TheGSE

The Dead and Weird Languages 1. Black City Alphabet (?): Found inscribed on some metal sheets brought from the mythical Black City in the west. Some academics say it’s not a language, just intricate patterns. Faraway people joke that the writings are really the schemas for a very complicated dance. 2. Cat Thought (cat): Thought-speech of the Violet City cats, which can best be described as a formalized logical structure used to enable empathetic coordination between cats and telepathic communication with their thralls. 3. Deep Dwarven (dwarven): The hidden priestly language of the Deep Dwarves that is not spoken, only carved in stones and bones. It can be written in any direction, even constructing beautiful figures with the characters. Very succinct. Some carvings are considered visual poetry. A subset of Deep Dwarven is Deep Dwarven Hexadecimal, used for programming Dwarven prayer machines. 4. Blue Tongue (isolate): The forgotten speech of the Blue God, now used by some secretive cults and mad wizards. A forbidden, written corpus exists. It is harsh, logical, iconographic, and ambiguous by nature. 5. Elven (elven): A hypothetical Elven language, reconstructed by sages from common elements of Woodlander and Moonlander. Some scholars associate it with the Vile Ones of Long Long Ago. They surmise that a written version existed, though aside from possible decorative stelae, no examples have been found. 6. Moonlander (elven?): An extinct (?) language found inscribed in tombs in the Mountains of the Moon. Samples of the writing have been found to be memetic worms, taking over the reader’s mind and driving them to perform odd, incomprehensible tasks. Though usually not deadly, permanent personality changes and madness have been noted often enough that in the popular imagination reading Moonlander is associated with lunacy. 7. Marmotsk (isolate): The language of the Marmotfolk requires large incisors and musky pheromones to use correctly. The delicately whorled bone-script is more accessible to outsiders. 8. Umber (steppe): Dead language of Fallen Umber, characterized by delicate poetry and three-dimensional writing on woven, living chitin. Heavily influenced by another missing isolate. 9. Lingish (lingish): Obscure dead language, hypothesized from references in old libraries, toponyms in modern languages, and some fossilized Oranjetic expressions. It seems to have been a fluid, contextual and permutative language designed to overwrite human brains and prevent personality reprogramming and remote sensing. 10. Great Language (lingish?): The hyper-contextual and agglutinative dialects (languages?) of the Great Folk communities in the vicinity of the Behemoth shell. Individual communities’ dialects are so divergent that mutual incomprehension is common. 11. Trilignic (lingish? steppe?): The ancient languages of the Three Sticks civilization, before its decline. Found on countless inscriptions, buildings, and screens. Not fully reconstructed, but seems focused on overcoming hedonic limitations. Modern inhabitants of the region use Sunsettish day to day. 12. Vomish (?): A hypothetical machine hive language used by vomes. Perhaps a whole series of languages. Many scholars dispute that vomes are not even sentient. Likely utilizes electromagnetic radiation to convey meaning. 13. White City Pictographic (?): Hypothetical original language of civilized trading nexus beyond the Yellow Waste. Known from decorations and vidy crystal recordings brought to Safranj by adventurers and merchants. 14. High Ultra (?): Psychemorphic language of the body-hopping ultras, it produces profound psychedelic dislocation in embodied sentiences. It seems to lack temporal structure and appears to be physically unwritable, or rather, it can only be written by rewriting psychic structures or memories. Profoundly alien, it has been recovered from some crystals. Some scholars speculate that this is not actually a language but the substrate of the ultra’s existence—in effect, their bodies.

The Common Languages 1. High Common (rainbow): The upper-class, literary common rainbow tongue taught by teachers to noble and rich students. Old fashioned, unnecessarily complex grammar and pronunciation. Words change depending on context, speaker, and intent. Numbers change depending on what is being counted. Elaborate written tradition. 2. Vulgar Common (rainbow): The trade lingua of the non-noble middle-classes and professionals of the Rainbow Lands, with distinct regional dialects. Only written for trade. Influenced by outer languages. Similar to ‘City Speak’ or ‘Gutter Talk.’ 3. Purple Speech (rainbow): The dialects of the peasants and laborers of the Purple Land, with many borrowings from the steppe folk. Mostly oral, no written tradition. Very similar to Bluenttalk, but it’s an insult to say so. 4. Bluenttalk (rainbow): The harsh and uncouth dialects of the exiles from the Blue Land and the wild folk still living there. Any writing has been suppressed long ago. Possesses a surprisingly detailed vocabulary of dairy products and aquatic vegetables. Borrowings from Blue Tongue. 5. Greenspeak (rainbow): The peasant and forester dialects of the Greenland. No written tradition. Large vocabulary corpus. Speakers from different dialects can mostly understand each others’ words, even if just by context. 6. Emerald Common (rainbow): The vulgar lingua franca of Metropolis, the Emerald City, with many Elfish and Greenspeak borrowings. Developing a broad, popular written corpus. Beautiful traditional handwriting. 7. Decapolitical (rainbow): The vulgar dialects of the Sea Fingers and the Decapolis, also popular with sailors. Written for trade purposes. Very onomatopoeic. Short, simple words. Understatement is prized. Silence is golden. 8. Saffranian (rainbow): the vulgar speech of Safranj and the Yellow Land, now also adopted by the local oligarchs. Extensive written traditions. A more refined and rhyming variant of Decapolitical, popular in the opera. 9. Caravanian (rainbow): The trade tongue of the caravans in the Yellow Waste and of some nomad tribes there. Mercantile written tradition. Borrows from many languages. Speakers can bend the language to adapt it for speakers of a certain language, or make it indecipherable to anyone but other Caravanian speakers. 10. Oranjetic (rainbow): The vulgar dialects of the Orange Land, very similar to Saffranian. Paltry written tradition. A musical dialect, exquisite in song. 11. Free Circle Kriol (rainbow creole): The wonderfully rhymed disyllabic speech of the Circle Sea free families (pirates) and river-travelers. No written tradition and vast variation among dialects prompting some scholars to say it is not so much a language as a mass outbreak of glossolalia. 12. Redland District Cant (rainbow creole): The badly rhyming vulgar speech of the autonomous enclave that is the Red Land District. Vast written tradition, but mostly political tracts. Large influence of Decapolitical through trade. Lots of swearing. 13. Red Tongue (rainbow): The vulgar dialects of the Red Land with many dwarven elements admixed. Poor written tradition. Heavily influenced by the slurred speech of the long-reigning Grand Red Duke Moshle IV, the Red Tongue replaces ‘s’ sounds with ‘sh’ and runs words together, as after too much wine. 14. Winerian (dwarven): The hill dialects of the Vintner Dwarves of the Red Land and Orange Land. Little writing, and what there is, quite literalist. Heavily influenced by the Red Tongue, Winerian is the most linear of the dwarven dialect. 15. Volkan (dwarven): The mountain dialects of the Mountains of Light and the Black Gold. Vast written corpus. When written, the space between the characters has as much meaning as the characters themselves. Much is lost by speaking it. Lots of silences and isolated consonants. It is best spoken indoors or in echoing caves. The echo is part of the language. It sounds very strange outdoors as parts of the words are missing. 16. Woodlander (elven): The language found inscribed on trees and rocks in the Elvenwood, spoken by some of the tribes there. Isolated inscriptions. The language is structured to change meaning with the seasons and the phases of the moon as though it does not quite belong on the solid earth. 17. Steppe Speeches (steppe, rainbow): The various dialects of the Ultraviolet Grasslands grew from a patois of rainbow dialects and Steppeland trade tongues. Its written tradition is uncertain. Posseses an immense vocabulary for grazing creatures and mechanical engineering. 18. Sunsettish (steppe): The common trade language of western Steppelanders. Written by merchants. Surprisingly focused on spirits and spirit possession. 19. White Line (steppe): The cryptic language of the Porcelain Princes was once more widespread, now it has been reduced to their outposts and trading missions. Vast dusty libraries exist. Because it has extensively evolved to suit the polybody structure, some of the more refined forms of the language require multiple synchronized voices used in unison to convey meaning properly. 20. Satrap Canto (steppe?): The color and light-adapted language of the Spectrum Satraps seems to be an outlying dialect of some larger language group or system. Its writing traditions are polychromatic and use both color and sound to convey meaning. Without light-generating organs or a rainbow translation array, this language is practically unusable by baseline humans.

I think I'll go with Commonplace Guns: While still expensive and tricky to wield, early firearms are readily available. Instead of requiring the feat, all firearms are martial weapons. Early firearms and their ammunition cost 25% of the amounts listed in this book, but advanced firearms and their ammunition are still rare and cost the full price to purchase or craft. Mountebank and its archetypes are allowed. Sphere races are allowed.

