Important Places
The Black Desert (The West): Black as far as the eye can see with a westerly backdrop of towering mountains abruptly rising from the ground. In some areas, the rocks are jagged, but in most places they’re smooth with a black sand filling in the depressions. Shifting black sand dunes exist in places. The rock feels porous. The air smells hot and gritty.
Weather and dark clouds come primarily from the east. Strong daily storms bring lots of lightning and sometimes rain. The rain quickly disappears into the ground where it’s held in place by deposits of a water bearing rock. Uncaptured water drains towards Nukpana Chasm or just disappears.
Greening operations dot its surface and are owned and primarily worked by miners known as grēners. The larger operations employee many workers, who live in company towns, and are characterized by massive rusting equipment that only a few can work and upkeep and large water towers. Some smaller mines, often dug by solo prospectors, consist of hand tools, a small cistern and a shack. Solo prospectors, often uneducated, who find a rich load of water-bearing rock, quickly come into wealth.
A typical greening operation prospects for water bearing rock. Once enough water bearing rock is welled, the machines grind the surface rock into small grains of sand. In other machines, over months, the sand bakes to a workable soil. Then the grēners install underground irrigation pipes across their claims. Years later, after planting successive seasons of specially chosen plants, the soil becomes richer until it supports food-bearing plants.
One native plant flowers across the desert. Its seeds germinate quickly, often overnight after a rain. Their roots, tiny white strands, reach out to scrap grains of black sand together. They consume the sand to grow, often to waste high. All the nutrition swells into the fist-sized seeds, which fly away on the next days wind trying to find a crack to wait in until the next rain. After the seeds fly, the stalks crumble to black dust. When people are around, the plants refuse to germinate. Flour made from the seeds is a gritty as rock. It wears teeth down quickly, but is nutritious–three seeds can feed a man for a day.
A small ecosystem of insects, rodents and reptiles revolve around the seeds. The insects pollinate the flowers and mine the seed’s meat, the rodents eat the insects and the reptiles eat the rodents. Nearer to the mountains, white tigers, eagles and yeti bear venture out onto the desert at night.
New Askja: An ordered and tranquil settlement organized into smaller kin-based communities and towns. Most families are young and well-educated. Decades and decades of greening work created an agrarian society and miles and miles of newly created farmland surround the city’s center protecting it from the dust and grime of other western places.
Three features define the city’s center: a date and citrus tree orchard, a public garden with unregulated fountains and a University built from white marble quarried in the mountains and shipped to New Askja on a high-speed railroad specifically built for the purpose.
Oasis (The Exile’s City): The greatest punishment for criminals is physical exile to Oasis, a city located at the only natural oasis in the Black Desert. Although miles from Oasis, the Nukpana Chasm limits access. Only one railroad bridge leads across the chasm. That bridge is guarded by highly trained federali.
Oasis’s economy centers around rich warlord-like exiles, who employee the rest of the exiles to do their bidding and help maintain their power. Because exiles are forbidden from making money outside of exile, they run into power struggles as their wealth and savings run out.
As rough as and as gritty and dirty Oasis is, on the surface it seems docile. People live out their lives, some have families. A weak government tries to keep the infrastructure functioning. Scientists with their maintenance skills are sought after and protected. They often live a privileged life in Oasis.
Nukpana Chasm: Over a half-millennium ago, the first explorers of the Black Desert settled within the water-rich walls of Nukpana Chasm. After a half-millennium of settlement, these people adapted their lifestyles to survive in the extreme environment of the chasm. Over a mile deep in places and a mile wide in places, it’s walls climb almost vertically.
The settlers, now considered natives, live in dwelling carved out of the black rock. Their bodies were adapted to to drink the stagnant, black, silty water below and modified to eat the native flower, but they eat primarily fish and rodents. Some dwellings are adapted to grow plants using soil stolen or bartered from the grēners.
A nature-worship religion, known as Nukpanism by scholars, has grown-up around the chasm and most natives follow it. Spirit animals protect practitioners, who are able to commune with the animals and plants of the world.
There are only two real places for non-natives to cross the chasm: the railroad bridge and the confusing, jumbled ford near the mountains.
Crossroads (Officially named Indra): A dirty, lawless, grēners city located on the crossroads of a rail line that runs between Oasis, New Askja and the east. It consists of quickly built false front buildings, uneven rock roads, supply warehouses, taverns and almost anything that anyone would desire.
The law enforcement–what limited laws there are–is overseen by one marshal, who commands a sheriff and several deputies. The federali occasionally seize power in the town by force replacing the entire enforcement team. Many of the wealthy business owners are connected to the railroad or the powerful back east. They often demand a change of law enforcement. If the federali won’t do it, they take it into their own hands.
Inhabitants of Crossroads are mainly young, impulsive males searching for quick wealth with a inclination to conflict. So many funnel in that the town experiences explosive growth. Many new innovations appear from Crossroads.
Railroad: A high-speed modern railroad built to open expansion into the Black Desert and, hopefully, when work finishes, through the western mountains to the fertile plains far beyond. It runs between Oasis and New Askja. Crossroads sits on this line and the connection to the east. From New Askja, the line extends to the mountain quarries and new tunnels. Lots of nomads work on the furthest reaches of the rails.
There are many small trading posts and forts connected by paths across the Black Desert.
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