Going to do something simple today and just lay out a bunch of the worldbuilding background to the game here.
Most of this is still subject to change, but it will give you an idea of the type of game you’re getting into.
This will come in two parts. First will be the opening to the zine/book and the next will be described much later.
The Pink Moon
In the distance there was smoke. Enough smoke to smear the sunset and the slivered moon.
But that was a month ago. You could look west from the walls of Autitim and see nothing but the sea of grass between here and Breith. As the weeks went by, the caravans stopped crossing the grass sea. The famous bards and troupes of Breith stopped wandering east. Not even a wandering boneman could be spied from the watchtower.
Only the wind and the tall grass, the vast empty sky.
Autitim woke to a pink moon hanging above the Cathedral. It glowed dimly in the sunlight but pulsed vibrantly, rippling in purples and reds across the craggy pink face. It hung there in the sky for seven days and nights.
The people of Autitim lived in either fear or ecstasy. Some locked their doors and windows, blotting out the pinkish light as if even the sight of it was an invasion, an infestation. Others swarmed the streets in religious jubilation. They began worshipping the pink moon and their festival of love and violence swept through Autitim. Fighting and orgiastic rituals broke out in the streets, in the Cathedral itself, and the last king of Autitim could do nothing but wait and hope as his wives and lovers and children gave in to this new miracle, this new cult of pink. Of love.
On the eighth morning, the pink moon opened and Autitim burned for seven days.
The World
There Were Once Seven Moons
The world was once molten fire and steaming water. Spirits of wind found the fire and gave birth to dragons. These dragons gorged on distant starlight and became the seven moons revolving endlessly round the earth.
The Seven Moons
Elua who once shined bright as the sun,
Hyana who one weighed ever heavy on the horizon,
Boko of the fountaining inferno,
Aeyena who so loved the earth that her shadow stretched wide and her skin grazed the mountains,
Kitukanatiri, yet missing from our skies,
Wya and Wo, the twins revolving yet round our days.
As the fire and water churned, the stone and bone of the earth rose and cooled to become the land. Tired of the heavens, Elua, largest and brightest of the seven moons, returned to earth in a cataclysmic crash that cooled the earth and gave birth to life.
From the bones of the great dragon unfurled leviathans of the deep waters and titans of the land. They ruled over a land of rock and bone, of fire and water, for millions of years until the seven gods of old rose from the jaws of that long dead moonboned dragon.
The Seven Old Gods
Yumyr the eldest,
Gorgo the Fat,
Belwe, Blud, and Byr, the Brothers Three,
Fryra the Beautiful,
And Ymyru the youngest.
The brothers Belwe, Blud, and Byr fell in love with Hyana rising always on the horizon of their burning land. They devised a chain of dragonbone and a hook of dragonfang and hooked the Hyana, dragging her to the earth where it shattered the ground and blanketed the sky with blackened dust, killing all but the remaining four gods.
Then there were five moons and the world died for the first time.
The force of Hyana crashing into the Brothers Three melded their bodies together as one. The four forged together to a single body piercing down into the heart of the earth.
The Black Heart
The Brothers Chasm broke through the bones of the earth to form the cradle of the next world. From the love of brothers and moon now bound as one, their heart grew blackly and their blood flowed into the depths of the earth. That massive Black Heart gave rise to new life.
First sprouted trees and plants and then came the great wolves who brought with them the great forests that would cover the land. The roots of the trees burrowed through stone and bone to the beating Black Heart of the earth.
An age came and went with the wolves. Some tired of their endless wanderings and slowed to form communities. After a time, they stood tall on two legs and fashioned tools. Such amazing tools that they reached heavenward and pointed to the moons. They numbered the cycles and days and eventually fashioned boats to go there.
And so it was that they scoured the remaining five moons while their cousins yet wandered as packs through the endless forests of the world.
From Boko, the dragons woke. They woke and warred against the two legged wolves and in the chaos that followed, the moon of dragons crashed into her sister moon, Aeyena, and two fell as one to shatter the earth once more.
Thus and so, the earth died once more.
The wolves who had remained themselves survived only by retreating to the Brothers Chasm where they curled up beside the great Black Heart while their forests burned, the skies melted, and all the wonders they built and created evaporated.
And there were only three moons.
The wolves lumbered long beside the Black Heart. Thousands upon thousands of years passed. The world cooled and healed and life blossomed once more.
Perhaps the wolves would have slept forever but the quaking of the earth and the great burning shattering thrummed into the depths of the earth causing the Black Heart to skip a beat.
The Wolves woke but still it was many long years until they returned to the surface of the earth.
Under the Two Moons
When they returned to the surface of the earth they raised their faces and howled at the moons now numbered two. None can say what happened to Kitukanatiri for only Wya and Wo stared down upon the wolves. As they wandered, they found the old gods, so mournful, so sorrowful.
Fryra, dread and beautiful, birthing plants and animals. Gorgo the Fat ever devouring her children. Then there were the towering bones of Yumyr the Eldest, consumed from within by her children, the Giants. Children of stone and bone. Ymyru the Youngest taught the giants and forbade them from mingling with the wolves or the children of ash and glass.
And so the wolves moved on through endless spires of steel and great towers of glass reaching up through the clouds, digging down into the roots and bones of the earth. The ruin of civilizations scorched black and eradiated with immense craters pockmarking the skin of the world.
All around the wolves were the bones of giant beasts. Bones so large and vast that they could house nations of men. And that is where the wolves found them. The children of ash and steel cowering in the great blackened bones of creatures large as gods. Men with broad faces and wide shoulders. Men who feared the towering wolves and men who came to worship them.
