The Modern World
From Reydala
The course of time has greatly changed the landscape of Reydala. The once vast oceans have receeded into a collection of pools, rivers have dried up, forests have withered and dried away, and mountains have become fields of dust. Bereft of it's previous protection, temperatures on Reydala can reach from a blistering 350 degrees near the equator to 130 below near the poles. Very few life forms can survive outside of the protective cities built by man, and even they struggle to maintain their ways of life in an uncooperative world. Each of the surviving three countries has very few cities still extant and a multitude of ruins. If the natural decay of the world were not enough, the new weapons of man continue to leave scars upon the planet's surface, the remaining battlefields a testament to the neverending struggle of man.
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Ohnben
Deloria (Captial)
Deloria weathered the Celestial Exodus exceedingly better than most other cities on the planet, mostly due to the nomadic lifestyle of the Ohnben. Technology never built up to a point that the entire city depended upon it simply because nobody would be there to take advantage of it all of the time. The communal ownership laws of the Ohnben also gave little incentive for Technomancers to work their trade. After the Exodus had passed, the city of Deloria remained largely intact, though some of the larger clans (mostly those who had in-house technomancers) found themselves stranded in the desert or worse after their high tech crafts became as worthless as scrap metal. The confusion prompted a need for information, and this prompted people to gather. Ironically, the exodus caused the population of Deloria to sharply increase while people began to question what had happend.
Decades went by in the desert, and even the nomads begin to swelter under the gradually increasing desert heat. Oases that had sparkled for millenia were suddenly drying up, life that had once thrived in the desert began to wither and die. Nomads soon found themselves with no herds, water, or plants to sustain themselves on. Deloria for some time was sustained by it's relative proximity to the muline river, but after the first century after the fall, even that began to recede.
Something had to be done if the Ohnben people were to survive, supplies of food and water were quickly running out as the land died. Births were few, and deaths were many. For great stretches of time, one could not expect to live far past 30 years. Not only were Starvation and Dehydration rampant causes of death, the direct solar radiation that shone upon Deloria year in and year out took a harsh toll on the bodies of the nomads: cancers of the skin were extremely common and often deadly.
Deloria finally found some respite when a researcher found a way to reactivate Deloria's oldest relic, a crystal that was once given to the city by high mage Varaan over 5 millenia ago. The complicated machine (onlookers would describe it as a mass of tubes, though it's primary element were electronic fields) required extreme amounts of energy to retain it's function. Deloria constructed hundreds of wind turbines on the slopes of the Navorals, though with centuries passing the winds became for too unpredictable for them to be useful. Ohnben instead turned to trying to harness it's greatest enemy, and to this day, the country is the leader in solar power research and utilization. A full 95% of the machines, ships, cities, and dragoons in Deloria today function purely through solar power.
Modern Deloria is a far cry from it's nomadic roots. Since the outside world became too harsh to wander, people have flocked to the comparitive safety offered by cities. Ironically Ohnben finds itself in the same condition that plagued it's fellows prior to the celestial exodus: too many people in one place, all reliant upon technology to survive. Since the dome was first constructed approximately 400 years after the Exodus, the people of Deloria have continued to refine it and make life even more bearable to those who live underneath. Populations have slowly started to creep upward, but since the dome is very difficult to expand outward, living spaces have primarily expanded upward. Skyscrapers dominate the Deloria skyline, with real-estate in the central regions (the tallest sections of the dome) often more expensive than the buildings built upon it. The affluent tend to live near the center of the city, and the destitute try to scrape out a living near the borders of the dome.
Deloria retains the highest population of any Ohnben city. It's technology is often the most reliable to be found anywhere in the nation, though most new environmental technology is now imported from the research domes dotting the Highsand. It still remains the central hub of military action and military research, being the dock of the OB-M3 and seat of the Matron.
