The Silence and the
Long Road Home
Hey guys! I'm super flattered y'all were interested in checking this out! I'm excited to get your feedback on it. I'm breaking this down into a couple of sections for your convenience, but by all means jump around as you see fit — follow what's interesting.
I really want to encourage you to share your unmediated experience of this stuff as much as possible, ideally via comments. As you go, if you see something that looks cool or makes you excited or seems neat or inspires an idea in you, drop a comment to that effect! And vice versa — it can be hard to give negative feedback but this isn't my darling, it's a pre-alpha design bible, so I'm expecting to make a lot of changes. So if you see something confusing, or contradictory, or even something that you just bounce off of — a clichéd idea, an uninteresting stock character, a boring-seeming mechanic — comment that as well! All of this is going to get many passes of improvement, hopefully. And if you have any ideas you want to contribute, please do! Setting, story, character, classes, items, abilities, core system mechanics — I'm eager for any new ideas!
So What Is It?
Well, that's actually something I was hoping you guys could help me figure out. This started as a creative outlet while the campaign was on hiatus, and began with the question "If I were making a tactical RPG like Final Fantasy Tactics, Battle Ogre, or even XCOM, what would I want it to look like?". But mechanics led me to classes, and the only way to get classes that didn't feel super generic required setting, which suggested a story, until now we're here.
To state the obvious, I do not know how to code! AI tools are very good and getting better, but even with something like Claude Code or Codex I don't think we're at the level of vibe-coding a game like this from scratch; not at the level of complexity I want.
Reading Guide
Throughout this document you'll find three types of highlighted notes:
The Long Road Home
The Eternal Empire rules through the Word — lexical magic inscribed in sacred texts and spoken by the Herald-Prophets of the God-King, whose voices can shatter stone or bind oaths into flesh. For centuries, the God-King's voice has echoed through every corner of the realm, carried by the Chorus, a living network of mystic lexicographers permitted to learn the Lexicon. Then, the Chorus goes silent.
You command the vanguard of the Third Legion, tasked with bringing the Dalimyri Barrowlands — a distant, fractious backwater — to heel under imperial dominion. Three days into the Dalimyri hill country, the Chorus goes silent. With no word from command and strange lights on the horizon behind you, you made camp near a river the locals called the Drowning.
The Dalimyri war-host hit you at dawn. Without the Chorus to sing a warning or echo the wrath of the distant God-King, without the Herald-Prophet's voice to rally the lines, and without the supply trains that were to meet you but never came, six thousand soldiers became sixty scattered souls by noon.
Now you must lead what remains back across hostile territory: through the Barrowlands' many dangers, through the empire's rebellious periphery, through whatever nightmare has claimed the heartland, and arrive at the capital in time to matter. The empire has taught you that foreign magic is heresy. Foreign arms are corruption. Foreign allies a pollution. Yet the empire is silent now. And if you cling to imperial orthodoxy, you will die in these foreign hills, and your purity will be no help to those you left behind. The question isn't whether you'll compromise. It's how much of yourself — and your empire — will be left when you finally see the capital's spires.
Room for some fun strategic questions around who you ally yourself with, providing some replayability (e.g. the Auric League opens up the Phantasmal Duelist class, whereas the Alkahest Syndicate gives you Butcher Priests and new alchemical munitions, but you can only pick one in any given playthrough) and depth to the story. Plus the Heterodoxy meter — there is a by-the-book approach that limits your choices (no alchemy, no non-lexical magics, etc.) — the result is a powerful but limited force. You can recruit outsiders, arm yourselves with new weaponry and accept strange aid (heal crippled soldiers by giving them the briarthorn torc, threading their broken bodies with living flora), but each such compromise moves you further from the imperial ideal. But is the imperial ideal even something worth defending?
Act 1 Playable Characters
The Commander
Imperial Player Character
Either gender, selectable at beginning of campaign. A scion of an aristocratic House of the Golden Zenith Concordat, the Commander chose a life of service over one of leisure. Their father still serves in the elite Praetorian Guard within the Forbidden Quarter, where the God-King's own feet tread the halls — one day the Commander aspires to such an honor. A true believer in the imperial creed. Intelligent and learned but raised in the heart of empire and oddly sheltered in some ways. Understands that the legions and the censors do ugly things, and has even at times participated in some of them, but firmly believes that those things are the price of safety, stability and good lives for millions of imperial citizens.
Depending on the player's choices, may end the campaign a bitter and disillusioned cynic, a tortured but loyal servant of the empire, or a dangerously charismatic idealist whose optimism exposes the heartlands to foreign dangers (depending on one's view).
Casian, the Legionnaire
Imperial
Say one thing for Casian, say he is loyal. Loyal to the Commander, loyal to the Third Legion, and loyal to the God-King and the Empire. He's charismatic and a natural leader, handsome and an excellent follower, not arrogant. But he is Orthodox, and while he will follow his Commander's lead during a crisis, too much heterodoxy will frustrate him and ultimately undermine his faith.
In Act 1 or Act 2 something will happen to him — he is crippled, cursed, etc. The Commander can choose to let him continue as he is (unable to fight, but will still give advice on the strategy screen) or he can, in an act of significant heterodoxy, use a Dalimyri artifact from the Court of Spring — the Briarthorn Torc — to knit Casian's shattered body back together. Doing so makes him a Briarknight and restores his ability to fight, but also transforms Casian into what is, in his eyes, walking heresy. He will accept it if the Commander decides it is what needs to happen, but he will hate what he has become.
Convert him to a Briarknight and continue in heterodoxy and he will complain darkly; push him too far and eventually he will foreswear you, abandoning the warband and returning in Act 4 to exact his revenge — twisted by his bitterness into a monstrous, swollen hybrid of man and plant. Enough battles alongside the Phoenix-Knight will provoke a dialogue that might — perhaps — bring him some measure of peace and acceptance of his fate and heterodoxy, but it is a narrow path requiring a deft touch.
Draedan, the Scholar
Imperial
Natural voice of heterodoxy and long-term secret ally of the Monastery of the Last Word (something that he does not consider disloyal but which the Censors most certainly do). The litany of Tarski defines this character; he's the ultimate Scout mindset — no matter how bad or confusing the world is, knowledge is a good.
Grew up desperately poor on the streets of the capital, but was given a chance when he was taken in by the Scriptorium to sweep their floors and so forth. One of the monks taught him, painstakingly, how to read in the evenings. This moment lit a fire in the child's mind; he read everything he could find, and in time his performance was so impressive he was taken in as a young scholar. He is working a tour of duty for the Third Legion, but in his heart cannot wait to hang up his blade and return to a research cloister. Yet the tragic irony is that his commitment to understanding the world on its own terms may very well cost him access to the peaceful life of the mind he so craves.
Mostly argues for Heterodox actions from a sense of devil's advocacy; if he serves an Orthodox commander he will accept being overruled with good grace, secretly relieved to have the decision taken from him.
Ehani, the Scout
Imperial Shanese Heritage
A Shanese from the high mountains, always subtly aware of her otherness. Does not have a particularly strong sense of her own Shan identity, as her parents were killed during the annexation (unclear by whom — the story she was told is that they fought with the empire against a corrupt Dhar, but she's savvy enough to know that could just be a convenient fiction to tell a young orphan) and she was raised in a state-sponsored orphanage.
Raised by the state, given a home in the Third Legion, Ehani is no rebel but she is a realist — the empire has treated her well enough, although it has left her a perpetual outsider; too Shanese for the imperials and too imperial for the Shan. Serves as a voice for brutal and unsentimental pragmatism — doesn't care about orthodoxy or other high-minded ideals, will just ruthlessly pursue whatever is most likely to keep as much of the legion breathing as possible.
