House cleaning on the new and improved Pb, coming sometime early next year. If you've been keeping up with the setting, not much here is a revelation. But I do have a map now, which is more than I could say at any other point in this setting's development. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.
THE FIRST TRUTH. The landscape is no unbroken mass of endless earth. Rather, it is composed of floating motes of land held in place by titanic chains plunging down into the luminescent, eldritch Æther below. The largest cohesive land mass, the AGGREGATE, was a work of deliberate artifice from the earliest civilizations, the product of lashing countless motes into a patchwork. No sun nor moon hangs in the star-spackled sky.
THE SECOND TRUTH. The AGGREGATE is ruled with an iron-gauntleted fist by the EMPIRE and its right hand the CHURCH (or perhaps it is the other way around). The CHURCH teaches the doctrine of the Warrior-Poet, who compiled the stories of the Saints, mythopoeic personifications of the chemical elements, into the Codex Periodicum. Whispering adherents venerate, for example, Saint Gold the Witchfinder General or Saint Iodine the Mysteriarch.
THE THIRD TRUTH. The OLD WORLD was the age of the Saints, when human civilization was still in its infancy. When the first great human congregation, known to historians as the CONQUEST, crafted the AGGREGATE, it ushered in the NEW AGE, marking the decline of the Saints and the beginning of an age of stability and growth only interrupted by the insurgency of the Warrior-Poet’s successors. As order waxes, magic wanes. The UNDREAMT WILD surrounding the AGGREGATE is still in a tumultuous, hypermagical state of nature, making the AGGREGATE a fragile bastion in a sea of undifferentiated OLD WORLD.
To allow for ease of administration and to alleviate ethnic tensions, the EMPIRE is divided into 5 major principalities, the domains and influences of which are broadly safe from politic’s fickle maneuverings.
IODINIA. The heartland is littered with the EMPIRE’S most bountiful jewels. Raz Haruungar, the greatest city of this or any age and the capital of the EMPIRE, lies beyond the ensnaring hyphae of the Mycelion, a colossal fungal forest-organism. Iodinians have fair or lightly browned skin and eyes in any number of unnatural prismatics, a holdover from the physiognomic tinkering of the CONQUEST.
SACCHARINIA. The closest thing this imploding dynastic power has to a holy book is Machiavelli’s The Prince. Massive spires of sugar-crystal grow out of the sweetened soil of the Sugarspire Flats, into which the Saccharinians carve palaces and dance halls silly with decadent splendor. Saccharinians are known for exaggerated bod-mod, from bleaching their whole body in vibrant pastels to piercing anything that isn’t bone to elaborate full-body works of tattoo artistry.
BURSINGR. The cold here is so bitter it will cut the skin right off your back if you’ll let it. In the shadow of Zenith Mons, king of the motescape’s mountains, glacial fjords thich with piracy cut through the gelid landscape. Bursingi are built thickly and pale, bristling with red hair and marked with spiraling tattoos, breathing tapestries of genealogy and reputation.
GOLGOTH. This is where the old faiths still live, and they don’t mind the heat. It is named for the Golgothan Edifice, the cliff face upon which the first painting of the human form was painted. Golothans are barely unified by their bark-brown skin, hair, and eyes; each clan has developed its own conventions and aesthetics over the centuries.
CHURLIA. Here, the EMPIRE is ripping the riches from the earth’s singing hands. Churlia is dominated by swathes of rolling grasses, in which are littered the rusted ruins of OLD WORLD wars, and its native tribespeople find themselves in the crosshairs of the EMPIRE’s expansionism. Leather-browned and olive Churlians integrate beadwork into their oil-stained overalls, sewing their aviator hats out of Yeabu pelt and woven grass.
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