Erethea

One-off campaign setting to start my week of posting-once-a-day-ness. This is based on a writing style called Dungeon Punk that may or may not even exist, but it piqued my interest. Look it up on TVTropes.

The story goes that the Elder Gods created the world in the First Aeon, raising it out of the sea of Alsarel through sheer force of will. First, they populated it with rocks, and then with plants, and then with animals. But rocks cried out for life, and the Gods breathed life into them out of pity, and the rocks became the Trolls. And the plants were envious, and they in their turn cried out for true life, not their entrapment, and so the Gods breathed freedom into them, and the plants became the Elves. And the Elves fought with the Trolls, and the Gods despaired over what they had created, and they departed, never to return.

Now, the stories told of the Sigils that the Gods had hidden throughout the world, and so the Elves and the Trolls sent out their greatest champions to find the Sigils and bring magic to their races. The champions spent years searching the land, and finally they returned to their motherlands with four of the eight Sigils each. And the Sigils were installed in the cities of the Elves and the caverns of the Trolls, and for the first time, the two enemies had access to magic.

The first use of their magic was to create their own foot soldiers, numerous and capable of breeding quickly and fighting well. They drew from the essence of the animals, which had been dumb and oblivious to the conflict so far. And the Elves changed the animals in their own image, so that they became Men, and the Trolls changed the animals in their own image, so that they became Dwarves. And the armies of Men and Dwarves made war upon each other while the Elves and Trolls watched in satisfaction.

But the Gods saw this, and they were not pleased, so they sent a plague upon the lands they had created. They created the Salamanders from fire, and they gave them four Sigils of their own, and the Salamanders were as numerous as Men and Dwarves and as mighty as Elves and Trolls, and they made terrible war on the other races.

Nobody really believes this story anymore. I mean, it’s definitely true that the Sigils are the source of magic, but it’s become obvious since the genome was decoded in 1513 that magic is inherent in the genes of every species; it’s just that somehow it’s a dormant quality that can only be activated when one comes within the field of a Sigil.

Not to mention the fact that the Salamanders are not inherently evil. Ever since the Treaty of Kel Azan in 1407, the disparate Salamander kingdoms have become highly geared towards peace and civilization and are more than willing to negotiate with Erethean powers. Extremist groups are becoming less and less common, and the full integration of every Salamander nation into the Union is projected by 1530.

This is the world of Erethea, a place in which magic has been accepted into society for so goddamn long that it’s become almost commonplace. You can buy scrolls for just about anything in stores, from cooking assistance to deodorant to facial reconstruction (though this is expensive and delicate), and even, in the shadier parts of Nova Amphyri, several hundred varieties of instant death.

There are three major political forces in Erethea: the Salamander Union, the Western Alliance, and the Northern Alliance.

The Salamander Union is the youngest, smallest, and by far the most volatile. The product of the Great War, which lasted almost all of the 14th century (that’s 1300s, bitch), it is all that remains of the largest empire in world history. The Ivrizine Empire was a pan-Salamander confederacy that solidified its hold on regional politics in the 1000s and spread rapidly until its final defeat by a coalition of the non-Salamander races. It accepted a reconstructive government and has shown a lot of promise to the Alliances, but its development is constantly slowed the Ivrizine branches of various Allied corporations.

The Ivrizine (the politically-correct term for Salamander) branch of a given corporation is basically devoted to outsourcing. Salamanders are excellent workers – they have four arms, which allows them to manufacture very fast, they’re immune to most heat, which lets them work in very hostile environments, and they’re highly resistant to magic, which allows them to manufacture heavy-duty thaumic products without much hazard. This makes them immensely profitable, and as such every corporate bastard from here to Indvelkar is jumping on their backs. Their country’s government is so corrupt that all it takes is for the businessmen (or elves, trolls or dwarves) to throw some money at them and they’ll turn a blind eye to the injustice. However, the IU (Salamander Union is the common name, but you can’t call it that in public) is modernizing rapidly, so it’s anyone’s guess as to how long the corporations can retain their hold.

