Shamna

With the DragonSpine mountains to its back, and the foot of the Great Karagar lake, Shamna feels like a world away from everything. And in many ways it is. Founded centuries ago as a staging ground for prospectors and surveyors from Edraxia, hoping to tame some of the wild expanse of wilderness that surrounds Shamna for literally thousands of miles. The formidable Dragonspine mountains are at its tallest only a days travel south, the mountains on the surface are thought to be impassable.

Also to be found here is one of the wonders of the world, a great subterranean river enters the mountain chain at a place called the yawning Jaw. A great volumous river seamingly falls into a gigantic sinkhole, where thundering water cascades down with churning violence, and seemingly is swallowed by the land. Early survey workers believes this river to fallow large subterranean caverns flowing south, and are the headwaters of the holy Edraxian Cascade waterfalls, where great shoots of water is ejected at various location out of the southern side of the Dragonspine, creating what many call the most beautiful and holy place on Agonia. Before the discovery of the sinkhole, the common belief was that the Cascades was a creation of the gods, and the source of all water in the world.

At higher elevation of the Dragonspine, an underground network of ancient dwarven highways links the southern kingdom, to Shamna and the great wilds beyond. It was the famous Edraxian, Sir Eldezar, who discovered the route over dozens of explorative ventures into the dwarven ruins. It remains the principle access route to Shamna and the wilds beyond. The discovery of the yawning Jaw has some scholars theorizing that it was the river that destroyed a once thriving dwarven empire that stretched the DragonSpine. A cataclysmic event is thought to have breached an underground network of tunnels with a large body of water that once covered much of the wilds of Alunsia. Ancient maps show a mega lake north of the DragonSpine, dwarfing even the mighty Karagar, and flowing South-West towards Campillia and further west into the Ocean. Something happened to have diverted the flow almost directly into the DragonSpine, and out the other side. The breach must have drained the mega lake, leaving behind the Great Karagar, and her two sisters, Bratra to the north-west in the Gold Valley Taiga, and Keylosi to the north east between the Kur-kura steppes and the Plains of Cromland.

Shaman was founded as an Edraxian outpost, but Edraxia has long abandonned the outpost. Today the town of barely 5,000, is thought to be controlled by a druidic order. Its streets are mud covered and the architecture is mostly large log-buildings called long houses, where dozens to hundreds live in communal arrangements. Some stone buildings remain, remants of her Edraxian founders. Here survival is at a premium, and racial prejudice is of no concern. Races of all kinds live here, many are strange creatures from the Wilds of Elunsia, exiled or runaways, that find refuge in Shamna. And of course there are the gold seakers and adventurers that make Shamna their base camp. The gold seakers wait for the cold of winter, and travel on the frozen surface of the Great karagar, and up into the Gold Valley Taiga, where they find their fortune or more likely their fate. The adventurers on the other hand head in all manner of directions;  North-east along the North face of the DragonSpine, searching for long lost dwarven ruins. Or West along the network of footpaths and herde trails that lead into the formidable Wilds of Alunsia, seakers of lost civilizations and their lost treasure of course.