The Geography of the Lakelands and the World

21 Jul, 2025

Life tends to be local in the Lakelands, as few people travel farther than the next village or two. Those who do, however, often travel far, bringing news from places throughout the Lakelands and beyond.

Source: Dan Reynolds, 2020

The Lakelands

No one knows why, but the Weird has a strange interaction with the Great Lakes of North America; yellow and purple lights scintillate in their depths and, at times, float out of the water and across the skies for kilometres around them. And no one knows for sure that these curtains of light repel the Unbound, but it is widely believed; after all, something must explain how the people who live near and between them remain free from Unbound tyranny even after all this time. This region is called the Lakelands, and for now it is safe from the alien powers' domination, though many other dangers threaten its inhabitants.

The Lakelands have no clearly defined borders, but in general what is now southern Ontario up to Ottawa, and nearly all of present-day Michigan, certainly count. Most would also consider any part of northern Ontario within approximately 150 kilometres of one of the Lakes to be part of the Lakelands. So too do many include those parts of Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin within approximately 50 kilometres of the lakeshores – not that any of these states' governments, or the United States of America, remain. While the Dominion of Canada still endures in Quebec and Atlantic Canada and continues to make territorial claims over the Lakelands, it has no real power there. The Lakelands has no central government; instead, micronations, independent towns, and tracts of wild country make up the region.

Many people eke out a living in the Lakelands: human descendants of its pre-Arrival inhabitants, extraterrestrial refugees, and new-made species. The area is heavily forested, mostly mixedwood or deciduous in the south and more coniferous forest on the Canadian Shield in the north. In the southern parts the soil is fertile and even post-Arrival farms were once plentiful, but since the doughts, parasite outbreaks, and insectoid swarms of the Bad Years, many fields and pastures have been abandoned, slowly turning to wetland or woodland again.

Pre-Arrival cities of any size have long since gone wild, and reclaiming them is out of the question: most urban ruins are haunted by spectres, ghosts, and transformed beasts. Human settlements ring the edges of these ruins but, within the wreckage, the only communities are cult encampments, protected after a fashion by their egregores. There are exceptions, but they are few; every pre-Arrival city over 500,000 people has become virtually uninhabitable.

Currently, a number of city-states and confederacies are expanding their influence through the region. Some are coming increasingly into contact and conflict with each other in what was once southern Ontario, including but not limited to the following:

• Tricity is on the outskirts of Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge, and is attempting to unite the surrounding villages and farms under its banner;
• New Guelph, with its expansionist ambitions and authoritarian social norms, is far too close to Tricity for either's comfort;
• the so-called Thames Baronies, centred around Thorndale, are an alliance between new hominid communes and mundane human dynasties with chivalric pretentions;
• the Bruce Energy Authority invests heavily in regional trade routes, which bring in the resources it needs to maintain its nuclear reactors;
• the Six Nations have reclaimed a portion of Haudenosaunee territory, including and exceeding the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve; and
• Rochester, seat of the Rochester Dyarchy and the self-styled American Curia, tries to force its integralist form of government across the southern shores of Lake Ontario.

Many smaller communities watch these powers carefully, while other parts of the Lakelands have their own burgeoning polities.

Bit by bit, the people of the Great Lakes build and rebuild as best they can. Egregores and idols lay their claim to the region, however, and dreamzones grow, and the Unbound are restless. The future of the Lakelands is ever uncertain.

Neighbouring Regions

To the south of the Lakelands, the Unbound rule over vast dystopias. Each sits in the centre of its own immense dreamzone, but their political influence extends well beyond their supernatural reach, through enforcers and informers. These are not unlivable realms; every Unbound needs its mortal servants for its own unique interests and aims, and most take care not to burden their subjects beyond what they can survive. The Unbound are always, however, tyrants with otherworldly power, and no one has challenged them in their own realms and survived. The only rebellion ever to succeed is escape, and too few have succeeded even at that. Those who made it to the Lakelands bring often-contradictory tales of the Unbound Empires.

Somewhere beyond the Unbound's various dystopias, toward the geological centre of the continental United States, is a place even those eldritch horrors fear to tread: the place where they Arrived. The world broke here, and few have seen what remains. The story that has come to the Lakelands is this: as one approaches that abominable place, life grows thin, and eventually dies out entirely. Nothing there grows or creeps, and no stray thing that died there will properly rot. Further past this point, the ground turns to silt, and metal turns brittle, and a haze of dust obscures the air. Eventually, there is no distinction between the dust of the ground and the dust of the air. It is also said that no one has gone that far and lived to tell about it, raising obvious questions about the truth of this account.