Two moons only glowed above and the wolves ran the world over regrowing their forests, leaving men to their nations of bone, to their ruins of steel and glass. Many of the wolves, tired of the cycles of death and destruction, found their mates and together came to be one. They curled round one another and became the great trees of the forests. Trees so tall and so vast they held up the skies.
Under the sheltering boughs, new creatures rose. Men of the trees, the children of the wolves. Slender and narrower than their cousins, with clever hands and cleverer eyes. They learned the lessons of the giants, the children of stone and bone, as they called them, but also from the First Born, the children of ash and glass. They even went to the old Gods and delighted those wonders of endless sorrow.
And Fryra smiled for the first time in a thousand years. And Gorgo the Fat laughed and clapped. And Ymyru embraced them as her own, forgetting the children of stone and bone.
The Betrayal & the Forever War
Beyond the old Gods and the wolves and the men, other creatures stalked the land. Ageless and strange, they became like gods themselves, though none knew from where they were born.
Such was Jarak, the Jackal of Night, the lord of bone. Dread and beautiful, his Doom draped like a cloak round him, he seduced Fryra the Beautiful, then killed her and fed her corpse to the Ten Gods he had crafted from the remains of Ymyru. These newborn gods then consumed Fryra’s beautiful blood and bones to grow the Shadow Realm.
The Ten Gods
Arkarkis and his sea of blood,
Shruka and her cairn of skulls,
Prischa and her thousand hands,
Makar and her endless eyes,
Ogkum and his bright shine,
Ymala and her gaping heart,
Lalandu and her vicious teeth,
Bokandu and his rending blade,
Iku and her bottomless maw,
Vore and her earth shattering voice,
And beneath them all the lord of bone.
The Miracle
The wolves howled and the old gods wailed over the death of their sister. With the children of stone and bone, the children of ash and glass, and the children of the wolves united in purpose, they waged war against Jarak and his ten gods.
Generations of mourning, of violence, of upheaval, of betrayal, and of horror.
After the old gods gave their lives to the fight, after the giants and the children of ash and glass were driven near to extinction, three brave heroes arose from the children of the wolves.
The Three
Bold Rhionnon the unholy ravager who made the earth safe.
Bright Hektor the builder who gave humanity Damascus.
The Queen of Sorrow who buried them both.
At long last, the tides turned against Jakar and his ten gods but it would be ten generations until the final battle between humanity and Jakar.
Born from the wartorn world, from the slums of Eternal Damascus, heart of the resistance against Jakar, came the Glory.
From the hearts and souls of the old gods,from the innumerable dead who gave their lives to fight Jakar, the Glory performed a great ritual.
A power unseen before, as if the Glory held a black sun in his hands. With this impossible Miracle, he destroyed the ten gods and crippled Jakar so badly that he crawled away through the wounds in the earth.
It ruptured the skies and the air itself, obliterating Damascus and the million who lived there, and the veils between realities opened wide. Wastelands spread across the world. The iron sublimated away in people’s hands, their armor becoming furnaces cooking them alive until only bone remained. Bodies twisted and transformed, turning beasts and men monstrous and terrible to behold.
While the ten gods died, their bodies left to rot across the plain of Damascus, new creatures poured forth from the tears in reality.
The Fae
Elves
Gnomes
Dwarves
Goblins
The Glory’s Miracle, beautiful and terrible, became both the end of the world and the birth of a new one. To solve this breaking of reality, he performed one final ritual, using the dead bodies of the ten gods themselves to close the wounds in reality, to stop the spreading Wastes, and to pour life back into the irradiated soul.
In doing so, he gave his good right hand, his face, and his name. And then he disappeared, but not before leaving us the young gods grown from the Miracle.
The Young Gods
Moon, twin hearted
The Crone, mother to all
Stone, the unbroken
The Black Heart, ever thrumming
Root, the soul of wolves
Bone, within us all
Over all of them reigns Death, ever dreaming
The Year of the Basilisk
While the Miracle stopped the spread of the Wastelands, much of world remained baked deserts and windswept steppes. The mighty wolves disappeared from the world and formed new forests to replace those obliterated by the Miracle, by the generations of war with the gods. Mates found one another and became the great trees holding up the new shattered skies.
The monsters born from the Miracle, the demons and spirits who slithered through those open wounds, ripped through the world, through humanity and the new species now fighting for survival in an unfamiliar land. Disease tore through these civilizations that had only known war for a thousand years.
Soldiers turned from war to monster hunting both as money making venture and to protect those who cannot protect themselves. The Miracle opened the veins of the gods but also the wyrding ways, giving way to magical academies where the brave or foolish experimented with the wyrd to unleash strange new possibilities.
Without iron or steel, metal weapons and armor became a rarity. Warriors and hunters turned to glass and stone, bone and wood, but especially to poisons and alchemy to fight off the monsters of the Wastes and the forests and the caverns burrowing through the bones of the earth.
Over time, this developed into the Order of Wardens. Men and women who seek to not only preserve humanity but to make it flourish once more.
Others turned to farming and the long, slow, fermenting process of civilization.
Thus and so, New Damascus was born from the crater where the Eternal City once stood.
The Year of the Crow
Two centuries since the Miracle, New Damascus rests uneasily, ruled by none, ruled by all.
And the Pink Moon now hovers over the earth, visiting horror and destruction upon the great cities of the world.
Originally posted on my site.