Twilight

Just beyond the first veil, where the living heartbeat of Creation fades into stillborn silence, lies Twilight, also known to different people as the Shadow Realm, Darklands, World-Shade, Penumbra, Upside-Down, Abyss, Stíny, or the Other Side. It is a dark and decaying mirror-realm, an uncanny echo that clings to the living world like a black mould. A shadow that hungers.

Indeed, Twilight shadows and mirrors Creation, but imperfectly and slowly, always struggling and failing to catch up to the endless changes of the real world. Twilight cities are hollow, their streets silent and broken. Permanent structures - mountains, temples, great trees - are always present, yet everything ephemeral is fragile, or missing, or found in states of ruin. Shattered cups, torn banners, books whose pages crumble to dust at the lightest touch and whose ink spells only madness-muddled nonsense.

Some say that Twilight lies at the very edge of Creation, where it meets the Dead Dimensions and the endless Void Beyond. That this uncanny mirroring is a universe's defence mechanism, a thin layer of corrupted reality that, just like tarnish, seals and protects the healthy reality beneath it.

Upside Down concept art from Stranger Things

 

There is little light in Twilight. No sun, no stars, nothing but the suffocating blackness of perfect night. Torches sputter and even magical flames grow dim. Only occasionally is the realm's cimmerian firmament punctured by thunderstorms of red lightning, or contaminated by creeping clouds of bioluminescent, carcinogenic spores. Sunlight, if somehow cast into this realm, does not illuminate - it burns and scours away creatures and matter of Twilight, leaving behind only drifting motes of soot.

There is no water in Twilight, at all. While blood will remain in the veins and liquids in their bottles, any spilled drop or free-flowing stream rapidly dissipates into nothingness. Attempts to conjure water end in failure and water elementals perish screaming.

The vegetation of Twilight is sparse and terrible. The only things that truly grow there are black mould and wrixling vines, which feed on warmth and magic, respectively, rather than light. Trees stand as pale ghosts of their counterparts in Creation - dead and petrified, their branches twisted skyward in eternal agony. Leaves or grass collapse into ash when touched.

Yet Twilight's ashen bedrock bears one treasure the living world cannot produce - black iron ore that, once smelted with captured souls, can be forged into spectre-slaying soulsteel weaponry.

And rarely, strange monuments can be found in Twilight that are not a reflection of the mortal realm. Obsidian monoliths, inhuman statues, sprawling complexes of bleak geometry. Necromancers claim that these mark the entrances into the Labyrinth, a vast under-realm of impossible angles and shifting gravity. The Labyrinth is said to touch most worlds - including the Land of the Dead, the Dreamlands, and perhaps realms even older and odder.

The Three Tombs of Words

There are three Great Books, artifacts of prodigious power that are hidden and protected in three corners of the world. Each one is capable of changing the world.

 

Book of Void by AppleSin

  

The Book of Names

The book contains the three names of every being that lives, lived and will live.

• Given name is the first name that a creature was ever granted or referred to with. It holds a mystical significance in many rituals. Especially magic users are careful to keep their given name a secret, while devils and the Folk will gleefully buy them.
• Taken names are any names, nicknames or titles that a creature is/has/will use, no matter how obscure.
• True name is the cornerstone of one's identity, the true self. Mastering one's true name unlocks great power, but if anyone else finds one's true name, they gain power over them.

Not only can the Book be used to learn the names of any being, it can also be used to erase names. When a given or taken name is erased, it fades from the memories of the whole world. All deeds and misdeeds will be forgotten. But when a true name is erased, that person's identity will fade. They will, slowly and torturously, become a Blank, a being without history, purpose or fate. An unperson.

The Book is located in a great underground library in the Steel Mountains. A lost dwarven dynasty had dug deep halls into the mountains and filled them with endless knowledge in the form of books and scrolls and tablets from all over the world. The dwarves have mostly disappeared, but the scholars they invited to their library remain. And deep within the library, hundreds of floors below where any normal scholar dares to delve, where the books cease and only endless wards and traps and guardian golems are present, is a vault of curse-rock holding the Book of Names.

The Book of Years

The book contains the whole of the past, the present and the future of the world. It can all be changed. A change in the future becomes a prophecy, a fixed point in time that will come to pass. But changing the present or the past is more complicated. The minds of people are rarely completely changed, and many historical events have a lot of inertia, so things will happen similarly anyway. But if the change is large enough, a bit of the world might change without the rest of the world following suit, resulting in paradoxes like ancient civilisations who were always there but no one remembers, or an event that everyone remembers but there are no physical signs of it, or people who have no parents, etc.

The book is found in a small shrine in a beautiful oasis deep within Utabi, the Red Desert. A magic circle around the oasis displaces it to infinity, making any journey to the oasis impossible.

The Book of Laws

The book contains all the Laws of the universe, physical and metaphysical. Rewriting it can fundamentally change the world, or destroy it with a single stroke of a quill.

The book is said to be protected by a whole pantheon of forgotten gods somewhere in the sunken continent of Kal Cher. Maybe.

