The lands of the inner sea
The Middle Sea Lands are the warm coastal belt south of the Kharvorn Mountains, the civilized core of Clueanda and just about the only stretch of the continent where the growing season can be relied on. A dozen trade states ring the inner sea. They share a coast and a sea-road, and very little past that. No crown has ever united them, and the occasional schemes for a single Middle Sea league have all run aground on the same rock: no state on the rim will trade its own tariffs for a common one.
Counterclockwise from the eastern end, where the Kharvorn meet the water, the better-known states run like this. Adron sits easternmost, a Naga banking kingdom that once rode war-dragons and now mines red gold and lends at interest. Camaran is a human republic that has written magic out of its law and sells the coast its tools and clockwork. Ta Minn is an Oznak horse theocracy of the inland steppe, ruled by its chief horse-shaman. Kazül is the desert glass-kingdom at the western mouth, the last harbor a hull clears before the Tarkhon Strait. Between and around them lie Ubrik, Bestacia, Erasnus, Watar, Echea, Thespia, Stipen, and Zintacas, each with its own port and its own seat at no shared table.
Two facts govern all of them. The first is the sun. The warm band exists only because the congregations of the Solar Accord hold Bryn's trail across this latitude, and the cities frozen under the Nysanna ice to the north are the standing reminder of what becomes of a country the trail abandons. The second is the toll. The sea has one mouth to the western ocean, past Kazül and through the Tarkhon Strait, and the Tarkhon Empire taxes every hull that uses it. The states of the coast resent the toll and pay it regardless, because a cargo that cannot reach the open ocean is worth a fraction of one that can. How the coast holds together under both pressures at once is the matter of the sea's own entry.
Geography
The Middle Sea Lands gather the temperate coastal nations ringing the inner Middle Sea, south of the Kharvorn Mountains and east of the Westwilds. The region spans roughly [180–340, 130–225], from the western approaches near Anarak and Thespia to the eastern shores of Adron and the Breidlheiss Basin, enclosing the "Middle Sea trade cities" named in the Clueanda gazetteer.