Mattergrove is a large human nation west of Deepmarsh, notable for its poverty, difficult geography, and comparatively limited development. Its importance lies in the way it connects several kinds of movement: travelers approach Port Royal through roads and cable cars, airships carry goods through Greenshade, explorers use maps to cross its surrounding wilderness, and even Mattergrove’s wine becomes part of the political and infrastructural history of the region. The kingdom therefore functions not merely as a place on the map but as a pressure point where trade, exploration, military suspicion, and uneven access to technology meet.

Geography and Political Position

Mattergrove is built around the Seven Peaks, a mountain range that defines the kingdom’s physical setting. Its lands are poorly suited to cultivating useful crops, while the mountains contain little worth mining. These environmental disadvantages help explain why Mattergrove is described as impoverished and why it has fallen behind both the Nesting Kingdom and Deepmarsh in technological advancement. The kingdom’s position west of Deepmarsh places it within a larger network of competing states and travel routes rather than in isolation.

The contrast between Mattergrove and its neighbors is repeatedly expressed through transportation. Port Royal stands at the base of the Harpy Mountains but belongs to Deepmarsh territory rather than the Nesting Kingdom, while Farseeing, the harpy capital, is known for producing the best airships. Mattergrove’s own connection to the wider region is consequently framed through what it lacks as much as through what it possesses: it is a human country with enough size to matter, but with fewer agricultural, mineral, and technological advantages than the surrounding powers.

Mattergrove also exists within a politically tense frontier. The United Republic of the Trenten Flats is described as the continent’s largest nation and as fiercely expansionist. Its attempted invasion of Deepmarsh, an assault conducted with an army three times the size of the force Deepmarsh could assemble, shows the scale of the regional power struggle. The invasion failed not simply because of organized resistance but because an inexperienced general, inadequate scouting, inexperienced troops, swamp water, insects, and the marsh environment steadily destroyed the invading army. Mattergrove’s location places it near this history of territorial expansion and defensive suspicion.

Roads, Cities, and Infrastructure

The kingdom’s wider world is reached through systems that make distance negotiable but never entirely easy. Port Royal offers three routes upward: a traveler may climb the switchback path, pay three copper for a shared ox-drawn carriage, or spend a silver to take a cable car through towers to the city proper. The difference between these choices gives movement an economic scale, distinguishing ordinary labor from a more expensive and efficient ascent. The cable car also provides a striking approach to the city, whose three large plateaus end in sheer cliffs and whose port hangs beside a chasm crossed by bridges and connected to airships below.

Mattergrove’s infrastructure is practical, crowded, and visibly improvised in its relation to older urban forms. Port Royal’s roads are narrow and steep, with houses pressed tightly together because the city was not planned around cars. Lines cross above the streets, however, and cable cars move through the city, suggesting an urban system adapted to vertical terrain and aerial transport rather than to broad roads. Pipes carrying water and hot steam run through the streets, while clanking machinery and shrill whistles make conversation difficult. The setting presents technology not as an abstract sign of progress but as a physical presence that shapes movement, noise, housing, and daily access.

Even a minor road preserves a history of technical failure and social correction. Tripping Lane was supposedly made by an earth mage who had drunk too much Mattergrove wine, leaving the road bumpy and the side paths uneven enough that a noble broke his nose. The road was later repaired. This anecdote gives Mattergrove’s built environment a comic but revealing quality: infrastructure is powerful, yet its effects depend on the competence, condition, and status of those who create and use it.

Trade and Airship Connections

Mattergrove’s most important economic gateway is Greenshade. The city is a trade center for overland travelers entering or leaving the Ostri Desert and one of the few proper cities near Deepmarsh where goods can be loaded onto airships and sent over the Darkwoods. Independent cities trade with Mattergrove through Greenshade, as does the Nesting Kingdom, and nearly all goods entering Mattergrove pass through this one city. Its strategic importance is so great that its status as a commercial hub invites the observation that it could almost be the capital.

This trade system reveals Mattergrove as dependent on corridors that extend beyond its own borders. Goods move through desert routes, forests, neighboring kingdoms, and airship networks before reaching the human kingdom. Greenshade is positioned at the intersection of those routes because it overlooks cliffs near the desert, while the surrounding geography turns loading and transport into matters of strategic importance. Mattergrove’s poverty therefore coexists with substantial regional connectivity: the kingdom may lack fertile land and valuable mines, but its commercial survival depends on being plugged into the movement of other places.

