The Marrow Plains

Ruler: The Marrow Queen (Underborne wight, she/they) - meticulous, patient, resentful

Theme: Unending Debt

South of Bastion is a wasteland created by a border war between Frazzek and the greater wight known as the Marrow Queen. Vast swathes of the Marrow Plains are home only to the dead, playing out behavioral loops as a result of the interactions between the Marrow Queen’s necromancy and Frazzek’s experimental magitech. The Marrow Plains includes a couple of larger towns/small cities (including the Marrow Queen’s fortress), but unlike other realms in the region, the Marrow Queen controls no large central metropolis. Despite the magical aftermath, life continues in small pockets within the Marrow Plains, with the primary industry being sharecropper farming and fishing. Since individual debt is passed on to kin or the local community upon death, most people are coerced into afterlife labor contracts, giving the Marrow Queen an ever-growing workforce of the tireless dead. The Marrow Queen runs her realm on contracts binding her subjects to labor and loyalty using the social pressure of the very communities helping mortals survive adversity. In her “benevolence,” she allows her tenant-subjects to buy water and food and rents out parcels of land so people can build houses. And in the long, sleepless nights, the Marrow Queen gazes northwards and plots revenge on Frazzek.