Aidra, the Chorister
Imperial
Distant, almost dreamy, oddly childlike at times. Always seems distracted, as if listening to music you cannot hear. Not devout exactly, but very intuitive; trusts their feelings and sense of surroundings even if that's not fully rational. Trusts the evidence of their (esoteric) senses over any particular orthodoxy.
Having beheld (from a great distance) the blazing light of the God-King and communed with his voice, begins the game devout but as exposure to heterodox practices and the Unwrought stack up, grows less and less sure what to make of it all, will lean on the Commander to help put their feelings and senses into some sort of context.
The Moonsinger
Dalimyri Autumn Court
A (metaphorical) spider with the soul of a poet. A trap-layer, a web-spinner: careful, thoughtful, a long-term strategic planner who feels deeply but has carefully severed the connection between his sentiments and his actions. Serves the Moon spirit (which is far too large and distant to be awoken like lesser spirits), and is full of dark secrets about the spirit world, the Labyrinth, and what lurks in the darkness between stars.
Deep communion with the Moon has attuned him to subtleties of mystical awareness others lack; he can feel what seeps into the world in the imperial capital and has some inkling of the danger there. Is not charismatic but intelligent and deeply perceptive; his followers are called the Moonsworn because they go where he leads, though they feel themselves to be following the Phoenix-Knight.
Understands the Eternal Empire better than almost anyone, and does not hate it — but he knows the corruption at its heart, and cannot permit it to escalate. Very clearly perceives the genuine good the empire and the God-King have done; the lives saved, peace preserved, knowledge attained. And just as clearly perceives the inevitable way the same virtues that allowed that have led inexorably to the crushing inhumanity of Annexation and conquest, the stultification and stagnancy of imperial learning and art, the arrogance and thoughtlessness of the imperial bureaucracy.
The Phoenix-Knight
Dalimyri Spring Court
A rarity: a Spring-court Dalimyri with a calling — a passion, really — for leadership and war. A healer of such rare power that she can literally raise the dead, but who has turned that power to violence. A warlord, a charismatic leader who leads from the front. In many ways the Yang to the Moonsinger's Yin; she trusts him implicitly. Theirs is a powerful bond of love and trust of which romance is but one facet, although monogamy is rarer (but not unknown) among the Dalimyri, and they do not practice such exotic customs.
The Scrimshander
Imperial Orthodox
A cheerful, foul-mouthed, blustery slab of a man. A bit like Scotty from Star Trek — prone to loud outbursts but good-natured and reliable. Although a mage he carries himself like an artisan, and has the calloused, chisel-nicked hands to prove it.
Despite his blue-collar presentation, is actually extremely thoughtful and has chosen orthodoxy not out of inertia (like Aidra) or thoughtless loyalty for its own sake (like Casian), but rather from careful consideration of the intellectual merits of the position. Sees no moral issue with animating corpses to serve, though he well knows that others disagree. Also is not as gentle or reverent as one might expect with the dead — to him they are property of the God-King, tools of the empire; no craftsman worth a damn is careless with his tools, but neither does one refrain from striking things for fear of damaging the hammer.
Classes & Subclasses
Basic Classes are available in Act 1. Every class has a passive Core Mechanic and a Signature Ability, then has 5 ability slots where more abilities — class, weapon, origin, etc. — can be slotted. The core mechanic of another class you have access to can be equipped in one of your two Passive slots, if desired.
Legionnaire
Basic Imperial
The primary soldier of the Eternal Empire. Core strategy is to set a defensive stance near more vulnerable allies, then slowly advance in formation, marking foes, shielding allies and retaliating when allies are attacked. 4E-style marking mechanic. Very good HP, access to heavy armor, weapons and shields, and alchemical munitions.
Core Mechanic: Formation
If a Legionnaire does not move during their turn, they gain the Formation status until they move (or are moved, in the case of forced movement), providing a Medium boost to Defense and adjacent allies gain a Small boost to Defense. Some abilities are only available when in Formation. Some abilities provide extra power if you use them on a turn you break Formation. Some abilities put you into Formation even if you've moved this turn.
Signature Ability: Defender's Mark
As a Minor action, mark a target within 6 squares. Until the beginning of your next turn, the target takes a -Medium penalty to attacks against any character except the Legionnaire, will attack the Legionnaire preferentially, and if it moves out of a square adjacent to the Legionnaire or if it attacks an ally while adjacent to them, the Legionnaire makes a Defensive Strike against it as an interrupt (resolved before the trigger — note that reactions are automatic and there is no limit on reactions/round). If this attack hits, the target is Immobilized until the beginning of the Legionnaire's next turn.
Ability Themes
Juggernaut (unmovable, unstoppable, heavy armor), Interceptor (retaliatory attacks), Shieldwall (defensive bonuses to allies), Lockdown (imposes slow and immobilize).
Scholar
Basic Imperial
Many would say the Legionnaire is central to the Empire's military might, but the Scholar is no less vital, though they play a subtler role. Exceptionally quick-thinking and perceptive, Scholars carefully analyze enemies and direct attacks from nearby allies to maximize their lethality. Medium HP, access to light armor, shield, maces, crossbows, knives, Battlefield Medicine, Alchemical Munitions, and Implements (including, eventually, Staves), but not codices.
Core Mechanic: Observe and Report
Use the Observe ability as a Minor Action to give an enemy the Identified status. Identified targets have any damage resistances and vulnerabilities displayed, and display exact to-hit and to-crit percentages when the player selects them as a target for an attack. Some abilities give enemies Identified for free, and some abilities can only be used against an Identified enemy, including the powerful Analyzed debuff.
Signature Ability: Battlefield Analysis
As a Major Action, choose an enemy that is Identified or an ally in line of sight. An enemy becomes Analyzed; an ally becomes Advised. An Advised character gains Advantage on their next attack roll. Analyzed enemies take 6 extra damage from attacks, +3 damage per additional stack of Analyzed after the first. This may not sound like much, but Analyzed statuses stack and affect every friendly attack — the whole party gets bonus damage per stack of Analyzed, making Scholars superb anti-boss support, but they struggle more against wide arrays of different enemy types or swarms of weaker foes.
Scout
Basic Imperial
The Legionnaire might be the Emperor's sword and shield, but they cannot fight what they cannot find. Scouts are their eyes and ears, and excel at stealth or high-speed skirmishing. Uses light or medium armor, swords, axes, knives, bows, crossbows, traps, medicine.
Core Mechanic: Momentum
A Scout gains 1 Momentum for every square he moves on his turn (forced movement doesn't count). When he damages an enemy, he deals 3 extra points of damage for every point of Momentum he had at the time of the attack, then his Momentum is halved (round down). If a Scout does not move on his turn, his Momentum drops to 0. Some abilities grant Momentum, and some abilities can only be used when a Scout has a certain amount of Momentum.
Signature Ability: Skirmish
As a Minor action, move half your speed and gain the Elusive status (an attack against an Elusive target removes that status automatically, but has Disadvantage on the attack roll).
Chorister
Basic Imperial
A member of the Chorus of the God-King, these are invaluable for communicating messages from the imperial capital, but if pressed into battle their command of spoken and sung lexical magic makes them formidable indeed. Low HP, light armor, can use knives, implements and codices. Class abilities tend to be support, but offensive codices like Flame, Storm, Stone and Legion provide a wide variety of offensive magical abilities. Effective as a force-multiplier for friendly legionnaires, and absolutely lethal in groups.
Core Mechanic: Crescendo & Resonance
Resonance is a battlefield-wide resource. It is class agnostic: 2 Resonance is generated whenever a character uses a Lexicon ability. If a Lexicon power deals damage or heals hit points, it deals extra damage or healing equal to twice the current Resonance. Resonance is dangerous — if Resonance is ten or above, any time a Lexicon ability is used, the caster takes damage equal to (1d4 × current Resonance). A Chorister can reduce Resonance by ten points to Crescendo — they can use a Lexicon ability without spending an action (which benefits from Resonance normally), and then Resonance drops by 10.
