The rocky hills and scrublands of northern Mysidia are home to a population as intransigent as it is belligerent. Conquered by the Kingdom of Jardine in 827, the people of the Phiander Lowlands retained a proudly (or stubbornly, depending on who you ask) independent culture, making them a perennial problem-child for Jardinian tax-collectors, military recruiters, and law enforcement. While, periodically, various factions within Jardine would declare a policy with an eye towards ‘‘civilizing the northern territories,’’ the simple fact that in addition to being extremely difficult to rule, the lowlands also lacked any particular valuable exports, meant that eventually the costs required by such attempts became unpopular and the policies themselves fell out of favor.

Eventually, in 1392, Prime Minister Ornitier signed the Northern Emancipation Act, officially recognizing the sovereignty of the Phiander Lowlands. Since then, the newly-formed nation of Phiander has gone through no fewer than five separate systems of government and three revolutions, most of them unnoticed by the average farmer inhabitant.

The only thing that draws international attention to the Phiander Lowlands is the North Shore Academy of Statecraft and History, a prestigious institution of higher learning frequented by the rich and politically connected of Ihlathi since its founding in 1194. As part of the Northern Emancipation act, however, Jardine deeded the lands around the Academy to the institution ‘‘in perpetuity,’’ and since then the Academy has maintained itself as a technically sovereign nation that happens to be entirely surrounded by the nation of Phiander, enforced by a healthy standing mercenary army and the threat of intervention by the many nations well-disposed to it. Native Phiandrans regard the Academy with a mix of scorn and distrust, matched evenly by the disdain of the Academy’s live-in staff for their neighbors.