The furnaces of Baddock billow with smoke ahead of you, downhill. It is not a pretty place to look at: although most buildings are masonry and concrete, you can see even from almost two miles away how they're held together by huge bands of steel and joined by metal bolts, all of which are rusted to varying extremes. The weathered frontier town looks slumly below where the forges and factories tower, with many small buildings held together by twine, bamboo and only sometimes proper carpentry.

It wasn't like this elsewhere in Styria, your home country and where Baddock lies within. Live stone masonry was your nation's pride and artistry. Baddock, however, is a frontier city made for practical purposes- it borders Morgbrell: the land of monsters, a lost continent where creatures created by magic during the Apocalypse of the Second Age turned against their makers and tore civilization asunder. It's a wonder the world manages to hold off Morgbrell's horrors at so many borders... It is a huge and hated land that no one wants to go to, but everyone must work against it somehow.

With a twist of your lip, you're thankful at least that the faint smell of smoke from Baddock lessens the rank odor of horse shit caking the dirt road ahead of you. Your wrists pump as you flick the reins of your horse, sending it charging forward to Baddock's gates.

You have been here before. But here again, now, you enter Baddock to begin a new adventure.