Signature Ability: Inspire Awe
At-Will, Major Action, Lexicon. Choose a 2×2 area within 10 squares. Allies in that area regain a small amount of health and gain one stack of Inspired (a small bonus to attack, defense, and ward; number of stacks reduce by 1 at the end of their turn).
Codices (equipment, not class abilities)
Codices are items unique to Choristers during Act 1 and will form a major part of their play loop.
Spiritbinder
Basic Dalimyri — Locked until alliance with Dalimyri; training Imperials causes Heterodoxy
A Dalimyri tradition of shamanism, focused on negotiating with Spirits — the inherent sapience that slumbers within all things. Can equip light armor, knives, spears, medicine, and spiritmasks. The spirits associate identity with the masks, not the wearers, so each mask is a unique identity built up over decades or centuries, and comes with its own particular spirit allies and enemies.
Core Mechanic: Favor & Spirit Masks
Each mask is bound to 1–3 spirits. Each spirit provides either a passive bonus or an ability (subject to normal slot limits). Each spirit has a Desire: fire spirits want to burn things, wolf spirits want the kill, water spirits want you standing in water terrain, etc. Every round that you fulfill the desires of any of the spirits linked to your mask, you gain Favor. Favor can be spent to Invoke any of the spirits for a super-charged ability.
Act 1 masks have 1 spirit linked to them. Starting in Act 2 you begin finding masks linked to two spirits, introducing new complications. You don't find a mask linked to three spirits until Act 4.
Note: the same spirits can appear linked to multiple masks, so Stormbrother could be the only spirit linked to a Tier 1 mask, but the same spirit with the same Desire, abilities and Invocation (maybe at a higher power level) can be just one of the spirits linked to the Son of Summer mask as well.
Spiritbinder abilities involve spirit-agnostic ways of generating Favor directly (use your action on Propitiation to gain Favor directly), invoking a spirit on a cooldown (without spending Favor), a passive to increase Favor gained per satisfied Desire, and some court-specific abilities.
Advanced Classes
These classes open up in Act 2. Core and Orthodox Advanced classes don't introduce new currencies or mechanics, instead using new ways to generate or use the Base class resources like Analyzed, Resonance, and Formation. The Heterodox paths represent alien magical traditions and operate differently.
Neutral Advanced Classes
Require no particular orthodoxy or heterodoxy. Likely advancement lines: Legionnaire → (Champion, Slayer); Scout → (Slayer, Marksman); Scholar → (Marksman, Commander/Champion, Calligrapher); Chorister → (Calligrapher, Virtuoso).
Neutral A deadly killer, plain and simple. Nothing showy or flashy, just speed, skill and overwhelming offense.
Possible Core Mechanic: Killing Momentum
Generates Momentum when making an attack or if an enemy attack is evaded. Killing Momentum stacks with Scout's Momentum. Signature ability: Blood and Steel, making multiple low-damage attacks generating Momentum for each one. The core fantasy is being deadly — Achilles, Black Dow, Lancelot.
Builds
The Ninja: Uses Stealth as defense and offense-enabler. Powerful alpha strikes to quickly kill or incapacitate single foes. Slower but safer combat rhythm.
Vivisectionist: Scholarly but terrifying, a deadly close combat debuffer with powers like "snip tendon" or "flense" or "sever artery." Can generate Analyzed stacks on enemies by killing enemies of the same type. Imposes bleeding DOT effects and debuffs like Agony or Stun.
Duelist: Elegant killer, wants to focus on a single powerful enemy and lock them down, using parries and ripostes for defense and flurries of strikes for offense.
Neutral Martial support, like the 4E Warlord class. Gives allies free moves and attacks, can analyze enemies like a Scholar, put allies or self into Formation, and has various morale abilities. The core fantasy: Hector, King Arthur, El Cid.
Builds
Warlord: A battlefield commander, very hands-off but a powerful force multiplier that buffs martial allies and can give them free attacks.
Gladiator/Paladin: A hands-on warrior's warrior, a tank who wants to be the target of attacks to take pressure off others, and retaliates with flashy but effective strikes to inspire allies.
Thane: Frontline AOE debuffer, using battlecries and particularly vicious or brutal strikes to spread fear among the enemy.
Neutral Ranged sniper; Striker. Equips bow/crossbow.
Signature: Sharp Eyes
Minor action. Identifies an enemy and adds a stack of Aim to the target. When a Marksman attacks a target with Aim, they gain a significant accuracy and damage boost per stack, then removes all stacks.
Builds
Sniper: One shot, one kill. Stack Aim, then take them down from long range. Has Stealth skills.
Skirmisher: Kill on the move, mixing it up in close to medium range. Slippery, with disengage-type abilities.
Machine Gunner: Focus on high volume of attacks, spreading damage and providing covering fire-type abilities.
Neutral Controller/Leader. Deploys expendable origami constructs and uses long-handled brushes to paint holy verses in magical ink on the earth, creating zones of effect.
Builds
Origamist: Focuses on summoning large numbers of expendable minions more effective with higher Resonance.
Mosaicist: Focuses on establishing limited-duration (2–4 rounds) static AOE Zones — damaging, buffing, healing, and debuffing.
Runecarver: Focuses on establishing semi-permanent buffs on allies — carves Inscriptions or Sigils of power. Allies can only have one sigil at a time but each gives a powerful benefit until end of battle.
Neutral The rare Chorister whose command of the Lexicon has risen above the Chorus like a mighty promontory. Virtuoso powers build Resonance faster than Choristers and benefit from Resonance, but they cannot Crescendo — instead they build Resonance to dangerous heights, fueling extremely powerful abilities. A Virtuoso supported by Choristers can have the Choristers use Crescendo regularly to keep things safe; Virtuosos alone spike Resonance very quickly, making lexical abilities very effective and very dangerous to the caster.
Builds
Soloist: True glass cannon — generates Resonance fast and personally uses it to fuel massive AOE or Healing abilities, but will burn out without extensive healing support.
Soliloquist: Picks one target and locks them down hard with intensive CC and debuffs, growing more powerful as Resonance increases.
Cantor: The least "selfish" Virtuoso, uses hymns and chants to empower multiple allies at once. Needs Resonance least and doesn't mind when Choristers Crescendo.
Orthodox Advanced Classes
Require Orthodoxy above a certain level. Traditions of the God-King and the Eternal Empire.
Orthodox Controller/Striker. Scrimshaw necromancers, carving glyphs into bones which they later animate. Start every battle with two glyphworked skeletons, can use a Major action to turn an adjacent corpse or dying creature (friend or foe) into a glyphworked zombie. Can also Carve Glyphs into friendly adjacent creatures to buff them, but doing so inflicts modest damage. Can choose a passive that generates Resonance when a glyph is carved.
Builds
Necrolord: Corpse-economy specialist. Animates shambling hordes of expendable glyphworked undead which can be converted to unliving bombs.
Constructlord: Focuses on one big pet, a hulking terra cotta golem.
Painlord: Focuses on carving glyphs into allies (pets or characters), inflicting damage but providing stable buffs for the rest of combat.
Orthodox Dervishes, holy men, worshippers of the Word. Woad-inked warriors with cryptic glyph-armors composed of holy verse in sacred geometries inked into their skin. A bit like a D&D monk — mobile, unarmored warrior with some unnatural abilities. Benefits from Resonance.
Core Mechanic: Zeal
Taking damage generates Resonance, and can burn Resonance to use a big, Crescendo-like ability (Word of Creation/Destruction?).
