History of Near

The Shadow of Yesterday was originally selfpublished in 2004 by Clinton R. Nixon, a canny roleplaying game designer and IT professional. At this time the game book included both setting and rules in one book. The second edition followed pretty quickly in 2005, as Clinton honed the rules system, now also published separately under the moniker of “Solar System”. The game has been pretty widely available both in game stores and the Internet in different forms since then.

Clinton as a programmer is an ardent supporter of the open source movement, which has through the years weighted increasingly on his work as a game designer as well. TSoY has from its first edition on been available for free under the CREATIVE COMMONS licensing scheme, first under the non-commercial license, then without even that limitation. In 2008 Clinton released all of his other game designs under similar terms, completing his move towards pure open culture.

The open nature of TSoY has helped it become a relatively successful game in terms of popularity. I myself published a Finnish translation of the game in 2006 with Clinton’s support, and the game has been translated to other languages as well. Perhaps even more significantly, Clinton has been steadfast in his support of not only freedom from expense, but also freedom in thought: The Shadow of Yesterday has developed through these few short years into a community project, with many people all over the world interpreting the game and reinventing it to their needs.

In 2008, after discussing the matter with Clinton himself, I myself decided to take up his challenge and do what those licenses are meant to do: I would create new products for the game, gathering and refining the various Internet discussions about Near and the Solar System rules into a new round of finished products. At this point I decided to split The Shadow of Yesterday into two separate texts: there would be SOLAR SYSTEM, the rules of the game separated from the fantasy setting, and THE SHADOW OF YESTERDAY, a new, expanded edition of the setting information. This would encourage friends of the system to use it for other things as well, and meanwhile the setting book could be wholly dedicated to its own purpose, making for a leaner, meaner reference and a more ample and passionate reading experience. We shall see how that works out.

What is TSoY?

The Shadow of Yesterday is a fantasy roleplaying game that is very much defined by its peculiar setting, NEAR. Clinton characterizes it as “pumpkin fantasy”, akin to that genre of fantasy literature in which young boys leave the farm, take up the sword, learn of their world and their place in it, and ultimately redeem everything.

Aside from pumpkin fantasy, a major influence for many of us working on TSoY has been the idea of pulp aesthetics as a counterpoint to genrified post-Tolkien, post-D&D fantasy literature: Near is a very organic world (some would call it “gritty”) that draws pretty freely from sword & sorcery imagery and encourages stories to go where they will regardless of conventional structure. So there is a definite tension between uplifting heroism and literary realism in this material. It is a fruitful tension that I have seen no need to resolve: TSoY is at once sentimental and pragmatic; it is always exciting to sit down to play and see what we bring to being this time.

This is not to say that The Shadow of Yesterday is a generic fantasy game that suits anything and everything. To the contrary, Near has a very definite feel, one that is easy to recognize, as anybody who’s witnessed our frequent forum discussions on expanding and detailing Near can attest. To wit, Clinton even wrote these principles into his book:

• No monsters: The occasional wild animal happens, but the real threats and antagonism reside in characters with understandable motivation.
• No gods: Mankind of Near shapes their own destiny. This is not to say that faith has no power, but no gods will judge or redeem the world.
• Only people: Good and evil happen for a reason. That reason is somebody making them happen.

Stories of Near are humanistic stories, and even when the protagonists might not be human, they are still people, and their fates speak to us on that level. Read this as a refutation of certain sorts of fantasy literature and roleplaying if you will.

There is more to Near in general, such as the Sky Fire and the Year of Shadow, but those are incidental matters of history, not underlying thematic purpose.

Acknowledging Sources

I should note that much in this book derives from the community of interested roleplayers. While I’ve written the words, often the ideas come from other works or discussions we’ve had over the years with others enticed by The Shadow of Yesterday. Many of the words I’ve even borrowed directly from others, especially Clinton’s to-the-point prose in the original THE SHADOW OF YESTERDAY.

Aside from Clinton, whose influence is obvious, I have to commend Josh Culbertson, a long-term contributor in related forums. His “southern initiative”, as I’ve come to call a spate of discussion threads in the spring of 2008, was central in inspiring me to take up this work. With Josh’s kind permission I’ve adapted freely from his vision in bringing the southern continent and other ideas of his into this new form. Anybody interested in the origins of many ideas in this book should visit the forums at the Forge (http://www.indie-rpgs.com) for the original discussions that gave rise to what we have here.

In addition to Clinton and Josh there are of course many others whose ideas, critique and imagination have contributed in different ways and degrees to my work here. At least Troels, Harald Wagener, Dave Michael, Sami Koponen, João Mendes and my brother Jari are easy to name, and there are likely many others whose names escape me at the moment.

Another set of acknowledgement goes to the various people who have helped me playtest the materials in the book. These are mostly my local friends who have graciously helped out. At least Jari and Sami above, Markku, A-P Lappi, Henrik Mikkonen, Pyry and Peitsa Veteli, Satu and Timo Eskelinen, Sipi Myllynen are easy to name, and there are probably others I forget. As this book largely consists of an editorial reworking of multiple sources mixed with original writing and design, I make a point of indicating the main sources of each individual chapter in rough terms at the beginning of each. I don’t nitpick obsessively over the matter, but that should be enough to help direct the reader towards the original sources in each case, if he’s interested.

Using this book

First off, if you’re new to the game and don’t have the Solar System yet, we’ll need to fix that. The Solar System is available on the Internet for free, as befits its open nature, and you can also buy it in a cheap booklet from yours truly. There are several different versions out there from when Clinton actively revised the game – look for the “2008 edition” if you can, as that uses the same terminology I use here. Easier to follow that way.

Looking at the Solar System, it already advises quite a bit in how to latch a ready-made setting into the game. Actually, I write about setting up a game in general there, so I won’t repeat all that now. This book is special, though, in that it has been written with the Solar System in mind. This makes using the setting most straightforward.

I recommend reading or at least browsing through the whole book before going to the game table, especially if you’re the Story Guide. I’ve tried to write this in an entertaining manner, and to sort the material so it makes sense as a reading experience. The indexes at the end of the book are there to make referencing various details easier in play.

Traditionally roleplaying settings have been presented in gazetteer format, so I should note that this book is arranged a bit differently: TSoY is as a matter of method a random-access work wherein geographical logic is not nearly definitive: rather, players need to mix and match the material for use in their own campaign, connecting the dots between different parts of the book. For this reason I decided to arrange the book with readability in mind: in actual play you’re going to be skipping all over the place anyway, utilizing the index and your own bookmarks heavily, so I might as well organize the book logically as a reading experience, thus:

Front Matter of the book includes introductory material, Story Guiding advice and the default CRUNCH LANDSCAPE of TSoY; all material that is necessary for most campaigns using this book. Study it well.

1st Movement

consists of the material I think of as the “short Near”: it tells of Maldor, the empire, and what became of it after the Year of Shadow. I’ve arranged this material with internal coherence in mind: if you’re overwhelmed by the extent of the setting in whole, the 1st Movement is actually a sort of mini-setting in its own right, perfectly playable.

2nd Movement

concerns the “Matter of Ammeni”, the steamy northern Near. Although Clinton didn’t originally plan it this way, in practical play the Matter of Maldor and Matter of Ammeni tend to become sort of separate: a given campaign in my experience rarely tries to encompass material from both, it would simply be too sweeping.

3rd Movement

is practically Josh Culbertson’s “Southern Initiative” edited through my own lens and connected with the rest of the setting. It concerns the lands of the southern continent, a Nordic fantasy wilderness that connects and impacts the Ruined Empire from across the ocean in unpredictable ways.

4th Movement

presents a powerful general theme of the game, the issue of the Human Equation. The different intelligent species of Near are introduced and their place in the world discussed. It is a rich and useful additional angle on everything that came before. Not mandatory for a lighter campaign by any means, but useful for everybody.

5th Movement,

finally, is a segue of possibilities. I’ve written this book with an eye towards the future and inclusiveness, with no regard for a setting canon. This part consequently gathers in one place various ideas, shards and notions that might prove fruitful in the future as we continue play and work on this imaginary playground of ours.

Back Matter

includes the essential indexing. This book is pretty extensively concerned with rulesmechanical crunch, so I’ve tried to offer enough tools for finding what you need in the midst of play.

Although I’ve made a point of grouping the material a bit in the above manner, do not for a moment entertain the idea that I’d want you to limit your practical play to one or two parts of the book. I just found that the book made a better reading experience when I gave it slightly more structure than a huge dictionary of articles in alphabetic order would have had.

To Interpret Canon

While writing this book I have had to think a lot about what roleplaying game settings mean and how my and others’ play of TSoY differs from how setting material is usually used in roleplaying. Issues such as “gregging” (the actual verb used by Glorantha fans when the canonical setting is changed by Greg Stafford) or “metaplot” (a big issue with many ‘90s roleplaying games that included a prose narrative that progressed and made changes to the setting of the game through various sourcebooks) have made me wonder how come our attitude in playing TSoY with its relatively elaborate setting has never stumbled on these kinds of issues.

I remember vividly how in 2006 or so somebody asked on Clinton’s forums about “Oran”, a vaguely referenced land and people that gains hardly a mention in Clinton’s TSoY. The answers to that thread consisted of no less than three separate visions of what Oran might be – one of them by the creator of the setting. Not once in that discussion did we have any confusion about the truth of the matter: Oran would have to be, by necessity, whatever a given campaign or writer would want it to be, whether that’d be savage falconers, homosexual Arabs or a lost colony of the empire. (Check chapter 28 for what I ultimately made of that discussion.)

This is a lesson in using setting material in roleplaying, one that TSoY puts to use in a most fruitful manner: Near as a literary entity is strictly secondary to the art performed upon this stage we craft in words and pictures. A roleplaying setting must be solid in play, but this does not mean that a setting book has to have automatic credibility against the desires of the players: the group and the Story Guide (according to his task as backstory authority) should consider a setting book, no matter how well-crafted, a series of inspiration and suggestions only.

I do not write about this because I’d need to explain this ethos to old friends of TSoY. I’m explaining a fundamental difference in attitude to new readers so that you may understand why there are references never explained, why the seemingly objective descriptions differ in content, why all rules systems are partially unfinished and why I break immersion all the time to talk about why the setting is built the way it is. There simply isn’t any more objective reality behind the curtain than we please to pretend from moment to moment in our play.

The First Session

The basic procedure for starting a TSoY campaign is for the whole group to gather for a planning session, just like I describe in SOLAR SYSTEM. When using TSoY, the Story Guide often ends up being the person who has studied the setting a bit and imagined using it, so he is in a good position to tell about it to the other players. Tell small, general stories, one might say. Answer questions. Provide a picture of the sort of stories that will be created and the characters that will perform the main roles.

Many groups go into this sort of process topdown, by describing a setting in general terms of setting history first and continuing to the details. That’s fine if the group works well with that sort of approach, but I’ve personally found that an ordered top-down process is more for the comfort of the person explaining things than for utility: the rest of the group won’t really care and perhaps shouldn’t care of the generalities before you’ve nailed down the particulars.

As an alternative, consider leaving history and geography at the door and working with concrete images and concrete situations. What the players need to know and want to know is not necessarily the history of Absolon and Hanish (page 56), but the fact that now a people lies in slavery while black hearted men reach for immortality. If the latter is what excites the group, then perhaps that is what should be offered first.

When the group has latched onto a FOCAL POINT of the setting, such as the ever-popular Zaru slavery issue (chapter 10), character generation can commence in relation to this common situation. Players can choose to create characters who are directly involved, or they can choose to play outsiders, but the important thing is that they know which their character will be by figuring out the character’s relationship to the focal point. I’ve managed to make a mess of TSoY myself by going into the game characters first, so I can’t stress enough the importance of first having the group (or, conceivably, the Story Guide alone) choose the focal point around which the campaign will revolve.

Near is a big place full of possibilities for play, so an individual campaign will never need to have an integral relationship to everything in this book. Let go of any need to cross-reference your chosen material any further than seems fruitful for actual play. Ignore the parts that seem irrelevant to this particular campaign. Embrace setting-definition through the process of play, rather than looking for answers in a book.

Everything in this setting book is written with a dual purpose: on the one hand it is for the players to create their characters, the protagonists of the story world the players will create. On the other hand, all the material is usable for the Story Guide in preparing the situations he needs to conduct the campaign.

The Terse Near

I am not sure if this is actually necessary for understanding what is to come, but in case it is, here is a very compact explanation for the setting of Near, the world that is the home for the Empire of Maldor, jungles of Qek and other miracles that come later. A Story Guide who prefers a top-down approach might start with this when introducing the game to a new group.

Using the Crunch

Having a book full of rules material makes for a quite different play experience with the SOLAR SYSTEM than starting from an empty table would. Consequently, the Story Guide might consider how to best leverage the resources under his guidance.

One thing I myself tend to do is to discourage players from seeing the setting material as a selection of character options: not only (as I’ve been repeating already in the book) are all the materials in the book only suggestions, but the purpose of the setting materials is not so much to encourage character optimization as to provide ideas for how to express the fiction of the game in the rules mechanics. Sometimes I get players who presume that everything in the book is to be considered as resources characters are entitled to, and I think that this sort of thing tends to lessen the experience a bit.

So what I do instead is to encourage the players to start with simple characters that’ll then grow organically through the game into whatever direction fate and player choices dictate. As the Story Guide I like to take on the job of consulting with the players on how their characters grow and develop: the players do not need to go through long lists of character options because I’ll be throwing things out for them in the fiction of the game. Instead of going through a list of options for what he’d like to spend his Advances on, I like to see players work with what the setting is offering: a character might encounter an Uptenbo master who offers to teach him, or he might decide to become a wizard and seek tutelage in that, or he might have to learn advanced survival skills and knot-making in the jungles of Qek just because he happened to get stranded there. All of these options and more are so much more interesting when they follow and inspire the fiction of the game rather than being necessitated by a systematic study of crunch materials conducted by a player.

Often you need to do nothing more complex than utilize the crunch fully in creating secondary characters, and make sure that those characters get to engage the game mechanically. For example, a great way to introduce a new culture into the game is to create some characters that use the new crunch and have them come into contact with a player character. This allows the players to see how the new crunch works, inspiring them to consider new options for their own character.

My point in this is not to ask the Story Guide to limit other players in how they engage with the game (this book, as all materials, is for everybody), but rather to ask him to consider his responsibilities in the SOLAR SYSTEM to be expanded when this sort of crunch-heavy setting is dropped onto his lap: in addition to everything else, the Story Guide should now make sure that the players do not need to make the reference book their best ally in providing exciting character development options. There’s even no need to create your own additions to the crunch, just being active and inventive in bringing the existing material to the fore is enough. There’s quite a difference in just having a given Secret sit on the page as compared to having a character in the game actually possess it and be willing to teach it to your character.

Campaign Themes

Near is a fantasy world with the makings of your typical historical romance – there are humble farmers, evil tyrants, high mountains, wide rivers and all that stuff you’d expect. The world is just recovering from disaster as fractured societies slowly knit themselves back together, often in completely new forms. It’s a time of heroes, as the direction of the world and even its very survival are at stake.

The numerous cultures of Near have many differences. Their differing values and material lifestyles take them into conflict as old routes of travel are opened. A big part of the game is to create characters that represent or contrast with cultures in the focal point of the campaign; player characters can clash with each other as representatives of different cultures, or they can come as strangers into such situations.

Another large theme of Near is humanity; no gods, no monster as I explained in the Introduction. The so-called “old species” are a number of drastically different creatures such as humans, goblins and elves, all of which share the world and society with each other. Then there are the new creatures that have come with the broken world, in their own way both human and bestial. All of these people have identity issues that need to be resolved for a hero to truly emerge.

Finally, Near has magic. Amazing feats are possible for heroes, but only at the price of their identity: all magics and other sources of personal power are rooted in culture or even species, making the choice of tools a choice of values for a hero.

Of Cultural Sources

As TSoY is a shared endeavor, I can’t really give a definite list of useful sources. I could make a list of the sorts of culture that have influenced me on my part when playing in Near, but I desist: it’d just be that same list of seminal fantasy literature you’d get from Wikipedia and any number of other fantasy roleplaying games: just look for “sword & sorcery”, “pulp fantasy”, “pulp horror”, “Tolkien”, “feminist science fiction”, “military scifi”, “Glorantha”, “Dungeons & Dragons”, “historical novel”, “libertarianism”, “Romanticism”, “neopaganism”.

You probably know the seminal authors already, or if you’re young and don’t – I can’t guarantee it, but you’ll probably have a much better time reading the Masters than my book. In any case TSoY is for me a very wide organic writing and playing experience, one that allows me to detach from formulaic expectations of genre and just play the setting and rules, playfully shifting from genre to genre and throwing cultural references like they were cherry pits. I hope the game works the same way for you.

I should mention that Clinton gives Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber as the main influences of the original TSoY book. You will certainly not be far off if that’s the sort of setting you expect, although there are many other things here as well.

Character creation

The next couple of chapters introduce the core CRUNCH LANDSCAPE for a campaign set in Near. There are Abilities, Secrets and Keys that are usually available to all characters that want them. Many cultures in the setting use their own, more specific crunch for accomplishing some of the things covered here, but many concerns are shared by all.

When creating characters for THE SHADOW OF YESTERDAY, the convention is for the player to choose one specific CULTURE his character belongs to. The player then creates the character using only the general crunch and the culture-specific material for the culture in question. What is a “culture” in this sense is up to the group – I could see prohibiting a mixture of crunch specific to certain social classes in some lands of Near, for example. The book doesn’t make a big deal of this, it doesn’t specifically list which cultures are enough of traders to wield the trading crunch in chapter 9, for example. You’ll just have to pay attention to the fiction and make choices that fit with your campaign’s intent.

The player may also choose to make his character non-human (as opposed to the human default, chapter 22), in which case they may not access the human-specific crunch but have additional options related to their species. Nonhuman characters are still members of a culture just like humans, so they can use that crunch as well.

I should emphasize that the culture limitation does not mean that characters can’t adopt another culture during play; to the contrary, this is often a matter of great emphasis in the character’s story. During play crunch is chosen normally, so characters can learn anything they have the reasonable background or mentors for. The culture limitation is there to emphasize the cultural theme, not to limit the fiction itself.