 

How do you actually use these books in your game? You don't, or at least not the whole books, unless you wish to destroy the setting. But a single page, somehow stolen and lost?

d6 Book Hooks

1. The old king is dead and his heir is about to be crowned. The heir is the last one of the dynasty, the only royal remaining in the country... Wait, but what about all the cities that had been ruled by... nobody for years? And the statues that depict people no one remembers? And who is this guy in lavish clothes, begging you to help him, because he doesn't know who he is and why does he have this signet ring?
2. A single page from the Book of Names is available at the next Black Auction. It contains true names of the four most powerful gods of this continent, among others.
3. The Loyalists have been running the kingdom ever since the unsuccessful uprising. The Rebels have fought failed to ensure prosperity for all, but there is still a long way to go before the rightful powers could even begin to be threatened by the Rebel scum.
4. A rumour about a "scroll of prophecy", in fact a page from the Book of Years, sends every faction into a deadly race to find it first and write their own bright future.
5. A lich is looking for a scrap of paper that apparently contains one clause of the Laws of Magic. She wants to change them to suit her whims.
6. A benefactor of the party has fallen into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that claim that a Law has been recently rewritten and reality was changed. Why? By whom? And while some of the conspirators want to change everything back as it was before, a growing portion of them want to keep the changed Law...

The Many Schools of Magic

The Manse has recently published a very nice rant on categorisation of magic where they discuss several approaches to the classification of spells and derive their own schools of magic, a neat and clean system of seven traditions with a rigorous naming convention. But there's a fallacy in this approach, I venture. It's tempting to create a well-defined, all-encompassing set of categories and just use them for everything. I will freely admit to doing just that many a time. But real-world systems are rarely if ever neat. There's always something off, missing or superfluous. New findings undoing the symmetry of old theories, things that do not fit into known patterns, weird edge cases that could go either way, someone who made a mistake a century ago and now it would be too costly to fix it. Classification is a human invention and humans are imperfect.

If the classification of magic is to be used in-universe, I think a different approach is needed. Embrace this imperfection, build on it. Explain it, so that it stops being an irritant and becomes a piece of lore.

Also, why should there be only a single classification?

  

The Imperial Collegium recognises eight schools of magic:

1. Abjuration
2. Conjuration
3. Divination
4. Enchantment
5. Evocation
6. Illusion
7. Restoration
8. Transmutation

Restoration is a very recent addition, founded and still led by Archmage Hasenbach, whose groundbreaking research into positive energy allowed any mage to wield the healing arts that a generation ago would be the sole purview of the divine. Any naysayers who point out that white magic is quite common outside of the Imperium are usually booed out by Hasenbach's near-fanatical followers.

Necromancy used to be a recognised school for centuries, but also illegal for most of the time. After decades of academic misuse, where every spell deemed inappropriate would be labelled as necromantic, and after increasingly pointed inquiries from the Inquisition about why exactly does the Collegium keep a library wing dedicated to illegal magic, Necromancy was officially struck from the Rolls of Magic in the year 769 of the Three United.

One might also wonder about Enchantment and Illusion, the two odd schools out. There used to be a single school of Prestidigitation, but a falling-out between two archmages about three centuries ago led to a schism that created two new, closely related yet highly quarrelsome schools. It is a public secret that whether a spell is an enchantment or an illusion depends entirely on who publishes the paper first.

Foreigners are sometimes confused that the school of Enchantment works with mind-trickery rather than creation of enchanted items. Well, there used to be a school of Imbrication dedicated to crafting enchanted items, but it was officially disbanded in the wake of the Dwarven Trade War.

In Nymbia, magic is colour-coded:

• White Wizards are the only sanctioned practitioners. They deal in healing, protection and exorcism. Some tower-cabals can get quite militant about their exorcisms, training squads of professional undead hunters, though this get rarer the further one gets away from the Dead Lands.
• Grey Wizards are a wide assortment of hedge practitioners who hold very disparate secrets, from wood-singing and fate-reading to teleportation and unmaking. They are not allowed to own a tower, so a grey practice rarely has more than a single master and one or two apprentices.
• Black Wizards are practitioners of the dark arts, which is a nebulous set of practices that include necromancers and biomancers, but also telepaths, mindcrafters and most alchemists. They are outlawed everywhere but in Alema.
• "Red Wizards", or rather Pyromancers, as they actually call themselves, are foreign to Nymbia, coming from the Great Swamp. Their magic is very limited and narrow in scope, but all the more powerful for it. So powerful in fact, that the authorities have not yet found a response to their increasingly common depredations. Hence also the reason why Black Wizards are now allowed to settle and openly practice in Alema, whose countryside suffers the most from the flame-makers' raids.

An island nation of Sik has an alternate colour scheme to their practitioners:

• White Mages are healers, just as in Nymbia, but much less belligerent. They are widely recognised as the best surgeons on the continent, capable of cutting away ills of the body and the mind alike.
• Blue Mages study weather control and ship magic. They can be quite potent war-casters, but their primary focus is binding the powers of the ocean and its storms for use in transportation and agriculture.
• Silver Mages are spellwrights who specialise in charms - a type of talisman - and wards. While charms against insects, snakebite or the cold, glamour-charms to allure and impress, or any kind of dowsing-charm are sought-after export goods, the much more powerful wardstones that can protect a whole village from locusts or pirates are never sold outside of Sik.

