WrenMen - Making Halflings Interesting?

To me anyway.

This is my addressing Halflings for Eldritch Foundry, essentially by making them a genetically-engineered sub-species created to inhabit Rama-style generation craft and explore deep space.

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HOMON

The Wren, small, brown, unassuming and rather rotund, still sings with a loud and imperious voice, drowning out the calls of other birds. “Little King”; so came the name from hedge-stepping country folk.

So “Wren-Men” is a better phrase for the race. “Homon” is simply a corruption; “Somon” refers to the single names borne by standard humans, but “Homon” doesn’t really mean anything except ‘Half-Men’. WrenMen do not have half a name and they are not a part or reduction of anything.

Some other terms are ”Halflings”, “Hobbits” and the oldest word; “Zeegees”; its origin unknown.

But “Homon” is simple and “Homon” has stuck.

The WrenMen look just like classic Humans, half the height, a little wider by proportion, and for some sub-groups, with broad, thick-soled dexterous feet. Other than that they could easily be mistaken for a Somon child or a sport of nature.  As if they were only half a step from each other.

BIOLOGY

In almost every case other than their size, Wrenmen are a “superior” race.

A brief list of problems they don’t have;

Cancer, dementia, insomnia, schizophrenia, lung infections, damaged tendons, concussion, depression, torn muscles, hysteria, hypnosis, arthritis, dizziness, hallucination, mutation, superstition (except for their Ghost Festivals), Alzheimer’s, poor spines, heart disease and post-traumatic stress.

Bones and muscles retain their strength and flexibility even without use. (They can dance their way out of prison after some time in the clink). They tan in minutes, skin colour shifting to the relative level of light. They can live on very little, infesting marginal environments, in which Somon would starve. They live as long as Somon, but excellent health (“And a good attitude ^_^”) seems to make it count for more. They breed true. A Homon parent always produced Homon young.

And they are fiendishly, frustratingly lucky, surviving disasters or impossible dangers with unnerving glibness, all while remaining friendly and even-tempered to the point of patrician dullness.

In short, for anyone, but ­­especially for standard humans, Wrenmen are some of the most agonizingly frustrating and irritating beings its is possible to encounter.

"It is fortunate indeed for Somon that out greatest competitor is, not only deeply agreeable, but conveniently half the size. If they were of equal mass we would be enslaved within a decade. Or, what might be worse, simply managed." - Vosis Fail, excommunicated Sophont of Yga.

THE HOMON STATE OF MIND.

Homon as a group, hew closely to a mean, with less diversity of thought and action than in Somon culture. They are practical, sensible and agreeable, sometimes to the point of absolute boiling insanity.

It's been remarked that if their house was on fire and the vote was split on whether to leave, a Homon would simply stand in the doorway and let half of their body char to ash. They almost always think the 'middle way' is best, and because their communities are so uniform, the power of the majority can take on a terrifying aspect.

While they are certainly friendly and reasonable, they are hugely intolerant of anyone who doesn't seem to care about, the things they do.

Anyone absorbed in the mind, 'theory' or abstract thought is “a queer fellow”.

Anyone with a point of view outside the mean is “a bit odd”, even if they happen to be right.

Homon, especially in a group, will systemically deny, rationalise and ignore these flaws. All Homon know they are a tolerant and reasonable people. THEY KNOW IT TO BE TRUE.

They grasp detail and process relating to people, (as opposed to Deoth) but they have real difficulty with things that have no immediate or obvious utility. If half a society were in favour of banning slavery, and the other half for it, the Homon would simply vote for some slavery, some of the time, and be entirely morally secure in their choice. Anyone distant, disagreeable or 'other’ will be labelled “haughty” or “high” and quietly and ruthlessly ostracised.

Living with Homon can resemble being crushed slowly to death by a fat man. The enormous intensity, intimacy and uniformity of Homon culture is the prime creator Homon adventurers.  If you cannot fit in, you have to get out out out.

Their strange luck, knack for survival, uniformity and ease of aging means they lack 'depth'. (In the opinion of non-Homon.) They rarely experience or feel tragedy.  They rarely hit bottom.  And so, because they never crash and burn, or fall apart, they rarely have crises or dramatic moments of growth and change.

The Homon mind-state is alleged (by non-Homon) to make them unsuitable for certain kinds of magics, especially those of a dark, dreamlike or entropic aspect. (Though any Homon would claim that those are simply ridiculous and unreliable methods anyway.)

The only way which they could be considered 'fey', is that, for them, large matters are invariably treated lightly, and small matters are of great importance. So that death, love, fire and disaster are looked over as small things, but knives or pistols might be drawn,(and have been), for instance, over the matter of a missing spoon.

HOMON ADVENTURERS

Homon are one of the few prople to become adventurers to learn how not to get along with people. Or at least how to respect the privacy and inwardness of others without frustration or contempt.  To learn that the study and comprehension of abstracts can sometimes be, not only useful, but meaningful, even if it is not used!  And to, eventually, with great difficulty, learn that the middle path is not always the best path That sometimes, occasionally, VERY OCCASIONALLY, the right thing might be a very slightly extreme choice.

HOMON POPULATIONS

Homon LIVE roughly four patterns; the 'Cantons', large settled groups whre they make their own law, the small ghettoes in the Grey Cities, the marginal travelling (and criminal) communities and the strange 'wild' Homon, who live on the borders of the Waste, or even in the Waste itself (if they are even real).

THE CANTONS

Small sub-nations within the spheres of larger cities, or, in the Mountains of Reality, in the more distant valleys of a Gloom Queens rule.

Here, in their own micro-nations, the Homon are at their most Homon-esque. They run agricultural communities with ruthless efficiency and the farm owners, or Squires, spend every single spare copper on enormous hats, clothes, parties, interior design, cooking and siege equipment.

They are insanely socially competitive, obsessed with out-doing their neighbour, and love splendifereous displays; big hats, parties, games, balls, more parties, parliaments, meetings, guilds, markets and simply any or every chance they can get to both interact with, subtly judge and painfully outdo their immediate social group.

This is the society that many Homon adventurers are trying very hard to escape.

The Cantons are well-defended and several send treaty-troops to their larger parent polities. These rarely serve directly along their larger allies but the Homon very adept at logistics and the handing and operation of siege equipment. Their troops have marvellous esprit-de-corps and magnificent hats. Their generals are dumb as muck; part-time enthusiasts bloated on delusion and self-importance, but once they are distracted with a pie, the relatively high quality of Homon troops, training and logistics comes into play.

And of course they have cavalry.

There is nothing a Homon will not ride, or at least try to ride.  Every Canton has a species which they have dedicated to mastering.  Depending on the place you may see Homon riding Goats, Sheep, MegaDogs, Snails, Pigs, Donkeys, Giant Tortoises, Huge Turkeys, Miniphants, Hippos or Weird Lizard Things.

THE GHETTOES

When WrenMen make it to 'the big city' they become politicians, socialites, scribes, sewer-workers, journalists, teachers, thieves, gangsters, assassins, restaurant owners and celebrity chefs.

They love to run major cultural institutions, but it can be very, very bad to have two two news-sheets, theatres, operas etc, and similar prestige, in the same city, both run by Homon.