It is not uncommon for the group to coordinate so that all the player characters are members of the same 1-2 cultures at the focal point of the campaign. For example, players might all agree to create characters living in the same town in Maldor. The choice to play an outsider in this set-up is a strong one as well, for such outsiders naturally become pivots and judges of the local situation.

Another approach is the classical adventure fantasy paradigm: have all players create characters out of the material they are most interested in, getting a mix of cultures from all over Near, but also require the characters to be severed from their society and already adrift, looking for purpose; some heavy-handed dramatic coordination from the Story Guide will then get all of these colorful, idiosyncratic individuals mixed up with the focal point of the campaign, at which point they can take sides and proceed with the scenario. Even a traditional adventure party is a possibility here, at least for a time.

Dealing with the list

You won’t go too far wrong if you consider the list of Abilities a list of examples only, but there is some hidden wisdom in what I choose to include in it. Here’s some advice on handling situations that might be unusual compared to how you might expect one to handle the fantasy genre in the SOLAR SYSTEM.

Intimidation:

Usually I don’t allow this as a conflict. Rather, when characters try to intimidate others, the other party chooses whether they succeed and how the character will be treated going forward. For example, the Story Guide might have the target either buckle under and harbor resentment, or attack the intimidating player character outright. Note that if the target of intimidation is helpless and refuses to give in, it’s up to the other party to go through or not with their threats.

Healing:

A community of Near won’t necessarily have any dedicated health professionals. Lacking any real knowledge, a character may use HOUSEWORK (I) to treat simple injuries and illnesses. I usually limit this to the most rudimentary of treatments, such as bandages, splints and nursing; when these are insufficient, nothing much can be done.

Fighting:

Aside from BRAWL (V), there is no universal martial discipline available – the role of violence is different enough in the various societies of Near. A character that wants to be a disciplined martial artist needs to learn such arts and mindsets from a specific culture.

Archery:

Not available to everybody. In fact, unless you count throwing rocks with SPORTS (V), characters wanting to resolve conflicts with missile weapons need cultural Abilities. For others missile weapons might delay a conflict or change details about it, but the actual resolution will hinge on other things.

Stealth:

All sorts of sneaking about and hiding cleverly are accomplished with either WOODCRAFT (R) or THIEVERY (I), depending on the environs, purpose and the whim of the group. Surprising someone to mug or murder them is a fine application of THIEVERY (I), for example.

Forgery:

THIEVERY (I) can deal with this, but only if the character can write in the first place. This might require the SECRET OF SCRIBING if the group is using that distinction, or it might just require having a background in a literate culture like Maldorian courts.

Lore:

VAGRANCY (I) deals with the news of the present world, STORYTELLING (R) with history and stories. I like to use plenty of various lore checks to find out where player and character knowledge diverges; the intent is not to hide things from the players, but to give them tools for crafting entertaining situations. So the player would indeed know that his character is now romancing a witch, even if the naive fool himself didn’t. This can then be used by the player in portraying his character. If your group isn’t so hot for this sort of thing, no need to have lore checks at all.

Convincing others:

CHARM (I) and SPEAK (R) may well be used to sway another character. In the case of player characters, it is a good idea to ask the player of the opposing character to validate the conflict stakes, as he is the leading expert at the table on what the character might be willing to do; if the player feels that his character really can’t be talked over in this situation even with circumstantial penalty dice, the conflict may still cause Harm from uncertainty, shame or other such social considerations. Thus, instead of “I convince him to kill himself out of shame” it’s more reasonable to have stakes along the lines of “he takes a MAJOR (4) Harm as I shame him”.

Arts and crafts:

If it can’t be done with CRAFTWORK (I), chances are that some culture in the book holds the lost knowledge. Other cultures make do without.

Noticing things:

For the most part there are no Abilities for noticing things because noticing something is just set-up, not conflict. REACT (I) is used when this is not the case, but mostly it should be assumed that the characters notice what they need to notice for the scene to find its dramatic purpose.

Useless Abilities:

This is not so much the case with the common Abilities, but the cultural stuff later in the book includes some quite marginal cases. It is good to remember several things about this: dramatic coordination can be used to bring narrowly useful and exotic Abilities to the fore; the player can play towards his Abilities and use even a tenuous connection to justify a support check; choosing a weird Ability in itself signals a certain degree of willingness to wait and see whether it becomes a dead reminder of the character’s past or a surprising, fresh focus for some different play.

Leverage and Secrets:

TSoY has a boatload of Secrets, much more than can be used during one campaign. It is extremely important for the players to understand that only content introduced into play is pertinent: disallowing a character from trying to set up an ambush with a normal Ability check because the book has a separate Secret of Ambushing or an Ambushing Ability somewhere in there would be abusing the content; the real crunch landscape of the game is only what the players willfully choose to include into their game, not what I might have written into this book. If this seems vague, meditate on the SECRET OF LANGUAGE until it becomes clear.

Creating new Abilities

In actual play of TSoY I’ve long used the Ability list more as a guide than an authoritative source for what can be turned into an Ability. Partially this has been because I haven’t sat down to sketch my own perfect list until now, but part has been the fact that some Abilities should be developed for individual campaigns only. For example, if your character concept is an optician or some such, and you expect the play to center on how he helps everybody with eyeglasses, I simply can’t predict that, and even if I could, all the crunch I wrote for the optician would be useless overhead for other campaigns.

Thus: remember that this book is a reference, the real crunch landscape is the one that is actualized by your individual campaign. It might have quite different Ability lists from what this general treatise suggests.

Missing Abilities

TSoY is more or less a flagship setting for SOLAR SYSTEM, so it’s pretty complex. Sometimes characters encounter each other in the weirdest of situations and simply have asymmetric Abilities. How to resolve conflicts when characters lack obvious Abilities?

The precept of Solar System is that Abilities simultaneously reflect character identity and allowable venues of conflict resolution. What this boils down to is that a character that lacks a MEDICINE (R) Ability, say, can’t resolve conflicts through this venue; he fails automatically when the issue is whether a disease will run its course or not. The only way for the group to avoid this stark reality is by manipulating the TURNING-POINT of the conflict: perhaps the issue is not whether a character can heal another, but whether he can travel quickly enough to bring a remedy from far away? Or perhaps success depends on being able to convince a traveling doctor to help? As long as the player can re-frame a problem in terms his character understands, he can tackle the conflict from the new direction and be victorious.

When two characters conflict against each other, both have a say in where the turning-point of the conflict forms. For example, if the issue is over a military campaign conducted by imperial Maldor using BATTLE (R) against a primitive tribe without similar strategic culture, it might well be that the imperial forces would win with a simple, uncontested Ability check: their tactical supremacy allows them to win the war without a fight. A player character on the other side, however, is well within his rights to influence the unfolding narrative to include a concrete fight scene wherein his character’s BRAWL (V) or other melee combat Abilities come to determine the fate of the war: whether the war between an empire and a primitive tribe comes down to brawling or logistics or some completely different Ability is a nuanced dance of scene framing, narration, player initiative and stakes negotiation: I can’t give a straight answer because this largely is the game of SOLAR SYSTEM. Play the game and find out!

Cultural Strengths

Later, in the actual culture write-ups, there are headings for “Cultural Strengths”. Under these I have long lists of suggestions for how to adapt some of the more generic common Secrets for the culture in question. For example, I might list “specializations”, which are suggestions for how to use the SECRET OF SPECIALTY with that culture.

Traditionally this sort of content would have been written into separate Secrets to emphasize how this culture is really good at swimming or whatever, but that goes a bit old, isn’t that helpful to you and takes a lot of space, frankly, so I stopped doing it and just listed everything in one long list. I try to separate only Secrets that have somehow strange mechanics or are otherwise notable.

One thing the players might wish to do (and which was explicitly done in earlier editions of TSoY) is to make common Secrets based on cultural strengths just the slight bit more powerful than any old implementation a player might grab. This could range from allowing an abnormally wide specialization to picking two generic Secrets under one heading. This is all fine, as the Secrets featured in Cultural Strengths are mostly pretty low-key stuff anyway. Thus, to pick an old TSoY example, the SECRET OF SWAMP LORE would be a Zaru SECRET OF SPECIALIZATION that also expanded the usage of WOODCRAFT (I) a bit.

This might go without saying, but do treat those lists of cultural strengths as a list of examples to be added to as the group’s understanding of the given culture increases. Here more than anywhere else I just sat down and typed whatever came to mind, there is no great plan behind the free association that went into this particular piece of crunch.

Mechanical Issues

While most of the general Secrets are mechanically simple, this is a good place to introduce some overriding mechanical principles I’ve worked with while editing this book to shape. Some of these are terminology issues, some are new rules, some are optional rules. See for yourself.

New Keys

I’ve always created new Keys as needed for the dramatic sensibilities of the group. I would probably read the Keys in this book as important examples and likely candidates, not as a limiting constraint. There is no pressure to create your own Keys, of course – the general list alone is more than sufficient for many different characters.

Keys for secondary characters

I don’t usually bother with Keys for secondary characters per se in TSoY; instead, I assume that all named secondary characters have a Key concerning their foremost passion of the moment, should that become pertinent.

Secondary characters in my TSoY only really advance in experience with fictional events and time. So something has to happen in the fiction for the character’s capabilities to change, and the Story Guide judges what the change brings. Sidekicks and such are an exception; if a player runs the statistics of a given character, then the player may as well track experience points for them.

Useless Keys

Keys in TSoY tend to be quite quirky by generic SOLAR SYSTEM standards. It’s not that hard to make a Key completely useless without hitting the Buyoff condition with some of these, especially when characters can change the world. I handle those situations by allowing the character to regain an Advance for the useless Key, provided that it has really become non-applicable and not just difficult to use.

Basics of Equipment

When a character has an important tool, such as a signature weapon, the player may choose to have it emphasized via the SECRET OF EQUIPMENT. The Solar System rules for DECLARED equipment may also be used if desired.

Each piece of equipment has a QUALITY VALUE as an Effect; this is derived with a Barter (I) or suitable crafting Ability check, depending on how the character came by the equipment. The quality is important when another character is trying to destroy the equipment, and it sets the upper limit for the equipment’s usefulness in other ways as well.

The two main mechanics for a piece of equipment are EQUIPMENT RATINGS and IMBUEMENTS. A given piece of equipment will usually have equipment ratings equal to its quality rating; it may also have at most that many imbuements. However, each imbuement increases the INTRODUCTION COST of the equipment, so having them is not always a good thing.

Rated Equipment

The equipment rating is a value in the range +1–3, combined with a short phrase describing where it might be applicable.

For example, a simple sword might have an equipment rating “+1 to injure men or beasts”. This sword would then be applicable when the character using it tried to injure men or beasts with it.

Each equipment rating is associated with a different scope of effect: higher ratings come only from more specialized equipment, like so:

+1 rating

applies to certain sorts of activity, with the scope roughly similar to an Ability. Examples:

• A telescope for a +1 when examining distant things.
• The Book of Light for a +1 when convincing people.
• A horse for a +1 when traveling overland.

+2 rating

only applies in specific circumstances, akin in scope to the SECRET OF SPECIALTY. Examples:

• A firebomb for +2 at burning a thing.
• An Ammeni perfume for a +2 in convincing people attracted to you.
• Snowshoes for a +2 when traveling over snow and ice.

+3 rating

applies in very specific circumstances that rarely come up of their own accord. Examples:

• A helmet for a +3 against head-blows.
• A royal charter for a +3 when convincing people to go along with it.
• A shallow boat for a +3 when traveling in the Zaru marshes.

Each equipment may have at most three +1 ratings, two +2 ratings and one +3 rating, provided the equipment quality suffices. Most likely these ratings overlap in one piece of equipment, providing increasing specialties within a single field of endeavor, but that is not mandatory.

Imbued Equipment

IMBUED items are a lateral depiction of equipment. They are items with integrated Secrets in them that a character can use through the item. Imbuements are useful in depicting not only wacky magic items that do stuff for you, but also for mundane equipment that does more than just improves Ability checks. A character might, for example, have a heavy mace with the SECRET OF KNOCKBACK inherent to it, to coin a mundane example.

Existence of Imbuements does not increase the Advance cost to own an item; instead, an imbued item has an INTRODUCTION cost: first time the item is used for anything in a single scene, the player has to pay a Pool cost equal to the number of imbuements it has. This goes even if the item is just used for its ratings; the presence of imbuements makes taking the item out a weighty matter.

Which Pools the imbued item drains is established by the Story Guide when the item is introduced; the profile remains unchanged after that. Be colorful about it: heavy anime weapons take Vigor, items with many parts take Reason, that sort of thing. An item’s quality rating sets the maximum number of imbuements an item may have.

Although the imbued Secret is used just like it would if the character himself possessed it, Pool costs and all, in the fiction it is usually not the “same” Secret that people use. Thus imbued Secrets don’t care about fulfilling requirements, can’t be used to learn the original Secret and so on. When I particularly want to emphasize that I’m not talking about a natural Secret that characters learn, I call imbued Secrets IMBUEMENTS. So an imbued mace doesn’t strictly speaking have the SECRET OF KNOCKBACK, it has KNOCKBACK IMBUEMENT. One other difference between Imbuements and Secrets is that the former are usually somewhat narrower in application: the character has to use the item in question to activate the Imbuement, for example, while the Secret version can be used in any situation.

Gaining Equipment

The simplest method for gaining equipment is to DECLARE it. Aside from Story Guide decision á la SOLAR SYSTEM, players may purchase the SECRET OF EQUIPMENT all but instantly by deciding that a character’s horse or armor or hat is important enough to pay an Advance for. Most Story Guides seem to be fine with this; I myself used to be hardass and demand a character to go buy or steal or otherwise gain a piece of equipment interesting enough for this, but nowadays I’ve come around: if equipment has been established as existing in the fiction and it’s not in the middle of a conflict, it’s the player’s decision where he wants to spend his Advances.

When the SECRET OF EQUIPMENT is spontaneously declared like this, have the player make a suitable Ability check to represent the quality of the item, in case such a check hasn’t already been made. If no pertinent Ability jumps out, the Story Guide may well decide the quality of the item freely: the item would probably be between MARGINAL (1) and GREAT (3), but it’s the Story Guide’s call. The equipment ratings for garnered equipment are determined by having the player first pick one equipment rating, after which the Story Guide names the others based on his sensibilities. Declared equipment is always “mundane” in the aforementioned sense, I’d expect.

Cradle of Earth

Near is shadowed by the ROOF OF THE WORLD, a large mountain chain to the west. Everything falls into the great Eastern Sea on the other edge of the world. In between was the Empire of Maldor, the greatest civilization Near had ever known.

As the Skyfire broke the world, many changes happened: new mountains rose, valleys fell into sea and the sky itself occluded, darkened by great clouds of dust. The Sea of Teeth ripped into the Northern part of Near, drowning much and separating the rest.

Life in Near is for most people a constant struggle. The great majority of the people live in preliterate barter economies. The difference between cultures that survived the Year of Shadow as primitive hunter-gatherers and those that stockpiled technology into elaborate shelters is striking. It is now anybody’s guess as to how the world will shake out in the end.

The Moon is a terrible curse for those who cling to the values and ways of the past. For those who look to the future and change it becomes a symbol of rebirth. Often actual history has little say in where the battle-lines form: politics unanimously condemned by the Empire might be defended by invoking that very name, while ethics cherished then are being reintroduced as a new thing, with the Moon embroidered on the battle flag.

Let me introduce the players, or at least set the stage:

Myths in Play

A couple of words on this whole Skyfire thing and the Near in general; why is this historical back-story material useful in practice?

Most campaigns do not concern themselves directly with the Year of Shadow or the Skyfire, or in fact any old myths I might choose to include between these covers. Your typical campaign tells the stories of individual people who sometimes rise to change their own society into something better. For most purposes you can just file this Skyfire thing in the bottom drawer and concentrate on the now: these fictional people in this fictional situation.

Regardless, the Skyfire and the coming of the Moon are a common strand that ties together the stories of Near. The world is young and raw after the catastrophe, but the shadow of the past presses down on it; there’s lots of high-level thematic stuff in heroes who rebuild the world and need to choose between the past and the unknown future. The Story Guide or anybody interested in setting backstory can use this stuff to make sense of things for himself.

One thing I like to play with here is the symbolism of what the actions of player characters actually mean for the world: just like the characters are struggling to find their place in society, so is the world itself trying to find an equilibrium. It’s completely arbitrary, but I like to think that should the heroes fail in their own passion (whatever it may be), perhaps that doesn’t bode well for the whole world, either: as the days get longer and the Moon grows larger, this failed world goes into tidal lock and dies out of the last convulsion it was given by cruel fate.

Then again, heroic deeds go with the genre, so great successes are also narrated. The astronomy of Near is in shambles after the Moon appeared, the celestial objects themselves are still adjusting. Whenever a hero transcends (TRANSCENDENT success in an Ability check, you know) in Near, an eclipse blackens the sky for an hour, day or night. Perhaps it is a sign of hope for the people.

A Land of Lieges

When the Sky Fire fell, Emperor Absolon passed on and Maldor passed into darkness. As people took to the land again, the country found itself shattered, with local lords claiming royal blood dividing the land up like lions on a carcass: unfair and bloody. The disparity between the wealthy and poor is immense; only those families with great stone fortresses and great stores were able to emerge as anything but destitute.

The Lords of the land press commoners into service as infantry, farmers, artisans, or whatever suits their whims. Outright war between these Lords is not uncommon as they attempt to gain dominance over each other. None have achieved their goal, however, and the country remains divided.

The Maldorites are war-weary, blindly attempting to follow their old ways of life. The people are a mix of ethnicities, although the noble lines are all Caucasoid in appearance. Nobility treasures their blood and the peasants huddle together, but families are often separated by war, hunger, and wanderlust. Filthy children run rampant; with nothing to own, people make much of their only resource.

The Remnants of Culture

Maldor is in its dark ages; the old Civil Service wilted soon after the academies closed down, with the remaining officials turning their talents of lore and wizardry to the service of the Lords in an effort of survival, becoming courtiers. The noble courts are now the primary centers of learning in Maldor. Sciences, history and the arts of wizardry are transmitted by masters to their disciples individually, as they will and care.

