Thundain Thursday: The Eastern Kingdoms — Myridia, Sillennia & Fharisth

If the western nations of Thundain are defined by ancient pride and careful positioning, the eastern kingdoms are defined by something rawer — the ongoing negotiation between ambition, faith, and survival in a part of the world that has never been entirely tamed.

Myridia

Myridia is the largest and most powerful of the eastern kingdoms, a nation that has spent centuries building itself into a regional power through a combination of military strength, trade acumen, and the kind of institutional memory that comes from having survived things that destroyed lesser nations.

Myridia is predominantly Farmen in culture — the scholarly, caste-conscious people whose faith in the Trimurti (the three-faced divine principle of creation, preservation, and destruction) shapes everything from their legal system to their architecture. Farmen society is stratified in ways that outsiders often find uncomfortable: your caste is not merely a social position but a spiritual one, reflecting the accumulated karma of previous lives. A Farmen merchant and a Farmen laborer are not simply in different economic circumstances — they are, in the Farmen worldview, at different points in a cosmic journey that spans multiple lifetimes.

This makes Myridia a fascinating place to visit and a complicated place to live. The scholarship is extraordinary — Myridian libraries are among the finest in Thundain, and their mages are respected across the continent. The rigidity of the caste system means that extraordinary talent born into the wrong family has a very hard road ahead of it. Adventure hooks write themselves.

The Church of Ultimus has made significant inroads into Myridia over the past century, which has created a fascinating and occasionally violent theological tension between the Trimurti faith and Ultimite monotheism. Two very different answers to the question of what the divine actually is, competing for the same population.

Sillennia

South of Myridia and east of the Thunder Rail's reach lies Sillennia — a smaller kingdom that has survived in the shadow of its larger neighbor through a combination of geographic advantage and deliberate cultivation of things Myridia needs but cannot easily produce itself.

Sillennia sits at the edge of a significant natural boundary that makes it both defensible and strategically valuable as a waypoint for trade moving between the eastern kingdoms and the wider continent. Sillennian merchants are known for being shrewd without being dishonest, which in Thundain's commercial landscape is considered a significant distinction.

The population is mixed — Farmen and Midmen cultures in roughly equal proportion, which has produced a society that is more religiously pluralistic than either of its parent cultures tends to be on its own. Sillennia has temples to Ultimus, shrines to the Trimurti, and a healthy population of people who light candles at both and figure the gods can sort out the details.

Fharisth

Further east, at the edge of the continent where the maps start to get speculative, lies Fharisth — a kingdom that most people in the western and central parts of Thundain know primarily by reputation, and the reputation is not entirely flattering.

Fharisth is old. Older than most of the nations around it, with a history that stretches back to before the current political order of the continent was established. It has survived that long through a combination of isolation, internal cohesion, and a willingness to do things that more squeamish nations prefer not to think about too carefully.

Fharisth's relationship with the Church of Ultimus is formally cordial and practically nonexistent. The kingdom has its own religious traditions, its own power structures, and its own idea of what the eastern edge of the world is for. Travelers who make it to Fharisth tend to find it either deeply fascinating or deeply unsettling, and the ones who find it fascinating are usually the ones who should have found it unsettling.

The Thunder Rail has never reached Fharisth. There have been discussions. The discussions have not gone anywhere productive.

The East as a Whole

The eastern kingdoms share a position at the far edge of Thundain's main currents of commerce and politics. The Thunder Rail connects the center of the continent. The Church of Ultimus pushes its influence outward from that center. The eastern kingdoms — Myridia with its ancient scholarship and caste tensions, Sillennia with its pragmatic pluralism, Fharisth with its unsettling self-sufficiency — respond to that pressure each in their own way.

For adventurers, the east offers the particular pleasure of being somewhere that does not particularly care what the rest of the world thinks of it. That independence has costs. It also has rewards that you cannot find anywhere closer to the center of things.

For GMs running campaigns in the eastern kingdoms, Book of Beasts: Wandering Monsters 1 is an excellent resource for populating the roads between these distant nations. And for players building Farmen clerics navigating the tension between Trimurti faith and Ultimite pressure, Divine Favor: the Druid offers expanded divine options worth exploring.

Thundain is the personal campaign setting of John Reyst, creator of d20pfsrd.com — the world's most popular free Pathfinder 1e rules reference, used by millions of Pathfinder players worldwide. Support John's work and get exclusive early access to Thundain content on Patreon.