During the Age of Collapse, mana storms tore through the Mana Wastes with an unprecedented ferocity. An outpouring of chaotic and unstable magic warped the land, the creatures, and even the peoole it touched. Many denizens of the Wastes were mutated into Fleshwarps, and over time some Fleshwarps even began to appear seemingly spontaneously from the deserts themselves.
Many Fleshwarps found homes among the nomads of the Wastes. Even though their bodies had been changed by the storms, their families and communities accepted them as their own. Any resistance or reluctance to do so died out quickly as a matter of sheer pragmatism. When being warped by the storms becomes such a common occurence, you simply can't afford to be prejudiced against those affected.
Acceptance wasn't universal, though. The Wastes' nomads have never been a monolith, and some groups did eject their Fleshwarp members, trying to preserve as long as possible the desperate belief that it couldn't happen to them. And while Cloudreaver Market never explicitly turned Fleshwarps away, its location at the edge of the Wastes kept it far away enough from the mana storms that it never developed a significant Fleshwarp population, and Fleshwarps often felt unwelcome there if only because of the stares. Even among more accepting communities, there were always some Fleshwarps who just felt wrong continuing their life as if nothing had changed. They weren't the person they were before, and they desired to be with people more like who they had become. Wasteborn Fleshwarps, on the other hand, never even had a non-Fleshwarp community in the first place. Eventually, these outcast Fleshwarps with nowhere else to go found each other, and they founded a town they called Grittybank.
Located in the Spellscar Desert between the Gritty River and its largest tributary, Grittybank is one of the very few permanent settlements in the Wastes to survive the mana storms. This is largely thanks to the Fleshwarps' ability to live relatively unbothered by the effects of mana storms. Having already been changed significantly decreases the chance of more dangerous mutations or magic-related illnesses, and while Fleshwarps can still have their bodies changed and warped by a powerful mana storm, most people in Grittybank view this as a natural part of life and something to celebrate and embrace, not live in fear of.
Being the last remaining permanent settlement in the Spellscar Desert itself ensured Grittybank an important economic position during the Age of Collapse. While not quite as safe, stable, and relatively wealthy as Cloudreaver Market, Grittybank's welcoming nature—showing hospitality to all outcasts and travellers, not just Fleshwarps—and its steady access to food and supplies provided by the plants and animals of the desert made it a welcome respite from hard desert travel and a safe place to rest and resupply, so long as you left before the next storms hit. When the worst of the storms died down and the desert became relatively calm for the first time in centuries, some non-Fleshwarps even began moving into Grittybank, though they've always been a relatively rare sight in town.
It would be wrong to say Grittybank has grown since the start of the Age of Renewal, but they've undeniably prospered while remaining a close-knit and humble town. They enjoy healthy trade relationships with Moonlit Junction and Gitna, and the region's increasing stability has given the people of Gitna more time to pursue their own interests in science and the arts. About ten years ago, Grittybank was visited by a representative from the Menders who wanted to establish a clinic where the citizens of the town could be treated, and studies could be conducted to better understand the unique conditions and physiology of the Mana Waste's Fleshwarps. After some debate, this offer was politely declined; while the clinic could certainly have been valuable, the townsfolk weren't comfortable with the idea of Menders coming from outside to conduct research on them. So Grittybank made a counter-offer: the town would enter into a partnership with the Menders to fund a school where Fleshwarps could study science and medicine on their own terms. Many Fleshwarps wanted to better understand their own bodies and their relationship to the magic that had made them, and a school would allow them to explore the subject for themselves while also creating opportunities for those who wished to pursue magic and the sciences in general.
The Menders agreed to lend their support, and five years later the Grittybank Academy for Magical & Medical Sciences was founded under the watchful eyes of Headmaster Lurrus Kemp, a two-headed kholo-like Fleshwarp with pinched spectacles and an elongated left arm. The school is still young, but it's the town's greatest point of pride, and their work has rapidly improved the scientific understanding of the Mana Waste's modern environment. Only the wizards of Samsara Oasis had been studying the topic closely, and they largely relied upon research conducted by calikangs a millenia ago. The Academy has begun a fruitful exchange of information with Samsara Oasis, and both sides are benefitting from their shared knowledge.
In the last few months since the shardstorms started, Grittybank has been in turmoil. While most people in the Wastes have a long legacy of avoiding and protecting themselves from bizarre storms with adverse affects, Grittybank was unprepared for the shardstorms that fell upon them in the weeks and months following Alkenstar's reappearance. Worse, Mana Wastes Fleshwarps have proven to be particularly susceptible to the shards—more prone to becoming Shardbound, but also more likely to be stricken by shardsickness. Study of the shards has become a top priority for the Academy, and Grittybank was the first community to throw its weight behind Moonlit Junction and the Harbor of Hearts. They are a resilient and resourceful town, and they have quickly undertaken efforts to protect themselves from the shardstorms, but everyone in Grittybank agrees: the sooner the storms can be understood and predicted, or even stopped, the better.
While Grittybank has long enjoyed good relationships with their neighbors, in the last few years the smaller towns of the Mana Wastes, mostly populated by humans looking to establish footholds outside of Moonlit Junction, have been terrorized by a gang of rogue Fleshwarps calling themselves the "Spellscarred." Though they adopt a fearsome and even monstrous posture, the Spellscarred have only ever fought in self-defense, and while they will deface buildings, they avoid doing much worse. Instead they barrel through towns on the Flamescarred Longboards that inspired their name, frightening and intimidating the unsuspecting townsfolk with an unconventional form of freestyle dancing that revolves around the use of the longboard and emphasizes their pride in the traits that those unfamiliar with Fleshwarps find uncanny or upsetting. They see the Mana Wastes being settled by profiteers and treasure hunters who don't respect the culture that's developed there, and their response is to confront those who would rather turn away from them with a provocative form of self-expression that exemplifies the radical outsider spirit they believe in.