The dead do not rest easily in the Wargrounds. Wild magics may compel the dead to rise, both spectral and corporeal, creating roaming throngs of zombies and wailing hosts of spectres. Necromancers can exploit these energies and raise undead minions of their own. These same energies make the fallen slow to fully die, spirits lingering within dead flesh. Skilled healers and thaumaturges can restore what would usually be lethal injuries, pulling their allies back from Death’s threshold.

For the warbands that enter and adventure within the Wargrounds, standard coinage carries little value. Instead, they trade in Marx, a catch-all term used for a variety of coins found within the Wargrounds itself, infused with magical energy . These coins take many shapes and sizes but all carry a similar magical aura that makes them singularly desirable across Arebnak for use in magecraft and industry. Most have been worn down to smooth metal slugs by the passing of strange aeons, while rarer examples may bare the faces of long dead monarchs, words in forgotten languages, and other, stranger images.

Cults and esoteric orders devoted to dark gods proliferate across Arebnak, forming and gathering in isolated places in the wilderness or in secretive corners of its cities. When these iconoclasts are discovered and their hunters fail to fully to destroy them, these cultists will often flee into the Wargrounds, seeking cover within the chaotic deluge of magical energy. The bloody practices and sacrifices of these fanatics can often have a profound effect on the eddies of sorcerous power of the Wargrounds, which gives some the delusion that they can control them, or are otherwise chosen by their patron for greater things.

One of the more virulent and repellent phenomena to emerge from the Wargrounds are the Whispering Oaks, mutated trees with bark that splits apart to play host to sap-drooling maws. These numerous mouths gibber and murmur, babbling out false prophecies and demented untruth in harsh, guttural whispers, lending the arboreal abominations their name. These barely-audible ravings can ensnare the minds of the unwary and foolish, causing them to stand before the tree and listen for days on end until they eventually die and are quickly grown over by the tree’s roots, nourishing it and adding another mouth to the idiot chorus.

Arebnak plays host at times to divine forces, manifesting as demons and angels. Their forms are numerous and varied, and at times the distinction between the two is largely academic. Indeed the arrival of an angel spells doom for a town, city, or even whole country just as the arrival of a demon does. Whether these powerful magical beings are truly avatars of the gods is also a matter for debate; though many match the descriptions found in religions across the continent, others defy description, and worshippers can be punished or rewarded as accorded by their inscrutable whims.

There are many orders of mystics and sages throughout Arebnak, dispensing esoteric lore and wisdom both true and dubious. Among the most well known if not most common are the Order of Spore Seers. These seekers of truth collect various strains of fungus, mould, and mushroom, consuming hallucinogens to divine the future and brewing potions of incredible power and effect. Some even host fungi upon their own bodies, sustaining mycelial growths and fruiting caps with their own life force. Though their future sight may be blurry at best, their knowledge of alchemy is unmatched across the lands.

The history of Arebnak is fragmented and scattered at best. There are several different calendars, origin myths, and accounts of ancient days that mix history and legend into a blurry histiographical mess. While many are content with their local and biased reckonings, groups of historians and archivists exist that desire to sort out the true past of the continent. The Conclave of Librarians is one of the most widespread and well known, travelling scholars that offer access to their mobile repositories of knowledge in exchange for information of any kind from their visitors. Eclectic in the extreme, these compilations are often apocryphal, and a lifetime of sifting through fact and fiction leaves most of these Scholars eccentric, at best

The Wargrounds are dotted with ruins of all kinds, which emerge from the tumultuous landscape as if they had always been there, only to vanish back into the roil after a month, a week, a day or even mere moments. Abandoned hamlets, entire cities bearing the marks of destruction, and particularly the crumbling remains of forts, castles, and bastions dot the land and inevitably attract the interest of warbands within the Wargrounds. The more intact forts are used as temporary bases by expeditions and are sometimes subject to sieges by other groups hoping to winnow out the competition for their own purposes.

Parallel to the world of Arebnak is the Void. The Void is difficult for scholars to describe, but it is known to be a dimension of darkness and chaos, an all consuming abyssal sea that steadily consumes anything it comes into contact with. There are places in the world where the walls between realities are weak, and the void creeps through, spreading and devouring, and the Wargrounds is particularly prone to allowing the Void through into reality. Despite absorbing everything it touches, the Void is known to not be empty, and dreadful creatures sometimes emerge from it, distorted reflections of living things that shamble and lash out with grasping tentacles and claws. The Void is an alien place that defies all natural laws, and only the truly mad attempt to understand it.

Nature is perverted and twisted by the energies of the Wargrounds. Flora and fauna are deformed and mutated into strange and alien new forms. When the magical eddies flow quickly, livestock too close to its borders suffer from monstrous births, siring bizarre, many limbed horrors that wreak havoc and then find their way into the Wargrounds itself. Tainted by the chaotic energies and the void, the many hunting beasts that haunt the land are nevertheless valued by arcanists, alchemists, and sorcerers. Hunting the beasts can prove profitable for those who traffic in magic ingredients, as their magical hides, bones, and blood can have any number of useful properties.

Many races inhabit the lands of Arebnak. Besides the most numerous humans, elves, dwarves, and Wee Folk (Halflings and gnomes) can be found almost everywhere. Less widespread but still common are orcs and goblin-folk, and part-animal Beastkin. The Empire secures equal rights for all races of being, and mono-cultural enclaves are rare in the League. Other, stranger beings, that only appear rarely, are becoming a more and more common sight in the depths of the Wargrounds; trolls, ogres, and more twisted, mutant things that defy conventional description.

The realm of Arebnak is filled with prophecies, tomes stacked as tall as a castle packed with predictions of the future. Very few of these prophecies are genuine, and fewer still are accurate, as divining the skeins of fate and the threads of the future is an almost impossible task. Those rare few with the gift to unravel those tangled temporal strings are inevitably driven mad by the pressure on the mind, and as such what they utter may be garbled through insane babble. This may also be why most prophecies are predictions of treachery, death, and doom, and those who claim to see the future are regarded with caution at best and a hungry pyre at worst

In remote places that are rarely tread by the mortal races, one may find the demesne of the Fayfolk. The Fairykin, Feyborn, or simply the Fay linger in wild and untamed places, holding court amongst themselves. These creatures obey rules and laws that are strange and unknowable to the mortal races and can range in appearance and manner from nearly human to deeply, unsettlingly alien. Mercifully, the Fay rarely enter the Wargrounds, but the specimens that do tend to be among the most dangerous and animalistic. Experienced warbands know to carry talismans of cold iron, salt, and other fairy banes or else risk death and worse fates.