You awaken beneath the crimson sun Suk-Krath in the caravan settlement of Luir’s Outpost.
Here, beneath patched canvas awnings and the perpetual haze of cookfires and dust clouds, you might wipe the crust from your eyes and remember little of where you are, or how you got there. You might shakily stand and find coin or common gems to purchase a skin of watered wine. Others around you haggle over questionable yet intriguing maps, ancient relics of dubious authenticity, and attempt to hire companions whose loyalty remains firm under verbal contract – at least until morning. Caravan horns echo through narrow streets lined with cracked clay cisterns while the smells of spice, sweat, perfume, beasts of burden, and unfamiliar unguents mingle heavily in the unrelenting desert heat.
There, in the distance, looms the Storm’s End; an immense and ancient tavern of black volcanic glass said to predate even the Outpost itself. Its thick, black walls guard the deep aquifer beneath Luir’s, and its shaded common room has sheltered merchants, assassins, elves, tribal chiefs, fugitives, and fortune-seekers for longer than any living historian can accurately recount.
If you linger long enough in the upper markets, you might glimpse the glass merchants of Cenyr haggle furiously beside tribal wanderers draped in brightly batiked dust-cloths and bearing ominous bone fetishes. Well-armed mercenaries lounge beneath shaded tarpaulins pretending not to study one another’s weapons too closely as they guard chests filled with exotic fabrics and often-forged texts. Pilgrims, scholars, hunters, thieves, caravan guards, and magickers of suspiciously humble profession all drift eventually through the Outpost in pursuit of one appetite or another.
As you pass out of the upper markets, you might see evidence of the many lives of this place. Runes in some bastardized tongue are etched into crumbled columns that once marked some sort of hall, perhaps a barracks for soldiers. An open square with brownish black stained cobbles stands as testament to a time when the now-forgotten city state of Allanak held sway here and executed many who stood in their path. Signs that the aberrant Gith inhabited this place are visible here and there – pits and foul-scented tunnels that lead to who knows where. The hills that lead up and beyond from the gates in the lower markets contain the bones of the multitude who fell here, defending or conquering this place.
Above all else, people come to Luirs seeking opportunity.
For the deserts of Zalanthas are crowded with the dead.
Not the ordinary dead, who are plentiful enough as you know, but the remains of civilizations vast and extravagant beyond modern understanding. The wastes are littered with broken watchtowers and half-buried roads left by the decayed empire of Allanak in a golden age of expansion long ago. Abandoned fortresses dot the landscape with no sign or sound of what befell those that once manned their walls. Silt-drowned crypts and the shattered estates of those called Nobles and Templars. One caravan returns bearing verdigris-green bronze weapons and ancient tablets worth fortunes; another returns with half its number missing and the survivors unwilling to discuss what transpired beyond the last milestone.
The red sun Suk-Krath rises further still, and the morning grows longer. Your coin purse is lighter than it was a day or two ago. Still, you find yourself aching for a warm ale to pass the time and quench your thirst. But truly, you know you will head to the Storm's End to seek others like you...Those who seek fortune in this desolate world, and those who would seize what they can, while they can. A broken man with broken teeth sits in a heap outside the obsidian walled tavern, holding up an alms cup as you approach.
"Water and shade, traveler...Spare a coin? I have tales to tell of Zalanthas and the treasure you might seek...Fragments of the past, yes...Spare a coin..."