Step 1. Choose Your Starting Region

The Lowland Wastes are vast yet packed full of wondrous and terrible happenings. In order to bring focus to the start of your adventure, we will choose a biome for your character to begin in.

How much of the biome your starting region is covering is entirely up to personal discretion. During the course of play, you may end up creating new region maps that zoom into an area to cover the contents of a single building, or zoom out to represent huge swathes of land such as multiple biomes. For now though, your region map will only cover an area within a single biome.

These steps will make heavy reference to content found in the Land of Cicadas book made for the Cloud Empress setting. It is possible to use this section without it, though it is heavily recommended to use the book.

Breadbasket: Sprawling pastoral farmlands stalked by deadly automated machines. It is resource rich and contains multiple townships of farmerlings. Notably, the biggest known town in the Lowland Wastes and the de facto trade hub between the Lowlands and the Cloud cities is located here - Tack Town.
If you want to focus on interacting with individual people and slowly expanding your knowledge of the world, begin here.

Weeds: Grasslands struggle to return through blasted battlefields and labyrinthine trenches. The 29th has their strongest foothold here with Fort Snek, despite the abundance of Imago and Broken Bread saboteurs seeking to undermine them.
If you want to focus on the conflict between the 29th and the Order of the Broken Bread (Or other war-torn stories), begin here.

Thickwood: An impossibly dense forest dominates what was once a technological hub of the Torturers, casting the entire biome in pleasant shade. Some trees, millennia old, are the width of whole villages and can support entire broods of Imago in their branches. Few humans live here permanently, though a great many treasure-hunters, broodmonk pilgrims, and curious magicians set out to explore the region.
If you want to focus on the strange magicks of the Hereafter and explore the ways that the natural world has struggled against the ruin brought about by the Torturers, begin here.

Rustbucket: A veritable jungle of dilapidated, plastisteel structures and decaying factories. A great spire reaches towards the heavens above. The scars the Torturers left on the world are most visible here in this dying city of automatons. Even attempting to go from one city block to another is a formidable challenge, and few humans have settled here.
It is not recommended to begin here.