House Encrezent

House of The Crescent

The entirety of Western Istolaire is an expansive but rather isolated region known as "The Crescent": A vast, golden desert pockmarked with glittering limestone cities, sprawling shanty-towns, sleepy trading posts and colourful nomadic settlements. All denizenry from the Cador Coast, to the False Moon Sands, to the impenetrable Relurie Mountains, come under the protection and administration of House Encrezent ("House of The Crescent").
Note: Due to old convention, both Crezentine and Encrezentine refer to that which is of The Crescent, though the latter does more specifically invoke the Imperial House Encrezent.

Roads of Gold

The voluntary Crezentine assimilation with the empire may seem odd on the surface. The nearest Velpyrian soldier is an entire treacherous mountain pass and inhospitable desert away from any Crezentine city. But the true society of The Crescent is not relegated to its cities like most cultures. The Crescent is really a sprawling empire all of its own, one made of roads and trails and more importantly the thousands of merchants, guides, moon-shard hunters, emissaries, artists, storytellers, bandits, thieves and everyone in between who trace their way along them between the shifting dunes in search of fortune and purpose every single day.

Actors from the East and West perform the play of fair exchange ad nauseum, weaving their cultures tighter with every coin, trinket, spell, prayer, story and song that changes hands.

By integrating with the empire, the Encrezentine House solidifies and legitimises its existing relationship with the Eastern Houses, confident that trade alone will keep the peace and allow The Crescent to advocate for itself more directly in the Velpyrian courts. Should the worst come to pass, the desert has buried greater foes before.
Until then, House Encrezent claims the West in the name of the Imperatrice Voya Velpyrus, who retains the title Stewardess of The Crescent, and guarantees the safety of the three main imperial roads through the Relurie Mountains.

Art of The Desert

The centuries-old trade routes across The Crescent afford Crezentine society a rich and hospitable culture. An important part of Crezentine culture is keeping travellers safe and equipped while braving the harsh and often unpredictable conditions of the desert. Roaming traders and whole pop-up markets are commonplace on major routes, bridging the gap between more permanent watering holes and trade posts.

The Guiding Guild is infamous for its colourful and highly skilled travel companions who can be hired individually or as part of a caravan. Guides are usually experts in the geography and customs along their routes, as well as trained survivalists who always seem to have one more trick up their sleeve than any would-be thug or bandit encountered along the way.

Treasure and Ruin

Every drunk on the continent will tell you the Crezentine Desert is rich in treasures as old as the Gods themselves... But perhaps it is with good reason that even the Gods have not returned to retrieve their belongings from the ever-shifting sands. Officially, a permit from The Imperial Excavation Committee is required to access any known or potential ruin sites. The thriving black markets that deal in ancient artifacts indicate that for every excavation permit there are dozens if not hundreds of treasure hunters scouring the desert for secret entrances, buried cities, and lost tombs of forgotten rulers.

The False Moon

For centuries a truly unbelievable phenomenon has been observed and documented above the Northern Desert: A massive spherical object which resembles an astronomical body rises out of the sand and begins a slow but steadfast journey up into the air, arcing through the sky and seemingly picking up speed as it does so. Along the way, this "false moon" disintigrates gradually, chunks of material falling back down into the dunes. Eventually, when what remains of the sphere is so high in the sky as to be mistaken for a star, a final explosion causes thousands of shards - reportedly ranging in size from an arrowhead to a horse - to rain down over a wide area.

There is, unsurprisingly, no shortage of seekers of the shards that fall from the false moon. Despite extensive study, its appearance remains unpredictable in terms of both time and location. Is it just the result of some natural process underground or something more deliberate at play? Regardless, countless amateurs compete with professional hunters from the Moon-Shard Guild to find pieces of the strange object. The allure of the moon-shards themselves comes not only from their hypnotising natural luminescence, but purported magical and alchemical properties range from turning sand into gold to raising the dead.