Location Artwork - Smolderbone Flats (Patreon)

The Calamity burned down the great forests, tranquil glades, and neat hedges of the region that is now the Searing Plains. A part of it, what is today called Smolderbone Flats, used to be a series of large lakes and islands surrounded by these forests. During the cataclysm, the lakes became sour and salty in a matter of hours and everything in them died. Today even the traces of them are gone. What remains is a barren, infertile, salty flatland that is only inhabited by weird monsters that thrive in such environments: salamanders, fire lizards, even fiery elemental creatures. 

The reborn Empire soon moved back to the abandoned area and found it quite valuable because of the new resources that are abundant here: salt, rare minerals, and even obsidian under the earth. Thus, the city of Avernum was built at the center of the Flats, and it’s been garrisoned ever since by the Avernus Legion. Since Imperial presence is somewhat less prominent in the Searing Plains than in surrounding provinces, Avernum has become the place where anyone who wants to trade converges. The flats themselves are empty save a few mining colonies, mineral fields, quarries, and a few tiny outposts that guard them. A large number of liberated tribes (composed of fugitives and escaped slaves) make their home in Smolderbone, which provides sufficient cover to set up hidden camps and ambushes.