Builds
Healer, Striker, Evasion-tank
Orthodox An inquisitor — no lexical magic, but secret techniques (some bordering close to Dalimyri spirit-binding) used to stop dangerous esoteric cults, rogue spirits, etc. Ups allies' Ward, dispels summons, deals extra damage against non-human non-beast foes, at higher level can cancel magical attacks as a reaction (significant cooldown). Will not enter battle alongside a non-orthodox spellcaster or a Knight-Chandler.
Builds
Anti-caster, Anti-magic creature, Divination/detection/analysis
Dalimyri Advanced Classes
Spirit-sworn warriors. Require cooperation with the Dalimyri. Training imperials causes Heterodoxy. Equipment: Spirit-fetters, curse-brands, shadow-silk. Cost: You're making peace with people who have every reason to hate you.
Dalimyri Warrior-healer hybrids. Fragile, but if struck down their burning, vengeful spirit remains fighting with a different suite of abilities. Uses on-death and on-kill effects. Specializes in healing, AOE fire attacks, and resurrections.
Uses soul-stealing to recharge resurrections (must kill an enemy to charge/recharge the ability to resurrect). If the battle ends and the phoenix is dead, the spirit dissipates and they are lost permanently — of course, nothing stops you from having them kill a friendly to afford self-resurrection. Calligrapher's origami constructs and Scrimshander's skeletons are not considered to have souls.
Dalimyri A willing host to possessing spirits, channeling them into magical effects. Draw on a spirit too much and it may permanently transform you into its Vessel.
Core Mechanic: Control
Start at 12 Control. Host abilities are powerful caster abilities; using them generates Favor but burns 1–3 Control each. Dropping below half health also burns 2 Control; falling below 0 health for the first time burns 4 Control and resets HP to half (the "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry" fantasy).
Host abilities are more powerful the more Control you have (e.g. Spring's Blessing: heal 10 HP per point of Control, then burn 1 Control). At 8 Control or less, gain health and evasion to compensate for losing caster effectiveness. At 4 or less, gain more health/evasion plus DR, accuracy and weapon damage. At 0 Control, briefly become an uncontrollable Spirit ally for 2–3 rounds before transforming back at 4 Control.
Dalimyri Beloved of the moon goddess (mistress of secrets and wild things). Curse-casters and callers to things-in-the-darkness. Debuffers and summoner specialists that can reveal the hidden, make themselves or allies invisible, weaken enemies with debilitating curses (some of which jump to a new target when the original dies) and conjure strange and unsettling creatures.
Shanese Psyche Classes
Once dreamwalkers and seers, now a conquered province. Help the separatists seize their freedom and they'll work with you. But what you're discussing is insurrection — there's a word for that, and it is treason.
Shan Muses, inspirers, dream-artists. Focus on manipulating and inflicting emotions to buff and debuff. Can cause sleep, hallucinations and madness. Unique characters include the Rage Knight and She-Who-Walks-In-Awe.
Signature Mechanic: Ardency
An aura of emotion affecting allies or enemies near the Ardent. Attuned to one emotional pole (Fear, Rage, Awe, Hope). Core gameplay is deciding when to switch aura types, as each creates a different aura and a rider on abilities. Switching auras takes a Minor action and is on a one-turn cooldown — you have to plan ahead.
Shan Make their own weapons and armor in dreams. Know they will gradually slip into madness. Focus on creating impossible things — conjuring weapons, animating nightmares, terrain-shifting, the solipsistic overwriting of reality.
Core Mechanic: Delusion (0–200 scale)
Using psyche abilities generates Delusion. The more deluded you are, the more potent your abilities become, but abilities shift at thresholds — generally growing more powerful but gaining drawbacks. At 100 Delusion you are Deluded; at 150 you are Deranged.
The slippery slope: Every time you end a battle Deluded, your minimum Delusion increases by 2. Every time you end a battle Deranged, it increases by 5. Over a campaign, Oneiricists find their minimum gradually rises; they have to work less and less hard to become more and more Deranged. Once your minimum reaches 100, you always end battles Deluded and are much more likely to end Deranged. If your minimum reaches a certain threshold (150? 200?), the character goes solipsistically mad, dropping into a permanent dream coma and becoming unplayable.
Shan Striker/Controller. Use psyche to confront their inner darkness, embodying their sins and nightmares into dream form, leashing them, then externalizing them as chained monsters. Signature Ability is Incarnate Daemon, summoning powerful monsters from their own id, but which can be as dangerous to allies as enemies.
Daemons are independent creatures with their own HP, defense and abilities that take their own turns following predictable but uncontrollable patterns: Rage demons attack the nearest foe (random if equidistant), Pride daemons attack whoever last damaged them or preen and do nothing, Terrors attack whoever has taken the most damage recently, etc. On the Goeticist's turn they can use Major actions to take control of their daemon and Minor actions to apply buffs/debuffs, functionally giving the daemon two turns per round, only one of which is fully controlled by the player.
Only one daemon can be incarnated at a time, and they cannot be dismissed (except by a capstone ability that destroys it for AOE damage). So having a daemon on the field is powerful but a double-edged sword.
Auric League
Distant naval power with their own interests. Equipment: Battle-staves, flickerskin cloaks, warded plate. Cost: The League doesn't do charity; their "aid" comes with strings.
Auric Slippery, flexible hybrid Striker/Controller that creates illusionary duplicates using magical mirrors. Creates Mirrors (static emplacements, broken when stepped on or attacked) and Echoes (fragile but moderately dangerous reflections that take their own turn following the Phantasm's, moving to attack the nearest enemy).
Alkahest Syndicate
Alchemists from distant Taltasqua. Equipment: Transmutative munitions, chemical weapons, enhancement elixirs. Cost: Your soldiers become dependent on and addicted to alchemical enhancement; some transformations are irreversible.
Taltasqua Battle Alchemist: Medium armor, high speed, medium range munitions — explosives, buff/debuff clouds, crowd control.
Alchemical Berserker: Fast, high damage, resilient but easy to hurt and hard to control — Striker/Defender.
Taltasqua Taste of the sacrament — regenerative healers and buffers with big carving swords. Have passive regeneration but use their own HP as resources; damaging themselves to heal or buff allies, deal retaliation damage when wounded (burning blood). Lightly armored but heavy weaponry. Can play like clerical healer-buffers or maneuverable, resilient berserkers.
Miscellaneous Classes
Each requires specific story choices that don't necessarily align with a particular faction.
Misc Heterodox Walkers in two worlds; usually the maimed or very ill, they accept a grafting of magical plants into their bodies to cure their ailments and in exchange must serve the Green for 2 seasons each year. Story requirement: steal or accept the Briarthorn Torc from the Temple of the Green in Act 1. Thereafter, characters who would die have a 50% chance of becoming a Briar Knight between battles instead.
Misc Defender/Leader. Scholar-warriors sworn to be a light in dark places. Collect ancient secrets in their library-cloisters and use them to hunt dark things. Has an aura of light (~3 spaces); enemies entering the aura are immediately Identified. Can use the light offensively; extra effective against spirits and the Unwrought. Story requirement: must ally with the Monastery of the Last Word.
Note: As worshippers of knowledge, Chandlers hate the Censors and will not enter battle alongside one, and vice versa — but handily, both offer extra utility versus spirits and the Unwrought.
Slayer: Specialist in hunting beasts, spirits, and other non-human foes; maybe Orthodox?
Beastbonded: Hunters working in conjunction with a magically bonded hunting beast (bloodhawks, terrorbirds, ambush drakes). If a fourth Dalimyri class, Beastbonded would be a natural fit. Beasts would be soldiers like any other, locked into special classes of their own. A Beastbond is a skirmisher with abilities that empower nearby animals, grant them attacks, synchronize attacks with them. This works for terra cotta warriors as well — they're just recruitable monsters, maybe with high defenses but no ability to heal.
Cut & Additional Notes
Auric Arcane defender — Auric gish specializing in combining spell+sword, attacking Ward or Defense wherever foes are weakest. Defender/Striker. Currently cut.