Art and culture take second-place to survival. Among the noble classes, art still exists in collections from before the Shadow Moon came. Tapestries, painting, and sculpture are most prized. Artists are employed by lords, but innovation is rare: the artists are called on to make knock-offs of preShadow art more than anything else. Musicians and actors do well if they can find a liege, as owning the better court entertainment is a major point of pride for these cardboard nobles playing at being kings.

Other troubadours wander the countryside, going from inn to inn to make a few pieces of gold. It is said that one enterprising merchant hired a gang of mercenaries to pillage a fallen city and is now printing books using a press they managed to liberate. From the borderlands, there are stories of commoners banding together to rebuild villages; these communes are said to sponsor community theatres of dubious quality, but high humor.

The food of Maldor is considered bland by the rest of the world, but it is hearty and filling. Potatoes are served at every meal, from a commoner's feast to a noble's snack. On the other hand, Maldor's beer is the best in the world.

Let Them Eat War

The Maldorian economy can be described as an ever hungry violent monster, constantly devouring itself to live. Farmers grow grain, corn, potatoes, and other root vegetables and raise goats, sheep, and cattle for milk and food, but it never seems to be enough, especially as the Lords take an obscene amount of crops and livestock in land taxes to pay for their wars. Beer and vodka make up a large amount of their exports, especially to the Gorenite highlands. Metal is found in the western hills, and what doesn't become an axe or breastplate gets sold to the iron-poor north. Most families have to supplement their income by taking up the sword. The nobles promise good pay in their armies, although plenty of young people end up dying on the end of a sword before payday.

Individual lords of Maldor supplement their coffers by trading priceless artifacts and antiquities to foreigners. The Ammenite Houses are the major buyers of these objects. There is good pay in Maldor for a seasoned explorer; the ruins of many great cities are filled with arms and art, as well as fierce ratkin unlikely to appreciate pillagers.

Actual Play

Maldor is the linchpin of TSoY in that it holds the Shadow of Yesterday: the past is everywhere in sight and its weight oppresses the land every day. A game set in Maldor will not necessarily go all revolutionary, however; characters may well end up championing the feudal obligations, transforming the shallow rule of warlords into a real social contract between the rulers and the ruled. I try to reflect this in the crunch, which provides some functional-but-not-quite means for upholding a society in an essentially lawless, feudal context.

Maldor also has a function as the point of relation between the fantasy genre and Near; this is why I start the book with it. Basically Maldor is your normal fantasy setting, so if you want to play around with thieves’ guilds and such, this is the place. There are only few fantasy staples that can’t be inserted here at the group’s pleasure, and ADVENTURE CAMPAIGNS are more than natural, whether they only start or remain indefinitely in Maldor.

Ideas

The diminishing middle class of imperial Maldor is represented today by courtiers and craftsmen. When the common people are concerned only with survival and the Lords only with war, the cultural heritage of the land and the world is in their hands.

Freedom is at a premium in the lawless Maldor. Even the nobility is constrained in their lives by the expectations of their peers and vassals, and by the necessities of war. The game is played for the highest stakes of all, but it is far from certain whether participating in it is worth the sacrifice, morally right or even humane. Getting out might cost even more, however, because your family is just as committed as you are.

Maldorian peasants as player characters seem to usually be either vagrants, rebels or not peasants for long; the social framework of Maldor is such that it doesn’t make for much of a drama to accept this lot in life. If the player character doesn’t want to leave and doesn’t want to change the system, the Story Guide does well to proffer him a chance at social betterment through the court or battlefield.

Rebellions discontent with the rule of particular Lords mingle freely with proper revolutions that strive to start new societies afresh. Reformation towards the society of the old Empire is far from unknown as well in the central areas that still remember. I don’t hesitate to mix modernistic, utopian and high philosophical ideas into the social movements that roll through the Maldorian countryside. There is no one revolution, but many.

Maldorite Names

The basic theory is that Maldorites use Romance names (Hispanic, particularly), but for some reason my own games always tend towards Germanic when I’m not paying attention. Cities get names ending in “-burg” and so on. It’s probably because fantasy empires are usually German here in Finland or something.

Mandate of Heaven

The lords of Maldor are monotheistic. Their religion centers around a variation of ancient sun god worship: they have melded the figure of the sun god and Absolon, saying that the Year of Shadow was Absolon's sacrifice as he descended into the underworld, then rose again, undefeated by Shadow. Their priests prophesy his return to Near as a king that will re-unite Maldor and make it strong again. Some philosophers might debate about when Absolon will come again, but the lords do not: there's not a one of them without the hubris to think that he is Absolon-Come-again, and that all will bow down to him. This messiah complex makes their wars all the more bloody, of course.

The original empire of Maldor was defined by its worship of the sun as deity. The sun gave light and life to all things and was venerated as such. The original worship was personal and communal in nature; small invocations were given before a meal, for example. As the empire grew, worship was formalized and gave birth to a priestly class. The Emperor Absolon was designated the sun's champion on Near, and became an object of worship himself. The trappings of sun worship can still be found in Maldor, including broken churches, usually designed with no roof and a structure that was aligned with sunrise and sunset.

Monotheism trickles down to the peasants, who tend to worship the sun god in its more pagan aspect, as a giver of life and blessing. Unlike the lords, the peasants definitely argue about when Absolon will return: their dream of a better day is well-deserved, but pathetic. As Maldor was once a great multicultural cornucopia, though, religion varies widely among its lower classes, which practice animism, ancestor worship, or any variety of other religious practices in addition to sun-worship.

Eclipse of Intent

Rumors of a Shadow Cult abound, evildoers who would try to throw down the sun and replace it with their dark Queen of Shadow. It is unknown who exactly the Shadow Cult is. Earls and dukes tell their people that the Shadow Cult are the followers of other earls and dukes; advisors tell their lords that the Shadow Cult grows among their own people; commoners believe the Shadow Cult are the ratkin, or nasty elves, or their next-door neighbors, depending on what day of the week it is. Some elements have been assassinating self-proclaimed messiahs and blowing up castle walls without getting caught, but leave no clue as to whom they are.

The reality of the Shadow Cult is that it has no leaders and it revels in plurality. Whether this anarchy turns into discord as the Sun Lords weaken remains to be seen – for now there is well enough room for witches, ratkin, revolutionaries, reformers and even republicans in the ranks of the movement. The theology of the Shadow Cult is vague, but generally it deals with ending the rule of man, celebrating the human body and justifying acts of violence against the Sun Lords. The cult practices witchcraft, but not everybody agrees that the Queen of Shadow is actually the tri-partite Goddess of old. Regardless, the Queen responds to her witches who raise the Aspect of the Moon.

Women join the cult for protection and power. Ratkin join the Cult because it teaches that the fanged ones are children of the new Goddess. Men join the cult for the free sex. Lords join for the poisonous gifts offered against their enemies. The cult ceremonies accept all, although some new recruits might find themselves under the knives of the less compassionate priestesses of the Moon.

March of the Servitors

The last era of the Empire was a time of great breakthroughs. It was then that the eye of man was cast at the heavens. The royal astronomers with their telescopes discovered new stars that moved like no other. With time their secret was deciphered: like the Emperor was orbited by servants in running the empire, so was the Sun Lord himself orbited by these eight planets, Servitors of the Sun. What transformed the understanding of the sages, however, was this: Near was one of these Servitors.

Now much of this knowledge is lost, but legends still remember the names of the Servitors:

• ABRAMOV, Judge of Fire
• PHOLUS, Sky Navigator
• NEAR, Royal Doctor
• KIEV, Star General
• MASAKO, Mighty Reeve
• GWANGJU, Court Magician
• SIJJIN, Renegade Repentant
• ENCHIRIDION, Mysterious Confidant
• FAR, Trusted Stranger

The litany of names is revered by courtiers, what remains of the Civil Service of Antiquity. The Servitors are a resonant idea, suggesting a celestial order that refutes stark monotheism. They get no worship, however, for they are only remembered by men too civilized for gods. Even where the commoners know the stories, they cannot see the stars: the sky has grown more opaque after the Year of Darkness, with only the light of the most powerful stars shining through.

Still, in a time of chaos, many courtiers rely on the litany for their dignity and role in the drab, martial courts of the present Lords. It is not a faith on the unseen gods so much as a faith on the tradition and propriety that allows the courtier courage to rise even against his Lord at times to demand and receive the proper respect. Thus the Servitors shape the life of those who care of their example; every court magician knows the banes set on their work, every reeve that they have no jurisdiction over the servants of the legal counsel.

Actual Play

There is huge thematic tension in the sun cult of Absolon as it relates to character identity, being how it is just about the only religious tradition in the book that doesn’t offer kewl powerz up the wazoo. I find it interesting to play the humble rural sun priest as a good guy, or have the influential abbot do his best against the ravages of a corrupt Lord, all without Solar Rays of Death in his back pocket.

The Shadow Cult is the only serious ideology to resist the Lords of Maldor, but at least in my games it seems to be filled with terrorist assholes willing to go to any lengths against the Lords. This is sad, as the Shadow Cult is also the only really liberal theology in Maldor. Traditional witchcraft is weak in Maldor, but it makes for interesting sectarian disputes when it encounters its young, mad sibling faith.

The Servitors are only a faint idea, wistful for a third way but impotent in the monotheistic, monolithic present. The Nine Celestials in chapter 32 provide a sketch of an elite mystery cult revolving around them.

First Victims of War

Most lords of Maldor maintain almost permanent armies, the bulk of which is formed of MILITIAS and GUARDS of infantry. The difference between the two is in whether the troop was formed by conscription or voluntarily. The military paradigm emphasizes disciplined troop action; foot soldiers are not expected to have initiative, but rather to use pre-learned maneuvers to move and fight in coordination. Militia sergeants are the best of the veterans, while guard sergeants are almost always mercenaries from the border marches where ancient tradition and terrain make the footman into the core of the army.

Cavalry has the pride of place in modern Maldorian warcraft, foremost because cavalrymen are professional soldiers with superior morale. The ones that own their own horses and weapons are called KNIGHTS, while the rest are ARMSMEN and receive their arms from their liege. Cavalry sergeants are valued veteran armsmen or knights.

The captains of all Maldorian military units are theoretically of noble blood, although foot units are considered much less prestigious and in practice often end up in the command of trusted veterans. There is not much formal careerism in the military of today; the land is much too chaotic and the armed forces of individual Lords in constant transition. The best a captain can do is to make himself and his unit gain in value in the eyes of the Lord – that is, if he doesn’t decide to lead his loyal troop out east to Ammeni, where mercenaries are paid well and respected highly for their superior fighting skills.

Quality over Quantity

Roleplayers usually have plenty of experience in running normal skirmish combats, so I won’t worry my head about those. Some other situations might require advice, however:

Warbands:

When a character has a vague number of extras backing him in combat, he has a WARBAND. This by itself does nothing, but it allows the character to try leading from the back (rolling BATTLE (R) as primary) or boosting his personal combat prowess with tactics (rolling BATTLE (R) in support) or train his troops (creating various Effects with BATTLE (R)). Basically it’s the Story Guide who decides whether a bunch of extras forms a warband; I’d let anything with armed adult men or equivalent willing to fight pass, as long as there’s more than a couple of them.

One against many:

When an individual character fights against a bunch of extras without leadership, promote one of the extras into a real secondary character. Give them a real motivation, too, not just “I want to kill the player character.”

Being underdog:

When a hero fights against another who has extras supporting him, assign circumstance penalties to the underdog. If both have support, don’t bother unless the difference in numbers or quality is cinematic – just like always with circumstance penalties.

Holding the line:

If a player character is not in command of a battle, he doesn’t have leverage to determine the outcome of the battle outright. The Story Guide decides the outcome in these situations, just like with any conflicts between secondary characters. A non-combatant player character or one fighting in the battle might still influence the outcome with partial stakes (see below).

Partial stakes:

This is important. When a character has insufficient leverage in any conflict to get his way, the Story Guide is responsible for downgrading the scope of the conflict stakes to match the character’s capabilities. In battle this is commonly seen when a player character is just one of the troops fighting; he may well run conflicts about whether he gets injured or captured himself, or to save the lives of others or to do other heroic things on the battlefield, but he can’t determine the outcome of the whole battle unless a suitable opportunity presents him with such leverage.

As can be seen, battles with many participants work exactly like normal skirmishes as far as the mechanics are concerned. The characters that actually have dramatic goals in the situation get the spotlight, and this may or may not mean that a player character gets an opportunity to influence the battle outside his immediate vicinity.

Quantity has Quality

I’ll return to those partial stakes for a bit, because they are important when the whole campaign starts revolving around what characters can and can’t accomplish in battle. Specifically, how does superior LEVERAGE affect the stakes of a battle? This is how:

• There are so many enemies that the sparse defenders can only hope to delay, not to stop them. While the character’s GOAL might be to stop the enemy, the Story Guide downgrades the STAKES into “delay them long enough for a successful retreat”.
• The lone hero never even stops to consider fighting the enemy, they are so many. He can’t hope for stakes like “I win the battle”, alone as he is, so he accepts “I escape from their hands”.

There are other ways of building asymmetric, biased stakes, but the basic principle is the same: when a character doesn’t have appropriate leverage to fight the forces arrayed against him properly, he has no choice but to accept lesser stakes. This is really obvious from a cinematic viewpoint; nobody ever questions it when the hero runs from superior forces. Still, sometimes roleplayers stare a bit too intently at the dicing rules of a game and start claiming that they have some sort of right to a “fair fight” against any comers.

Now, in actual play the technique of partial stakes depends a lot on the Story Guide. A given campaign might be so superheroic that partial stakes would never come up: heroic swordsmen just up and face whole armies arranged against them, and win. However, I like my TSoY with a tad grimmer take, which is why I have crunch that actually formalizes the Story Guide judgment here: the key piece of rules material in this chapter is the SOLDIER IMBUEMENT, which says this same thing: a character with a professional Maldorian MILITARY UNIT backing him is actually unassailable on the open field by a single hero, barring magic or whatnot.

MILITARY UNITS with the SOLDIER IMBUEMENT have SUPERIOR LEVERAGE in martial conflict, which means that lone heroes automatically lose against them if they try to clash directly. This is heavy stuff in the SOLAR SYSTEM context, so it’s definitely up to you whether you want to allow this option in your own campaign. If you do, remember that “auto-lose” only means that characters can’t contest the military unit directly on the field; they can still conflict over weaker stakes such as escaping, delaying, misdirecting and so on.

Also, the basic strategy for a lesser force (and the one I’m shooting for here; it’s what they do in this sort of fiction) is to attack the unit cohesion of the military unit: units in disorder are useless as equipment. The character leading a military unit often has to choose between protecting the cohesion of his unit (by avoiding melee, for example) and actually doing anything in the battle. And of course characters can just choose other means apart from violence; a military unit is just as vulnerable to a convincing speech or major-scale magic as any other warband.

Making it work for you

Running combat for the sake of combat is not very interesting, so I don’t particularly recommend using this war material just because it’s there. Some players might gravitate towards power-tripping with the mechanically cheap power provided here, which is of course fine, but not the actual point; the Story Guide should know where to go from there, as simply running combat after combat doesn’t do much in this game.

I’m myself pretty fond of military science fiction after having had too much time in my hands earlier this decade and reading a bit too many paperback books by Lois McMaster Bujold, David Feintuch, David Weber and such. This literary genre has been on my mind a lot when playing TSoY in Maldor, as the military themes are similar: honor between fighting men, responsibility for the welfare of the men and the cause they fight for, obedience and contempt towards civilian authorities... Maldor is a great place for war stories of adventurous bend.

A key issue here is that soldier characters need to be challenged morally just the same as everybody else. If their war happens to be just, then there might be division in the ranks or corrupt officers; if the troop thinks with one mind, perhaps the resources might not be enough to achieve all goals, necessitating gruesome triage; if everything can be achieved, perhaps the consequences of victory are where the actual issue resides; if all else is well, perhaps the problem is with the mind or family of the soldier himself? It is not acceptable to reduce military fiction into a straightforward calculus of won and lost battles.

I’ll write more on this issue in the Chapter 12 wherein I consider the worst war Near knows today. Surprisingly enough, Lords of Maldor are not behind those atrocities. Not directly.

The Three-Corner Foci

Students of the Three-Corner way learn magical FOCI, methods for unlocking the mind and seeing the world-that-is. There are six foci divided into two triangles, the Day and the Night. Like so:

	Day Triangle	Night Triangle
Vigor	Creation	Destruction
Instinct	Enhancement	Transformation
Reason	Divination	Enthrallment

Of the two triangles the Day triangle was considered the more benign in the Academy, and the Night triangle was only taught to Day adepts who could handle the responsibility. Now, with the school scattered and third-generation knowledge being passed around, much of the structure has been lost. The Night foci are today the more common arts, even as they are considered evil magic (as opposed to just dangerous) in a manner that was unknown in the past.

Using Three-Corner Magic

The Three-Corner foci are normal Abilities in most respects. As pure Abilities they are pretty limited, however, and more powerful magical workings often require the wizard to combine magical Secrets in their workings. Furthermore, all Three-Corner magic has certain rules and limitations that hold true unless lifted somehow:

Ivory Tower Broken

The Three-Corner Academy was never as influential on the religious and otherworldly life of Maldor as when it came to an end, scattering the masters and students alike all over the world. Now every court of any note boasts a court magician of supposedly vast power and knowledge; every village has a physician or craftsman with some small shard of the thrice-wound philosophy. Even outside Maldor proper it is rare to encounter a sage who’d fail to list the dual triangles.

Academy magic was atheistic, mystical and alchemical, convinced of its universal character and superiority of the message, which was nevertheless considered too elevated and complex for the common man. In their own mind academy tricornerists formed a secret elite of the Empire, one that was spiritually ascendant simply by the virtue of their practice. It was said that Three-Corner philosophy was the true secret, with the magic an afterthought.

Today the understanding of the thought behind the magic is considerably less certain and unified; two practitioners of the magic do not necessarily see eye to eye on even what the dual balance achieved by the Three-Corner practitioner is supposed to mean. Many tricornerists are members of the Celestial cults, unsatisfied or unknowing of the cosmology behind their own practice. When the magic is practiced by little more than hucksters and hedge magicians, it is no wonder if they mix in RITUAL MAGIC (R) practices and other ideas; everybody swears that theirs is the pure lineage of the Lost Academy, but sometimes their ideas are total opposites of each other. Maldor is a xenophobic, traumatized land. When rumors of the Shadow Cult rise, a wandering Three-Corner wizard may find himself being burnt as a witch. It is a horrible death.

