Pathfinder Chronicles - Gazetteer - Asamnet

Pathfinder Chronicles
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who purport to represent the departed archmage’s plan
for the subjects he left behind. The contentious Council
of Three and Nine is an attempt to build consensus within
Nex’s infamous factions, and while the nation remains
characteristically crippled with bureaucracy it nonetheless
has never been conquered, despite the best efforts of Geb
and political forces from within and without.
Society in Nex centers around Quantium, as it has for
countless centuries. The city attracts a wide assortment
of inhabitants, from ambitious wizards seeking to perfect
their craft in one of Quantium’s vaunted arcane universities
to outsiders summoned to Golarion by long-dead mystics
to merchants from Druma, Jalmeray, Vudra, and even Tian
Xia. The city thrives upon its diversity of thought, trade,
and inf luence and shows little tolerance for xenophobes.
A creature that might be considered a monster or worse in
the ports of the Inner Sea is merely a citizen in Nex, where
legend holds almost anything is possible.
Deep in the barren interior of Nex, the alchemists of
Oenopion toil at the creation of the eldritch elixirs and
potions so common to the capital and so important to the
nation’s economy. The craftiest, most reliable homunculi
come from Oenopion, which also boasts an impressive
golemworks and an immense ooze colony. The latter
dominates the town’s miasmatic central lake, forming a
sentient hive mind useful for potent divinations and the
utter disposal of faulty artifice, renegade constructs, and
enemies of the state.
South of Oenopion, 3 days by boat along the Ustradi
River from Quantium, lies the sprawling city of Ecanus,
a fortress town created to fuel the war effort against Geb
and the hub of Nex’s awe-inspiring military. Battlemages
trained in warfare and tactical evocation form the backbone
of the mobile force, backed up by nightmare monstrous
beasts churned out by the city’s monumental f leshforges.
Building-sized artifacts created by Nex himself, the
f leshforges are responsible for a significant portion of the
murderous creatures that haunt the wastelands between
Nex’s cities, the Barrier Wall mountains, and even the
eastern jungles of the Mwangi Expanse.
Farther south the barrens give way to an ever-shifting
nightmare of magic-blasted desert forever twisted by the
ancient spellduels of the wizard-kings and their potent
servants. This forebidding landscape—the Mana Wastes—
marks the ever-shifting, unclaimed border between the
two nations. Its unpredictable danger and otherworldly
inhabitants promise a swift death for most explorers, but
some few political exiles, escaped slaves, and dissident
thinkers find their way through the Wastes to Alkenstar,
an independent city-state in the western foothills where
magic refuses to function.
The ancient war with Geb left an eternal stain upon Nex
and its culture, but open warfare with the necromancers
of the south faded into reluctant trade centuries ago, and
these days Nex imports most of its foodstuffs from Gebbite
plantations worked by zombie slaves. Obstinate factions
in the capital, notably the star-crossed Arclords of Nex,
argue that the current state of détente would enrage the
wizard who gave his name to the kingdom, but it has been
centuries since Nex last appeared in the world of Golarion,
and history marches ever forward without him.
Nidal
SHADOWY SERVITOR STATE
Alignment: LE
Capital: Pangolais (18,900)
Notable Settlements: Nisroch (24,320), Ridwan (11,400)
Rulers: The Umbral Court
Government: Militaristic theocracy
Languages: Shadowtongue, Common, Varisian
Religion: Zon-Kuthon, Diabolism, Desna
When the strike of the Starstone cast Golarion into a
thousand years of darkness, the warrior clans of ancient
Nidal cried out for the protection of their long-forgotten
gods. Their pleas instead reached the ears of a malignant
entity from a distant corner of the Great Beyond who
uniquely appreciated their predicament and delighted in
their fear of the dark. The immortal being—a powerful
entity from the Plane of Shadow known as Zon-Kuthon—
offered the terrified humans succor from the darkness in
exchange for unquestioned obedience for eternity. Facing
extinction with the blotting out of the Sun, the proud
warrior-lords of Nidal relented, ensuring the nation’s
eternal survival while enshackling its freedom.
Thus did the rulers of Nidal become shadowbound to
the Midnight Lord, an eternal bondage revealed by the
dull black eyes of Nidal’s Umbral Court. Lesser citizens
of Nidal know that opposition to the court means death,
swiftly deferring to the orders of even the most minor of
their lords. Some members of the aristocracy are more
powerful and inf luential than others, of course, including
the Black Triune of Pangolais, the dark druid Eloiander
of Ridwan, and the persuasive sorcerer Kholas, adviser to
Queen Abrogail in Egorian.
Senior members of the Umbral Court convene thrice
annually in Nidal’s secluded capital of Pangolais, which
sprawls below the eternal shadow of the Uskwood. So
little light reaches the cobbled streets of Pangolais that
it is nearly impossible to distinguish day from night, and
strangers to the city soon find themselves lost without
a guide. Such a service demands outlandish fees, for
outsiders are forbidden from walking the winding ways
of Pangolais.
The port city of Nisroch serves as the public face of
Nidal. Traders from Cheliax, Korvosa, and northern