The Fallout Wastes

History

During the invasion of Rushari Vastri, the sheer volume of magic utilized by the various kingdoms began to build and bottle to bursting. A calamity in the making since the Horseman War eventually reached a breaking point that the laws of reality found intolerable. As a result of years of potent and powerful magic being utilized in rampant and abusive succession, a Cataclysmic Magic Event ripped through the plane at the height of this dreadful conflict. Ripples of devastating and primordial essence warbled across the landscape that was once Erebus, rending asunder concrete principles of life and being replaced with something primeval and horrible.

All non-sentient beings that still existed, including even the plant life and the very air was subsumed with wretched perversions, leaving the area in nothing but a state of brokenness and futility. In a last act of mockery by the fates, following the conclusion of the rupture, the darkened beings that had devoured Erebus were not to have been found. Formless rifts left behind tell not where they went, or if they even exist anymore. The invaders were left victorious, but a terrible pyrrhic victory was all that could be claimed. Vengeance was found to be hollow and hardly earned. Now all that remains, are the dying, the dead, and the worse than dead.

Description

Nestled in between the lands of The Republic of Alzhak Reger and the Tidal Empire, lay a testament to hubris and the undoing of the world. Sickening radiance spills across the skies like a spectacle unto the aurora borealis, as unstable and primal magic clashes with the null of it. Darkness envelops and consumes light, only to be regurgitated like the roiling of a god’s ill temper, a never-ending cycle of deprivation and misery that fights within itself. Wastelands as far as the eye can see coalesce back on themselves as mutations run rampant, and the non-sentient life of the landscape curdles like spoiled ichor as life tries desperately to reject what it has been turned into.

Among this dreadful and almost eldritch landscape, a brave (or foolish) explorer would discover an alien environment unlike any yet found on Chronus. Senses to detect magic would find an abundance of pockets of primal energies stirring in one place, only to be replaced soon after by a deprivation of such magic in another. Seemingly random, the environment itself is nonsensical and nauseating to be in, and altogether highly lethal.

Various mutations have claimed the lives of the creatures that once lived within the landscape, transforming them into shattered versions of what they once were, and altogether reminiscent of those beings who once called Rushari Vastri their home. Ruins of what was once Rushari Vastri lay scattered about, while new ones have yet to be uncovered. Left behind by the monstrous kingdom during its sudden retreat, these monoliths to corruption and depravity still brim with foreign and altogether distressing magic.

Effects

Mechanically, the Fallout Wastes operate very similarly to that of the Golarion Mana Wastes. As such, magic is temperamental in some spots, and null in others. For the spots where magic is unstable, each casting of a spell, spell-like ability, or sphere effect results in a Primal Magic Event being rolled. Those spots where magic is nullified are treated like that of a Dead Magic Zone. As such, Mana Nails, Nails of Blood, and other effects that are similar to those (at GM discretion) function in such areas. Other areas, the laws of magic, rather than being unstable or dead, are outright broken into a new form and cause your magic to act in a unknown, but still coherent, ways from the norm. How this occurs, is at GM discretion.

Attempting to claim such areas as a kingdom comes with its own complications:

• 2 additional consumption per tile claimed.
• +2 lore per tile.
• -1 stability per tile.
• New settlements cannot be made in the area, but the existing ones may stay due to... reasons.
• Those settlements have 3 consumption instead of 2 for their tiles, but an additional +2 economy as well.
• The settlements still count as original tile for pre-req purposes. But also as something 'new' for pre-reqs... for something I may introduce later on.