Tara Mountain Range

The Tara range winds along Mu's northern coast and through its interior. Apart from a few small rock-climbing lizards, its volcanic hills and peaks are home only to wyverns, firedrakes and wyrms.

Explorers say the terrain is hard but not impassable. Occasional eruptions threaten only parties that cannot move quickly; the smoky, acrid air is unpleasant but seldom deadly, and steering clear of the biggest, most active volcanoes avoids the worst poisonous and sometimes scalding vapors that burst up from below. Streams of lava and creeping red-hot magma endanger only the careless.

The reward is geodes. The volcanoes throw out these rounded lumps half-molten; cooled, they look like ordinary stones, but cracked open they are full of glittering crystals. Most hold only quartz, some contain as many as twelve sards, amethysts, chrysoprases or similar stones, and a rare few hold rubies, emeralds or even diamonds of 1-20 carats. Since an ordinary day's search can turn up dozens of geodes, prospectors here, though still few, grow more common every year.