A Player’s Guide to the Realm
Ancalia The Patrian Empire
Five years ago Ancalia’s peaceful, civilized monarchy was shattered by a The Patrian legions are the best heavy infantry in the world, their ar-
massive outbreak of Night Roads opening throughout the country, dis- mored ranks and steely assegais a bulwark against their ancient rivals in
gorging waves of abominations and raising those killed by the Hollowing Dulimbai to the south. Their senatorial families scheme for influence
Plague. The survivors huddle in coastal redoubts and inland enclaves, over the plebian classes, while swarms of bitter slaves toil in their mines
aided by the ragged remnants of Ancalia’s famed knightly orders. and finely-built homes.
Atheocracy of Lom The Raktine Confederacy
The Voice of Reason rules this chill and cheerless land with the aid This patchwork of city-states, demesnes, and free towns was once a
of his antipriest acolytes. The people are but pawns to their master’s battleground divided between Patria and Dulimbai. In desperation,
theories and schemes, yet they fear to pray to the gods that so utterly the sorcerers of Raktia unsealed the forbidden Black Academies in
abandoned them in the past. the mountains and used their secrets to conjure beasts to drive out the
invaders. It came at a price; even today, Raktia is plagued with monsters.
The Bleak Reach
A thousand years ago this was The Regency
an advanced and powerful na- of Dulimbai
tion. Now the land is cursed, a Greatest of the nations of the
refuge for exiles and those no south, Dulimbai’s mandarins
other land can tolerate. Reach- came as an invading force a
er folk are hard, canny, and thousand years ago. Their Re-
ruthless in their will to survive. gent still pledges loyalty to a
long-lost emperor, and their
The Bright Republic magistrates keep to old ways.
The sole technologically-ad-
vanced nation remaining in The Thousand Gods
the realm, the Republic relies Once this steaming jungle was
on its irreplaceable etheric a favorite site for theotechnical
nodes to power a sophisticat- research by the other nations
ed society of modern technol- of the realm. Now the descen-
ogy and political intrigue. dants of those arcanists are
tribes of god-enslaved cultists
The Howlers ruled by artificial divinities of
Savage raiders, peerless poets cruel and capricious nature.
and famed beast-tamers, the
Howlers shun writing of all The Toba Plains
kinds as a curse that destroyed Nomadic clans of herdsmen
their ancient nation. ride the broad plains, con-
gregating around the massive
The Kasirutan stone monasteries of their re-
Archipelago vered lamas. These monks are
The finest sailors in the realm proud and wealthy, and their
call these volcanic isles home, disputes often leave the nomad
though they’re feared more for clans divided and troubled.
their pirating than for their
ruthless mercantile dealings. The Ulstang
Skerries
Nezdohva These icy islands lie under the cold hand of quarreling witch-queens,
The mechanical Iron Tsar and his automaton nobility rule this land who send their sea raiders faring forth with dead men at the oars. Their
of impoverished human serfs. Their human Artificer’s Guild has the warriors are mighty and pitiless, dreaded all along the northern coasts.
best automaton-builders in the realm, and a liberty born of the tsar’s Their robbery is bad enough, but all know that the corpses of the hapless
dependence on their arts. His patronage of their talents is all that keeps souls they slay are taken north to be slaves… or worse.
his fractious, ambitious mechanical boyars and autocossacks in line.
Vissio
The Oasis States Home to the richest financiers and most ambitious artists in the realm,
Pyramidal city-arcologies rise amid the red sands, a wealth of spices and Vissio is a proud land of rival city-states and scheming patrician families
drugs grown within their hydroponic gardens. An inbred nobility culti- whose deep rivers and seaports see most of the trade of the western
vates their bloodlines for physical and magical power, while outside their realm. Their clockwork artificers are superb, and work many marvels
walls the “sand prince” raiders pillage spice caravans and foreign goods. for the merchant-princes and the assassins of the Order of Redactors.
