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Sebiland
Historically the weakest of the Twelve Kingdoms, Sebiland has suffered significant losses of territory to Ang'arta within the past decade, most recently in the barony of Adenhault. The kingdom remains too weak and fractured to mount any significant defense, and it seems likely that Sebiland's borders will continue to erode once the Baozites have solidified their hold on the newly conquered lands. King Besallius, distant and safe in his western castle, seems to have resigned himself to this as inevitable.
Sebiland has been poor and fragmented for as long as anyone has tracked the history of the Twelve Kingdoms. For most of its existence, Sebiland has been unified in little more than name; barons rule their fiefs with near-independence, due to the difficulty that the king has in extending his power over them. Not only is it difficult for the crown to collect taxes and enforce lesser lords' military obligations, but there is little to be collected even if it could. Much of the land that cartographers consider part of Sebiland lies within the troll-infested Bilewater Swamp, which is impossible to farm and produces nothing of value.
Ironically, the richest fiefs in Sebiland are those most vulnerable to the Baozites who press the kingdom's eastern flank, for the northern and western borders are those most heavily affected by the Bilewater's sicknesses. Southern Sebiland, though less directly threatened, has nevertheless suffered from the instability plaguing Porphia. The wide span of the Vesserine River, which has long been a liability to the crown because of the natural barrier it creates across the kingdom, has become a bitter blessing in the midst of Sebiland's recent woes. Whatever happens to the eastern provinces, the Vesserine grants some safety to the king's court in the west.
Sebiland does not have a strong national identity. Its people tend to identify themselves by local lord or village rather than as Sebilanders; the swamp clans have little in common with the knights of Steelpoint in the south or the farmers and archers of Adenhault in the east, and it is difficult for any of them to conceive of having a political kinship to the others. The crown's lack of influence not only prevents it from being able to deal effectively with outsiders, but keeps it from maintaining order between its own lesser lords. Feuds between Sebilander barons can go on for generations, bloodying both houses, without the king being able to do a thing to quell them.
The Twelve Kingdoms' Wars have been especially exhausting for Sebiland, which had little military of its own to call upon and so drained its never-abundant royal treasury to pay for mercenaries. Many of those mercenaries were rewarded with land and titles when the king ran out of coin to pay them; consequently, several fiefs and knighthoods in Sebiland belong not to hereditary holders, but recently up-jumped sellswords of sometimes dubious loyalty.
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