The Atrar States

🌲 Geography & Climate

The Atrar States occupy a difficult, amphibious landscape that defies standard cartography due to its shifting nature. Situated apart from the central continent's stability, the terrain serves as a testament to biological resilience.

• The Northern Glaciers: The northernmost reaches are locked in permafrost and dominated by towering glaciers. These frozen wastes are largely uninhabitable but serve as the source of the fresh water that feeds the endless wetlands below.
• The Great Fens: The majority of the country varies between treacherous bog, deep peatlands, and marshes. In the summer, these regions effectively isolate communities, turning towns into islands amidst a sea of mud and slurry.
• The Ice Highways: In a reversal of standard logistics, winter is the season of connectivity. When the bogs freeze solid, the Logistics corps pave the "Winter Roads," allowing heavy haulers to transport goods across the hardened ice shelf.

🏗️ Infrastructure: The Pontoon Arteries

In the southern provinces, where the freeze is less consistent and the summers more temperate, the Atrar engineers have constructed the Pontoon Arteries. These are massive, modular floating bridges that span hundreds of kilometers, hovering rhythmically atop the water table.

These structures are a marvel of the Age of Reason, utilizing buoyancy calculations that account for the shifting density of the peat. They ensure year-round trade flow between the southern trading hubs and the interior processing plants, preventing the total economic paralysis that historically plagued the region during the thaw.

⚗️ The Alchemical Economy

While the landscape is unforgiving, the economy is booming. The unique anaerobic chemistry of the bogs, combined with the mineral runoff from the northern glaciers, has created an ecosystem dense with hyper-reactive flora and fauna.

• The "Green Rush": The Atrar States have become a destination for opportunists from the Fahill Nations and Coplin. Settlers arrive in droves to establish bio-farms, braving the harsh environment for the lucrative payout of alchemical exports.
• Reagent Farming: The primary exports are not food, but catalytic fungal agents, psychotropic mosses used in anesthesia, and modified rice strains capable of absorbing heavy metals. These supplies are essential for the laboratories of The Rift.

👥 Demographics & Culture

Orcish Innovation: The region is historically the domain of the Orcs. Far from the primitive stereotypes of the pre-Reason eras, Atrar Orcs are regarded as stoic pragmatists and biochemical pioneers. Their culture values endurance and efficiency, viewing the bog not as a curse, but as a complex equation to be solved.

Diet & Lifestyle: Life is hard, wet, and cold. The local diet consists almost entirely of farmed eels, resilient sub-aquatic mushrooms, and wetland rice. Despite the harshness, the population is dense and multicultural, united by the shared pursuit of profit. It is a common saying in Aillutia: "The mud of Atrar smells like sulfur, but tastes like coin."