Thundain Thursday: The Southern Lands — Indrastan, Shaibya & the Burning Sands

If the north of Thundain is defined by cold pragmatism and the center by the competing ambitions of Corrillia and the Republic of Thrane, the south is defined by heat, faith, and the kind of ancient complexity that makes every other region of the continent look young.

South of the Thunder Rail's reach, beyond the mountain passes and the great desert, lie lands that most northerners know only by rumor. The rumors, for once, do not do them justice.

Indrastan

Indrastan occupies most of the great forested peninsula south of Shaibya, and it is unlike anywhere else in Thundain. It is a matriarchal theocracy populated almost exclusively by Farmen — the olive-skinned, almond-eyed people whose scholarly traditions and caste consciousness shape everything they touch. Here, however, the Farmen have built something distinct from their cousins in Myridia: a civilization where women hold all meaningful power, where the jungle itself seems to breathe with divine intention, and where the monsoon season does not merely bring rain but reshapes the entire rhythm of life.

The landscape matches the culture's intensity. Deep verdant valleys choked with jungle give way to lowlands that are, in the summer months, essentially steam baths — humid, teeming, everything growing with an abandon that feels almost aggressive. The monsoons arrive each summer with a ferocity that shuts down roads, floods lowland settlements, and reminds everyone that the gods of Indrastan are not subtle.

Indrastani society is organized around three ethnically distinct castes. The Kana — darker-skinned, taller, from the southern regions — occupy the highest social position, many of them living in elaborate mountain palaces and shrines that seem to grow from the peaks themselves. The Doha — lighter-skinned, shorter but more powerfully built, from the northern border regions near Shaibya — form the backbone of the military. The Uma are the lowest caste, believed by Indrastani theology to have been placed among the higher castes as a test of their virtue.

Most Indrastani males are generally subservient, though some serve in local government or ministerial roles. The elephant-riding female warriors of the Doha military are among the most formidable fighters on the continent — disciplined, ferocious, and trained from childhood in traditions that blend martial skill with spiritual practice.

That training happens, for the finest warriors and nobles, at Devanagari — a temple complex of extraordinary beauty, its surfaces covered in gold decoration, its courtyards filled with the sound of training. The Upanishad monks who inhabit Devanagari are not merely religious figures; they are a military resource, contracted by the Indrastani state to train soldiers and selected nobles in exchange for donations. Their leader is Mother Yu — a human monk who looks to be in her fifties and is at least ninety, tall and lean and bald, with a hawk-like nose and no eyebrows, and an athletic form that makes it very clear she has not spent those decades sitting still.

The nearest city to Devanagari is Lothal, built into the face of a seaside cliff in a way that defies easy description. Nobles occupy the clifftop. The famous seaport sprawls at the bottom. Between them: houses and businesses carved directly into the cliff face, pulley elevators (some powered by elephants), ladders, and winding cave systems that connect the levels. Two sets of docks serve the harbor — one for high tide, one for low — in a perfect natural cove that remains safe in even the wildest sea storms. The poor live in caves and shanties under the docks, flooded out periodically and appearing on the piers as beggars. The same caves shelter some of the most successful pirates and smugglers on the southern coast, who find the proximity to the docks and the cover of the undesirables extremely useful — and who maintain the good graces of Bel of Lothal, a godfather-style divine patron who hides his faithful from detection magic and psionics in exchange for tribute.

The Indrastani coast is fabled for its ports and its sailors. Its islands are said to contain treasures and perils as numerous as the stars.

Shaibya

North of Indrastan, sharing a border and a centuries-long argument, lies Shaibya — another hereditary matriarchy, but one with a very different relationship to power and conflict. Where Indrastan is lush and theocratic, Shaibya is defined by its warriors and its almost constant state of tension with its southern neighbor.

The conflict between Shaibya and Indrastan is not a simple border dispute. It runs along lines of culture and religion deep enough that neither side expects it to be resolved in any living person's lifetime. What makes Shaibya's military particularly noteworthy — and what gives Indrastani commanders genuine pause — is that Shaibya's most experienced warriors ride hippogriffs into battle. Aerial cavalry changes every tactical calculation, and Shaibya has had generations to perfect the art.

The Burning Sands

East of Corrillia and south of the mountain ranges that form the continent's spine lies the Burning Sands — the great desert of Thundain, vast and inhospitable and home to the Sandlings, a people who have survived and thrived in conditions that would kill most other races within days.

The Sandlings are not merely desert survivors. They are the longtime allies of the Drow — a relationship forged during the great war between the Primusene and Drow elves, when the Sandlings answered the Drow call for aid and fought alongside them against the combined Primusene and human mercenary forces. That alliance did not save the Drow from being driven south of the Black Drake River, but it was not forgotten. Sandlings can be found in Anshar, the great Corrillian trade city at the mountain pass between Corrillia and the Burning Sands, where they move freely as recognized friends of the Drow community.

The pass through the Emberwave Mountains that Anshar guards is the only navigable route between Corrillia and the Burning Sands — which makes Anshar one of the most strategically important cities on the continent, and makes the Sandlings' relationship with the Drow a matter of ongoing geopolitical significance.

The South as a Whole

The southern lands of Thundain share a quality that the north lacks: antiquity. Indrastan's caste system stretches back further than most northern nations have existed. The Sandlings' alliance with the Drow predates the current political order of Corrillia. Shaibya's hippogriff cavalry traditions were old when the Thunder Rail was still a gnomish dream.

For adventurers, the south offers something the center of the continent cannot: the genuine sense that you are somewhere the world has been working on for a very long time, and that most of what it has built, you have not yet seen.

For GMs running campaigns in the southern jungles, the Book of Beasts: Wandering Monsters 1 is an excellent resource for populating Indrastan's verdant valleys and Shaibya's contested borderlands. Players building Farmen characters navigating Indrastan's caste system will find rich roleplaying material in Divine Favor: the Druid for those exploring the spiritual dimensions of the setting.

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.