Three-Corner in Play

The Story Guide should remember that Three-Corner magic still benefits and is limited by all the normal rules that concern all Abilities and Secrets. For example, the following points have sometimes proven elusive:

Examples & Advice

These large magic systems are easy to use if you remember that I’m including so much material for the people who’ve played TSoY for years. The beginner tricorner wizard will get by just fine with very simple fare:

Rodent Kin

Ratkin basically look like anthropomorphized rats, complete with tails and whiskers. The shared heritage is obvious to both the ratkin themselves and any outside observer: ratkin speak gutturally, sometimes run on all fours and in general act like overgrown, intelligent rats. About three to four feet tall, they have pointed button noses, whiskers, and are covered in either grey, brown, or black fur, with the occasional albino all-white ratkin.

Perhaps even more striking is the LITTER, the basic social group among ratkin, completely instinctual. A given litter consists of three or four ratkin and ten to twenty normal rats; the young ratkin are only distinguishable by their thumbs and size, being half again as large as their rat kin.

The young ratkin learn from an early age to fight vigorously for everything, starting with their mother’s teat that the rest of the litter would gladly hog if given a chance. The ratkin instinctively know to restrain themselves in their constant scrapping, avoiding serious injury. These instincts carry over to adulthood: ratkin generally own only what they can carry and do not hesitate to fight a bit for whatever they desire.

Even without intelligence acting into it, the litter is fiercely loyal to each other and quite able to engage in real violence against outside threats. A predator attacking a member of the litter is often an offense that is taken more seriously than threats against the individual ratkin himself.

This social structure remains the same for the HORDE, the larger community the litter is born into. The horde might consist of hundreds of ratkin and thousands of rats as long as it remains successful as a community.

Infested Cities

Ratkin are most common in Maldor and usually only appear in the environs of the old empire. A partial reason for this is that Maldor is a fertile environment for the bestial creatures: the ancient walled cities that have long fallen into ruin provide an ideal environment for these new beings that thrive among the remains of the ancient culture that came before them. This might make such places dangerous to other people, as in the ruins the ratkin horde truly is at the top of the food chain.

Ratkin are social and curious creatures capable of modeling their life on human culture. Ownership is something they have a great difficulty understanding, however, so it is not uncommon for human societies to ostracize and marginalize ratkin, treating individuals as pests, pets, criminals or worse. This is not true of all human societies, certainly: the people of Khale accept ratkin as natural, and allow them to form tribes that interact with humans on equal footing.

While most ratkin belong in litter communities that have various relationships with humanity, some ratkin end up loners due to ill fate befalling their litter or simply because they like the new, civilized lifestyle promised by going after humans. Such ratkin prove adaptive, working actively to form bonds with any company they meet; a ratkin without a litter is often depressed and moody.

Bestial Hysteria

Wild rumors fly in Maldor of ratkin living in the old cities. Some stories elevate albino ratkin above their peers in respect and mysterious powers. It is even said by some adventurers that the Three-Corner Academy of old has fallen to the same sort of ruin, being a nest of pallid ratkin hostile to humans.

Ratkin are considered harbingers of disease by many. One particular disease at least is real, although the ratkin himself would probably not know of it: the SECRET OF TOXOPLASM is contracted by close relations with ratkin, such as drinking from a well they use. Most people of Near would not be equipped to even notice the parasite, but it is known that people who associate with ratkin sometimes turn... strange. Player characters in danger of contracting the toxoplasm might avoid it with an ENDURE (V) check, like any disease.

Should a Maldorite human get over his preconceptions and win the trust of a horde to his side, there are many things the beings breeding in the body of Old Maldor might be able to provide: nobody else knows the old cities as well as the ratkin living in them do – ratkin who gather, compulsively sort and even worship treasures of a civilization that is at this point starting to be as foreign to the modern Maldor as it is to the ratkin themselves.

Ratkin in Play

My experience playing with ratkin was for the longest time that they are a problem, not a solution: it always seems that when you start playing TSoY with a new group, there is inevitably one player who gravitates towards a ratkin (or goblin for that matter) player character over any other option – this always seems to be because that player wants to avoid PROTAGONISM: his ratkin character is a hanger-on with no discernible issues of his own and seemingly no other function in the campaign than to attack squealing vigorously against whoever happens to threaten the real main characters. The ratkin with its humorous appearance and inhuman immunity to human issues is the perfect hanger-on character for the player who couldn’t care less about making a real effort in the game.

This all changed when I figured out that I should not be moaning the fact that some of my friends wanted to play sidekicks; I should embrace it. When you have something like four players in the game, where’s the problem in allowing one or even two to play unabashed sidekicks? Removing ratkin wouldn’t remove this need, and why would we need more than a couple of heroic leads, anyway? Looking at it this way, ratkin are perfect: they’re comedic and sympathetic, can be completely inefficient in messing up the game, and suitably compact to fit in the hero’s backpack. The KEY OF CHEESE is an example of this shift in my strategy: I can support the comedic role actively, and I should.

This is not to say that ratkin can’t be used seriously; they do certainly have many fascinating and serious aspects. I am personally especially fond of their nature as genuinely non-human people in Near, outside the Human Equation and one of the beastkin. I consider it a fully valid thematic challenge to ask a ratkin character to prove that he is actually people and not just an animal, in whatever manner a given campaign would consider such an issue.

Ratkin Names

The TSoY theory is that non-humans are just as likely to share the mainstream culture as they are to develop their own, depending on conditions. Consequently we get ratkin adopting human names, which might seem funny to humans. A civilized ratkin might well use the second name of their human best friend, for example.

In practice I often find myself using the sort of animal-sounding guttural, punchy names we’ve all learned from Disney and whatnot. Or purely descriptive primitivist names, “Black Paw” and such. Not an issue as far as I’m considered. Sometimes low-Reason ratkin of mine don’t even have a spoken name, as they don’t strictly speaking need it with their litter.

Houses of Treachery

Ammeni, being incredibly hot and wet, is extremely fertile. The majority of the Houses' business is growing rice and fruits and farming fish and water buffalo. These staples, plus the chilies grown further in the west, provide them with an endless source of trade. Their navy is powerful and is used for shipping, not only for Ammeni, but to allied merchants in Maldor, where it makes a tidy profit on the deal. Ammeni is also home to Near's most wondrous drugs and deadliest poisons. A career in death is definitely a lucrative one here. The items Ammeni is most deficient in, yet craves, are metals and jewels. Most of their trade is for these two goods.

Power in Ammeni comes from the seven Houses, plantations which have grown into both tremendous mercantile houses and governmental entities. The “House” refers not only to the ruler of the House, or the business, but also the land that House controls. Within a House, laws are determined by the ruler of that House or his staff, and are usually capriciously enforced. Trade law is created by majority vote among the rulers of the seven Houses, the Council, which are normally embroiled in the covert sabotage and annexation of each other, forming alliances that last only weeks before backstabbing tears them apart.

Sleeping Among the Snakes

Ammenites are known outside their country for their cruelty and decadence. The appearance is misleading, however: only the richest of Ammenites have the opportunity for cruelty and the ability for decadence. The rest of them are merely opportunists, making the best deals they can in a colonial society. The upper class of Ammenites, however, are decadent to an extreme, clothing themselves in the finest silk and eating bizarre delicacies grown only in the fertile delta soil. Ammenites are the descendants of Maldor, although they do not like to be reminded of this fact. Their language is much like the language of Maldor, but is filled with pops and flecks in between words to convey connotation.

A full five percent of the population of Ammeni belongs to the hyper-wealthy House families, although many of these are not related by blood. The habitual assassination of family members means that ambitious types may rise quickly. Slavery is common in Ammeni, and at least twenty-five percent of the population is made of slaves, many of them from the former nation of Zaru. The rest of the population are either what we would know as middle management – low-level employees assigned to control slaves and supervise menial labor – or poor freemen, who try to attract as little attention as possible, and often leave Ammeni to become wanderers or traders.

Hordes in the Mouth, Fires in the Belly

The Ammenites collect art of other cultures more than they create their own: the acquisition of art is a hobby for the upper classes. Native Ammenite art is bizarre, focusing on themes of oppression and the inevitability of death. The most famous Ammenite painting is of a rice patty, red with blood, with tall stalks rising to the sky; the most famous book is the story of the last 24 hours of a rich, mad man. Zaru slaves do create art as well, although mostly ritual chants made of gibberish that manages to convey emotion. Their funeral dirges are known to bring even the strongest Ammenites to tears, which brings horrible wrath upon them.

The food of Ammeni, however, is considered a delicacy. Hot and spicy, full of cream, rice, and noodles, as well as odd ingredients such as slugs, uncooked quail eggs, and fish-eyes, it evokes either love or disgust in most people. They make a rice wine that is similar: either astounding or repulsive, depending on the taster, and they take large amounts of poiture, the pollen of a gleaming white flower that grows wild in the rice fields of Ammeni. Poiture puts people into a deep relaxed state much like slumber where the sense of time becomes elongated. The Ammenites eschew religion, worshipping only gold and riches. The Council of Houses has outlawed religious ceremonies in the land, although both the Zaru slaves and members of the Houses often participate in odd cults, especially the Revenant Cult.

Actual Play

Ammeni are the ever-popular antagonists of Near. In fact, their greatest theme in my eyes is redemption: how might this culture be justified or cured? Much of my original work on Ammeni in the following chapters revolves around this theme.

Ammeni makes a very good milieu for steamy, passionate stories of human folly, sex and violence. This sort of story, called a BLOOD OPERA, is very good as a first introduction to the game for a group that doesn’t want to work with an adventuring premise. A blood opera operates on the premise that player characters are set up from the beginning to have clear, passionate goals that conflict with each other and those of other characters in the setting; this is very easy and natural in Ammeni, perhaps contributing to its popularity.

Ideas

Ammeni is not, properly speaking, a nation; it is a cartel. It does not have citizens or nationals; even the individual Houses do not – they only have members.

A member of a House is an interesting character because he or she might be steeped in cruelty, but still be a human being. How does that work? Is there a tension?

The lower rungs of the House organizations have less and less stake in the endeavor that is Ammeni, thus making them more and more likely to have their own interests outside the House life. Or the middle-management might just be hungry and ambitious, ready to impress their masters by being even more ruthless than the next guy.

Women of the Houses are usually very equal with the men, and twice as poisonous. The contrast is stark, as women in general are treated as property by the House scions.

The Ammeni relationship with their slaves is an interesting topic, as it can range from pure victimization for gratification to uncaring practicality to a sort of internalized, natural partnership predicated on unequal rights. Pay attention to this, and you will see the Ammeni society in many different lights.

Ammeni Names

Ammenites are of Maldorite stock, so their language is Romance like Maldor’s. Theirs is a land of many minorities and cultures, however, so in practice their language sounds exotic to those from Maldor, including foreign clicks and accents.

The Taste of Death

The simplest way of creating poisons, drugs and cures is to engage HERBALISM (R) (or even WOODCRAFT (R) with the SECRET OF HERBAL MEDICINE) in a simple Ability check and make an Effect of the result according to the normal rules: assuming that the herbalist found the right herbs, the player gets to write the Effect as he would. Later the player gets to spend the Effect as bonus dice on appropriate checks, just like any Effects. Suitable Effects in this regard include such as “Various psychotropes from the hills” and “Fever-curing herbs” – give it enough detail to be interesting and make clear what the preparation actually does.

ALCHEMY (R) is an alternative for this simple Effect-work: it is inferior in that it requires more expensive equipment and ingredients to get the same outcome, but for more complex work alchemy is mandatory: aside from the SECRET OF BOTANY simple natural cures cannot be leveraged much further. Alchemy can use mineral and animal materials as well as plants to work on, although Ammeni alchemy is traditionally almost exclusively based on Flora.

When a herbal Effect is used in a hostile way, the victim is of course entitled to declaring a conflict. This might be a simple ENDURANCE (V) check against the poisoner’s ASSASSINATION (I) or COOKING (I), depending on how the poison is applied, with the Effect value as bonus dice for the poisoner. Normal conflict resolution in that regard.

The next step in alchemy is distilling INFUSIONS, which is possible with the SECRET OF THE STILL. An infusion (the effective pharmaceutical substance suspended in a liquid such as grain alcohol) is also an Effect, but it is not normally consumed as bonus dice: instead, it represents the potency of the special formula the alchemist produces. When infusions are created, the alchemist creates one or more STAGES of the infusion, all of which may have different mechanical effects on the target. The first stage in Ammeni alchemy is always created with HERBALISM (R), while the other stages are normally created with ALCHEMY (R); the player makes the appropriate Ability checks for each stage in a support chain. Should a stage fail, the whole concoction is ruined. The alchemist may opt to end the process at any stage, or continue to make the infusion even more powerful.

For each successful stage in the distillation process, one STAGE EFFECT from the following list is chosen; the Story Guide chooses the first stage according to dramatic coordination; afterwards the player (or players, if several are involved) and the Story Guide take turns, with the Story Guide messing or cooperating with the process as he would. Depending on the details of the process and the available resources of the alchemist, individual stages may have to be delayed to procure some special tools or materials (or even replaced by checks of TRADE ROUTES (R), WEALTH (R) or BARTER (I)); the Story Guide interprets the fictional details as necessary. The player may also freely delay the work for refreshment or do other things on the side, provided he keeps notes of the progress.

Pushing Alchemy

As written, alchemical infusions can mostly influence Ability checks and incapacitate recipients. As with all things SOLAR SYSTEM, the interesting high-level stuff is in reality in your hands: negotiate through play the opportunities and costs of expanding alchemy – what it takes to become immortal.

What I would do to implement new, strange stage effects would be something like this:

Secret of Medicine

The character has learned a new stage effect to include in his infusions: Healing infusions still may cause Harm, but they also hasten recovery from appropriate Harm. Remove one Harm of at most the Effect level of the infusion. A healing stage may only occur on stages divisible by three.

That last part is a bit frivolous, but I’m demonstrating a technique: a stage effect may be limited to appearing only at certain stages of the infusion to make life difficult for alchemists. Another thing to do with the stages is to tie the strength of the effect to the stage it appears on. This forces the alchemist to choose between an easily endured powerful effect and a more reliable, but weaker one.

Secret of Spirit Travel

The character has learned a new stage effect to include in his infusions: Travel infusions allow the recipient to visit faraway places in spirit. The effect lasts days equal to the stage of the effect, during which time the recipient lies in coma, needing neither food nor water.

I’m again demonstrating another thing here as well: sometimes it’s best to think a bit on how tightly you need to couple mechanics to setting. In the case of SPIRIT TRAVEL I myself would forgo this specific stage effect and just create a drug that does the same thing by combining UNCONSCIOUSNESS and HEIGHTENING SENSES; a creative reading makes applying crunch exciting, which is good, because that’s where the fun is supposed to be.

Incomprehensible Wealth

The merchant princes of the Houses are exalted beings in this day and age. They wield wealth that is not only all but monetized, but greater than any one man could ever hope to consume. They have capital, a concept near unknown in great parts of Near. This is a condition that allows the princes unprecedented options in elevating and ruining themselves and others.

This wealth is not trivial to create. The SECRET OF FORTUNE is extraordinary and mechanically challenging to create. A character wanting it needs to use SECRET OF QUEST to execute a business plan of some sort or get the fortune from another character, willingly or not. My take is that I allow at most one character to take the Secret in character creation; let the rest become clients to the independently rich if they want.

Chattel by Convention

The Ammeni plantation industry is predicated on cheap human labor. They do not hesitate to enslave new peoples when opportunity arises, and they encourage their stock to breed in captivity to increase the wealth. Bred slaves are prized, and the institution certainly has its painful and uncomfortable moments: Ammeni culture as a whole does not have an over-arching legal theory for slavery, so often a person’s status as a slave or a free man is a matter of opinion, resolved by the people present and how they view the claimant to freedom: deeds of ownership are usually honored by the Houses, as well as brands and other such marks, but lacking those leaves the putative slave-owner with little but his own strength to enforce his claim. Only Zaru, goblins and similar distinctive subject peoples are presumed slaves without further proof; the only issue with them is finding the legal owner.

It is important to distinguish that while slaves often have little mechanical impact to what happens in individual scenes of the game, this is not because they do not have individuality, value or purpose as human beings to us; rather, we deal with a bunch of plantation slaves exactly the way we would deal with a bunch of guardsmen or free peasants or nobility at a soiree: as extras who don’t have direct impact on this particular story as long as we choose not to look closer.

Specifically, when the SECRET OF SLAVERY says that slaves always perform with MEDIOCRE (0) Ability when conflicting for their master, this is not to say that slaves in the setting are always non-remarkable in every way; rather, the relationship of the slave to his master deprotagonizes him when it comes to the master’s goals. The same slave might turn around and act as a MASTER (3) in the very same scene, should he have reason to act for himself as a human being instead of as a tool for another.

Veins of Travel

Ammeni law is set by the Council of Houses first and foremost to facilitate trade. Although some other things are touched upon when the Houses act in agreement, trade is the common priority. What’s more, the authority of the Council in this role is accepted with surprising sincerity by the Ammeni: free traders do not lightly renege on a fair deal between unencumbered traders, even as the cynical princes of the Houses follow the law as a convenience only.

Ammeni trade law makes clear distinction between House trade and independent speculative endeavors; the differentiation is essential, because the preferential trade clauses commonly used in treating with trade partners are only enforceable in House trade; meanwhile independent trade is free from having to defend stapling and market rights from falling to disuse. In practice this arrangement means that while internal and well-established trade routes in Ammeni are carefully allotted as House monopolies by precedent and their ability to demonstrably service the trade, the same Houses compete with the most adventurous independent merchants when it comes to speculative trade.

Ammeni trade law divides trade privileges conceptually into MARKET RIGHTS and ROUTE RIGHTS. The former concern rights connected to local control of territory: for example, the right of House trading depots to inspect and delay travel through the depot, most often situated in a waterway access of some sort. This might also involve rights of first offer or mandatory market participation by any merchants passing through the depot. In Ammeni lands only Houses hold market rights, while elsewhere Ammeni traders have to negotiate for these rights with the local rulers; typically a House trader would set up an enclave within an existing settlement or start a new trade station in the area after negotiating for exclusive rights to conducting the local market. Such rights would then be enforced against other traders with the help of the local ruler. It is entirely conceivable for an Ammeni trade master of this sort to eclipse the wealth and authority of whatever local ruler his position depends on.

