Moreaux Island

Off the western coast of the Eldritch Jungle is an isolated island with a dark history. Taking advantage of everyone’s fear of going anywhere near the Eldritch Jungle, a group of scholars and magic users from Azan created a top secret research center for carrying out a wide range of unethical experiments, including demon summoning, necromancy, and monster creation.

Surprisingly, the research center’s creations never successfully overwhelmed their creators, instead, the programs were deliberately shutdown and most of the creations destroyed, after some of the senior mages found new employment or new locations to carry out their research closer to home.

However, some of the programss less monstrous creations were allowed to live, and their descendants still live on the island today, along with the descendants of laborers, servants, guards, and junior scholars and mages.

## History

Moreaux Island was first described by Lorientois naval officer **Jardim Moreaux** some three hundred years ago, giving the island its name. It's one of many unremarkable islands off the western coast of the Eldritch Jungle, its proximity to it being one of the main reasons it was never inhabited or settled.

It was only quite recently that the island earned its infamy, where a group of shunned mages and scholars from Azan moved to it, in order to continue practicing their wicked spells and experiments. These people had been exiled from their homeland, Nanakinor, the capital of Azan, for conducting unethical experiments and partaking in banned forms of magic, such as necromancy, demon summoning and other dark arts.

The group, led by a sorcerer from Changrila known as Xi Wu, eventually found themselves in an island off the coast of the Eldritch Jungle, away from prying eyes. They settled in and began conducting and practicing their dark arts, but many of them fell victim to slavers and pirates from Ortuga and the Maneater Islands. This led to many of them moving inland, into the jungle, and abandoning their coastal settlements.

Years after years, most of these scholars and mages have either succumbed to disease or left Moreaux island, since the circumstances there weren't ideal. During these years, however, their experiments kept going without halting, and the aftermath of these can be found today all over the island. Things like living failed experiments, summoned demons, reanimated skeletons and corpses and magical cross-breeds can be found roaming the island without purpose, alongside the few surviving mages, scholars and other people brought in as workers or guards.

These people live in the interior of the island, occupying parts of the jungle. They aren't in danger of the magical anomalies, as those had been imbued with magical seals as they were created, and for that reason are unable to harm any sentient creature. The most common hazard for the humans of the island are slavers and pirates, who will usually raid the island in order to capture some of the experiments, as they fetch for a good price in the black market and by nobles looking for new curiosities, and communities of Badgassi and Zulutaurs, who were brought in the island as slaves by the mages. The different races in Moreaux are in constant threat against each other, and coupled with all the diseases being rampant in the island, has led to it being relatively depopulated, a far cry from any sort of civilization.

## Demographics

The inhabitants of Moreaux live in isolated communities. The humans, mostly of Azaneese origin, inhabit the interior of the island, mostly surviving by scavening and hunting while the Badgassi and Zulutaur populations can be found mostly near the coast or in the highlands. An exception of that are some people from the Mona Ki Ngi Xica Savannah, who also near live the coast and survive off fishing.

The more unusual inhabitants include races made while testing the limits of the primal elf ability to cross-breed with other races (crab-elves, frog-elves, badger-elves, cow-elves, fungi-elves), races created while magically fusing different body parts together (animal-heads, fungi-heads, false mermaids, mini-ettins), and races made while tampering with the human form (blemmyes, monopods, cyclops). These cross breeds are for the most part sterile and lacking functioning intelligence, so they are commonly found aimlessly roaming the island scavenging for food in order to survive, but they are nevertheless tolerated by the rest of the populace.

Demons and the undead are a different story, however, as they are hunted with no exception. Since they cannot fight back, most of them have hidden deep in caves or other remote places.