Hex Crawl 23 General Lore 3: Geography of Urighem

Geography

It cannot be denied that Urighem is a miracle, the works of generations in calming and extending the waters of its central river Zi-id. Across the broad river plain the Urig have dug six concentric circular canals, the outermost one 250 miles in diameter. The Zi-id passes through them and divides the ancient capital metropolis, Tabirri. Tabirri is also known as the Dual City because each building of consequence has a double across the river, occupied in alternate five-year lustra, due to ancient superstition.

Within and around the canals is only agriculture -- black rice, barley, millet, and varied luxury crops -- with the occasional hamlet or administrative centre, no other settlement being allowed to rival Tabirri. Six straight, raised roads radiate from the twice-three gates of Tabirri, crossing the canals via lock-bridges, ending in the four trade roads, the Salt Sea port complex Mahirri, and the Shuser-Nukitumhe, the Road of Unburied Dead that heads fatally into the desert. At the end of each road is a vast fortress housing one of the eight Umanna (armies) of the Empire, whose needs tend to attract a rowdy, bustling settlement of tents and shacks. 

The Urig lands on a 125 mile scale, terrain necessarily approximate

To the north is the savanna of Emur, where ruined villages and palaces host the meditations of Eastern Church hermits, and where wends the officially closed Peha'a, the Road of Grasses. These hermits of Odaus and their pacifist creed have so far deterred the pious kings to the north from invading through Peha'a.

To northwest, the scrub and timber groves of Pungatan, and Urnumma'a the Road of Cedars, the only active one of the four trade roads. Urnumma'a rises to the mountain range of Yagan and its halls of quizzical and prankish black dwarves, the Kabiroi, whose ruling families have hair and beards of crackling flame.

To southwest, Idia'a, the River Road, follows the Zi-id, through bushlands and highlands and supposedly to a lush forest, though nobody has officially been to trade with the black emissaries of the upstream Mnai civilization in generations.

To the south, the Road of Unburied Dead leads into a monster-haunted badland where only the most unfortunate exiles are sent.

Nam'aa, the Road of Flowers, leads southeast through a gap in the barrier ridge known as the Sickle Scarp, to vassal kingdoms now abandoned on the edge of deserts and volcanic mountains.

And northeast is the salt sea of Ghem, dead to all normal life, which is madness to sail and yet, somehow, traversed by smugglers from its other shores who do not mind being mad.