Sky Islands

Vast in scale and planetary in reach, the Sky Islands are the largest region in the world of Baroque, comprising a sprawling collection of scattered floating islands of varying sizes suspended high in the air above the planet's surface, spanning every corner of the world and forming the dominant geographic layer of the setting. The variety within the Sky Islands is enormous — individual islands can range from rugged and mountainous to swampy and overgrown to flat and barren, meaning the region as a whole resists any single aesthetic and instead functions as a vast, diverse aerial archipelago where wildly different environments can exist in close proximity simply by traveling from one island to the next. What unifies all Sky Islands regardless of their individual character is their extraordinary richness in rare and precious ores — the entire region is deeply saturated with raw materials, making it one of the most resource-abundant zones in the world, though this mineral wealth comes at the cost of vegetation, as plant life is notably sparse across most of the islands. This abundance of ore is precisely what made the Sky Islands the cradle of power in Baroque — it is what allowed The Luxian Empire to rise to dominance, funding their technological advancement, military superiority, and architectural grandeur, and the climate across the region varies from island to island, with the altitude generally contributing to cooler, stormier conditions on the more elevated islands like those occupied by the Luxian Empire, while lower or more sheltered islands may experience entirely different weather patterns, reflecting the sheer geographic diversity that makes the Sky Islands the expansive, world-defining region that it is.