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My understanding is that the Belkzen Hold is a harsh and inhospitable landscape with little in the way of resources. but... why? given it's location, And tall peaks, with a river running down it's spine, and tall mountains, I would expect it to be fairly green. Is there an in universe reason for the harsh environment
... because I can think of one.
There are a lot of residual necrotic energies that infuse the hold. That probably doesn’t do it much favor as far as having fertile soil.
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This is the kind of thing I was leaning toward in a more Eisengard manner. all those centuries ago when the Whispering Tyrant brought the Orcs into servitude for 6 centuries, among the things he had them do was deforest their land to feed the war machine (weapons, structures, fuel for fire, etc) and they are still living with the resultant desertification to this day.
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That doesn't make a ton of sense to me. I get seasonal uptick in the river's volume, that make sense and was used to help build several river valley civilizations, like the Nile.
tons of civilization were built on regular predictable annual flooding. that should help keep soil renewed and fertile.
Water alone just washes away the top soil.
Unless the water leaves fertile mud, it will actively harm fertility. And that mud has to come from the right conditions upstream.Also, few buildings and few trees can exist in the flood plain.
On top of all that, the Nile is a supremely bad example to cite as flooding = agricultural productivity since it was almost freakishly predictable and calm. The Yellow River is key to China’s development of agriculture, but it’s floods also earned it the moniker “China’s Sorrow” because of how utterly destructive and vicious it could be. Flooding rivers are not a safe things to live by, people did it out of necessity. The Nile is the exception rather than the rule, as is the River Sphinx on Golarion by extension.
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Belkzen is categorised by nutrient-poor soil that holds water very poorly, as well as seasonal flooding rains. That's not a combination that gets you fertile floods, that's a combination that gets you twisting ravines that are prone to landslips carved anew into the earth every goddamn year. Maybe Belkzen could one day be an agricultural hub, but that's going to take a hell of a lot of earthenworks and soil improvements (like, actual, literal, <i>centuries</i>) of work), and frankly nobody's even been in a position to <i>consider</i> such projects until like five years ago, and they probably won't have the administrative and logistics ability to even start such a project for another fifteen years or so (and that's assuming the local Lich doesn't get them!)
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Everyone asks "Why Is Belkzen?", but nobody asks "How Is Belkzen?"
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In a basin between two mountain ranges, where the wind blows from one range to the other, the clouds seldom rain. Nevada in the United States between the Sierra Nevada range to the west and the Rocky Mountains to the east is an example of this. Belkzen has this geography, too, resting between the Mindspin Mountains to the west and the Tusk Mountains to the east.
In addition, Belkzen is fairly far north. Its northern edge is the frigid Algid Wastes. Such a location often means a short growing season, though in real-world geography warm trade winds or warm ocean currents can extend the growing season. The mountains around Belkzen prevent such warming.
The river down the middle of Belkzen is called the Flood Road because it is dry 10 months of the 12-month year. And its banks are unstable for the wet two months, which makes irrigation of adjacent land via water channels difficult.
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The river down the middle of Belkzen is called the Flood Road because it is dry 10 months of the 12-month year.
This. Think an arroyo or wadi rather than a river.
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Okay, I can understand a lot of what y'all are saying (impressive environmental science knowledge here that I am very appreciative of)
So my next question is, given that people (mostly orcs but a few other peoples too) live in this area, is it likely to have always been like this? Is this condition natural, or is it possible that it could be a result of environmental destruction like I suggested above?
And, would that idea contradict any major lore? (that seems to always been the place my head cannons get tripped up)
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I dont know exactly how long the dwarf Sky Citadel at Urgir was inhabited, but its plausible if it was almost any length of time that they attempted agriculture in around that area for a while. This doesn't necessarily mean they succeeded (dwarves obviously seem to have subterranean food sources) and even if they succeeded it doesn't mean the climate was any different, but 8000 years ago things might not have been entirely the same.
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I dont know exactly how long the dwarf Sky Citadel at Urgir was inhabited, but its plausible if it was almost any length of time that they attempted agriculture in around that area for a while. This doesn't necessarily mean they succeeded (dwarves obviously seem to have subterranean food sources) and even if they succeeded it doesn't mean the climate was any different, but 8000 years ago things might not have been entirely the same.
Very good point.
There are several known cases of RL civilizations becoming extremely good at harnessing the gifts of their natural environment through great artificial structures, only to disappear utterly when climate change removed said natural gifts.
I can totally see the Dwarves of Koldukar creating magnificent works of civil engineering harnessing and amplifying the bounty of nature, only to be devastated when nature suddenly changes.
Meanwhile, the Orcs survived and even thrived in more hostile conditions and were finally able to overwhelm the weakened Sky Citadel.
