Realms Of The Fae Lords

The people of the sleepy trade-town of Freehold are accustomed to a life rich with local abundance and opportunity. Rumours of a vicious civil war in the Northern Cities are little more than common gossip for the people here, and the annual calls by the King's Guard to collect the annual tax, have never resulted in conflict... so long as the taxes are paid, in full and on time. But they say now there is a new King in the far northern City of Northwatch, now called "Ashfall" following the bloody coup that laid a father low and brought a son to power. Other than those uncomfortable annual collections of the Tithe, which will now be paid to a new King for the first time in known memory, Freehold is a place actually quite famous for it's liberal views, racial openness and strong trade-based economy. The bulk of the population is human or elven, or half between, although there are scant few citizens who hail from more exotic parts of the world. All visitors pay a small pittance to enter the town's fort proper, but this small levy adds up since Freehold is situated in the very center of the south heartland of the known realms... and far enough south from the capitol of Ashfall to still feel free. For now.

OF PACT AND BOND

    Minervera. The Fae-touched Realms. Industrial cities choke the air with smoke from behind fortress walls, while the wild-lands between remain dangerous, fraught with peril and untamed. Beyond the human cities stretching north and south through the central heartlands, others make their mark on the world; dragonborn warriors and flame-speakers herald from volcanic mountains, Aven bird-folk hunters live and catch fish alongside titanic sea-serpents, clans of Elves who live atop impossibly tall ancient oaks, while the roots are chewed by hordes of insects larger than horses. And between them all, in hidden burrows deep beneath the earth and beautiful palaces made of dream-stuff and illusion, the Fae Lords, Divine Sphinxes, Great nature Spirits and all other manner of exotic power exists, waiting to prey upon mortal ambition.

From within your home of Freehold, where you have always dwelled, there has always been a sense of the world being somewhat distant and unknowable. Everything comes to you through stories, and they come from visitors and merchants who come to the trade-towns in search of profit and adventure. There are many names for the vast world and many tongues spoken among it's diverse inhabitants. This is a world where the impact of the spoken oath, the ritual bond, the magical pact, is seemingly enhanced. A world where supernatural and mundane mix and merge, and something entirely new is produced. Something awesome, an awful source of power in a troubled world. Mirenerva, named by the ancient Fae Lords. "Inside the mirror", if such old translations are to be believed.

This is a world where an emphasis is placed on the bond between the mystical and the mortal. The Gods, Sphinx Lords, Great Spirits and Fae Lords, whoever they may be in truth, have real power over this world. But they do not live in our world, not truly, and so their influence has limitations. Everyone knows this. And so the powerful and often unseen forces of Minervera seek intermediaries, servants and soldiers for their inscrutable schemes. Thus, a bargain might be struck! Mirenerva is a world where warlocks make pacts with devilish imps and divine sphinxes grant wishes to adventurers in exchange for quick favours… or enduring servitude.

These dealings, trades, pacts and bonds come in every variety imaginable. This is a world where Knights pledge themselves to Lords and Sorcerers pledge themselves to conquest. A place where recurring dreams might come to life and where faerie interlopers might place seeds of wretched corruption between such waking dreams. It is a world where mystery abounds, where the people fear not the necromancer or the mad evoker wizard, but the folded spaces, the corrupted reality, the predatory illusionist, the mind-reader, the psychic parasite, the manipulative Fae Lords. It is a place where the wrong word in the wrong place at the wrong time can seal your fate, and where the bold adventurer must always remember to take the caution of the superstitious to heart.

And, sadly, it is a world where sometimes people just... disappear. Without warning or trace, never to be seen again.

And thus this is a world where great value is placed on honour, truth, the bond of the contract… and the implicit necessity to enforce those contracts. Not to mention, a strong-armed expectation concerning the collection of overdue debts. In other words, no matter where you live in Minervera, and certainly in local Freehold, your word is your bond and your spoken promise a debt owed. In a realm where fiction and fact often become intermingled, being able to sort out what reality is and is not has enormous value for everyone.

CURSES AND WITCHCRAFT

    Here on Mirenevra people do not prosecute women accused of witchcraft on the basis of rabid fear, but rather an entirely rational fear of the very real possibility of being cursed by an actual witch, or as they refer to them here in Freehold, a profane one. Wicked sisters of the darkest arts have formed covens all over the wilds of Minervera, and no effort to stamp them out has come close to succeeding. Attitudes towards witchcraft vary, especially since the line between witchcraft and other forms of pact-magic can be incredibly blurry.

