The nature of the Scrollworld means that nobody can stay put where they are. There’s no such thing as a thousand-year-old-city - they would vanish into the north, covered by a layer of ice and frozen atmosphere. This means that certain types of civilizations emerge:
The vast majority of people in Scrollworld just move south at a slow pace. If you’re a farming community, you simply plant your crops slightly further south after every harvest, to keep up with the migration of the sun, and either move your house every so often, or build a new one. This puts a limit on how big a community can be; Strollers don’t build large cities, because they’re too difficult to move.
Strollers tend to eschew and distrust magic, since they associate it with Rammers.
To someone from Earth, most Stroller communities would look like a small community of subsistence farmers, or nomadic herders.
The counterpart to Strollers are Rammers. Rammers build big cities, and control much larger areas, and amass bigger resources. These are much more analogous to kingdoms on Earth.
When Rammer cities begin to get too close to the frozen north, they pack up everything they can carry, and move south en masse, intending to reach all the way to the emerging south and settle a new city. This usually requires having a large marching army that can both guarantee safe passage through the intervening land, and establish a safe presence in the south.
Rammers depend heavily on magic; both to build up their cities and defenses quickly, and to move south. A Stroller farmer doesn’t need to cast fireball, but a Rammer general marching south through hostile territory does.
To someone from Earth, most Rammer communities would look either like a pre-industrial city or an army on the march.
Elvish civilizations are focused around Glades. Glades are mobile microclimates that slowly migrate with the world. Most Elves who are born in a given Glade cannot leave that Glade - much like a animal that has become too adapted to a particular climate to survive outside of it, they are too dependent on that particular climate and its magic to survive outside of it for too long. (See the section on Elves in the Races page for more details.)
Every Glade is mobile - slowly moving to keep up with the sun, generally moving south and growing their particular microclimate in that direction, using their magic to move through otherwise different climates; it’s not uncommon to find a pocket of jungle in a desert, or a patch of snow-covered evergreens in the middle of a prairie, each driven slowly south by magic.
Every Glade has a Guardian - a demigod who provides the innate magic that Elves depend on. If the Glade dies, the Guardian dies, and vice versa.
Glade Guardians are the source of nearly all Warlock pacts. They are also where Tieflings come from; see the Races page for more details.
Most Dwarven civilizations are similar to Strollers, except their slow southward migration tends to take place underground. They tend to burrow upward at certain intervals, usually intending to emerge near a city to trade with; after a time, they’ll abandon their surface settlement, and re-emerge further south, to repeat the process. These emergences are virtually impossible to predict, as the Dwarven communities don’t tend to maintain contact with anyone outside of their local emergence spot once they go further down.
Since the landscape is constantly changing, maps are incredibly important. A Rammer polity can’t safely make it south without knowing the environment that lays ahead of them and Glades find it difficult to route around completely inhospitable terrain. Out of this need arose two giant sailing vessels, Index East and Index West, slowly sailing south off the East and West coasts of the continent. Built by gnomes millenia ago, they keep a vast library of maps and other information, compiled by scouts and purchased from others.