They will go to war.

On the positive side, this does result in a brief cultural incandescence as each organisation drives the other to ever-greater heights of excellence and hard work.

On the down side are whispering campaigns, threats, violence, murder, whispering campaigns and opportunistic demonic summoning.

THE MARGINS

Guns, goats, bare-knuckle boxing and highway crimes.

Those who cannot get along in the Cantons, and have been banned from the cities, travel the highways and waterways of Blackwater;, a dangerous business at the best of times, considering the wars, monsters, waste incursions, tyrannical rulers and unstable politics of that realm.

They move in groups, ranging from a single family to a trail of thirty, as waggon trains or in long river-boats.

These friendly travelling groups of Homon are popularly assumed to be thieves and charlatans which, to be fair, is true a meaningful percentage of the time, though in most cases they limit themselves to petty theft, confidence scams and the more useful forms of smuggling.

More dangerous are the river pirates, goat-bandits and highwaymen who prey on honest trade. The Mountains of Reality are infested with outlaw tribes of Goat Riding Halfling thuggees who ride near-naked except for vast cloaks of sheepskin and who spend all their ill-gotten gains perfecting the breeding of bigger and bigger goats. Bantito legends say that the greatest of these rievers have, through deep communion, perfected the power to psychically control goats.

THE WILD

Strongly-denied rumour speaks of wild and feral Halflings in the Waste. Groups of “wild” WrenMen living naked in vast warrens.

The addled tales of memory-stripped travellers describe squirming piles in the warm darkness.

Homon sniffing each others musk and running out in starving crowds to pull down prey. Huge balls of flesh, composed of hundreds of Homon piled together a linked arm-to-arm, rolling over the land chasing and collapsing on travellers to devour them.

Though these are almost certainly mere figments of the imagination, drug visions, deceptions, delusions or snares of Yggsrathaal,

THE GHOSTS

Homon are secretly symbionts.

WrenMen themselves call it their ‘ghost', ‘belly ghost’ or ‘stomach spirit’, and, the common people see it as a semi-spiritual thing.

Inside their body, and integrated with their flesh, is a tissue of pale filaments, like torn translucent silk, wadded up sheets of thin wet paper, a crushed pale rose, or an albino octopus held in a fist. It does look a lot like the common conception of a ghost.

This is a psychic, non predatory, largely sessile and ethereal extradimensional creature. A peaceful, vulnerable organism that needs an anchor to survive. If allowed to grow within a host it can feed off their bodily sustenance (one of the reasons Homon like to eat so much).

If allowed to integrate, the ghost gives subtle benefits.

Lightness – Ghost-holders about ten percent lighter than they should be, relative to mass.  This makes Homon surprisingly supple, bouncy and agile, despite their plumpness.  If they die of natural causes, the corpse of a Homon will occasionally float up into the night sky. (The ghost going home).

Memory - The ghost, though somewhat intelligent, has almost no personality of its own. Instead, as a psychic creature, it continually and intimately reads the mind of its host and keeps a nearly-complete para-personality as a kind of living simulation. If the host suffers memory or personality loss, the ghost can 're-load' lost memories and even run the whole body in a dreamlike state.

The ghost and the host sleep at staggered interval, one of them is usually awake at any particular time, making them hard to surprise, even when ‘asleep’.

 They even share and swap dreams. Halflings can have up to three sets of dreams inside them; their own, the ghosts, and a marginal realm in which the two meet.

This makes it very hard for the Children of Yggsrathaal to prey on Homon. Name-Thieves are frustrated, (Homon can sometimes 're-grow' names in a way incredibly rare for other creatures).

Memory-Eaters find the memories replaced and Dream-Stalkers are utterly confused.

Dimensional Awareness – The belly ghost gives Homon a soft para-sense for extradimensional things manifesting as a dull intuition, or a 'queer feeling’. They are rarely totally surprised by the cascading otherness of dimensional incursions and it is hard for them to get lost in non-Euclidian space.

Magical Resistance – The ghost can split the effect of the more deadly spells, confusing the precise coding such murderous thaumaturgy requires by essentially having multiple identities in the same body.

GHOST CULTURE

Most take the WrenMens references to 'my friend', 'my own ghost' or ‘the stomach spirit, and their weird giggling and belly rubs, as just an odd cultural affectation.

Even if the 'ghost' itself is seen, during moments of trauma, or due to strange magics, well, it looks like.. a ghost, exactly the vague kind of ethereal spirit that many cultures believe rests inside mortal flesh.

Ghost Festivals are seen across all Homon cultures. A rare, rather spiritual, and somewhat spooky party-day with a great deal of eating and drinking, parades and dances with ghost puppets and ghost-flags, Homon dressed as ghosts, and then private parties behind closed doors late at night where Homon commune with their own ghosts.

Its possible to pass or swap the ghost between Homon, which allows them to share or exchange memories and personalities with each other.

Its also possibly for an old ghost to inadvertently enter a young body. In theory the new personality should rapidly overwrite the old memories as the child develops. But in practice they can guide the development of the mind to produce particular patterns of thought and knowledge.

These are all things that civilised Homon will avoid at all costs, considering them “savage” or, worse, “very regrettable”.

No such strictures prevent ‘Wild’ Homon (if they are real), or criminals on the margins from using the ghost to gain skills, knowledge and education from each other, or to produce ‘hive minds’ of tightly bound ultra-competent beings.

Don't Penetrate me Bro - Vivimancy for methuser69

(Brendan is doing ANOTHER survey.

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Anyway...

Remember those request posts frooooom, six months ago now?

You ¬don’t?

Well there was one left!

…………………………………….

"methuser69

Hey I don't know the right place to ask this and it feels weird to make requests, but since you asked I'm gonna do it.

I'm running an Ben Laurence's Submerged Spire of Sarpedon the Shaper, an adventure in which the characters visit the lair of a wizard studying vivimantic arts. He's used this place to conduct biological experiments in creating new life forms. He seems to me like the sort of guy to brave the veins to further his research. I think he would have been keenly interested in atomic bees, particularly the part where their royal jelly can breed new species without divine consent. I'm thinking there is still a living hive in here, as the bees have a long half life.

Would it be crazy to ask what might the players find in his decaying lab notebook, given that he wanted to cultivate and experiment with the jelly? I'm thinking the bees are still alive as they have long half lives. I'd like to think he succeeded in some form or another but he's long dead now. Maybe some more information about the honey would be cool too.

If you think this is lame feel free to ignore it. Looking forward to Silent Titans!"

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Vivimancy is tricky for me as I already put a huge amount of my limited supply of Bio-Horror into some parts of Silent Titans.

(Available now! Link to the right!)

As well as that, Arnold and Scrap are the true experts at making weird shit out of living stuff. I feel out of my element.

Biological horror is interesting because it’s all stuff that's inside us or in the world, and which powers everything, but it freaks us out when we witness it directly.

So our safety and sanity as biological organisms is based on a kind of duality in which it’s important that we are not fully aware of our existence as biological organisms. We are this magical other thing, and so long as we believe that, we are safe. And a lot of ‘unnatural’ bio-horror is about carefully stripping back this illusion.

