Military: Foskyldae
Population: 29,877,000
Capital: Glasda
Governor: Train Lord Raendaer 1780 – Present
Nationality: Arnyaran(s) (noun), Arnyaran (adj)
Affiliation: Nodd Ffae Alays!
Climate: Arid desert; narrow temperate rainforest between mountains and the Goseth Ocean. Very little arable land.
Terrain: Mountainous coast, otherwise unstable altiplanos, arroyos, and generally rugged landscape.
Notes of Interest: Of all the places in Alwyd to live Arnyara is the furthest from pleasant. Scant water, heavily alkaline soil, and generally unstable ground renders much of the country largely inhospitable. Despite these shortcomings, the Arnyarans have found a way to live there, and to even thrive. Since long-term, sustained habitation of any particular area is essentially impossible, the Arnyarans adopted a nomadic lifestyle, always moving from one area to another as the seasons and local conditions dictate. Many Arnyarans have taken this approach even further, spending years if not decades traveling long-established trading routes across the Continent.
Traditionally thought of as merchants, Arnyarans drive great “land trains,” across Alwyd, from town to town, selling, trading and performing shows for the amusement of locals. Their great Iron Houses, mobile edifices of steel, pig-iron, and wood, as much cabin as tractor, slowly travel to every far corner of Alwyd in caravans of merchants, entertainers, and information gatherers. Arnyaran merchants might be away from home traveling for a decade in their trains before returning home with trade goods, foreign wares, and news, great and small, from the mountains of Naedio to the coast of Achon. While their tea is prized nearly everywhere, it is always information, news from far and wide, that has traditionally welcomed Arnyarans throughout the continent; and it is commonly japed that the humble quar of Arnyara knows more about Alwyd’s politics and goings on than the most accomplished spymaster or gossip at any Royal Court.
The “towns” of Western Arnyara remain in perpetual flux as dozens of family groups come and go in their Iron Houses, swelling or reducing the population and composition of these mobile enclaves. From day to day, week to week, an Arnyaran Land Train might be unrecognizable and this fluidity is taken as given by resident and outsider alike, and allows the nomads a certain anonymity of identity and purpose as their caravans rove the country, and rarely, is an Arnyaran caravan ever turned away at a border. While many a more cultured quar might recoil at the uncouth and strange Western ways, the Arnyarans and their Iron Houses are always off and on to new ranging before the welcome of their itinerant camp has worn thin with the locals.
Their nomadic ways, history has now revealed, allowed the Arnyarans a particular anonymity, an everyday camouflage of a kind, to the shifting size and shape of their roving towns, and a cloak of seemingly peaceful character to their peoples, that drew neither attention nor suspicion to their information gathering activities, nor to a gradual founding of new enclaves established for sustained manufacturing, in preparation for the coming tide that would rend the West and plunge it into a new war.