Introduction

The Highlands are the surviving mountain belts of pre-collapse Earth—elevated terrain that endured where sea, city, and desert failed. Ranging from 1,800 to over 4,000 meters in elevation, they remain structurally intact but climatically destabilized.

The highlands themselves are steep and irregular, cut by landslide scars, collapsed scree basins, and fractured basalt. Many ridgelines are impassable due to vertical shear or atmospheric instability. Storms form rapidly at altitude and discharge with little warning, making overland movement treacherous. Despite these conditions, the Highlands host some of the most biologically diverse and least trafficked terrain in Errata.

Soil is mineral-rich but patchy. Subterranean heat pockets drive geothermal upwelling, sustaining cave ecosystems and deep-rooted growth zones that would not survive elsewhere. While civilization favors the Plateaus, the Highlands persist without intervention—too wild to govern, too necessary to ignore.

Weather

Glacier retreat has stripped many summits bare, leaving behind scoured rock, exposed thermal seams, and debris fields prone to flash erosion. The air is thin, dry—the weather can best be described as unreliable, and at worst can simply be stated as unstable.

  • Temperatures range from -40°C at the summits to 50°C on the rock faces. 
  • At night temperatures routinely drop below 0°C at all but the lowest elevations and transition zones.
  • Rainfall is rare at the lower slopes, but once elevation becomes more pronounced this can change quickly.
  • Flash floods are common. A dry gulley at lower elevations can quickly turn into a wall of water.
  • Electric storms are common in the cold, dry air.
  • High winds are common as superheated air from the plateau rises against the mountain slopes and quickly cools.

This may make the zone sound appealing to habitation, however the ground has not achieved stability. Crustal rebound continues, and earthquakes are common throughout the region. No areas are immune. Few places are stable enough to maintain large civic structures.

Rocky Badlands

Jagged sprawls of eroded stone and fractured clay where nothing grows and few things travel, wind carves the rock of the Badlands into spires, shelves, and hollowed gullies, each formation a hazard for ankles, wheels, or Wahka treads. The terrain itself is dry, sharp, and old—bones and rust both disappear quickly here.

Coming Soon

Highland Brush

Clinging to the upper slopes of the mountains, wind-stunted, rain-fed brush exists in wide, exposed valleys. Totara and cabbage trees grow in isolation, scattered between tussock and stone. Water runs off quickly here, carving channels that bleed into the forests below. Hunters sometimes pass through, but few linger—there’s nowhere to hide.

Coming Soon

Canyons

Most days it’s dry, with wind-scoured stone and powder-choked gullies. But when the clouds crack and the runoff comes, a canyon can becomes a channel of violence. Water from far away mountains can surge through with no warning, tearing loose silt, bone, and scrap as it crashes down ancient erosion channels. Then just as quickly as it came, the water goes.

Coming Soon

Terrain Features

While the Highlands are largely uninhabited aside from small Highland peoples’ settlements, they serve as environmental regulators for the surrounding regions. Many aquifers in the Plateau and Lowlands trace their origin to ancient snowpack and meltwater flows seeded in these high zones. Though glacial mass has nearly vanished, flash floods still drive groundwater movement through rock fault networks, feeding pressure-fed springs and basin-edge oases below.

Geologically, the Highlands remain in flux. As the planet continues to adjust to oceanic loss and tectonic imbalance, the mountain belts experience ongoing flexure—slow shifts that manifest as rockfall, sudden fissures, or earthquake.

Older infrastructure, if it ever reached this altitude, has mostly been reduced to fragments: collapsed road switchbacks, rusted anchor points, survey pylons embedded in stone. Vegetation reclaims only what is sheltered.

Tree canopies tend to follow the terrain, not reshape it, leading to crooked growth patterns and valley ecosystems that appear layered, almost terraced by necessity. Few travel here. Fewer live. But for those who do, the Highlands offer something Errata rarely allows: unregulated space. Not lawless—but untouched.

Protected alpine valleys retain enough temperature differential to allow microclimates—dense forest pockets where inversion layers occur, fog collects, vegetation climbs exposed rock, and deep-rooted trees genetically modified for survival during early Bygone Age preservation attempts still anchor cliff-side soil. 

The plants attract grazers, and the grazers attract predators. The plants have evolved toxic means to defend themselves, and the animals are more aggressive than their modern Earth variants. This makes the Highland region particularly dangerous. Untouched does not mean easy. Many traders lose their lives trying to make a profit moving goods to and from Highland settlements.

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