Route rights are involved in a different way, as they range from trade secrets to legally enforced monopolies. A speculative trade route increases in value greatly after it has been proved feasible by successful exploration. At this point the route does not have any protection aside from obscurity. However, a House that conducts regular trade along a specific trade route and improves it with waystation arrangements may in time claim ownership over it; such ownership over an abstract trade route is not legally enforceable against foreigners, but the Houses themselves do not compete on routes claimed by other Houses in this manner. Independent Ammeni traders might or might not respect route claims; if caught, however, they lose negotiation privileges for right of passage and trade in the lands and markets of the particular House, which would often be a crippling blow for an independent trader: all Houses hold established steadings on the Poison River, which any may bar against trade at their own cut-off point.

The Ammeni trade law is in many ways orthogonal to old civil law of the Empire, and in many ways its direct opposite. This is no constraint to the Ammeni traders, who follow their own laws in their own land and no law at all anywhere else, unless forced to it by a local power.

Trade Rights

Characters may know or have rights over individual trade routes or markets as Effects, created with TRADE ROUTES (R), VAGRANCY (I) or appropriate LOCAL (R) Abilities. These might be useful in wielding influence over the area or in traveling safely, just like any Effects.

Characters may also wield actual dominant influence over a particular ROUTE or MARKET by getting the associated Secret, collectively called TRADE RIGHTS. For these purposes think of markets as geographical areas like towns or counties; routes in turn are travel arrangements between markets.

Possessing the Secret to a route or market is not exclusive, unless the possessors make it so: characters can force others to relinquish their hold on trade rights with appropriate Ability checks, provided that they are themselves established with the same trade right.

Merchants in Play

The key to using the trade material in play is to realize that there is no real and appreciable difference between economic and political power. The Ammeni trade crunch is one rename away from being a set of tools for re-establishing the Empire.

That’s the socialistic narrative, anyway: merchant princes wield enormous power, which is counteracted by human decency. The alternative reading is that the soft power wielded by traders in the post-Shadow Near is by its nature cooperative and egalitarian, opposed to feudal arrangements of Maldor. It is a way for the world to find itself without conquest.

Either way, it is a good idea to tie merchant characters and their business onto issues of human identity; the character is easy to leave shallow if his only driving force is to succeed in his trade endeavor for no particular reason. The background is important: is he a member of a House, knowing that the pride of his parents ride on his success? Is his caravan backed by his community, their prosperity depending on his success? Is success in trade a way out of the gutter for him?

The ultimate tension for all this trade material is simple: is your character part of the problem, or part of the solution?

People in Chains

After the Moon rose, Zu became broken. Now the people long used to peace had no means of defending themselves. By nature, the Zaru are pacifists, finding no need for violence with their terrible gifts. As they emerged back into the world, they found themselves overpowered by the Ammenites, who had long before envied the fertility of the Zaru delta. Zaru's people were taken as slaves and made to work in the worst sort of hot, steamy, swampy conditions.

As a people, the Zaru are fairly uniform in appearance. Black hair is virtually homogenous among them, and their skin is dusky, their eyes dark. If they look like a modern-day people of Earth, those people would come straight out of Southeast Asia, complete with loose-fitting clothes and large, flat hats made to keep the burning sun off them when toiling in the fields.

As a nation, Zaru does not exist any more. Ammeni truly has dominated it, and Zaru villages exist on Ammenite plantations, under the care of foremen. Typical construction is made of bamboo, and communities exist around “speaking halls,” long buildings in which the Zaru eat, cook, converse, and often sleep. Only the elders of a community and their adult children have the privilege of living in tiny huts built around the speaking hall. Older villages, pre-Shadow, do exist in Zaru, which are basically larger versions of their slave villages: large speaking halls with family houses built around the central building. These are usually constructed of hard, baked clay around a bamboo center, and are incredibly durable. As insurgency has grown in Zaru, some radical groups have fled to the old towns and formed their bases of operations there.

Families are very important in traditional Zaru culture. They are viewed as “mini-villages,” with the eldest person being the leader of that family. (Pre-Shadow Zaru houses bear this out, as they are usually built as a long room spanning the house, with small rooms for the elders built off of this.) Villages are built around the same structure, with the eldest person in village taking the role of priest and leader, as they have seen more and heard more than anyone else. The Ammenites are well aware of this, and break up families and villages by sending children inland and working the elderly to an early death. One underground movement in Zaru returns babies to their mothers in the dark night, traveling far over land to switch them back.

Thieves rule the world

The zu phrase for an Ammenite is “land-thief,” an appropriate epithet for a people who have turned Zaru into their personal playground. Even more sinister are the terms “word-thief” and “blood-thief”.

“Word-thief” is a term given to a non-Zaru that uses the sacred tongue of zu, especially Ammenite sorcerers. Zaru elders are torn on how to deal with the resurgence of zu and its potent virulence. The majority of them, who grew up with stories about when zu was taken away, agree that it should not be used, thereby keeping it firmly - but uselessly – in Zaru hands. The younger generation doesn't completely agree: there is a strong underground movement to rebel against the Ammenites using any means necessary.

Killers and especially the radical MOONMEN priesthood are called “blood-thieves”. It is not just that they are willing to spill blood; the actions of the radical freedom fighters reverberate in the world and cause outsiders to bring violence to Zaru villages. Elders consider this a crime just as much as having blood on your own hands.

Life-Shield-Hand

Non-aggression and pacifism are fundamental cornerstones of the Zaru existence. They are also what binds the people to their servitude and makes them the preferred slave stock for their Ammeni masters.

Resistance comes in a multitude of forms: for example, the priesthood of Hanish has released a martial art for the slaves, called UPTENBO or “life-shield-hand”. It is non-lethal but powerful, concentrating on redirection of force and incapacitation of the opponent. Uptenbo is not just a martial art, but a philosophy that strives to teach the frustrated Zaru to turn their weakness into a non-violent strength on the face of the enslaver. It is taught secretly, disguised as dance.

A martial art such as Uptenbo consists of a number of TECHNIQUES. Techniques are just Secrets that are further referenced by other Secrets, such as the PUMSA, intensively trained fighting combinations that strive to overcome an enemy without giving him a chance to react. The opponent of a pumsa can break the sequence by preventing the character from performing the next technique, which might be done by various means, but at least a REACT (I) check to dodge whatever the opposing fighter is doing should work. Pumsa are normally used in extended conflict over several rounds, but a smart group can apply them feasibly in other mechanical contexts as well.

(Although I don’t usually term fighting techniques from other cultures as such, they are still TECHNIQUES in the mechanical sense. Feel free to experiment.)

The philosophy of pacifism is rooted deep in the culture of Uptenbo, the masters of which believe in not only the moral superiority of non-violence, but its actual strategic superiority: one day they will free Zaru by demonstrating to the conqueror that the people will not, cannot be swayed to cooperate any longer. Whatever happens then, the land will once again be free.

Actual Play

An important Story Guiding principle for a solidly slavery-focused campaign is this: do not take the institution of slavery, in farming or personal servitude, as a standardized proposition to which all characters should have easy snap-shot judgments prepared. Life doesn’t work that way.

The above is important for the idea I’ve already floated earlier: the Story Guide should engage in enabling play. Thus, when a player tells you that his character is going to steal away and go explore inside the master’s villa to find that girl he took a fancy on, the correct response is not “of course all slaves are branded or memorized by face or watched by foremen all the time, that’s what it means to be a slave, right?” Rather, consider the opposite reality in your judgment: for the slave economy to function at all, there must be a certain degree of participation and cooperation, however enforced, from the slave population. This in turn means that a character willing to risk punishment might very well have a considerable freedom of action on his side, at least until he is noticed as a troublemaker by the foreman.

To choose another tack, consider the Ammeni slave masters and their attitudes. It would be easy to presume that for them to uphold the institution of slavery at all, they’ll all have to be remorseless monsters that will of course never care a bit about what a slave has to say. A more moderate (and again, more realistic) viewpoint is to presume that many Ammeni are not directly exposed to the more savage facets of their economy, and thus are emotionally utterly unprepared to face the reality. For this sort of character it is far from unlikely that a player character could influence them through pity, even if the player character happened to be a slave.

What those examples are trying to say is, once again, simple: do not deprotagonize and disable player characters just because of your own preconceptions about how powerless they should be. Rely on the conflict resolution system to make these judgments for you.

Ideas

Zaru can be secret agents of priesthoods striving for freedom, or they can collude with Ammeni masters to improve their own lot, perhaps for desperate and sympathetic reasons. They can also be passionate youngsters with no political aspirations, crushed by the limitations chattel slavery imposes on them.

Zaru can also escape their land to go elsewhere, but can they escape their past? An ordinary person might find peace elsewhere, but how about a hero?

Zaru Names

Zaru do not have family names anymore; they use only one name and an epithet, if necessary: “Quick Adad” or “Aruru Prim”, for example. Ammeni masters refer to the birth plantation of each slave within a House, and to the House between Houses.

Zaru Priesthoods

There are several priestly organizations loosely forming in Zaru, all centered on proper zu usage and Zaru unity. One group believes that all Zu should be kept firmly in the hands of Zaru, specifically elders, thereby keeping the unwise from using it, and denying their enemies a potent weapon. This group, the WATCHERS, train young rebels to work as “word-horses”, adventurers who steal zu from non-Zaru, or Zaru using it unwisely, and bring those zu back to their priests. This group is committed to the Zaru way of non-violence, but some fringe sects have seen fit to use foreign mercenaries to carry words.

The SONS OF HANISH follow a more moderate path. They seek to follow Hanish and be an active force in the world, while staying true to their beliefs. This group operates in cells, which are based on the family “mini-village” structure, and attempts to change the situation of the Zaru by subtle actions, like using zu to influence a foreman to keep a family together, or causing a crop to do well or poorly.

The MOONMEN are the most radical of the Zaru priesthoods, and are the most diverse. While the Sons of Hanish are mainly young and male, and the Watchers older, the Moonmen are made up of brash youngsters, lunatic elderly, calm mothers, and even foreigners. They advocate nothing more than a full unleashing of Zaru power. Nonviolence is taken only on a personal basis among them, and they have no real structure. Instead, individual Moonmen tend to upset the cart, often putting the community in a worse situation, and spread their beliefs among those pressured enough to listen. It is said that the Moonmen count among their ranks at least one elf and several goblins. More conservative Zaru call these “blood-thieves”, both for their subversion of the normal Zaru structure, and for their willingness to kill.

The Language of Zu

What of Zu, then? It is a language with a relatively simple structure, easy to learn even after it has become broken. However, the same simplicity breeds ambiguity, making mastering zu a task for a lifetime. Zu is made up of discrete syllables, each with a generalized meaning. These syllables are also words; complex ideas are built by combining several. Syllables each have three meanings, based on tone:

• Nouns have mid-tone, or no tone.
• Verbs have low tone.
• Modifiers have high tone.

The syllables, depending on tone, mean each of these things; thus no syllable exists in zu that cannot be used as a noun, verb, and modifier. Pronouns are implied by context and body language. Some examples of syllables:

Noun	Verb	Modifier
knife	cut	sharp
tooth	eat	full
murder	kill	murderous
hunter	stalk	stealthy

Sentences, as modern-day speakers think of them, exist by combining syllables. The last syllable used in a sentence conveys the mode. A sentence ending in a noun is a statement of fact, meaning “this exists” or “this is so”. A sentence ending in a verb is a command, even if it refers to the speaker: the speaker is stating her action and in essence, commanding herself. A sentence ending in a modifier is optative: it expresses hope or desire for change, meaning “I wish that it was like this”.

As mentioned, syllables are for general terms, not specific. There is no one syllable for “tiger”, for example. “Tiger” would be spoken as “knife-tooth-hunter-beast”. Another example would be “sword”, which is said as “killing-knife”. If a zu speaker does not use multiple syllables to be specific, then the most appropriate meaning is assumed. For example, if a speaker says “beast” in a forest, he means “forest animal”; if he were to say the same syllable in a snake pit, he means snake. If he were to say “knife” to a farmer and a hunter, he would again mean different things – most likely a scythe and a hunting knife.

There is one syllable in zu that is not like any other: “zu”. “Zu” is an affirmation, an agreement. Originally, there was no opposite, no “no” in zu. (True Zaru never speak in the negative: if there is nothing affirmative to say, they do not speak in zu.) With the first act of murder, however, that changed. The murderer, the destroyer, lost his ability to speak the syllable “zu.” Instead, he spoke the syllable “uz” a word of disagreement and destruction. No person can say both “zu” and “uz”.

Theft of Zu

Originally, anyone who spoke zu could use it as words of power. Stating that something was so made it so; commanding someone compelled them; wishing for different circumstances brought them into being. With Hanish's final chant, this changed. He brought all the power of zu into himself, recreating himself as the First Man. Suddenly, the Zaru lost their power, as their language became ordinary and impotent.

Hanish died that day, but the power of zu did not die with him. Instead, it changed forever. The power of a syllable could be harnessed, but only by one person at a time. Anyone who studies zu can speak it, but only those who are the master of a syllable can use it to enforce their will. Now, Zaru priests, outcasts, and foreigners vie to obtain the knowledge of these words.

The words of power are first awakened within a person when he hears them used: the SECRET OF ZU (or UZ) is learned only when the words are uttered in a character’s presence. Some grasp it at once, some never, to some it comes against their will. The danger of using zu around other people is that they may steal the knowledge of a syllable. When a word is uttered, anyone who hears it can engage the speaker in a battle of wills to own the knowledge of that word. Only ZU (and again, UZ) itself may be mastered by all.

Mechanically speaking, anyone with an Advance to spend (two Advances if they lack the SECRET OF ZU) may engage an immediate conflict of ZU (R) against ZU (R) to wrest the word from its current owner when it is uttered. Should the transference succeed, the owner regains an Advance while the thief pays for the word.

Words may also be given willingly, in which case no Advances are spent or recovered. In all other ways Zu syllables are handled as Secrets.

Words of Power

When a character with the SECRET OF ZU and some mastered syllables uses the power, the mechanical effect depends on the mode of the utterance:

Naming words

Traditionally lists of zu don’t provide the actual syllables, only the translations we use. This book doesn’t use many zu syllables; UP, TEN and BO are probably the most prominent after ZU itself. This does not mean that we don’t use made-up syllables in actual play; we certainly do, it’s just that we establish whatever syllables we want when and if they’re needed.

I’ve included a long list of suitable zu words here because it’s something people tend to ask after when it comes to actual play. Thinking up words can be hard, but just like all other contents in this book, don’t let my words constrain you: your zu can be different, or it might be that zu includes many ways of structuring the same concept. Just because I might connect <person|speak|humane> doesn’t mean you can’t use <person|love|passionate>, or even both words. The important thing is for you to choose the small set of syllables that you actually use in your campaign to reflect your own understanding of the primal society and culture of Zaru. Presumably the things easiest to express (individual syllables) are also those that reflect the state of creation as spoken by the First Man.

Note that while the players invent Zu words, characters are limited by the language itself. Sometimes there just is no word for something in zu, the language of creation.

Tribe is Family

Khaleans are a hearty and strong people, Mediterranean in appearance, with generally black, brown, or red hair, and green or brown eyes. They claim ancient heritage with the people of Qek and maintain good relations with the few Qek that emerge from the jungle, although they speak different languages.

Khaleans operate in tribes of two to ten dozen people and consider all tribe members to be their family, not just blood relations. In fact, blood brothers from different tribes are not considered to be related at all, except in the way that all Khaleans are related. Upon marriage, males join the tribe of their wife, becoming part of a new family.

In addition, outsiders, or those with no family, can become part of the tribe through a naming ritual.

Within the tribe, status is very important. While family lines are matriarchal, positions of power are dominated by men. The tribe's chief is almost always male, the husband of the eldest woman in the tribe, and his advisors, usually a bard and his most accomplished warrior, are also men. When two tribes battle, it is Khalean law – that is, tradition as old as Khale – that only the tribe's men can fight. If a woman were found to be fighting for a tribe, it would be a horrible disgrace, and that tribe would more than likely surrender the fight.

We are the Forest

The forests of Khale are worshiped as ancestors. Each tree in a tribe's territory is believed to be a fallen member of the tribe, born again as part of the land. An ancient and legendary tree in the center of Khale is said to be the great King Khale, a ruler that united all of the peninsula and lands beyond, and the father of all modern Khaleans.

Religion revolves around festivals, gatherings where a tribe – or many friendly tribes – will gather for a many-day-long revelry and celebration of their past. All festivals have tellings of great tales about the ancestors, done ritually around a bonfire. These rituals are competitive as tribal priests or BARDS try to outdo each other with fantastic stories. The bards, part priest and part artist, are given a special place in Khalean culture, as they are immune to normal tribal conflicts. When two tribes clash, the bards of each tribe will meet to write down the story of the conflict, narrating it as the battle flows. Killing a bard is a criminal offense, and usually results in the death of the murderer.

Magic is fully accepted in Khale, and fascinates most people. The bards of Khale, and foreign sorcerers (called DRUIDS by the Khaleans) are highly respected and use magic freely. It is said that each bard learns three PERFECT CHORDS in his lifetime; which three seems to reflect life experience in a profound manner. The chords are normal Secrets, except that obtaining them can be somewhat arduous: SECRET OF QUEST may be used to sidestep requirements. Musical effects may, of course, be RESISTED (R) by the audience at will.

The Green World

Inside the forests of Khale, there is another world, a mystic world. This is their greatest secret, and it is forbidden to share it with those not of the tribe. Ancient trees, those with a circumference greater than two men holding hands, can be used as a gateway into the GREEN WORLD.

This Green World is a maze of pathways, some so small that one must crawl through them, and others large enough for five people to stand side-by-side. The walls of these caverns are growing wood, light and grainy, and glow with faint green light. When the Sky Fire came, many Khaleans moved into the Green World to escape, building cities inside its immense caverns. Those cities lie dead now, and are said to be haunted; gnarled trees grow throughout them, with human expressions twisted into their trunks.

