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Rym’s largest continental mass is Penduk. Its climate ranges from sub-arctic Freilu to tropical Cekus, with a number of unstable wasteland regions still recovering from the great Automatic War seven hundred years prior to the current age. The world is sparsely-populated, its inhabitants having only recently reclaimed the land from the utter ruin of the previous era, the so-called Golden Age in which the Creator State grew powerful enough to challenge the divine will of the Amai, Rym's ruling caste of demigods. This is the era now referred to as 'The Bygone'.
The weapons and aftershocks of the Automatic War caused roughly a third of the continent to break apart and sink. The New Sea itself was once a vast underground domain, while the divine paradise now called Endland best demonstrates the sheer destructiveness of the conflict. These cratered areas are shot-through with jagged fault-lines, chasms, and geological upheavals where the shockwaves of the war are recorded in the very landscape. The visible profusion of craters, called ‘tons’, are distinguished by their unnatural size and shape, caused not by impacts or explosion but by the wholesale disintegration of entire regions, and subsequent collapse of the surrounding landscape into the void left behind. By the late third age, shown here roughly seven centuries later, Penduk is well on its way to ecological recovery. The ruins of The Bygone are largely crumbled away or overgrown, though there are some regions where the lost Creator State remains clearly visible, with remnants of the old world still exposed. This is more common in the southern region where the war was concentrated, and in other regions deep underground, where forgotten shelters became tombs for the majority of the conflict’s would-be survivors. There are belts of smaller uninhabited islands in the vast southern ocean, though anything below the equator is regularly swept by the moon Zunat’s perigee wave, which almost nothing can survive. This phenomenon forms a near-impassible barrier to exploration of the southern hemisphere, as its atmospheric compression is powerful enough to destroy even airborne vessels. In mythological terms, it was the world’s edge, a wall raised by the passage of the gods, and a demonstration of their power. This is the Lunar Wave.
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Below is Penduk as it appeared before the Automatic War. The Creator State had dominion over most of the continent, with only the last vestiges of the old divine order holding sway in the East. The Isles of the Amai were the final refuge of Rym’s beleaguered demigods and their followers, and though they still commanded the fantastical powers and mythological creatures which had once dominated the world, their time was drawing to a close. The continent’s extensive underworld lay deep beneath the desert of the Tropaz Basin, the region which would collapse into the New Sea at the height of the war. Axis was still lush and green, divided into Upper and Lower territories by the Bay of Advosia. There was a longstanding truce between the new mortal domain and the ebbing divinity of the previous age, a peace which held for nearly two thousand years as the balance of power shifted and the last of the Kobath Empire faded into obscurity and legend.
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