Many of these programmed-in aversions make immediate intuitive evolutionary sense;

- Don't want our skin penetrated or for things to lay eggs in us. Pretty simple as any organism that does want to have its skin penetrated and to have other species lay eggs in it is probably not gonna survive very long. So some deep aversion/desire to personal and bodily integrity would seem to go right along with the whole concept of individually-distinct beings.

(Brief aside, I can't begin to express how good it is to be a mammal with hands. I've seen photos of field and forest beasts just infested to fuck with all kinds of nits, mites and burrowing creatures and they disturb the hell out of me. Just being able to reach and scratch any part of my body, and to pull a bug off me if it’s trying to get in, is indescribably wonderful.)

(Would things be different underwater? There's already a much more conductive medium between everything. What would be horrific for an evolved underwater species?)

- Don't want decay or poop on us. Again, this makes perfect sense for a physically coherent entity.

But what if poop wasn’t dangerous. And we already have some bacteria inside us working their stuff, so what if we extended that to say a being could take advantage of its bacteriological environment in a more complete way, say what if its immune system could re-fit bacteria as bacteriophages or make them extra cells that could rove the body doing useful things, so, the more poop and decay the better?


- Don't want body parts to be too independent or alive. No living severed limbs, no squirming organs, intelligent cancers or eyes or mouths opening on our bodies and seeing for themselves.


- Multiplication, mutation, pattern shifting. This is a really interesting horror element because depending on how you look in it, the mutant can be monstrous or divine. A lot of magical, super-good, or at least super-great Gods often have extra stuff, like the hyper-signalling arms of some Hindu sculpture, various different heads and eyes, horns etc.

And transiting between forms also, werewolves and shapechangers, these are numinous powers that can belong to a god or a monster equally, it depends on the cultural music around them.

Still, in modernish times, there is a reasonably strong binary between the 'cool' mutant and the monster, which we can see pretty easily with the X-Men. 'Good' or godlike mutants tend to have idealised human forms and one extra or other-signifying thing. The otherness acts as a kind of counterpoint to their otherwise perfection.

Bad monsters and mutants have too much, the coherency of the human form is distorted beyond a certain point, and that point is certainly somewhat relative culturally.

And the good god team can have one pure counterpoint character, like the X-Men have Beast, and the Bad god team can have one 'pure' (physically) character, like Magneto is very purely human and the highest status character in his group. Lucifer, when seen in a group of demons or dukes of hell, it seems to me is often very pure and near-angelic compared to them. (Though I don't know if this is true in the data, it may be merely a cultural seeming).

- Sex/Pregnancy/Gender, it’s hard to know how much of this is generally mammalian, how much apelike, how much homo-sapiens and how much specific human culture. Certainly taboos around sex, pregnancy and gender always feel ancient, absolute and deeply real and old, like core values. And the enormous strength of those taboos and feelings does strongly suggest deep roots. But they can be pretty damn different in the details.



(What would ant body-horror be like? What would horror be like if you just don't have a strong sense of individual identity, if you feel subsumed in a crowd always so that it is you and you are it?)


I should probably try to bring this back to some kind of point.









What would non-divine-consent species be like?

Assuming that for 'Divine Consent' in this case we simply assume that our deepest intuitions about how things should be and what is right count for 'divine order' and not the alternate, (but interesting to think about) path of just reading the main Abrahamic books and then creating species based on the moral laws and divine assumptions in there, >as read< that is, textually accurate species. Which might be something like a hyper-version of the medieval legendarium where every animal is both a being and a moral lesson and a sermon.

(There are other physical/biological laws where it’s quite hard to find a level of subversion which feels horrific rather than just odd, and pseudo works rather than just self-evidently crashing reality. I guess that's why natural laws are natural laws. And also most monsters and science fiction terrors have heavily colonised and exploited already.)




SUBVERT PREGNANCY - Alien already did this one way by forcibly implanting the egg.

Elves did it the other way by stealing the baby.

Could make even-darker elves that steal the baby from inside the womb and the mother gives birth to something impossible like a flower child.

Got It - An animal where the creature is unintelligent, but the fetus is self-aware, but becomes dumber as it ages.

So the pregnant version is extremely dangerous and smart, because it borrows the intelligence of the fetus. For maximum horrors have it look a little humanoid, like Homo Erectus or something, but be mute and thoughtless, then gradually get smarter and smarter as the fetus grows, so it learns to talk. Then you have a horror-movie moment when the mute beast exhibits thoughts it should not have.



SUBVERT INTERPENETRATION - Like maybe a friendly little Aye-Aye except it has a mosquito face. Just creeps up on you in the night, sits in the curl of your hand and dives its face into the artery of your wrist?

But that doesn't seem impossible or disturbing enough.

Maybe it can draw more blood out of you than you actually have inside you?

I think I got it. It’s a little black Aye-Aye with a mosquito face, mild hypnotic powers and a narcotic injection. But its little proboscis is too slender and fine to get easily through human skin. So it creeps up your body, gently opens its mouth with its little monkey hands, leans in and drives its proboscis into your tongue. Then it draws moisture from your sinuses and brain, maybe its drinking your neural transmitters. Your face dries out and your brain shrinks and dies in your head. Your eyes shrivel to raisins in your face. The little monkey fattens and thickens, becoming more shiny like a fat trick, but still clinging to your face like a beard with its head inside your gawping mouth. Its narcotic sends you into a dreamy slumber and the slow death of your brain is interpreted as euphoria so your face and head bear a stretched goofy grin on their dried out and sunken-in features and that's how they find you. If they shake your head your brain can be heard rattling around inside.

This isn't that great. Honestly anything where you are dealing with penetrating the body ends up reading like a really sketchy Gridr profile;

- You'll get penetrated, and it will be unusually messy.
- You'll get penetrated, but you'll be into it.
- You'll get penetrated, and I'll leave eggs in you, and you will love the eggs.
- You'll get penetrated, and they you will penetrate, and then die.





SUBVERTING SINGULARITY - Disturbing Colony Apes. Like an ape where, if you cut off a piece of it, that part still lives and will seek revenge, and will find other animals and attach itself to them, growing into them and gradually taking over their bodies.

No that's pretty much the Thing.




SUBVERTING INFECTION - A Disease Dog, like a pallid pink caniform with skin and flesh like the goo of a petri dish, made specifically to be easy to penetrate and open to every kind of infection. And it just keeps getting more and more infected with every single thing it comes into contact with, and gradually grows bigger and bigger and bigger until its huge, bear-sized, encrusted with these competing colonies of fungus and disease and they keep cracking open and its disturbing pink flesh still shows underneath, warm and easy to slip your hand into. And everywhere it goes it picks up and spreads diseases.







AUTO-CANNIBALISATION - A species can't just be an auto-cannibal. It can't get more energy out of eating its own kind that it puts into generating its own kind, or it would just feed on itself and become everything.

So a purple monkey breed that, when it eats another purple monkey, gets waaay more calories than you would ever need to grow and raise a batch of new purple monkeys. So the number just keeps growing. They eat everything else but they eat each other too, and when they do that, you get insane numbers of new ones.