Act Structure
Prologue — Battle of the Drowning
Begin in media res — "It's an ambush!" "'Ware the flanks!" "Oh God-King, they're coming out of the river!" "Where is the General?" "Stay clear of that fog — it's poison!"
Commander (Legionnaire 1) and Casian (Legionnaire level 1) against four lightly armored Dalimyri Skirmishers amid burning camp. Dialogue provides helpful tips — "Casian, take the high ground!" "Let us form a shieldwall, Commander — like at Arvenne."
Casian: "Commander, they're in the baggage train — the Scriptoria!" Draedan the Scholar is outnumbered but has wisely backed himself into a chokepoint. Enemies are a half-dozen Dalimyri Skirmishers and a Summer Court Thane. Casian and the Commander need to rescue Draedan before he is killed. After battle, Draedan says the camp's Scriptorium was swallowed by the river itself — drowning most of the books and scholars both.
Two friendly NPC legionaries have set up next to Aidra (Chorister) and Ehani (Scout). They are defending against skirmishers, a Thane, a Spiritbinder, and worst of all — a war spirit like a grizzly bear made of flames caged by thorns. Amidst the battle, Aidra confirms the Great Chorus has gone silent — there was no warning of ambush, and she cannot hear His Most Holy Voice at all. At end of battle: "Fall back to the designated rally point; we will gather what survivors we can."
Act 1 — Escape from Dalimyr
After three days, the Commander has assembled only a score of legionnaires; but they can wait no longer. Aidra cannot make contact with other officers, and the Great Chorus remains eerily silent. The commander and his score of battered survivors seem to be all that is left of the Third Legion. He gives the order to withdraw — "the conquest of Dalimyr and vengeance for the Third must wait; it is our Empire that needs us now."
The strategic layer opens up: the Commander can order any Legionnaires to cross-train (switch classes) into any Basic Class. Aidra says that normally a soldier would need years of ritual preparation to become a Chorister, but given the dire situation she is willing to oversee training others in the arts of the Lexicon.
World map screen is a point-crawl, like Final Fantasy Tactics. There is a branching primary path of story battles (10–12 per Act), plus optional side battles (~6), and repeatable procedurally generated battles against Dalimyri forces for modest XP and gear rewards. Soft level cap at 10; after that, XP slows dramatically. Beginning in Act 2, Advanced classes open up and the cap expands to 20.
A desperate series of battles against Dalimyri Summer Court Hunters. In battles 5 and 6, Moonbound Dalimyri allies arrive to inexplicably aid you against the Summer Court; the Scholar theorizes this is some internal civil conflict within Dalimyr, while the Chorister says the Moonbound "sound different, somehow." Maps are large and hilly with dense groves of trees and tall grass; some begin with hidden traps.
During Part 1, you can send scavenger teams on repeatable procedurally generated battles.
Choose: follow the Scholar's advice to make a desperate dash for the Forest of Stones (a place even the brazen Summer Court fears), or the Scout's advice to travel fast and light through the Highlands.
Forest of Stones Path (7a–9a)
Claustrophobic maps cluttered with stone columns, petrified trees and spiderwebs. 7a: fight Summer Court (they turn back when you win). 8a: fight feral spirits of wood (fast, high ward, heal passively, vulnerable to fire) and stone (spiders of splintered rock, slow, high defense, bite + web immobilize). 9a: boss fight — the Spinner of Stone (huge stone spider-spirit, very slow but devastating bite, spins immobilizing webs, spawns stone spirits each turn). Dalimyri Moonsworn ride to the rescue.
Highlands Path (7b–9b)
Wide-open maps with significant altitude differences. 7b: fight Summer Court warriors and raptors. 8b: fight Summer Court warband — Lancers and Autumn Court Hosts (witness them becoming possessed). 9b: night battle — Autumn Court ambush. Every character is in concealing terrain. Hosts, raptors, assassins, and Spirits of the Hunt — great hounds with fires where their eyes should be (cause Fear, bonus accuracy at night). The Moonsworn ride in to the rescue.
The first big decision-moment. Extended dialogue with the Moonsinger and Phoenix-Knight. The Moonsinger says he can hear something awful calling from the Capital. They offer not just truce but cooperation. Do you trust them? Fighting alongside them is heterodox. But as Ehani points out, "in a desert you take what water you can find."
Accept the Deal
Big heterodox hit. Unlock Spiritbinder class. Gain two unique Dalimyri characters (spiritbinder/moonsinger and scout/phoenix-knight) plus ~6 Moonbound of various classes. Fight missions 10a and 11a.
10a — Summer Court Camp: The Drowned River must be pacified first. Battle in a cave with altitude variation. Boss is the spirit of the river — a vast water-dragon, invulnerable. Get the Moonsinger to the four altars before the dragon drowns everyone.
11a — Dash for the Bridge: Climactic fight against the Summer Court. The Chosen tries to call the River spirit but finds it slumbering. Win by getting all survivors into the bridge zone (after damaging the gate). The Moonsinger calls on the Drowning to smash the bridge behind you.
Sidequest 2a: Appease the spirits of scavenged Dalimyri weapons at a shrine. Commander must perform rituals (awkwardly and heretically). Then fight spiritbinders of all four courts who are appalled at the blasphemy.
Refuse the Deal
The Moonsworn leave (return in Act 4). All orthodox units begin the next battles with Zealous (advantage on attacks) and Heartened (+10 HP).
10b — Raid on the Shrine: Capture a spirit-bell. Deface it with lexical magic. Same map as Sidequest 2a.
11b — The Defaced Bell: Same climactic Summer Court fight, but now the Chosen calls the river dragon and you sound the defaced bell to madden it. Dragon attacks randomly, killing Dalimyri and Imperials alike. 10-turn timer before the bridge gives way.
Grindable Mission: "Foraging missions" — but the reality is you're raiding Dalimyri villages. Battlefields feature burning tents, slain civilians.
Sidequest 2b: Rescue the Scrimshander — a chorister/scrimshander and his undead are being attacked by Spring Court Dalimyri.
The Chorister's Song: Aidra requests to follow a mysterious song from the Red Fens. Optional battle against swordwraiths and crazed spirits. Unlocks follow-up battle against the Red Lord, genius loci of a major battlefield where the Second Legion were lost decades ago. The Dalimyri will report shamefacedly that the imperial dead were left to fester — vengeance for the burning of Summermount and a calculated gamble. Dangerous fight but spirit would have valuable equipment, and recovering imperial dead would be a great good [Gain Orthodoxy].
Casian's Wounding: Casian is poisoned/cursed/crippled. Sidequest to steal an artifact of the Spring Court — the Briarthorn Torc — to knit his body back together. Warning: he will not be wholly human after that. (Opens Briar Knight class.)
Act 1 Gear
Tier 1 items: the weakest in the game — salvaged Empire weapons and scavenged Dalimyri weapons. If you ally with the Moonsingers, they explain the stats are bad because "those weapons hate you"; take a heterodoxy hit to soothe the spirits of some items to upgrade them to Tier 2.
Act 2 — Navigating Shan
Enemies: Shanese rebels or imperial garrison troops, unbound goetic nightmares, a particularly bold Autumn Court warband that pursues you even after the Drowning.
Gain access to merchants where you can buy and sell goods. If too heterodox, imperials won't trade with you, but Auric and Taltasquans will trade with anyone except each other. Each side offers quests earning faction favor, unlocking new gear in shops. After enough favor, an optional capstone quest involves fighting the other merchant faction, permanently closing their shop but unlocking the Auric and Taltasquan Advanced classes.
