Riabor

Why is this going up now, rather than yesterday?
Because I am easily confused by schedules and complex things like 'the day of the week'.
This is why I started off not taking weekends off.


It is a tragic fact in almost every world, that eventually, the blank spaces on the map are all filled up, and there is nothing new left to discover.
The world of Riabor is different, though in that it is (as far as anyone can tell) an infinite flat plane. Where exactly the sun goes at night is one of the many questions about this situation to which noone has yet been able to give an adequate answer.
The world is one in which exploration and discovery are a way of life.  The civilizations of the known world are constantly hungry for resources, and so they send out teams to uncover new lands, and send back what they find there. Slowly, as more and more people follow those first pioneers, and as the infrastructure there becomes more and more built up, the new land becomes more and more a part of the known world, and the pioneers who first discovered it move on, to find yet more places to settle.
Civilization in Riabor thus has a strange, sloping structure - at the center, the people of the world have built wonders that on most worlds, where resources are ultimately finite, would be simply impossible. And as one travels further from that center, civilization becomes sparser and sparser, until at the frontier, one would barely know that one was still in the same century.
The only indication, indeed,  would be the great rails that run throughout the world. The central parts of civilization are almost entirely dependent upon goods from the frontier, while the frontier relies upon goods and people from more developed parts of the world. And so, it is vital that transport between the two be as fast and as smooth as possible. And so in towns where the height of technology otherwise is the spade, there are nevertheless electrified rails, along which come the great trains. The rails run through mountains, and across oceans, able in places to travel at more than twice the speed of sound.
As one can probably guess, there exists a  certain degree of tension between those who live closer to the center of civilization, and those who live on the edge. Indeed, the two groups ultimately have almost nothing in common. And states the size of those in Riabor rarely survive for long at the best of times. Open war would probably have erupted long ago between the center and the periphery, were the two not so utterly dependent upon each other. As it is, they exist in a precarious balance, in which neither can afford to try to exert too much influence on the other.
Wars between can be very quickly ended simply by the disruption of the rail-lines. And as a result, war of any kind is rare - the damage that could be done by even a short war with a weak nation is immense. Instead, conflicts between nations tend to be resolved by more indirect means.
But there is one group which stands apart from these general rules, and those are the true pioneers - the first people who come to new lands and settle there, who go beyond where it is possible to get by train, and so who travel instead by ship, by plane, and even on foot. Riabor is a world in which one really doesn’t know what might lie over the next hill - the valley on the other side could be filled with anything from mountains of precious metals, just lying there on the ground, to swarms of ravenous, flesh-eating insects. Or just a new species of tree. There were a lot of new species of tree.
In fact, the only thing you could be pretty sure you wouldn’t find, was civilization.
To  be  fair, it had happened, exactly once - a group of explorers had found a peaceful group of forest spirits. However, said spirits had had little technology, and no concept of war. As a result, they didn’t count, or at least hadn’t counted for very long.
To the average person in the more developed parts of the world, the life of an explorer is romantic and exciting. Stories of people like Balbin, Liemir and Suel Merson are the stuff of myth. They say you can make your fortune exploring and, indeed, you can. But though many explorers might end up rich, more than half of them end up dead.
Given this, it would be easy to think that those who become explorers are probably mostly those who don’t realise what it will involve. But what people forget is that even though resources are infinite, there is still a limit to the rate at which they can be extracted, and so population growth has led to poverty throughout the developed word. Those with no other way out often travel towards the frontiers, hoping for a better life. And some of those who do so keep going, join up with an expedition, and explore unknown lands. Often, they come from  the more developed parts of the world, and find frontier life intolerable. Sometimes, however, they have reasons of their own for accepting the risk - to try and characterise the whole group would be an exercise in futility.