Roo is a northern country in Vanaheim, slightly smaller than Sweden and roughly comparable in scale to Svealand and Götaland together. For most Rooans, however, size is not what makes their homeland feel distant. History does.
A northern country
Roo is a land of forests, mountains, fjords, coastlines, rivers, rapids and lakes. Its natural world resembles ours in broad form but is more vivid and fertile: trees, flowers, mushrooms and moss grow larger, richer and more intensely colored.
North of Roo lies a colder and poorly known region of snow and tundra. Knowledge thins toward those northern reaches. Roo itself is only one country within Vanaheim, which contains many countries and several empires.
Two thousand years looking inward
Around two thousand years before the present story, the moon disappeared from the sky. Seas rose and became violently unstable during the catastrophe remembered by different traditions as the Moonless Sky or the Time of Aegir.
The dangerous seas isolated Roo for nearly two millennia. The water became broadly navigable again around a century before the present story, but geography can reopen faster than cultures do. Roo is only now beginning to reconnect with the wider world in a meaningful way.
The south exists beyond rumor
Far south across a large sea lies Varren. A normal voyage between Roo and Varren takes several days. Varren began as a kingdom and remains a kingdom at its core, but conquest turned it into an empire whose emperor stands above the kings of conquered realms.
Varren is not the only imperial power on the wider continent. Three major empires exist there in total, alongside many independent kingdoms. More than ten kingdoms occupy the broad plains between Varren and a much older western empire.
Why Roo matters to outsiders
Ancient ruins exist across the continent, but they are rarer and usually far more decayed than those preserved in Roo. Roo's unusual concentration of surviving ancient structures makes the northern country important to anyone searching for evidence of the old world.
That difference is one reason Varren looks north with curiosity. Its capital, Highward, is itself built directly over an enormous ancient ruin, and deep beneath the city rests a mechanism Varren has never fully activated.
The world is opening again
Roo enters the present story while its long isolation is ending, its internal political order is under strain, and foreign ships are arriving with knowledge Roo has lost. The people of Roo are not discovering that the wider world exists. They are discovering how little they know about it.