The New Court and the City of Nivhar

Once veshite industry and Ill-Vess as a whole started to pick momentum, both Arrakans and Stallia were flooded with more resources than they could possibly spend.

This triggered a wave of great endeavours and exploration. The most notable endeavour was the construction of the "perfect city", that would later be called Nivhar. A coastal city south east of Stallia, Nivhar is currently the largest city of The Steppes by far with more than 485.000 inhabitants.

The initial project envisioned pretty much tearing down the squiggly, crooked Stallia and rebuilding it using a more organized layout, but there was such a strong opposition on so many levels that the construction of a new city was favoured instead. This new city would be built around a central axis, the so called Spinal Avenue, from which smaller avenues would stem. The whole concept was highly symbolic and propagandistic, symbolizing the blooming of a new era for The Steppes and humankind.

The city enjoyed a milder climate than any other city of The Steppes, a more efficient layout and, once it was connected by railroad and the maritime commerce started to grow, more business opportunities as well. As soon as the nivharian economy really launched, disgruntled stallian tenants relocated as independent farmers, arrakensis traders and entrepreneurs moved in fleeing from the city's lawlessness, and many former, destitute veshite land owners sought a new life in the city. As a consequence, Nivhar became a cosmopolitan city with strong aspirations that started to envision itself as the pinnacle of humanity.

There was a strong sense that everything had to be perfect from the beginning, and the surest way at the time seemed to regulate every aspect of life in the new city. This feeling was somehow compounded with a strong desire for a wide range of individual rights. As a consequence, a corpus of entangled and often contradictory laws concerning every imaginable issue was quickly created and expanded over the years.

The perception, specially in the eyes of those that chose not to move into Nivhar, is that the nivharian bureaucracy became a monolithic entity unable to take any kind of fast or decisive action. Any such attempt is after all met with delays or obstructions by swarms of lawyers and rivalling lobbies looking to further their interests.

Armed with these very lawyers, the increasingly large nivharian aristocracy eventually wrestled control of The Court from Stallia. There wasn't much the stallians could do to prevent this course of events once it was actually but grudgingly put to vote. Nivhar was larger, had a better emplacement, and was after all composed of people from all the other cities. A new, larger and grander court building was therefore built in Nivhar, while the old one was transformed into something in between a community centre and a storage building.

The only thing Stallia was given in exchange was a botanical garden with all its maintenance paid inside the patios of the building. Something that the austere, down to earth stallians consider a waste of perfectly arable land anyway.


Soon enough, the new court, following the nivharian spirit, set forth in a crusade to guarantee the rights of humans everywhere.

In sharp contrast to the aggressively autocratic and isolationist stallian court, the new nivharian court set its sights further beyond The Steppes. Since there were trace populations of unchanged humans in these areas, mostly in the form of savages and enslaved individuals by either beastfolk bandits or ogre warbands, The Court of All Humans established a protectorate in each of these territories in order to legally accommodate these people and try to enforce their welfare.

These were laborious endeavours given the vastness and hostility of the surrounding territories. It soon became clear that these territories, separated each by their respective mountain ranges, could be divided into 2 very distinct categories with very different needs.

The lands west of The Steppes were to become the protectorate of Malahs Kovoss. A nearly impracticable jungle grown over the ruins of the now long-gone saurian civilization and inhabited by unknown thousands of warring beastfolk gangs.

The lands north of The Steppes, on the other hand, were to become the protectorate of Hieronhorte. A tundra of ashes covered by an almost perennial hailstorm. Whenever the hail storm stops, black, noxious fog seeps into the surface from the sprawling and unknown underground.


Meanwhile, strong reactionary movements started to grow in Arrakans and specially in the emasculated Stallia.