The central thematic question of Act 2 is whether to support the Shan rebels or the Imperial governor. But this shouldn't be a caricature. The temptation develops slowly, not all at once — a carefully constructed slippery slope:
"Do you protect these Shan citizens against brutal Censorate soldiers?" → "Do you turn over this Shan citizen you just rescued when he accidentally reveals psyche abilities?" → "Do you let the Ardent teach your people some principles of psyche?" → "Do you protect him against outright arrest?" → "Do you accept his invitation to meet the organized rebels?" → "Do you help the rebels protect Shanese civilians against the governor?" → "Do you protect the rebels against a raid?" → "Do you help them attack the governor's private jail?" → "Do you help them assassinate the obviously panicked and tyrannical governor?" → "Do you help them declare outright rebellion?"
This plays out reversed if you back the empire — fighting on many of the same maps but against the rebels.
Why Back the Governor?
Psyche is genuinely dangerous — to the practitioner, to innocents, and to the Empire. Even practiced responsibly, it provides such temptations (reading memories, creating the impossible) that one can never really trust the practitioner — how do you know they aren't editing your memories?
Shan under the Dhar was bad — deeply insular and impoverished. The Dhar enjoyed impossible luxuries while the peasantry toiled in harsh conditions barely above subsistence. The Empire brought roads, grain, imperial tools, even terra cotta laborers, measurably improving quality of life — at the cost of independence, history, and cultural identity.
Pragmatism: The Governor still controls imperial resources and is in a far better position to assist you in returning to the capital than some scruffy rebels.
Act 3 — Civil War
Taiping Rebellion-style religious revivalism centered on the Queenscult and the Empress-in-Yellow, complicated by competing fleets of Turathi raiders. A savvy and unorthodox commander could ally with one fleet to obtain support against the others.
Act 3 takes place in the imperial heartland. Structured by a three-way battle between competing imperial factions and the Queenscult (which has long-dormant headless corpse-legions), complicated by Turathi raiders. All of this plays out amid chaotic magical effects and strange monsters emanating from the Capital itself.
The key split isn't heterodox/orthodox: instead there are The Obedient (who believe the correct response is to level the capital, burn and salt the ruins) and The Faithful (who believe doubting the God-King's power is heresy, and the correct response is to build defenses and wait for deliverance). Both are led by Herald-Prophets slowly going mad from exposure to the Chorus within the city.
Among this, the player inherits a band of refugees who place their faith in you to lead them out.
Enemies: rival imperial factions, Queenscultists and headless legions, Turathi raiders, possibly Auric or Taltasquan forces if you've sided hard enough with one, Brotherhood of the Fox bandits, possibly Knights-Chandler from the Monastery of the Last Word, and the first symptoms of the Unwrought.
Act 4 — The Capital
The entirety of Act 4 takes place in the imperial capital and the Forbidden Quarter, culminating in a series of battles within the Divine Palace itself.
Setting
The Eternal Empire
Inspired by Late Qing-dynasty imperial China. Once the undisputed hegemon of the region and possibly the mightiest nation anywhere. But arrogance and an obsession with ideological purity has caused it to become insular and complacent, relying more and more on the power of the God-King, transmitted through the Chorus — a dangerously singular point of failure. Now the imperial ministers look out on a world they find strange and distressing, full of vigorous younger powers with very different ways.
The core imperial provinces are rich lands centered on a pair of fertile river valleys. Stories claim the rivers were once wrathful and unpredictable, but that some ancient emperor chained the dragon-spirits of the rivers. Since then, the river spirits have been pacified: steady currents, predictable floods that enrich the floodplains, thick with fish.
In ancient times, before the coming of the Others, the region was home to the Sun-and-Moon empires. Little is known of them, but they fought in "Flower Wars" — nonlethal contests for capturing prisoners who were ritualistically sacrificed by the hundreds or thousands. A period of regular bloodshed yet surprising peace. Their wars were ritualized, their magic fed by bloody sacrifice.
After the Others came and went, half a dozen dynasties rose and fell, until the current era began some three hundred years ago with the fall of the so-called Last Dynasty, grown tyrannical and corrupt. The last empress — the Empress-in-Yellow — her name magically excised from reality. She commanded the excavation of a cyclopean city buried in the cold eastern deserts and installed strangely-proportioned mummified corpses on pallets of silk within her chambers. She communed with the dead, consorted with things from beyond the Labyrinth, demanded a hundred new concubines daily (none seen again), and most famously would behead her enemies, bind their souls to the heads for interrogation, while the headless corpses rose to march in her service.
The empress was cast down by a scholar who spoke apotheosis unto himself, becoming a living God: the God-King. Over three centuries the God-King has withdrawn increasingly into the Forbidden Quarter, a city-within-a-city, engaged in deep, decades-long contemplation of the Lexicon. The imperial ministries have played an increasingly important role. The Ministry of Rites (Templarate) forbade any esoteric traditions resembling the Empress' practices, declaring the Lexicon the only permissible practice, restricted to those of highest piety. The Ministry of Harmony (Censorate) instituted strict isolationism, eventually dispatching the Third Legion to Dalimyr — the events that begin the game.
Ministry of Rites (Templarate): One of the "Twin Ministries." Conducts exorcisms, hunts esoteric threats, oversees inquisitions to root out forbidden rituals.
Ministry of Harmony (Censorate): The other Twin Ministry. Oversees and administers the Emperor's justice. Most law enforcement is local, but the Censorate handles special cases.
Golden Zenith Concordat (Divine Houses / Senate): The aristocratic Houses that govern provinces in the God-King's name. Functions as a de facto legislative body.
10,000-League Syndicate: Mercantile body focused on overland trade. By far the most knowledgeable about foreigners and their strange magics.
Red Hand Guild: Ceramics and constructs. Produces the invaluable terra cotta constructs before the Scrimshanders can animate them. Hugely influential in military, agriculture, and industry.
Chorus of the Divine Voice: Songs and spoken lexical spells, communication first and foremost. Has a branch that assists the Legions and the Twin Ministries.
Ministry of Recordkeeping: The imperial bureaucracy — tax ledgers to travelogues. Where the Scholar class comes from.
At the beating heart of the Eternal Empire is the Lexicon — the systematic study of manipulating the universe using the written and spoken word. Lexical magic has long been studied throughout the world; traces appear in Dalimyri spiritmasks, Taltasquan runes, Auric sigilry, even Avalonian heraldry.
Compared to other traditions, the Lexicon is notable for three things: 1) it is pure, disdaining non-linguistic techniques; 2) mastery typically requires extensive study of a significant library (which raises the question: how did the Nameless Scholar come from seemingly nowhere?); 3) the returns to scale are very high — lexical magic is synergistic with itself, a single chorister is dangerous but an entire chorus operating in concert can sing down the mountains.
The Empire approaches war like a glacier: slow, even ponderous, but utterly irresistible. Claim a beachhead (often at significant cost), then spend months relentlessly fortifying it — using hundreds of choristers to sing concentric walls of seamless stone, which scrimshanders cover in overlapping wards. Meanwhile, scholars collate reams of scouting data until a small library of information exists on every opponent. Only then do the legions sally in force, using the Chorus to choreograph assaults across huge distances, crippling enemy centers of power and establishing new fortifications. Repeat until resistance is ground into dust.
However, this method has been struggling against the Dalimyri, who decline pitched battle, prefer attritional skirmishing, and live in lands that are literally alive and hostile to the empire.
The God-King's apotheosis worked, and the empire it created is genuinely, materially good for most of its people. Consider what it replaced: the Empress-in-Yellow's headless legions, the tyranny of the Last Dynasty, centuries of invasion and civil war, and before all that, kingdoms sacrificing prisoners by the thousands.
For three hundred years afterward: tame rivers, reliable harvests, terra cotta constructs doing backbreaking labor, and the Chorus ensuring no province is ever truly alone. For a peasant farmer, that's not an abstraction — it's knowing that when the flood comes wrong, someone will hear. The God-King isn't a distant tyrant to most citizens; he's the divine ancestor who made all this possible.