So you have to either exterminate them all or make them religious figures that must be appeased, maybe you need to make sure the purple monkeys are fed the most tempting foods and make that a priority, or they will eat each other, hyper-breed and become EVERYTHING.



LAMARKIAN TIGERS - honestly Arnold did a Tiger post a long time ago so maybe just read that one.

But if you did have a species that predated on man and did evolve in a Lamarkian way, every problem it had to solve to get its prey would affect its young, so they would become, what? beautiful half-men? Hot tiger vampire babes who could pick locks? Can they do taxes as well? Run an empire? Or do they stay at animal-level intelligence but have only these specific skills gained from Lamarkian evolution? (He even did a book of tigers)



REASONABLE BIRDS - Something like Ravens or Crows, but they have a higher I.Q. than humans by quite a way, but only bird bodies and bird desires. So they can solve any abstract problem for humans in return for food and shelter. And, they collectively won't let human society evolve into anything that might threaten them of their species/environment. So effectively any kingdom or polity that works with them is effectively spreading a Reasonable Bird-Biome.

Buut, other than that, they don't really care what we do. And their needs and desires don't intersect with or even conflict greatly with ours, so human society goes on. We are technically a subservient client species, but it barely seems to make any negative difference to our lives, since we still go after and get roughly the same things as usual in roughly the same proportions.

This is like an alien encounter story of a kind rarely told, where we meet aliens and we don't instantly supermurder each other, and we don't immediately Federate up and work together, instead, we just don't have much to say to each other.

We know they are intelligent and self-aware, and they know we are intelligent and self-aware. We are not hugely in conflict. Our desire patterns and goals are just so utterly different that they barely even seem ridiculous to each other.

There are so many animal species that live around each other, and seem to recognise each other, but don't really care or interact. Where are the stories about the mute indifference of nature?

The Eldritch Foundry Kickstarter is Live

Well, these guys I have been building a small reality for are going live with the Kickstarter for the company today.

If you like Minis, 3D Printing, D&D, ooooor just looking at Kickstarters?

A big link to that is HERE, 

or click the tentacle;

I am a very, very small part of this, you can see the main cast list below;

Hey, they even made a movie;

(which I can't find a way to embed here but HERE is a link)

Or Click the lady below

(By Shoof Creative Video)

Future of the company depends a lot on what happens in the first few days of the Kickstarter so you are in the rare position of deciding if a world lives or dies.

And if you have read this far, here is another recently completed small fragment.

Morningspain

From the Blackwater map,
eventually this will be live online and every location will be clickable

High, high up in the centre of the Mountains of Reality, like the hub of a savage wheel, lies the plunging steep-sided valley of Morningspain.

You could pour a nation into it and there would still be room for more.

Morningspain is oriented perfectly to catch the rising and setting sun. The first rays of morning strike a gigantic blue-white glacier which hangs at the valleys upper end like a frozen tsunami. This burns gold-white and the reflected light rolls back into the terraced valley sides. These have been built up over thousands of years of human effort, its great slopes divided into seemingly endless line upon line until it feels as if the place were a figment of the imagination, almost unreal.

From the glacier comes a surging river of clear, cold water, which winds the valleys floor, and forms a lake. From the lake rises a palace of shifting glass, which changes size, form and location every day, so that it is never the same twice. This is the House of Fog, embassy and centre for the Fey Aeth of the Mountains

Against this shifting spire, rising up from the valley floor but far below its teetering sides, is a city-sized plug of black eroded stone. On this stone is the City of Morningspain, seat of the Beodomor, First among Prerogatives, Queen-of-Queens, Mistress of the Mountains of Reality. From here, the Mountains are governed and the future is seen.

Morningspain is old. Its basal architecture is neolithic, made of huge monolothic blocks worked to precise angles and held together purely by gravity. The streets are made up of the bases of ancient temples and the opened crypts of prehistoric monuments. Over this and rising from its compressed age, are the towers of the city itself, the Fairytale 'High Style' of the Queendoms brought to its finest pitch. Flags and pennants flutter in the breeze. It seems like an airy dream grown from bloodstained ancient stone. At the centre is the palace, and at the centre of that is the Beodomor herself.

Morningspain is quiet all of the night, cold and silent with frost. This place is so high up that it takes visitors from the Cities days to acclimatise. Knights moving in the dark must plan in advance, purchasing rare oils so that their armour will not squeal. The city can contain many Queens, and waking even a minor Queen can be a tragic mistake. She may have been in the middle of a vital and important dream. And if anyone should wake the Beodomor by mistake, whose dreams can rule the fate of whole nations...

That would be very, very bad.

THE MORNINGSNIGHT

In Morningspain the day officially and legally begins whenever the Beodomor wakes up. Until then, it is still 'last night'. The time between dawn and the Queens waking is called the 'Morningsnight’, a strange and ethereal time in Morninspain. Everyone must remain silent and still, only quiet business may be transacted and only nightly things be done. It is customary to go about carrying a lantern to indicate that you are aware of, and recognising the Morningsnight.

As soon as the Beodomor wakes, a golden flag (with actual gold thread, it's quite heavy) is raised over her palace. Then, all over the city, more flags of many colours are raised. The city bursts into activity and sound, the Morningsnight has ended and True day begins.

Should the Beodomor die tragically in the night, the Morningsnight lasts until a new Beodomor both sleeps and wakes. And the Morningsnight seems to affect magical qualities. Thaumaturgic effects usually functional only at night will also function in the Morningsnight. (Magical experimentation in this time and place is strongly frowned upon.)

After the waking of the Beodomor comes the Breakfast of Doom, one of the most important state occasions in the whole of the Mountains of Reality. The Beodomor eats breakfast and, as her dreams are still fresh in her mind, consults with her advisors, in particular, the High Druid and the Minister of Dreams. Here she may ask for advice, give information and issue orders intended to counter the terrible things she has seen in her prophetic nightmares.

Anyone can be called to the Breakfast of Doom. Local or foreigner, high or low, whomever the Beodomor calls for must come. If she has seen you in her dreams, she will know you.

Since the lamentable reign of Mad Queen Sisss, the Beodomor is not quite the whole of the State. Before she orders anyone killed, she is expected to at least consult with the Minister of Dreams, who will offer a cool-down period. There are legal courts of dream analysis in the Ministry to which people can appeal and offer a different context or interpretation of the Queens dream.

Traditionalists hate all this - for them the Beodomor is Law, and Law is her. They don't even like Mad Queen Sisss being referred to as mad, instead they call her 'Poor Queen Sisss'. In particular, the Knights of the Pale Feather, who also attend the Beodomor, are utterly fanatical to obedience of her exact words, and will do whatever she says, regardless of the "law", apparent sanity and even poor grammar on her part.

  

POPULATION

All advise politeness on the streets of Morningspain, and this is wise. There are probably more Knights than peasants moving around. Morningspain is a political city, a capital and the centre of a great empire of weeping Queens. Many of the people there are there for political and feudal reasons. Some as part of the Beodomors court, or to petition her or seek her favour.

Here also stands the Ministry of Dreams, a bureaucratic organ of state which exists to assist the Beodmor, and every Gloom-Queen, in the recording, comprehension and actioning of their dreams. Here are the chambers of the High Druid. Fey and other Aeth visit, or reside in the House of Fog. The Lords of the Beothoborg keep a nominal ambassador here, as do the Grey Cities, Declension in particular.

