Three Brother-Kings
The Brother-Kings
Once there was a proud king and a prosperous kingdom: EXARCHIA. When Çulema died, his lands were divided between his three sons. Even though they did not kill their father, THE DEMIURGE cursed each of their realms, for IT knew in their hearts lurked patricidal intent...As the prophets once said, "Innocence proves nothing."
Açach the Firstborn
King of SOLVEYLLIDA, land of the waning sun. Once the breadbasket of Exarchia, now the ground is overgrown with tall weeds and grasping vines, draining the parched earth dry. The air is hot and foul like your lover's breath the next morning. Dark falls easily, dawn gasps and claws its way into the sky, making every sunrise uncertain.
The curse over Solveyllida is the subtlest of the three, a waning of light and heat and growth and life. Every year the weeds grow taller, and sprout more thorns...The dead are unquiet in the hills, and empty-eyed vintners bring strange crops to near-empty marketplaces...They say no child has been born whole and healthy for a year now; the king's own royal bastards are kept sealed within deep vaults beneath his palace, fed a steady diet of heretics.
Ezmael the Plundered
King of ANSURIUS, the land of the sword law. The ground here is parched like dry lips, crumbling and crunching beneath your feet, flat for miles in every direction, until it rises shockingly into monolithic mesas. Everywhere you walk, you carry the land's red dust. There is no clean floor or clear window pane in the whole of Ansurius.
The curse over Ansurius is the most overt of the three: THE WAR. While the other curses steeped for years after the death of Çulema, news of the war came even as he drew his final breath. The endless stomping legions of THE KHAL swept in across the sea and put whole cities to the torch within the first weeks. Only when Ezmael invoked the power of THE SILENT KING did the tide of conquest slow to a trickle.
Ezmael's sacrifice to the greatest of the Eight Worldly Powers was brutally simple in its insanity: a whole generation of men, fed to the charnel fields of the war without a chance in hell of making it home. Their deaths secured his realm, but won him few friends: it's said that the schools for the swordmasters were founded not to defend the realm from the Khal, but to take Ezmael's head.
Every generation, the toll is paid again: security, stability, and order in exchange for fresh offal for the battlefields. Ezmael and his inner circle are some of the only men left in the country.
It is assumed (somewhat optimistically) that the Khal, who give their lives for a foreign Power thought just as terrible and hungry as our own, are doing as poorly with the endless slaughter as us...
Merdocay, Last of His Name
King of SAN GRAÑA, the fell country. The ground here is sodden and boot-sucking; the unwise find themselves caught for hours, or til death if they are fool enough to travel alone. The trees have sunk so far into the muck that only their canopies remain, like odd spiny bushes by the roadsides. All this changes when winter falls, and the killing cold splits stones, and none dare travel anywhere.
The curse over San Graña is a plague like no other in Exarchia's short and brutal history. The manner of its transmission remains a mystery: some say it is contact with the dead, others the defilement of the will and relics of THE DEMIURGE. Whatever the vector, you will know it by your burning throat and creaky voice. By night, you sink into delirious fever, assailed by ecstatic visions. Restlessness grips your limbs, abated only by listless writhing. This is your death: you will sweat and squirm and pant until dehydration claims your soul.
The afflicted become obsessed with a cure (which is believed by those not fever-addled to simply not exist), even as their lungs collapse and their brains boil. Some studies by clerics have shown that the ill effects of the plague can be warded off for a time by seeking a cure, even when none exists. These cure-seekers, called ZANCUDOS by locals, undergo a horrid transformation...
Those who say the plague came on dark ships from over the same sea the Khal crossed into Ansurius are liars and rogues.
Making it Gameable
Using this post which I only recently came across to differentiate the three lands of Exarchia. The linked post is perfect for me, since at the table I usually prep problems and let the players bring solutions in play, with no expectation on my part that I'll have any prefigured solutions myself. Call it improv-heavy ("yes, and...").
Credit where credit is due: by "using this post" I mean I have rolled directly on their tables AND used the text of the entries I rolled up. My text follows their bolded text.
Traveling Solveyllida
You must not stop traveling. The weight of silence over the land is palpable, and it only grows heavier the longer one stays in place. Resting replenishes hit points as normal, but also inflicts fatigue which you cannot be rid of while you travel Solveyllida. When this fatigue overtakes you (can be staved off with certain alchemics), you slip suddenly into restless dreaming. If you travel with companions, they will note your petrified body before quickly moving on.
You must not stand upright. The unquiet dead in Solveyllida hunt exclusively human prey, which they recognize only through what little dim sight reaches them across the endless gulfs of death. Having no sense of smell and only rudimentary hearing, one can evade the dead simply by crawling on all fours, or staying prone and hidden for a time. Unfortunately, the dead know if you touch them; the pulse beneath your living skin will drive these ambling shades into a howling frenzy.
Traveling Ansurius
You must not look at anything. The horrors of the war are simply unbearable. While you can, of course, look at many things in Ansurius, the closer you get to the frontline, the more you must beware of your own powers of perception. Movement in your peripheral is just as likely to alert you to an ambush as it is to expose your feeble mind to a sight no mortal can reckon with. Rumors say that the latest generation fed to the war by King Ezmael are marched all the way from muster to combat wearing blinders and heavy eye-shades.
You must not bring liquid. A natural matter of the landscape, known long before the curse. The parched desert lands rip exposed liquids into the ether, leaving only acidic salts behind. Anyone traveling more than a day from town, where wells are protected by old djinn compacts, will have to make do sucking from cacti. Armies on the march to the front leave whole swathes of the desert stripped of cacti, making them virtually impossible to cross.
Traveling San Graña
You must not leave a trail. Any discarded food scraps, abandoned possessions, or spilled blood will bring the zancudos. The immature ones typically keep a sort of harem/adventuring party/mobile food source close at hand in the form of old traveling companions who've been impressed by the hypnotic majesty of their new colors. Zancudos past their first molt hunt in packs, having long ago devoured those faithful friends they once sought the cure with.
You must not fall. The hissing, sucking mud patches found across the land have strange properties; steadily-paced footfalls do little to disturb the mire, but fall forcefully upon the earth here and the surface tension of the whole patch pops like a soap bubble, plunging you yards down into tightly packed muck. Travelers walk confidently over flat ground, and very carefully on anything approaching "rough terrain." Combats on these mud patches are mutual destruction pacts.
Notes
The lands (especially Ansurius and its curse) are in large part inspired by the Bel Dame Apocrypha book series, and as with all things Los Tronos, the game Blasphemous.
If I were to run a game in Exarchia anytime soon, I'd take the "Making it Gameable" idea further and sub-divide each land into several regions, giving them all their own themed laws. Call the post you're reading now a proof of concept, then.
Alternately, I'd give Exarchia the Quasqueton treatment, THEN give each of the "rooms" a law or two.
Yes, the king names are just Dark Souls boss names, or at least they were named with that glittering vein in mind.