Verit - Wildbound and Statewards

On the branch of Verit that stretches towards the Gate to Liberty - “Wildbound” of Crossing – lies first the Fringe, a band of villages and hamlets in loose affiliation, then the Wildlands.
The Fringe is composed of villages who agree to the representation of a single Voice, a public office voted on whenever the current Voice steps down or is called into question. In practise, this representation exists only to communicate the one message the whole of the Fringe can agree on; “Bugger than swank bastards in the city.” Individually, each community does just about what it wants and offers as much respect to the other Fringe villages as it feels like parting with. Characteristic of its Wildbound philosophy, the racial makeup of these villages is so varied as to seem random.
Though the Fringe is united in its opposition of Crossing and any other form of government that stretches further than a few streets, each village and hamlet has a bullheaded pride and patriotism, compounded by a tight and complex web of rivalries, grudges, and grievances. These annoyances tend to manifest most in the game of Twohalves, thought of by Fringe-dwellers as wholesome fun and by most other people as organised barbarism. The aim of the game is for either team to relocate a rock to the opposing team's goal as many times as possible. At the halfway point, determined usually by reaching a certain threshold of player casualties, the teams change sides, the reason for this being twofold: It settles any accusations of the land favouring one team over the other, and it honours the memory of village-leader Parton Halt, who proposed the rule and then used it to turn around and raid the opposing team's now undefended village once halves had been changed.
Beyond the Fringe lies the Wildlands, deep forests that grow denser and denser, eventually opening out to the Untamed Plains towards the Gate, where the more sparse forestry allows the development of some truly terrifying wildlife. The forests themselves are said to be home to all manner of werecreatures and fae entities. In terms of sapient population, the Wildlands are limited to the nomadic tribes of human, halfling, and orc, and the savage elven berserker hordes.

On the branch of Verit that reaches towards the Gate to Hierarchy - “Statewards” of Crossing – stand first the twin port cities of Halsam and Pardon. Beyond them are the Stretching Plains – so named because they seem to get longer as you cross them. In the centre of the plains lies the city of Claim, and beyond them rise the Abiding Mountains.
Halsam and Pardon – the former on the Abwards coast and the latter on the Ambound coast – facilitate the majority of the trading between the Abwards and Ambound limbs of Verit that does not go through Crossing, via the great road the crosses the width of the limb between them. Though the cities act in concert and are officially twinned and allied, Halsam's position as the older and more established city create an inequality that leads to a quiet but strong rivalry. Residents of Halsam pride themselves on being of greater pedigree and generally wiser than the well-meaning upstarts in Pardon, and the people of Pardon see themselves as more revolutionary and capable of moving with the times than the people of Halsam who, though they're certainly dependable, are quite stuck in their ways. Certainly, which this dichotomy may be true of the cities in general, and a percentage of their more influential figures, it's nothing more than a kind of patriotism to most of the citizens. It is the joint lobbying of Halsam and Pardon that largely prevents Crossing's influence from extending along the Statewards arm.
The city of Claim holds the fealties of the various baronies and counties that compose the Stretching Plains. The farms of the Stretching Plains provide a diverse range of vegetables, fruits, and livestock, but most people travelling through them tend to observe that it seems to be all sodding cabbages. The reclusive nature of the Dwarven Mountainhomes is generally attributed to the territorial and petty reputation of the government of Claim, who go to lengths to make commerce and travel through their borders troublesome, trying, and profitable only to themselves.
The Abiding Mountains – and more specifically, every inch of its undug stone – belongs to the dwarves. Though once Claim attempted to assert its ownership of the edges of the mountains that fell within their borders, they have long since given up trifling with dwarven ownership law. In specificity, the ownership of the mountains is a complex arrangement, peaks and stata parcelled up to different families long ago and now passed down and divided through the centuries so that a dozen families own equal share of the top three feet of a mountain, and an entirely separate group owning the seven inches beneath it. This is to say nothing of who has claims of which minerals found in the section, excluding those belonging to an owned seam, of course.
Though the dwarves of the Mountainhomes generally have little desire to interact with the outside world, this is largely because those that care for the outside world enter into it, and those that remain behind are usually content for the outside world to come to them. Indeed, passes carved through the mountains and dedicated guides exist purely to service outsiders seeking to travel to the Gate of Hierarchy.