The Spiral Mountain Range

"If they wish to come to the Forrest, they should be prepared to fight their way here. None should assume safe passage, or a warm welcome.

— The Iconoclast"

Over many meadows and through many woods, the full width of a continent away from the Dwarven Kingdom, is the region of Arrhynsia that makes up the Spiral Mountain Range, the land and effective border of the elven kingdoms. The Spiral Mountains are a new mountain range, filled with jutting majestic peaks and deep valleys. The region is home to an extensive array of wildlife and a number of monstrous magical creatures who prey on sentient beings for sustenance. Travel in the Spiral Mountains can be perilous for those who stray off the main paths, and there are few enough of these. It is generally believed that this enforced isolation is encouraged by the elves to secure their borders while reducing their military defense costs.

A Young Land of Opportunity - and Danger

West of the Echovad Forrest, the Spiral Mountains are a vast untamed land of young, impossibly steep mountains. This area is laced with dangerous geothermally active areas fed with the energy of colliding tetonic plates - a formidable challenge indeed. More dangerous though is the abrupt seemingly random bursts of magic brought on by the unimaginable arcane forces the area was subjected to as the site of the Dragon War, a war between the eldest gods - the Voices themselves.
Of course, sapient beings being what they are, the Spiral Mountains attract settlers from all over Arrhynsia for the purported wealth of minerals and abundant wildlife – a source of undeveloped wealth. Here, it is widely believed, opportunity presents itself to those who are willing to work hard and risk much to attain a better life for their families and themselves. Here freedom and anonymity allow any who dare to start new lives and build new futures.
But the Spiral Mountains are no place for the unprepared and unwary. In the mountains the crust of the world can appear as an innocuous meadow one moment but explode in jets of scalding water or rivers of melted rock the next. The mountains often rumble with the noise of the children of the Voice Saynleh the Dragon God threatening reprisals on the people and lands of the other Voices for their joining with Jiisho in rejection of his claims, and humbling the Dragon God's pride. The unwary, be they traveler or settler, suffer for their ignorance and foolishness when the mountains explode in showers of stone and fireash, and bleed molten rock through hidden veins under the mountainside slopes.

Surrounds

The Echovad Forrest hugs the western side of the mountains, deeply forresting the steep slopes that appear navigable to the uninitiated. The magical woods thrive on the abundant water that falls on the western slopes. The impossibly tall trees disguise precipitous chasms where stone has broken, forming gaps tens of meters deep and up to 3 meters across and extending several kilometers in length. Abrupt height discontinuities in contiguous surfaces of several meters are common making travel by most conveyances impossible.
To the east of the Spiral Mountains the land drops into hot, dry plains, punctuated by bands of areas of rich green lands. In the North Spiral Mountains the mountain range watershed flows across the ridge divide down from the slopes and into rivers that flow through valleys to make their way inland to the Lesser Sea, a giant freshwater lake in the middle of the continent. In the northern (mid continent) region of the Spiral Mountains, streams and rivers tend to flow across the Short Plains to the Tiny River through the land of the gnomes, while the southern watershed of the Spiral Mountains joins into the Gnomish River and flows more directly south to the South Ur Hilgarria. The eastern slopes of the Spiral Mountains are famous for their spectacular waterfalls that run constantly regadless of season, the most famous of these are the Long Fall a fall in the Northern Spiral Mountain Range, and the River to Hell, a spectacular fall dropping over 400 meters vertically, and extending over 2 kilometers wide.
All of these challenges leave the Spiral Mountains practically uninhabitable, posing a formidable physical barrier between the lands of the elves and other somewhat neighboring races including the short and the fierce, warlike orcs.

The World

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Settlements

Settlements on the slopes of the Spiral Mountains tend to cluster in "greenlands" on the eastern and western approaches to the mountains. Here, near valleys that facilitate passage through the steep cliffs and forbidding geothermally active areas communities of hardy adventurers gather. These a racially and ethnically diverse as it requires a "special" type of sentient to take on the challenges of the Spiral Mountains. One of the largest of these “racial stewpots” of Arrhynsia, Arcadia, is situated directly east of a break in the Spiral Mountains near the south end of the Lesser Sea. It is an extremely independent city state, owing allegiance to none and intent on it's own purposes. Comprised most noticably physically by orcs, the people pf Arcadia are descendants of orcs, elves, and humans.
The only race hardy enough to attempt to send large contingents to settle into the Spiral Mountains themselves are of course, the lovers of mountains and caverns, the dwarves, whose desparate outcast Steelsong clan, having been banished from the Draak'thor Massiff by Erth Oreheart settled on the east slopes of Steelsong Mountain, an area whose seismic activity they proactively manage carefully through some obscure techniques known only to dwarves.