Abandoned Lands
A vast territory east of the main continent — once inhabited by a significant civilization, now empty of its people and occupied instead by monsters, magical contamination, and ruins. How extensive the former civilization was, who built it, and why they left are among Aethoria’s great unanswered historical questions. No nation has successfully colonized the territory; those who try do not return in large numbers.
What It Is
The Abandoned Lands were once inhabited — the architectural remnants make this undeniable. Ruins of former cities occupy the territory in varying states of decay, from looted outer zones to partially intact structures deeper in. What the civilization that built them was, how it was organized, and what it achieved are questions the ruins themselves do not answer clearly.
The territory divides into zones by accessibility and danger. The Outer Ruins are accessible and thoroughly looted — still dangerous, but the danger is understood. The Middle Ruins contain partially intact structures and significant magical instability; exploration here requires preparation for spells that may not work as intended. The Inner Dead Zone is nearly unsurvivable — magical contamination at maximum concentration, cause unknown. The Coast along the eastern edge is somewhat safer than the interior, and occasional fishing settlements cling to it.
Known Features
Magical contamination zones scatter through the territory in patterns that do not correspond to known magical theory — the effects are unstable, sometimes corrupted, and do not match the categories established by any school of magic. Whether this contamination is the cause of the abandonment or a consequence of it is debated. Creatures have moved into the ruins and are territorial in ways that suggest organization above simple animal behavior.
Artifacts of unknown design and purpose surface regularly from the ruins — highly valuable because no one knows what they are or were for, and highly dangerous for the same reason. Adventurers who return from the Abandoned Lands report contradictory experiences: the same location behaves differently on different visits, as though the ruins are not entirely stable in either space or time.
Why They Were Abandoned
The cause of the abandonment is genuinely unknown. Proposed theories include: a magical catastrophe connected to the Third Calamity; a plague of supernatural origin; an invasion by something that is still present in the Inner Dead Zone; a deliberate mass exodus to an unknown destination. The theories are not mutually exclusive, and some scholars suspect the answer is “all of the above in sequence.”
Some scholars believe the Abandoned Lands and the Feral and Untamed Lands to the south are connected — that they were once part of the same civilization, and that whatever drove the population from one territory may have driven them toward the other. Neither territory has yielded enough information to confirm or disprove this.