Malatran Plateau

The Malatran Plateau was a mountainous land form in the center of the southern jungles of Malatra that was created by alien magic and rose thousands of feet above the rest of the region.

Geography
Like the rest of Malatra, the Malatran Plateau was covered mostly by jungle. In the north west and the north east however, there were large swathes of land that didn't have significant tree cover.

History
Some of the earliest people to inhabit the land that would become the Malatran Plateau were bamboo and river spirit folk.

Thousands of years before the Time of Troubles and before Abeir-Toril had split, a faction of a humanoid race known as the ancient Nubari had come on spelljammers in retreat from war in another crystal sphere, seeking a new place to call home. Viewing the central jungle of Maltra as undesirable to the natives, they used their magic to raise the ground and create the vast Malatran Plateau.

Vowing not to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors, they swore to create a society without war. As the ancient Nubari worked to create a new utopia free of strife, the land's spirit folk chose to hide instead of greeting or troubling them, the two groups living in harmony. They built a long chain of magical domes around their territory, which generated a effect similar to spell Hallucinatory terrain, but with permanency and on a massive scale. They also wove powerful and permanent variations of the spell Antipathy into the domes. Altogether this ensured that the plateau, as well as the domes that made this effect, would go unnoticed by the people below.

Eventually some disaster, whose exact details were unrecorded by history, struck the ancient Nubari and destroyed their civilization. Most of their buildings, culture, and knowledge was lost in this disaster. A legend passed down by members of the Simbara claimed that they were discovered and attacked by their ancient enemy. The surviving Nubari would flee what was left of their homes, taking up life in the plateau's jungles and plains.

Years following the destruction of the ancient Nubari's civilization some of the natives Toril had discovered plateau. During this period the carnivorous dinosaurs that inhabited the jungles surrounding the plateau were experiencing a severe decline in population. These Toril natives &mdash; humans, katangas, and korobokurus &mdash; somehow managed to ascend the vast plateau and overcome its magical barriers. These humans were related to those who would later become the Shou.

Those humans would intermingle with the ancient Nubari and over the course of thousands of years they descended into the modern Nubari. Over time the Saru also came to be, evolving from plateau's gorilla population. How the shu came to be on the plateau though, was a mystery to the other races.

Inhabitants
The intelligent races that populated the Malatra Plateau included the Nubari, katanga, korobokuru, saru, shu, and tam'hi. With the Nubari, korobokuru, and shu living in tribes. The saru sometimes settled near Nubari villages and mimicked their habits, but never created tribes of their own. The tam'hi lived in clans of families rather than tribes.

The Nubari tribes were broad groups of villages tied by blood relation, with villages of the same tribe only rarely going to war with one another. Relations with the Nubari tribes and other races were generally good, with most Nubari considering all humans and demihumans to be people, though in some cases tribes only considered humans to be people. Almost all tribes considered korobokuru and shu to be people, with outcasts joining their tribes on rare occasions. Larger tribes were known to adopt even outcast katanga, tam'hi, and saru.

The more monstrous races that inhabited the plateau, known for often raiding the aforementioned peoples, included bullywugs, lizardfolk, mold men, a fresh water breed of sahuagin, tabaxi, tasloi, wemics, and yuan-ti.

Notable Features

 * Fire Mountain: The southernmost peak of the plateaus central mountain range was an active volcano. Many legends had grown up around the mount and several tribes based their primitive religions on it.
 * Rayana Savanna: One of the two great plains of the plateau. An area of rolling grasslands and plentiful watering holes where elephants, gazelles, lions, and zebras could be found. Nubari plainsmen had tilled a few fields where the jungle met the grass and the aarakocra maintained all of their low-land villages in the middle of the savanna.
 * Valley of Spirits: Where the River of Laughing Idols fell from a high cliff was the beginning of this valley which widened out until it reached the Himsala Mountains at the south east edge of the Plateau. Constantly shrouded in mist from the waterfall, the Valley was mysterious and the greatest of Nubari taboo places. Alien screams filled the air and those few who returned from the valley always refused to speak of what they saw and never again ventured back.
 * Yaku Plains: Also known as the Plains of Ash, was the second great plain of the plateau. It was once a hilly savannah populated with Nubari, until one day a great fire blasted it into a wasteland covered in grey ash and husks of trees. When and how this fire occurred is unknown to the Nubari. Vegetation failed to grow here despite being surrounded on all sides by thick jungle and many cultures viewed this land as taboo. Aspiring witch doctors and shamans among the Nubari were often brought here by their instructors to be told a vague lesson about the foolishness of man.