The Green World covers all of Khale, and can be used as a passageway to anywhere else in the land, provided there is a guide. When one ends up is less certain: while experienced travelers have little trouble, those who get lost in the Green World may find themselves exiting into another time entirely. Bards sometime use these passages to go to earlier times and talk to ancient ancestors, although no one has ever been able to travel within one hundred years before the Time of Shadow, or one year after it.

Legends say that King Khale himself still wanders these halls, a large old man with a beard like moss, and hands like wood-knots. Supposedly, he or other great ancestors can guide you to any place and time within these halls, or grant you great boons, provided you perform a quest, usually a reenactment of a previous adventure of the ancestor. During festivals, tribes will sometimes send their greatest hero bands to perform a quest and grant them success over their enemies. As war envelopes Khale from the south, some tribes have moved completely into the Green World, leaving the land of Khale behind. Their great mistake lies in the fact that the Green World does not stand alone: it is formed of the forest of Khale, and as the forest falls, it grows dimmer and smaller.

The Hands of the Tribe

Within tribes, farming and hunting are both fine jobs and craftsmen and artists are well respected. The ability of Khalean craftsmen to forge sharp swords and carve strong tools and weapons from wood, curing them with sap, is legendary.

Tribes are communal entities divided internally into MOIETIES or “skin groups”, sort of totemic factions named for common animals that are entangled with both means of production and procreation: while a person’s moiety does not directly determine their occupation, it does indicate his responsibility of oversight over the work of others in the commune. Moieties for individuals are determined based on the moieties of their parents as well as their gender; the foremost purpose is prevention of incest, which is achieved by strict taboos in determining which moieties are allowed to marry each other.

Khale trades for metal tools with Qek, and their longships sail to southern Maldor to trade spices which do not grow in that colder climate. Many young Khalean men, bereft of family, have joined crews, even becoming pirates. The Wooden Sickle is a famous ship of pirate youth that has been the scourge of the Ammeni coastline.

Khaleans have a taste for drink, and import beer from Maldor and Goren and wine from Oran in large quantities. They are also known to grow marijuana, a plant which is smoked for mild hallucinatory and relaxing effects. This drug is said to bring out epic tales in heroes and increase sexual desire.

Moon Metal

After the Year of Shadow, a group of explorers found a forest like no other in northern Khale; metal grew up from the ground, gleaming like bright silver, sprouting branches like trees. This, the only metal in Khale, is said to be a piece of the Shadow Moon fell to earth. Whatever it is, it has taken root and grows in a parody of a natural forest.

Moon-metal is easy to craft, and deadly sharp and strong. If heated over a fire, it responds to the user's wants to form itself into any metal object of superior quality. However, moon-metal severs the user's relationship with the Green World: merely touching moon-metal gains the character a circumstance penalty die for TREE-BOND (I), and routinely handling the stuff merits two. One cannot enter the Green World at all with any moon-metal upon their person.

Moon-metal has a weakness for wood, it deforms like soft clay when clashing with it. A LUNAR FORGING (R) check can be used to force the metal to retain its form, however. Failure ruins the item.

The Worst War

Near is not a very peaceful place, but nowhere does war burn as savage and bitter as it does in Khale today. The Ammeni Houses have almost all sent their mercenaries to Khale, many uniting their forces under one leadership in their hurry to subjugate the land.

Reasons for the war are two-fold: The coastline of Khale controls the Hungry Mouth, making sailing between the Eastern Ocean and the Sea of Teeth a hazardous thing when even stopping for water can bring hostile barbarians out of the woods. The other reason is moonmetal, which Ammeni princes have witnessed and which they desire for themselves.

Ammeni bamboo weapons are no match to what the Khalean warriors have, but their leadership has been tempered in the wars of Maldor, consisting of some of the most cunning and ambitious men to ever come out of that war-torn land. Ammeni troops group together, build fortifications, patrol the forest paths and guard the building of roads into the woods. They fight in closed formation, with harsh punishment to soldiers who endanger the unit by breaking discipline.

Khaleans respond with guerrilla warfare, striking and then disappearing into the forest, refusing definitive engagement. The tribes that did have died to the man, with women taken as spoils after the men reveal the tribe’s location under torture. The tribes farther in the wilderness might have only heard stories of what is going on, but all Khaleans are family to a degree: they will all fight when the word reaches them.

Khaleans do not have a regular army in this war; what they do have are HERO BANDS formed of the best warriors of many tribes. These were originally based on the lodge structure of moieties that tie tribes together, but today great heroes travel from tribe to tribe, initiating any able body into the war against the Ammeni. The hero bands are highly motivated and thoroughly skilled, and they are pretty much the only cultural structure the Khaleans have for bringing the war to the Ammeni; hero bands make long treks into areas under Ammeni control to strike at the enemy where they can.

As the Ammeni supply lines grow longer and the war grinds to a halt, the princes are sure to bring in more weapons, whatever they need to pacify the land. Burning the forest and desecrating Khalean beliefs forces tribal forces into disunity or decisive confrontation. Three-Corner wizards, native Ammeni sorcerers and eclectics from Inselburg can name their price when the war reaches this point.

Regardless, it’s the Ammeni mercenaries who gave this war its name, for many have died in the woods without warning. For most of the Khaleans it’s still not yet a single, unified war; when this changes and Khale rises as one, who knows what will happen.

Actual Play

The basic function for Khale and Khaleans in the larger Near is that they are fantasy barbarians. In fact, they are my go-to barbarians in the setting: if the game is set in Maldor or wherever and I need barbarians, then the Khalean woods are in Maldor, or next to it, or there’s an off-shoot culture of Khaleans somewhere about there, never mind geography.

Having a barbarian culture to deal with is a fine thing when you want to compare and contrast lifestyles. Khaleans are of course by-the-book fantasy barbarians, noble and harmonious, but that sort of thing can be played around if desired: the war makes jerks of everybody after they’ve hidden under a rock for a couple of months while waiting for the enemy to make an appearance.

A specific challenge that certain sorts of groups might have to face is this: why play in Khale when you could be playing ORLANTHI in Glorantha? I don’t know how it came to be that way, but there sure are similarities. A cunning Story Guide might draw on the rich Gloranthan sources for inspiration here, I’d say. In fact, I recommend it: that whole heroquesting thing in the Green World has already been figured out three or four times in detail there, for example.

Ideas

Khaleans are a very romantic culture, which translates to “good” in our fantasy literature sensibilities. Go along with that, it’s probably more worthwhile at first than undermining it: for instance, destroying or corrupting the poor, noble savages is going to be very, very tragic, regardless of which side player characters happen to be on.

Alternatively, consider my Ammeni Wars campaign, in which the Worst War becomes regional as a hero band travels to Orania and wins the Senate of Kalderon to their side; even if victorious, the epic heroes are going to have a bitch of a time with the Ammeni reconstruction: what do you do with a nation like that?

I have the impression that the Khalean capability for time travel has largely been neglected in practical play, possibly because it takes a campaign to such radical directions. Still, one day I’m going to play an assassin from the future, his only hope to kill the man who would sell his people to eternal slavery.

Other basic directions to go here are the Celtic olden goldies, like shamed heroes cast out of their tribe, bards seeking their art in the oddest places, romantic troubles caused by the moietic taboos and so on.

Khalean Names

Khalean names are vaguely Celtic, of course. The moiety is more important than specific parentage for most purposes, so a typical name format in intertribal matters could be <position> <first name> of <moiety> in <tribe>. “Bard Nevins of Snake moiety in tribe Luthan”, for example. Alternatively, “Bard Nevins Snake-skin of tribe Luthan” has a nice ring as well.

Additional bynames are added, but only for braggarts and people who actually make an appearance in bard songs, in which such are a matter of course.

The Family is a Breathing Thing

The only real unit of people in Qek is the family. Families live together, carving out a small bit of land to call their own, although there's no real land ownership. Three generations usually live together: a husband and wife, some of their parents, and their children. Generally, as sons and daughters grow to maturity, they leave and form new family units; as one half of a couple dies of old age, the other will live with one of their children.

Qek has no government, but each family unit is part of a larger family unit. Within the larger family unit, families defer to the family they grew up in when they meet. In distant relations, the older family is deferred to, although they often choose another to make decisions. There is no clan-type structure in Qek: there are no clumps of unrelated people at all.

All that Glitters is Trouble

The Qek do trade with the people of Khale and the nomadic tribes of Oran, exchanging wild fruits and cocoa for tools of metal, which they do not have the craft to make themselves. In addition, Qek is known for its precious gems. The people of Qek find these stones useless except for tools (they tip their own spears with diamond, which slip through armor as if it were butter, for example) and they are often traded for goods or services. Men from other countries that do not respect the sanctity of Qek often attempt to sneak into the country and smuggle out gems and cocoa pods, although few return.

Apart from outsiders, the people of Qek have to contend with the APES as well. Apes are these furry goblins that live in various places in the jungle and the more hospitable slopes of the Wound of Heaven mountains. The problem with apes is that the Qek do not understand their language, if they have any, so there is much unnecessary strife with the “jungle people”, as the Qek ironically call the beasts. As a matter of fact, many of the apes do not have a language at all: the Qek goblins run the gamut from human-intelligent to completely animallike, but generally speaking they are all content to gorge themselves on fruit, intelligent or not.

Stories Without Letters

The Qek have no written language, at least not since the Year of Shadow. Because of this, their art revolves around painting and oral storytelling. A great majority of their art is utilitarian in nature: ornately carved spears and staffs; beautifully crafted clay jugs; shields painted with intricate camouflaging patterns. Without cities, traditional sculpture is almost unknown, although carved frescos in rock are relatively common, used to tell ancient stories.

The music of Qek is unearthly, and most outsiders have a hard time appreciating it. Their language is made up of a multitude of hard consonants, which lends a guttural quality to it, whether spoken or sung. In addition, the music has no traditional rhythm, instead alternating between discordant rhythms frequently. While a large part of their music – all based around stories – is sung, it is sometimes accompanied by a CHURANG, a guitar like like instrument made of dried innards strung across a hollowed-out armadillo shell.

Qek's jungles are full of succulent fruit and spices, and are used liberally to season their food. A speciality that has reached out to be eaten elsewhere in Near is wild boar glazed with mango and cocoa, a plant native only to Qek. Cocoa (in the modern day, chocolate) grows in huge pods within Qek's jungles, and is used to make a hallucinatory beverage called araka of dried cocoa pods, fermented bananas, and hot chilies.

Everything That Breathes Dies

The people of Qek do not speak of religion: they worship no single entity nor have organized worship. They do, however, have a strong belief in the idea of spirits.

Spirits have three forms, the ROHO, the SASHA, and the ZAMANI. The roho are the spirits of the living, the animus that gives them individuality and vitality. These are bound within the bodies of people, animals, and plants. People and animals have the strongest roho, while plants have the oldest roho.

The sasha are the “living dead”. Those who have died that are personally remembered by those still alive are sasha. Memories from stories do not count: someone who met the person while alive must still live. These spirits have a will of their own and remember their name, and they are said to hover close to earth, watching those who knew them. Their will can be bent by changing the memories of their human tethers.

The zamani are the true dead, those long dead and forgotten. They do not remember their name and their own will is the longing for final rest, in the oblivion above the earth.

Nobody’s Been to Every Valley

The jungles of Qek are basically impenetrable and largely unknown even to their inhabitants. The native Qek may however increase his chances in the wilds by listening to his parents and to the spirit of the terrain itself. Geographical knowledge is not codified in maps in the featureless jungle; instead, the people memorize and share long path-songs that list distinctive landmarks and other important knowledge about the lay of the land.

The earth spirits are considered similar but distinct to spirits of living things. The two are connected, however: a person can sometimes perceive the land correctly, and by doing so, name it. The end-result is called a KNOT, or simply a “place”.

Knots make up the geography of Qek, which is otherwise indistinct and homogenous to human eyes. Knots are connected by PATHS, which in turn limit AREAS; in this way the jungle gains a topography people can understand and perceive.

Jungle Landscape

The Story Guide of a campaign is of course responsible for the geography, but some suggestions might be helpful, being how most Story Guides are used to having a wide variety of environments to work with. In the Qek jungles new places are sort of a big deal, but also simple to introduce.

Death River:

A sinuous river traveling crosswise across the jungle. Useful for fishing and travel: many paths leave from the river for other knots.

Birdrock:

So called because the height affords a great view of the jungle. Useful for seeing over the jungle canopy; also easy to find when lost in the jungle.

Honey Trees:

The traditional usufruct of a respected local family, a clearing surrounded by special trees favored by honey-bearing bees. Not many know of the path here, if any do anymore.

Moot Caves:

A number of caves suitable for temporary habitation. Well-connected by paths to local family homesteads, as the place is favored for meetings of various purposes.

Lost Ziggurat:

A bloody cult gathers here in remembrance of a civilization that once was. It is one of many such ruins scattered through the jungle.

Runti Homestead:

The home of the family of Runti, a Qek hunter. Her family lives in the transition between the coastal and interior livelihoods in many ways. She’s well-connected to other local and not so local families, thanks to Itzelher-father who made many children.

Gumbay:

An ideal natural harbor area used by Ammeni traders, who have built a permanent outpost here.

Grey Bull Path:

A worn, long animal path that connects many water-holes and leads one from the western savannah to the mountains. Excellent hunting.

Absolon’s Tomb:

A low-rising yet deep-rooted, stony building almost lost to the jungle. There is an insane myth concerning a forsworn knightly fellowship and a lost testament that’d purportedly prove conclusively the nature of this place; for our purposes this is just a good example of a principle: everything and anything might be found in the jungle.

All of the above places and more can be connected by paths, some of which might not be known to all jungle people. Having a functional, sufficient knowledge of the resources in the jungle is mandatory for long-term survival.

Actual Play

The way I play it, Qek is all about the HEART OF DARKNESS. Even the natives are scared shitless by the jungle, which is quite foreboding, considering that Near does not know serious inhuman threats. Still, animals make believable antagonists, and the jungle can be difficult for other reasons, as we’ll see in the next chapter.

The most difficult part of Qek play is getting a handle on minimalism, as far as the Story Guide is concerned. You need to accept that your story will tell about these seven or so people variously related to each other, and about the jungle, and about these crazy, lily-white (metaphorically speaking, although the highest class Ammeni are white) colonist/explorer/Ammenites who’ve set up a trading post on the coast.

That trading post is important, because that’s how you get cultural interaction going. Qek has always been the most marginal of the lands of Near due to how a character from Qek is always the outsider. It’s even true to a degree in their land.

Qek Names

Qek names are short, Aztec-sounding, or perhaps South American aboriginal. I haven’t divided them by gender, although the Qek themselves do; I recommend picking a name that sounds good to you.

Using Knots

Knots are the ROHO of the land itself given form. A knot is a place in the jungle, wherein “place” comes into being by the perception and naming done by a person, the tsafari. Without tsafari there would be no knots, and the Qek would be as lost in their jungle as outsiders are when they try to penetrate it.

Knots are connected to each other by PATHS, naturally enough; knowledge of these is essential as well. Paths limit different AREAS of the geography, which concept may also be used by knotwork Secrets.

Knots themselves are simply Effects that describe the place they tie to: “Knot of Birdrock 3/R” might be a knot, as well as “Knot of the Death River 4/R”. A character can learn about a knot from another just by listening to their stories. The teacher’s STORYTELLING (R) check determines the Effect level for the pupil’s knot Effect – however, the pupil’s Effect can only get higher than the teacher’s if the two are on location at the knot. A character that already knows a knot may renew his knowledge by visiting the place and making a LOCAL (R) check.

For knotting purposes we sometimes need to distinguish between “terrain” and ephemeral elements of a location. The Qek say that anything that has not left the knot since its creation is part of the terrain – even the people.

Knots are created by tsafari – indeed, being able to knot a place is what makes a tsafari. A once knotted place cannot be reknotted without dissolving the existing knot, which of course destroys the Effect from any characters that’ve learned it. Knots dissolve naturally when the sasha of the knotting tsafari is forgotten.

Getting Lost

A pretty big part of this whole knot thing is what happens when characters get lost in the jungle. This happens when they fail their LOCAL (R) Ability checks; characters without pertinent knot knowledge get lost pretty much automatically when they leave the coast or other landmarks behind.

Getting lost is like having a refresh scene in that it opens the door for the Story Guide to control where the game goes next. The character has only two choices: to WAIT or GO ON.

A waiting character will encounter an interesting secondary character introduced by the Story Guide, probably by happenstance (dramatic coordination, that is): an animal, stranger, enemy, friend... a chance meeting that opens up new directions for the story.

A character that continues wandering ends up at the most interesting knot currently available. Again, dramatic coordination – the jungle is featureless and nigh-endless, the Story Guide does not worry about where the character would “likely” end up.

In a word: getting lost is losing control of story direction. It might also mean trouble: I typically have the lost character check WOODCRAFT (R) to see if the fatigue, disease or other fun things get to him while lost, causing some Harm and thus raising the tension for the next scene with people.

Summoning spirits

A sasha given form or bound to their body will be a shade of their former self, mechanically speaking: the Pools are halved and the Ability ranks are capped to the walozi’s contact ritual result, minus one. The number of Secrets and Keys combined is limited to the Ability check. However, an ULTIMATE (6) Ability check grants full restoration. A bound sasha acts like a living being, except that they will be automatically severed should they ever suffer MORTAL (6) Harm or worse.

To make it explicit: player characters can be freely resurrected by these rules. I imagine that legends of the amazing skills of the walozi are known far to the south as well; all good fodder for epic storytelling.

Zamani are much simpler to create: a normal zamani will have Advances equal to triple the success level of the Ability used to summon them, distributed in half by the player of the walozi and half by the Story Guide. Zamani cannot have Keys, and they may only have crunch allowed to animals (chapter 27). A zamani bound to a body is immediately severed when they suffer a MAJOR (4-5) Harm or worse.

Roho, when returned to their body, do not suffer of these limitations. They are as good as new despite all their travails.

Blooded in Honor

The society of Goren is focused on clan holds, fortresses built on sparse hilltops before the Year of Darkness. A Gorenite CLAN consists of the people loyal to the clan chief holding the fort, often of people descended from the survivors of Darkness who sheltered in that particular fort. No land ownership is implied; land is only owned insofar as a family has an ancestral, established right to its use, a right that lapses when the family abandons the farming, grazing, fishing, mining or other occupation they have on the land. Because clan membership is often hereditary while people are transient, it is not uncommon to have members of different clans live as neighbors all mixed together in the more fertile (and troubled) areas.

