Land of Mist IS what MystarAIN'T

Now that I've grabbed your attention and/or murderous intent with that awful title, I'd like to share something better with you: Land of Mist for Old-School Essentials by Joseph Quinn and BirdEnuf Games, which I picked up on sale recently.

I at some point this year I took a greater interest in OSE. If BFRPG is any indicator, I like more 'traditional' OSR games when they freely blend Basic and Advanced rules, and have a healthy 3rd-party scene that spits out mechanics and ideas niftier or at least better-baked than anything I would come up with on the fly, and OSE does both.

Land of Mist is the first setting written specifically for OSE that I've read, so it's unfair to say it's my favorite (it'd also technically be my least favorite). But I do like it. And that's for a very simple, weirdly specific reason: It's Mystara, without 90% of the Mystara.

For those who need a refresher or never knew to begin with, Mystara was the flagship setting for BECMI. It's set in a world that looks suspiciously similar to Earth a few hundred million years ago, and it's full to bursting with that 1980s flavor of kitchen sink fiction bordering on what we might today call gonzo fantasy. There're feudal kingdoms, magitech elves, a hollow world full of living fossils, a god who used to be a bespectacled nuclear physicist, etc. It's sometimes good, often dumb, and always goofy.

This zero-context art sums it up about as well as anything else can.

Land of Mist is a tremendously slimmed down world in that same whimsical vein. Some reviews say it's too sparse, but I'd say it's more honed to a needle's point. It emphasizes the "lost world" aspect of Mystara that I find more interesting than the surface world, which outside of the occasional gonzo regions is often a whole lot of fantasy counterpart cultures from various points in human history, and theme park versions at that.

The titular Land of Mist is a continent surrounded on all sides by a wall of sentient mist hundreds of feet high that nothing can circumvent. Passing through the mist erases all your memories of the outside (or inside) world until you cross back through the way you came, so the island is completely isolated from the rest of the world. Even information like written words or pictorial depictions get scrambled on their way through. It's a bit like an immaterial, non-malevolent version of the net cast by the Dark Powers from Ravenloft, although the actual motivations of the mist are up to the referee to decide.

Populating the continent (which is just called the Land) are all manner of odd folks, alongside the presumed existence of humans and standard demi-humans. There are aquatic elves, nonevil drow who venerate the moon while still remaining mostly subterranean, beastfolk who are descendants of the progenitors of all humanoid species like orcs and goblins, gremlins who have an always-on AoE aura of chaos and shenanigans, and somewhat uniquely for an OSR game, human variants that still gain access to most of the classes and options as regular humans: the Lilliputian bittles and their Neanderthal-adjacent brute rivals.

Folks familiar with Hollow World, the Mystara sub-setting dealing with the, well, hollow world, might recognize the beastfolk as a take on the beastmen. They are the exact same type of extremely mutable ur-humanoids, except here they weren't fashioned from the souls of evil people by a god, they aren't Inuit-coded, and they aren't locked in magical cultural stasis underground by a different god the way TSR's were.

Speaking of gods, LoM uses the same system of mortals ascended to become Immortals as in Mystara. There's even a guide halfway through the book for creating your very own cult and ascending to join the pantheon, assuming you can survive the Save vs Death and get the other Immortals of your alignment to vouch for you. And you don't even need to slog to 36th level to take a crack at it.

Classes available to humans (or certain other species using Advanced rules) are also dead ringers of old Mystara content. These include the Mystic (a monk by any other name) from the Rules Cyclopedia, the Forester (arcane woodsman warrior who's buddied up with the elves) from Dawn of the Emperors boxed set, and the Rake (a non-thief thief with some swashbuckling flare) from the same. There's a pacifistic Desert Druid too, but I don't know what that's a reference to, if any. There's also a whole subsystem for Hedge Witches that gives very limited casting (max 3rd-level spells) to any character who takes an additive XP cost to level up, similar to the shamans and wokani née wiccans from BECMI; both names even make a return as specific traditions of hedge magic.

There's a host of other optional rules besides hedge witches, including playing a human afflicted with lycanthropy, playable "enlightened" monsters who gain levels, mist dragon riding, oft-maligned underwater adventuring, craftable spell runes similar to specialized scrolls/potions, and spiritual totem animals that anyone (including NPCs and commoners) can spend HP to summon for a brief time, similar in spirit to but more overtly magical than the animal totems of the Atruaghin Clans.

The language for summoning a totem animal is a little ambiguous to my eyeballs, but I asked about it on Drivethrurpg and Joseph Quinn clarified that you spend HP on a 1:1 ratio to give a summoned spirit animal that much, up to the max they could have from their normal hit dice. You also then share any hit point loss that the animal takes while summoned. This makes it a poor mechanic for creating say, a beefy animal companion like a bear to fight alongside unless you're comfortable with putting yourself very close to death. But it also works quite well for summoning a temporary distraction or a pseudo-familiar, especially handy for small or stealthy animals you'd only need to spend 1 or 2 HP on.

Outside of these rules, a few new spells, and some artifacts, the book is quite light. This is because it foregoes the massive chapters of lore and gazetteering that Mystara was famous for. The island is broken up into a few regions and the populace into a few broad cultural groups, each with just a paragraph of fluff attached. The rest is up for the referee and their table to fill in as they see fit.

I get why that's a big negative for many people, I do. It makes the world feel emptier or less thematically concrete than something with more world-building right out the box like we're used to. But it's also somewhat freeing to not have to pick through hundreds of pages of history and demographic data about Glantri, Karameikos, or Thyatis to find the bits useful for your particular game.

LoM is more of a sandbox, but not in a truly trackless, empty way. I'd compare it to one of those fancy backyard sandboxes the neighbor kid whose dad was a contractor played in; one that has shapes or topography or fake dinosaur fossils embedded in the bottom, that offer guides and contours for you to then play around or on top of. And it's still 123 pages of content with illustrations and a collection of short stories for an easy $12 or less ($9 in my case), so even without deeper world-building I didn't feel cheated.

Speaking of the illustrations, the book has a pretty regular mix of old public domain sketches and commissioned art by Emily Eastman, Finny, and Tara Quinn, the other half of the Quinn duo. I like each of them for the different feels they evoke with their art; Emily and Finny have a style that reminds me of the better 3rd-party d20 books of the early 2000s before the Gold Rush hit, while Tara's creations  are real stand-out showstoppers that I can only describe as grotesquely cute. Or maybe cutely grotesque?

