Escaria

Escaria lies far to the west, out past Amulta, and it is a merchant nation before it is anything else. It is counted among the human countries of Erôth. It speaks Idioma, a tongue of its own that the upper echelons of several other nations have taken up since. And it is reckoned an isolated realm, alongside Angband and Silencio, which does not mean a country nobody deals with. It means a country nobody goes to. No capital of it has been named, nor a city, a ruler or a border, and nothing about it reaches Idir first-hand.

Deep green eyes and dark hair are common among its people, and its forests are called lush by the few accounts that mention them at all.

An Escarian abroad is generally taken for rich, and generally taken wrongly. A middling family there is one that owns a business, or one that served a greater house, and even a comfortable Escarian would think it odd to carry much coin: the name raises the money, from a lender in whatever town the traveler has reached. What a person carries out of that country is commercial. An ease among merchants, and a knack for getting one to dig a little deeper into his own pocket, are Escarian traits the way archery is a Galderian one.

Some of what Idir knows of the place arrives at second hand and by way of somewhere else. A fair part of the romance-novel trade about Amulta’s ice wall is written by Escarians who have never stood anywhere near it. The Fox family of Loshev has sent its heir, Alistair, abroad there to study statecraft. Many-course dining, which northern Peredhel treats as ordinary etiquette, is an Escarian custom too.

Trade

What comes east out of Escaria is the raw material of magic. The reagents that arcane focuses and components are made from came from there by trade for as long as anyone kept accounts of it, and there are metamagic components, herbs that sharpen a casting rather than perform one, which grow nowhere else on the continent.

It buys as well as it sells, and one of the things it buys has been expensive to somebody else. Live giant eagles, Al-Sāmiyah’s kind, are sold in Escaria as luxury pets. Between that trade and the price an unhatched egg fetches, eagle numbers in the western mountains have crashed, and the wyverns the eagles once held in check by their presence alone have swelled to fill the space.

Foreign Relations

Amulta

Escaria and Amulta were long-standing partners, and the reagent trade between them stopped abruptly about thirty years ago. No reason for it ever reached anybody outside, and no account out of Escaria explains the decision. Amultan speculation divides between two culprits, neither of them Escarian: the Arcane Congress, which has worked to impede Amulta for centuries, and the gnomes of Ustos, who had no appetite for a rival in the arcane and are held to have got to the Escarians. Nothing has been proven either way. The reagents never came back, and new magical work out of Amulta has been a rare thing ever since.

Peredhel

Distance has not cooled it. Peredhel counts Escaria a strong trade partner and reaches it by sea or along Galderia’s established roads, and its own accounts call the relationship peaceful, profitable and a lifeline, which is a considerable claim on a continent otherwise in flames.

The Jewels of Erôth

The Jewels of Erôth sit in Amulta geographically and keep their closest ties there and in Escaria. For a body with no country of its own, a nation that trades everywhere and is visited by nobody is a convenient second home.

Campaign Updates

The company has never been near it. Gwenivere Velmont’s healing tea is brewed with the metamagic components that grow only there, which her Amultan training taught her to use. And when three guests walked into a Haudh-Gwenn soirée under names that were not theirs, Mikhail went as an Escarian designer in fishnet and a trench coat, on the reasoning that nobody in that room had ever met one. Nobody had.