Moribund Factions

Asthaomic Factions

The high Asthaom desert is no stranger to adversity. No being has escaped the touch of its Thousand-Year drought, an ecological cataclysm manufactured in prehistory through the abuse of its rivers and waterways. No being has escaped culpability for the drought, either. As its people learn to recover from a bloody history of war for water, so too does the desert learn to heal.

The scholars and diplomats of high Asthaom, the Lexarcs are a worldly bunch who have their fingers in many pots. (Too many, according to some.)

They operate out of the city of lights, Lin Dai, where they maintain the most extensive public library in the world. By all rights, the modern Lexarc is the face of true scientific curiosity. They honor the spirit of their namesake, saint Lex, who held a fierce desire to understand others— and the world around her— above all else.

But an unspoken sense of urgency and shame shadows the organization's pursuit of knowledge. Lexarcs are often called “Asthaom's apology to itself.” In many ways, they are.

100 years prior, a very different order of Lexarcs marched on Asthaom. They were pallbearers and archers, swordsmen and slingers who rallied under the hateful dogma of the false god Motu. Asthaom's only war culminated with the entire Lexarc order defecting from Motu's steel grip, leaving behind hundreds of ex-soldiers too wounded in mind and body to reconcile with the incalculable violence they had committed.

It was this wound that birthed the modern Lexarc. There was a great need for a body of science that made sense of how Asthaom got here, and how to prevent this from happening in the future. These ex-Lexarcs co-opted the order's name and radically changed its purpose, to prevent any remaining members of the old order from spreading Motu's sickness.

Today, Lin Dai leads the global theatre in research on anti-war policy. The world has never seen a major conflict since.

It's difficult to know where to begin with the Sentinels.

They are overwhelmingly ex-criminals, ranging from petty thieves to cold-blooded killers. They were once a de-facto militia, laying down their lives to protect their home during Asthaom's only war. They now preside over a vast subterranean city as social servants and elected officials. Each of these things is true, and none of them are considered to be contradictory by those they serve.

Perhaps because none of it is. The Sentinels are the result of what is considered to be the world's most successful and compassionate criminal justice system.

The average Sentinel is themself an ex-con, who takes on Asthaom's most grave offenders and mentors them through a holistic program of social service, mutual aid, and cultural renewal. In the process, nobody is left behind. Belonging within the ranks is so strong that few are willing to leave once they have been deemed fit to; many Sentinels go on to serve for the rest of their life.

The efficacy of this system is a global curiosity, which many nations have attempted to study and model. But even its veterans shrug when asked for the secret of their success. There's some things you simply can't explain to somebody who isn't a Sentinel.

Somewhere between a public works project and a church, the Temple is the physical and metaphysical backbone of the holy city Merike. Its parishioners follow in the footsteps of the god Koda, who— to this day— sacrifices her divine body to protect her people from a wrathful sea.

The Temple's constituents come from all walks of life. Few share the same reasons for being here, and fewer still observe the same religion as their neighbors. Likewise, many gods have come and gone through its canon, and it's mothered several of the major faiths in the high Asthaom desert.

But its parishioners do hold one thing in common. Whether they view it as a holy burden or a civic duty, each has a responsibility to the Stormbreak Quarter— the great wall held up by Koda herself, in the face of the tumultuous ocean black. Although the god has retreated from Merike's political sphere, the Temple remains the manager of the city's great Wall “on purely logistic grounds.”

With good reason. Should it fall, the city would be wiped off the face of the earth. It's no exaggeration to say that Koda and her faithful cradle the lives of uncountable thousands in their hands.

Basedti Factions

An eternal storm has isolated the city of Basedt from the outside world for 100 years and change. Inside the city's walls, time is normal, and life is good. But outside, there is no life, no death-- only a hateful ash tundra, a predatory woods, and the hellish space between.

Disaffectionately called the “Wall Watch” by those they are sworn to protect, members of the Stormwall are both saints and pariahs. They are tasked with maintaining a holy wall that shields the city of Basedt from an eternal storm, and the nightmarish world it created outside.

They are also the only individuals permitted to leave the city.

Some are called to serve the Stormwall out of this morbid attraction to the abyss, seeking freedom and answers from the long ash tundra. Others are dispossessed, desperate for the food and board provided by the Watch. Others yet have little else to live for. All are considered untouchables by the rest of the city.