Along with these come the courts of any visiting sub-Queens, from those who rule whole quasi-nations of their own to the smallest Queen, mistress of a handful of Yak herders. The Beodomor may call on any of them, and any of them are permitted to call on her, Queen-to-Queen.

The narrow streets are thick with dignitaries, there is even a special class of footman-ambassador, recruited from only the highest reaches of society, whose whole job is to resolve jams in the streets when high status individuals, and their entourage, encounter each other coming in opposite directions and are unable to negotiate precedence, neither willing to step aside, and therefore both trapped, unable to pass each other. In most cases these unfortunate incidents are resolved within a couple of hours. In others walls have to be removed so groups can pass each other. And in one sad occasion this was not possible and a Bishop of the High Seeker froze to death after several days. His opposing number, an ambassador from Vocht, died soon after, of an ague.

Should I do anything with my Patreon?

So I finished my patreon application to get it in before the deadline that would involve a raising of prices, and largely for that reason.

I got half-way through applying for one years ago, with the vague idea of doing something or other with it.

The main question here is capitalisation. And how much of your life you want to capitalise and the weird fluctuation of power and influence around that.

largely, my blog and my reading, I've treated them as an extension of my personal self, not quite as a job thing, so I don't have to make excuses to myself or others about what I am doing,  finish anything on time or not. Its whatever I'm reading, whatever I'm interested in. So no ads e.t.c.

And I'm happy selling actual books, like physical things, or pdfs at least. So the blog is play or personal and the books are capital.

And I'm largely happy with that largely symbolic division, even if it is mainly psychological it seems to me that such boundaries are more important than ever in todays world where one thing , business and social networks and everything else, all flow one into another.

All of this is thrown into rather sharper focus by a lack of money.

Something suggested by various intelligent people is that I do book reviews for patron dollars. I do reviews anyway and have about 50 books to get through.

So its the usual, take something you are doing already and do it slightly better, in a more focused way, and for money. The idea does have its appeal, but again, it feels slightly creepy and somewhat wrong to effectively paywall something I was doing anyway.

It would be nice to do it *better* and money would lend focus to that I suppose. But I am pretty much doing it anyway. Would I paywall reviews? Paywall them temporarily, like put a review up on Patreon for a month before putting it on Goodreads or the blog? Take votes on what to read next? What about really long books that take ages to read and have to be talked about in sections?

Or could I do something completely different?

Currently I'm leaning towards not doing anything with it and just keeping it as a tip jar.

However I'm throwing the issue open to you, if you have a strong opinion or ideas about what you do or don't what, let me know in the comments below, either here or on Facebook.

The Waste

Trying to put a face on absolute Nothing and give the loss of meaning itself a kind of geography. Something like a meta-desert. I have not read the Neverending Story. Did watch the film though.

This is the current boundary of the known world of Uud.

(If things go on, it may turn out to be more of a very dark kind of connective tissue instead.)

........................................................

All know it. Even in the soft, safe centre of the Grey Cities, and upon the tallest peaks of the Mountains of Reality, Mankind knows it is surrounded.

The Waste waxes, its power rolls forth. Storms roll over Blackwater, the soft mists rise; invasive fingers pushing inland, crawling over everything, sneaking tendrils over hills and into valleys, hiding monsters and Her children. Shadows in the Mist.

Nowhere is safe.

The continent of Blackwater is bounded on all sides by the Waste of Yggsrathaal. The Waste pushes against Blackwater. It tries to roll over the cities, over the mountains, seeking always to consume the land, to take everything and make everything Waste.

The Waste is whatever remains of Udd when it was still shining Esh; the Diadem of Worlds before it fell. Esh was consumed, the Wreath of Worlds pulled apart like dough being stretched, each piece growing more distant from the other, until it was eaten alive by Yggsrathaal.

Her power ebbs and flows over time.

On the Blackriver plains, the margin of the Waste can roll forward over centuries. Over years. Over hours. Only repelled where Declension meets the Mountains, and held there like a wall of cloud, raging against What-Is.

Then, for days, or years or unpredictable ages of man, the Waste pulls back. A mile? Two? A hundred? There is stable land, real direct light, calm winds, even stars and the black of night. Birds fly out into the clear air, still a desert, but no longer Hell.

But for how long? She could take it all back in a moment. Or could she?

Could there be clear passage to another realm? Could another fragment of Esh have survived somewhere out there?

THE MARGINS

What counts as Marginal land can shift, year by year, or even hour by hour. Whole sub-realms might be swallowed over minutes.

There are failed cities out there, places where the rituals were not kept, where the megastructures failed or where the Waste was too strong. Warnings to the rest.

You can tell by the tenor of the air. The shadow of Her terror lies across the Margins of the Waste. A wind that leeches colour rides the emptiness, and a rain which, when tasted, strips the mind. The water is not safe. Nothing is safe.

Yet, people do live here, or try to. Those driven from the Cities or the Queendoms, or simply seeking freedom. There can be no law here, and nothing to enforce it. The soil decays slowly to ash. But ash is fertile. Grey reeds replace the grass. Needle-Forts manned by Stylite-Paladins sentinel the passes, watching for the un-things that come from the deeps. Villages, homesteads, cults infesting ruined castles, murderous predator Aeth in paling forests, anyone who does not wish to be ruled or interrupted comes here, to the edge of the world.

VIEWING THE WASTE

Cold north, stagnant south, the dead seas of the west or the endless storms of the east, you know when you have met the Waste.

Grey clouds piling on a grey land, either parched dry or humming with humidity. Crushing gloom. No ray of sun but a sharp, grey, polarised light that has no source. Thick grey storms piled like cotton wool or sheepskins heaped into mountains, pressing down upon the earth, but never breaking.

The Waste warps and changes, blisters as you look at it, like a reflection in melting glass. Things move on the horizon.

THE BORDERS

You must never drink the water in the Waste. A lesson you should have learned in the Marginal Lands, but the effect is stronger here, it might be that a single drop could annihilate every memory, reduce you to a blank.

Salt pan crunches beneath your feet. The flats are caked in ash that melts instantly into adhesive grey mush at the first breath of rain.

Huge castle-sized dunes of ash and dust, such terrible dust; fine, grey, gritty, crawling into the corners of the eye, the nose, beneath the fingernails, in the hair in the shoes, in food. You wade in an ocean of the softest ash, trying not to breathe.

No clear unshadowed light, and no absolute dark without some vague gleaming round its edges. No steady rhythm of night and day, no predictability, no moon, no stars, no night, no day, only a tireless consuming mutable Nothing.

Nothing moves but the ghosts of birds, the grey gulls; maddening echo of life.

Something in the distance, mountainscapes stripped of life, scoured down to cinerous bedrock, perhaps an Age ago, perhaps yesterday, or is that shadow no mountains but the coils of an enormous wyrm?

Worst of all, the terrible watchful quiets when even the static-hiss wind fades and silence rises up like a smothering pillow. So quiet you hear your own pulse, the shifting of your skin over your flesh, breath heaving like an engine. These are the Eyes of the Waste.

