Adylheim is a loose confederacy of seven fiefdoms with no one fiefdom having risen to a greater level of power than any of the others. The northern fiefdoms are characterized by rugged terrain, which grows flatter in the southern areas. Each fiefdom is held by a noble of some manner who is continually striving to expand his domain at the expense of others. Given that Adylheim is encapsulated by hostile terrain this is a zero sum game, with each expansion at the cost of a neighbour.

Statistics and Information

The main staple of Adylheim is grain. The peasants who make up the majority of the population do not really care all that much for who owns the land and only really complain when increased taxes are moved their way. Taxes are generally paid in produce, which is converted into money in nearby cities.

Cities can generally be found in three sizes. Small cities have populations less than 2,000, and medium sized cities have populations between 2,000 and 10,000 inhabitants. Large cities have populations which exceed 10,000 citizens. The largest city in Adylheim is Aram, which contains almost up to 100,000 inhabitants. Cities require a steady influx of people from the rural areas to join them in order to maintain their size. This is due to the high mortality rates and poor birth rates.

Longmoor, along with part of Nevros, forms the easternmost fronteir of the fiefdoms, and often suffers from raids launched from the Ogres' lands. Dominated in large part by moors and swamps, it is arguably the poorest of the fiefdoms, and rarely meddles in the affairs of its neighbors.

Local History

In the early days, before the Empire, the area that would come to be known as Longmoor was little more than an extension of the Ogre lands, with only a small population of hardy human settlers in the western portions - predominantly made up of the outcast and the desperate from the areas that would become known as Arameia and Nerin. With the rise of the Empire, however, came grand ambitions, and one of them was the subjugation and settlement of the Ogre territories. The lure of colonization was always strong, but Longmoor seemed especially tempting because at the time it was theorized that the area's substantial rainfall and supposedly fertile soil would, once drained and tilled, allow the cultivation of exotic spices and foodstuffs that otherwise had to be imported from the island kingdoms at great expense. Whether this would ever have been possible seems unlikely, and the question soon became academic. The costs of converting the marshes into farms stacked up quickly, and the reports trickling back from Longmoor indicated that small-scale attempts to produce foreign foodstuffs there resulted in anemic, low-quality crops at best. The failure of the Eastern Campaign to wipe out the Ogres sapped much of the remaining political will in Aram to see the project through to its completion. When the Empire began its decline, Longmoor was forced to shoulder the burden of protecting itself from predation by neighboring kingdoms and, especially, the Ogre tribes. In the end, Longmoor did not rebel against the Empire, so much as the Empire abandoned Longmoor.