The Elven Desert
GENERAL
The Feywilds
GEOLOGY
Rock Mushrooms / Desert Mushrooms / HooDoos… not actually living things in the conventional sense
Rocks:
Strangely arranged (on purpose? It’s hard to tell sometimes) Petrified woods can be found her and there… Sometimes there are just loose gatherings, often in stone circles, but rarely there seem to be small forests or large groves of teh wood… rarely full trees, usually short or tall trunks or stumps
The desert has been weathered strangely by forces only native to itself. There are odd formations including mushroom rocks, pedestal stones, arches, and hoodoos. These are sometimes found in close proximity, leaving their creation’s randomnity in question.
Some sections of the desert are made up of greyish sand-dunes, and they house a number of odd and unexpected creatures.
Gemstones and Minerals
Blue Green Opals can be found in small quantities and sizes (900)
Cross Rock (Rolallah), a maroon/grey mineral that crystallizes in a cross-shape… smaller crystals gathered for elven amulets (40)
Copper-red Feytalc--soft, waxy mineral can be powdered (slightly grainy) to magic (500)
“Herbed” Halite (natural form of salt, flavored with a barely describable flavor of basil or thyme) (60)
Amber (50)
WEATHER
RESOURCES
SETTLEMENT
HISTORY
The Elven Desert has two primary Origin stories (and one brief claim), either or neither (or both?) of which might be true..
STORY I
The weather changed in Dreamsgate less than three thousand years ago, and the area south of the Antir Hills became
much drier, while the north became wetter and warmer. Where once the Elven forest stretched on to the south, there came to be a desert—eventually a land of shifting sands and dry winds from the north. The Elves gradually withdrew from the place, but it is still revered as sacred, and many strange creatures, fey and otherwise, still dwell there.
Those Elves that hold the desert as a sacred place of meeting and magic sometimes hold to the story above, but story two below is generally accepted as the actual cause of the permanent blighting.
STORY II
At one point, an evil Elven power arose in the western forest. Now and then there were renegade elves who broke from traditions and became spiteful and jealous. One such elf--a great wizard as powerful as any other on the continent--led a heedless charge and great war to destroy all of Elvendell and rule over it by wicked law. The seething and terrible hatred of this individual (named contemporarily the Yeedah) ultimately laid waste to an entire swath of the forest, leaving the ELven Desert, rife with ruins of the old elven civilization, and even some fell creatures that the Yeedah left behind (or were generated and kept alive by his residual power).
Part of the city of Elvendell was destroyed by this war, and when they finally defeated the Yeedah, they rebuilt that section of the city with great soaring towers and cathedrals and castles and dwellings, all with a sheen of emerald color. The Emerald Quarter fairly glows with a sheen of bright green, reflecting flashes of sunlight and giving off endlessly varying subtle tones of emerald color. The aftermath of such a horrible war became the height of architecture in the history of the continent.
It is told that certain renegade Elves, who held enormous reserves of wicked power, were driven into the Nameless Mountains north of Elvendell. They were exiled, but not defeated. The wise tell that these evil sorcerers and wizards festered there in their awful magic, that they somehow spawned the Orcs and Trolls that still roam these regions so many years later. No one really knows, for to anyone’s knowledge, no one has ever ventured so far into the mountains and lived to tell.
(OR A BRIEF CLAIM:)
Another story of the Desert tells of a change in climate that may have destroyed that section of the forest, but this claim is largely discredited. It is true however that no one has been able to fully or officially deny this. To the elven bards, the story is just plain... boring...
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