WASTE AUGURURS AND OASIES

The Waste changes like a slow sea, corpses of ancient nations washed up unseen in what passes for night. A tower in the distance. A city gleaming. A hint of colour -

Dangerous temptations. She is watching, even here.

Still, there are always those who wish to test themselves, or those seeking some impossible end who will attempt the Waste.

It is popularly supposed that the very nature of the Waste precludes any meaningful observation or divining. Even the sight of the deep Waste through spells and visions is meant to be corrosive to the mind. It’ s also illiegal everywhere.

Nevertheless, Humanity being what it is, many take this as a challenge, and off-the books, criminal, idealistic or just mad would-be-augururs of the Waste can be sought out in many places. Wizards, sorcerers, cracked mathematicians and lunatic Theists who think their particular God has afforded them accurate dreams can all "guarantee" the existence and location of "safe" places in the Waste.

The Augurers tell many tales...

Some speak of great fallen storms; cyclones of enormous size, frozen into grey glass by the effect of the Waste, falling to earth and shattering. These enormous ruined palaces of cracked and flowing glass, riddled with unpredictable passages, then broken into a thousand pieces, are said to still exist. More importantly, the strange warrens of these ruins, and the edges of their glass walls, are said to be hard for the Waste to penetrate. Even the grey mist is cut off by their angles. Here, the Augurers whisper, living microcultures and clean water may be found.

Others speak of fallen Wreathe-Ships still, protected from Entropy by their powerful sustaining magics. It is known in song and story that Humanity once strode the stars and planes. These ships are said to be one of the means by which this was done. What powered them, or what strange or timeless capacities they might have, are the subjects of myth and conjecture.

Some talk of wrecked Titans, relics of the inter-planar war against Yggsrathaal, lying in the ash like murdered Gods, their strange interiors and ruined bodies still guarded by half-living creatures of Thaumaturgic art.

The fallen Grey Cities, lost in the last great expansion of the Waste, two and a half thousand years ago, must still be there. It has been so long, all that is known of such places is rumour, story and song. There could be great treasures there, lying unclaimed. Or perhaps they have been taken by Her creatures, or infested by the Teratarchies.

One concept that consumes a minority of radicals in Blackwater, is that idea of re-taking the lost cities. The old Megastructures must still be there. If the city was re-inhabited, the structures repaired, if, somehow, new rituals could be begun, then for the first time in memory, Blackwater might actually expand, taking back what had been lost, pushing back the Waste.

And if such a thing could be done once, in the ruin of a city, could it not be done again, with the building of an entirely new city? In theory at least?

For now, these are crazed and idealistic dreams.

THE RIVERS

At the edges of Blackwater, rivers run and curl out into the dustlands, or dissolve and burrow under the salt flats. Both suspected deep-time geoengineering and the more brutal efforts of modern powers encourage rivers to stay within the bounds of liveable land. Canals and levees, aqueducts and channels all try to guide waterways back into liveable country, to stop them becoming, literally, a waste.

But hydrogeology pays little attention to the borders of nations or the needs of civilisation. Over one age, or another, they bend, shift and move as they will. So rivers surge out into the grey desert, like lines of black pencil on a sun-paled page, or spread out into acrid lagoons, shimmering shallow pools full of disturbing shrimp, fed on by evil-eyed pale grey flamingos. Some sweep out into the Waste for a hundred miles or more, then come back inland. These are always guarded and watched, often strung with chains and barred water-gates.

The cold black waters seem to resist the annihilating power of the Waste. They pin the land in shape, provide vital fresh water and allow relatively easy transport. On the borders of such streams, micro-ecologies of oaplescent reeds wave in the waste wind. There are islands and rumours of islands out there. Small, safe, steep-sided fortress isles where a traveller can rest, and perhaps even use as a base to go further.

Many are tempted to use such rivers to explore, driving boats or canoes deep into the Waste in search of other lands or pathways through the endless expanse.

It’s much easier to let the river take you out into the Waste than to find your way back, paddling your way against the current, and every expedition must make a careful choice, deciding at exactly which point they should turn back.

It is very easy to go on just a little too long.

Sometimes the Waste can be kind. It seems foolish to not use these 'Kindly Gaps', to force your way as far as possible while the conditions are still good. But travel even one day too far, even a handful of hours too far...

Perhaps the river runs out into a delta of sucking mud, perhaps rains increase the flow, making it harder to row back, certainly you will lose one or two members on every trip, making it harder to return. You may run out of food, go mad, lose your memory in the rain and not know why you are rowing or where.

All it takes is one mistake, or poor twist of luck and then event compounds on event, disaster on disaster. Food runs out, water is tainted, the Waste shifts, and She notices you. (And perhaps She always knew you were there.) The river sweeps you, or what is left of you, back out into the Grey.

GOAT ROADS AND SKY PATHS

Some animals find a way to live among the Margins, and some of these do seem, sometimes, to travel in and out of the Waste via paths of safety they alone can sense.

To the north, grim, angry, shaggy splinterhorn goats, to the south the lolloping, wrathful moon-eyed camelS, able to spit dangerously alkalai wads directly into the eye at a significant distance.

Crepuscular grey racing Hares live on both boundaries, and can be seen in the low gloom of morning or the gloaming before the dark, making their way in and out of the Waste in strange shadowy lines.

In the sky, thin trickles of daylight or starlight at night, or a path of the moon like a crack between clouds, suggest some semi-stable route out into the Nothing. Sometimes birds can be seen returning on these sky-paths.

Birds cannot always be trusted, especially the Grey Gulls of the Waste, who are popularly thought to serve Her.

No sane animals are thought to live out in the Waste, but they must be doing something out there.

Perhaps they simply use the vastness to avoid predators. Perhaps the have located some food or water source unusable by Humanity. (Does it really matter if a Goat loses its memory? Or goes mad? Does a bird even have an identity to lose?)

Those who walk and watch the Waste, Guardians, Barbarians, criminals and adventurers, often develop the habit of quietly watching animals. Their movements can be predictive, suggestive, revealing unlikely paths and strange locations.

THE DEEPS

Far from the sight or memory of any comprehensible reality, the Nothing sets its own ontology.

Of those who have seen such things, or claim to have, no boundary can be placed between madness and reality. Perhaps they were driven insane by the ash and the silence, dehydration and the watching eyes of Yggsrathaal. Or perhaps the landscape itself was mad, and all they declaim took place, exactly as described.

Skies of blood. Storms swarming with the ghosts of Dragons. Fog-Giant stampedes. Rains of burning acid. Iridescent swarms. The moaning of dead oceans, walls of poisoned brackish water held back by flailing invisible hands until they break and Tsunami-walls of corpse-wash roll like wrath over the ash. Mile-long corpses of Yggsrathaals children lit by the shadows of black burning forests bordering realms of ultimate evil. Dreamless wars across tectonics twisting like cooked spaghetti. Tall ruins of great cities pared down by a keening wind till only the edges remain. Fields of glistering rainbow; oapalsied corpse bones sorted by an unending wind into dunes of form and weight, joint and femur spread like a moraine of death. Beaches of jewel-like teeth broken by the dull lumps of imperishable gold. Dunes of crystallised eyes frozen from their skulls and rolled by pneumo-geography into wadis of heaped orbs and spiderweb ridges, then crushed to splinters by your punishing feet. Rains of knives; shining shards of toxic metal condensed in the atmosphere of another world, falling through writhing tornadoes. Storms of sulphuric rain, tearing flesh from bones in minutes. Falls of clear rainbow hail that burst into shrapnel of toxic gems, poisoning the blood.

