Blog Posts: World & Cosmology

A short piece on the night sky and how it reflects the larger cosmos of Telrhin. More than a map of stars and the solar system, it tells the story of the world.
 

The sky above is dark and thick with stars, rich and vibrant and full of life.

A velvet dark ceiling, gathered around the black void at the center: the Womb, the Well of Dreams, the dream-dark source of all things.

The three moons find their place too: Luna the red goddess, Tala the grey, and Mashana the broken moon that circles the great dark world of Orh heavy in the skies above.

Songs from the Drunk Bard (snippets from the ongoing work on Telrhin): A short piece from the section on Rakshem: Khitagan and the Three Lands

The Divine Empress

The great god Kiyotamaka crossed the world and lay ruin to everything in his wake. As he flew over the Three Lands, a lone girl stood her ground in defiance, and he spared her for her bravery.

This is a snippet from the history appendix about Talon. The image shows her incarnation as Maragul, the Faceless Mother.

Goddess, demi-god, the Black Queen. Her hand has been in conflicts throughout the story of Telrhin, from the discord among the Five Gods through the betrayal of the Kaladri and the Eldring Wars.

Goddess of the broken moon Mashana, the Golden Queen liberating the world from the tyranny of the old order, leaving war and famine in her wake. 

I fed the World Overview page to Google's NotebookLM, and this is what it created. An AI generated discussion of the world between two AI podcasters.

"It's like a dragon just swooped in and stole your expectations."

Apparently Telrhin has no unicorns.

This is an excerpt covering the monomyth of Serpent Earth and the premise of the world story.
 

The world is changing, writhing, cracking under the strain of time. Serpent Earth is waking, her many dreams fracturing as she uncoils. 

In the beginning the world was a scattered sky of different dreams, each one a world, born from the Womb and the Well of Dreams. Born from the sleeping minds of sleeping gods.

This is a short piece demonstrating the mundane magic of a fantasy world. In this case a temple in a major city, and the kind of things considered impressive but expected in a world of dragons, gods, and magic.

This is from some new work in the Field Guide to the Lowlands, in a section on Courts and Intrigue.

Very possible this was all influenced by too many games of this:

Lockdown gaming has driven us to this... pic.twitter.com/T7US1yTL5E

— The World of Telrhin (@Telrhin) June 9, 2020

In a world where the laws of science are mutable, and there's a palpable existence of good and evil, how do people define reality?

Each campaign can embrace its own direction for this, but the default worldview for most people is one of these.

The Gods Want You to Die (and other fun facts): in the end, every god wants you to die. They may promise health or safety, love or happiness, but what matters is your faith in them. That devotion binds your spirit to them and helps deliver your glow. It's ravenous and desperate and it drives the gods more than anything else. Without it they wither and die.

"...in the soft hum of people’s sleeping minds I’ll tell you more. I’ll tell you about the Nine Rulers of the Seven States, the Lost City, the Darig Kingdoms, and the forgotten past of the Venthi people. Because here in Brok Nine every dream has found its way, and with it every secret and every truth."

This is from the work I was doing on a second edition of Maelstrom Storytelling for Hubris Games back in 2006. I think it was Chapter Three with a note to call it "At the Storm's Edge".

The Pox Crain is a bar in the dusty streets of Dryer Mob. Steps lead down to the relative cool of a low vaulted cellar near the Ivory Souk in Southwarren. It smells of hookahs, fish oil from the small kitchen, and cabbage. Sounds of the souk drift in from the street above and mix with the conversations of old men playing tiles, washer women in the alley behind, and the talk of travelers, traders, and the occasional drunk.

To most people, that's all there is. But to some, the Pox Crain is a vexing series of half-seen pathways into the Veil, full of whispers and echoes of dreams, spirits and the dead.

Serpent Earth coiled herself to sleep after the Long Night in which all things came to be. The black sun Syr grew ever larger until it threatened to overcome the gold sun Hael. In time they struggled, as Serpent Earth slept on.

If there were such a thing as archaeologists they'd find remnants of forgotten gods as well as different interpretations of the current ones. There's Bachnel, the brother of Gahl who was god of night and dreams, and the Goat God of the Grasslands called Puknet. There are ancient Rayikian texts with references to Borgia goddess of seizures and possession. There are whole religions that are lost, like the Sanctum of the Four Winds.

A short stab at the world origin myth from the Lowlanders world view, which is one of many Westron variants of the Serpent Earth mythology.

Odom Tan is the 'great uncle', a folk figure who travels between the farms and towns, whose real identity as Tandim Ulgrasar is forgotten -- and unimportant -- to the rural Lowlanders.

Diagram of the Three Worlds: Prime (known world), the Embers, and the Listar (Spirit World). The Traum is its own reality, a greater embryo for the inception of the original Chimerums before the Diegesic Struggle and the Antedivisian world.

New region write-up for Rakshem: Khitagan and the Three Lands. This chunk of the world has been begging an overhaul to mark iv for a long time. Here's a teaser:

Image from Blackadder the Second

An excerpt from the culture sidebar for the citystate of Larakan:
 

This is the draft of the "jacket cover" text for a fiction project called either 'The Quartz Sea' or simply 'Indahi':

Last post mentions the de-elfing process, which led to a revisit of the world origins and the why/whats of it all:vthe diegesis.

The new vision rethinks the chain of events from the Dream to the Agon, which ushered in the Mythic World (Antedivisian) before the Fracture. From there it's the balancing act of the Ehtre: the struggle between the Course of Dreams and the Ascendancy.

As we rebuilt Telrhin a few years back, the impulse was a full embrace of nostalgia. The whole panache of beloved geek fantasy from our gaming years. We're living in the Old School Renaissance after all.

But there comes a time to de-elf the world. We may have re-invented everything top to bottom in Telrhin Mark IV, but the old names were still there, ripe with stereotypes and the stolen ideas of others before us. The backstory to the "older" races was re-imagined, history re-thought, origin myths re-invented.

Tavern Tales is an appendice to the Field Guide that sums up popular stories and legends, the kind of things you'd hear and know about if you spent time in the Lowlands. Faierie tales, parables, myths and the tale of an adventurer or two. This is the latest addition:

(from the Field Guide to the Lowlands)

From overhead the City sits perched on an outcrop of rock, thrust into the Valek and shorn from the Lowlands by the wetlands between them. The broken bridge says it all, and from above looks like a finger pointed toward land. The city is a sea of whitewashed stone, dotted with colorful doors and shutters and the tiles and slates of the rooftops.

This is a write-up of the story at the center of the world, the flavor and theme inside the structure. The Tale of the Ember Queens:

The Two Queens, first among the Old Ones (the Ethrings) and last vessels of the creation song. They are the soft silk of an ancient truth, a long thread of purpose in the tapestry of the world, shaped by the unfolding of years, the choices of man and the dreams of the Embrings as they slide into forgetfulness.

In their unfinished tale lie the secrets of the world.

The older incarnations of Telrhin were a rehash of the Tolkien story: once mighty civilizations, tarnished and diluted over time from change and the emergence of "man", battling an ancient evil in the form of the Black King, Talon.  There were gods and a cosmic struggle layered into this, and later in 'mark iii' the idea of a crossroads of fate emerged, determining the future paradigm.