Gamblers? More like in shamblers.
... Alright, I apologize for that one.

All in all, I like LoM. It's a fun setting that does what it sets out to do and then leaves you space in which to easily drop your Tower Silveraxe or what other pulp adventures have you.

To answer the question I implied with that lazy pun back up at the top: Land of Mist is svelte.

Let's Dig Into: The Sultanate of Zeif

Greyhawk was not the first campaign setting ever, but it was one of the first ever devised for Dungeons & Dragons. It was Gygax's own brainchild, originally created as just a dungeon under the titular castle to amuse his friends and family with. But as the early 1970s dungeon crawls played out, Gary expanded upon the world overhead until it became a sprawling, publishable setting in its own right.

He also decided that the alternate Earth it's set on, Oerth, should be pronounced Oith, like someone doing a very bad (or maybe extremely good?) Brooklyn accent.

That's the first of several sins I hold against the man, as you may see.

Instead of doing a tour of the entire combination racist-theme-park-and-right-libertarian-wet-dream that is Greyhawk, I want to zoom in on one part of the world that I find interesting: The Baklunish Sultanate of Zeif. It didn't feature very prominently in early Greyhawk except as the backdrop for part of a novel or two, but by the time 3rd edition rolled around it was major enough to be afforded a slice of the planet during the Living Greyhawk live campaign.

The way Living Greyhawk worked was each participating region on Earth had a corresponding section of Oerth in which all adventures would take place. Sometimes these regions included a few US states or a single Canadian province, sometimes they covered one or more countries. For instance, Italy got the Sea Barons, while Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee shared Yeomanry, and Ohio got Veluna all to itself.

Zeif was given to the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon Territory. Materials for Zeif were made available online for live play, both in English and French. Unfortunately these materials were not pirated or preserved the same way so many other D&D peripherals have been, and the websites they were originally hosted on have long since decayed. For a long time before I started this post, I thought that glimpse into early 2000s live D&D was lost forever.

Turns out, I just needed to find a super cool Albertan who happens to know one of the original writers. 

Thanks, elfman!

Anyway, back to the post.

The Sultanate of Zeif

The heraldic shield of Zeif,
as done by Anna B. Meyer

Every region in Greyhawk is either an explicit pastiche of a historical civilization and its peoples (Erypt, Nippon, etc), or an ambiguous hodgepodge of European fantasy names and ideas (The Kingdom of Keoland, The Yeomanry, etc). 

Zeif is in the former camp, being a gloss of the Ottoman Empire without all the gunpowder and tulips. Specifically, it is a Western fantasia of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle-East after the start of its slow territorial decline, when the loss of most of its holdings in Eastern Europe and the Balkans rendered it a foreign and exotic land of the Orient in the minds of many Europeans, rather than the immediate and cosmopolitan neighbor it had been for centuries prior.

The Sultanate occupies the western half of the Baklunish Basin, which used to be unified under a single empire, back in the days before some Suloise mages blew everything up- as they are wont to do. The Basin is located in the far northwest of the subcontinent of the Flanaess, which is where 90% of the action happens in Greyhawk. Compare it to the Forgotten Realms' Sword Coast. The basin is separated from most of the world by tall mountain ranges and the weirdly polar, ice-choked Dramidj Sea- I find it interesting that if not for some warm, supernatural water regulating temperatures close to the coast, Zeif would be a subarctic land more similar to someplace like the Khanate of Sibir than the historical Ottoman Empire.

I know I keep harping on about this, but Zeif is very Ottoman. The sultan (currently Murad the Proud) is head of state and is advised by a cabinet-style diwan, as well as a sultana who wields a lot of soft power from within a politically-active and well-educated harem (points for making it more than a licentious bathhouse full of pale, naked concubines like older Western depictions of hareems, I guess); the sultan ostensibly wields absolute temporal power, but in reality authority is decentralized somewhat across the empire's many different types of timar provinces, each with their own governors and major families; cavalry officers are called spahis; there is an elite slave-soldier bodyguard similar to the historical Janissaries (more on that later); the cities all have coffeehouses that act as the heart of news, politics, and culture; the locals literally just speak a mix of modern Turkish and Arabic (a handy appendix includes phrases like "hoş geldiniz!"); and the rugged interior is home to rustic nomads who do their best to resist the boot of empire.

The Basin straddles Central Oerik with its khanates and faux-Chinese Celestial Imperium. But that part of the world got next to zero development back when Greyhawk and Chainmail were actively being released, so we don't know much about it or how it interacted with Zeif. For what it's worth, Zeif stands upon Central Oerik's borders as the so-called "Rock of the West".

The Baklunish People

Zeif and its neighbors are inhabited by the Baklunish people, who act as Greyhawk's analogues to various West Asian, North African, and occasionally Central Asian peoples. In Zeif they are treated like the mix of Anatolian Turkic and Levantine peoples that made up the eastern Ottoman Empire, while in Zeif's next-door rival, the Caliphate of Ekbir they are closer to Arabs (both city-dwelling and Bedouin). The Tiger and Wolf Nomads of the north, despite being vaguely Mongol, are also of Baklunish extraction. Other Baklunish nations or city-states include Ket, Ull, and Tusmit.

Baklunish people worship a pantheon of gods that act as a curious mix of fantasy Islam and Chinese folk religion, of all things. On one hand they venerate the awkwardly named hero-god Al'Akbar who once went on a famous Hajj, and his worshipers are divided into two camps that seem to be modeled on the Sunni-Shi'a split within the Ummah. But on the other hand they also have deities of harmony and martial arts with names like Xan Yae and Zuoken. Maybe they came to them via cultural diffusion from the Celestial Imperium?

Perhaps even more central to the Baklunish way of life than their gods is their code of ethics. All of the Baklunish peoples adhere to a philosophy called the Four Feet of the Dragon, which consist of four principles that they are to strive for at all times and in all facets of life. The Four Feet are Honor, Generosity, Family, and Piety. These feet aren't very strictly defined, which leads to a wide range of interpretations as people navigate the messy and complicated realities of life.

