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  * **Region:** South Polar Region
  * **Primary Peoples:** Historically Tuskgar, Artic Animal Life, Large Art Turtles
  * **Associated Faiths:** [[majorgods:lazareth|Lazareth]], hostile legacy with [[minorgods:beck|Beck]]
  * **Known For:** Frozen wastes, ancient Tuskgar arcane camps, Lazareth worship, the Flight of the Tuskgar
  * **Current Status:** Largely abandoned by its old Tuskgar population

**Southscar** is the frozen southern mirror of the campaign world, a vast antarctic land of black ice, broken glaciers, buried ruins, and storm-carved coasts. To most northern peoples it is more rumor than map: a place of permanent cold, pale auroras, and old magic preserved beneath ice that never fully melts.

Historically, Southscar was the homeland of the **Tuskgar**, a people remembered not only as hunters and survivors of the southern ice, but as disciplined academic arcanists. Their oldest camps were part settlement, part observatory, part arcane college. The Tuskgar studied cold, death, preservation, sea-ice, and the boundary between endurance and undeath, shaping much of their learning through devotion to [[majorgods:lazareth|Lazareth]].
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===== Description =====

Southscar is a continent of extremes. Its coastline is surrounded by grinding pack ice, hidden reefs, and storm-choked waters. Inland, travelers find white deserts, glacier walls, dead volcanic ridges, and blue-black crevasses that seem to descend into older ages of the world.

The ruins of the Tuskgar homeland are scattered across the ice in half-buried rings: stone observatories, collapsed lecture halls, frozen ritual yards, and ivory-marked archive vaults. Many of these places remain sealed beneath frost wards, either to preserve knowledge or to keep old mistakes from waking.

Even after the Tuskgar flight, Southscar is not empty. Winter spirits, sea-beasts, icebound undead, abandoned constructs, and old arcane defenses still haunt the region. Some claim the land itself remembers the wrath that fell upon it.

===== History =====

==== The Tuskgar Homeland ====

Before their exile, the Tuskgar of Southscar were famed as scholars of cold magic and arcanists of the southern ice. Unlike more tribal or nomadic peoples of similar lands, the Southscar Tuskgar maintained formal academies, preserved lecture traditions, and passed down magical disciplines through master-apprentice chains.

Their faith in [[majorgods:lazareth|Lazareth]] shaped both their culture and their studies. They viewed cold not merely as hardship, but as preservation, discipline, and divine truth. Ice could guard memory. Death could be delayed. Ruin could be endured.

==== The Ascension of Beck ====

After the Ascension of [[minorgods:beck|Beck]], the Tuskgar became the target of divine revenge. Beck bore a personal grudge against the Tuskgar and used his new divine power to strike at their southern homeland. What had once been a harsh but stable arctic civilization became the site of storm, flood, and disaster.

In Tuskgar memory, this event is not remembered as a war. It is remembered as a punishment.
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==== The Flight of the Tuskgar ====

The surviving Tuskgar fled Southscar and crossed the world toward **[[worldmap:thewinterlands|The Winterlands]]** believing that Lazareth’s influence would be stronger there and that Beck’s wrath might be held at bay. This migration became known as the **Flight of the Tuskgar**.

Their descendants eventually established new communities in the Winterlands, including **[[thewinterlands:camptuskgar|Kaskala]]**, where their culture adapted to northern seas, trade, fishing, and continued rites of protection against Beck’s storms.

===== Points of Interest =====

^ The Drowned Lecture Camps | A chain of former Tuskgar academies along the old southern coast. Many were partially swallowed by divine floodwaters and later sealed in ice. Their halls may still contain spell tablets, frost-preserved bodies, and lecture chambers where magical diagrams glow faintly beneath |
^ The Ivory Meridian | An ancient Tuskgar observatory line marked by whale-bone towers, ice mirrors, and star-facing circles. The Meridian was once used to track polar stars, planar tides, and omens of Lazareth. Some of its towers still rotate without visible mechanism |
^ Beck’s Scar | A shattered coastal region where sea and glacier meet in unnatural violence. Storms gather here even under clear skies, and the ice bears salt veins like frozen wounds. Tuskgar legends claim this was where Beck’s revenge first struck Southscar |
^ The Silent Archive | A rumored subterranean vault beneath the inland ice. It is said to contain the last collected works of the Southscar Tuskgar arcanists, including forbidden treatises on preservation, divine shelter, and surviving a god’s wrath |
^ The Empty Hearths | Ruined circular longhouses abandoned during the Flight. Offerings to Lazareth remain frozen beside cold fire pits, untouched for generations. Some travelers report hearing chanting beneath the wind |

===== Culture and Legacy =====

The old Southscar Tuskgar valued scholarship, endurance, and controlled emotion. Their arcanists were expected to master both theory and survival, copying formulae by lamplight one day and crossing lethal ice fields the next.

Modern Tuskgar communities in the Winterlands retain fragments of this legacy. Their bathhouses, seawalls, storm rites, ice-sculpting artisans, and prayers for Lazareth’s protection all echo older Southscar customs. However, much of the academic tradition was broken during the flight, surviving only in family chants, ritual diagrams, and half-remembered titles.