In Mirenerva, the world of shadows and night-time dealings is ruled by witches and warlocks, sorcerers and walkers-between-worlds. Ambition and betrayal, movers and whisperers, pact and bond. Fae Lords and great elemental spirits vie for power over a misbegotten and shadow-plagued mortal realm. Mortals in turn reach up, sometimes in prayer, sometimes with a bargaining silver tongue, to seek divine power for themselves. Great cycles play themselves out again and again, squires who become knights, who become adventurers, who become conquerors, who become tyrants, only to be fel by some brave young squire while attending some mundane parade thrown in his own honour.

Can the cycle be broken, or are you doomed to merely play your role within it?

And there are the Fae Lords, each one of them unique, powerful, deific. Creatures of old age and vast cunning, but each of them with their own temperament and their own ambitions. Some of them elect Avatars and move into the world to seek their schemes out directly, others, build cults and covens and make cunning plays across the surface of eons. For the adventuring sort in search of power and hope, the world before you is treacherous indeed. Every new place carries the promise of vexing illusions, of spies and enchantment and blackmail and every kind of evil one might imagine. Every unexplored tomb and hidden place, full of wonderous treasures... and cursed relics, waiting to unleash their vengeance.

A WORLD ON THE EDGE

    The people of Mirenerva are stoic and tough as nails, but even stone erodes under the waterfall. Cracks have appeared in the corners of that once solid mirror. A mad King has fallen in the north, put to the sword by his son. That son has made his intentions clear, and whispers of him now spread... under the mantle of the King In Ashes. A nervous energy of foreboding now surrounds this years tax collection, which will be the first paid to this new King and his rumoured "Ashen Guard"...

The people of this world endure constant hardship and strife; curses grip the land and terrible shadow-demons who rampage across the world outside of the safety of city walls, which all help to make the prospect of travel an inherently unsafe one. Law and order often hang on a razor edge, and criminal opportunists are a dime a dozen. Tall walls and long spears make for a normal sight when approaching most villages and answering a litany of questions in some places is not considered a rude interruption, but a matter of security and safety for all.

Only in Freehold, where the shadow-demons do not dwell, can anyone enjoy an actual sense of freedom and comfort. And even Freehold will soon discover that distance and isolation were always temporary conditions. The world reaches out with hungry ambition, and not even the Oak of Eternities can provide shelter from the growing shadow...

TWO WORLDS, PERHAPS MORE...

    The Fae Realms are as known to the mortals as they are unknown; for many have seen their strange and ineffable mark, yet few can claim to have plundered their depths and survived, even fewer can make sense of what they saw beyond. From such a journey, one who is properly prepared might seek and find a great power for themselves. To return with such a stolen gift is the stuff of legend and myth on Mirenevra. They say the Tyrant In Shadows himself acquired his great dark power in a pact with a particularly foul-tempered and wicked Fae Lord, whom some say he forced into submission after invading it's Fae Realm.

They pock-mark the surface of the known Realms, the entrances to these distortions of reality. From these pockets of the subversive, the Fae Lords scheme and plot with impunity. The stories and legends tell of the worlds that lay behind the Gate to a Fae Realm, worlds of fire and dragon rage, worlds of illusion and choking poisons, worlds of cackling shadow-demons without end, worlds of endless machinery and supernatural axioms written by faceless clockwork titans who stand taller than the clouds. How much is truth, and what is mere fancy? No one can say, for very few have ever survived an encounter with the Fae.

And yet, a persistent rumour you have all heard, a common whisper... that raison d'état of the Fae Lords intense obsession with Mirenevra. That rumour whispers that the Fae Realms are inexplicably connected to our own, perhaps even dependent on our world. What else, other than plain cruelty and divine hubris, could explain the Fae Lords many wars to control the fate of the mortal realms?

The Fae Lords are no different than any other pretenders to divinity - they require mortal agents to act for them in the world.

Those Fae realms are vast, but the entrance is often just an impression upon our world, sometimes little more than a "cursed" building everyone knows to stay away from, or an unexplainable patch of lush green oasis in the heart of a rocky crag range; a break down in order, deja vu, a sense of being watched, a wrong turn down the wrong hallway, one hand upon a seemingly innocent doorknob, and then suddenly one might find themselves traversing the threshold of a Fae Lord's domain, at risk of becoming lost in a nightmare realm of twisting corridors looping back on themselves, or perhaps stepping through a door and into an impossibly vast library full of books written in languages you cannot read, only for the doorway behind you to be packed by an unpassable wall of heavy tomes.

Those who find Fae Realms know the danger implicitly, for the stories tell of little else; to trespass upon a Fae Realm without invitation is to sacrifice oneself to the will of that Fae Lord... and more often than not, to never return again.