As the movement of people makes all the more successful clans increasingly fragmented, the nature of the clans starts to resemble that of farming cooperatives or outright gangs: the common form of justice in Goren is to ask for your clansmen to aid you in extracting whatever refurbishment is possible when somebody has wronged you. Stories tell of the time of the JARLS who united the land against the Empire in the past and ruled with justice, but those days are long gone.

When somebody is a member of a clan, it is said that he is BLOODED to that clan. In Goren, you can only have justice if you are blooded, or have a blooded clansman speak for yourself: STRANGERS have no credibility to their demands, unless they come armed and ready to fight like the Maldorites did. In towns this makes for an increasingly large underclass of people forced to desperate poverty; the more urbanized clansmen realize the advantage they have, and are resistant to change. In towns three fourths of the population might be “strangers”; in the hill country, only one in five or ten.

In olden times newcomers were eased into the clans through the institution of THRALLHOOD, a sort of contract slavery that could end in initiation; the children of thralls would in any case be free clansmen without exception. Thrallhood could come about as an alternative to killing an enemy in combat or because an unblooded Gorenite had no other choice but to submit himself as thrall to another. Today the Sky God Faith forbids keeping thralls, however, which means that admittance to clans is all but impossible for those with no desirable skills or considerable wealth.

Divided by Waves

In the pre-Skyfire era Gorenites were accomplished sailors and explorers who colonized much of the long coastline of the southern continent. It is unknown how long ago all this happened, but the Gorenite people on both coasts of the Southern Sea share modes of speech and dress, as well as means of living.

The close connection between “Old Goren” and the colonies was severed by the Year of Shadow, and has been slow in being re-established. Some clans on both continents share mottos and insignia, but there are no chiefs wielding influence in both lands. The south continent Goren often refer to their land simply as “Goren” just like the northerners do, but the land has a separate name as well: the first colonists called it JOŠLAND.

The environment and conditions of life are in many ways similar in Goren and Jošland: herding and farming are important to both, while Jošlanders are also accomplished fishermen. Trade is much more important for Old Goren, which produces much of the metals consumed by all of Near. Jošlanders trade as well, but they have a fierce reputation as pirates among the northern peoples. An Ammeni trader who didn’t stay to experience the savage skirmishes in Maldorian border marches would consider the Gorenites almost civilized in comparison.

However, what really separates Jošland from Goren is how they experienced the Year of Shadow: while Jošland was sustained by its belief in the Goddess through the dark, and sustained its witchfolk in turn, Old Goren was decimated by trolls, underground-dwelling goblins that conquered the highlands during the darkness. The fate of Goren was changed when the cenobitic actions of the Sky God religion brought a new destiny to the people.

The religious schism is not a large issue for common Gorenites on either side of the Ocean, especially as the two have been long separated, but as contact increases, the issue grows like a boil in between them. Witches from the old country have fled to Jošland, speaking of persecution; highlands saints of the Sky God faith have been attacked when they’ve traveled overseas.

Under the Earth

Old Goren is not a land of humans only: when the Year of Shadow receded and clans started out of their fortresses, the TROLLS were already there: goblins adapted to darkness, living in old mines from the times of the Empire, proliferated through the Shadow, laying claim to much of the lands people had felt their own.

Goblins had always been rare in aboveground Goren, mostly stories of changelings and humaneating. The trolls were predatory and strong-willed, unwilling to relinquish their herds and heaths to humans hungry for land. Although solitary creatures, the trolls were strong; humans long secluded into their fortresses were weak.

Stories of the troll age tell of great troll chiefs and their goblin courts. While clansmen are unwilling to discuss their ancient enemy in a neutral manner, many unblooded families of today descend from collaborators that worked with goblins through the early years and accepted their Trollish rulers. Understandably goblins have a pretty bad reputation in Goren, considering the long struggle the clans underwent to reclaim their lands. Often a lone troll would keep an entire valley in terror for a generation before moving out or being slain by COISTRELS, professional troll slayers.

Today trolls are a receding phenomenon in the central parts of Goren. Skyclad trolls can still be encountered in the farther reaches, but most old trolls and the remains of their courts have withdrawn back below the earth, where they belong as far as coistrels are concerned.

Actual Play

Goren reflects my personal artistic vision a lot more than most of this book does. Specifically, the idea of Abrahamic religion and its relationship to the world at large and Nordic society in the specific, in both good and ill – I wanted to give it a proper treatment. It was a fortuitous coincidence that Josh’s vision of witchcraft fit well into my own plans.

I’ve played through many, many sessions of thinly veiled critiques of religion in my time, complete with inhuman inquisitors and fanatic mobs; it’s possible that you’ll get that sort of thing with this material, too, and it’s not the end of the world if you do. The way I’ve come to see it, the attitude Finnish roleplaying takes towards religion reflects rather directly on the fact that our whole society is working to secularize itself and find some reasonable balance in regard to the ideas of Lutheranism. It’s just something we need to play through to arrive at something new.

My immediate play with the Gorenite material has been more understanding and less black and white. The Story Guide is very much responsible for pushing against the preconceptions other players bring to the table: if a character concept is most comfortable with evil witches and faultless chaplains, play against that; if the player presumes that the witch hunts are brutal and unnecessary, perhaps there even aren’t any; whatever the characters think of the trolls, it just might happen that the specific individuals they encounter are completely contrary to those expectations, in good or bad.

Ideas

Sky God Religion brings to the table two completely different character concepts: the Highland Saints are impossibly good people with impossibly high expectations, while the deacons of the fledgling church are responsible for actual people and their lives.

Witches of Goren can be wise or wicked, and their faith condones both as long as they come in harmonious forms. Witchcraft liberates women, but only by forcing them to express themselves through the feminine, not by freeing them as people.

Urbanization of Goren is ultimately going to be the future. What does this mean to the clans? Is religion going to rule the society in their stead?

Gorenite Names

Gorenite names are Germanic, of course. First names in Goren are usually formed of two parts from separate lists. They used to carry a meaning and reflect the hopes of the parents, and often still do in Jošland. A second name is patronymic, although in towns they’ve started to develop into actual surnames.

Above the Earth

The Tiserian monasteries are a chain of Spartan stone temples that reach ever higher up into the Roof of the World. They are ancient; the people of Near have always looked to be closer to the sky, and as far back as the monastic records go, people have been traveling here for a sense of holiness. The “highland saints”, as they are called, were already famous holy men during the imperial times. Their martial power was feared, as it was well known that they fought the frost giants of the mountains through the harshest of winters.

The highland saints used to be reclusive before the Shadow, but afterwards things changed: as Gorenite lands below the mountains disintegrated into chaos during the troll age, monastic orders stepped up to support the clans. These assaults from the mountains are called CENOBITIC ACTIONS in the monastic language, to contrast with eremitic actions sometimes taken by individual hermits.

The creed that Cenobitic Actions brought down to the lowlands is now called the Sky God Faith, a rapidly spreading religious renewal of the tired land. Highland saints and preachers are popular among the people because they have magic that works against the trolls, and they have justice; the Sky God Faith does not distinguish between clansmen and strangers, their laws are the same for everybody. Thus members of Sky God congregations can expect to be treated with dignity, just like clansmen.

The saints themselves are now tired and their ranks are thin after fighting a century to secure the Gorenite highlands from trolls and antagonistic witch-women. The reality of bringing wisdom to an ingrate population has been a disappointment to many, and they have returned back to their mountain abodes. Preachers of the faith step in to pick up the slack and maintain the zeal of laymen eager to seek virtue. It is unlikely that another Cenobitic Action will be launched anymore.

Note the different implications of the Sky God Faith, Sky God Religion and Sky God Church. All three terms are used by Gorenites, often revealing different degrees of foresight concerning the direction the movement is taking.

The Book of Light

Ideologically the Sky God Faith is dogmatic and monotheistic: the God is invisible and one, living in the Sky. Virtue comes from listening to his word, revealed in nature. Vice is associated with lowlands, lavish waste and Trollish ways, such as mining. Virtue and Vice are recognized by their consequences, and a virtuous man should not be afraid to judge the boundary in between. Magic is a force empowered by virtue or vice, and not to be invoked lightly.

In practice the highland saints are committed to bringing virtue to the Gorenites; they believe that a good life will be rewarded by the community here and now, if only the community remains true. The saints have started churches in all the largest towns of Goren and sent preachers to teach in the countryside, hoping to convince the clansmen of the wisdom of just thought and action.

Interestingly enough, the Sky God Faith is a book religion: the highland saints have brought with them a great number of teaching texts that have been compiled with recent histories of the cenobitic actions – the result is called the Book of Light, and while its sources range from old imperial philosophy to Oranide poetry, it is slowly becoming established as the definition of the Sky God Faith. The stories of Lowden Mountain Man, the commander of the second cenobitic action, are an inspiration for preachers and laymen alike.

Virtues of the Sky God

The highland saints practice a virtue ethic that is best expressed in the dictum “God helps those who prove worthy of aid”. NATURAL virtues are those that come to humans without effort, as long as they are humble. CIVIC virtues are things like self-sacrifice and honor, which come with experience with the world and society. The saints have a complex philosophical system that charts out different virtues and their interrelations from first principles to the highest spiritual virtue.

Virtues of the highland saints are represented as Abilities in the game. This is not because others could not be virtuous in these ways; rather, it is because only with Sky God adherents (and others who learn these Abilities) do we give the option of testing the character’s virtue directly, as a matter of conflict. You might wish to consider such a conflict more of an internal than an external matter: the issue is not whether the character can do something, but whether he will. The player choice to use one of these Abilities is a sign of willingness to leave the character’s intent up to the dice in this matter. The whole concept of virtue presumes that people can, to an extent, learn to act better by some measure.

Virtue Abilities are all considered Passive Abilities when that is useful, usable in all the ways the standard Passive Abilities are. I should note that the Story Guide’s job regarding virtue Abilities is pretty much to say no to the player who’d want to use them to do everything. Rather, presume that a virtue can never be used for a non-passive purpose, except in a dramatic situation or through a Secret. Characters might get around this with the SECRET OF SYNERGY and other means, of course.

As practical advice, I suggest taking the virtues as a challenge for gaming technique, as that’s sort of why I find them interesting myself. Consider the classical RPG PENDRAGON as an established example of what might be done here, perhaps, and keep an open mind. I haven’t had trouble applying the virtues myself, but I can imagine how they might confuse a player who is not prepared for the full implications of turning personality traits into Abilities. The Story Guide will do well to remind a player creating his paladin character that he will enforce the need for concrete, material Abilities, allowing the virtues to be pinged only in the truly dramatic or clearly internal struggles.

Blessings of Virtue

BLESSINGS are magical Secrets activated by the virtues; the Tiserian cenobites know of many miracles based on the holy writings, but individuals are limited to blessings they are granted – afterwards the saint who qualified for a blessing once may use it freely, nobody can take it away from him unless he relinquishes it to another. Blessings are handled like Secrets, except that they are only learned through Secrets such as the SECRET OF THE AXIOM, QUEST or HAGIOGRAPHY, or perhaps as bequeathal from a saint close to death.

Blessings have different strength depending on the virtues they draw upon. This is reflected in their mechanical design. The following limitations are what I use: a Blessing with only natural virtues may not have a Pool cost above 1. A Blessing with a civic virtue may have a Pool cost of at most 2. A Blessing with the spiritual virtue would be limited to a Pool cost of 3. Humble Blessings, if there are any, would have no Pool costs at all.

As always, remember that while we discuss Blessings being “granted by God” and such, this is just how the characters themselves perceive the matter. We the players know that God does not make judgments in Near – indeed, God has no mechanical impact in the game mechanics whatsoever.

Witches of Goren

Goren is the Old Country, the nest of witchcraft. In Goren stands WITCHMOUNT wherein covens gather in council. However, today the Gorenites have turned from their witch women to embrace the new Sky God Faith. It is even said that witches have been burned at stake, for the highlands saints consider some aspects of the Goddess suspect and all of them false worship.

In Jošland, however, witchcraft remains as strong as ever: witch women advice and aid the people in their relations with each other and the two worlds. Witches live among the people and gather in covens for private worship. The bravest still travel to Witchmount like they did before the Year of Shadow; others look closer for meetings.

Gorenite witchcraft is usually only taught in a concerned manner to WITCHBLOODED individuals, which almost always means children of witches. Witches can marry, but that often means reducing their commitment to coven activities, so many have children out of wedlock. An exception to the avoidance of marriage is the practice of TRIUNE MARRIAGE, a custom unique to Goren: clan chiefs and other important men of the community may, should they choose to do so, seek another wife from among witch women. This is usually encouraged by Gorenite covens, and most witches indeed consider only chieftains worthy enough mates for themselves. There also exists a belief in strengthening the blood by marriages among the accomplished.

Triune married witches do not settle down like normally married women in Goren do; they meet their husband as suits both parties, while the secular wife takes care of the chief’s household. The witch is expected to advice her husband, but any children he begets are her own to do with as she would. The children of the witchwife cannot inherit the chief and in theory there should be no animosity between the two wives, even while some sagas teach the opposite.

Male children of witch women usually go into secular crafts, following their fathers; children from triune marriages are often adopted as bastards to the chief’s household. WARLOCKS, male witches, are despised, and while the witch blood may run true in male children, teaching the art to the boy is never encouraged.

The Triune Goddess

As all witches know, the Goddess has three aspects: Maiden, Mother and Crone. All women embody the Aspects throughout their natural lives, moving through them in order.

The first aspect is MAIDEN who is sinless and flawless, unblemished by the touch of morality. She inflames the passions of men – who seek purity – and she keeps the Harmonic Covenant with the natural world. She is rather than does, resists all and bends to none.

The second aspect is MOTHER who is weathered and strong, rooted to the real world. She rules and makes decisions, runs a household, cooks and cures, crafts and raises children to her will. She meets with the other women and finds the Covenant of Accord in their midst.

The third aspect is CRONE who is tough and wise, knowful of what is. She answers questions of things generally forgotten, guides the young and fights the fights others see not. She is a solitary figure, mindful of being and imposing the Covenant of Seeming upon the traditional beings.

The knowledge of the Aspect Abilities is an everyday thing for women, there need not be any witchery in being a good daughter, mother or grandmother. Neither does a woman need direct life experience to know these Abilities; most will have some little understanding of each of them long before (and after) it is their time to live in the prescribed role.

Tricks

Witchery starts with simple things, wisdom that is only barely magical. We call these TRICKS. Each Trick set is a little Secret about how the world is made.

As can be seen from the examples, Tricks really manifest as several little effects which can reflect different Aspects of the Goddess. These can be IMPROVISED: if the character encounters a situation where knowing the tricks to breath can be applied, the player can create a new trick for her bag. The limitations are really just that the trick has to draw on one of the Aspects the character knows, and it can’t be strong and central enough to be considered a Secret on its own; tricks are less important and powerful than feasible Secrets by definition. (Note that “smaller than Secret” is ultimately campaignspecific, just as judging individual Secrets for strength is.)

An improvised trick can be written down by the player if he wants, just like the example tricks are, but he doesn’t have to. The difference is that if he does, the Story Guide has less grounds for complaint next time the same trick might be used. This is not to say that tricks are any more immutable than anything else in the crunch landscape; tricks can be turned into Arcana (explained later) and vice versa as the group’s sensibilities dictate.

Everybody can learn the tricks, and it doesn’t take that long to do so. They’re not useful without understanding of the Aspects, that’s all.

Embodying the Aspects

Women who want to be witches worship the Goddess. They live according to their chosen Aspect and gain Her blessings. Sometimes they do this instinctually and without knowledge of witchcraft, although this is rare.

Usually a witch will only embody one of the Aspects, the one that accords with her current role in life. Some witches manage two Aspects simultaneously, especially when their lives are in flux. A witch is considered to be embodying an Aspect as long as she has the Key of the Aspect in question.

A serious witch will sometimes find that she needs to draw on the magic of an Aspect she does not embody. An old woman needs the powers of seduction, or a young one has to strike down her foes. Such a witch may RAISE THE ASPECT she needs by other means; some sample rituals are provided as Secrets.

Goddess’s High Magic

Finally, there is one other facet to witchcraft, RITUAL MAGIC. It is usually only practiced by covens due to how exhausting it is, and how useful it is to have all Aspects of the Goddess represented in the ritual.

The ritual magic practiced by Gorenite witches is called COVENANT RITES due to the specific theological leverage the witches employ in contacting and treating with the Goddess; other traditions might have other ways to do ritual magic. The purpose is in any case singular, to communicate with the Goddess directly and consciously.

When the Covenant Rites are invoked, the coven can bring to motion several magical workings all at one time, unhindered by the limitations of Arcana. Witches are not rules-wise limited in advance as to the effects their workings may have; instead, they are limited by the following principles:

• The magical working can only affect matters of which the coven has personal knowledge among them: people they know, places they’ve seen.
• The magical working can only act upon the Covenants embodied in the ritual: the natural world can only be influenced through the Harmonic Covenant, human society through the Covenant of Accord and the inner world through the Covenant of Seeming. Should an Aspect of the Goddess not be embodied by a ritual participant, the ritual will be completely ineffectual in that sphere.
• The magical working cannot affect people within the ritual space. Outside forces can affect them while they are inside, and they can communicate or leave the space, but their magic will not affect anybody within the ritual.

Aside from these limitations, there is little the covenant rites cannot accomplish, provided the witches are willing to pay the price and try as often as it takes to succeed.

Boreal Beasts

Vulfen are not known in Maldorian records from before the Year of Shadow, but according to their own legends, they’ve always been in the world, confined to the most distant south. When the Shadow Night rose and temperatures fell all over Near, Vulfen prospered in the lands suddenly inhospitable to humans. As the Southern Sea froze over, some even crossed over and staked territory in Near.

As the Shadow Night has receded, most Vulfen remain in Vulfland, the extensive swath of tundra and borderline glacier in the interior of the southern continent. They do prosper in the maritime taiga as well, but the Jošland Gorenites have largely driven them inland over the last generation. This does little to reduce their numbers: Vulfland is an enormous area, almost as large as Near itself, with plenty of room for the current Vulfen population.

Vulfen packs subsist on a diet of hunted deer and smaller animals, as well as megafauna of the far interior. Nothing threatens them in their habitat, their ferocity and intelligence makes them the match of the largest mammoth.