The capital of the Ivrizine Union is Kel Azan, a sprawling city which spreads out from the central palace district, known as the Brass Island, in a morass of ramshackle, magically-supported skyscrapers. It is built into a massive lava vein to the southeast of the lands considered civilized. Originally, the city was only the Brass Island (so named because it is a massive floating island constructed mainly of brass. Most citizens can’t afford the absurdly high real estate prices on the Island, though, so they usually just spread out around the base. Salamanders get around by literally riding on lava currents: they use heat to power magitechnological skiffs or just swim through the lava.

The Western Alliance is a federation of elves and humans, who have been allies for as long as anyone can remember. The two races have something of a symbiotic relationship: the humans need the elves’ ingenuity and creativity to give their nation credit as a cultural center, and the elves need the humans’ numbers and determination to make their nation powerful. It’s worked out well for them so far. There was a little bit of an inferiority complex in their relationship, because the elves have a natural affinity for magic and often live up to 500 years, but when it turned out that the spell for unnaturally long life was easy enough for a human with a few years of magical training to perform easily, that turned out to be meaningless. Most humans are, in fact, dosed with elf-life scrolls upon birth, so the gap is closed rapidly. Elves do still have a better natural talent for magic, but there are some pretty amazing human mages, and there are more humans.

The capital of the Western Alliance is Nova Amphyri, the biggest and most elaborate city in the world. Nova Amphyri was planned as the capital of the Alliance after the old capital, Amphyri, was burned to the ground. Ironically, there is an eternal flame to its memory in the center of Nova Amphyri. Nova Amphyri is a prosperous city, full of metropolitan apartments, magically-suspended art buildings, and MC Escher-esque lofts that people occasionally become lost in and are found weeks later somewhere in Dwarven territory. However, not all of it is so rich: the docks, in particular, are some of the shadiest places in the world. You can find anything in the docks of Nova Amphyri if you look hard enough. Back-alley merchants sell illusory sex dolls tailor-made to specifications, scrolls that bring about more intense highs than any physical substance, tomes that contain banned necromantic spells, or anything else you could possibly want. People even sell their true-names sometimes, which is something so taboo that only the truly desperate do it. True-names are personal words of power – knowing something’s, anything’s true-name grants you complete control over every aspect of it. True-names sell for obscenely high amounts of money, but it means that whenever anyone commands you to do something using your true-name, you are magically compelled to do it. Nova Amphyri is a city of stratospheric highs and subterranean lows.

The Northern Alliance consists mainly of the mountains to the far north. It is the biggest nation, geographically, but regionally it has less power than the Western Alliance, due to the fact that dwarves and trolls are less likely to be dicks to other nations. This is because they’re too busy being dicks to each other. The elves and the humans at least have something in common, but the trolls and dwarves aren’t even based around the same molecule. Troll are silicone-based and dwarves are carbon-based. The conflict is such there was actually a high-profile secession debate several hundred years ago, but ultimately this was a failure because, as much as they hate to admit it, the trolls and dwarves do need each other. The dwarves can’t function economically without the rare magical minerals that only the trolls (who grow continuously until they die at about sixteen feet tall and have magic so well-aligned with the rocks that they can almost phase through them) are strong enough to dig up, and the trolls can’t function economically without the delicate restructuring and jewel-cutting the dwarves are capable of. Also, the trolls can’t function very well at low, warm altitudes, because their silicone brains cycle down and cease to work very well, so the dwarves almost have to be used as ancestors.

A certain population of dwarves and trolls exist as a controversial minority in the other lands, but for the most part they are confined to their cities, the center of which is the twin cities of Indvelkar (for the dwarves) and Az Sur Kal (for the trolls). Indvelkar is built almost completely underground, and resembles a large hole from the air. Below the lips of the hole, tunnels spiral away from the city center. Around the rim rests Az Sur Kal, a city of impregnable granite spires that literally grows as time goes on. Rocks are brought up from the quarries of Indvelkar and assembled into obelisks, and the trolls apply solvent to the buildings so that they can literally sculpt them. Tourists are frequently struck dumb by the beauty of Az Sur Kal, a city built by people they know as brutish and monosylabic, because the entire city resembles a piece of communal abstract art. Houses are suspended magically, and so they can be edited however the trolls want without fear of collapse. Unless the Sigils fail. But that’s never going to happen.

Unless the Ivrizine Radical Front gets its way.

(I actually might add more to this later but whatever.)

~ by pieboy on February 24, 2008.