Location from The Wandering Inn by pirateaba
The mountain range dividing Izril — home to Teriarch's hidden cave, apex predators that eat Gold-rank adventurers for breakfast, and the kind of monsters that make even Walled Cities nervous.
The High Passes are Izril's spine, and like a spine, everything important connects through them. The mountain range divides the continent between north and south, Human and Drake, and the peaks are high enough and deadly enough that most people travel around rather than through. The things that live in the High Passes — Wyverns, Gargoyles, adult Frost Wyverns, and creatures that don't have names because no one who sees them survives to report back — make the mountains functionally impassable for anything below Gold-rank. Somewhere in the High Passes, the ancient dragon Teriarch sleeps in a cave filled with millennia of accumulated treasure and regret. He's old enough to remember when the gods walked, powerful enough to reshape continents, and tired enough to prefer napping to doing either. The Goblin Lord has also used the Passes as a staging ground, and various Goblin tribes maintain territories in the peaks. The High Passes are a barrier, a habitat, and a reminder that the world contains things far older and more dangerous than the civilizations squabbling at their feet.
Also known as: the High Passes, High Passes