Utilitarian progression is allowed. My ideal mix would be more social and exploration than combat, and more combat than puzzles. Maybe a 40/30/20/10 mix, or 35/35/20/10 Allowed! Probably some kind of para-human lineage descended from some Long Long Ago humans biomodified from baseline to be exceptionally virtuous or pure, or the result of Lingish dream magic, or a horse of a different color! Quarter-lings are "Several remote and moderately rare human phenotypes retaining lingish characteristics (like exceptional hand-eye coordination and fur coverage of certain body parts), but are otherwise mostly baseline. Many subscribe to neo-lingish origin myths and cling to various cultural traits as though these were the Long Long Ago lingish originals." As for RP constraints, let's just stay away from the monstrous power level races, and maybe once I've made selections those whose races are really under-rp'd can shop for new features. I'm not at home, but will publish the list of languages in the world info tab once I'm back at my laptop. Game balance I'm aiming for is 35-40% social, 30-35% exploration, 20% combat, 10% puzzles. Age adjustments are allowed, as is the leadership sphere.

Fragmentsof a Glossary Abmortal A sentience (sometimes human) that does not die of natural causes. The Porcelain Princes and ultras are among the more common abmortals. Most mortals hate them. A lot. Aerolith Stuckforce-infused rock generated from the air itself, usually the after-effect of catastrophic transmutation or portal failures. The rock is actively aerostatic—it is functionally weightless and levitates at a set distance from the ground once moved there. It does remain massive, however, so a long lever is often required. Animancy Soul or spirit magic. Magic using and modifying the animating spark of life, from golems to ba-zombies. Most humans regard it as a horror and abomination, for the simple reason that it re-processes and modifies the heart of what it is to be human. Elves infamously have no such compunctions in fairy tales. Modern golems are powered by far weaker sources than pure soul juice. Art Florist A wizardry discipline, akin to biomancy but focused on plants. Some primitive peoples might call them druids or bush doctors, but wizards know better. Autofac, Fac An artificial organism or organic machine, sometimes of great size, that generates other organisms without outside control. Created in a forgotten age—perhaps by combining wizards and autonomous vehicles in an unholy union. Sages speculate they were designed to produce useful commodities. Now they are almost all menaces, leaking toxic fumes and liquids, ravaging the land, and producing odd, dangerous, and mostly useless artifacts or oozes. Today associated with vomes. Perhaps the downfall of the Original Folk. Autonom An autonomous, synthetic organism, usually semi-sentient and capable of following simple commands. Like a zombie or skeleton but built from the ground up with biomantic precision. Simpler variants use exoskeletons and the autonom is just a collection of muscular tubes connected to a general-purpose crystal brain. Autowagon A golem wagon that can move under its own power. Tough, hardy, often covered in custom spikes, armor, defensive embrasures, firing platforms and other accoutrements, autowagons are among the most impressive (and relentlessly slow) forms of transport in the UVG. It can follow simple instructions and navigate across terrain on its own if required. Much like a mule. May also be as mulish. Ba, Personality The creative threads of possibility woven into the tapestry of a human. The changeling essence that weaves together a unique individual over time, fired by the spark of soul, and unified in the world through the medium of body. Some cultures believe personalities have afterlives, while others believe their threads wind, unwind, and wind again over time. A few rare sages argue that personalities are unique occurrences that fade away after motivating a single body, but necromancers and vivimancers put the lie to this notion. In game terms, ba or personality is associated with Thought and Charisma. Bardstone Stone imbued with the songs of Long Ago. Some say that in a great cataclysm a grumpy deity turned all bards to stone so that she could get some sleep. Obviously, this is nonsense, but bardstones are valuable and can store more than just songstones with messages and moving pictures have been found. They are attuned to their fixed locations and moving them destroys their magic. Perhaps it has something to do with the star lines? Who knows. Ba-Zombie Reanimated creature, actually closest to a flesh golem, created from an intact soul-stripped body-personality. Using an artificial soul, or souls, it can be maintained indefinitely. This is how many of those ageless wizards, called liches by simpler minds, are crafted. A soul mill is the usual way of creating the suitable body-personality. Bone-Work Hybrid discipline of necromancy and petromancy. Uses the personality memories of bones combined with livingstone spirits to grow, reshape, and animate bones into new and useful forms. Some intellectuals view it as a lazy dead-end in petromancy. Biomancy Wizardy art of sculpting flesh and bone and sinew to create living works. The burdenbeast is the most common example of the art. Biomechanicum Hybrid wizarding art that melds mechanics and flesh. Vomes are an example of advanced biomechanics. Implanted prosthetics are readily available, from the chop-chop fixer (€100 for a cold grey hand) to the porcelain sculptors (€2,000 for colour-shifting chameleon glass dermal implants) popular with artistes and burgleurs. Blue Land of the Dead God Flooded, festering swamp inhabited by degenerates and haunted by the bleeding rotten ghosts of the Blasted Field. Cults regularly try to reawaken the Dead God, but continually fail. In the Blue Lands fermented dairy products and north walls should be avoided. Cat, Violet Sentient cats, beloved of the Violet Goddess and rulers of the Violet City and the Purple Land of the Cat. They use pheromones and mental parasites to control their blissful, happy subjects. Too lazy to bother with most day-to-day activities, they let the wizards and administrators of the Violet City pretend to be in charge. Chitin Caps Engineered fungus that, when farmed and grown on frames, produces usable quantities of chitin. Sturdy and light, it was popular as a roofing material and in many industrial and manufacturing applications. In the Third and Fourth Corporate Dynasties articles of clothing, such as hats, bustiers, and shoes were grown with chitin frames. Not to mention armor. Circle Sea The great round sea at the heart of the Rainbowlands, swirling in the endless current around the Needle of the World. Communal Body Monstrous, amoeboid creature created to carry the soul-personalities of multiple individuals beyond the boundaries of a single body. Some sages call them biological virtual-life machines, most call them horrors. It is debatable whether the soul-personalities kept within are actually still viable or not. Cyan Sea Half-legendary inland sea far south, beyond the Wine Dark Mountains. Said to be entirely clothed in a lethal cyan mist which ebbs and falls with the tides and makes the entire Plain of Haze an impoverished and deadly land, inimical to great civilizations like those of the Circle Sea. Decapolis, The Nine to thirteen viciously independent, smallish city states controlling most of the Circle Sea coast from the Metropolis to the Orange Lands. Famed for their trading prowess, industriousness, venality, fetishistic fascination with magic of all sorts, and utter ineptitude setting up anything comparable to the Purple University. Demon Confused term for various bodiless sentiences. Applied indiscriminately to multiple superficially similar phenomena. Avoided by scholars. Dryland Coral The ‘living rock,’ one of the ancient biomantic and petromantic arts. Master growers can sculpt and shape it into evocative post- modernist forms emphasizing the interdependence of human and nature. Ill-grown dryland coral may leach nutrients and life from nearby areas, creating localized deserts. Cancerous dryland coral may even spread runners that grow into burgeoning house-clusters. There are rumours of a great living-ghost city in the heart of the Twilight Desert which has grown to occupy an area larger than the freehold of a corporate duke. A civil biomancer and crew can sculpt a dryland coral home in 2 years for €10,000/year. Dwarf Backronym from ‘De Werker Aristocratiscee Revolutie Fraternitie,’ Dwarfs are a distinct culture-class of selectively biomanced people. They have effectively fought the traditional aristoi of the Red and Orange lands to a standstill and now form a major industrialist society of the Rainbowlands. A famously bureaucratic and collectivist faction, they are the only one staunchly opposing the bureaucratic and individualist Emerald City Cogflower Corporation (actually a coin church). Elf, also Vila (or Vile?) Scary, mythical, time-dilating, shape-shifting monsters rumored to live beyond the Mountains of the Moon, where the tangled sky trees snag clouds from the sky and a shadow lurks over every soul. Emerald City, also Metropolis Chief city of the Green Land and largest city of the Rainbowlands. Governed by the Banker Priests of the Green God, devoted to greed and the untrammeled growth of the vital forces of the individual and society. Major forces include the Paladins of the Cogflower, the Revenue-Service Accountant-Monks, and, of course, the Green Inquisition—crucial to maintaining public support for the fear-and- pain backed cash currency of this industrial ecological meta-topia. Fast Stars The remnants of cities and factories and paradises in orbit around the world, glittering reminders of the decline of these later days. Fetish Bundle of matter imbued with a spirit or demon drawn by a wizard’s sacrifice. Most wizards know how to create a basic fetish that serves them in exchange for their life energy. Binding a spirit in exchange for a sacrificial victim, or an ongoing sacrifice of spirits and fowl, is a much harder task. Full-Body Prosthetic Often immobile, this bio-necromantic