And the Templarate's monopoly isn't just about control — it's a genuinely held belief that words are dangerous. The Empress-in-Yellow proved that esoteric knowledge in the wrong hands produces atrocities. You don't hand a child a loaded crossbow. You don't teach the Lexicon to someone whose character hasn't been tested.
A foreign visitor's first impression is scale and order. The roads are legendary — wide, stone-paved, waystations at regular intervals with Chorus posts. The rivers are supernaturally pacified, the agriculture staggering. The terra cotta constructs are genuinely eerie — soldiers standing motionless at crossroads, laborers working fields at midnight, construction crews hauling stone in perfect wordless coordination.
And the sound. Before the Silence, the Chorus meant you could hear civilization — choristers singing in relay, carrying messages, sacred music, weather reports, all woven together. The Chorus isn't just communication; it's the empire's heartbeat. When it goes silent, it's not a technical failure. It's as if the sun went out.
The literacy divide: even mundane writing verges too close to the sacred for carelessness. A skilled calligrapher's brushwork is scrutinized not just for beauty but for spiritual purity. The written word has weight in a way that foreigners find both fascinating and claustrophobic.
The rhythm of life is deeply communal and ritualized. Morning chants from the local Chorus post. Seasonal festivals tied to river floods and harvests. Offerings at the household shrine — not groveling worship, but reverence and profound gratitude, the way you light a candle for a grandparent who built the house you live in. His portrait (stylized, sacred — no one outside the Forbidden Quarter has actually seen him) hangs in every home.
Family and hierarchy are inseparable. This isn't experienced as oppression by most people; it's experienced as belonging. You know exactly who you are and where you fit. There's a comfort in that, especially in a world full of chaotic alternatives, but it can be rigid and stultifying.
The relationship to outsiders is complicated. Syndicate merchants returning from long journeys must undergo extensive purification rituals, bordering on punitive — not because anyone thinks they've become heretics, but because the ritual marks the boundary between the civilized world and everything outside it.
Shan Prefecture: The Inverted Kingdom
A rugged land of high peaks and lush, narrow, isolated valleys. Isolated monasteries and hidden libraries, mountain villages and terrace-farms, ruled once by dreamers, artists, and ascetics. Key words: interior richness, material austerity, valley micro-cultures, feudal dream-tyranny, living archives, broken transmission, quiet mastery, opacity to outsiders, the gap between what is visible and what is real.
Shan is a figment. It is not a nation in the waking world at all, having been conquered almost sixty years ago. But even before that, there was never a nation called Shan. There were the Seventeen Valleys — each separated by passes that close for months every winter. Each developed its own lord, its own festivals, its own dialect, its own textile traditions, its own blend of tea, and crucially, its own traditions of psyche.
Psyche is the blanket term for a mystical tradition encompassing multiple techniques focused on dreams and using that understanding to affect the mind, spirit and physical world. Dreamwalkers plumb the unknown vistas of the mind's eye; some claim they can pass through the internal door into the shared dream that is the very substrate of consciousness itself.
Traditions include: dreamwalking (meditation, visiting others' dreams), thought-shaping (telepathy, incepting ideas, memetic pseudo-contagions), emotional manipulation (Knights-Ardent who suffuse themselves with a single emotion), mementology (edit/create/steal memories), mesmerism (sleep, trance, puppetry), and oneirism (channeling dream-stuff into the waking world).
The contemplatives of the Jade Falls first developed dreamwalking as a meditative practice. Traditions diverged: the seers of Burnt Ridge specialized in emotional attunement, the monks of Kherang built vast memory-palaces, the Order of the Glass Threshold practiced oneirism. And then there is Goetia — practitioners who externalize their own nightmares, leashing them, weaponizing them. A Goetic isn't channeling abstract nightmare; they're pulling out their own specific trauma and giving it a body.
The Knights of Ricaria represent a more disciplined tradition: inward-directed emotional cultivation paired with oneirism to create arms, armor, and servitors from their own thoughts. More narrow but far more reliable. A Ricarian who draws a blade of literalized resolve is exactly as formidable as their emotional self-mastery allows — no more, no less.
No one really understands where the talent for psyche comes from. The Auric magi debate geomagnetic effects, unknown minerals, or genetics refined through isolation and intermarriage. It remains an open question.
The role of the Dhar began as dream-keepers, maintaining memory-palaces containing the history, genealogy, legal precedents, and cultural traditions of their entire valley. When a Dhar died without a trained successor, it was as if a library had burned.
But they were not merely benign elders. The romantic image of wise dream masters is at least partly propaganda — and in a culture where the powerful can edit memories, that takes on a sinister meaning. History is whatever the person who can edit memories says it is. A Dhar who wanted to erase a rival family's claim didn't need soldiers — just a few nights to work.
Weaponized tele-empathy was a tool of control. An Ardent of Contentment presiding over a farming village could effortlessly keep the peasants happy. Productive. Docile. An Ardent of Awe attending the Dhar makes every audience feel like a religious experience. This invisible emotional coercion produced people who could not know whether their loyalty was their own feeling or something installed in them.
When the legions crested the first passes, they expected organized resistance. Instead, they found seventeen separate lords making seventeen separate calculations. The conquest was faster than it should have been because "Shan" had never been a unified polity. The irony: the Empire gave the Shanese a national identity by taking everything else away.
The cruelest act was the systematic execution or "re-education" of the Dhar — not the burning of physical texts but the breaking of the living archives. A generation later, the old man in the noodle shop might remember his grandmother teaching him a lullaby, but the language would be gone, and eventually so would the identity itself.
The imperial imprint is everywhere — grid-pattern streets, the Chorus post in the meditation garden, the Censorate office with its orderly files. But the terra cotta statues keep having "accidents" on the old mountain paths. The Shanese say the mountains don't like them. The Censorate suspects sabotage but can too seldom prove it.
What survives of the old traditions is fragmentary and precious. A middle-aged woman sweeping garrison floors still carries her grandmother's memory-palace — the herbal medicine wing, painstakingly taught in secret over five years of shared dreams. A young man has, locked in a room in his mind he barely remembers how to access, the combat techniques of an order of dream-knights that no longer exists.
The experience of visiting Shan is one of perpetual low-grade confusion. Everything is slightly less than you expected. The food is simple. The buildings are functional. The people are polite and opaque. But then you notice: the uncanny precision of the stonework. The herbalist who glances at you once and knows exactly what's wrong. The carver whose pieces reappear in your dreams for weeks. You get the persistent, unsettling sense that the real Shan is happening somewhere you can't see.
The monasteries are among the most disappointing buildings in the world. Bare rooms. No ornamentation. Rush mats on stone floors. The soldiers laughed. Neither understood what they were looking at. The monks had no need to enrich their surroundings; their attention was invested in the interior world.
Before the conquest, the Dhar kept their valleys' psyche traditions isolated. A unified dream-space would have threatened every lord's monopoly. It took the destruction of the Dhar before the Shanese, groping in shared grief, stumbled into something none of them had known was there.
Did the Silver City predate them? Was it always waiting? Or did the Shanese build it together without realizing, their shared grief crystallizing into something none of them knew they were making? Or has it come from elsewhere, some strange memetic complex moving mind-to-mind for its own alien reasons? None can say.
But it is there now: vast and tarnished, intricate and inconstant but real. Its architecture borrows from all seventeen valleys but also from altogether different places, even strange architectures that seem like nothing made by men — impossibly inverted towers crowned with mother-of-pearl parapets.
Every week, another Shanese learns the secret of how to walk to the Silver City while sleeping. And in that strange place, they speak to each other. For the first time in their history, the Shanese have a commons. The fire of rebellion is growing in the Silver City, and when it reaches the waking world, it will arrive in every valley at once. By day you may be a shopkeeper, a soldier, an obedient citizen. But by night you are princes-in-exile, walking tarnished silver streets. The Empire can burn the scrolls and execute the masters, but it cannot censor a dream.
