Hex Crawl 23 #23: The River Shi-Ar

Three hexes northeast of Alakran.

The river Shi-Ar is in dire state. Its bed is 30 feet across at this point but the river itself now fills only half of that in the height of summer, and the dry mud of the river bed is exposed under heaven. What remains can be crossed with no more peril than getting one's knees wet. The grasses and bushes that spread out from the water are still green, but parching and drying at the edges of its watershed. Only in the rainy winter and early spring does it flow as it once used to and present a real obstacle.

 

The droughts of Dulsharna have been increasing in severity over the past few decades, and this is no accident. It is part of the plot of the chaos gods Apep and Tiamat and their followers, the Lament of Dust and Salt which has strangled the once-fertile kingdom's water supply between encroaching deserts in the south and the rising table of the salt sea in the north. The ensuing dislocation of many thousands stressed the resources of the kingdom to the point where it has now fallen, replaced in its capital by a cult of Tiamat and elsewhere by a patchwork of petty warlords and embattled states.