Movoto

Movoto is a river-region that constitutes the Northwestern border of continental Sonev, before it transitions to Samvara. It is a wealthy region, with fertile soil, a river teeming with rainbow shrimp and massive fish, and hills rich with mineral wealth. But the land is also hot, humid, and teeming with malarial mosquitoes and contagious fungi. The landscape is littered with ruins of empires that tried to claim this wealth before, only to be destroyed by rebellions, flooding, disease, and a mercurial climate. Despite this, merchants from the temperate South are committed to trying to wring every copper they can from this region, and are spreading their economic and cultural influence across Movoto. 
The native communities of Movoto are divided between those who are trying to navigate and adapt to this new order and those struggling to push out this foreign influence. Collaborators dam the sacred river and cover the land in rubber plantations, and work with local mercenaries to hunt for rebels; factions pivot in dozens of local courts in the twenty small and decentralized kingdoms. The line between these factions is often extremely blurry outside of a local context, and a rebel in one kingdom might be a collaborator in another. The only marker for what "side" a person is on is how they refer to the river - traditional religion calls it the Movoto, while Navanan outsiders call it the Mavata and differentiate it from the regional name. The two names are extremely similar, of course, and are basically the same with the right accent; it is not uncommon for a street fight to break out over an accidental pronunciation.
Outside of the kingdoms, a network of tribes are connected in a vibrant trading network, though conflict is common in these hinterlands.
Several locations worth mentioning: 

• Yullnalan, city of the delta and largest settlement in Movoto. Dominated by Navanan merchant princes, who monitor all trade entering or exiting the river
• Unen, a small city 90 miles in that serves as the furthest upriver any light ship could sail. Dominated by foreign clergy and traders but reclaimed politically by a local monarch twenty years ago
• Anivu, an island to the North known for its sugar and shipbuilding, once used as the imperial capital of the neighboring region of Katten. Ever since the last empire fell (back in 1810), Katten has been in open rebellion and Anivu predatorily raids their former subjects, scouring the coastline. 
• Tomala, the city of pirates, a once vibrant imperial settlement torched by Navanan mercenaries and is now occupied by river pirates and deserters. Sits North of the recognized kingdoms, along the river.
• Malata, the Northern kingdom, and its capital settlement of Kishtek. Lots of prisms here, and hosts the last of the old Imperial family of the last regional empire. 

While Movoto was considered largely unimportant by most of the world for much of history, it has recently become a center of divine attention. As of 2018, it was attacked by unusual monsters swarming over the mountains. The full fleet of Orchid of Blue has come to meet them, and the Northern reaches have become an apocalyptic warzone.

Geography

Movoto is a tropical region surrounding the Movoto/Mavata river. The region extends 350 miles inland, though the river continues for another 175 miles through the mountains. Movoto extends across the tropical flatlands, which average around 170 miles North-South around the river. East of Movoto are the Vomali mountains, which extend into the equatorial heartlands. North of Movoto are the marshy coastal tropics of Katten, and South of Movoto is the more lightly forested and seasonally cool region of Noluzo. 
Movoto is a region of dense jungle and intense humid heat, overwhelmingly populated by dryads who thrive in those conditions. Small, hot savannah plains speck the flatlands, and rocky hills periodically break the tropics in small bursts.
Most sedentary settlement is clustered around the river and its tributaries.

Ecosystem

Movoto is a land of flourishing life. Great apes live in the hills and mountains, including mountain gorillas. Many strange primates live here, from guereza to bushbabies to chimpanzee's. Porcupines, cane rats, and and the bug-eyed cape hare can be found here. You can also find armored shrews, golden cats, clawless river otters, epauleted fruit bats, hippos, hyraxes, hooded vultures, griffon vultures, shoebill storks, snake-eagles, secretary birds, and duiker-antelopes here. 
Giant pangolins, the non-magical non-sentient counterparts to Pearl Pangolins, thrive in the hills and have attracted attention from a number of interested scholars - a legend has even developed from stories of these pangolins, of a sinful city of pangolins who rejected Halcyon and had ability to speak taken away. This legend has unfortunately led to foreign adventurers looting archeological sites belonging to the native people, as foreign scholars and collectors are eager to believe that any ruin in Movoto could belong to the God-Punished Pangolins. Over-eager visitors have similarly begun hunting and trapping these pangolins for export (dead or alive) as "Void Pangolins". 
The Mavata/Movoto river is famous for its multicolored freshwater shrimp.

