Gerrim

## Geography, Climate, and Ecology

Gerrim is a large continent located eastward across the Gerrim Sea from Haven. Sitting between Haven and Gerrim is the island of Bilraqighan. To Gerrim's south, on the dividing line between the Gerrim Sea and Dawn Sea, lies the island of Surmusra. To Gerrim's east is the wide open Dawn Sea, across which lies many distant small islands including Safe Haven, Konchutochi, and others.

Gerrim is a roughly circular, mesa-like continent, with a broad, flat, table-like interior surrounded by long, gently sloping coasts. It has a temperate climate similar to the Northland and experiences all four seasons, though with mild and rainy winters.

The majority of the continent is covered by wide open grassland, though towards the northern coast there exist large stretches of evergreen forest situated among the continent's few hilly regions.

Due to the fact that the continent's primary inhabitants, the Gerrimites, are elementals, almost no hunting or agriculture occurs anywhere on Gerrim. Because of this, the continent supports a variety of complex, thriving ecosystems; this has recently attracted attention from the scholars, collectors, and trophy hunters of Haven.

## Inhabitants and Notable Locations

The primary inhabitants of Gerrim are the elementals known as the Gerrimites. They inhabit the only sizable city on the continent, Gerrim City, which sits at the geographic center of the continent, surrounding the ancient, massive structure known as the Soulforge. Wide, expertly-paved roads connect Gerrim City with a number of small ports around the continent; these are most common on Gerrim's west coast in order to facilitate trade with Haven.

Also inhabiting Gerrim are two closely-related lineages of humans, known as the Ukuzola and the Xuuluu, though both are present in very low numbers relative to the Gerrimites. The Ukuzola primarily dwell alongside the Gerrimites in Gerrim City, whereas the Xuuluu have established their own small city of Bandari on Gerrim's southern coast.

## Ancient History

Gerrim's ancient history is unknown to most scholars, and no living mortal beings have true knowledge of its past.

In truth, Gerrim was once home to the earliest human settlements outside of Inismona. While on Gerrim, over thousands of years, they developed a highly advanced, magic-focused society capable of extremely advanced arcane feats. This society experienced a schism with the development of soulforging in 15,000 BH, a magical process in which a human soul is drawn out from the body and reforged into an elemental. Some saw this as the pathway to immortality, though others were in fear of the fact that this process often entirely destroyed souls, and even when successful often created an elemental with only faint traces of the human soul's memories and personality.

A vicious war erupted between those factions which supported soulforging and those which opposed it. The tide of this war was turned when the Soulforge was constructed; this massive structure took many years to complete and its construction claimed thousands of lives. Resembling an enormous, trapezoidal temple, it harnessed the power of a ley line convergence to maintain a perpetual soulforging spell like an arcane crucible. This allowed the rapid creation of many new elementals, which drove the opposing, anti-soulforging humans out of Gerrim.

Eventually, by 9,900 BH, all of the humans remaining on Gerrim would undergo soulforging, leaving Gerrim as a continent entirely inhabited by elementals. Left without any human direction, many of the elementals would go dormant, returning to equilibrium with the land of Gerrim itself. Those elementals still clinging to their vague memories and desires leftover from their human selves would attempt to create a community; this would manifest in the form of Gerrim City, and its inhabitants would name themselves the Gerrimites.

In 9,000 BH, a group of humans is forced to return to Gerrim, driven away from Surmusra by infighting with their kin. These humans prepare to fight waves of elementals to be able to claim a home on Gerrim's lands, but to their surprise they encounter a small city full of fairly docile and friendly elementals who seem to have very limited memories of humans at all. These returning humans integrate into Gerrim City and name themselves the Ukuzola to distinguish themselves from their Xuuluu kin still on Surmusra.

## Recent History

In 30 HE, explorers from Haven, along with the Iron Helix Syndicate, arrive on the shores of Gerrim. While they initially initially have a positive impression of Gerrim City and the Gerrimites, their disposition shifts when two members of the Iron Helix are gravely wounded and nearly killed when attempting to enter the Soulforge. The fact that the Gerrimites wield this level of power leads the Iron Helix to distrust them, and one member ascends the steps of the Soulforge to deliver a speech to the inhabitants of the city.

In this speech, this Iron Helix member would call into question the Gerrimites' motives, purpose, and the entire nature of their society; unbeknownst to the Iron Helix, these very topics had haunted the Gerrimites' cultural consciousness for thousands of years, as they recognized that on some level they were merely imitating humans. Shaken to their cores by this message, every single elemental on Gerrim would make their way to the Soulforge, enter inside, and would not emerge. Stunned, the Ukuzola and some settlers from Haven would attempt to carry on the operations of a now ghostly-quiet Gerrim City, with no one quite sure what had transpired.

In 32 HE, the Soulforge begins emitting pulses of energy across the ley lines which course beneath it, attracting the attention of factions from far across the Material Plane. Three of these factions (the Azure Aviaries, the Alabaster Abyssals, and the Crimson Crusade) invade and begin fighting a strange three-way land-sea-and-air conflict for control of the Soulforge; this war also attracts mercenaries from Haven, such as Chompski and Joe Scalleta of the Iron Helix Syndicate. Within only a year, the fighting becomes so bloody and brutal that all three factions are forced to withdraw as their losses far surpass what they can each sustain. Historians would name this strange war "The Soulforge Struggle."

After the conclusion of this brief but intense war, Gerrim is quiet again for a short time until, suddenly, the Soulforge's doors re-open and thousands of Gerrimites return into Gerrim City. However, observers and scholars notice that there are roughly only a quarter as many Gerrimites than were lost. The Gerrimites themselves are not sure what happened to them or why they returned now, years later. Scholars speculate that some sort of soul consolidation occurred within the Soulforge, with many Gerrimites combining their souls together in order to combine their human memories and desires, resulting in fuller, more complete and complex sentient entities. In any case, the Gerrimites picked up roughly where they had left off in attempting to grow and refine Gerrim City.

The next major change to Gerrim would occur in 45 HE, when the extermination of the Surmusra Xuuluu by the Iron Helix Syndicate would force a small band of survivors to flee to Gerrim's shores. These refugees would receive help from a local Gerrim City merchant known as Rej, a Half-Ukuzola and Half-Earth Elemental merchant that would aid the Xuuluu in purchasing land from the Gerrimites and establishing their own community in the form of the small port city of Bandari on Gerrim's southern coast. While initially relations between Gerrim City and Bandari would be cold due to strong cultural and religious differences, the two cities would eventually become strong allies, with Rej acting as a skilled intermediary and eventually the de facto leader of Bandari.

For the last half-century, both Gerrim City and Bandari have flourished, and had become important economic and cultural centers after Haven's destruction during the Leviathan Impact. They now face fierce competition with a resurgent Haven, but due to the unique skills of the Xuuluu, Ukuzola, and Gerrimites, they are still able to provide access to rare goods and services not available anywhere in Haven, and so still maintain a significant amount of regional power.