THE PALE COURTS

Here, folding out of terrible dimensions, are the Blind Palaces, white wombs like inexpressible pits; voids in Nothing itself.

They open with a screaming, white noise across the sky and earth. A glimmer of white cloth, like a dress opening to show something decayed and obscene. Static. White/Nonewhite, the colour called nullfire. Boiling churns of palaces within the hems of following storms. Land and sky seem to change places, you look up to see yourself walking across clouds as if they were mountains.

The mountains crack open from within, oozing structure like pus, curdling into revetments and porticos, doors yawning open, spilling forth the sound of blindness and the pennants of the deaf. A loss of cognition, the pace of thought is lost, reduced to a dull, drooling self, witless and accepting.

Here are the Coils of Yggstrathall, the Womb Void - where she presses against the Waste which is itself a kind of scar tissue of Reality. Even as she coils to crush it, it decays, and her grip slips.

These are the high Eyrie’s of Yggsrathaals Eagles; the Entropic Wyrms.

Those who see the Pale Courts are changed. Witnessed. Selfhood leached away. Yggsrathaal does not consume them, but secretes them away in the placeless void, showing them her Blind Palaces, driving them mad and forming from that madness a facsimilia of individuality. Made Prophets of Nothing, they are returned to the world like a virus sent back through the skin. To spread Her word.

THE TERATARCHIES

Good may not have survived the fall of Esh, but evil has.

Not only Her children come from the Waste. The Un-Things come. The Monster kind, and they were not made by Her. They are as old as Man and they come bearing the signs of mans destroyers, the Demon-Emperors, the God-Killers.

Monster Nations, continents cutting through the ash like grinding black freighters, hunting Blackwater, hunting each other. And fleeing from Her coils. An empire of the dead bordered by burning black imperishable forest, one a castle swollen to god-habitable size, cracked and stupid, infested with cultures like worms, one a flock of shells wheeling like birds, one born on the back of a cyclopean Trilobite.

WASTE TECTONICS

The Waste is forced into comprehensibility by its contact with the Real. Near a continent like Blackwater, it seems like continental shelf; tectonic crust. Though over a cold and empty core.

Or like a sea of fine ash. You can walk, or even float on it.

The further away you get, the less like a 'real' or comprehensible place it seems. The land roams and nation-sized fragments of stone tilt out of the crust in a matter of hours. Though it still has scabs of reality around the parched bones of the worlds of Esh.

The nations and ghost realms of fallen Esh move through Uud in the manner that seems best to them. Blackwater is a continent and moves through a kind of continental drift - so it seems like normal land. Some walk endlessly across the Waste, for them it is a vast desert. Some crash through it as if it were pack ice over a cosmic ocean - flailing mighty limbs and surging forward. Some plunge forth and seem to float, as a ship upon the ocean.

Should two realms with different Waste-interfaces come into contact they can 'jam'; grind together pushing for ontological dominance as the waste tries to interpret different concepts of itself.

This can mean...  REALM WAR.

..........................................

Oh and I have a Patreon now. I set it up purely as they are changing the charges tomorrow and I wanted to get in at the Founders pricing.

I don't really have anything to do with it, might develop something later. To be honest, just selling books is enough of a job for me and I am busy as HELL.

If you really really want to give me extra money for extra bullshit leave a comment and I will think about it.

(Bear in mind that this one is purely a tip jar.)

Clerics in Uud & Adventures in Questionable Metatextuality

Starting to get a little bit weird here. Attempting some kind of synergy between the open-to-everyone, fits-the-5e-handbook elements of the world and the hopefully-original elements.

So we have 'The Pantheon' which takes care of almost every possible god from every D&D game ever. 

Then we have the fact that the Gods are missing, presumed asleep, which explains or contextualises in this setting why clerical or divine powers work the way they do, you are linking up with a dream of a God.

Then things get stranger with The Tolerance. How does a huge society of mixed elements survive for thousands of years without magically nuking itself, descending into ethnarchy or just jihading each other into oblivion? Because they have a somewhat creepy group of Inquisitors who wander around with terrifying powers making sure no-one does anything that can endanger Humanity as a whole.

Here, a bit further towards Cordwainer Smiths Lords of the Instrumentality than the Holy Ordos of 40k.

"Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!"

I imagine their rules to be broadly like those of the Instrumentality. You can do whatever you think you need, but you are being watched;

"Each could do anything he found necessary or proper to maintain the Instrumentality and keep the peace between the worlds. But if he made a mistake or committed a wrong—ah, then, it was suddenly different. 

Any Lord could put another Lord to death in an emergency, but he was assured of death and disgrace himself if he assumed this responsibility. The only difference between ratification and repudiation came in the fact that Lords who killed in an emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list, while those who killed other Lords rightly (as later examination might prove) were listed on a very honorable list, but still killed. 

With three Lords, the situation was different. Three Lords made an emergency court; if they acted together, acted in good faith, and reported to the computers of the Instrumentality, they were exempt from punishment, though not from blame or even reduction to civilian status. 

Seven Lords, or all the Lords on a given planet at a given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a dignified reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove them wrong."

Are the Tolerance enemies? Allies? Just a particularly notable faction? It depends how you want to run your game. 

And then we get even weirder, in a stroke of arguable-genius or perhaps just lunacy, the Eldritch Founder, the guy (if they even have a gender) who the company is named after, is also a quasi-character in the described world.

And the members of this Cult have a particular interest in assembling mixed groups anti-authoritarian sensation junkies and setting them on explosive or dangerous missions, because that, presumably, is what the Eldritch Founder wants.

And the Founder, as a voiced character, actually plays a part in the companies promotion, which should be coming up in a few weeks.

A metatextual bridge character. Kind of like how Stan Lee was both the voice of Marvel comics, but also occasionally in Marvel Comics, and then in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but from the other way round. The Eldritch Founder is in the cosmos of Uud, and occasionally launches messages or information out into reality. 

......................................................................

There were Gods once, they shaped the world, and more.

Then, reality collapsed. Yggsrathaal came. Uud shrank in upon itself, paling away to nothing. The Gods now sleep, if they live at all.

In the long, slow backwash of this cataclysm there are a few who still believe.

Yes, many claim to. They cling to faith like storm-tossed survivors clinging to a rock - holding on out of fear.

But not you.

Fear plays no role in your faith

There must be more than this. You feel it. You know it.

There are many kinds of awakenings; for some, scripture, an ancient scroll or rare surviving testament recovered from a dawn-age ruin in the Waste.

For others, experience, a waking revelation in a moment of despair or understanding.

For some, meditation, for others learning.

But many wake in sleep. The gods dream, or so they say, and in our dreams they still speak, as much as they can, and many are brought to faith through dreams.