Natural Resources

Movoto is rich with gold, iron, silver, and copper. The river also carries down precious minerals from the interior mountains, and gold panning is profitable enough to be done on a large scale. The climate is well-fitted for cash crops such as rubber, sugar, and coffee.

History

Movoto's history has mostly been spent in isolation, and is a repetitious story of expansion, unsustainable growth, collapse, and reconstruction. The people here have spent millennia using trial and error to build settlements and societies that are resistant to plague and blight and which use more sustainable forms of agriculture - though many of these traditions are being eroded in the name of market efficiency. A choice faces many Movotan groups: to carefully integrate foreign technology into their societies on their own terms, or to embrace foreign markets and risk becoming dependent on them.  

Ancient History (0 - 1200)

There have been three "great societies" that have conquered or otherwise unified the riverlands before dissolving, and each left their cultural (and archeological) mark on the land. First were the Battuma, a thriving society of dryads surrounding particularly fertile trading communities along the river. The Battuma were the first city builders, who began constructing large formal cityscapes not long after the Architects vanished. The Battuma collapsed from Corpseblight and other epidemics, which raged through the region in the 200s and 300s ME and caused mass migrations away from urban centers. Contagion wasn't the only cause of the collapse. Increasingly hierarchical authorities were dominating the cities, and the new city leaders fought their own people as well as one another. Lunar Cults entered the region and became a new structure to challenge these authorities, but by the time the elites came around to accepting these cults, it was largely too late - the cities struggled to feed themselves and collapsed not long afterwards. 
The Battuma left behind an interesting cultural legacy into the 400s onwards - they became a mythic golden age as well as a shared past for the groups of the region. The first Battuma societies were also governed with and legitimized by Comedy Magic, which retained its sacred status after the Battuman collapse - Movoto remains aggressively enamored with their particular style of comedy magic (which might be referred to as religious performance art, as they have pioneered ways of expanding the definition of "jokes" and "comedy" over the centuries) even after the introduction of "true magic" like druidism in modern history. Battuman temples also lived on in the ruins even after the cities were abandoned, acting as homes for reclusive monks, mystery cults, and sites for ritual action.
In the late 600s, a new group rose to try and recreate the Battuman phenomenon. They were known as the Kottetu, and later the Kottetan Empire. Claiming to be the vestiges of the late Battuman warrior-kings, the Kottetu mixed old traditions with new technologies and new cultural practices brought in by groups that migrated in. Known as expert ironsmiths, merchants, and warriors, the Kottetan empire was a centralized military monarchy that demanded mass economic and population expansion from their subjects. The Empire expanded wildly from 695 to 800, and it seemed to work at first: jungle was burnt to make way for peasant farms and royal estates, and hundreds of mines were built and fed slave bodies for iron and gold. But a small climatic shift in the early 800s was all the system needed to go from mass growth to sharp decline. The soil was being drained; the dammed river was causing agricultural problems; the weak crops were vulnerable to blight. Crop failures led to famine; famine led to civil war, rebellions, and plagues. The Empire collapsed, and so did its dams; entire cities were washed away. Many believed it was the end of days, and groups fled the empire for the jungle. By 850, the Empire was a single, failing city; that, too, was abandoned by 1000. 
The Kottetu retreated into the mythic imagination as a fable-kingdom about the danger of disrespecting the sacred river and of unfettered greed. Its legacy remained in the fine smiths of the jungle tribes and the new lines of trade and extraction that continued (in a weakened state) after the Empire. 

