The Broken Marches
Overview
The Broken Marches are a ruin-belt and salvage-margin region on Caeldon, established as the first main regional anchor for Goblins.
The region is not a single dead wasteland. It is a broad march of failed works, broken routes, abandoned holdings, half-repaired roads, old storehouses, minor ruins, contested bridges, market edges, and small settlements living in the remains of stronger past systems. Its importance lies in making the medieval world feel inherited rather than freshly built.
Regional Nature
The Broken Marches sit where older infrastructure no longer fully belongs to the powers that built it.
Roads continue without reliable patrols. Watchtowers become granaries, shrines, squats, toll posts, or lairs. Old border walls are quarried for stone while still shaping movement. Canal cuts, culverts, root cellars, service tunnels, and ruined storeworks create partial shelter and hidden traffic. Some settlements are recognized towns. Others are tolerated repair camps, salvage markets, or unofficial quarters that appear wherever there is enough leftover value to support life.
That makes the region a natural home for Goblins, Salvage Peoples, and later Wrought remnants. It can also overlap with Human, Dwarven, and Orc-facing borders without becoming owned by any one of them. The Marches work best as a connective ruin landscape: a place where several histories have broken and where medieval communities keep finding ways to use the pieces.
Historical Role
The Broken Marches matter because they give medieval Caeldon an inhabited aftermath.
They can inherit traces from older Human road systems, Dwarven-facing exchange routes, failed frontier settlements, abandoned military works, salvage traditions, and elder infrastructural collapse without requiring one single origin catastrophe. This keeps the region flexible. Later passes can tie parts of it to specific ruins, wars, abandoned works, Wrought creation sites, or Goblin settlement histories as needed.
For now, its main function is practical. It gives Goblins a place where ruin-adaptation is normal rather than exceptional, gives Salvage Peoples a recurring regional counterpart, and gives medieval stories a zone where old debts, useful scraps, unofficial roads, and mistrusted but necessary communities meet.