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Gold Lake
Latitude 3°30'N
Longitude 37°E
Area 1,050 sq. miles

Gold Lake lies at the western edge of the Sabo Jungles and forms the boundary between the Goldcoast colony and Ujaland. Many of the rivers and streams which feed the lake are flecked with gold washed down from the Mogonjeb Hills, giving the lake its name.

The shores of Gold Lake play host to the ruins of several cities, spanning three cultures and over a thousand years, the most famous of which is Straystown. Some of the cities show evidence of having been cyclically occupied, abandoned, and rebuilt by later cultures on the spot of their antecedents. The true reason for the rise and tragic collapse of these cultures still exists, and it still threatens any living in proximity to the lake itself. Located on an active geothermal field, the lake lies above an ancient volcanic vent. Though it hasn't erupted for tens of thousands of years, the magma chamber far below the surface still leaks a prodigious amount of volcanic gas into the lake's waters. Over time measured in centuries or millennia, the lake's lower, colder layers absorb the suffocating gas until some natural event, such as an earthquake, triggers its sudden, spectacular, and deadly release as a rolling, asphyxiating cloud along the lake's margins, killing everything within miles of the shore. Time and time again, civilizations have flocked to the lake and its adjacent rivers for water, transport, and food, and each in turn has fallen victim to the poison fitfully entombed below the surface.

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