The Badlands
The Badlands is a large barren desert area north of Western Midasfjall. It is believed that the Badlands used to be the ancestral home of the Ordentian Empire before their dabbling in powerful magic resulted in a cataclysm which caused the widespread drain of magic over the entire continent of Midasfjall and wiped out the Ordentian Empire. In present time, the area is a huge desert spanning from central to western Midasfjall where nothing can grow and nothing can live. According to legend, the cataclysm caused most of the structures built by the Ordentians, filled with ancient treasures and technologies lost to time, to sink into the sands where they wait to be rediscovered but with vicious desert storms and the hostile environment of the region, not many have been brave enough to seek out any of the buried ruins to unlock the secrets within.
Geography
The Badlands is an arid desert of rolling sand dunes. During the day the sun beats down on the land relentlessly forcing creatures to find shade or suffer scorching rays of heat, while at night the desert undergoes a very quick drop in temperature making it hard to acclimate to. Strong winds blow in from the sea and carry layers of sand in their wake causing the dunes to constantly shift their locations, making the region incredibly hard to map. There are, scattered about the region, places where the bedrock underneath the Badlands is close enough to the surface that water can accumulate to form an oasis. People have been able to cultivate the land around these oases and form small towns or, in the rare case, a desert city situated around a large enough oasis. One such example of this is The Arid Nexus located in Central Midasfjall.
Localized Phenomena
Rainfall & Storms
Despite the rainfall the regularly showers the desert, the sand never gets wet. This off phenomenon has baffled researchers who have studied it for years in search of a way to re-cultivate the area but have made no headway, the best guess they have is that it is a result of the magical cataclysm. In addition, fierce thunderstorms can occur in the Badlands which result in a very dangerous phenomenon. When lightning strikes the desert sand, the sand is quickly superheated forming lumps of glass which quickly become lost under a layer of sand, so when a dust storm comes along as a result of high winds blowing across the desert surface, the lumps of glass are picked up by the winds and carried by the storms. Creatures caught in a dust storm face an extremely dangerous combination of low visibility and lumps of glass colliding with each other and shattering to form razor sharp shards of glass flying at high speeds.
Type
Desert
Inhabiting Species
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