| abstract
| - Gondwana habría empujado contra los continentes boreales el geosinclinal mediterráneo, plegando los álpides euro-asiáticos y provocando en ellos grandes corrimientos hacia el norte. Es importante biogeográficamente, pues explica la distribución geográfica de muchos grupos taxonómicos, que surgieron allí y se diseminaron luego algunos a los continentes septentrionales derivados de Laurasia.
* Alfred Wegener
* Geología
* Laurasia
* Pantalasa
- Gondwana is a select-able nation in Europa Universalis IV at the beginning in 1444. Its government type is a Tribal Kingdom.
- The southern supercontinent Gondwana (originally Gondwanaland) included most of the landmasses in today's southern hemisphere, including Antarctica, South America, Africa, Madagascar, Australia-New Guinea, and New Zealand, as well as Arabia and the Indian subcontinent, which are in the Northern Hemisphere. The name is derived from the Gondwana region of India.
- Gondwana, also known as Darwinia, the Great Land and the Savage Land, is one of two major continents on Terra in Earth X and it recurringly appears in the setting of other games of the series. It is a huge terra incognita, with biomes ranging from broadleaf, mixed and riparian woodlands to savannas to tropical cloud forests to montane shrubland. By appealing to analogy with the real world, one may describe it as corresponding to the continents of America, especially South America, incorporating elements of Africa, south and east Asia and Oceania. Its southern limits may border, or correspond to, Antarctica. Gondwana is home to a variety of plants and animals extinct in the real world, such as dinosaurs and prehistoric humanoids, but also entirely fantastic creatures and a number of equally-fantastic human societies. Gondwana is located to the west and south-west of Laurasia's west coast, across a large ocean, although the distance is never given and, indeed, it may be that it is not on the same world at all. Its location relative to Araby, Kushan and the Far East is never clarified, but it appears that the western coast of Gondwana has settlements that serve as port of call for Tiki merchants, which serve the islands in the ocean south and southeast of the Far East, although - again - it is uncertain whether the relation can be given in ordinary space. To add to the confusion, a map depicting the outline of Gondwana contiguously was never released, instead, smaller sections of coastline were depicted in separate maps, with some of them apparently continuations of each other, but other sections in uncertain relations. Likewise, the maps are limited to the eastern coastline and do not depict regions further inland. What has been cartographed of Gondwana's outline is a vast and blurred tangled expanse of smaller and larger islands and riverlands by which the land fades into the ocean. Some of the westernmost islands are actually washed by riparian sweetwater, being located in the estuary of one of the vast rivers flowing from inland - splendid conditions for agriculture. The more easterly islands extend into the ocean and are completely surrounded by saltwater. Colonists from across the ocean have, over time, migrated to and settled along the eastern coastline and have founded a multitude of states, statelets and city-states on these outlying islands and a small strip of seaward land, the so-called "Outremer" (lit. on the other side of the ocean), forming only in rare cases a contiguous territory and in most cases separated by wilderness, although wilderness relatively tamed, relative to the interior, by frequent human forays. Some colonies are affiliated with their homeland across the ocean, others have hard-won their independence. While the cultural and civilatory sophistication of the colonies pales next to that of the homeland, they are a thousandfold more advanced than the societies of the natives that were encountered when foot was first set upon the land. The largest, or at least narratively most prominent, of these colonies is Romera, a city-state governed from an adjacent fortress-island, the Citadel of Magdalena and surrounded by a massive landward wall, by which the country wards off the dangers of the untamed wilderness. The area of civilization is slowly but steadily advancing landinwards, if occasionally beset by breaks and even setbacks. Interior Gondwana is described as a green hell almost devoid of human population, even when one applies the local definition of the term "human", which is far more lenient there than it is in civilized lands, with the exception of primitive tribes, but covered the in perennial bloom of lush jungles and filled with steaming swamps and extensive salt marshes teeming with deadly insects, wild streams, ruins of immemorial and unwholesome antiquity and a variety of wildlife deadly even to seasoned adventurers. To the very far south, the jungles give way to wind-swept wastes and towering, ice-capped volcanos - or so say maritime explorers, who claim to have glanced them from a distance. Being not formally the domain of any lord, adventurers capable of mastering the wilderness, and in possession of an imperial lettre de marque can wring their own share of land from the claws of the jungle, to rule as they see fit. Those less inclined to physical altercation can hire mercenaries to do the work for them - or settle for buying land or even one of the outlying islands, which have all been taken into possession, but are offered for a multiple of the price of an inland domain of the same size. The continent is permeated in many locations by a strong thaumic field, which effects various changes and transformations on animate and inanimate alike in accordance with powerful emotions and mental influences. What would take complex thaumaturgical ritual in other regions often takes merely a word carelessly uttered or even a vivid thought in these circumstances and some changes appear to be entirely unrelated to any desire of which its recipients are conscious. Animals are sometimes granted speech and even magical powers and even unattended inanimate objects are known to be animated into artifact dæmons, also called tsukumogami by the people of the East. What can befall one in this way even in the colonized areas has been, and still is, affecting the wild hinterland all the more. However, the threats of nature are not the only threat with which one has to contend - while relations between the colonies are cordial, with so much land master-less, relations between them vary, and powerful merchant cartels, trading between them, between them and the hinterland tribes, and between Gondwana and Laurasia, often have their own interests to claim in the affairs of state and individual. Even within civilization thus looms intrigue and the law of the street rules overtly where the judges do not consider worthy