dregs share is that they are all equally unwelcome in the Empire and the League. They form bandit crews, blasphemous cabals, and cannibal throngs. Though some claim to have a moral code, they inevitably find themselves sharing common company with other hated outcasts and form misfit alliances.
The Empire’s laws are mandated by the Empress herself, a series of Imperial decrees known as Imperial Common Law. These decrees constitute a simple bill of rights for all Imperial citizens, ensuring basic rights such as the right to a fair trial and a total ban on slavery. The Confederated Kingdoms may have their own local laws regarding trade, taxation and other more material matters, but Imperial Law overrides all others, often to the chagrin of their rulers.
The League of Free Peoples and Nations encompass a large range of nations and kingdoms. Though most maintain soft borders in accord with the ties that bind the League together, some maintain firm and competing territorial claims, and grudges as old or older than the League itself can cause conflict between different peoples. Border skirmishes and outright war are common, and the balance of power can shift quickly.
The Dreadhorde include some of the few people that can be considered “native” to the Wargrounds, insofar as any mortal folk can belong to such a place. Among them are shamans and cabalists who can read the currents and eddies of the wild magic that rules there and find the safest places to make camp in the endless magical roil.
The capital of the Empire is High Imperia, located on Arebnak’s eastern coast. It is there that the Empire’s many colleges, guilds, and labour unions will usually house their main offices, clustering close around the Imperial Palace where the Empress resides. The Empress only rarely makes public appearances, and an Imperial citizen will be lucky to hear of her appearing before her subjects once in a generation
Though the League of Free Peoples has no single, centralized capital, the city of Great Terkissa is considered by many to be the de facto seat of power, as an important trade hub and the place where the tenets and rules of the League were laid down and written into law. Placed on Terkissa Bay off the Sea of Ink, ships from the Endless Isles and even from the Empire itself enter its ports to trade for exotic goods.
Cults, iconoclastic orders, and particularly brutal and cutthroat mercenaries regularly find themselves drawn into the Wargrounds. Driven out of their home nations, these renegades have nowhere else to go but the chaotic and inhospitable lands, and whether through dark pacts, pragmatic cunning, or or simply being cowed into submission by greater powers. That these groups form into one dreadful whole seems to be a fact of the Wargrounds, and they make up the horde portion of the Dreadhorde.
For the time being, the Empire and the League exist in a state of fragile peace that some might more accurately call a stalemate. Over the past thousand years, both sides have incurred into the other’s borders to annex territory and settle accounts of blood and honour. However, as the Wargrounds goes through ebbs and flows of power and chaos, bottlenecks have formed to the north and south, making mobilizing armies increasingly difficult. Instead, the great powers have turned their attentions to the Wargrounds itself and the opportunities to seize power it offers in the form of ancient magics and technology. To this end, small bands of warriors are commissioned to sally forth into the Wargrounds on expeditions to recover these treasures and prevent their enemies from doing the same.
The dead do not rest easily in the Wargrounds. Wild magics may compel the dead to rise, both spectral and corporeal, creating roaming throngs of zombies and wailing hosts of spectres. Necromancers can exploit these energies and raise undead minions of their own. These same energies make the fallen slow to fully die, spirits lingering within dead flesh. Skilled healers and thaumaturges can restore what would usually be lethal injuries, pulling their allies back from Death’s threshold.
To enforce Imperial law and settle civil disputes, High Imperia maintains a College of the Laws, where experts in law both Imperial and local are trained and given the authority to pass verdicts on any Imperial citizen. These Magistrates travel the length and breadth of the Empire and assist in settling local disputes. They have a reputation for being strict at best and draconian at worst, delivering harsh verdicts and serving as judge, jury, and, when necessary, executioner.
The nations of the Free Peoples are free to enforce whatever border law they desire under the terms of the Pact, and travel from one place to another is common. However, unlike the Empire, the Free Peoples lack a single, unified currency. Barter is common, as is using Imperial coinage as a de-facto currency, but a merchant in the League will often carry a wide variety of coins and know their value in gold down to the hundredweight.
The Empire maintains a standing army of soldiers under the Empress’ own banner, recruited from its many provinces. For every soldier a member nation raises for their own muster, one must be sent to High Imperia to join the Imperial Legions. Regiments are deliberately made of soldiers from across the Empire with different cultures and languages. To overcome these differences, Imperial soldiers are subject to strict tenets of discipline and taught a new shared language, Soldatencant
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