device keeps a soul- personality dyad locked in the material world even as the body is reabsorbed into the cycle of life. Full-Body Rebuild What degenerate savages call a spell that raises the dead. In fact, it is not far removed. This involved scientific procedure requires necromantic, biomantic, and psychomantic expertise. Ideally, it requires the brain of the creature being rebuilt, for that is the seat of the personality. A soul-stone is used to rebind the soul from the animasphere into the flesh. A body-knitter then rebuilds the body around the brain and the soul-stone. Finally, a necromancer teases soul, personality and body together into the rebuilt form. The rebuilt body is basically a flesh golem animated by the original soul and motivated by the original personality. Costs around €5,000 and takes at least a week. Golem Soulless automaton powered directly from the source of creation. Golemancers are now a rare and exotic breed, but very prized—a few industrious golems may uplift a tribe into a civilized city or turn a small city-state into a powerful empire. Poorly built, damaged, or jury-rigged golems can be very dangerous and are known to explode catastrophically. See, for example, the Salt Reassembly Incident of the 7th year of the Era of Saffron Ascendant. Golden Desert A desert of rock and sand and Stone Dragons stretching towards the sunrise beyond the Yellow Lands. Grand Companies Hereditary trading aristocracies of the Green and Yellow lands, ideologically and practically opposed to the Hexads. Through selective eugenic practices over many centuries they have achieved longer life spans, more acute numerical abilities, and far more sophisticated debaucheries than most baseline humans could manage. Particularly in the case of the Emerald Engineering Kompany and the Avocado Promotion Executive where the rumors of Half-Elven admixture may well be true. Great Forgetting, The Common term for the lack of records and the decline that is supposed to have happened in the Long Long Ago. Some heterodox scholars and mystics suggest that no Great Forgetting happened, but rather an ascendancy into divinity, or something similar, and that all humans currently living in the Rainbowlands only acquired sentience after those prior beings—perhaps lings—departed. Gun, gunpowder magic Any combat wand that doesn’t require wizardly skill to operate. Some even use actual gunpowder magic. That school combines alchemy, fire and earth elementalism, and force manipulation. Ha, Body The material aspect of the human triad of body-personality-soul. Half-Elf Elf-touched humans, a medical condition resistant to most interventions. Inquisitor Scirocco II classified it as a progressive neuro-moral degenerative disorder, with the unfortunate side-effect of prolonging lifespans. Many half-elfs eventually succumb to the elven infection and disappear into the great Wall of Wood, lycanthropic half-beasts rather than proper civilized humans. Haze, Purple Occlusion of the sky that rises from the eastern horizon as one enters the Ultraviolet Grasslands. The occlusion blocks visible-length and infrared radiation, leaving the land in darkness. It appears that the haze is an atmospheric phenomenon that thickens or otherwise changes the further West one travels, delaying further and further the appearance of the sun. By the central Grasslands the sun only appears from behind this occlusive layer at noon and the Black City only experiences a few short hours of late afternoon light. Hexads and Self-help Associations Combination of clan association, socialized healthcare-and-pension fund, thieves’ guild, private education system, insurance and protection provider, and para-state actor. Hexads bind together the six de jure Rainbow Lands. I suppose if there were only three colours, somebody might call them Triads, instead. Human Most of the Circle Sea power groups consider all close-to-baseline sentient and soulful post-humans as effectively human and possessing the full spectrum of rights attendant to a soul-body-personality triad. This includes retro-humans, dwarfs, half-elfs, half-lings, quarter-lings, and half-orcs. Inquisitions Federation of truth-and-reconciliation enforcement societies that maintain the peace of the Unity Promulgates in the Rainbowlands. Half parastatal corporations, half secret police. Ka, Soul The engine of life, a contradictory essence of the world that activates the body and makes place for the personality to guide the activity of that thing that is called a living human. In game terms, ka or soul is associated with Aura (and sometimes Endurance). Ka-Ba Maintenance Body Physical body substitute, knitting spirit and soul to the world, even beyond death. Most KBM Bodies are immobile crystal or ceramic structures housing incredibly complex organic metal magitech structures. Expensive versions are mounted in golems, giving a life beyond the flesh. Attitudes to KBM technology are generally ambivalent: why live in a hollow shell that can not experience the pleasures of life, after all? A basic body costs around €10,000. Ka-Elemental or Soul Elemental Spurting, flaming, ball-lightning paradox of life-force unmoored from both body and personality, yet trapped in the essential world. Sages are uncertain what kind of tragedy or nightmare machination rips the souls apart from the beings they animate, yet also blocks them from the Recycling Infinity of Nothingness. Some speculate that the legendary soul mills of the Vile Ones are involved. All aspects of earthly intelligence and individuality are lost within days, if not hours. Ka-elementals (L2d4, gutting) dangerously affect biological and personality baselines, causing (roll d6): (1) organic regression to a more primitive form, (2) personality devolves to simpler, more primal structure, (3) organic shift to parallel evolutionary path, (4) random personality change, (5) rapid organic evolution into more advanced form, (6) uplift as biological baseline interfaces with the essence of the Recycling Infinity of Nothingness (+1d4 Aura). Ka-Zombie Classic living zombie. It is not undead, merely a body-soul stripped of personality and ready for use by the animancer. Creating a ka-zombie has nothing to do with necromancy, and the subsequent creature, though no longer animated by the wit of personality, nevertheless looks and functions as a human, albeit with zero drive, personality, or ability to resist its master. Ling Mysterious, missing sentient subtype, attested to in Long Long Ago records, epic poems such as The Epic Journey of the Great Wand E. Ling, and the bloodlines of the half-lings and quarter-lings. According to the myths of the Half-Broken Age, the lings mastered dream travel and ended the Vile Age. Livingstone Inorganic material, usually rock, animated with the spirit of life to reform into new structures. Core discipline of petromancy, only superficially similar to dryland coral biomancy. It uses a silicon-based process to create its ‘living’ constructs. Long Ago Half-remembered times before the Rainbow Order was founded around the Circle Sea. Studies of the Long Ago are half-heartedly forbidden by the Green Inquisition and avidly pursued by the Red Land District and other fringe groups. Long Long Ago Eras and times lost beyond the records in the Great Mist. Fragments, shells, and hazy memories remain, but even they have a tendency to fade and melt from mind and time, like sands in the storms whipping off the Golden Desert. Lumin Tree One of the wonders of biomancy: bioluminescent trees. Originally used in grand avenues, now restricted to the private parks of grand despots and the re-education centers of the Cogflower Inquisitors. Machine Humans Legendary sapients who managed to combine personality and soul with bodies built from the dust of the earth. There is discussion among sages as to whether they were even possible, with the bloodsages particularly opposed to the idea of bloodless humans. Mind-Burn Common side effect of vomish biomancy. Sages speculate that the vomish neural redesigns are flawed and buggy because the vomish common algorithms have trouble comprehending real-world behaviors and goals. Mind-burned creatures usually have their original neural behavioral patterns replaced with alien patterns that mesh poorly with their original encoding. Recorded examples include rabbits who behaved like pressure cookers, one tuberous vegetable that tried to function as an alert siren, and several wire-crusted nomads performing an odd pelican mating dance. No overarching order has yet been found. Mist, The (also The Great Mist) Phenomenon of the very early Long Ago, of dubious veracity. Some scholars suggest that the Mist is a metaphorical device for the Great Forgetting, others maintain that it was a very physical event, similar to the mists of the Cyan Sea beyond the Wine Dark Mountains. Moon, Mountains of the Impassable, vicious range, rising almost to the heavens, it cuts the Rainbow Lands off from the north. Home to eerie structures and odd half-humans who preach of elfin queens and weird dreams. Necroambulism Related to necromancy, the technical discipline of turning dead tissue into an animate workforce for simple, repetitive tasks. A skilled necroambulist can create a Z or S-class laborer for €1d6 x 50. Needle of the World A very thin and very, very high mountain rising sheer from the heart of the Circle Sea, surrounded by storms and ignorance. These days most Rainbowlanders avoid talking about it. Oldtech Common term for advanced technology, often indistinguishable from magic, used by humans Long Long Ago. With practice and study, much of it is accessible to later day humans, half-lings, and quarter-lings, since their soul source imprint matches the data-protein codes embedded in the oldtech. Oneiromancer Reader and traveler of dreams—ultras are known to be terrifying oneiromancers. Orcs Obviously, the orcs were a Long Ago attempt to create a combat-adapted para-human. They were successfully eradicated following the Decree of the Seven Lands, slightly before the Swamping of the Blues. In fact, many were ‘eradicated’ by the efforts of the Bureaucratic Legion which reclassified large numbers of orcs as half-orcs—a permitted