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=== The Great Wastes ===
A vast desert in the northeast.  The western sections where the wastes fade into the more lush steppes to the west and northwest are fairly easily traveled as long as a group is careful and prepared.  The northern swaths are passable in the rainy months, but you’re also bound to be hit by sand storms and flooded by hurricanes.  Traveling the southern wastes is considered suicide by all but the most powerful magic users or especially well suited travelers.

Only two permanent settlements are known.  Best known is the only port on the northern shores, Oasis.  A dumpy outpost frequently lashed by great storms that regularly sweep down from the Endless Ocean.  Built at a convenient little bay next to a break in the cliffs that line most of the north shore it is divided into two parts.  The lower city has been flooded and destroyed countless times, only the magically reinforced piers and sea wall are truly permanent.  The upper city gets destroyed less often.  Imperial presence in the city was never stronger than a persistent outpost.  At one of their stronger moments, they attempted to build a fortress and keep as they had done in the distant south.  But a particularly nasty storm struck halfway through building, and they never attempted to rebuild.  The bits of the ruin that remain are half buried in the sand.  Fishing in the seas there is lively and dangerous, though half the time fishing is just a cover for smuggling.  Which happens at a rate that defies the remote location of the town.  Salvage is a common hobby for those living here and while shipwrecks aren’t exactly common, they’re often lucrative and many will tell stories of doomed riches waiting to wash back up onto to the coast.

Known to fewer people, but far more majestic is the Spire Of Glass.  An ancient mage tower deep in the desert created by a quartet of mage friends long ago.  It has become a refuge, similar to the Isle of Beasts, for outcasts of imperial xenophobia.  But while the isle is focused on the ‘beastkin’ races, the Spire calls to people cast out because of their magic.  It is the single greatest concentration of natural magic users and plane-touched beings and a sizeable city has grown underneath the spire itself.  The city there is roughly divided into three sections.  The roosts along the crescent cliff, few of the homes there are accessible to those unable to fly.  The open Shades area, named for the way the cliff provides shade somewhere outside the couple weeks of highest summer.  And then there is the Delves, underground tunnels made originally by a couple clans of kobolds who landed at the settlement and decided to call it home.  Very much against the wishes of the small population there at the time, but they ingratiated themselves quickly and have shown themselves useful numerous times through the history of the settlement as it grew.  Imperial attempts to crush this little sactuary have been persistent but seem cursed.  Only two attempts got troops within sight of the spire.  One was wiped out by a sudden sandstorm their weather mages couldn’t counter, the second was scattered by a great brass dragon.  Even their spies seem to be quickly discovered and removed.  Sunrise is a particularly sacred time at the spire.