Stipen is an Ezuri gerontocracy in the old forest along the Chedwin Strait, east of Thespia and north of Zintacas. The whole country is canopy. Its gnomes live in tree-settlements strung between the crowns, and they can last close to five hundred years, so long as they never leave the wood.
The Ezuri did not begin here. Their flight into the trees happened long ago and far from this coast, under a pressure no Stipen gnome alive has felt, and the race has since settled across much of Alaria. Stipen is one of the realms they built afterward, and the longest-lived of them. Power in it belongs to age. The eldest hold the councils, and since the five centuries are forfeit the moment a gnome steps out of the forest for good, no one who wants to rule ever travels far. The ambitious stay home. The elders who govern are, by definition, the ones who never went anywhere.
The young leave and come back grey. We who stayed do not come back at all, because we never went. — a saying of the Stipen canopy-councils