Orathos

The fallen island nation the campaign is about reclaiming. Forty years ago (1360s),
a handful of villains and their minions sowed discord until Orathos fell; its people
fled to Varia as refugees. In 1395 the reclamation pact was signed between the
Orathi Militia, Varia, the Firebrands, and the Mage's Society
(see The Coalition), and a foothold was established. The party sails to its shores
in 1396.

Four provinces:

• Rivalon — south; knights, honour, tribute. The campaign's landing point.
  Villain: Laewendas, the Quisling Queen.
• Veilwood — west; cursed dark forests, Venatori monster hunters, vampire counts,
  fae courts, the demonic Chantry. Villain: the unknown Cursebringer.
• Atollia — east; volcanic archipelago + coast, sub-aquatic cities. Villain:
  'Seadog' Jon Thomas, who enslaved the Scylla.
• Baelheim — north; glacial, ruled by the elder dragon Bael'Drakkor, whose
  centennial tribute is due in ~4 years and looking sparse.

Transcripts frequently render the name "Arathos" — canonically Orathos.
See World History for the timeline of its fall.

The winds — "the mountain poking out of the ocean"

From "Rivallonian Air Currents — A Study in Shear and Orography."

Orathos is where three weather systems collide. Turbulent air arrives from the Western cloudwall of Mireland, from the Eastern maelstrom's displacement currents, and from the Northern icecaps' chillwinds — and, open ocean aside, Orathos is the only hiccup in the path of every one of them. The study's phrase for the island is that it is simply "the mountain poking out of the ocean": a single obstruction in thousands of miles of sea, studded with large numbers of irregularly shaped, volcanically formed mountain ranges.

The consequence is extremely potent and unpredictable wind shear. The study's warning is oddly specific about who needs to care: shear here leads to "loss of aircraft control if unanticipated." Orathi skies are not neutral ground — the island's own geography is an anti-air weapon, and someone is writing survey papers about flying over it.

(Noted: aircraft are a going concern in this world — the party sailed with a retired airship pilot aboard The Expedition Ship. Mireland and the Eastern maelstrom are new geography, named nowhere else in the vault.)

The volcanic arc — and the Middle Tor

From "Orathi Volcano Cycles: A Theoretical Warning."

A written treatise makes the same argument the blind-drunk red-robed mage charcoal-scrawled across Silithane's table in Foothold (Session 8) — the one the table filed under "Bermuda Square." It plots Orathi volcanism through the eras:

• The Lair of Bael'Drakkor (Baelheim) — believed shaped by volcanic activity in the first or second era.
• Gogoro — proven an active volcano during the third era, recorded as disrupting the shipping lanes of the Final Empire "as it sacked the island to take its population as slaves."
• Teki Teki and Hakara — volcanic now, and continuously so since the later years of the third era.

Plot those in an arc, the author asks, and does it not follow that the Middle Tor may one day activate and become volcanic? Worse — or better — was the Middle Tor volcanic in pre-history? And does the "amply named" Sootspewer close these five regions of volcanic activity into a near-perfect circle?

This is not an abstraction. The party is inside the fifth point right now. As of the 22nd of Newsummer 1396 the group is at least twenty to thirty miles beneath the Middle Tor — through the burned tin workings, past the flooded caverns, below the aqueduct to the drowned city, into a Foredweller stratum with a 220-ft skeleton-dragon pit and a hidden research facility in it. A treatise arguing that the Middle Tor is an old volcano is also a treatise arguing that the Ancients built their deepest works inside a magma system, and that the mountain Laewendas is hollowing out for panache has a floor to it that may not stay shut. It also gives Ulda Golgain's dying warning — that something beneath the tors must not be dug up — a second, entirely geological reading.

(The vault's Session 8 account of the drunk mage's map names "Hitihara in the north, the dormant Sootspewer." Hitihare is Atollia's capital; whether the mage's "Hitihara" is the treatise's Hakara, the Atollian capital, or a third thing is unresolved. Gogoro, Teki Teki, Hakara and Sootspewer have no notes yet.)