The Ravenwall

"The Wall, lad? You'll want to stay far from that place. Traveling in the Ravenwalls makes for an 'interesting' life. The Chlothan Necropolis is there. Dead kings and queens from as far back as the founding of the Alliance hold court in that place. Nothing stays dead in those mountains, at least not for long. Even the undead ain't right in there."

Geography

The Raven Wall is a steep range of mountains that branches off to the south from the Great Furthen Loft. It forms the western border of the lands claimed by the Chlothic Alliance, specifically the nations of Territh and Kirkgarde. The range is old, wide, and dark. Deep and ancient forests blanket the lower and middle slopes so thickly that sunlight never strikes the ground in many of the vales and valleys; while the tallest peaks, along the spine of the range, stay snow-capped year round. Passes are very few and rarely conveniently placed and dwarves outright refuse to build or mine there.

The range is well known for its defiance of the natural cycles of life or the traditional understanding of undead. Two leylines converge and overlap as they follow the range; one of negative energy from the Shadow Plane, and the other of healing life energy from the Positive Plane. The result is that many creatures of any kind and most sapient creatures who die within the range rise again if not removed in time. But the undead of the Ravenwall are not usually the simple mindless zombies and skeletons of other necromantic zones or even the higher vampires, mummies, and zombies. The undead of the Wall are usually undying, a positively energized form of undead that is very poorly understood by most scholars. They are intelligent and tend to retain the alignments, personalities, and motivations of life; but can become unstable and insane from the transition if their unlife was unplanned.

The Temple City of Valrune constructed and maintains a necropolis housing the dead kings and queens of the four nations of the Chlothic Alliance within the Ravenwall. While this is common knowledge, and many of the people of the Alliance question the reasons, it is a carefully guarded secret within the Church of Chloth that the Necropolis deliberately houses the Undying Conclave. The collected royalty of the Alliance from its founding forward act as a supreme shadow council manipulating the Alliance and church from afar. This has proven to be necessary for not long after the foundation of the allied kingdoms, their patron deity who had fathered the four founding families went silent and his pantheon disappeared from the face of Aurus. It is now the collective energy of these revered undying monarchs with divine blood (figuratively) who provide the energy to power the priests and powers of the Chlothic clergy (although precious few outside the Undying Conclave know this, not even the church itself is aware of the reason their god remains silent but still answers prayers and provides healing and spells).

Fauna & Flora

In addition to the Undying, the Ravenwall is home to a handfull of species unique to it, and a few that are exceedingly rare outside of cemeteries and other places where the corpses and souls of the dead congregate before passing on or decaying.

Natural Resources

Aside from a few rare herbs that thrive in the bath of strange energies infusing the mountains, the Ravenwall is not known to house many valuable resources. There must be ore and stone of good quality for the undying of the Necropolis build and repair their city and fashion armor and weapons for their soldiers and guards without doing economic trade with living mortals. But few of the living will hunt or mine within the range given the consequences of dying while within it. Metals or gems mined from the range might have uses in crafting phylacteries or other tools of the necromancer's art or they might be poisoned by the presence of positive energy. There is not enough of such materials in either the open or black markets for reliable testing.

Type

Mountain Range