TheGSE Posted May 8 Clone Share Posted May 8 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 RPG Crossing Home Forums My Account Subscriptions -Support the Site!- Site Rules & Help Search Tools Log Out RPG Crossing > Games > Other Roleplaying Games > Ultraviolet Grasslands: Neon Wanderers And Porcelain Gods > The World Around Fragments of a Glossary Welcome, ImperialProphet. You last visited: Yesterday at 04:36 AM Private Messages: Unread 0, Total 2. Notices The Outplay 2024 player competition is open for applications!!! Check out the fancy real-life prizes!!! Thread Tools Search this Thread #1 Jul 8th, 2020, 06:38 PM TheLawfulNeutral Dura Lex Sed Lex Tools Profile Send PM 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?” Name xDiceName xDiceResult xDiceString xDiceRolls Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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