Gilmora

Gilmora is the agricultural heartland of the north-central Riverlands, a sprawl of flat alluvial plains, moated manors, and large peasant villages lying between the Bontal country to the south and the Wilderlands frontier to the north. The soil, the mild climate, and a dense network of cotton plantations made Gilmora the wealthiest commodity region in the Five Duchies, exporting fine cotton to Merwyn, Remere, and Vore, and supporting a population far denser than any other rural region. It was famous too for its finer luxuries — excellent red wines, silks traded up from Merwyn, and the gracious, generous culture of its people. Its chief political feature is an array of powerful counties — the so-called Gilmoran Counts — who traditionally enjoyed outsized influence at both the Castali and Alshari ducal courts.

The region was also home to sizeable communities of River Folk, who often lived alongside human peasants in a mutually-beneficial arrangement: the humans cultivating grain and livestock while the River Folk tended vegetables, poultry, and smoking herbs. Stallburrow, in Gilmora, was a celebrated example of such cooperation, where the River Folk adopted human language, dress, and social structure; elsewhere they were more often marginalized.

The province's status was historically disputed. Portions of northern and western Gilmora were claimed by Alshar, while the bulk lay under the Duke of Castal, a dispute that simmered for generations but was overshadowed by the gurvani invasion. Shortly after the Dragonfall, roughly a hundred thousand gurvani warriors, trolls, and shamans poured into the region along the Timber Road, capturing castles and moated manors and then methodically depopulating the countryside. Tens of thousands of Gilmorans were coffled north into the Penumbra, and the breadbasket was essentially emptied; entire northern counties lay fallow and ruined. Lord Commander Terleman led the campaign to contain the invasion, with the young knights magi Tyndal and Rondal cutting their teeth in the Bloody River Company and the Iron Ring.

Despite this crisis, the gracious Gilmoran gentry remained famously generous: in the wake of the Battle of Dragonfall the wealthy folk of Gilmora heaped honors and gifts upon Dara the Hawkmaiden, gifting her some seventy heavy gold chains, many set with semi-precious stones.

After the war Gilmora was slowly resettled, with the Crown and the Arcane Orders funneling refugees, magelords, and Kasari settlers into the shattered north. Key locales include Barrowbell (the great cotton market), Maramor, Cotton's Ford, and Stallburrow. Politically the region is now divided between loyalist Gilmoran counts under Castal and newly created magelord estates.