In my previous post, I said that my next goal was to flesh out Old Tophet. Plans have changed a bit, both because I’d like to sketch out some higher concept background for the world to provide context and define terms, and also because I just don’t feel like working on the city yet. So here is part one of that larger context, the Official History of the world, lightly sketched. It is composed largely of lies, damned lies, and words carved on stelae so you know they have to be true. The next post, which can be expected soon, will consist of descriptions of the most common sapient species in the Northern Hold, where the campaign begins.

According to the official and approved calendars maintained by the Royal Household’s Horoscopists, a thousand years have passed since the ascension of the Lugal to his throne. This is broadly understood by most astronomers and scholars to be a lie of some sort, with conflicting records claiming that the actual length of his rule has been anything from a few hundred years to two thousand years. Contradictory evidence points to both possibilities, but a lack of means to comprehensively compare notes the world over and the habit of the Horoscopists to have anyone who makes too much of a fuss about the discrepancies flayed and killed has so far prevented full investigation of the matter.

Either way, the world prior to the ascension of the Lugal was a radically different one. Only two sapient species lived on the planet: humans and shoalfolk. Or three species, because no matter how much the Lugal denies it, someone lives in the depth of the ocean, and Shoalfolk can’t live that far down. Or perhaps it was only one species that split into three distinct groups. A few radicals suggest that someone else entirely lived on the planet, and that humans arrived alongside everyone else. Either way, the official Royalist history states that two groups lived on the planet, at a “primitive” technological state with copper tools at best. This wholly unprepared world was invaded and conquered by a vast coalition of alien invaders who descended from the heavens and enslaved the native species. This alien polity is known to history as the Magog Empire. Centuries of warping and mispronunciation have resulted in the common name for the most numerous and powerful species of the empire: Goblins. These gray skinned, short, big eyed conquerors acted just as any imperialists might in Earth’s bloody history. The only thing that mattered to them was the planet’s natural resources, and the inhabitants were at best a resource to be exploited and at worst a pest to be culled. All of the most terrible crimes of imperialism and conquest occurred under the rule of the Magog, to humans, to shoalfolk, to the species brought in from other planets as specialized slaves, and even to goblins who did not meet the standards of the rigid hierarchy of the Magog. Even the planet suffered as though under the lash, entire mountains laid bare by strip mining and the valuable minerals which powered the ships of the Magog stolen entirely.

It was this cruelty and evil that the Lugal revolted against, banding together rebels and heroes to overthrow the conquerors. That very same cruelty and evil was then repeated when the Lugal assembled his fleet of stolen alien ships and destructive weapons and bound the whole of the world tightly under his now-immortal rule.

According to the Royal Annals, a golden age reigned. The Lugal distributed the fruits of alien technology freely, and no person wanted for anything. So long as they were not one of the Magog remnants pushed into the most hostile territories of the world to fight an endless guerilla war against the now overwhelmingly powerful humans. Or the dissident, non-Magog goblins who were branded by the Lugal as complicit with the occupation and driven into those same lands to be raided and preyed upon by Magog Loyalist goblins as traitors. Or the numerous humans and other sapients, now declared “free” as equal subjects, who rejected the rule of the Lugal and were driven to the wastes. Or those unfortunate enough to live in a land that actively tried to resist the Lugal and who were destroyed utterly by apocalyptic weaponry for their defiance leading to the creation of new wastelands to drive “enemies” into. So long as you were one of the narrow band that behaved, that held to the Law rather than the wild Chaos Wastelands, everything was perfect. Or so the Royal Annals say.

The golden age, if one existed at all, was not to last. The occupation had stripped the planet of its most valuable natural resources, resources needed to power the fantastical technologies of the Magog. As power became more and more scarce, the Lugal restricted the use of technology more and more to his own extensive personal household and administration, to conserve it “for the good of the defense of His Highness’s subjects”. The rest of the world was left with scraps of technology supplemented by resources previously held to be worthless such as copper, tin, iron, coal, and even in some places oil. Sometimes, technology is blended or replaced by sorcerous arts or by calling upon the aid of spirits and gods. A few say that these spells, spirits, and gods are themselves leftover manifestations of no longer understood technologies, but they don’t say that too loudly for fear of the same flaying as people who ask too much about calendars.

The world of the modern era is one that appears totally anachronistic due to the blend of high technology with a culture unable to sustain that technology. Germ theory sits alongside humors, laser rifles alongside swords, triremes alongside steam ships . The vast majority of the world considered to be the Lugal’s territory, connected by trade and the Lugal’s own network of messenger ships, lies at a roughly even level of material sophistication. Technology in the wastes is far more diverse, ranging from the high technology of die hard Magog loyalist goblins who have spent every minute of the Lugal’s rule tinkering with their saucers and blasters to try to keep them functioning to peoples who have been robbed of absolutely everything and left in the wastes to start from scratch.

There is no equivalent of Earth’s pre-Columbian divide of plants, animals, or people. Tomatoes, potatoes, chili, and coffee are found the world over. Largely, I have drawn my cultural inspiration from the civilizations of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean and West Asian worlds, with high medieval technology. This is just because I know the most about these subjects and feel the most comfortable tackling it, and I fully expect to draw from fascinating periods and places in Africa apart from the Mediterranean coast, the rest of Asia, the Pacific, and from the Americas as I expand the scope of my world outwards to follow the travels of my players. I want my players to be able to pick through a world chock-full of both splendor and horror drawn from our own world, with the additional fantastical catharsis of getting to swordfight the people who have made the world so harsh and cruel. For many of these ideas, I must give credit to the excellent blog posts Old School Rebellion and Marx & Monsters: A Radical Leftist Fantasy Sandbox for inspiring me to create this world of oppression to topple over and for giving me inspiration on how to mechanically handle that toppling.

What all of this means in a practical sense for a game world is that anything goes. If my players want, a jaguar warrior, a samurai, a hoplite, a Gemarthian Sword Singer, Gandalf, and Spaceman Spiff can all walk into a bar together and then go on adventures. High technology is powerful, but rare and heavily policed by Lugal forces, and often a sword or a spell is a more practical and available option than a laser rifle. The existence of the Chaos Wastelands throws a bit of Mad Max and anarchic energy into the whole thing. If you add the possibility of pocket dimensions and parallel worlds that form fey realms and cosmic landscapes borrowed from Worlds Without Number’s concept of Iterums, the sky’s the limit.

Speaking of the sky, don’t go to the moon. The weather on Lake Hali is terrible this time of year.