Despite their natural superiority, prosperity does not come easy to Vulfen packs: winters in Vulfland are harsh even with thick natural pelts, and bad hunting can lead to outright starvation. Vulfen are not accustomed to mercy in their cruel land.

Pack Society Politics

Vulfen are competitively social: they put great stock to honor and face among the pack, to such a degree that they can’t quite enjoy life in isolation from a pack of worthy peers. Respect and expecting respect comes naturally to the Vulfen.

The pack itself is organized akin to a wolf pack: there is an alpha Vulfen called VALRU and perhaps some beta VAL. A particularly powerful valru is termed a RUVALRU, the master of many packs. Originally all these terms refer to kinship: “valru” is a parent, “ruvalru” a grandparent and so on.

A Vulfen will be uncertain without a clear hierarchy and will often challenge others for dominance simply to find out where he belongs. Even the scapegoat-like HAR on the lowest rung of the pack politic are happier when they know their position unequivocally.

Vulfen have become socialized to humans in different ways: most Vulfland Vulfen make use of human dexterity when it serves their needs, going so far as to capture humans into servitude as FETCHES, hand-servants. Some rogue Vulfen may adopt a human tribe in lieu of their pack, often becoming kings or even gods to the human community, depending on their reaction to the lupine. Vulfen do not need human amenities, but they easily come to enjoy cooked food, shelter and other perks of civilization.

Outside the cold and sparse Vulfland the balance between humans and the occasional Vulfen shift: a lone Vulfen finding himself deep within civilized territory often ends up hunted as a “werewolf” or captured. Such a Vulfen may be tamed and become civilized after a fashion, coming to appreciate the creature comforts that humans can offer. Being tamed is shameful for the Vulflanders, who might slay a weakling or pup unable to cope with the harsh life of Vulfland.

The lure of civilization in its different forms is a perennial source of internal conflict among Vulfen: many Vulfland valru consider it an identity issue that Vulfen are akin to the wolf and despise any sign of civilization as weakness. Others disagree, preferring to interact with humans in different ways.

A similar divided curiosity governs the way Vulfen relate to wolves, which are rare in Vulfland, outhunted by Vulfen themselves. Vulfen who would respect their primordial way of life often look up to true wolves, gladly adopting them into the pack; after all, the wolf is not conflicted by human concerns of morality. Others are shamed or angered by wolves, which to them seem like stunted, incomplete Vulfen.

Dreams of Agarim

Vulfen tend to scoff at religious notions – not because they do not believe in unseen forces (they have good noses, after all) or because they do not believe in spirits; it’s just that they consider themselves wolf spirits and heirs of Agarim the Father Wolf already, so they should have little to prove and less to ask from other spiritual forces. Again, some Vulfen disagree, especially when they’re forced to leave their comfortable pack life on the tundra; while a Vulfen would not be likely to stoop to worshipping other spirits, he might cooperate with them when their interests coincide.

Lacking a religious mind-set does not mean that Vulfen are entirely without spiritual experiences. They take dreams very seriously, and hold certain respect for powerful dream shamans. While they do not practice dream shamanism themselves, Vulfen dreams are important due to their relationship with the common ancestor Ru-Agarim, Father Wolf. Most Vulfen believe that their dreams are visitations to another world, one in which Agarim reminds them of his way.

Of particular import are PROPHETIC dreams, recognized as such when the same dream is shared by many Vulfen. Usually prophecies concern only one pack, but some of the most important, dealing with Agarim, are known to all packs in Vulfland.

Vulfen in Play

The Vulfen vision can be savage. I’ve wrestled hard with the issue of whether Vulfen are even playable: they are like furry Nazis in so many ways that one might assume that they’d only attract players who want to play a monster.

As it happens, though, there is a trick to making this work: the Story Guide must not downplay the Vulfland environment. The harsh creatures and their unforgiving culture start to make sense when they are contrasted with the stark reality of the wastes. My impression was completely overturned when we found out in play that the Vulfen relationship to their fetches is not necessarily one of slavery – it could not be, when the land is so hostile that the Vulfen needs to support his fetch just to allow him to survive. What seems like exploitation may be cooperation necessitated by survival.

This works the other way around, too: when the Vulfen go north, they certainly start looking unnecessarily savage if they insist on the values developed on the wastes. In my mind the grand narrative here concerns the grandiose Vulfen eschatology: how does the proud creature react to realizing that the world is much larger and much more complex than he ever realized? What happens when the other people in the story find out that ultimately, only those basic Vulfen values matter?

Vulfen Names

Like ratkin, I seen to end up with folks like “Greypaw” or “Growl” with Vulfen. Why fight the inclination, anyway? The Vulfen don’t care, they probably think that names are uncivilized.

Impossible Survival

The southern continent is an extensive landmass that has always been inhospitable to habitation according to Maldorian records. The polar shift during the Year of Shadow did little to change this; the continent has moved farther north alongside the rest of Near, but the weakening of the sun has only extended the tundra to areas where once dense boreal forests held sway. Rainfall has increased considerably, however, and now great rivers flow south towards the great depression of the renewed southern glacier, slowly building up into a reservoir that will become a great arctic sea in time.

Human people of Vulfland were there before the Vulfen came, or so they say; they call themselves the people, “Inuk”, despite what others say of them. Outsiders often ignore these natives in favor of the Vulfen packs in their tales, even while they trade with the humans for beautiful bone and thick furs of arctic beasts.

Most of the Inuk live either in small lakeside fishing villages or stay on the move, following the half-wild caribou herds as they track the sun north and south over the year. Some few are hunters and fishers far in the glacier, out of the reach of Vulfen. There is ample trade between these population groups: the herders carry surplus production from village to village on their travels, while exchanging their bounty of bone and skins for pottery, fish, oils and other products of the sedentary villagers. Glacier-walkers trade with yeti and come annually or biannually to villages to gain the few supplies they can’t make on their own. Marriage customs reflect this interdependence: Vulflanders consider a marriage from a village into a herding family or vice versa a particularly conspicuous one, as the new family members make for trustworthy partners in barter.

The humans of Vulfland are submissive towards the Vulfen packs that roam the wastes, moving over considerable distances in search of prey. Most packs disdain the weak humans, perceived as such because of their dependence on a multitude of tools, clothing and foodstuffs scraped from the ground. Through the Shadow Night the numbers of humans plummeted and Vulfen even ate human flesh, but since then the power relationship has been turning around.

Spirits of Aether

Vulfen are irreligious, but the Vulfland humans have an intense spiritual relationship with TOTEM animals, powerful dream spirits that watch over the people and regulate their relationship with the natural world; as one story has it, the Vulfen themselves are children of the Wolf totem, sent to punish people for over-exploitation of their environment.

Totems are usually community-specific: herders bring their totem with them as they travel, while villages abandon theirs if they are forced to move to a new place. Sometimes different genders or occupational groups within the same settlement have separate totems. A mystically potent family or even a person might also have a totem of their own: in these cases people usually consider the person to have some blood of the totem animal in them, explaining the close relationship.

Some people, called SHAMANS, specialize in communing with the totems and recognizing their signs. Most shamans are also expert dreamers; the next chapter discusses this facet of their power. The most important duty of a shaman in inuk society concerns negotiating with spirits that visit the community by possessing its members; some spirits have important tasks they need help with, while others just want to have fun and feel the experiences the body has to offer. The shaman sorts these out and makes sure the spirit gets what it wants, and blesses the community in return.

Typical totems include bear, reindeer, seal, walrus, whale, various fish, arctic birds, fox, squirrel, wolverine and other common Vulfland animals. Wolf totems are not unheard of, but they usually denote a settlement under Vulfen control and are not actually active spirits. Communities honor their animal totems through special feasts, dances and ceremonies, vision quests, carved jewelry, fetishes, and totem-poles.

Actual Play

In my playtesting the Inuk have been a remarkably passive subject people to which things are done and who do nothing in turn. I wonder what’s up with that? Hopefully others will play stories that center on these people who live on the border of the universe.

Specifically, consider the heroic potential of PERSONAL STORIES. I imagine that the Inuk heroes do crazy things for small reasons, like visiting other planets to get some wedding gifts for their sweetheart. They also do small things for small reasons, like stabbing each other to death for promiscuity. This zooming in to small things happens to outsiders as well: life in Vulfland is harsh, and sometimes just fighting for your own happiness is more than enough work.

Ideas

The wendigo might or might not come with a personalized spirit. If the spirit is not personal, then it’s up to the player to play the subliminal urges and monstrosity of the character as he wishes.

The wendigo is powerful. If it could be controlled and corralled, perhaps it could even be a match for a pack of Vulfen: a weapon born of desperation.

Meetings between communities are a low-key event for heroic drama, but important for the Inuk, for whom new faces mean new marriage and trade opportunities. Consider enjoying this material at the pace it sets.

Spirit interactions can be interesting, as the smart community goes a long way in satisfying the spirit, whatever it wants. But there is a line at which the spirit becomes a liability; the good shaman knows where it lies.

I am personally convinced that the southern glaciers do not hold just doors into dreaming, but to other worlds. Perhaps the two are one and the same.

Inuk Names

Let’s use Finnic names for the Inuk. The people usually only have one name and perhaps a patronymic, formed with the suffix -nen (male) or -tar (female) out of their parent’s name. A person might also be known by his totem (if he has one) or his village’s totem. “Gull-Jakko”, for instance.

Dreams of Power

Reality on the southern glaciers is sometimes mutable, strange sights are seen. Green forests and weird beasts may be encountered, things of other words. This is because of the SOFT PLACES, areas that have yet not been perceived enough to separate the real from the imaginary. Dream shamans sometimes seek these soft places because of the power it gives to their dreaming; others dread them for the illusionary dangers they may contain.

The southern aurora is connected to the power of dreams: it is said that dreams seen under the twisting polar lights contain great truths about the future. Such dreams, when they happen, are thought powerful divination that may come to anybody. Seeking the services of a dream shaman is considered most prudent in these cases so as to find out what the dream signifies.

Aside from dreams of divination, there are dream visitations from totemic animals and other dream spirits. Vulfen do not have these dreams, as they do not have totemic animals. Humans take these dreams most seriously, however.

The last type of powerful dream is the LUCID dream. These are especially important for dream shamans, as they can only make purposeful choices in these kinds of dreams. A dreamer will not normally realize that he is dreaming, but in a lucid dream he does. The dream shaman has usually trained to enter a lucid state during his dream; a layman will only enter a lucid dream accidentally or when provoked by a dream shaman.

Dreamwalking

Other dreams are like recorded plays and can’t be influenced while they are running, but lucid dreams are different: they happen in an interactive environment, the dreaming of the individual dreamer. Because the lucid dreamer is aware and in control of himself, normal scenes may be framed within the dream.

A character enters a lucid dream by making a DREAM-TELLING (R) Ability check while asleep. The check result gives the maximum number of scenes that the dream lasts before the character wakes up. A dream may also become lucid when a lucid dreamwalker first enters it or interacts directly with the dreamer; in this case a REACT (I) check may be used instead.

A dreamwalker is a character that can move from his own dream to another’s using the SECRET OF DREAMWALKING. A lucid dreamwalker may interact with a non-lucid dreamer in the dreamer’s dream; however, non-lucid dreamers may only make Passive Ability checks, and they can’t realize that the things and events in the dream are not real.

Once a lucid dreamer is present, he may opt to shape a dream freely, or act within the dream, possibly making Ability checks. A DREAM-TELLING (R) check may be required to make complex changes or make emotionally powerful changes without waking the dreamer up. Social interaction is possible in a dream almost normally, but any action that would cause Harm, refresh Pools or otherwise affect the dreamer mechanically will wake the dreamer instead. Secrets can and will change this; Vulflanders fear nothing as much as a dream shaman turned into an enemy, as a non-lucid layman is all but helpless against a phantasmal killer within his own dream; horrible nightmares are the least danger, many enemies of dream shamans are found under their own furs in the morning, frozen to death as if they’d spent the night naked on the glacier.

A lucid dreamer may awake accidentally just like a non-lucid dreamer would, but only within his own dream. Within another’s dream he will only wake with a DREAM-TELLING (R) check, when his dreamtime runs out or when the other dreamer wakes, which wakes up everybody visiting that dream.

Aside from the above, dream scenes may be played the same as any scene. However, circumstantial penalty dice work differently within a dream: the Story Guide may assign up to five penalty or bonus dice to individual checks; he is encouraged to make these decisions according to seemingly arbitrary criteria that hide a poetic logic. Different things are feasible in a dream than would be in reality.

Dream Modes

The Pool costs of the various dream shaman Secrets are given in generic Pool points, but the actual Pool used is not arbitrary: the current MODE of the dream determines which Pool the shaman needs to use to activate his magic.

Each dream scene always starts with a mode that accords with the largest current Pool of the dreaming character. A dreamer may switch the mode by making an Ability check: the mode always accords with the last Ability checked in the dream scene, but only if it is stronger than the last mode-change. DREAM-TELLING (R) does not count; in fact, the associated Pool of the DREAM-TELLING Ability itself switches with the mode when the character is dreaming.

Non-dreaming Secrets, when used within dream, are affected by the mode as well: when a character pays points from any Pool, all but one of those points come out of the current mode Pool instead. A payment of three VIGOR during a REASON mode would turn into 2 REASON and 1 VIGOR, for example.

Running out of the mode Pool wakes the dreamer up immediately, provided that they can.

Dream Spirits

Spirits are powerful dreams that do not dissolve when the morning comes. Instead, they escape to the soft places to wait out the day. Some, such as totem spirits, are ancient, powerful and wise, rarely coming out of the soft places. Others are fearsome and hungry, such as the wendigo.

Spirits are just like lucid dreamers (in fact, lucid dreamers are like spirits, except that they have a body to return to) when it comes to moving through dreams, interacting with dreamers and so on and so forth. It is far from unknown for a dream shaman to forge relationships with spirits.

A dream spirit newly summoned has Advances equal to triple the success level of the Ability check used to summon it, distributed in half by the player of the dream shaman and half by the Story Guide. Dream spirits may be very imaginative in their composition, built out of dream logic. Free spirits of course may have whatever statistics the Story Guide finds best. Dream spirits encountered in the real world have their strength reduced: halve their Pools and reduce Ability levels by one. Dream spirits encountered during the day are also fragile: anybody who has a reason to suspect may make a REACT (I) check to recognize the creature for a dream and dissolve it. For this reason dream spirits almost never make an appearance outside the soft places and dreams. Dream items brought out into the world follow similar rules: their quality drops by one, and a successful disbelief causes the item to disappear. For this reason a dream shaman might make his dream equipment seem mundane, so as to avoid disbelief.

Soft Places

Soft places are powerful because they are half-dream themselves. Entering a soft place is like entering a true dream space from the SECRET OF TRUE DREAM: the place has a mode, DREAM-TELLING (R) and dream shamanism Secrets work normally and so on. However, a person entering a soft place in waking life is really there: anything that happens to him is real.

Pure soft places have a direct connection to dreaming: there is nothing preventing a real being from moving into the dream or a dream spirit or item from becoming real in a soft place, provided they know how to dreamwalk and know of the soft place. A person going bodily into the dream cannot awaken accidentally or by force; they are like a dream spirit. A person who comes out of a soft place into the world during a dream endangers his original body most gravely; he also loses one level from all of his Abilities and half of his Pools until he returns to the dreaming and/or his own body.

Most soft places are actually in the process of hardening, so they are not so pure anymore: in these places circumstance penalties may be suffered, manifesting spirits may be even weaker, going into the dream bodily may not work at all and the power of dream is otherwise limited. Dream shamans both fear and covet pure dreaming places for their great power.

Species Dreams

The dream landscape is different for the different peoples of Near. Individual dreams are greatly influenced by personal experiences and cultural background, which often allows a dream shaman perceiving the dream to learn much about the person himself. However, this is nothing compared to the differences between the dreams of the races: a dream shaman may take a great risk by going into the dreams of people they do not understand.

Human

dreams are the default described earlier; they are colorful and varied in properties, reflecting the person of the dreamer. The large circumstance penalty range makes the dreams whimsical and chaotic if one does not solve the dream logic the Story Guide uses in assigning the dice.

Elves

do not dream, for they consider the world itself the dream. This does not mean that they are completely unaffected by the dream world; auroras interfere with Elven auras and soft places sometimes seem more real to them than reality does.

Goblin

dreams are largely inherited; they dream of things their ancestors did and felt, not of imaginary things. The goblin himself is usually encountered in the shape of one of his ancestors in the dream. Goblins might well learn important things from these dreams, if they realize their significance.

Dwarven

dreams are utopian: they almost always concern the ultimate success of the individual dwarf’s purpose. There are no circumstance penalties in dwarven dreams, and in fact using any bonus or penalty dice carries an additional surcharge of one associated Pool point.

Giant

dreams are slow and calm, with no loud sounds. Giants themselves are humans in their dreams, and part of society. Visiting dreamwalkers are usually insubstantial on-lookers, unless they manage to materialize somehow.

Beastkin

such as ratkin or Vulfen, all have similar dreams. Beastkin in dream take the shape of a pure animal, albeit they may still speak if they want to. Humanite dreamwalkers in beastkin dreams lose their own nature, instead becoming like a beastkin most reflecting their inner spirit (SG choice); this may be an existing kin, or one that is only real in dreams. Otherwise beastkin dreams are relatively mundane, following rules from reality.

Soft Places

and other ”neutral” dream territory might be considered in this context as well. They are, perhaps surprisingly, very life-like, and have no special rules to them. Of course, unearthly things may still be encountered just the same. Sometimes a soft place takes on the qualities of the dreams of their residents, though, if people live in them.

Choosing a Species

Humans are the default species of the game, they don’t have any special rules attached to them aside from some optional crunch on the facing page. Other species, however, do: each has a mandatory Secret they need to take to belong to that species. (It costs an Advance, too.) In addition, each species has various other specific crunch the player may sample at their pleasure.

The Old Species have a special place, as they are all long ubiquitous in all parts of Near. Thus all civilizations have had to form some sort of stance on them. Even the rare elves and giants are known as something other than pure fantasy to all but the most ignorant.

The Beastkin, meanwhile, tend to be local to certain parts of Near. Partially this is because they’ve been in the world for such a short time, partially because their instincts are adapted best to their home terrain.