Barrowledge Canyons
Geography
The Gate at the Barrowledge Canyons opens in a dry, dusty bowl of a valley surrounded by a ragged escarpment. When first opened, the surrounding walls held half-buried skeletal remains of a dozen or more of the Ancient Race. They have long since been removed, but the name stuck to the entire area. The surrounding high cliffs hold many exits to an extensive network of canyons. The canyons running towards the Core Islands eventually empty out into surface jungle, but the rest fan away on the opposite direction for an unknown distance - they are still being explored.
The Traverton around the Gate is known as Dosthim to the locals – a Travit word that means dusty home or dry resting place (or death by starvation) depending on which root language and accent is used. They usually just call it Dost. Dost has two halves. One half is inns and rooms to those waiting for Gate openings and is sedate and mostly civilized. The other supplies the explorers and regulars of the Canyons and has little in the way of law and order.
The entire area is arid and dry, and the lack of water is the most severe limit on exploration and settlement. A native domesticated creature known as a Bivark is used as a pack animal. Bivarks are a man and a half tall and just as wide, and resemble giant lumbering pill-bugs, with grey plated hides that ripple faintly when they move forward. They seem to eat only the sparse desert vegetation and not to need water. They also will not approach within a half mile of the Gate and the Gate Guardians. A line of Bivarks in a water caravan from the edge of the Jungle is a common site in the jungle-ward canyons, and small caravans head out form there to supply the few settlements further in the canyons.
Surface Danger – low to medium
The Barrowledge Canyons are unique in that the surface monstrosities that run rampant everywhere else are here frozen in place, stilled, entombed, and held dormant by some unknown force. They come alive when disturbed, or sometimes just when people get too close. The areas nearest the Gate have long been cleared of these quiescent dangers, but the ways beyond the frontier are to be approached with caution. The tunnels and ruins that run into the canyons are a particular danger, as the beasts within seem to be triggered more easily than those frozen out under the sun. Where the canyons meet surface jungle, the jungle creatures seldom cross. When they do, they are held in place just like the others.
People and Culture
The Barrowledge Canyons are host to more adventurers and explorers than most other surface locations combined. The predictability of the surface dangers and the areas to uncover and explore make it a very attractive Gate from which to study the surface and the Ancient Race, and from which to find artifacts and other valuable items. There are contingents from most major Islands in Dost and the surrounding settlements, and the dominating interest is of course in procuring, making, or conjuring water to support further human presence in the canyons. Those who have spent a lot of time in the canyons learn an uncanny ability to find rare caches puddled from the scant rainfall, and skins of water are sometimes traded as a higher value than silver and gold.
Local Authority
A pair of Canyonland natives named Arask and Enod claim authority for Dost, although the explorer half of the Traverton can be too rowdy for any consistent order. There is not any authority past Dost, and the various settlements out in the canyons are their own entities.
Language
Travit and any.