At first glance the name of the philosophy makes it look like it will be modeled on the Five Pillars of Islam in some way, but fortunately the writers didn't try to make the parallels that explicit there. Instead, the Four Feet are broadly drawn and broadly applicable enough to offer a good deal of roleplaying opportunity without being hyper-local. The Four Feet also function as one of the few strong cultural connections between the sedentary Baklunish and their nomadic relatives.

Speaking of nomads!

The Nomad Tribes

You all knew this was coming.

The southern steppes and deserts of the Baklunish Basin are home to nomadic pastoralists known as the Paynims, which in real life is a corruption of the word "pagan" that was used in medieval and early modern Europe to describe non-Christians, but especially Muslims; in that respect it was a gloss similar to Moor. But here in Greyhawk it specifically refers to the Baklunish nomads of the basin.

The Paynims of Greyhawk are most heavily based on the Bedouin ethnic groups of Arabia and beyond, perhaps with a bit of Amazigh mixed in as well. Curiously, they seem to prefer the Turkic title of khan to Arabic terms like sheikh or emir. They are a proud people with strong equestrian and martial traditions, and they often figure as raiders and enemies in the histories of their settled neighbors. They are also waiting for the arrival of the Mahdi, an Islamic messianic figure that was often central to millennialist movements and revolutions in Muslim-majority states throughout history.

(I can't fault Gygax or his TSR and WotC successors in particular for including this element, because fiction writers in general seem to love the aesthetic of desert people waiting for a warrior-messiah to drive out the abusive foreigners. See also; the Fremen Mahdi from Frank Herbert's Dune, the Nerevarine from TES III: Morrowind, and the Keleshite Namzaruum from Pathfinder, more recently.)

Most sources don't actually go into great detail about it, but each Paynim tribe is fairly culturally distinct from its neighbors, making their plains a diverse tapestry of tribes and decentralized nations that the generic blanket exonyms used by sedentary folk can't do justice to. That might be the most verisimilitudinal bit in this whole book.

Paynim tribes tend to be more "pacified" now than in the past when they were a united threat to much of the Basin. They still resist the rule of the sultans, but the sultans have over the centuries used them to create a sort of buffer state for Zeif. Now, the tribes mostly keep to themselves while hashing out the occasional territorial dispute- both with other tribes, and with the orcs.

Speaking of orcs.

Zeifan Orcs

You all knew this was coming.

I neglected to mention until now that roughly 1/10th of the Zeifan population is orcish or at least half-orcish. Besides a smattering of halflings, dwarves, and elves, orcs represent the largest minority group in Zeif. They are descendants of the orc tribes who fought as mercenaries on behalf of the old Baklunish Empire against the Suel Imperium, those mages I mentioned who have a habit of blowing everything up.

The orcs were given a place to live in the Basin as payment, and ever since then they have had an ambivalent relationship with the Baklunish peoples. Sometimes the two lived together in relative peace, sometimes a sultan used the orcs as naked tyrannical muscle against his own people, and sometimes the orcs tried to strike out on their own again.

Gradually the orcs were "watered down" as the Player's Guide to Zeif put it. They lost their warlike nature due to the influence of human civilization, and most of them stopped worshiping their old gods and totems. In essence, they were culturally assimilated by a dominant non-orc power that instilled nonevil ideas in them, rather than the orcs having an opportunity to affect positive change in themselves.

(It was not the first instance of D&D orcs being made nonevil by means of paternalistic outside interference, and I plan to write a post griping about all of them at some point.)

Currently, orcs exist as an impoverished underclass in Zeif. Their life is itinerant rather than truly nomadic, with their means of livelihood being confined to working as miners, laborers and scavengers when they aren't moving around the dry plains of south-central Antal, jostling for resources with the Paynims. The name of the Antal region makes me wonder if the Zeifan orcs aren't some kind of very obfuscated reference to the semi-nomadic Yörük people of the Anatolian interior, but that might be too specific a reference for me to expect of anyone.

Orcs make up a large proportion of the population in southern cities like the eponymous Antalotol, but they benefit little from the trade wealth of that city. Additionally, they have virtually no representation in local government. The only consistent avenue for upward social mobility available to even a minority of orcs is the military: specifically, the Uruzary Corps.

The Corps

A few hundred years before present, Jehef Sultan brought an end to one of the last periods of orc rebellion by founding the Uruzary Corps, an elite infantry division comprised of orcish shock-troops. The first generation of Uruzaries were already battle-hardened warriors, but every generation after that was hand-selected during childhood to begin their training and indoctrination. Every Uruzary was made to be personally dependent upon and loyal to the sultan himself, so that he could have a private bodyguard and task force that was above corruption.

The Uruzary Corps is Zeif's answer to the elite slave-soldier trope, like the Ottoman Janissaries or the Mamluks of the, well, Mamluk Sultanate. All were drawn as children from a particular ethnic background to serve the sovereign, and in exchange they were granted considerable positions of power within the military. Unlike the Mamluks, the Uruzaries have never usurped their sultan to become a ruling dynasty. Unlike the Janissaries, they haven't yet devolved into a corrupt band of reactionary brigands shaking coffeeshop owners down for money using decorative axes.

Instead, the Uruzary Corps is austere, highly professional, and undyingly loyal to the will of the sultan. So much so, that they practice a philosophy called giribim, which is essentially the process of grokking the sultan's mindset so thoroughly that they can predict exactly what he would order them to do in any given situation, even in his absence. It's like a W.W.J.D. bracelet, except for battle tactics and covert political raids.

The Corps does have more mundane functions, too. Because of their proximity to the sultan, they are actually treated as members of his ojak, or household. Their officers hold the ranks of cook, waiter, gardener, and janitor, and sometimes they'll even perform those duties- amusingly, the janitors also serve as executioners. And they do all of this with solemn pride, because the cult of the Baklunish god of poverty and self-effacement, Daoud the Mendicant, is strong in the Corps.

New Uruzaries are selected by lieutenants who travel to meet all of the orc tribes every 4-to-6 years in an event known as the Fierce Harvest- which is just the most badass name it could possibly have. I know the subject matter is something straight out of a young adult dystopian fiction novel, but can you think of a name more metal than that?

