The Great Evaporation

The Great Evaporation was the drying of the southern continent that began in 1019 PC, the year of The Skyfire, when Herentor's spell fell. Grasslands turned to desert in The Restless Expanse and the west, and the desertification drove away the dwarves of The Citadel and cut off towns like Ashwell.

The desert spread slowly. It took nearly fifteen years to reach Sandwater Slough, arriving around 1034 PC, and by 1047 PC it stands right on the city's doorstep.

Its roots. The disaster was set up centuries earlier. Over more than a century the engineering clans of Rillachor, with The Star Scorpion Guild, carried out a deliberate geomantic and hydrological re-tuning of the southern continent, to thin the "world-friction" that kept their ships from leaving. The Seven Journals of Mechanus record its marsh protections, heat wells, condensation routes and compensation ledgers, and call that long work itself "the Great Evaporation". Rillachor's crystal diary ends about 150 years after the tuning was delivered. After the last Star Scorpion ship left, the city was abandoned as a project city, around 720 PC, and its machinery was locked away but never dismantled.

In the Hall of Navigators the party concluded that the desertification of the south, only about thirty years old, was an acceleration of whatever this ancient machinery manipulated, and that the fall of Herentor's veil caused the acceleration (see Herentor).

The same name belongs to the disaster that ruined Slick's family, the Von Pesto-Gallons, and the link is no coincidence: the Von Pesto-Gallons descend from the Gallon elves, one of Rillachor's principal engineering lines. The family's disgrace, about thirteen years before 1047 PC, came when the Evaporation reached the Slough around 1034: the drying began in 1019, and its arrival at the city fifteen years later was what ruined them.