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My suggestion is that the Orcs were forced to change the environment during their servitude to Tar-Baphon for 600 years. Severe deforestation could easily lead to desertification, soil that gets easily washed or blown away by the regular flooding. Wind conditions would become more harsh without the trees cover leading to that also exacerbating the instability of the River Road, carrying moisture away. and it could be something that future books in the series show them combating, trying to re-green Belkzen, like someone said, a project that could take centuries.
Various Kineticists could shorten that time to years, if not months. If available that is. While they're Common mechanically, thematically it's probably best for a campaign world if they were unavailable for such terrain-altering shenanigans (et al). Of course casters can do similar things, but at higher levels & for fewer instances; occasions often worthy of a minstrel's song.
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Various Kineticists could shorten that time to years, if not months. If available that is. While they're Common mechanically, thematically it's probably best for a campaign world if they were unavailable for such terrain-altering shenanigans (et al). Of course casters can do similar things, but at higher levels & for fewer instances; occasions often worthy of a minstrel's song.
IIRC Kineticists being Common in Golarion is a very recent thing caused by the return of the Wood and Metal planes.
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I consider that in the overall arc of geology and geopolitics the number of individuals on Golarion who have PC-level agency is very small.
Like a sufficient number of druids and kineticists working in tandem can solve all manner of climate/terrain related issues, but you're not likely to find critical mass of that without PCs getting involved.
Like canonically Rahadoum has been searching for non-divine solutions to their ongoing desertification problem, and that's a nation that has significantly more resources to bring to bear on a problem than Belkzen does.
The difference with Kineticists is fresh rookies can alter landscapes. They could make significant changes to the narrative/geography/setting from level 1, if made available as unnamed NPC labor; which I'm asserting they shouldn't be despite being Common. And if a team of PC Kineticists set their minds to it, yeah, that'd become an issue (and likely reroute a campaign, for better or worse).
And in 1E they had been popular (with quite a clamoring for their return). While they were "offscreen" in PF2 until Rage of Elements, I don't think that Paizo retconned them away in the interim. But with PF2 NPCs seldom using PC builds, such NPC "Kineticists for hire" could be considered morphed to lack such abilities.
I consider Rahadoum's desertification as coming from hostile forces (likely fiendish and/or divine), hence their prolonged struggle. Or maybe the Eye pulls away its precipitation?
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My suggestion is that the Orcs were forced to change the environment during their servitude to Tar-Baphon for 600 years. Severe deforestation could easily lead to desertification, soil that gets easily washed or blown away by the regular flooding. Wind conditions would become more harsh without the trees cover leading to that also exacerbating the instability of the River Road, carrying moisture away. and it could be something that future books in the series show them combating, trying to re-green Belkzen, like someone said, a project that could take centuries.
The mountains would still be in their current location, so it's not like the region really every got, like, rain, but considering it still gets the springmelt off the Tusk Mountains every year, there was probably more growth once. Then Tar-Baphon made the orcs cut the forest and scorch the grasslands (remember, prairie's got real deep roots that holds the soil in), so the floods went from a slow seep to a rushing torrent, and that's really bad. (Best way to reduce flood danger is to slow that water down, so removing everything that could do so was a real bone-headed idea.)
Belkzen-that-was probably looked a little like parts of the Australian Murray-Darling Basin, but minus the eucalyptus? Like, slowing that water down from a flash flood to a proper river with seasonal temperate wetlands around the base of the foothills (and proper forests up on those foothills to hold the dang things in place), and then a bunch of drought-and-flood-tolerant plants along a much more meandering course than the current Flood Road, with the whole ecosystem shaped by that high-water mark of the peak of the floods (late spring or early summer probably, but I don't think the people there counted their seasons like Europe). In current Belkzen, the waters don't slow till nearly all the way to the Fangwood!
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To add my 2 cents on this discussion, before Earthfall, Bellkzen was the Thassilonian region of Gastash, domain of the Runelord of Gluttony and breadbasket of the empire. The whole reason why Tar-Baphon came here was to pillage Runelord Zuthas' necromantic secrets
Earthfall in itself may have changed things a lot given its impact on the Saga Lands' coastline, but we also have to take into account that the Runelords were not adverse to use their magic for geoengineering (for example to create an artificial climate, including air pressure, to make Xin-Shalast viable as a metropolis despite its altitude)-
I could easily see Zutha using some kind of life force transference necromantic process to enhance land fertility. When it failed during Earthfall, it left the land barren and the current status is the land actually recovering slowly. Alternatively, containment failures on Thassilonian artefacts may have poisoned a naturally fertile land that is taking millennia to recover. In both cases, Tar-Baphon would just have made things worse and slowed down recovery even more
The Gastash theory is a damn good one. Just like land becomes barren in the wake of fertilization and irrigation, it must be even worse without the aforementioned land treatments but also necromantic power.