Details on the workings of the Fierce Harvest are slim, but it is known that of all the children offered up for selection, less than half are ever found worthy. The tribes are paid for every child selected before they are shipped off for a 20-year term of service to the sultan. Considering how impoverished many of the orc tribes are, I can easily picture a system in which each tribe trains and prepares its children from a very young age, pushing them to excel in martial pursuits to ensure that as many pass muster as possible, so that the tribe can earn a bigger payout from Harvests while also having a few less mouths to feed.

In the Loyalty to the Sultan character option from Living Greyhawk, we're shown that orc clans will show off their "warriors" in the capital city of Zeir-i-Zeif during the festival of Sadakat, well in advance of the approaching Fierce Harvest in the hopes of drumming up the sultan's interest. They spar in public matches using exotic blades, and all the equipment they would be expected to master in the Uruzary Corps. No word on whether those blades are blunted or not.

Keep in mind that because of the rate at which orcs physically mature, these kids can't be older than 9 or 10.

The unspoken tragedy behind this gets me every time I think about it. What must it do to a kid's psyche to be in pretraining for military servitude from the time they can walk? How does a parent endure, knowing that the tribe might not make it another year if their child isn't taken away from them? How much of a brain drain on a community is it to have your best and brightest taken away for half their lives to serve a state that barely represents you? What does it say about a society when a young person's greatest aspiration and highest achievement is to be bought like a commodity?

Unsurprisingly, Greyhawk doesn't really raise or even touch on any of these questions.

It just sends the new Uruzaries off to work, and if they live to retirement age they get sent to the fortress of Dar-Zaribad atop the ruined city of Mukhazin in the Antal. Mukhazin was once the seat of an orc malik in the distant past, but he was overthrown and the city was torched. He was a rather nasty tyrant who fought on the side of an old pretender to the throne, but it's still pretty grim that the final destination for the greatest orcs in the sultanate is the devastated testament to a time when their people had real power- and they were crushed for it. There in Dar-Zaribad, the retirees abide in monastic exile from the world, burying their dead and quietly tolerating the army of restless orc ghosts that may or may not haunt the city.

Sultan Murad the Proud

The man currently in charge of the Uruzary Corps, as well as the entirety of Zeif, is Murad the Proud. He is the 25th sultan of Zeif, and a man of big ambitions. After centuries of territorial losses and political decline, Murad wants to return Zeif to its former glory and height of influence. As a result, the past few decades in Zeif have been tumultuous.

Murad's predecessor, Selim the Scoundrel, was a hedonist commonly blamed for most of the institutions in Zeif falling into decay while he pursued black market excesses within his palace. He acquired a reputation as a poor ruler who did not follow the Four Feet, which soured the public against him, which drove him deeper into hedonism in a self-fulfilling prophesy death-spiral that eventually killed him. The people of Zeif had even begun to doubt the ability of the institution of the sultan to lead them, when Murad ascended to the throne.

Murad's answer to this has been to try to restore public trust while aggressively cutting out the rot. Starting with the Ministry of the Treasury, Murad purged huge swaths of the central government and the administrations of cities like Ceshra. In each case he set up public trials in which any official suspected of corruption was investigated and the testimony of any and all aggrieved parties was taken, even from commoners.

Murad personally presided over these trials. When the defendant was found guilty, the punishment was swift and severe. Either they were executed, their family was sold into slavery to pay for damages, or both. This restored some faith in the general public, but has also caused the people to begin fearing Murad and wondering where he might direct his next purge.

He is not afraid to use a combination of spy networks, Uruzary wetwork squads, and even general military occupation of cities by the Spahis to reaffirm the central government's grip on its timars.

Kinda weird how there's no mention of him trying to implement institutional reforms to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the first place, whether or not the big guy in Peh'reen Palace is snorting lines of yuan-ti white resin off a half-ogre pirate's washboard abs.

Did I mention Murad's alignment is given as Lawful Good?

My gripes aside, this does leave Zeif in an interesting time that is ideal for adventuring.

Do you help the sultanate reestablish its hegemony? Build a new trade network to reconnect with the wider world? Find your fortune on the frontier, or in one of the sultanate's secessionist city-states? Plunder desert tombs leftover from the time of ancient Suel? Strike out across the plains and convince the Paynims and the Antal orcs that they have more in common with one another than with their overlords in Zeir-i-Zeif?

You decide.

Antiborea

Patrick Zgarrick

This is not the land of the South Wind. The South Wind lies dead and blameless beyond the Wall.

This is the wind that is beyond the South Wind. This is the wind that snakes down from the spiderwebbing cracks in the sky. And this land is its prison.

This land is cold and desolate, but not so cold and desolate as to grant the mercy of death to all that washes up on its ice-choked shores. It is a twisted and cruel place, dangling misbegotten hope before one's eyes until you are fully in the grip of the things that dwell there.

And yet its captives and castaways insist and persist.

The Land of Antiborea

A continent located on and around a world's South Pole. It is like Antarctica, but Weirder. The coasts and some sheltered inland areas have habitable subarctic climates where mostly recognizable flora and fauna are found. Beyond those refuges, things get progressively more inhospitable the farther south one goes.

The South Pole is located directly beneath a hole in the sky, where strange things bleed in from beyond and the laws of nature start to break down. The cosmic wind that pours down out of that nebula-studded wound scintillates and thrums with energy that can sicken or transform life, and even the land itself.

A few dozen leagues off the coast, a perfect circle of wind and waves forms a wall that hedges the entire continent in. They tower like roiling mountains over any vessel, and their undercurrents reach deep down into the shallows of the ocean, spitting everything back so that nothing can escape Antiborea. By that same token, anything from the outside world that strays too close to the Wall of Wind and Waves is inexorably pulled in and trapped in Antiborea.

Most such unfortunates wind up torn to pieces by the gale-force storm or are dashed upon the rocks, but over the centuries enough survivors have piled up and clung together to call the continent inhabited.

The Antiboreans

Descendants of castaways and exiles from a dozen different distant lands, all scattered across the shores and hinterlands. They tend to congregate in small towns or tribes located far apart from one another, because not even the most fertile coastal regions can support a fixed population much larger than that.

They aren't insular by any stretch, however. People survive in this land by cooperating. Every culture is a fusion of several, their languages patched together from dozens of tongues and dialects. Like rafts pieced together from driftwood, they float precariously on. Outlanders are readily embraced- hostility and suspicion are reserved for those from too far inland, where the wind sours.