soul-body-personality triad under the regulations of the then omnipotent Power Group 13. Petromancy The art of using animating spirits to reshape and reform inorganic materials, creating wondrous and useful artifacts. Polybody Personality-soul distributed across several bodies linked by real-time glandular psychic links. The additional bodies make them more resilient to damage and death. By periodically adding new bodies they ensure a mental continuity across long epochs. Quarter-Ling Several remote and moderately rare human phenotypes retaining lingish characteristics (like > > > > Fragments of a Glossary Welcome, . You last visited: Yesterday at 04:36 AM : Unread 0, Total 2. Notices # Jul 8th, 2020, 06:38 PM Dura Lex Sed Lex Tools User Statistics Last Visit: Oct 7th, 2022 RPXP: 5858 Posts: 2,009 Fragments of a Glossary Fragments of a Glossary Abmortal A sentience (sometimes human) that does not die of natural causes. The Porcelain Princes and ultras are among the more common abmortals. Most mortals hate them. A lot. Aerolith Stuckforce-infused rock generated from the air itself, usually the after-effect of catastrophic transmutation or portal failures. The rock is actively aerostatic—it is functionally weightless and levitates at a set distance from the ground once moved there. It does remain massive, however, so a long lever is often required. Animancy Soul or spirit magic. Magic using and modifying the animating spark of life, from golems to ba-zombies. Most humans regard it as a horror and abomination, for the simple reason that it re-processes and modifies the heart of what it is to be human. Elves infamously have no such compunctions in fairy tales. Modern golems are powered by far weaker sources than pure soul juice. Art Florist A wizardry discipline, akin to biomancy but focused on plants. Some primitive peoples might call them druids or bush doctors, but wizards know better. Autofac, Fac An artificial organism or organic machine, sometimes of great size, that generates other organisms without outside control. Created in a forgotten age—perhaps by combining wizards and autonomous vehicles in an unholy union. Sages speculate they were designed to produce useful commodities. Now they are almost all menaces, leaking toxic fumes and liquids, ravaging the land, and producing odd, dangerous, and mostly useless artifacts or oozes. Today associated with vomes. Perhaps the downfall of the Original Folk. Autonom An autonomous, synthetic organism, usually semi-sentient and capable of following simple commands. Like a zombie or skeleton but built from the ground up with biomantic precision. Simpler variants use exoskeletons and the autonom is just a collection of muscular tubes connected to a general-purpose crystal brain. Autowagon A golem wagon that can move under its own power. Tough, hardy, often covered in custom spikes, armor, defensive embrasures, firing platforms and other accoutrements, autowagons are among the most impressive (and relentlessly slow) forms of transport in the UVG. It can follow simple instructions and navigate across terrain on its own if required. Much like a mule. May also be as mulish. Ba, Personality The creative threads of possibility woven into the tapestry of a human. The changeling essence that weaves together a unique individual over time, fired by the spark of soul, and unified in the world through the medium of body. Some cultures believe personalities have afterlives, while others believe their threads wind, unwind, and wind again over time. A few rare sages argue that personalities are unique occurrences that fade away after motivating a single body, but necromancers and vivimancers put the lie to this notion. In game terms, ba or personality is associated with Thought and Charisma. Bardstone Stone imbued with the songs of Long Ago. Some say that in a great cataclysm a grumpy deity turned all bards to stone so that she could get some sleep. Obviously, this is nonsense, but bardstones are valuable and can store more than just songs—stones with messages and moving pictures have been found. They are attuned to their fixed locations and moving them destroys their magic. Perhaps it has something to do with the star lines? Who knows. Ba-Zombie Reanimated creature, actually closest to a flesh golem, created from an intact soul-stripped body-personality. Using an artificial soul, or souls, it can be maintained indefinitely. This is how many of those ageless wizards, called liches by simpler minds, are crafted. A soul mill is the usual way of creating the suitable body-personality. Bone-Work Hybrid discipline of necromancy and petromancy. Uses the personality memories of bones combined with livingstone spirits to grow, reshape, and animate bones into new and useful forms. Some intellectuals view it as a lazy dead-end in petromancy. Biomancy Wizardy art of sculpting flesh and bone and sinew to create living works. The burdenbeast is the most common example of the art. Biomechanicum Hybrid wizarding art that melds mechanics and flesh. Vomes are an example of advanced biomechanics. Implanted prosthetics are readily available, from the chop-chop fixer (€100 for a cold grey hand) to the porcelain sculptors (€2,000 for colour-shifting chameleon glass dermal implants) popular with artistes and burgleurs. Blue Land of the Dead God Flooded, festering swamp inhabited by degenerates and haunted by the bleeding rotten ghosts of the Blasted Field. Cults regularly try to reawaken the Dead God, but continually fail. In the Blue Lands fermented dairy products and north walls should be avoided. Cat, Violet Sentient cats, beloved of the Violet Goddess and rulers of the Violet City and the Purple Land of the Cat. They use pheromones and mental parasites to control their blissful, happy subjects. Too lazy to bother with most day-to-day activities, they let the wizards and administrators of the Violet City pretend to be in charge. Chitin Caps Engineered fungus that, when farmed and grown on frames, produces usable quantities of chitin. Sturdy and light, it was popular as a roofing material and in many industrial and manufacturing applications. In the Third and Fourth Corporate Dynasties articles of clothing, such as hats, bustiers, and shoes were grown with chitin frames. Not to mention armor. Circle Sea The great round sea at the heart of the Rainbowlands, swirling in the endless current around the Needle of the World. Communal Body Monstrous, amoeboid creature created to carry the soul-personalities of multiple individuals beyond the boundaries of a single body. Some sages call them biological virtual-life machines, most call them horrors. It is debatable whether the soul-personalities kept within are actually still viable or not. Cyan Sea Half-legendary inland sea far south, beyond the Wine Dark Mountains. Said to be entirely clothed in a lethal cyan mist which ebbs and falls with the tides and makes the entire Plain of Haze an impoverished and deadly land, inimical to great civilizations like those of the Circle Sea. Decapolis, The Nine to thirteen viciously independent, smallish city states controlling most of the Circle Sea coast from the Metropolis to the Orange Lands. Famed for their trading prowess, industriousness, venality, fetishistic fascination with magic of all sorts, and utter ineptitude setting up anything comparable to the Purple University. Demon Confused term for various bodiless sentiences. Applied indiscriminately to multiple superficially similar phenomena. Avoided by scholars. Dryland Coral The ‘living rock,’ one of the ancient biomantic and petromantic arts. Master growers can sculpt and shape it into evocative post- modernist forms emphasizing the interdependence of human and nature. Ill-grown dryland coral may leach nutrients and life from nearby areas, creating localized deserts. Cancerous dryland coral may even spread runners that grow into burgeoning house-clusters. There are rumours of a great living-ghost city in the heart of the Twilight Desert which has grown to occupy an area larger than the freehold of a corporate duke. A civil biomancer and crew can sculpt a dryland coral home in 2 years for €10,000/year. Dwarf Backronym from ‘De Werker Aristocratiscee Revolutie Fraternitie,’ Dwarfs are a distinct culture-class of selectively biomanced people. They have effectively fought the traditional aristoi of the Red and Orange lands to a standstill and now form a major industrialist society of the Rainbowlands. A famously bureaucratic and collectivist faction, they are the only one staunchly opposing the bureaucratic and individualist Emerald City Cogflower Corporation (actually a coin church). Elf, also Vila (or Vile?) Scary, mythical, time-dilating, shape-shifting monsters rumored to live beyond the Mountains of the Moon, where the tangled sky trees snag clouds from the sky and a shadow lurks over every soul. Emerald City, also Metropolis Chief city of the Green Land and largest city of the Rainbowlands. Governed by the Banker Priests of the Green God, devoted to greed and the untrammeled growth of the vital forces of the individual and society. Major forces include the Paladins of the Cogflower, the Revenue-Service Accountant-Monks, and, of course, the Green Inquisition—crucial to maintaining public support for the fear-and- pain backed cash currency of this industrial ecological meta-topia. Fast Stars The remnants of cities and factories and paradises in orbit around the world, glittering reminders of the decline of these later days. Fetish Bundle of matter imbued with a spirit or demon drawn by a wizard’s sacrifice. Most wizards know how to create a basic fetish that serves them in exchange for their life energy. Binding a spirit in exchange for a sacrificial victim, or an ongoing sacrifice of spirits and fowl, is a much harder task. Full-Body Prosthetic Often immobile, this bio-necromantic device keeps a soul- personality dyad locked in the material world even as the body is reabsorbed into the cycle of life. Full-Body Rebuild What degenerate savages call a spell that raises the dead. In fact, it is not far removed. This involved scientific procedure requires necromantic, biomantic, and psychomantic expertise. Ideally, it requires the brain of the creature