“The Southlands.” That’s what the races of the Northwest call them, as if they were one place—a realm unified under a single nation or people. In truth, the Southlands are a molten mosaic of humans, beastmen, and sundry others flowing over and through each other in coexistence and in conflict. The land itself is a tapestry of desert and jungle, of low savannah and high plateau, where even the Race of Man is far from uniform: the hides of the humans here range from a ruddy tan to a deep blue-black that nearly equals the Drow of Wevenore.

Not that you got to see much of it.

You are James Efron, Senior Initiate of the Hawksong Mages’ Tower. At your age—twenty-three—you really ought to be a Mage Apprentice. You should be studying in some stuffy laboratory back home in the big city like Izirina Henzler, or maybe taking a practicum under some smaller adjunct Associate Tower like your old pal Testa. But nooo, you craved a life of action, of adventure! ‘ is meant for the field!’ you used to boast of your favourite spell. So you’d taken the field, first as a formal Field Researcher and then later as a freelance adventurer-for-hire.

And that had led you here. To the Southlands. To this dungeon.

It isn’t the cool kind of dungeon, full of monsters to kite and for coin, alas. It’s the kind where Southrons store their prisoners-of-war, for that seems to be the size of your sad situation: a prisoner, at the beginnings of what is shaping up to be a full-scale intercivilizational conflict.

The Men of the South may be myriad, but tensions between their ilk and the fairer folk of the Northwest—your homeland, Hawksong’s aegis—have been a unifying cause as of late, and not only for the human races. Relations have been fraying since before you were born, when a sinister cabal of dark-skinned demon-worshippers staged a terrorist attack on the Mages’ Tower itself, assassinating the Archmage and destroying the much-beloved Eternal Fountain.