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The Hearth & Umbrath

The world is called the Hearth. The faiths say it is the ash and ember of something older — kindled from the Long Dark by the Phoenix, burned and rekindled age after age. Those ages are called Sagas; the present one is the Fifth, the Saga of Embers, and the year is 1214 SR. Why any of that is so — the First Fire, the gods, the thing chained under the mountains — belongs to the Lore of the Hearth. This page is the traveler's version.

At the top of the world lies a whole cold landmass: Umbrath, the shadowland. Scholars will tell you the name means exactly what it says — the chained god's shadow, given a coastline — and that the cold of the far north is not weather but consequence. Northerners do not use the name. To anyone who actually lives there, the continent is the mountains, south, and the ice, and that is map enough.

The shadowland by compass

Umbrath is far larger than any road yet cut through it. What is known of it, quarter by quarter:

  • North — the Wyrmcrown. The high heart of the range, beyond the Iron Gate that was sealed from the inside. No living person has crossed it. The approaches are walked now — the Wyrmshoulder climbs to the Gate's own forecourt — but everything past it is testimony and dread.
  • West — the Pale Steps. Glacier country, shelf above shelf, crossed only in summer and not always then. Under the western spurs sits Hammerdeep, the dwarven mother-hold, and above it the High Shelves climb into the under-ice toward doors that are depicted, shut, and unexplained.
  • East — the Skorl Floes. The frozen sea: worked ice, Skorl fleets, and the Brinemoot truce-market where the Salt Peace was sworn. Since 1212 SR a peak of the drowned country stands above the water again — Kingsholm, green against all latitude, the packet Kittiwake working the leads to it.
  • South — the Thawlands. Follow the Emberrun out of the mountains and the world turns gradually kind: Runmede's grain-lands, the barge road to Southmere, and the hedgerow Sunfall Shire. The north's larder, and its gentler neighbor.
  • Far south — the Sunward Lands. Past the world's shoulder, the old kingdoms: cities, colleges, wars conducted indoors. To the north, mostly rumor — "mind the soft ground."

Where you come in

The mountain range that walls the top of the world is the Frostspine — the rampart the Forgefather raised, the prison-wall the last dragon still patrols. The playable world is one inhabited seam of it: a handful of lit sanctuaries hanging on at the edge of the oldest dark, and everything between them hostile ground. The towns are not the region's centers; they are its exceptions.

Start with the Map of the World to see every charted room at once, then The Frostspine for the region proper — its havens, roads, clock, and weather — and the chapter pages for each town and wild beyond it.