to enforce their own. Ordinary crime plagues the cities of the Outremer as it would, as one can conceive, plague any place where adventurers and fortune hunters and runaways and exilees of various origins and for various reasons intermingle. The seas are likewise plagued by pirates, who prey on the merchant caravans attempting to cross the big water, or merely trading between various coastal and island settlements. Some of these pirates enjoy the clandestine or more or less overt protection and support of well-known cities, but others operate independently and one can only guess their port of call to be on some remote island, a cliff-shaded lagoon or upstream one of the rivers that have their mouths at the lonelier parts of the coast. The bandits, both sea- and land-based, draw their number from numerous runaway peasants and those for whom life in the city would have meant constant vigilance against the strong arm of the law. These rag-tag bands of guerillas often enjoy the support of smaller villages at the edge of the jungle, founded for logging, mining or agriculture - or inhabited by subjugated natives. It has happened before that such bands account for a substantial settlement activity in a given region - or, when their number has increased sufficiently, by rebellion depose the administration of a colony and instate themselves. There are natives in Gondwana, too, even in the interior, where their presence was unknown and only speculated upon by early colonists, given the unhealthy conditions in the untamed arboreal maze just beyond the shore. But their population density is quite low and nowhere in the colonized areas are they known to have been able to congregate in numbers necessary to maintain a civilization; the first colonists encountered small villages at most and roving bands of forestal hunter-gatheres at least, neither able to contend with these would-be conquerors. The natives are of short stature, slender and lithe-limbed, even scrawny, and can be either dolichocephalic or brachycephalic, with a skin tone of bronze or copper, and straight hair that is universally black. They have high, prominent cheekbones and slanted black eyes, similar to the people of the Far East, their relation to whom this clearly reveals, yet they have prominent, aquiline noses, quite unlike their purported relations. Their names, too, reveal a linkage to the Far East, even though their descent must be of great antiquity. The state of art in most of Gondwana's human population is quite low - metallurgy is unknown to most tribes, although on occasion copper objects fall into the hands of merchants and adventurers, as do items of gold, and for such ubiquitous use as to hint to the presence of vast amounts of the precious metal in the hinterland. Iron, on the other hand, appears to be quite unknown. Sometimes, even stranger items are encountered, made from no known metal and, if at all, then barely malleable to the techniques of known metallurgy, and of very strange art and aspect. They wear clothing made of leather, plant fiber and wool, fashion pots from clay and for almost anything else use instruments made of wood and stone. As for transportation, even the wheel has not found practical application among these tribes, which is on account of the terrain quite explicable. If the ruins on occasion encountered in the forest have their origin in the activities of these natives, the lack of transportation and metal tools would appear not to have kept them from colossal feats of architecture. While the influence of the native kingdoms was removed from the shore by the Crusade, tales abound of the native city-state priest-kingdoms in the interior, of which three by the names of Tzan, Xzin and Qxun feature most prominently. From what little has been glimpsed of the strange deities of the natives and the strange rites by which they pay their supernal and infernal patrons homage, those lords of the inner earth and those who came down to the world out of the dark void between the stars, the tales that the city-states are not only the political, but also religious centers of the continent are enough to make one shudder despite the warm, purple light of a æquatorial sol setting upon the far-distant treelined horizon. These dæmons and fetishes they could bring down upon their enemies and in turn, their patrons could call on them for whatever purpose of labour or sacrifice. Word from explorers to the interior and captive or converted natives is circulating among the colonists that the city-states of which is comprised the human civilization of the remote heartland still enjoy undiminished life - or rather, unlife, for the tales told in hushed voices by these same travellers in the dim of habour taverns hint that these cities are truely necrocratic, their people subservient to the strange and malevolent dead and whatever stranger power has rained down from far stars in immemorial past that has granted them the debatable boon of extending their ephemeral human life into lingering on the borderland of the shaded beyond in apparent sempiternality. Tales tell of those hungry dead, which sit perennially, surrounded by immeasurable treasure and strange apparati, in certain remote caverns that no native dears to thread except during high rituals and festivities on certain days of the year, or during the burial of an important person. Whenever a king or queen or high priest or high priestess of the natives passes away, ze is wrapped in cloth and hung with jewlry, to join those who have gone before. Those tales also recount the superhuman size (up to 10ft) of the oldest kings of old found therein, which the natives say to have come down from distant stars in ages before - certainly an exaggeration colored by the social and religious importance of these individuals. Despite their practice to increase the number of the "lightly-sleeping dead", the natives live in perpetual fear of their visitations, and none can be found who would not shut the windows and doors of the house tightly at nightfall, or provide each possible entrance with certain apotropaics to ward against their incursions. It is said by the natives that these dead are capable of great magic and prey upon the life of the living. Once a human has falling victim to their predations, illness and a strangely "fading" death follow. Fantastic as these stories sound, certainly, it would not be a solitary case, were it so - there are ancient cults even in Laurasia, preserving the dead art, yet they are far more clandestine, and it is only occasionally that we hear of distraught travellers who, having been caught by nightfall in certain remote and unwholesome landscapes, reach a village tavern and spin a wild yarn of an abhorrent thing, lonely stalking over the windswept hills in the moonlight.
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