Known Dragon Blights¶
Overview¶
A Dragon Blight is any territory where a dragon rules openly — where no Imperial writ, garrison, or law reaches, and the land itself has bent to serve the creature that claims it. "Blight" is the Empire's word, and it is not a metaphor: soil sours, rivers run wrong, and whatever lived there before is either gone, hiding, or changed into something that serves. The Empire does not claim to have destroyed the dragons. It claims only to have pushed them to the edges of the map and kept them there. Every Dragon Blight is a place where that claim is being tested.
Three Blights are known and mapped well enough to name. There are almost certainly others — rumor puts one or two beyond The Shallows and further out on the sea, and the Kampanni tell stories about blights that move, though most scholars dismiss this as flight-song embellishment. This page will grow as those rumors are confirmed or discarded.
The Blighted Lands¶
Location: Directly north of Kemet, across the mountains that ring the Imperial heartland.
The largest and oldest known Blight, and the one every Kemet-born child is raised to fear. Travelers and soldiers alike still call it the Blighted Reaches — an older, informal name that predates the Empire's own cartographers and never quite died out, even after "the Blighted Lands" became the official term on Imperial maps. Both names point at the same place, and most people in Kemet use them interchangeably.
No one holds a census of the Blighted Lands, because no one who enters and returns has much interest in counting. What's known comes secondhand: a handful of dragons — no one agrees how many, and the Empire is not eager to admit it doesn't know — hold overlapping, shifting dominion over the region, more rivals than allies. Whole valleys are described as "reshaped," their geography no longer matching older maps. The Empire maintains a permanent line of watchtowers and garrisons along the northern mountains for exactly this reason; holding that line is one of the oldest and most sacred duties in Imperial military doctrine.
Refugees occasionally reach Kemet from the Blighted Lands, usually across generations-old smuggling routes through the mountains. They rarely speak of what they saw. This is treated as its own kind of answer.
The Ashenwake¶
Location: The far west of the Shield Lands, well beyond the last Imperial waystations.
Where the Blighted Lands are ancient and half-mythic, the Ashenwake is a live, ongoing war. This is the Blight Far Holdings locals mean when they say the heaviest dragon fighting happens in the Shield Lands — a contested frontier where Imperial legions, Shield Lands militias, and at least one aggressive, territorial dragon grind against each other in a fight that has not meaningfully moved a border in living memory. The land bears the marks: burned tree-lines that never fully regrow, ash-grey soil that gives the Blight its name, and abandoned holdfasts retaken and lost more than once.
Unlike the Blighted Lands, the Ashenwake's edge is a place people actually go — soldiers, obsidian-armed Qnassi mercenary bands, and the occasional relic-hunter willing to bet that a burned holdfast still has something worth looting. It is dangerous specifically because it is reachable, not because it is unknowable.
The Rimefang Blight¶
Location: The far northern reaches of Far Holdings, beyond Lampone's defensive line.
The newest and least understood of the three, and the one most directly tied to Far Holdings's slow ecological collapse. Locals increasingly suspect — though nothing is confirmed — that the Rimefang Blight is not just cold, but a source of cold: that the winter creeping earlier into every Far Holdings autumn and lingering later into every spring originates here, radiating outward the way the Blighted Lands' corruption radiates from the north. If true, it would mean the dragon or dragons holding the Rimefang aren't merely occupying territory the way the Ashenwake's rival is — they may be actively remaking the region's climate to suit them, one degree at a time.
Lampone's garrison treats the Rimefang as the primary northern threat, more pressing in the long run than raids or [[Blooded]] cultists, precisely because it can't simply be repelled at a wall. No one has mapped how far in the Blight extends; every scouting party that has gone deep enough to find its heart has failed to report back.
Notes & Development Questions¶
To Be Determined: - Specific dragon identities, numbers, and temperaments for each Blight (develop alongside broader dragon work) - Whether the Rimefang's climate-warping theory is confirmed setting fact or an in-world rumor GMs can play either way - Rumored Blights beyond The Shallows and the moving Blights of Kampanni legend — worth developing or worth leaving as unconfirmed flavor - Named locations, holdfasts, or notable figures within each Blight, once individual Blights need scene-level detail
Connections¶
Each Blight sits just past the edge of settled, Imperial-protected territory — that's what makes it a Blight rather than merely a dangerous wilderness. See Kemet, Shield Lands, and Far Holdings for the Imperial territories each Blight presses against.