The Mage Guild of Thorlan considers every spell to be an aspect of the four Great Elemental Dragons:

• Air also covers everything related to swiftness, movement and communication.
• Earth also deals with the Dead, as the Old Stone Serpent holds dominion over the dearly departed in Thorlan. Earth sages traditionally handle matters of inheritance and murder investigations.
• Fire also deals with destruction, counter-spells, curses and high emotions.
• Water also deals with knowledge, illusions, cleansing and low emotions.

Languages of the Amir Steppes

Here is a conversion of the standard D&D languages to the world of Althan, or more specifically the Amir Steppes in West Althan.

In addition, a new house rule is in effect: You may take an expertise in language, just as you can in any other proficiency. See the expert effects in the table below. Also the Linguist feat now lets you pick an expertise in one language you know.

Any effects that require a saving throw have a

DC = 8 + double proficiency bonus + Charisma modifier

 

d20	Language		Expert Effect	D&D Equivalent
1	Low Imperial	Various dialects of Old Imperial, spread throughout the fallen Aunian Empire. All mutually intelligible, though with many funny accents.	You can speak High Imperial with no accent. High Imperial is the language of imperial nobility, so people will generally assume that you are either a scholar or a noble.	Common
2	Nymbian	Language used in Nymbia, a great southern empire beyond the Trollish Mountains, and also by the southern barbarian tribes.
3	Taalish	Language used in the Thirty-Three Kingdoms.
4	Khazum	Old dwarven language once used in Khelek Dur, the dwarven realm beneath the Trollish Mountains, and now used by the dwarven clans who fled when Khelek Dur was destroyed. Useful as very few non-dwarves can understand it.		Dwarfish
5	Kanish	Language of the ashen elves from the triplet city of Kani. Related to Substratal.		Elvish
6	Trollish	Language used in Trollamor, the city of trolls. Related to the Dark Speech.		Giant
7	Pflecian	Language used in Pflec, the gnomish dictatorship. Related to the Dark Speech.		Gnomish
8	Skurut Tongues	The many dialects of various goblin tribes, all at least a little bit mutually intelligible. They often incorporate various body sounds.	Gain scent. You also become a little more ugly and green, slowly starting to turn into a goblin.	Goblin
9	Hinnish	Language of Hins, the tiny savages from the Hin Highlands.		Halfling
10	Ugrathish	Language of Ugrathi, the nomadic orcish clans who travel far and wide in their caravan wagons, wheeling and dealing.		Orcish
Rare Languages
11	Golden Gospeltongue	Language of clergy of the Triune Divinity. Said to be also used by the Empyreal Host of the High Heaven.	You can detect lies told in Gospeltongue. No save from the liar, but there must be intention behind the lie.	Celestial
12	Draconic	Also used by the dragonborn races and many sorcerers.	If you know the True Name of a dragon and call it in Draconic, they will always hear you, no matter where they might be. Their reactions may vary.	Draconic
13	Druidic	A secret language, forbidden to the uninitiated.	Animals understand your pleas or demands perfectly, even if you do not understand their replies.	Druidic
14	Dark Speech	Language of the Dark Ones, dead since they exterminated themselves in endless civil wars.	You can speak ancient words of command that still hold sway over the many races created by the Dark Ones. All creatures of such races* in earshot must make a Wisdom Save, or they must choose one of a) kneel immediately (as Prone), or b) cower in fear for [Charisma bonus, min 1] rounds (as Frightened). You may use this ability again after a short rest.	Deep Speech
15	Hereafter Speech	Language used by psychopomps, demons and the dead.	Any demon, undead or psychopomp must answer you one question thruthfully. Mindless undead get no save. Every creature can be affected only once.	Abyssal, Infernal
16	Djinnish	Language of the Elemental Lords. (Not an otherworldly power, they live around Lake Siva to the east and waged a long war against the Aunian Empire.)	The elements understand and try to help you. When you speak Djinnish, wind will blow when you command, fires will dim when you are whispering, earth will shake when you laugh and water will flow according to you will.	Primordial
17	Fey Speech	Language of the fickle Folk.	You can speak in endless riddles and allegories. Only the people you designate (who must know Fey Speech) will understand the true meaning of your speech.	Sylvan
18	Substratal	Dialects used in the various settlements around the Sunless Sea. Contains a lot of clicking sounds.	You can very, very poorly echolocate by clicking your tongue. Handy in the dark.	Undercommon
19	Thieves' Cant	A combination of code words, hand signs and markings used for covert communication. Originally developed by the Insurgency when they were fighting the Dark Ones, but later adopted by thieves all over the Amir Steppes.	You can sign with a single hand at the speed of normal speech. You can place marks that only you will find.	Thieves' Cant
20	Lip Reading	Works for any language you are proficient in.	You can lip-read even in languages you don't know. You will not understand the words, but can perfectly replicate the sounds for someone who does know that language.

*) Dark Ones specialized in biomancy and necromancy, leaving behind many half-human, half-animal races and hybrid monsters.