A few examples of Antiborean communities:

    Utqaalit- Marine hunters and fishers extraordinaire. They ply the icy waters of the coast in long canoes and outrigger kayaks, casting nets or toggle-heads to bring home their livelihood. Bone is their favored medium for art and artifice, but they also work in shell, leather, and ivory. Their chilling overtone songs are known across Antiborea. Closest to the sea, they are often the first to find newcomers to Antiborea- and the sea monsters nipping at their heels.

    Nasvhas- Traders and travelers whose iconic houseboats are known all along the coast. Their family flotillas slowly bob over the waves and through the ice, bringing news and commerce to far-flung settlements like gluts of cold, sluggish lifeblood. Most are polyglots, and many are entertainers. Amber is sacred to them, and they will search far and wide for it. Their cuisine is infamously hot and bitter with herbs- a welcome contrast to the sodden cold they live in.

    Zawendi- Keepers and harvesters of the squat pine forests, and hunters of the beasts that take refuge in them. The wood they work can be made into things far beyond the capabilities of bone and sinew, but their justified concerns over conservation ensure that the driftwood industry remains lucrative. They are the continent's sole heirs to the secrets of horticulture, and their preserved crowberries are the delight of many a bland-palated child.

    Kherrig- Masters of the windswept tundra and steppe, who goad their herds of ornery, primeval, and oftentimes gamey-smelling animals in search of pasture. They are often seen as having an overly dour cast, but they counter that it is justified when you have nothing but some musky furs and a long spear to defend yourself from whatever evil comes slithering down out of the wastes. They tend to lighten up when the hide tents are pitched and the fermented cheese is cut, though.

The World Beyond

The people who survived passage through the Wall have not forgotten where they come from, at least in a broad sense. Every generation brings a handful more outsiders to them, bearing new skills or news from the outside. None in the wider world know Antiborea exists beyond the ring of devouring waves that many posit to be the edge of the world. Antiborea's denizens, meanwhile, are always hungry for stories of the world denied to them.

Scraps of events and history reach them in this way, vaguely outlining the rise and fall of peoples and places and creating a mélange of myths that frustrate and excite the Antiboreans. Not even their greatest diviners can pierce the Wall, and many have tried. To them, the outside world is a half-formed, murky dream out of which terrible, frozen reality crystallizes and rises like ice on the sea. Some hope that in the end, they will return to it.

Bargaining with Magic

The root word from which the word "magic" is derived in most languages on Antiborea means "deal" or "bargain". This reflects the nature of the supernatural rather well. Knowledge or faith won't carry you alone- one must also be charismatic in order to attract and influence the spirits that govern magic. It isn't clear if the spirits are natural, alien, or even sapient. Some choose to believe they are watchful ancestors, or capricious demons.

Every magical act incurs a cost that can either be paid on the spot, or carried as debt. The spirits often collect on their debts at random, and with appreciable interest added on. If a cost is too high, the offending shaman or magician risks psychic backlash, the opposite of the desired outcome, or even temporary bodily possession.

Possession causes the magic-user to obsess over acts or concepts in line with an exaggeration of the intent behind the spell they wanted to cast; possession by a spirit of lore makes one babble useless information, possession by an animal spirit forces appropriate behaviors and lack of manners, possession by spirits of healing turns one into an overprotective hypochondriac, etc. Possession by spirits of harm and domination tends to go especially poorly for everyone involved, adding to the already heinous reputation of what is deemed "sorcery"- though there is no objective difference between one practice or the other.

Navigation

This far south, cardinal directions are almost meaningless. In most languages, "seaward" is synonymous with the direction north, and has replaced it in common usage. Similarly, "inland" or "windward" take the place of south. Any languages that retain the original word for south often treat it as taboo and forbid it from being spoken aloud. East and west still exist among some people, but they are interchangeable with terms like upcoast or downcoast, or body-relative words like right and left (when facing the sea of course, for none willingly face inland).

The sun is dark and distant, but it has not completely forsaken this land. It can always be seen hanging heavy and orange in the northern sky as it circles the edges of Antiborea. There are long winter months of pitch blackness where it vanishes beneath the horizon completely. Strangely, its summer counterpart is not equally as long or as bright, even if the laws of physics in this world should dictate otherwise. Only a dull twilight sheds itself across the land in between partial sunsets then.

At sea and along the coast, the wind blows randomly in all directions as the Wind Beyond the South Wind and the air currents of the Wall battle one another for supremacy. This makes sailing unpredictable and difficult, which is why most maritime peoples prefer rowing close to the coast. Only inland is the wind ever consistent, and that is because it always blows north.

The stars are strange over Antiborea. Close to the sea they resemble the night sky elsewhere, albeit squished and distorted. Farther inland, they become wholly unrecognizable and are prone to changing from month to month. They do little to aid in navigation, though some sages insist that certain, obscure patterns can be observed in them over time.

Geography of Antiborea

The continent is approximately round and blobby, with few large peninsulas or gulfs disturbing its shape. Eons of uniform erosion and sediment deposition by the wind may have contributed to this. Its climate regions can be easily visualized as a series of concentric rings:

    The Encircling Sea- All of the water between the Wall and the shores of Antiborea. A few small archipelagos and lone islands dot the sea, but they are mostly uninhabited by people or animals because of the perpetual storms wracking it. Currents tend to rotate counterclockwise around the continent at the moment, but this has apparently not always been the case, and there are regional exceptions. The wind and rain are brutal, but the sea is also bountiful. The shallows are abundant with trapped seafood, both native and pulled in through the Wall.

        Encircling Sea Rumors

• Strange towers of stone and coral jut out from the Wall at intervals, shining watchfully in the right light.
• The competing winds are so fierce that localized storms and waterspouts often form. Sometimes they are strong enough to drag sea life into the air with them.
• Deep trenches are hidden surprisingly close to shore. Their depths are neither empty nor still.
• A ship passed through the Wall completely unharmed, and now prowls the shallows as if in search of something.
• A mountain of ice has calved off of one of the glaciers. It weeps strange, rusty liquid as it melts.
• Several landmark islets have suddenly vanished and reappeared far from where they are supposed to be, throwing local navigation into disarray.

