Tamoanchan

Tamoanchan is a rugged, ragged continent as varied in land and climate as in its peoples. Much of it is wild and hard to reach, yet it also holds several advanced lowland cultures, and a traveler in its wilds never knows whether the next meeting will be with a savage or a scholar, a head-hunting cannibal or a gentle mystic. Its societies run from primitive tribes to neo-Atlantean states as advanced as any, from the mountain realms of Nazca to the jungles of Oguanabara, and many of its customs exist nowhere else.

Geographers split it into four districts. The subtropical Northern District has harsh inland deserts and mountains but fertile, pleasant coasts; because the continent's odd shape stretches it out in a long spur far from the tropics, its climate is closer to Eria's. The Central District is equatorial highland, jungle-clad mountains rising to snowy peaks, with livable coasts and some high valleys but much grim, impassable country. Its mountains run on into the Southern District, which lacks the tropical warmth and is colder, bleaker and less peopled. The Eastern District is two low, jungle-covered peninsulas wrapped around a great nearly landlocked arm of the sea, where the influence of Antilla and Atlantis has fostered some fairly sophisticated cultures.

Much of Tamoanchan's wildlife is found nowhere else and remains poorly known because the land is so hard to reach. Most notable are the animal-men, beasts able to take human form; their kinds are slowly dying out, though one branch has built a real culture of its own. Most mineral wealth lies in the Central District, where advanced peoples mine gold, silver, copper and other precious metals; elsewhere major deposits are scarce, perhaps only undiscovered, and the main resources are plants and animals.

Settlement is uneven. The North and especially the South are thinly peopled, while the eastern jungles and central mountains hold a few small, crowded pockets amid vast empty wilderness. Elves, dwarves and their like are almost unknown, but goblins, gremlins and similar beings, as well as demons, live in the Central and East Districts. The South shelters a dwindling neanderthaloid race of men, and parts of the East are home to animal-men, some bestial and a few intelligent enough to have founded a culture.