Dalimyr: Wardens of the Labyrinth
Taking loose inspiration from medieval and renaissance Ireland.
In the west, where the Others kept their gilded palaces, the land is dotted with mazes — entrances to the Labyrinth, passages between worlds. After the Great Revolt the rebels burned them, but the mazes returned. Even salted earth sprouted gnarled thornbushes that grew into thick walls shielding twisting paths. A few brave tribes — the Dalimyri — buried the entrances as best they could and set themselves to guard them.
Left untended, these barrow-mazes disgorge otherworldly things each year — goblins, hobs, fae hounds, nameless tangles of malevolence. The Dalimyri sought other allies: four hunters brought the Great Spirits of the Seasons to bay, forming the Seasonal Courts. Every adult Dalimyr swears to one: Summer (passion, idealism, warfare), Autumn (fear, sorcery, mystery), Winter (necessity, pragmatism, the will to survive), Spring (healing, nurturing, hope).
Dalimyr lacks iron and steel but has wildlife in abundance. Most warriors ride into battle (horses, Terror Birds, Aurochs, Greatboars, even Gryphs). Most form special bonds with hunting animals — Sea-Wolves, Sandhounds, Ambush Drakes, Bloodhawks. Masks are the most visible cultural symbol; it is shameful to show one's naked visage except to closest family. Spirits recognize masks, not faces — so inherited masks carry their own web of alliances, favors, and enemies.
The Auric League: A Symphony of Minds
Art deco mercantile maritime magocratic Venice, with mandatory wizard school attendance for all citizens.
Beneath chalcedony bridges arching between glass-wrapped towers, the city of Iridassa breathes. Its canals hum with the songs of tattooed windcallers propelling living coral ships through a harbor choked with wavefarms and a thousand kinds of vessel. The sky is busy with airborne skiffs. Awakened crocodiles argue with sahuagin diplomats over spiced coffee; blink dog bards recite epic poetry to rapt children in the shadow of a storm-cage — a lattice of starlight bleeding energy from a caged typhoon to power the city's million lights.
The Flint Islands were perpetually storm-wracked, sweltering lands with sandy soil and barely any fresh water. A group of exiled wizards chose them. They transmuted mud to stone, instantiated walls from raw magic, set bonfires to evaporate seawater. Then they made their pivotal decision: the Scholarum Universalis — teaching the basics of magic to everyone.
Within a generation, every third farmer could Move Earth or Create Bonfires. Productivity skyrocketed. The lessons: magic is the road to prosperity, education is the road to magic, and minds are sacred. If minds are sacred, then the more diverse kinds of minds the better — hence Awakening and Uplift of animals (dolphin wizards, blink dog storytellers, crocodile priests, owl librarians).
Today the Flint Islands are a federated republic that functions as a magocracy, social status determined by magical ability. Cities of gleaming glass spires, artificial islands of livecoral, jasper-plated war-frigates. In the lower wards, nonmagical dockworkers labor beneath the Skyways' shadow — the League's creed that all minds are sacred has a way of faltering where gold outshines ideals.
Spell-Legionnaires: Elite phalanx-style units bristling with overlapping wards and enchantments. Fight one-handed with a weapon and open offhand for spellcasting, or bare-handed with cantrips. Shields are usually magical; physical shields interfere with spellslinging. Their insignia is a Celtic-knot representing the knotting together of many lives. "No such thing as an ex-Legionnaire."
Marines: The scalpel to the Legion's fist. Fast, precise — aerial or underwater insertion, sabotage, ambush, assassination. Famous for flickerskin cloaks (constant color-shifting camouflage). Magic tends toward utility: amphibious breathing, featherfall, silence, pass without trace.
Navy Infantry: Lightly-armored Fusiliers with "Matchstick" battle-staves providing mid-range fire support; more defensive Tercios with firepikes; and heavily armored Grenadiers with blade, shield, and magical munitions (flashbangs, darkness grenades, psychoactive terror-bombs, flesh-to-stone grenades).
The Taltasqua Hegemony: Butchers of the God-Beast
Imagine if the Aztecs were founded by Knights Templar and now they keep the Tarrasque chained up in their basement.
An immortal, impossibly destructive beast was lured into a canyon, impaled by thirteen Immovable Harpoons at its acupuncture meridians, each chained to the canyon walls. The Beast cannot die, but must be bled every day lest it recover enough to tear free. A fortress was built, then a city, then a hegemonic power — all sustained by the endless harvest of a captive god.
The city's unique problems: cannibalistic ghouls wanting to feed on the Godbeast but unable to control the mutations. People who die in the city often rise as uncontrolled undead. Morticians are special forces; so are midwives. And the blood-locusts — flies that have fed on Tarrasque blood for generations become vicious, capable of draining a horse dry in minutes.
The honor culture: any insult can and must be repaid with violence. Duels are common, always to blood, often to death. But dueling cultures create extraordinarily polite people. Think the antebellum south: monstrous violence paired with genteel charm.
Founded by orders of noble paladins, now governed by their descendants — decadent noble houses made nearly immortal by consuming regenerative Tarrasque flesh. Berserkers painted in transmutative blood walk alongside industrial alchemists. A vibrant, crimson jungle grows in a parched desert, fueled by godsblood. The Tarrasque is an industrial revolution embodied in the form of a howling beast.
Outsiders fear the Berserkers, but Taltasquans fear the Blackbloods. Specialized alchemists deploying nightmarish weapons: concoctions that heal or enrage allies far beyond human limits, and assail enemies with explosives, corrosives, and stranger weapons that paralyze, madden, or mutate.
"We kill monsters, lad. The Iridassans make monsters, in Avalon they worship them, but we kill the monsters, no matter what it takes." — Lance-Captain Jaren Tressyn, Crimson Guard
"The Taltasquans love to boast of their monster-fighting. But they should remember, when fighting monsters the greatest danger isn't failure — it's becoming one." — Auric merchant, speaking anonymously
Weapons: Breath of the Beast (modified Tarrasque blood mist causing rapid uncontrolled mutations), Alkahest naptha, liquid rage, hallucinogenic deliriants, nerve agents, glasslung, and more. Delivery: grenadoes, censors, bombards, landmines, fog-cannons.
Culture of enhancement: Dancers on skitterspeed, marksmen using sharpeye drops, singers on Mellif, courtesans dosing themselves with feverwine. Not everyone is always on something, but everyone who can afford it will use something.
Titangrafts: Carefully selected tarrasqueflesh that remains partially alive, coaxed to meld with a living body. Prosthetics or augmentations, but with side effects — increased aggression, superior healing, disturbing dreams, and sometimes uncontrolled mutation or psychosis.
The Turathi Isles
A loose mashup of Polynesian and Maori influences paired with the medieval Norse.
Black longships with iron-sheathed hulls drawn by chained sea beasts, armed with incendiary hwachas launching a hundred three-foot arrows tipped in burning glass within seconds. Behind them, flotillas of narrow, sleek heartwood war canoes carry raiding parties armored in mystic tattoos and armed with salted iron and volcanic glass.
Tropical volcanic islands, swallowed by the sea after cataclysmic eruption. A land of rainbow-plumed serpents haunting lush jungles, cities of wrought iron and stained glass in the shadows of the volcano gods. Practice magic derived from the Lexicon, albeit with nearly a millennium of cultural drift. Masters of pact-making and pyromancy. Complete with a Varangian Guard analogue: a company of famous mercenaries employed as elite shock troops.
Aesthetic: Polynesian, Norse, with a touch of Gothic stained glass and wrought iron. A seaborne culture (almost) equally happy to raid or trade. Cities of iron and basalt, stained-glass towers rising like blades in the shadows of the volcanos.