    Coastland- The shore of Antiborea, as well as all the land within sight of the sea. Here, the endless flotsam of the wider world's ocean currents washes up on the continent's beaches. Even heavy wreckage that would normally sink to the bottom of the ocean is regularly brought to shore by the fury of the churning waves. This offers no shortage of resources, baubles, and curiosities to pick through, making the coastland the closest to wealthy that anything in Antiborea can get. The people here scavenge, fish or hunt marine life, and trade up and down the coast in skin boats. In winter the sea ice freezes thick, but the constant movement breaks it up into a million crashing, grinding pieces.

        Coastland Rumors

• Huge numbers of dead or deformed fish have been washing ashore lately. Their frequency is increasing, and they are being joined by larger and larger animals, all the way up to decaying whales.
• An entire tribe recently ran aground from the outside world. They walk about in the cold almost naked, and dive into the freezing waters wearing little more than animal fat. Theories abound how they do it- some of them grim and suspicious.
• Blooms of crimson algae choke a seal breeding colony, making them sick and disrupting the mating season. Things other than seals have been seen skulking between the rocks.
• Harvested mollusks have started giving huge pearls, but they come in unnatural colors, and the superstitious local traders refuse to deal in them for fear of taint from the south.
• A fishing village stands empty and abandoned downcoast. Only a pillar of whale bone was left behind, its scrimshaw depicting the destructive scene of a mountain falling from the sky.
• Someone has been going around cutting precise shapes out of fishing nets. They seem to be following a concerning pattern.

    Hinterlands- All of the habitable land beyond the coast, which in theory extends to about a week's journey inland. Forests of squat, gnarled trees are scattered across the sheltered parts of Antiborea here, bent away from the wind with leaves only on their northern faces. They provide the only native wood on the continent, and are precious and prized. Mammoth steppe sprawls elsewhere, supporting herds of hardy, cold-resistant animals. They may be megafauna previously thought extinct in the world, or entirely new and unusual creatures- it is difficult to say at this point. Nomadic tribes hunt or even herd these beasts, as well as provide the first line of defense against anything coming from farther inland, soured by the wind.

        Hinterland Rumors

• Several herds have taken ill and are in need of culling before the wind sickness spreads, but their caretakers are nowhere to be found.
• A bog recently caught fire, and has been ablaze for days. As bizarre and unlikely as this is, it spells very real doom for nearby inhabitants- bogs serve to trap much of the cosmic dust and other corruption blown in from the south.
• The coast has gotten a little too busy for one community, which has resolved to build a village farther inland. But the hard land is loathe to be homesteaded, especially by amateurs.
• The bent trees of a dwarf forest are suddenly straightening- and growing.
• One of the precious few freshwater lakes in the region has become the object of dispute between two clans, who both claim that the same person granted them the right to it.
• A young, brash nomad is rallying their fellows to go on a hunting expedition at a time when the south is dangerously active.

    Inner Wastes- The vast majority of the continent's interior, too dry and cold to sustain normal life with the exception of lichen, which can stretch in wide blankets over the rocky deserts. Beyond that lie vast glacial plateaus and high, jagged mountain ranges. The only living things out here tend to be creatures that have been turned by the wind, or those hunting them. The aroura australis common across much of the continent becomes especially intense here, and the faintest hints of the broken sky are rumored to be visible deep in the wastes.

        Wasteland Rumors

• The lichen grows huge in some areas, becoming alike to tall grass or shrubs. It doesn't always let you pass through it unscathed.
• Holes in the face of a glacier keen endlessly from the wind blowing across them. It sounds like someone playing a huge, discordant flute.
• Nomad scouts have spotted large numbers of shambling forms crossing the desert north.
• Freak weather brings showers of stardust down upon the wastes, irradiating anything caught in its path.
• That mountain range was not there last month.
• Someone is leisurely strolling through the wastes, claiming that they are on pilgrimage.

    The Uttermost South- Unknown and unexplored. The South Pole at the center of Antiborea would be lumped in with the rest of the Inner Wastes if not for the sheer, nerve-wracking mystique surrounding it. Surely something must be there at the heart of it all, forever bathed in the hellish wind and the lurid radiance of the splitting heavens?

        Southmost Rumors

• A city of clayed stardust stands at the South Pole. Shimmering waves of radiation rise up over its organic spires to obscure the step pyramid rising tall from its heart.
• The earth breathes here, rising and falling like huge lungs, or perhaps the slow beating of a titanic heart.
• The rip in the sky is only one of a mirrored pair, and the other ingress bores deep into the earth- maybe even deeper than the Wall can reach.
• No matter what direction one approaches the South Pole from, they eventually come to the shore of an impossibly wide sea, its gently lapping waters murky and warm like amniotic fluid.
• You've suddenly been turned back around to the exact spot where your excursion into the wastes started. Wait... how many years has it been...?
• An adventurer, heavily mutated by wind sickness, claims they carry knowledge vital to the safety of the coast and insists on safe passage north. This is a taboo the nomads will not allow broken if they find out.
• Space and physics begin to fall apart. Living things crumple under the weight of their own skin. Pebbles rocket into the sky at the slightest disturbance. Left is up, and backwards is inside-out.
• An ancient civilization of squamous, eldritch creatures once thrived here- and not even they stood a chance against the wind.
• A massive chasm yawns in all directions, and gravity contorts around its edges to allow easy passage into the hollow world beneath.
• The innermost mountain range is actually a huge caldera that contains a steaming, reeking jungle of writhing plants and fey animals.
• Nothing. There is nothing down here. Only a perfectly flat, featureless plain.
• The Perantique Ones have been sighted again.

History Excerpt: The Perantique Prisoners

Antiborea is in fact a prison, and the denizens of the Uttermost South are its prisoners. They sometimes refer to themselves as True or Old Antiboreans, for though they despise their cage and are loathe to consider it anything other than a temporary residence, they will take any opportunity to differentiate themselves from people whom they view as lesser- which is to say, everyone.

The prisoners are a small remnant of an ancient threat. Millennia ago, their people forged a sorcerous empire that stretched across much of the southern hemisphere. They were driven to conquest by an ideology of xenophobia and zero-sum thinking, mixed with a healthy dose of supernatural fearmongering and golden age hubris. At their height, they waged a war against the entire world.