The Late Independent Period (1200 - 1810)

The last and most recent of the "lost kingdoms" were the Amotu of the late 1600s. Technically, there was another imperial attempt prior to them (the Kutukath Empire) in the 1400s, but it was too small and brief to really impact the entire region. It does highlight that Movoto was changing, though: over the centuries, decentralized river kingdoms had emerged that relied more on small towns and reliable systems of agriculture than domineering cities, and these kingdoms were strong enough to resist Kutukath's attempted expansion and ultimately destroy the Empire. "River feudalism" was very localized and limited, though; each local area had its own way of dealing with growing populations, from limited pastoralism to limited agriculture to hybrid systems. The Amotu were the great unifiers of this diversity: the legendary Empress Nissia Amota unified her people, conquered the valley, and worked to create an empire that could accomodate and strategically mix these different cultures. 
The Amotu were not idyllic pacifists, for all their tolerance: they used violent displacement to forcibly mix cultures and ignite local rivalries they could better exploit, and they sought to conquer and dominate the entire region using an imperial cult and elaborate bureaucracy. They were ruthless innovators who walked the line between unsustainable and cutting edge, but they were more environmentally sustainable than the Kottetu. They also created the region's first port city, Yullnalan, connecting all of Movoto to foreign trade directly for the first time. This led to instability as well as growth; the Amotu ultimately fell to civil war and plague in 1810. The internal rivalries the Amotu encouraged ignited like gunpowder and led to mass war and chaos from 1810 to 1900. But, unlike the Kottetu before them, the Amotu's system actually outlived their empire in many places. While the inland tropics abandoned the imperial towns as residences, they remain active sites of local diplomacy and trade to this day; and the riverlands kingdoms of the modern era are all built on Amotan foundations.

Modern History (1810 - 2000)

The fall of the Amotu and the resulting wars of crisis led to Movoto becoming vulnerable to outside exploitation - a dangerous thing for a gold-rich region recently attached to a global market and within striking distance of empires to be. Almost immediately, merchants from the land to the South, Noluzo, began sailing up the river in search of gold and valuables. Much of this was led by the expanding Aquatic Empire of Kumuru that was rising in the great reefs off of Noluzo's river delta, which was partnered with Navanan merchants and adventurers even further South. The Navanan church, with Noluzan mercenaries and Aquatic fire support, slipped into the chaos of the 1800s and began seeking out profit and footholds of power. It started with buyouts and investment and trade deals and alliances, but the friendly hands soon bore weapons. The port city of Yullnalan fell to foreign merchants in 1861. By 1880, most of the critical river settlements were ruled by foreign conquerors. When the wars finally ended in 1900, the new order was overwhelmingly Navanan. 
While foreign merchant princes may directly dominate Movoto's cities, most of the land is still ruled by local elites and communities. Foreigners rely on local alliances to maintain their power, and the patchwork of small kingdoms have resisted total political takeover. The merchant prince's holds are fragile, and local monarchs proved this by defeating foreign mercenaries in major battles twice over the late 1900s. In some ways, this has led to a retreat from the countryside by foreign powers, who are now focusing on small pockets of intensely profitable resources. This political-military retreat is somewhat illusory, though. The merchant oligarchs of Yullnalan may not try to use gunboats or mercenaries to project direct power any more, but they have partnered with Selkie allies for a new economic offensive. The new strategy is to offer local elites access to profitable cash crops such as coffee, rubber, sugar, and cocoa, in exchange for imbalanced trade deals that favor foreign merchants and collaborating landowners over everyone else. This is partnered with a renewed religious offensive, where local allies host missionaries and help install Navanan clerics into local royal courts.

Alternative Name(s)

Mavatala

Type

Region

Location under

Sonev

Contested By

• Navana

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