It’s not about magic, because it’s not about controlling anything, or about seeking power. It’s about accepting that there is something fundamentally larger than yourself, about letting go. You do not do this for yourself. You have been given a mission. Something greater spoke to you. An unveiling. you may not know exactly what that mission is yet, but you will find out.

You know absolutely it is real.

Yggsrathaal is a test. Entropy is a test. Even Death itself. A test set by the Gods themselves, or one springing directly from the silence at the core of all things - it matters not from where the test comes, only that it is.

Did the Gods not promise an apocalypse? An unveiling of terrors? An end to all things?

And did that end not come?

But after the end - a new world.

You are fire. A dream of the Sleeping Gods, a dream that will lead all to a great awakening. Gods and Mortals will walk the world together, Uud will be re-united, the Entropic Wyrms will bleed and die. A new world will be born.

RELIGION ON BLACKWATER

There are three broad classes of faith on Blackwater (though an infinity of specifics in any particular situation).

THE PANTHEON

Polytheists worship the Pantheon, or one particular god of the Pantheon, while recognising the rest.

The Pantheon is.. heterogeneous. Almost every Human culture contributed something to Blackwater, and left some kind of trace behind, even if a small one. So the Great List of Gods contains multitudes.

They are organised around some prime archetypes, The Father, The Mother, Thought, Craft, War, Swift the Messenger, Love, Death and The Watcher, but any particular God could be worshipped in any of a range of forms and under a wide variety of names.

And there are many more gods than these, local gods, city gods, minor figures.

It is a very general form of faith, guaranteed to be different in each place, interpreted differently in each temple and with many local gods and legends.

THE ONE

Monotheists believe (or agree to say they believe, since the treaty of Birch Falls and The Tolerance) that one God, often 'Ark' or 'The Father' or 'The Reality', created everything, and that the rest of the Pantheon are 'expressions' of that One God, sometimes angels, prophets or 'thoughts in his mind'.

Many monotheists believe that Ark fell and became the Mountains of Reality, and that it is the presence of his holy flesh there that keeps back the Waste.

THE WAY

Pathists follow one particular prophet, or line of prophets, who they refer to as 'Teachers'. It's not clear to others if they truly revere the Gods 'as Gods' or simply as expressions of ways of being, or 'paths'.

As well as these, there are two forms of religion, or belief, on Blackwater, which have no parallel on any other world or plain of existence.

THE TOLERANCE AND ITS PRIESTS

Humanity is surrounded by total annihilation and infiltrated by predatory entropy. Monsters come out of nowhere and start killing, sometimes whole armies of them.

If the numbers, or military force, of 'real' humans, drop too low, all might be lost to some terrible event.

We have come close to it before.

So, after the last great religious war on Blackwater, came the treaty of Birch Falls and 'The Tolerance'.

Small, limited political wars are acceptable. Religious wars, crusades, genocides and pogroms cannot be allowed to happen.

There is no morality in this policy, simply survival.

Religious wars never end. They can permanently split large populations. Genocide brings the numbers down, it makes humanity vulnerable.

Dreaming being are, and must be, united, at least against The Waste. Or humanity will die.

The Priests of Tolerance

Are not truly Priests. They serve no God (though they may be believers). Instead they act as a kind of Benedictine or Jesuitical order of Monk or Nun-like investigators and inquisitors.

They do have a holy cause - the survival of humanity.

They exist to prevent dreaming beings turning on themselves.

This doesn't mean preventing crime, abuse, secular limited wars, grudges, murder, suffering or moral wrong. These things are threats to people, and groups, not to the whole.

They specifically stop holy war, or anything likely to lead to it, ethnic conflict, either intra-Somon or between dreaming peoples, genocides, or anything likely to damage the defensive posture of humanity.

(Exactly how broadly this should be interpreted is a subject of intensive debate.)

The Priests of Tolerance are made up of only the most serious, careful, well-tested, neutral, intelligent and capable individuals. (Or at least so they claim.) Becoming one is a little like becoming a judge.

Besides the respect and terror in which they are held, the enormous moral force of their judgements and the material power of their organisation, they have one major power no-one else on Blackwater is allowed to even attempt to access

They are allowed to make use of captured 'tame' or imprisoned Children of Yggstrathaal.

Those who break The Tolerance are not killed. In most cases that would only make them martyrs to their deluded cause.

Instead, depending on the severity of their offence, they memories are taken, their dreams erased, names consumed and faces blanked.

They become non-people, with no identity, memory, face, name or dreams.

Even those who would willingly die for their beliefs will rarely risk such a fate.

(It's rumoured that a few of these individuals, the more capable and intelligent, are even re-educated into being new Priests of Tolerance.)

Any freshly-awoken Theist, especially one exhibiting fresh blessings, will get a visit from the Priests of Tolerance sooner or later, just to make sure they are not a potential threat (or an agent of Yggsrathaal).

THE CULT OF THE ELDRITCH FOUNDER

There have been no new gods on Blackwater, or on Uud anywhere, for thousands of years.

But now, in the last century or so, a strange new cult has arisen. Do they serve a new god, or the memory of an old? (Or are they simply insane?)

Origin myths for this cult differ greatly. Almost as if there is no central organisation or testament, only a hydra of self-activating cultists and lunatics.

Many of these myths claim that just before the death of Uud began, one God quarrelled with the rest, Cunning perhaps, or Craft, or some wastrel demi-godling.

Others say it was some terrible chthonic power - a destroyer of worlds, or a demon or monster of awesome capacity, too dangerous to be allowed to roam free.

Whatever they were, they were banished, or imprisoned, sent to the end of all things, far far away in the cosmos. Far from Uud. And they were sent there for a long, long time.

And so they missed the arrival of Yggsrtathaal, the long slow fall of Uud, and the death of hope.

But they did not die, and they did not sleep. And, once their banishment had ended (or once they escaped their abyssal prison, depending on who you believe) this unknown Eldritch being quietly and silently returned, creeping back into what remained of reality like a thief into a burnt-out home, and found Uud in ruins with Yggsrathaal wrapped around its root.

Realising they could not defeat Yggsrathaal, they hid somewhere out in the dark. They waited and watched, thinking on how to defeat the Dragon Who Devours Meaning, and they set about a strange work

An Engine of Souls.

Using cunning and craft, and divine (or demonic, or abyssal) power, they formed a great foundry of souls, an engine of creation, a Seraphormer, into which they poured most of their power, and which could create whole fresh souls unlike any seen before.

Here, working in secret, they formed beings, each one entirely unique, each with a particular distinct expression, a place, a time, an arrangement of circumstance, when they would become fully themselves.

Then they hurled these souls at Uud, ghosting them silently past the coils of Yggsrathaal, sending them into the world to grow.

The Cult of the Eldritch Founder believe that certain special individuals were specifically created by this hidden god, and destined to come together to fulfil some unknown purpose that will, somehow, aid the cause of Uud and bring about the defeat of Yggsrathaal.

Exactly what this purpose is they do not seem to know in any particular case, but they wander around seeking groups of random oddities and trying to convince them they are destined to be 'heroes'.

The cult is widely derided as a bunch of ridiculous troublemakers.

https://www.eldritchfoundry.com/

We are adding bits and pieces to the site all the time if you want to check it out.