A Goshwen gnome republic on the Middle Sea coast, known for scholarship, invention, and a complete lack of military ambition. Bestacia is one of the happiest places on Alaria—pleasant climate, good food, rewarding intellectual culture. The gnomes here would rather tinker than fight.
Bestacia is a founding member of the Aldriktch Trade Alliance, which it helped assemble not with ships but with law. It is governed by a republic of chartered houses that elects a First Speaker, currently Oxwen Amberyskos, to a six-year term and rarely renews it. The arrangement suits a people who distrust generals more than they fear pirates. It leaves the country well-administered and badly defended, which is the central fact of Bestacia's present. The Ubrik refugee crisis, the silvertongue incursions, and the worsening standoff with Watar over the Telphineas Strait are all problems Bestacia must solve without an army.
The Southern Mountains
The mountain range separating Bestacia from the Telphineas Strait. These peaks are home to a remarkable variety of creatures—some native, some introduced by curious Goshwen naturalists over the centuries. The gnomes have a fondness for exotic fauna, and the mountains have become an informal preserve.
Crossing the mountains is difficult. Bestacia's lack of control over the strait stems partly from this geographic barrier.
The Forests
Temperate woodlands cover much of Bestacia's interior. They'd be lovely if not for the ghouls.
The forests are infested with soulless undead. They are the aftermath of the Ghoul Forge: an estate raised here in the Lost Ages by the Deoric mage Vakhreon, who staffed it with reanimated servants and then died at the Blight of Arcanus, leaving them to breed unsupervised for twelve thousand years. That history belongs to the deep woods now. The ghouls hunt travelers, lurk where the canopy closes over the old roads, and raid isolated settlements when hunger drives them, which it always eventually does.
The gnomes cannot clear them. The republic has no force equal to the task, and a ghoul dies only to elemental magic or to more violence than a scholar-state can field. So Bestacia does what it can afford. It pays a bounty, it warns travelers off the interior, and it leaves the deep forest to the thing that has held it since before there was a Bestacia to object.