being rebuilt, for that is the seat of the personality. A soul-stone is used to rebind the soul from the animasphere into the flesh. A body-knitter then rebuilds the body around the brain and the soul-stone. Finally, a necromancer teases soul, personality and body together into the rebuilt form. The rebuilt body is basically a flesh golem animated by the original soul and motivated by the original personality. Costs around €5,000 and takes at least a week. Golem Soulless automaton powered directly from the source of creation. Golemancers are now a rare and exotic breed, but very prized—a few industrious golems may uplift a tribe into a civilized city or turn a small city-state into a powerful empire. Poorly built, damaged, or jury-rigged golems can be very dangerous and are known to explode catastrophically. See, for example, the Salt Reassembly Incident of the 7th year of the Era of Saffron Ascendant. Golden Desert A desert of rock and sand and Stone Dragons stretching towards the sunrise beyond the Yellow Lands. Grand Companies Hereditary trading aristocracies of the Green and Yellow lands, ideologically and practically opposed to the Hexads. Through selective eugenic practices over many centuries they have achieved longer life spans, more acute numerical abilities, and far more sophisticated debaucheries than most baseline humans could manage. Particularly in the case of the Emerald Engineering Kompany and the Avocado Promotion Executive where the rumors of Half-Elven admixture may well be true. Great Forgetting, The Common term for the lack of records and the decline that is supposed to have happened in the Long Long Ago. Some heterodox scholars and mystics suggest that no Great Forgetting happened, but rather an ascendancy into divinity, or something similar, and that all humans currently living in the Rainbowlands only acquired sentience after those prior beings—perhaps lings—departed. Gun, gunpowder magic Any combat wand that doesn’t require wizardly skill to operate. Some even use actual gunpowder magic. That school combines alchemy, fire and earth elementalism, and force manipulation. Ha, Body The material aspect of the human triad of body-personality-soul. Half-Elf Elf-touched humans, a medical condition resistant to most interventions. Inquisitor Scirocco II classified it as a progressive neuro-moral degenerative disorder, with the unfortunate side-effect of prolonging lifespans. Many half-elfs eventually succumb to the elven infection and disappear into the great Wall of Wood, lycanthropic half-beasts rather than proper civilized humans. Haze, Purple Occlusion of the sky that rises from the eastern horizon as one enters the Ultraviolet Grasslands. The occlusion blocks visible-length and infrared radiation, leaving the land in darkness. It appears that the haze is an atmospheric phenomenon that thickens or otherwise changes the further West one travels, delaying further and further the appearance of the sun. By the central Grasslands the sun only appears from behind this occlusive layer at noon and the Black City only experiences a few short hours of late afternoon light. Hexads and Self-help Associations Combination of clan association, socialized healthcare-and-pension fund, thieves’ guild, private education system, insurance and protection provider, and para-state actor. Hexads bind together the six de jure Rainbow Lands. I suppose if there were only three colours, somebody might call them Triads, instead. Human Most of the Circle Sea power groups consider all close-to-baseline sentient and soulful post-humans as effectively human and possessing the full spectrum of rights attendant to a soul-body-personality triad. This includes retro-humans, dwarfs, half-elfs, half-lings, quarter-lings, and half-orcs. Inquisitions Federation of truth-and-reconciliation enforcement societies that maintain the peace of the Unity Promulgates in the Rainbowlands. Half parastatal corporations, half secret police. Ka, Soul The engine of life, a contradictory essence of the world that activates the body and makes place for the personality to guide the activity of that thing that is called a living human. In game terms, ka or soul is associated with Aura (and sometimes Endurance). Ka-Ba Maintenance Body Physical body substitute, knitting spirit and soul to the world, even beyond death. Most KBM Bodies are immobile crystal or ceramic structures housing incredibly complex organic metal magitech structures. Expensive versions are mounted in golems, giving a life beyond the flesh. Attitudes to KBM technology are generally ambivalent: why live in a hollow shell that can not experience the pleasures of life, after all? A basic body costs around €10,000. Ka-Elemental or Soul Elemental Spurting, flaming, ball-lightning paradox of life-force unmoored from both body and personality, yet trapped in the essential world. Sages are uncertain what kind of tragedy or nightmare machination rips the souls apart from the beings they animate, yet also blocks them from the Recycling Infinity of Nothingness. Some speculate that the legendary soul mills of the Vile Ones are involved. All aspects of earthly intelligence and individuality are lost within days, if not hours. Ka-elementals (L2d4, gutting) dangerously affect biological and personality baselines, causing (roll d6): (1) organic regression to a more primitive form, (2) personality devolves to simpler, more primal structure, (3) organic shift to parallel evolutionary path, (4) random personality change, (5) rapid organic evolution into more advanced form, (6) uplift as biological baseline interfaces with the essence of the Recycling Infinity of Nothingness (+1d4 Aura). Ka-Zombie Classic living zombie. It is not undead, merely a body-soul stripped of personality and ready for use by the animancer. Creating a ka-zombie has nothing to do with necromancy, and the subsequent creature, though no longer animated by the wit of personality, nevertheless looks and functions as a human, albeit with zero drive, personality, or ability to resist its master. Ling Mysterious, missing sentient subtype, attested to in Long Long Ago records, epic poems such as The Epic Journey of the Great Wand E. Ling, and the bloodlines of the half-lings and quarter-lings. According to the myths of the Half-Broken Age, the lings mastered dream travel and ended the Vile Age. Livingstone Inorganic material, usually rock, animated with the spirit of life to reform into new structures. Core discipline of petromancy, only superficially similar to dryland coral biomancy. It uses a silicon-based process to create its ‘living’ constructs. Long Ago Half-remembered times before the Rainbow Order was founded around the Circle Sea. Studies of the Long Ago are half-heartedly forbidden by the Green Inquisition and avidly pursued by the Red Land District and other fringe groups. Long Long Ago Eras and times lost beyond the records in the Great Mist. Fragments, shells, and hazy memories remain, but even they have a tendency to fade and melt from mind and time, like sands in the storms whipping off the Golden Desert. Lumin Tree One of the wonders of biomancy: bioluminescent trees. Originally used in grand avenues, now restricted to the private parks of grand despots and the re-education centers of the Cogflower Inquisitors. Machine Humans Legendary sapients who managed to combine personality and soul with bodies built from the dust of the earth. There is discussion among sages as to whether they were even possible, with the bloodsages particularly opposed to the idea of bloodless humans. Mind-Burn Common side effect of vomish biomancy. Sages speculate that the vomish neural redesigns are flawed and buggy because the vomish common algorithms have trouble comprehending real-world behaviors and goals. Mind-burned creatures usually have their original neural behavioral patterns replaced with alien patterns that mesh poorly with their original encoding. Recorded examples include rabbits who behaved like pressure cookers, one tuberous vegetable that tried to function as an alert siren, and several wire-crusted nomads performing an odd pelican mating dance. No overarching order has yet been found. Mist, The (also The Great Mist) Phenomenon of the very early Long Ago, of dubious veracity. Some scholars suggest that the Mist is a metaphorical device for the Great Forgetting, others maintain that it was a very physical event, similar to the mists of the Cyan Sea beyond the Wine Dark Mountains. Moon, Mountains of the Impassable, vicious range, rising almost to the heavens, it cuts the Rainbow Lands off from the north. Home to eerie structures and odd half-humans who preach of elfin queens and weird dreams. Necroambulism Related to necromancy, the technical discipline of turning dead tissue into an animate workforce for simple, repetitive tasks. A skilled necroambulist can create a Z or S-class laborer for €1d6 x 50. Needle of the World A very thin and very, very high mountain rising sheer from the heart of the Circle Sea, surrounded by storms and ignorance. These days most Rainbowlanders avoid talking about it. Oldtech Common term for advanced technology, often indistinguishable from magic, used by humans Long Long Ago. With practice and study, much of it is accessible to later day humans, half-lings, and quarter-lings, since their soul source imprint matches the data-protein codes embedded in the oldtech. Oneiromancer Reader and traveler of dreams—ultras are known to be terrifying oneiromancers. Orcs Obviously, the orcs were a Long Ago attempt to create a combat-adapted para-human. They were successfully eradicated following the Decree of the Seven Lands, slightly before the Swamping of the Blues. In fact, many were ‘eradicated’ by the efforts of the Bureaucratic Legion which reclassified large numbers of orcs as half-orcs—a permitted soul-body-personality triad under the regulations of the then omnipotent Power Group 13. Petromancy The art of using animating spirits to reshape and reform inorganic materials, creating wondrous and useful artifacts. Polybody Personality-soul distributed across several bodies linked by real-time glandular psychic links. The additional bodies make them more resilient to damage