In time, the empire crumbled. Awful logistics ground its military advances to a halt, then reversed them. At the first hint of blood in the water, its pernicious hierarchy tore itself apart- one cannot have a pyramid with an ever-expanding base and an ever-shrinking top for very long. Hounded by liberators and vengeance-seekers, their last remnants eventually retreated to Antiborea, once a worthless backwater in the empire.

There, they struck their bargain.

The barrier between this world and the next was always thin above Antiborea, but with a little applied occultism they punched a hole right through it. They entreated the denizens of the place beyond the broken sky to come down and serve them, to smite their enemies and help them reclaim their rightful place at the throne of the world.

The denizens did not take those demands lightly.

Instead of coming down to serve, they broke those would-be sorcerers in mind, body, and spirit. The Old Antiboreans became servants of the outer powers, physical instruments played to the tune of the wind that now howled down out of that tear in the sky. Generations of obsession with blood purity came to naught as they hypocritically took that otherworldly taint into themselves, becoming something eldritch and decidedly inhuman. The wind swept over the world, bringing unearthly horrors of light, sound, and thought with it. It threatened to overrun the world, and would have if not for the timely intervention of another.

The details of what transpired are as lost to time as the rest of this ancient war, but another entity drawn to the world by the rift chose to side with its peoples. Perhaps it pitied them, or perhaps it had some ulterior motive on a much larger scale than most can imagine. Whatever the reason, it lent its own wind to check the otherworldly advance. This was how the encircling Wall of Wind and Waves was formed, to make Antiborea the prison it is today.

Ages passed, history turned to myth and was lost, and now most of the world is blissfully unaware of what lies trapped and brooding at the heart of Antiborea. The old prisoners' impotence has only made them more cruel, and they often target the vibrant and diverse communities of the coast for no other reason than to vent their resentment and aggression. 

They are old and dwindling, but they are not content to die peacefully. They abide in their home below the pole, scheming almost in vain to undermine their prison. If they could just widen the rip, or perhaps make a hole in the Wall, the world would once again know their malice...

        Old Antiborean Rumors

• They steal away people suffering from advanced wind sickness and turn them to their cause.
• They make many more forays out across Antiborea than most believe, hidden by sorcery.
• If they leave the vicinity of the broken sky for too long, they lose their magic and die.
• All of them died long ago, and are now mindless puppets of the denizens above the sky.
• Even after all they've lost, they continue to compete and conspire against one another. A silent civil war threatens to spill over across the continent.
• They look...
• Tall, gaunt, and pale.
• Stocky, bent-backed, and fish-eyed.
• Like nebulae clad in old robes.
• Entirely alien and monstrous.
• Like human skins stretched over roiling masses of matter.
• Conventionally beautiful, and unnaturally symmetrical.
• One of them has recently misplaced their tome of eldritch lore. It would be disastrous for it to fall into the wrong hands- or anyone's hands, really.
• The spirits whom shamans and healers jockey with are deceased, or perhaps merely unfleshed, Old Antiboreans.
• One of them has looked past their blinding hate and begun to regard the other Antiboreans as coequals- or tried to, anyway. Their reanimated corpse has been sent by their former fellows to scour the wastelands of all life.
• They still possess that old world magic called metallurgy, and they use it to craft some of the deadliest weapons and arcane instruments on Antiborea.
• Some have decided to forsake what is left of their humanity entirely, and aspire to join their masters between the stars by building a mighty engine.
• The old emperor who struck the bargain still lives, if the form it currently exists in can be called living.

Desolate Days: Rudimentary Exploration.

 (A follow-up to my previous post about Desolate Days, in which I make the "game" slightly more than nothing by way of every properly lazy designer's fallback: random tables!)

THE WORLD was shaken to its core by the final victory, subsequent impotent ennui, and eventual explosive suicide of the Dark Lord. Many lands are ephemeral and transitory, rising up out of the sea of dust and discordant music of creation to meet living eyes, only to sink back down into oblivion after their passing. Stable islands stand out in the dust, but they are few and far between.

Because of this, the world cannot be mapped with grids or tiles. You can only know specific points, and their approximate locations relative to one another. Fortunately for goblins, they haven’t invented maps yet, and they lack the specialized language to talk in exact units of measure.

EXPLORATION is the main thrust of the game. Goblin expeditions venture out from recently discovered openings onto the surface to see what the wide, ruined world has in store for them.

The expedition begins on the Home point. This is where cracks in the earth lead down to the goblin vaults. Home is almost always a safe place to rest or resupply, compared to the wilderness. With luck, Home is the beginning and end point of every expedition.

From here, you can Visit Home, Quit and end the expedition, or move Outward to a new Point.

When moving Outward, the referee rolls d6. That is the number of times the referee rolls on the Encounters table. The Encounters can be rolled all at once and ordered how the referee chooses, or they can be rolled one at a time as the goblins overcome them. Every 3 Encounters is a full day of travel. After you navigate all Encounters, roll once on the Points table for a destination.

After arriving at a new Point, you may Explore the Point, move Outward to another Point, or move Homeward to travel back to older Points. All moves may involve Encounters.

Home can have up to 6 Points directly connected to it, like spokes on a wheel, but each of those “spokes” can lead infinitely Outward… or at least as close to infinite as goblins can count.

The sample Encounters below are more like evocative phrases meant to get an idea going. They are open-ended, and should always have multiple different paths to overcoming them. Goblins are encouraged to think of something and roll with it.

