The Kingdom of the Frozen Dead

South of the World's Edge Mountains lies the domain
once known as Sjornia, ancestral home to the humans now known as the Warriors
of the Broken Tribes. South of that land in the frozen seas, there floated a
massive iceberg known as the Isle of the Frozen Dead. After the resurgence of
dragons during the period known as the Second Dragon War, a flight of gold
dragons flew south of Ceilar and obliterated the iceberg, sinking it into the
sea and, they thought, ridding the world of that roaming, undead plague.

Unfortunately,
the surviving skeletons and zombies of the island sank with their iceberg and
found themselves wandering the bottom of the sea. After a matter of weeks, they
heard a mysterious call, pulling them to the north. They reached land in the fjords
of Sjornia and, under the command of the recently reborn Loran Morvaine, the
Lich King.

The
barbarians fought valiantly, but for every loss on their side, the forces of
the Lich King grew stronger. Eventually, the Sjornian people were overrun and
forced to flee into the mountains of the north to seek shelter from the undead
hordes. Eventually, they found their way into Wilder where they were reborn as
the Warriors of the Broken Tribes.

Their
frozen homeland, however, had become the domainion of dark magic, and remains
so today. So powerful are the necromantic energies of the place, that a corpse
left to lie for too long may rise of its own accord to seek out its new master
and join the armies of the undead. Even white dragons are not immune to this effect,
and such creatures have taken to freezing their own kind into cavernous tombs
to spare them that fate.

For
centuries, the Lich King was a very real threat to the north, warring on Wilder
Kæryn, his servants even working to extend his reach as far north as Seawn.
During the fallen archangel Az's war on the gods, the Lich King even dared to
strike against Qord himself, trying to destroy the god of the undead's power.
He succeeded in killing Qord, but the god used his last breath to scatter his
godspark and disperse the majority of that power across the Shadowfell to rob
Morvaine of his prize.

Refusing
to be thwarted, the Lich King abandoned both his physical body and the mortal
realm to search of Qord's godspark in the Shadowfell. While many of Morvaine's
lieutenants had been slain by mortal heroes while he was battling Qord, those
that remained saw a power vacuum that needed to be filled in their lord's
absence. For over a century, these powerful undead fought against one another for
control of the frozen lands south of the World's Edge.

In
the end, it was not one of the Lich King's lieutenants that sat upon the Frozen
Throne. Through false alliances and force of arms, it was the first and
immortal Death Knight, Lady Jhezra, who brought the former agents of the Lich
King into line and took control of the Kingdom of the Frozen Dead, the land's
new Undying Queen.

The only living humans south of the
mountains reside in a Kæri fortress on the far western shore of what was once
Sjornia, as far as can be from the Frozen Citadel. From that fortress, a large
force of paladins, clerics, and warriors strike out in small crusades, trying
to cleanse the land and perhaps, eventually, challenge the Undying Queen herself.