and death. By periodically adding new bodies they ensure a mental continuity across long epochs. Quarter-Ling Several remote and moderately rare human phenotypes retaining lingish characteristics (like exceptional hand-eye coordination and fur coverage of certain body parts), but are otherwise mostly baseline. Many subscribe to neo-lingish origin myths and cling to various cultural traits as though these were the Long Long Ago lingish originals. Radiation Ghost Accreted remnants of personalities fried into the fabric of space and smeared across the vastness of time. The sentiences of modern days can barely comprehend the magics and powers that were responsible. Radiation ghosts glow with blue light and though usually not hostile, their very presence brings sickness, decay, and rot—as is the lot of all that is associated with the Blue God. Rainbowlander Human inhabitant of the five united lands around the Circle Sea, the Violet, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. The Bluelanders are considered degenerate and somewhat inferior due to the Blue God Incident several centuries ago. Physically, the Rainbowlander humans range from about 105 cm (3’6”) to 200 cm (6’6”) tall, from pointy ears to beards, from tusks to fangs. Some specieist or racist fools would suggest that they are actually all variants of half-elfs, half-orcs, half-half-lings and half-dwarves. That would be foolish— and potentially life-threatening under the Unity Promulgates of the Rainbow Inquisition. Recycling Infinity of Nothingness (RIN) The eternal soul-chaos beyond the universe that is the eater and reviver of the forces of the many worlds, hidden beyond and between the material elements. Red Land District, RLD Powerful radical anarchist socialist city-state nestled between the Circle Sea and the Red Land. Nominally independent after a bloody popular uprising against the Vintner Lords. Though at peace for decades, its glazed-brick heat-ray colossi continue to burn every creature that approaches by land. Has developed into a hub of piracy, free enterprise, biomechanics, and Hexad ingenuity—making it an unusual competitor-ally of the Emerald City. Soulfire (also Soulburn) The energy of a soul, distilled and burned to activate an otherwise inanimate object or golem. It can be obtained by slow and precarious rituals from sunlight, plants, small vermin, and other simple organisms. Or, much more swiftly, through vicious sacrifice. Alternatively it is harvested in pearlescent form from a soul mill. But soul mills are very, very evil things that should be avoided. Soul Mill Nightmare machine from the Long Long Ago, thought to be an elven or Vile creation, that takes the actual souls of living humans (and sometimes other soul-bearing forms) and renders them into visceral energy. Most shamans consider it an abomination that brings closer the Final Entropy or the Descent into Grey. Still, the power harvested is immense. Scholars speculate that the Mist obscuring the Long Long Ago resulted from the overuse of industrial soul milling. In game terms, any hero or creature processed through a soul mill is gone forever, their very deeds and memories doomed to leach away into oblivion. Source Generic term for the creative essence of the world, sometimes called the world soul, that certain creatures use to exceed the parameters of their physical existence. Also called the ‘blood of magic.’ Stuckforce Detritus of Long Long Ago magics or technologies or curses, these shears in space-time create odd planes, lines, points, and volumes of solidified force. Over time they become visible with accumulated dirt and dust, some very large ones even appearing as floating islands. Even today, a critically failed Floating Disc spell might result in a small stuckforce plane, forever more disrupting the reality of the location where it was cast. Thornstone Fast-growing dryland coral variant, popular for building fences or enclosures for traveling parties. A skilled grower can coax 20 meters of thorny fence in a single day. The fence is relatively brittle, but the thorns are vicious as daggers (1d4). With additional time growers can extend the thorns into longer blades, hooks, and snares. Unchosen Mythical group of the viles (elves or Chosen Ones) who forsook the world-altering powers of the Choice to live instead as wandering immortals. Some ascribe wisdom to them, many ascribe madness. Vech Vehicular mechanism for carrying multiple persons and cargo, usually biomechanical, though sometimes pure golem. Examples include the prismatic walkers of the Spectrum Satraps, the dwarven diesel walkers of the East Coast, and the graceful porcelain prancers of the Porcelain Princes. Most vechs are capable of simple autonomous movement, particularly following a lead unit, but in all honesty are little more intelligent than a cockroach or brick golem. They require piloting for more complex maneuvers. Vile (also Chosen Ones): Mythical Long Long Ago sentiences. The powers attributed to them are vast, and often ridiculous, including complete personality permanence (immortality), reshaping the physical world at whim, shapeshifting, soul-transfer, and the ability to rebuild their bodies and souls from the stuff of other living creatures. Some Long Ago civilizations attributed godlike or divine powers to the viles, the Pleurote Gilded Decadence even worshipping them as the Urgent Demiurges. Fortunately they all collapsed in internecine struggles. Vome Short for violent mechanism, a self-replicating synthetic organism or auto-golem created (according to myth) by a Serpentine Capitalist faction in the Long Long Ago to fight in a series of wars that ended inconclusively. It is not clear if vomes are mindless, differently minded, intelligent and hateful, or just completely insane. They are inimical to most organic life and often assimilate or modify creatures on a whim, however, baseline bugs and coding cockroaches mean vomes are much less lethal than they could be. Wine Dark Mountains Grand mountain range in the south, beyond the Red Land, crowned with snows of flame and oxblood peaks. Wires, Wire-Ghouls Bodies without personality or soul, animated by machines. Some exhibit hive-mind behavior. The metal-first school of biomechané categorizes them as undead vomes. Wizard Shorthand for every kind of strange person dabbling in forgotten sciences and odd magics—clerics, priests, shamans, witches, warlocks, and druids, among others. All are wizards to the Steppelanders who make little distinction when dealing with mind-controlling, fire-throwing monsters. Yellow Land Dry land, north-east of the Circle Sea, and the terminus for trad caravans from the Mysterious Land. It is roughly divided between the confederation of the Decapolis and the powerful merchant republic of Safranj. The Yellow Land is famous for its spices, merchants, ranchers, and operas. Also, as the site of a recent massive, uncontrolled necroambulist outbreak. Zu Complex “Alert. This is Zu. Repeat. This is Zu. We have returned and we have bad news. The retemporization protocol will not work at scale. Repeat, the retemporization protocol will not work! Warn the Hyperlight not to initiate the protocol! Alert! This is Zu! Hello? Vesmir Observatory? We are not picking up your handshake. Hello? Is there anybody in there?”

Certainly, there's room for weird wizards of every stripe in the UVG! Sure, and in addition to namo's suggestion of Porcelain Princes, your character might be a unique sort of Ultra (After-Human body hoppers who possess others to interact with the world) I do, and will be filling out the world info tab over the next few days. namo does make some good points, and the way I see it is the things to the East of the Violet City are the province of the players. Who you are and where you come from are largely up to you, but the West is the domain of the GM. As for your place in the world, you are individuals who are seeking the near-mythical Black City, probably to use its strange Long Long Ago magic and technology to overcome some otherwise insurmountable problem you have back East. In service of this goal, you have signed on the caravan of the Cat Lord Jaya, plying your skills in his employ as you travel toward your shared destination past the horizon. So, the Decapolis is described as "Nine to thirteen viciously independent, smallish city states controlling most of the Circle Sea coast from the Metropolis to the Orange Lands. Famed for their trading prowess, industriousness, venality, fetishistic fascination with magic of all sorts, and utter ineptitude setting up anything comparable to the Purple University." The nearby Metropolis, also called Emerald City, is described as an "Industrial, ecological meta-topia", and your force disk could be a flavor of Sphere ability, piece of equipment or magic/technological item. You should indeed expect a survival/exploration game, and might build a character to magically feed your caravan or navigate/otherwise divine your way across the UVG. Standard PF equipment, including the technology guide and Spheres gear/magic items, though feel free to use the guide for inspiration/guidance on what you shop for.

Reaper is approved, as is Dhampir. Perhaps they are Redland Wine Vampires, or a result of faith in the Blue God, or a secret third thing!

Also, I kind of meant for my advertisement to go live on the first of next month instead of end on that date, so forgive me while I fill out the setting details. The core game concept I need the players to have their characters buy into is the goal of reaching the Black City, whatever your reason. In service of this goal, you have joined the caravan of the Cat Lord known as Jaya, who intends to be the first of his kind to open a trade route between the Violet City and the Black. Players can download a player's guide to the UVG It's mostly mechanics you won't need to bother with, but does include factions of the Grasslands and a brief synopsis of the various points of the crawl.

Androids are fine! You might be a human offshoot of the para-human Spectrum Satraps, the only surviving part of a polybodied Porcelain Prince, one of the Violent Mechanisms (colloquially known as Vomes,) or something completely different!

