The Other Cities

Highcliff

A vertical city built into the cliffs overlooking a mountain range. Highcliff still tries to project authority, and hosts houses that claim to be the "True Heirs" of the Empire. The city is mostly inside the mountain and highly defensible. Mountaintop pylon watchtowers encircle the city and serve as the meeting point for outsiders, as only citizens are allowed in the city proper. Some believe the city holds pre-cataclysm technology, hoarding, and working towards magical breakthroughs to become the start of the new Empire.

There is an ArcRail line that runs between Bastion and Highcliff. It is considered a beautiful trip, especially when approaching the vertical city as there is a large gorge simply called Highcliff Gorge about an hour outside the city. The bridge that transverses the gorge is considered a great feat of engineering.

Embersong

A relatively new trade city built around a massive planar heat vent in an otherwise frozen land. It embraces The Bloom, thriving on the unstable planar bleed and abundant energy. Arcanists outside the city warn of a constant risk of spectacular failure from drawing on such an unstable source. The relaxed atmosphere, trade, and entertainment provide warm relief to those exploring and delving into the ruins beyond. The massive Manaforge located inside city walls refines Aetherite, but produces a version crimson in color, more volatile than standard while enhancing destructive magics.

Threats

The Verdant

Long-exposure Bloom survivors who see their mutations not as curses but as the next stage of life on Orlon. They believe the Cataclysm exposed the true natural state of the world, and the destruction it caused as a necessary correction for centuries of Imperial abuse. To them, the majority of settlements are an extension of the old empire, justifying their acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare as defensive measures to protect a wounded world. They avoid killing when possible, and are willing to talk, but are still an uncompromising and dangerous force growing outside settlement walls.

The Weird Ecologies

• Living land, shifting, moving, and hallucinatory to protect itself from outsiders
• Mutated flora and fauna, usually very hostile. Many grown in size, and with monstrous or planar features.
• Unchained Elementals: Planar forces spawned from fractures.
• Manastorms and Bloomtides fluctuate and add danger to the outside world.

The Existential

Aetherite is a limited resource. We don't know how much there is, but we will run out at some point.