Shrouded Lands

We are visitors here, and nowhere else makes clear how unwanted we are than the Shrouded Lands.

— Senchai, Blight-Trackers

When humanity first breached the Surface and found the world under the sky, they entered what seemed something endless, but soon found otherwise. Even though horizons stretched towards eternity and there was no limit to skies, they soon found they were trapped within walls of deadly Blight that limited their trespass just as much as stone would. Mankind has carved themselves tiny fiefdoms in a vast and unknowable realm of deadly poison. Only through trial and great sacrifice have explorers pushed against the boundries of death to see the alien world beyond the Shroud.
By either greed or desperation, explorers still continue to plunge into the Blighted shroud in search of plunder, glory, or wisdom. Cults see heaven or hell beyond the horrors, and scavengers are always there to pick clean any who don't quite make it back out.

Geography

If there are gods and they made this world, then they are nothing like us.

— Senchai, Blight-Trackers

The Shrouded Lands are vast and diverse, uniform only in their hosility to humand and their alien nature. Far from the bleak and desolate Surface that humanity have grown familiar with, the Shroud is a perplexing web of stark color, radiant lights, and titanic lifeforms next to gorges so blighted that they glow or fields of quartz that spark with lightning. None of the rules that humanity have so painstakingly figured out about the Surface apply here, and certainly nothing from the caverns.
Far from one continous veil, the Shrouded Lands is more like a broken mirror with narrow paths between shifting, changing pieces. Wind, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes all play their part in how the Blight moves across the world. More than one previously safe region have been swallowed by death, and more than one path has been opened to lands previously too lethal to explore. The Shroud is unpredictable and everchanging,
As the Blight grows deeper and heavier, the Shroud twists the land even more. Depth and deadliness more than anything divides the different parts of the Shroud into it
Great swathes of fungi grow where the Blight is rich, covering the soil and stone in dark hues of black, purple,

The Borderlands

Though local variants exist, the fringe between the Shrouded Lands and the pockets of hospitable Surface are called the Borderlands. It is the edge of humanity's domain, a border between where they can and can't go. As the Blight falls and rises, or shifts with the wind, these borders are never a clear thing but a diffuse and unpredictable place with paths of safety and pockets of death. During the Surface year, the Borderlands expands or shrinks, but rarely the same. During the Season of Earth, it pulls back as many as fifty miles or more, only to explode back out again as the season ends and the Blight returns to claim its lost lands.
The Shroud

The Gloam

Beyond the Shroud and beyond where any human might ever tread lies the Gloam.



The shrouded lands cover most of the world and no one knows what lies within. A few attempts that have been made and they've found little different from the regions of the world already known. The Shrouded lands are not entirely continuous, though. Some pockets remain free from radiation that humans have been able to visit them by underground passages.
The unexplored lands are often lashed by storms and obscured by radioactive dust, proving another hazard to the unware. Worse, in many cases it is hard to tell when one has passed over to from safe grounds and into the deadly areas of radioactive without the expert eye of a Blight-Tracker.

What lie beyond?

Not all travelers tell of barren, blasted land. Some return with tales of strange cities of crystal and valleys of a thousand colors; even plants growing in the depths of the shrouded land. For the most part, these are dismissed as the ravings of a mind broken by Blight, but some still wonder...

Flora and Fauna

Things are bad enough out here. Can you imagine what they're like to survive in there?

— Sencha, Blight-Tracker

The creatures who live in the shrouded lands are uniquely adapted to surviving where Blight would kill lesser beings. Some, like the legendary Mahu'ca, occasionally venture into the part of the Surface visited by humans.
So far, very little is known about what, if anything, lives any further in than a few miles. There is no lack of speculation and every few decades, someone braves the certain doom to bring back the bones of creatures unlike anything else found in Araea.

A World Unknown

The Shrouded lands form a natural barrier for how far humanity can travel across the Surface. Every city-state near the Surface have their own relation with the irradiated regions, either as a shield to prevent the march of hostile armies or a vice that constricts them into place. To some, it is the home of devils in the night that steal babes from their cribs while other see it as the logical end of the surface's inhospitable nature.

Few ever venture into the Shrouded Lands without good reason and no one knows how far the continents stretch beyond the reach humans. Much of the world look like it will forever be outside the dominion of mankind.

The Surface
Beyond the relative safety of the caverns, the Surface of Araea is a hostile and alien world in which humans are unwanted visitors. Beneath the horrifying, infinite expanse of the sky and the hateful stars above, explorers seek fame and fortune in face of continent-spanning storms and insidious blight.
The Shrouded Lands are all this at its worst. Here, the blight warps the land to alien forms, and the flesh of intruders into tumor-riddled husks.
Read More About The Surface

Shrouds

The region gets its name for the continent-spanning storms of dust and lightning that can completely cover the entire stretch of border between the shrouded lands and the rest of the Surface. These violent storms dwarf even the winds of the The Howling Plains.

Auroras

One of the more striking elements of the Shrouded Lands are places where the Blight seemingly ignites in the atmosphere, forming waving patterns of light against the skies. No one is sure what these lights show or what omens they herald, but most agree it can be nothing good.

Change of the Season

The borders of the Shrouded Lands are not entirely static, but expand with the onset of the seasons of storms. Regions otherwise safe see a drastic rise in the ambient Blight and storms of dust can rage across otherwise calm lands.