Tarqan Plains

A forbidding, desolate wasteland and grass sea, no one but the goblins in their mobile towns can long survive.

A wheeled platform the size of a small town trundles towards you across the flat expanse of dray, brown grassland. Houses, workshops, and stores three stories tall crowd the nomadic goblin town of Maqassoit. The town is pulled by a herd of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, their elaborate gold-and-leather bridles flashing in the sun. Hundreds of druids and clerics keep things running smoothly, most importantly by creating food for the thousands of goblins and hobgoblins who make Maqassoit their home, as well as for the herds who pulled the town.  Smaller platforms surround Maqassoit, some with only a few buildings. Wolf- and bear-mounted outriders and herds of centaur keep pace with the town, watching for ambushes, scouting ahead, and negotiating trades and alliances.
The Tarqan Plains have always been independent, at least since the goblins evolved from the ancient ausrani, most likely in the Tarqan region itself. The goblins and other Tarqanites are still nomadic like their ausreni ancestors. Their caravans, however, are more like small mobile towns than strings of wagons. The capital city of Tarq is, in fact, an enormous caravan itself, built on a series of huge wooden platforms pulled by teams of woolly mammoths imported from Kuroshar. The city is a constellation of hundreds of these caravans, and at its center are enormous buildings on a wheeled platforms, surrounded by thousands of smaller wheeled buildings, caravans, and outriders. Smaller town- and family-sized platform-caravans are constantly attaching and detaching themselves from the city, with hundreds of outriders, herders, and hunters swarming around Tarq as it grinds slowly on. Horses, dire wolves, and oxen pull the smaller platforms, while dire bears, woolly rhinoceroses, and mammoths pull the larger ones. The entire city of Tarq makes a slow, regular circuit of the steppes, taking ten years to travel the entire loop. Known as the best astronomers in the world, many have wondered about the significance of the path that Tarq charts through the wastes. Tarqanite goblins are the only creatures who know what is on the other side of the Plains, and never speak of it to outsiders. When Tarq’s orbit brings it closer to its western border, all wars are stopped and months or years of peaceful trade take place, but only through the tiny nation of Thaan. When Tarq is gone, the frontier is fair game again for Tarqanite raiders and war parties. The Tarqans are currently isolationist and neutral, maintaining trade relationships only with Thaan and to a lesser extent traders on the Feanese frontier. They stayed neutral in the Halaanic Wars twelve hundred years ago, and are not a member of the Southern Covenant.