The Nentir Vale

EDIT: Added map at bottom.

The North, as the lands in which the campaign opens are referred to locally, is the Northern portion of what was once a vast empire of man, the Nerath Empire. The Empire ceased to exist as a functioning entity nearly a hundred years ago and its great works are now little more than ruins and memories. Some citizens still refer to the "country" they are a part of as Nerath or Old Nerath, but in truth there is little that binds the remnants together other than trade, proximity, and dying tradition. For the most part, each city, town, or village stands on its own, but trade between neighboring settlements is the life's blood of many of them, thus the esteem in which traders, those brave and competent enough to survive the rigors of the road and get their cargoes from one settlement to the next, are held.

The Nentir Vale is temperate, with bitterly cold winters and very hot summers. Climate is closest to the dryer portions of Northern North America. The great forests of Winterbole to the North and Harken to the South represent those edges of the Vale, separated by approximately a 100 miles of broken plains, hills, and fens, dotted by lakes and smaller marshes. The Nentir river runs from the South into the Wintermist and Nen Lakes to the North West and North East respectively, roughly cutting the Vale in two. To the West, the Stonemarch's broken hills, gorges and rivers lead up to the great Cairngorn Peaks, which protect the vale from the depredations of the Ogre and Orc tribes that hold sway beyond. Nearly 150 miles East, the Dawnforge Mountains make up the Eastern border of the Vale, with the dwarven city of Hammerfell setting upon the single reliable pass out of the Vale in that direction. The ancient King's Road cuts from SE to NW, intersected by the Trade road that runs East to West out of Hammerfell, intersecting near the town of Fallcrest from which most of the player characters originate.

Fallcrest is easily the largest human settlement in the region, with Winterhaven to the NW being roughly half it's two thousand or so population and Nenlast to the far NE being the only other human settlement of more than a hundred souls. Most others are either farmers in the Moon Hills around Fallcrest, or individual clans or families who have claimed and fortified holdings long abandoned throughout the Vale.