Beyond the Violet City: 1. VIOLET CITY: A LAST EERIE HOUSE This is the end of the Right Road. Humanity's dominions wind down in the purple haze that wreathes the sunrises of this western reach. No roads, but caravans brave the Ultraviolet Grassland into the eternal sunset of the Black City. Porcelain Princes and Spectrum Satraps oversee great herds of biomechanical burdenbeasts that bring the odd fruits, black light lotus, indigo ivories, rainbow silks, and sanguine porcelains popular among the meritocrats of the Rainbow Lands. Many voyagers are taken by the vomes but nobody likes to talk of those lost to the ultras. 2. THE LOW ROAD AND THE HIGH The cratered viaduct of the High Road runs on crumbling pylons of dying dryland coral across the pallid grasses. Beneath the half-passable testament to the follies of the Long-Long-Ago, the Low Road winds, smeared threads of soil and loam and oil and blood ground into a hard surface by the pounding feet, hooves, wheels, and treads of pilgrims, nomads, caravans, and vechs. 3. STEPPE OF THE LIME NOMADS The Limey Nomads’ lands are harsh and dry, forbidding to travelers. Odd remnants from the misty period referred to as the ‘Best-Forgotten’ Ages by the Saffron City's Opiate Priests dot the plain. In spring the Limeys graze west towards the Grass Colossus, returning east to the Circle Rim for winter. 4. PORCELAIN CITADEL The unmarked white surface of the great citadel, uplifted like an imprecation against the fanciful gods, serves as a reminder that not all that has fallen has died. Four robed figures arrayed before the decayed defense golems turn their faceless glazed masks as one. “This stair leads to the High Houses. Only permitted penitents may ascend to serve us there. Stay back, our Pillars of Power remain as potent as in your forgotten Long, Long Ago,” they speak in an impeccable chorus of disparate voices. 5. POTSHERD CRATER Scrub. Pallid soils of crushed ceramics. Drifts of porcelain exoskeletons crunch and ring underfoot. The autumn and spring rain showers bring sudden blooms of flowers and tubers, covering the pale landscape in a rainbow of colour. The rim rises pale, like fossilized porcelain ribs, from the dusty soil. Remnants of quarries from before the days of the Porcelain Princes lie abandoned to vomish lurchers while the sanguine porcelain prospectors whisper of bat-lion caves in the far rims. 6. TRAIL OF VOMISH DREAMS The grass grows high, sparkling and lush. Rumors say it is watered by sacrifice and an ancient Source Fac. Nomad Clans come here when grazing fails elsewhere, but cluster in thornstone enclosures close to the trail, driven to cooperation by the deadly machine-infested giant beasts that regularly traverse the steppe. 7. GRASS COLOSSUS Crossing a last purple ridge, the wide vale promises relative respite from the harsh grassland. Trees dot the courses of two rivers and, at their juncture, rise prehistoric ramparts of pitted ceramic with traces of pre-wizard spell-arms on their ancient shellac surface. Inside, on one of two hillocks, looms a great wicker-man of woven grasses, vines, and thorn bushes. Shamans of many clans make their meets here, teach their memory chants, and welcome the Clan Mothers once a year for the festival of the Circle of Grass. 8. THE LAST SERAI Three days out, you sight it. A metallic stepped tower, glinting in the daylight, glowing a ghostly, coppery green by night. Two days out, you smell it. Soft and seductive like cocoa. A day out, you hear it. Drumming out a rhythmless, rumbling staccato. Closing in on the tower you see three buildings, like hunched old men, clustered in the lee of a cinder dune. Around the tower a circle of gentle dust floats in a massive static charge. Nothing living grows within that circle. There the Last Serai's grand old harmonic rods draw energy from that magical field, powering the great hold of the Porcelain Princes while selling the excess to the last trading house of the Violet City and the final embassy of the Spectrum Satraps. 9. THE WAY STONE GRAVEYARD Larger by far than the Ignored Tower in the Last Serai, a crumbling verdigris obelisk rises from the bare bedrock, exposed by millennial storms lashing the tired earth. Surrounded by wrinkled iron husks and a veritable graveyard of Long Long Ago machine creatures. 10. THE DEATH-FACING PASSAGE A sharp, artificial canyon runs rough but true North-West towards the Grass Colossus. The rough crags and cinder dunes, lit from behind by the glare of static ghosts (L0, glowing), are littered with reminders to not turn back: the flickering soul-echoes of travelers seduced by the siren song of the Ignored Tower's Face of Death. Travelers say not every look at the tower from this angle brings death but most prefer not to try. Four or five days along the passage, past a landslide, the Face is mercifully obscured. The upland above the canyon is a pandemonium of shattered rock and odd twists of stuckforce coated in millennia of dirt and grime. Sages stroke their beards but cannot agree on the origin of this hellish scape. 11. THE SOUTH-FACING PASSAGE Rough, high steppe country, torn by the tracks of prehistoric Behemoths, but relatively safe. The journey from the Grass Colossus to the Behemoth Shell will interest every gentle-person naturalist. Due west the rounded humps of great cedarshaded hills rise, but the caravan trails bypass them. 12. FALLEN UMBER Beyond the Way Stone the steppe continues, flat, tasteless, tone-deaf. The caravan trails have carved a route down to the bedrock and the long-dry gully buttresses of gently crumbling livingstone attest to the long-lost land of Umber, once rich from local deposits of titanic biomatter which supported a thriving chitin-cap agro-industrial aristocracy. 13. LONG RIDGE On the way to the Serpent's Stone the grasslands fold back and forth on themselves like sinuous serpents undulating under the coating of ash-white grasses waving in the gentle breezes. Little steppe rodents peer into air, great eagles circle overhead, and for once, little trace of the disgusting remnants of the Long Long Ago are seen. 14. BEHEMOTH SHELL What were these things? These mountainsized calcite encrusted creatures that suspended themselves on levitation lenses and drifted and dragged themselves along the surface? Sages speculate demiurges might have used them to sculpt the world, to deiform it closer to some divine ideal. Most are gone. The logarithmically multispiralled shell of the greatest of their kind slumps here, a lumpy mountain like a cross between a sea urchin and a conch. The Satraps may claim it but, truly, it belongs to the Great Folk who live upon and in it, scurrying like lice within its ageless bulk. 15. SERPENT STONE MARKER Beyond the Long Ridge the steppe flattens out and becomes a flat ocean of white grass. From horizon to horizon, the world spreads flat and still. In its depth lies a great stone marker; smooth, rising a foot above the soil, and five hundred paces across. The entire surface shifts in curiously fractal serpent patterns of chocolate and amber. Compasses and guidestones swirl madly, then point themselves towards the stone, helping voyagers in this swirling place. Smaller markers dot the whole steppe, gently eroding and being reclaimed, pointless memorials from the Long Long Ago. 16. MOON-FACING FORD The expanse of the steppe seems endless, from north to south the flat land rolls on under the sky dome. The slow stars and the fast glitter, icy and cold, and voyagers from the four corners approach the Moon River with exaggerated care. The great shallows of the Moon-Facing Ford mark the easiest passage between the light grasslands and the dark. Weaker caravans—or those with something to hide—seek other, far deadlier crossings. Why Moon-Facing? Because as visitor's approach the ford their mouths go slack and their faces rise to gaze upon the Near Moon, suspended incongruously above the plain, half-concealed by the curve of the world. 17. THE NEAR MOON Whispers only came to the Violet City of this oddity—a spherical moon come to Earth, suspended less than a bow-shot above the ashen soil of the Grassland. The mile-high sphere, dusty and cratered, mocks astounded travelers. In the noon-daylight the Near Moon looms ash-grey, the colour of a ghost's ghost, but come sunset or if sunrise could pierce the thick haze of the grasslands, it would burn with the colours of a funeral pyre. Skyscrapers and towers and stairs of a halfdozen fallen cultures slither out of the dank bogs beneath the Moon, peopled by hermits, hardy soldiers, and ka-zombie keeping moonlings of quaint disposition. They bridge the airy void, coming within a ten-foot of the Near Moon and its strange gravity. 18. GLASS BRIDGE The High Moon Steppe and the High Horse Steppe are sliced asunder one from the other by the deep valley of the Old River, the turbulent outflow from the cold, deep Three Sticks Lake. Both steppes are as cold and as cruel as their names suggest, studded with mesas, splinters, boulders, and craters left over from the near cosmic forces that created the Cantilevered Rim. Past the amalgamated skyscraper of Red Bear Village, the valley bursts open to the astounding sight of Glass Bridge: a cathedral of glass that sparkles in the daylight and phosphoresces in the ultraviolet mornings. 