Broken Grounds

The Broken Grounds is an acursed place, a permanently scarred landscape, the sight of a great battle from the Daemon Wars, a mere 100 miles north-east of the great city Port Kolin. It is treacherous indeed to cross, most opting for the much longer routes to the east and west of the some two hundred square miles of torn ground. The land itself is rent by fissures and jagged rock formations, scattered about with blasted obsidian plains and rivulets of magma. Scattered about this are the ruined shells of machines of war, the specific purposes of which have been lost to the passages of time, crafted of metals in forms most unfamiliar to the warmasters of our age.
Aside from these most dangerous conditions, the fabric of the world itself here is thin and rifts to the lower planes come and go, which results in the regular appearance of fiends, walking the lands, and perhaps most terrifyingly, means an unwary traveller could, by accident, walk through one of these rifts to a lower plane. Patrols of the Griffin Knights are a regular sight above these blasted and cursed grounds looking for any of these stray fiends, as to let them remain would be disastrous in the extreme.
If this were not bad enough, the vast magical energies that were unleashed during this ancient conflict haver twisted the very nature of magic in the area, wild magic storms are not an uncommon sight, raging over the plains, and to use magic within the broken grounds themselves takes a highly skilled, or very foolish spell caster.
Yet for all this danger, bands of adventurers still roam these lands for it is rumoured that there are treasures of ancient wonder to be found, if one is lucky enough. Over the years, enough items of great value have been located and brought in to overshadow the fact that most treasure seekers never return from chancing their luck.