The Azure Isles
The Azure Isles is the name of an equatorial island grouping on the planet of New Cambria. It is the most important and densest region within a greater, more widely distributed set of islands which stretch away to the north and south and are collectively known as the Tropic Archipelago.
In the image above, a small plantation of regulin trees, marked with the claim of the Moon Islands, receives a visit from two scouts in the service of the Blood Gang as they assess the prospects for a later raid.
Geography
Tradition says that there are thirty seven islands in the group, but the number is certainly higher if you were to count all the isolated outcrops that lie not far from the shores of the better known locations and this number is a rather arbitrary figure since no one agrees on the specifics of the thirty seven qualifying islands.
The group is named after Azure Island which is one of its more significant landmasses but by no means the largest of the islands. Azure Island occupies a central location and its main city, St. Peters, has claimed the title of captial over the whole region for longer than any of the rival contenders. This is a title which comes and goes with great frequency since the Azure Isles are a fractious cauldron of competing political factions, more often at war with their neighbours than they are at peace with them.
Fauna & Flora
The archepeligo has an extensive range of native flora and fauna, but significant tracts of land have been cleared on many of the islands for the cultivation of regulin trees and the fesqua nuts they yield. Regulin trees are native to Green Home but grow well here.
The seas are home to a complex system of native coral reefs which produce a hard lusterous fossil form that can be cut and shaped and has been intermittently very fashionable when used as a building material in expensive items of furniture and to guild decorative objets d'art.
Natural Resources
The Azure Isles are rich in mineral resources, particularly around the Topaz group, where underwater mining operations extract manganese, vanadium and some rare earths.
History
The Azure Isles were hardly ever at peace during the New Cambrian troubles, which lasted almost from the moment the first colonists arrived on the planet in 2610 until at least fifty years after the fall of the Republic in 2960. In large part this was because the archipelago became an odd kind of arena where many different external Republican factions liked to flex their muscles. Conflict was fuelled by competition on the Islands for mining rights, the ownership of regulin plantations and their associated processing factories plus coral harvesting for a small but wealthy market of craft dealers during the period when the product was fashionable in the 28th century. In all honesty, some parties simply liked to use the Isles as a weapons training ground and this inevitably led to a need for defences and retaliatory strikes from their suspicious neighbours.
Three major factions vied for power. The Knights of the Gold Order, usually the most powerful, notionally ruled from St. Peters on Azure Isle itself. Their main income came from the production of blaze and the management of the regulin plantations but they dabbled in every other form of economic activity on the islands, whenever they could gain control of it. The Knights were allied to the party of the Old Assembly on Gwynned and in so far as New Cambria ever knew peace in its first four hundred years it was at times when both these parties were at their strongest. The Kingdom of the Umgumms, operating from Umgumm island in the southern half of the archipelago, contended with the Knights, usually only in proxy operations on the smaller islands but sometimes there were major conflicts which reached Azure Isle or Umgumm itself. Both of these powers were in balance with a number of different agencies who successively ruled from New Braganza in the Topaz group, using it as the primary location from which to exploit nearby undersea mining franchises. Some of these were commercial and some political (such as the Blood Gang) and the shifting alliances between these three major centres, spiced up by minor squabbling parties on the smaller islands and from other regions in the wider Tropic Archipelago, dictated the ever changing pattern of the kaleidoscope of violence that blighted the region for so long.
Comments