Three towering structures loom over the hotly contested battlefield at the center of Rope Isle: Rangdil Keep, Garmedis Stronghold, and the Killien Fortress. And while the two nations constantly vie for control over these three castles, little do they know the historical significance behind them.

The Garmedis and Rangdil Factories were the primary Neo Steam refineries of the old world. Rope Isle, then known as Acydia, had always been the world's leading source of the Energy Stones from which Neo Steam is extracted, and these factories were built so that these stones could be refined onsite before being transmitted to Neo Steam receivers all over the world.

After the exile of the Maestros, Neo Steam harvesting tripled within the first two years and then doubled again over the next decade. The refineries themselves, once much smaller and more efficient, underwent countless expansions, with new wings and floors added on in haphazard fashion. Soon, the refineries had become so unstable that craftsmen no longer built upward but instead decided to build downward. New tunnels were dug beneath the facilities, and a brand new maze of interlocking passageways continued to be added every year up until the great cataclysm!

As they grew larger, the maintenance of these refineries became much more difficult and less artful. When the Maestros originally designed them, they had planned them to be small and require only a very sparse task force of robotic workers to operate. However, without the Maestros' foresight to guide the ever-increasing refining needs, chaos soon reigned within the factories. Hundreds of new robots were constructed, each with varying degrees of success. The number of malfunctions increased with each day, until finally, the number of live workers needed to supervise production began to outnumber the number of robotic ones!

In between the two refineries stood the Killien Distribution Center, which the Maestros constructed to ensure that every ounce of harvested resources was catalogued and over-harvesting would never occur. In addition to being a storehouse for Energy Stones before being carted off to the either of the two factories, all Neo Steam extracted would be piped back into this facility before being sent off to the rest of the world. In fact, 90% of the civilized world received its Neo Steam from Killien, and with the old world's predilection for science above religion, it is because of this that the factory received its nickname: the Killien "Temple."

These three facilities, once working together to gather Neo Steam in a fine-tuned fashion, soon became too dangerous to navigate. Not only were the tunnels easy to become lost in but the robots themselves began breaking down more frequently and becoming increasingly violent. Rather than deal with these problems, though, the workers tried to seal off particularly problematic passages and continue expanding elsewhere. However, this did little to solve the problems at hand, and without knowing, the workers even began digging tunnels right next to existing monster lairs.

The only solution that the lawmakers of the time could come up with was to create a sizeable army, the only one that existed in the old world, and keep them constantly on call to help deal with the compounding risks presented by these three facilities. In addition, the army began fortifying the areas around the factories, giving them the more castle-like appearance they have retained until this day.

Finally, after the shattering, it was the Crom who sealed off Garmedis, Rangdil, and Killien for good, and they have only recently begun allowing small bands of worthy adventures permission to descend into them and search for what ancient, arcane mysteries have been buried down there for centuries...