Each Point should have a full day or more worth of content if they are delved into. They should also be able to be bypassed if the goblins can't handle it, or if they just really would rather not.

d20	Encounters
1	Uneventful travel, spiced up by “games”.
2	The weather turns. It rains dust and discord.
3	Dizzying, flashing lights descend on you.
4	Swarms of stinging, biting bugs harass you.
5	A sick, frightened animal blocks your path.
6	Something scurries off with your food.
7	That cloud is too low, and moving too fast.
8	Something glitters enticingly in the darkness.
9	The ground opens up. Something grabs you.
10	Voices whisper contradictory orders to you.
11	Melancholy and homesickness grip you.
12	You swear you’ve been through here already.
13	The plants here don’t like intruders.
14	A distant figure seems to be following you.
15	You meet a friendly goblin expedition!
16	You meet an unfriendly goblin expedition.
17	An old rock with carved scribbles. Magic!
18	Fellow misbegotten monsters from the deep.
19	Accidentally wake up shades of Tall Things.
20	The Shadow hangs heavily over you all.

d20	Points
1	A completely empty dirt field- eerily empty.
2	Watering hole with strange and exotic beasts.
3	Labyrinthine grasses that sway without wind.
4	Old, gnarled, and angry forest.
5	Ford across a furious, rocky river.
6	Many small, round caves in a cliff face.
7	Ancient, iron-studded battlefield.
8	Tall, jagged tor of unusual rock for the area.
9	Wide, wine-dark lake with a lone island.
10	Immense fissure leading deep into the earth.
11	Black sand desert pockmarked with ruins.
12	Murky, roiling hot springs.
13	Solitary, crumbling tower of basalt.
14	Frozen tundra with bizarre ice formations.
15	Magnetized, floating isles of rock in the air.
16	City once belonging to the Tall Things.
17	Temple to some dead, forgotten faith.
18	Ruins bearing the marks of the old Lord.
19	Foreign goblin Home- abandoned.
20	Foreign goblin Home- populated!

Desolate Days: A Super-Basic Feeble Goblin RPG!

(So I've been knocking an idea around for at least three years now. The catalyst for the thought was reading about the RPG setting Midnight, where a very obvious Middle-Earth expy is mostly conquered by the resident Dark Lord and players take the role of people either surviving, fighting the occupation, or ushering in the darkness. The question it raised was "what would it be like if the story began even farther along than this?" What if the forces of evil won entirely? Well, evil likes to turn in on itself in most stories, so I figured that after a brief victory lap, the villain would implode from pyrrhic hollowness or just plain boredom, and leave only ruins behind.

It quickly became a post-apocalyptic setting where I could guiltlessly let my two major biases--mistreated goblins and desolate beauty--play out in full. Of course that was three years ago, and up until now I just idly kicked around a bunch of different systems and rules as I tried to figure out what worked best; d20, TROIKA!, Savage Worlds, USR, Fighting Fantasy, Powered by the Apocalypse, Cypher, Engine Heart, and even one very ill-advised dip into board game mechanics.

Nothing really worked out to my liking, so eventually I decided to do my own thing... by which I mean ripping bits and pieces from other existing ultra-simple RPGs like In Darkest Warrens.

I offer zero promises for this thing's balance or enjoyability now that it has finally sloughed out of my brain, but here is what I have completed so far.

Originally it was meant to be one of those trendy little single-page RPGs, and it can still work like that because I avoided the worst of my habitual rambling (unlike in this intro segment). But I've since begun work on point-crawl exploration mechanics and encounter tables in order to make the game more than just a work generator or GM fiat machine. More will be forthcoming, as are edits.

Also, happy surviving into the New Year, dear Burrowers! Or new years, depending on your calendrical preferences.)

DESOLATE DAYS is a game about sifting through the ruins. You are goblins, newly awoken from your stasis vault after the end of the world. All is a wasteland; everyone from humans and elves, to gods and your former Dark Lord is gone. Set out from the cold comfort of your caves. Explore. Fill the gnawing vacuum. Inherit old legacies, or discard them.

GOBLINS are endearingly wretched little things. They have no history except for the nightmares they have of the Time Before. Tools more advanced than sticks and loincloths are a novelty to them. They are curious, eusocial, and yet to discover concepts like ‘war’ or ‘personal space’.

STATS define your ability to overcome adversity. Stats represent your goblin’s weaknesses; the lower the number, the better. The four Stats are:

Weakness- athletics, breaking stuff, enduring the elements, etc.

Clumsiness- balancing, hiding, delicate touches, aiming, etc.

Naivete- knowledge, problem-solving, learning “magic”, etc.

Timidity- social skills, being brave, resisting actual magic, etc.

Assign 3, 4, 4, and 5 to your Stats. Stats can change over time, but may never be less than 2 or greater than 6.

RISKS are taken when you want to perform an action that can result in failure. To Risk, roll d6 vs a relevant Stat; roll equal to or higher than your Stat to succeed. If you fail a Risk, you may Push Yourself to reroll once by increasing a Stat by 1. Circumstances may modify a roll by ±1 or more.

ENCOUNTERS are situations where goblins have to roll several Risks to succeed, and may suffer Anguish if they fail. They can be combat, exploration, interpersonal conflicts, etc. All participating goblins earn 1 Progress per Encounter, whether it ends well or not. There are usually 3 Encounters in a day.

ANGUISH is the physical and mental trauma a goblin can withstand before breaking under the pressure. A goblin’s Anguish starts at 0. Max Anguish is 6, but can be raised as high as 10. When you take damage or suffer stress, increase Anguish by that amount. When you reach max Anguish, you are Broken.

BROKEN means a goblin cannot act. They are unconscious, catatonic, or both. Broken goblins can be revived with the help of friends during a Rest. Revived goblins are reset to half their max Anguish (rounded up). If all goblins are Broken, the expedition is lost.

SPECIAL THINGS are items a goblin finds in the wild and decides to keep close for their utility or sentimental value. A Special Thing can give +1 to one very specific Risk, like a piece of lucky rope that lets you climb better. A goblin can hold up to 3 Special Things.

“MAGIC” is anything the goblins do not understand, which to a band of childlike stone-age agoraphobes is… most things. Starting a fire, drawing complex plans in the dirt, or picking herbs to ease a stomachache are all examples of “Magic” spells. Unlike Special Things, you don’t get any bonuses to Risks from using spells, but the right piece of “Magic” gives you new options. You must first witness a spell in order to learn it.

RESTING lets goblins recuperate, compartmentalize, and give hugs. In a safe place you can Rest to reduce Anguish and/or spend Progress Points. Goblins lose up to 2 Anguish per Rest, (3 if you spend Progress). Resting more than once a day might lead to unexpected Encounters.

PROGRESS is about overcoming your weaknesses. While Resting, you may spend Progress in the following ways:

Lose 3 Anguish instead of 2 = 1 point

Decrease a Stat by 1 (minimum 2) = 1 point

Increase max Anguish by 1 = 2 points

Learn a piece of “Magic” = 3 points

Revive a Broken goblin = 4 points (anyone can contribute, including the goblin in question)