K'leppe Wastes

Geography

It sucks. Most deserts are nice--have a few cacti, some nice smelling shrubs, pretty flowers, and a lot of lizards, but not this desert. It's sand, a few mean cacti that break off and get stuck in your skin, sand, a bunch of bones, sand, mean snakes that take a bite of your leg and later the whole leg once the venom spreads, sand, rocks that poke, sand, sand pits that suck you in, sand, the occasional sorry-looking rabbit, and sand. There is exactly one oasis in the whole thing, and it's always surrounded by dangerous things and thieves looking to try their luck.
Long ago destroyed by some ancient magic, that fury still lingers in the air in the deep places of the desert. In the caves that occasionally reach up to the surface, and quickly appear and disappear as the treacherous sands shift (more treacherous, indeed, than any regular sand dunes are--for these dunes constantly shift), deep magic lies. It is angry because of some unspoken offense that it has forgotten long ago. Often travelers find themselves avoiding the caves. If they dare to go in, they often wake up to find that their entrance has been piled with sand and they must find another way out. The caves go deep, and things down there skitter, unseen, and the walls breathe. They don't like intruders. The ones that make it out of the caves are lucky. Many don't. They often emerge to find that many days or weeks have passed. Perhaps in normal places it could be amounted to the loss of day down there, but in those caves--where people climb down, down, down, before finding a way up--some nameless magic seems to be at work.
Stories are still told of the wastes, and what they used to be. But the bits and pieces, the clues that would lead to knowing what it once was, are buried few and far between in children's stories and ancient tales, and half of them aren't fully true. But the travelers that make it out will sometimes report seeing a great carved hand, or the rubble of a pillar and house, or an ancient tree battered by sand until it is but an uprooted trunk lying in the sand. Fewer yet say they have seen houses, fountains, and people dancing in a far-away courtyard. Both the visions and the ruins are quickly whisked away by the sand. Most everything is, if it isn't moving. 'Perhaps once,' some say, 'it was a great country, or else a beautiful garden, like Icor. But now it has been carried away by magic and the sands of the wastes and time.' There is much truth in that, but no one has put together the pieces.

Fauna & Flora

Cacti, many species, lizards, snakes, some rabbits, a few shrubs, and not much else to speak of. The oasis has a few trees, and a few bushes. It hold the most life in the wastes, perhaps, bar the caves beneath. No one quite knows what lurks there--or at least no one alive. But those who do make it out have heard footsteps, and seen glowing eyes.

Natural Resources

Sand. Lots of sand. If only concrete was invented.

Alternative Name(s)

'Certain Death,' 'We're Not Taking a Shortcut Through That,' 'Your Adventurer Phase Won't Be a Phase Once You're Dead, Idiot.'

Type

Desert