19. THREE STICKS LAKE Three ragged villages cling to the steep shores of the cold, deep lake, built on layers of older settlements from the Long Long Ago. Caravans drag themselves around the harsh coastline, while smaller groups cross on the improvised and salvaged ferries of the Stick Folk. The lake itself is cold and full of fish, its bed—so it seems—thick with waterlogged vomes ready to drag careless bathers into the ultramarine depths. It is one of the deepest and darkest lakes known to the Steppelanders, a vital source of water and, even if one compromises comfort, respite in the Three Living Villages. 20. THE GALL GRASS A wide, high, and dry valley, decked in the pungent yellow stalks and interwoven galls of the slow-dreaming distributed sentience of the modified grasses holds sway here. The Gall Grass mind (L14, post-conscious) absorbs all moisture here and keeps the Hair Woods to the south and the Higher Spinewood to the north at bay. Little survives in the Gall Grass—thirst is a constant danger but the mildly empathic grass mind also keeps most predators at bay. 21. SPECTRUM RUN Fires of prismatic sentience gone mad light the crystal excrescences that mark old Satrap experiments and settlements. Whether the crystals are successes or failures, the Satraps do not tell. Black glyphs mark the trails of nomads and adventurers from the Circle Sea, while the Satraps follow light shows of bold, avant-garde design through the pancake-flat terrain. A frosting of metallic salts kills the grasses in great rings around the eerily unrusted corpses of grand traveling machines from Long Ago. 22. REFRACTING TREES Light bends oddly here, the bark of the trees coated in a slimy sheen. Long Ago mad experiments created tree-silicon symbionts and now most voyagers are cautioned to wear neutral-density eyewear lest the strange geometries scald their minds. Distances break with confusing abandon and smart voyagers stick to the ditch roads left by centuries of heavy vechs. Fools wander off and are lost in the broken planes of light. Nomads prefer to avoid these wooded, stream-carved lands altogether. 23. RIBS OF THE FATHER A bone formation the size of a small mountain range erupts from the ground, creating a landmark visible for a week and more in each direction. The old, eroded bone range, garlanded in ancient long-needle pines, is usually capped by snow-heavy clouds. The Satraps mutter uneasily of the swift-breeding Marmotfolk that live upon and within its bulk. 24. THE CAGE RUN A great avenue of fused terranova runs due north from the Ribs, passing by the Spectrum Palace and disappearing into the elf-haunted north. The terranova road surface is a wondrous artifact of Long Ago, a ruddy artificial stone that resists both weather and vehicles. Rows of ritualistic metal trees were once arrayed along the length of the road. Many have been removed and reused since the road was abandoned by its builders, but hundreds remain, most decked with Satrap cages holding the bones of Marmotfolk and other interlopers who threatened Satrap dominance. 25. SPECTRUM PALACE The palace of the powerful Spectrum Satraps is surprisingly small: a drum-shaped thing of dull metal and rivets, thirty meters lengthwise and across, and a hundred meters around, in the shallow saddle between two unremarkable hills. A single doorway of pitch black looms ominous upon its southern face. Every night full-spectrum localized aurorae light the sky above the palace—hence its name. 26. THE IRON ROAD Striking out due west from the Ribs, the Iron Road is a series of mammoth skeletal iron towers, red and rusting, like an army of giants marching into the sunset. They continue for more than a week's walking and Spectrum scholars claim that in the Long Ago cable wagons flew from one tower to the next, simulating the flight of an eagle or golden sky barge. At irregular intervals grand arcologies in once-livingstone erupt from the deep steppe like immense geometric termite mounds. Dew and earth saps collect in them, and hardy trees form eerie vertical forests in the southern reaches of the Ivory Steppe. 27. THE IVORY PLAIN The trackless deep plain is a sea of ivory grass that glows palely in the dark. Great herds of grazing beasts and their predators make their way across this plain in stately procession under the harsh ultraviolet radiation raining down from the hazy sky. Eroded livingstone stubs and glassy patches scored upon the ground are all that remains of some older time, like long-healed scars on a mild-mannered old warrior. 28. DEAD BRIDGE The Chasm, forty miles wide, marks the western extremity of the Ultraviolet Grasslands. Its depths are shrouded by a noxic haze. The projectors of glittering force bridges rust on the precipices of the chasm, and only one single archaic bridge of livingstone and dryland coral remains. It stumbles from organiform pier to organiform pier, overgrown and distended into a riot of towers and walkways. The old power generators are long dead and the lights long gone, but the Dead Bridge still teems with life—only now, instead of the engineer aesthetes of the Glittering Heavenly Republic, it is degenerate quarterlings and crawling subhumans. 29. DARK LIGHT PATH At its northern edge the Chasm branches and breaks out into canyons, craters, and calderas. Many cultures have built staircases, tunnels, hanging bridges, and cableways across the chaotic terrain. All in disrepair, but travelers still descend them into the eternal twilight of the Dark Light Path: a series of parallel grooves cut east to west through the mesas and ridges, as though the fine-grained stone were soft clay. The depths of the Chasm are shrouded in a noxic haze, obscuring the passage of the sun, but they are not dark—the passage walls glitter with phosphorescent shock gemstones and sparkling thermovores move like stately half-floating crabs through the thick, soupy air. 30. THE ENDLESS HOUSES Beyond the Dead Bridge lays endless ruinland. For over a week the landscape marches, a mind-numbing grid-work of abandoned houses, towers, palaces, monuments, aqueducts, and roads. Old death lies over the gently collapsing land like a comforting blanket, keeping out change, exhausting volition, tiring the rain itself. Deep ravines have chiseled apart antique roads over uncounted years. 31. THE FOREST OF MEAT Long ago somebody, somewhere thought it would be a great idea if easily harvested protein grew on trees. Animals would no longer be slaughtered for their life-giving flesh. Packaging and delivery would be simplified. Whole industries and cultures would be disrupted and innovation would create a thriving new proteinomic class. The carnibotanic disaster zone of the Forest of Meat creeps up on the traveler slowly. The trees grow thicker and fleshier, leaves begin to leer, birds fall silent, shrubberies click thorns like teeth, soil runs red with slime, mushroom eyes open in sudden clearings and, by night, howls of willow wolves (L3, fleet-rooted) echo across drinking bogs. 32. BLACK CITY The Omega. The Last City. Godspeed you, Black City. It hunches upon the shore of an endless, oily ocean, a lacquered black chaos of cubes that seem to slide one across another in almost-patterns that ever so slightly fail to repeat. The corpses of fools who tried to walk into the Black City lie in the toxic dust of the Pre-city. Hair stands on edge with the background electromagnificent radiation. >TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED >ABORT / RETRY / DIE?

Before the Violet City: There's not much Canonical information about the lands east of the Violet City, so feel free to make something up! Many-Mirror: Sunset-in-the-East: Hightunnel: Gardens of Two-Day: Hot Gate: Hole House: Sunrise-in-the-West: Safranj: Oranje: Emerald City: Red Land District: Ruins Azure: Red End:

Max HP all 3 levels, then 1/2 Max +1 thereafter (4 HP d6, 5 HP d8, 6HP d10, 7 HP d12), 2 Traits, or 3 with a drawback. 3pp spheres content allowed after GM approval. No Oaths/Aristeia. (The irony being totally lost on me until just now lol) Yes! Catfolk could conceivably be Violetlander para-humans created to serve the Cat Lords of the Violet City, or Steppelanders unrelated to the various magic felines, or something else entirely! Yes, and Yes! Custom Trade Traditions have blanket approval.

Updated 5/6/24 1AM EST Step 0- Create a thread here for your character. Step 1— Determine Ability Scores: 25 Point Buy Step 2—Pick Your Race: You can be any Core, or Other (within reason) race from the SRD, and use Spheres racial traits. But remember: Everyone is (probably) Human. Even the half-orcs, I hear you ask? Especially the half-orcs. In the UVG, Common pan-humanity includes all the close-to-baseline sentient and soulful post-humans. This includes retro-humans, dwarfs, half-elfs, halflings, quarterlings, and half-orcs. Step 3—Pick Your Class: Level 3, Please use Spheres classes or archetypes when designing your character. No standard vancian casting. Max HP all 3 levels, then 1/2 Max +1 thereafter (4 HP d6, 5 HP d8, 6HP d10, 7 HP d12). 3pp spheres content allowed after GM approval. Step 4—Pick Skills and Select Feats: Background skills, 1 feat per level. 2 Traits, or 3 with a drawback. No Oaths/Aristeia. Advanced/Legendary/Exceptional talents allowed. Custom Martial/Casting/Blended traditions allowed with GM approval. Custom Trade Traditions have blanket approval. Step 5—Buy Equipment: Standard WBL for level 3 PCs (3,000 GP) Step 6—Finishing Details: Please include an image/description of your PC, ~ a paragraph about their personality, and ~2-3 paragraphs of backstory.

A thread for questions and discussion before the Game begins.