Northeast of the Lakelands, Montreal is the gateway to the rest of the world – or it is the gateway to the Lakelands, from the world's point of view. Quebec and the Atlantic Maritime provinces are all that remain of Canada. The country still claims all the resources of its former territories, however, and attempts to manage all foreign interference entering the Lakelands, with little success. It accepts a small number of refugees from the Lakelands each year, and will sometimes issue temporary passes for visitors. Few Lakelanders wish to give up their homes, however, to move where they are not quite welcome. Moreover, most are skeptical that Canada will remain free of the Unbound for even as long as the Lakelands will: there is little to stop one of the alien despots from moving straight up the Atlantic coast, and the successful human cloning programs in multiple Montreal-area facilities suggest to some that at least one idol has made its way to the region.

To the west of Lake Superior is the Aurora Veil, a shimmering strip of dreamzone several kilometres wide at the narrowest, that formed in the wake of an Unbound called the Key of Ash and Lime, as it flew screaming up to the Arctic. The Veil starts in former Minnesota and cuts through what was once western Ontario, northern Manitoba, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories, ending on Victoria Island. Passing through this wall of shadowy, ever-shifting light is a dangerous, disorienting journey, but there are a few crossings staked out by generations of wayfinders. Of these, the Yellowhead Pass is the best known, and a hundred or so survive the crossing each year. Unfortunately, each year a hundred or so do not.

The Greater Americas

Little is known in the Lakelands about what lies west of the Veil. The prairies and mountains are said to be yet unclaimed by the Unbound, though the Key of Ash and Lime has established itself somewhere in arctic. As in the Lakelands, there is no central government, though rumour has it many settlements are growing on the banks of Lake Winnipeg, which has its own protective glimmer. Herders and oil-drillers still inhabit the grasslands and foothills, and beyond that, from the western mountains, comes word of a splendid Golden Road. This great ribbon, along which peace, order, and good government are said to still flourish, winds from the eastern Rockies to the Pacific Ocean. There, at the extreme west of any Lakelander's imagination, scores of little seasteading communities try their luck on the waves.

Strange people are said to live past the Veil, alongside normal folk like mundane humans and new hominids. In the prairies there are huldra, fully-sapient valravn¹, and coyote-headed cannibals, and in the tundra there are rumoured to be some other kind of alien, one not yet seen in the Lakelands. From the Pacific coast come cyborgs and perhaps even thinking machines, though these are not to be trusted: any of them can be under the secret influence of their maker, an Unbound called the Welded-in-Conflict.

Far to the south, too, there might be some kind of mortal flourishing: southern Florida is apparently free of direct Unbound control, though not because of any freshwater defenses. Rumour has it that two Unbound compete to extend their influence through the region, in some kind of cold war. That is very little guarantee of continued safety, unfortunately, if it is true at all.

Much like Canada, Mexico continues in reduced form. Its former northern states are pocked with dreamzones and rife with Weird phenomena; Mexico governs them in name only. So far the southern half of the country remains largely untouched, though fears of eldritch disaster proliferate.

Central and South America are on a defensive footing. Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean nations in particular are trying to discover ways to prevent Weird threats to their sovereignty. However, many of these American nations are more politically stable and economically affluent now that they've been free of Canadian and US interference for almost a century. They have little interest in the Lakelands, humanitarian or economic.

The World Abroad

Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania have had 90 years to develop since the Arrival, and from the point of view of the Lakelands, they have had unimaginable technological advancements. The medicines and materials that come in with aid workers, mercenaries, researchers, and journalists are almost as science-fictional as Sarladhiner technology. These foreign adventurers come largely from western Europe, south Asia, east Asia, and the Commonwealth nations of Oceania, and their interests in the Lakelands range from genuine humanitarianism to naked exploitation. Most of the world contemplates North America with equal parts curiosity and alarm, but so far the Weird seems distant, with two important exceptions.

At least one Unbound made landfall in the Canary Islands twenty years ago, and is exerting influence over Morocco, Mauritania, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, with dreamzones emerging as far as Algeria's western desert. Meanwhile, another of the Unbound has been moving slowly across the Pacific and now lairs somewhere on the bed of the East China Sea.² The Weird has started to manifest in China, Japan, and South Korea, and sailors off their coasts increasingly spot monstrous sea life. There have even been rumours of fish-human hybrids, though these accounts are widely disbelieved.

There is some good news. Between the collapse of the United States of America, significant Chinese and Russian political reforms, innovations in electrical storage, and international restrictions on automotives and air travel, the global community has made significant strides in addressing climate crisis. Though it is too late to save many coastal communities, catastrophic environmental changes have been halted and have started to be reversed. In light of this success, Earth's remaining free nations are optimistic that the creeping Weird apocalypse can also be averted.

There is no evidence to support this optimism.

As with all other Lakelands posts, everything here is provisional.

#post-apocalyptic #the Lakelands #the Weird