Dungeon Mastery: building on a geographic dictionary

 I like to suggest that when groups of words share a phonetic, they originate from a factual subgroup that can be used to map the past.


We find the Domain of Tanah...located on a Cape so it's part of something larger. A human clan occupies unforested highlands and shares the Cape with Halfling Primitives.
The Indonesian word for clock is djam so these Halfling Primitives are connected to the sphere of time.

The djam clock: An artefact of time.
At Any time, anywhere in the domain of Tanah a Halfling can stick a stick in the ground and draw on the djam clock to make use of any spell of the sphere of time. There is a price. The Halfling ages one year for every spell level used. A Halfling could burn through their life...drawing on the djam clock. The humans know nothing of the djam clock thinking the temporal powers of the Halflings a primitive magic that ages them.

The forested Highlands were Neanderthal Territory but they have vanished.

Here we have a regional setting with Halflings (Barbarians) and humans (Barbarians). It can of course be built on...