The world of Varden
Varden is a broken continent that used to be governed and is now merely occupied. What holds it together is not a crown - it is the archipelago of ruins, quarries, forges and vaults that everyone with ambition eventually walks into.
A short history
Nobody agrees on when Varden stopped being a country. The convenient date is the year the last central authority stopped collecting taxes, but by then the roads had been unsafe for a generation and the provinces had been governing themselves for two. What actually happened is duller and worse: the machinery that held the continent together was never destroyed. It was simply left running with nobody at the controls, and it has been running ever since.
That is the thing most newcomers get wrong. They arrive expecting rubble and find infrastructure - quarries still cutting stone on shift patterns, a forge that has not been allowed to go out, a fortress whose garrison still files reports. All of it is staffed. None of it is answerable to anyone. The horror of Varden is not that civilisation collapsed; it is that large parts of it did not, and nobody remembers what they were for.
Into that comes a steady traffic of people with weapons and debts. The guilds formed to organise them, then to compete with each other, and now largely to hold territory. Adventuring is not heroism here and nobody pretends otherwise - it is the one profession where the barrier to entry is a sword and the pay scales with how far in you are willing to go.
Three threads
The Black Mist
Everyone treats it as weather, because treating it as weather is bearable. It is not weather. It is woven, on a loom, out of the last breath of everyone who has died inside it, and the Fortress of the Black Mist that was built to contain it was always a filter rather than a source. The quarry at the island's edge cuts the saltstone the whole apparatus is bedded in, on debt contracts nobody has ever finished paying - dying does not clear the balance, it moves it to your next of kin. Follow the mist inward and it gets less supernatural and more industrial the entire way.
The Molten Deep
A forge lit for a reason no living person remembers and never permitted to go out since. When it first caught, the ash came down for eleven days and buried a cathedral whole, with the congregation still inside mid-service. They are still in there. The ash is warm, has always been warm, and they have decided that this is grace. Their liturgy has drifted over the decades into something that is mostly about heat.
The Void Throne
The Void King was not ruling the void. He was a lid on it. What he was holding shut is an hour that never got written - not erased, just never filled in - and blank things do not stay blank. It has been filling itself with drafts: approximations of people, rehearsals of events, guards who were nearly assigned a post. Killing him took the lid off, and the hour is now writing, using whatever walks in as source material.
The archipelago
Dungeons are grouped into islands, each covering a stretch of levels and a gear bracket. You are meant to be farming one while probing the next: a dungeon's mid tiers are stronger than the opening tiers of the dungeon above it, so there are always three or four worth poking at.