The Savage Sands is a poetic name for the current era of Tarisia, more than a thousand years removed from The Great Withering that destroyed the Old Kingdoms. The great seas are gone, much of the land has become wasteland, and civilization endures around the scattered sources of water that remain. Yet the peoples of Tarisia survived. New cities rose, new cultures took root, and life continued beneath the relentless Twin Suns.
A World Rebuilt
The first generations after the Great Withering inherited a world they scarcely recognized.
Survivors gathered wherever water could still be found. Wells, springs, underground reservoirs, surviving rivers, and remnants of ancient waterways became the foundations of new settlements. Some lasted only a few generations. Others grew over centuries into the great City-states of the Savage Sands.
The peoples of the Old Kingdoms endured, but their old identities did not always survive with them. Humans, Peri, Saurians, Asuras, and Fenn scattered, mingled, and built new communities as their former homelands disappeared. Fragments of older cultures remain in songs, names, rituals, clothing, and stories, though few can trace an unbroken path back to the kingdoms of the Age of Abundance.
The distances between these new settlements were vast. Roads disappeared, ancient routes became impassable, and journeys once made between neighboring kingdoms could now require weeks or months across hostile country. Communities that survived often did so in isolation, developing new customs and identities of their own.
The Tarisia of today was not rebuilt from the old world. It grew among its bones.
Rise of the Thrones
Water determined where civilization could return, and control of it became the foundation of power.
As settlements grew, wells and reservoirs became centers of trade, refuge, conflict, and political power. Sorcery offered power of another kind. A sorcerer could defend a settlement, heal its people, destroy its enemies, or accomplish things no ordinary leader could promise. Some became protectors. Others became conquerors.
Over generations, many of the longest-lived and most powerful of these rulers became known as the Thrones, a name inherited from surviving Old Kingdom carvings of figures seated upon elaborate thrones as symbols of authority.
The City-states
There is no empire spanning the Savage Sands, nor any authority recognized across Tarisia. Civilization instead gathers around scattered city-states separated from one another by enormous stretches of dangerous country.
Most are ruled by Thrones, whose influence may extend to nearby settlements, roads, wells, or other valuable resources. Yet distance makes power difficult to project. Armies require water, caravans require protection, and places claimed by a distant ruler may go months without seeing anyone acting in their name.
Beyond their reach lie independent settlements, nomadic peoples, caravan clans, tribes, and vast regions governed by no one at all. Trade and travel bind these scattered peoples together far more reliably than any ruler has managed.
The great exception is Astarte Ruk, where Queen Mother Astarte has begun gathering scattered Peri beneath her new Convoy and proclaiming the restoration of the ancient Peri Kingdom. Even this fledgling realm would seem modest beside the kingdoms sung of from the Age of Abundance.
Astarte is hardly the first Throne to try to rebuild an empire, but she is perhaps the most successful.
The Lost Past
More than a thousand years separate Tarisians from the people of the Old Kingdoms, and much of what came before the Great Withering has disappeared with them.
Most history survives through stories. Songs remember vanished cities and heroes whose kingdoms no longer have names. Priests preserve conflicting accounts of Taris, Erra, and the Betrayal. Ruins offer their own testimony, though rarely with the courtesy of an explanation.
The Thrones have done little to improve matters.
Knowledge of any kind is tightly controlled, but ancient Sorcery, the Eld, the Discordant Paths, and other dangerous remnants of the old world are suppressed with particular zeal. Relics are seized, forbidden knowledge destroyed or hidden, and those who uncover something particularly troublesome may find keeping it secret considerably safer than proving themselves correct.
There may once have been better answers. The Thrones have always taken a keen interest in ensuring there are fewer of those.
Life Beneath the Twin Suns
For all its hardships, life continues across the Savage Sands.
Markets crowd the streets of the city-states. Festivals fill plazas. Performers compete for audiences, merchants gamble fortunes on caravans, and gladiators fight before roaring crowds. Families feud over inheritances, priests quarrel over gods, lovers make promises, and children grow up hearing stories of places they fully intend to see for themselves.
Beyond the walls, nomads cross the wastes, hunters pursue dangerous beasts, caravans follow ancient routes, and explorers search ruins left by peoples whose names have been forgotten. The wastes are dangerous, but they are also places beyond the easy reach of rulers, filled with opportunity for anyone willing to risk what waits between one source of water and the next.
Water remains precious. Sorcery still consumes it. Thrones can be cruel; another failed well can condemn a settlement, and much of the world remains littered with reminders of what happened the last time its peoples believed their power had no limits.
More than a thousand years after the Great Withering, Tarisia remains stubbornly alive.