An Industrial Fantasy Setting



In the year 1866 (After the Empire), the Peninsula of Margran has been isolated from the rest of the world by the ever-growing Pale for centuries, its history riddled with holes as whatever the Pale consumes is erased even from memory.

Margran is a continent about the size of northern america, inhabited by a plurality of cultures:

 - Ceruleans are 10' tall blue-skinned people from the harsh taigas north of the copper crest. They have no established state but consist in an alliance of hundreds of tribes that share religious practices as well as barter and occasionally fight one another. Cerulean traders and storytellers are not uncommon throughout the peninsula, almost always accompanied by their massive six-legged steeds.

- Drulz are duck-folk, confined to the south-east plains outside of the Forest of Ys. Their territory is progressively being absorbed by the People's Federation of Estrel's rapid population, rapidly degrading the remnants of the Alliance. Drulz tribes operate under representative democracies, although it is very common for guides to be re-elected consistently throughout their lives if they prove to be excellent leaders. Drulz scouts roam the peninsula's wilderness hunting for outcasts and operating under the Law, righting wrongs and occasionally causing mischief.

- When the Empire fell, the surviving Elds escaped to Na'Ihr and have not been seen since. Ever since, nearly all ships that attempted to reach the coasts have been bombarded and sunk, and those that haven't never came back. During the time of the Empire, the Elds ruled over the peninsula as God-Kings, treating their enslaved subjects as little more than cattle. For this reason, any Eld foolish enough to set foot outside Na'Ihr would be executed on sight, although none have been witnessed in more than a thousand years.

- Ghouls, also known as the Bone Folk, are translucent save for their bones. Outside the Hegemony, they live scattered on the Peninsula in secretive and quiet communities or as wandering nomads, often unjustly treated with suspicion by their peers, an enduring relic of imperial past, now fueled by the brutal theocracy that forms the Hegemony of Nir. Inside Nir, ghouls live extremely regimented lives, taken into nurseries from birth and raised in clades before joining a clan based on their abilities. In recent years, the Bloodied, a particularly expansionist clan, has been gaining more and more control of the Council and rumours of war with Estrel are brewing.

- The Forest of Ys shelters the remnants of three cultures whose people were driven to near-extinction and cursed with near-infertility by the Elds. Trolls are a pondering, spiritual people dwarfing even ceruleans in size and bulk, with thick fur and long tusks - they live for centuries follow a pacifist (but not non-violent) creed as they value life over all things. Grimalkins are cat-folk fueled by curiosity. They value independence but also safety, and live in informal policules and family packs, sometimes wandering the lands alongside their chosen kin. Pixies are winged people the size of a hand, living alongside trolls in tiny tree houses. Polar opposites of their quiet neighbours, they are a festive and artistically-bent culture, fueled by moody passions. While the Forest of Ys is not a state, representatives from these three people will sometimes meet with Drulz leaders or Estrel representatives to discuss diplomacy.

- Three major states have emerged since the Eld Empire was destroyed, all of them peopled by a majority population of Androids, as well as people from the aforementioned cultures of Margran. Androids are human-like, complete with blood and internal organs, although their hearts are solid spheres made of a golden unknown material and their skin, eyes and hair are a great variety of neon and pastel colours, and their ears are pointy. While they cannot reproduce, androids regenerate a new body over a period of a year spent inside precious incubators, as long as the (arguably extremely resistant) golden heart is not destroyed. This process happens whenever they die, at most a hundred years after their regeneration (at which point their bodies rapidly degrade over a few weeks or months at most).

The Kingdom of Arill is an absolutist monarchy ruled by the Arill Core, a family of seven android clones, former Eld representatives, who believe themselves to be the original design for their kin and are rumoured to have saved ancient records from before the Pale consumed the waterways to other land masses, securing technologies as well as information that have allowed them to maintain their rule even after the Empire fell. Life there is rumoured to be little better than under the Eld, and Arillian spies are feared by Estrellians, be they monarchists or communards.
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While the Kingdom of Estrel has a Queen who maintains control of the army, internal politics are handled by the Senate, making Estrel a Republic de facto if not de jure. Kept in check by the Queen's guard and the Senate's finances, Lord-Marshalls rule over towns and cities.

The People's Federation of Estrel is an alliance of communes that split from the Kingdom in 1800 AE and have maintained hold of their territory through alliances with Drulz and the Forest of Ys. During the Battle of Rebirth forty years ago, they seized the last known progenitor, an incubator-like structure able to produce new golden spheres, and thus new androids.

The Margrave Peninsula has been steadily entering its industrial revolution, with the recent advent of coal-based energy, heavy industry and railway-based transportation is rapidly transforming Estrel, Arill and Nir. Ys, Cerulea and Drulz lack the infrastructure and population to keep up, and have been kept safe from expansionism by the Treaty of Peace sealed by the victors of the War of Liberation during the Eld Empire's fall. This Treaty is becoming to look more and more like a nuisance to the burgeoning bourgeois class of the Kingdoms and the Warrior caste of the Hegemony. As well as trains, you can find telegraphs, lever-action rifles, single-action revolvers, pre-penicilin medicine and early attempts at mycelium-based plastic-analogs, although steel, stone and wood are still the primary materials people work with.

There is no magic that we know of, although there are a fair number of creeds and belief systems throughout the Peninsula, of which I will discuss another time. There fairly recent liberal as well as communist political theories, as well as the rising specter of a nihilist creed spread by the warrior caste of Nir that they call "the Golden Path".

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