Tsen

At its zenith, Tsen was the undisputed crown jewel of the Hyperborean Empire. The Hyperboreans founded the city to commemorate the eradication of the Hundaei and celebrate their transcendence to superpower status. The victors built their grand metropolis in 689 I.R. on ground sacred to the faith of Arden, securely nestled in a valley surrounded by the Piedmont Highlands (as they were known at the time). Tsen rapidly expanded, swelling from a population of a few thousand souls to roughly 500,000 inhabitants within a few decades. Wealth and knowledge also poured into the city, elevating Tsen into rarified air among Akados’ greatest marvels. To acknowledge its growing sophistication and ascendance onto the world stage, it became known as the City of Wonders. Tsen thrived for 800 years and kept the world continuously awed over the next arcane or technological breakthrough to emerge from its laboratories and classrooms. Yet eight centuries of unparalleled achievements and magnificent accomplishments were undone in a single day.   Even the wisest could not foresee Tsen’s total annihilation. While bloodthirsty humanoid marauders and inhuman monstrosities seemingly sprung from the ground around Tsen during the decades before its collapse, the city’s potent military easily kept the swelling tide in check. Yet despite one victory after another, the enemies’ numbers never abated. Year after year, the relentless hordes kept coming, pillaging the estates and villages beyond Tsen’s imposing walls and fortifications. Tsen’s oblivious citizens took notice of the escalating conflict only when a force of giants and their war machines finally punched a hole in the city’s outer defenses. In response to the breach, the city’s leaders finally assumed a wartime footing to completely eliminate the monstrous threat once and for all. Within a matter of weeks, Tsen conscripted thousands of able-bodied men to bolster the ranks of its already impressive army. In glorious fashion to the bluster of pomp and circumstance, columns of troops poured out of the city to face the enemy in a climactic battle on the fields surrounding Tsen. And in an instant, these best laid plans were irrevocably foiled.   It began with a portent of a white, feathered serpent rising from the Gulf of Akados to the south and soaring into the skies above Tsen. The exact mechanism responsible for what happened next and the winged beast’s role in these events remain enduring mysteries to this day. However, there is no disputing that shortly after the feathered serpent appeared in the heavens, Tsen ceased to exist in an apocalyptic blast that leveled everything for miles around it. Nothing survived the unspeakable carnage. The cataclysm transformed Tsen and the surrounding area into a forsaken wasteland. Those who fled Tsen before its destruction resettled in other areas, most notably the Gray Tower in Oxibbul.   Most people believe nothing short of a god — and an exceptionally powerful one at that — could have wrought the devastation visited upon Tsen on that fateful day. Some speculate that the city’s scholars and arcane practitioners were on the verge of a profound discovery that would have altered the balance of power between mortals and the divine beings lording over them. Others believe the witnesses mistook the feathered serpent for a comet, meteor, or an asteroid that crashed into Tsen and utterly pulverized it. Whatever the cause, the effects still endure.   At the present time, Tsen resembles an abandoned ghost town seemingly frozen in time. Some of its grand stone structures withstood the devastation, though years of exposure to the elements further eroded their already scarred surfaces. The detonation reduced the remainder of its stone buildings to rubble, while the conflagration that followed the explosion transformed its wooden buildings into charred ash. Although the ground no longer trembles and the flames burned out long ago, Tsen remains inhospitable. The soil, the air, the water, and virtually everything else in Tsen is poisonous. The melted sand and fine rocks making up the ground retain almost no moisture and cannot support even the simplest form of plant life. Although short term or prolonged exposure kills most living creatures who venture here, those who can survive in this toxic environment mutate in ways sometimes beneficial and sometimes detrimental. Some change so drastically that they become unrecognizable, while others develop terrifying powers that make them far more dangerous than ordinary members of their species. Of course, the undead, constructs, and some other creature types suffer no ill effects from Tsen’s toxicity.   It is speculated that the lucrative mines beneath the city may have also survived predominately unscathed from the cataclysm. Tsen’s founders erected the metropolis on this site to provide the expensive city with a consistent source of lead, gold, silver, and other valuable metals to finance construction expenditures and as a commodity to export to its neighbor Apothasalos or distant Bard’s Gate. Speculation abounds that some of Tsen’s population, including its ruling elite or its researchers, may have fled into the mines at the first sign of trouble, bringing their riches or their wondrous discoveries with them. Nonetheless, anyone who escaped the initial cataclysm would have also had to adapt to living underground for an extended period of time with any other creatures that cohabitate the mines. To date, no one has ventured to the mines to confirm or refute any of these theories.