Cursed meadowy hills on the southern islands of the Free Isles, where the sun burns brighter than it should and the creatures have learned to use that light as a weapon. Sunshine Meadows is home to four significant points of interest, ancient tombs and strange structures that draw treasure-seekers, scholars, and fools from across Alaria.
Nature
The meadows occupy a chain of islands south of Kokotintin, connected by sandbars at low tide and isolated during high water. The terrain is rolling grassland broken by rocky outcrops, wildflower patches, and the occasional twisted tree. It looks pleasant from a distance, pastoral, even inviting. This is a trap.
The sun here is wrong. Light falls heavier, sharper, more intense than in surrounding areas. Shadows are crisp-edged and seem to resist movement. The animals have adapted: many species have developed bioluminescent organs, reflective scales, or eye structures that can focus and redirect sunlight. Encounter the wrong creature at the wrong angle, and you're blinded, temporarily or permanently.
Local guides wear smoked glass over their eyes and recommend visitors do the same. Expeditions time their travel for dawn and dusk, when the light is manageable. Midday in Sunshine Meadows is genuinely dangerous; the creatures are most active, the light is most intense, and travelers have been known to walk in circles for hours, unable to see through the glare.
Kokotintin's Interest
The Valdrossi of Kokotintin control access to the meadows, funding expeditions and taking a substantial cut of any recovered treasures. They maintain supply posts on the northern islands and employ guides who know the safer routes. The family's interest is purely financial. The dungeons below are lucrative, and controlling access means controlling the wealth that emerges.
Adventurer companies operating in Sunshine Meadows pay licensing fees, deposit bonds against expected returns, and submit to "inspection" of recovered goods before leaving the area. The Valdrossi take their percentage, provide healing services at marked-up rates, and maintain just enough infrastructure to keep the treasure flowing. They have no interest in exploring the dungeons themselves. That's what expendable adventurers are for.
Tomb of Braggus Solas
The greatest light mage to have ever lived, Braggus Solas chose to be interred in Sunshine Meadows, or perhaps was already here, and the meadows' strange properties are a consequence of his presence. The tomb is a massive underground complex of polished stone and crystalline chambers, lit by eternal flames that cast no shadows.
The tomb is a powerful point of affinity for light magic. Practitioners report their spells amplified, their connection to Kunus (the plane of light) strengthened, their understanding expanded. The tomb also defends itself aggressively. Traps of focused light, guardian constructs of crystallized radiance, and wards that turn intruders' own vision against them have claimed many explorers.
Recovered artifacts from Braggus Solas's tomb command extraordinary prices among mages, collectors, and institutions. The Valdrossi have standing bounties for specific items rumored to remain inside.
Dungeon of Flowers
A sprawling underground complex filled with flowers that never decay, frozen in perfect bloom despite the absence of light or water. The dungeon is beautiful and deeply wrong. Time itself seems to have stopped, or perhaps reversed, creating a space where rot cannot complete its work.
A rot-queen hag lives within, surrounded by things frozen at the moment of their decay: half-eaten meals, slowly-falling water, blood that never quite dries. The hag is ancient, possibly immortal, sustained by the dungeon's refusal to let anything fully die. She trades in knowledge, bargains, and curses, but her prices are always more than they seem.
Brilliant, corrupted light fills the dungeon. It illuminates without warming, and it is neither sunlight nor torchlight. Explorers report headaches, nausea, and a persistent sense of being preserved against their will.
Bturi's Tomb
The burial place of a lich king who mastered flesh-shaping magic before his transformation to undeath. Bturi was said to reshape his own body at will, growing extra limbs, altering his features, becoming whatever form suited his purposes. His tomb is filled with the results of his experiments: preserved bodies in various states of modification, failed attempts at perfect forms, and treasure accumulated across centuries of magical research.
The tomb is heavily trapped and still defended by constructs of shaped flesh, things that were once human, or several humans, or pieces of many humans assembled into something functional. The lich himself may or may not still exist somewhere in the lower levels; explorers who venture too deep don't return to report.
The treasure is substantial. Bturi accumulated wealth the way other mages accumulate knowledge, seeing gold and gems as materials for transformation rather than currency. His hoard includes items transformed partially into flesh, coins that beat like hearts, and jewelry that whispers in dead languages.
Spire of Ascension
The strangest of the four sites: a pale, unweathering pinnacle on an ornate base, built of nothing anyone can identify, whose apex opens a door out of the Alarian planar stack to whoever can pay its price in blood and treasure and speak their own true name. Those who reach its threshold and turn back are usually confined for the rest of their lives. The Valdrossi control its approaches and have lately tripled the watch, uneasy about an outsider's inquiries that are not the Valdrossi's and not any power the families can name. Red, the champion of the coliseums, is the one fighter known to have climbed to the door and come back carrying something. The full account, and what it cost her, lives in the Spire of Ascension's own entry.