For it's said that two funerals are held for a Watchman: the first on the day of their conscription, and the second two weeks past the date they're reported missing. Basedt is ill-equipped to understand the Watch, or the intense grief shared by its members. But camaraderie within the ranks is strong— and it's this sense of kinship that is, perhaps, the only thing standing between Basedt and the brink.

The Free Companies of the Ash Tundra are, by all rights, a Thing That Should Not Be. The ash tundra itself is a non-place, a hellish wasteland where men perish but do not truly die. The dead are cursed to rise as hungry ghosts, to pick and scratch at their vacuous bodies and feast on the flesh of the living.

So it's said, anyway.

The Free Companies are comprised exclusively of these ghosts— called Sauntiaq— and are the only organized community of such scale to roam the ash tundra. Their purpose is singular: to provide for one another in a world that refuses to. To this end, the Companies are saddled with the impossible task of finding and disseminating food in a world that supports no forage or game.

For all Sauntiaq are faced with a dire ultimatum: eat, or return to the deathless inertia from which they were born. Entombed in the snow as conscious prisoners of frozen bodies, who straddle the twain between life and death forever.

To understand the Manazthati, you must first understand that it is a deep well of grief and pain that causes them to do the bloody things they do.

100 years ago, the city of Basedt was plunged into an eternal storm. Their whole world was razed. The land was gutted like a fish with its entrails lain out before its body. Weeks of thunder and fire left behind a poisoned earth, forever isolated from the outside world by an impenetrable wall of storms.

No people could have been considered lucky in this cataclysm. But one small mercy survived: the holy walls of Basedt, which sheltered a remnant of the world that came before. Survivors gathered at the city and began to construct a sense of normalcy out of its old bones— stubbornly thriving in the face of this strange, cold world.

But the people outside of Basedt's walls have been given no such luxury. The long ash tundra is spiteful and supports no game, no food. Those who “die” out here are widely understood to exist in a state of false death; snared in the moment of their last breath, for all time.

The Manazthati are born from this— the blood spilled on the ice, the Sauntiaq starving in the snow, and the countless Watchmen who disappear without a trace. They consider this world to be so violent, so unspeakable that the only ethical decision is to finish what the storm started, those many years ago.

Doom-driven cultists of the very god that brought the sky crashing down, few things stand between the Manazthati and manufacturing the end of the world.

Mercasian Factions

The island of Mercasor rests in the middle of a wrathful ocean black. Hidden from the wretched ways of the world, it is either a very old or a very new addition to the global theatre, depending on who you ask. Still, no continent can hold a shadow to its strange and storied history.

Social servants based out of the city-state Normunt, the Justiciars are considered an oddity in the global theatre. They are one of few remaining civic orders that answers directly to a god— Io, the city's Chief Justice and beloved Grey Eminence.

Somewhere between lawyers, interpretive rangers, and social workers, a justiciar's day-to-day work is mostly public service: maintaining city infrastructure, serving as community liaisons, filing paperwork, mediating petty disputes, doing coffee runs, giving directions to tourists, and so on. This makes them the butt of a common Normie joke: “If your pipes burst, you could call a plumber and pay out of pocket... or you could call a justiciar, and put it on Io's tab.”

Most consider this to be a sign that they're doing their job right, though. There are more days when Normunt's courthouse stands empty than when it holds a hearing. Civic disputes are rare, and violent crime is almost unheard of.

In a city that considers such conflict to be a failing at every level of society, the Justiciars are a last resort: shouldering the courts as their most grave responsibility.

100 years ago, the world was plunged a thousand times into a thousand separate calamities. Each was removed from the other by geography and circumstance, but married by time. Concurrent and confluent, these events formed a wound so great that they spontaneously birthed magic into the world.

The Church was born in the aftermath, to shaky-handed mages that held holy everything touched by this cataclysm. This went on to become their North star, their founding tenant: all beings share a fragment of something greater than themselves, and magic is held as incontrovertible proof of this.

In truth, this guiding principle was an act of rebellion against the man-made gods that presided over the world before magic. But despite their contrarian roots, the Church made a fatal oversight. No parishioner could have foreseen the false prophet climbing through their ranks, co-opting their influence for much darker purposes.