The kingdom is also associated with the early history of airship construction. The Shady Lady is said to have been one of the first airships built in Mattergrove, constructed roughly five or ten years after the Nesting Kingdom began producing its own. That distinction gives the kingdom a place in the development of aerial travel even though Farseeing is regarded as the leading producer of airships. Mattergrove’s technological position is consequently uneven rather than simply backward: it is behind its neighbors in general advancement, yet it has contributed to a form of transport that reorganizes trade across the region.

Exploration and Frontier Danger

Mattergrove’s frontier is experienced through exploration. When Severin identifies a traveler as a poorly educated human from Mattergrove, he assumes that the traveler is heading to Port Royal to find passage home. The assumption is rejected: the actual goal is to join the Exploration Guild and make friends. This exchange places Mattergrove at the starting edge of an exploratory journey and contrasts the outsider’s optimistic view of travel with the more practical assumptions made by experienced delvers.

The surrounding wilderness is not empty simply because it is sparsely settled. From a plateau near the remains of old buildings, the Darkwoods stretch like a sea of trees, with marshes to the east, mountains to the north, and a possible great lake in the south. The surviving structures include wooden shacks resembling those in Threewells and a large corrugated-tin building marked by rust and grime. Mattergrove’s landscape thus contains both expansive natural spaces and remnants of human occupation, creating a frontier made of routes, ruins, settlements, and uncertain claims.

Dungeons intensify this uncertainty. Reports from Threewells record large shifts in mana and concern that someone may have damaged the dungeon core; a guard patrol even sees a green-clad figure in the forest and wonders whether Imperials have reached so far out. Later, an alleged evil hole is identified as the possible entrance to a young dungeon, and another mana surge raises the possibility that the dungeon was destroyed after the travelers left. Mattergrove’s frontier is therefore governed by more than ordinary geography. Mana changes can signal sabotage, dungeon damage, military activity, or the destruction of a dangerous site, making exploration inseparable from security and political suspicion.

Fort Frogger provides another image of the region’s danger. Its open entrance includes a broken wooden door torn from its metal hinges, while the courtyard is occupied by undead, chiefly Grenoil skeletons, alongside other humanoid-horse forms and armored Skeleton Knights. The fortress is approached through concealment and patrol avoidance rather than ordinary travel. In this setting, the spaces associated with Mattergrove are not only routes to commerce but also thresholds into military ruins, undead strongholds, and unstable magical environments.

Technology, Access, and Narrative Significance

Mattergrove’s most distinctive tension is the coexistence of technological ingenuity with material limitation. Cable cars, steam pipes, airships, cannons, and banking rings make the world highly connected, yet each system has costs, constraints, or points of failure. A banking ring can send a mana burst requesting paper and can teleport stored items from a bank in a proper city, but it charges a transaction fee and applies an exorbitant mark-up to sold goods. Airships can cross the landscape quickly, but their engines can explode, throw a propeller away, and leave a hole in the cabin; when the Shady Lady’s engine fails, it continues by drifting with the wind and using the rudder to seek favorable thermals.

Military infrastructure likewise depends on practical knowledge rather than sheer technological superiority. Raynold explains that aerial defenses are usually designed to attack threats coming from above, so he calculates the firing arcs of the primitive cervid cannons and guides an air skimmer through broad roads and over walls where the guns cannot depress low enough to fire. The maneuver succeeds, though the skimmer loses part of its rudder and collides with a chimney. Mattergrove’s world is consequently shaped by the gap between what machines are intended to do and what their physical limitations permit.

The kingdom’s association with dungeons extends this pattern into fantasy infrastructure. The dungeon located next to Port Hazel, the capital of the Kingdom of Mattergrove, has five floors at the recorded time. Its entrance room resembles a long castle chamber under a glass ceiling that remains near dusk and is filled with hundreds of dust-covered boxes. The boxes are empty, but excessive tampering or destruction causes some to be replaced with traps; on the first floor, a playroom packed with toys becomes dangerous when the toys rise and attack in waves. Mattergrove therefore contains not just cities and transport systems but engineered magical spaces whose rules determine how safely people may move through them.

As a narrative location, Mattergrove is defined through other people’s routes and judgments. Severin recognizes it by a traveler’s education and destination; Milread places Farseeing and Port Royal within a map of harpy, Deepmarsh, and Nesting territories; Greenshade turns the kingdom into a destination for goods; and the Exploration Guild turns its frontier into a field of opportunity. The result is a place that feels politically secondary but narratively indispensable. Mattergrove’s hardship drives its dependence on trade, its geography makes infrastructure decisive, and its borders expose the traveler to the overlapping dangers of war, dungeons, undead, and magical change.