Follow a saltshrike’s flight across Oon: over the lithium nets of the Circle Sea; the rim ports strung with copper; the vast glossy sheen of the Fens; the Vohrvex, deep and dark, edged with the rising smoke of the oil derricks; the sudden uplift of the Seize, mining towns among twisted geology; and beyond, the Boneplains, the rusting skeletons of an ancient empire. Above, day and night, passes the Ring: a glittering slow river of glass and stone which was, a very long time ago, something else.
Five cultures live beneath it:
- Saltfolk - argumentative merchants and utopian inventors, thriving and tinkering where magic does not reach.
- Seizefolk - terse highland miners and master gunsmiths, whose ancient religion practises, without understanding, in Opening-Shift Litanies and Rites of the Annual Audit.
- Forestfolk - peaceful forest-dwellers, keepers of dreamsap, who speak with the mycelial guardians of the deep woods.
- Bonefolk - proud scholars and translators whose only inheritance is a dead engineering empire, dreaming of climbing the towers in the sky.
- Fenfolk - gregarious rice-growers in drifting villages, amphibious and unhurried, with a keen ear for the gossip of the world.
Between them all wanders the Wheeled Court, its cartomancers and outlaws, and its poet king Sol Vermet, who is looking, without ever remembering why, for a lost city called Spire.
A new crisis has come to the old cultures. The deep black oil of the old world is rising, pressing into the minds of industrialists, killing forests, poisoning fens, promising wonderful new worlds. What does it want? What does it have to do with the Vohrvex, with the Ring, with Spire? Who was old King Vermet, once upon a time? And what is this hum you can hear, on a very quiet night, when even the wind dies down?
Who will you be, traveller in this strange world?
- The Arcanist - practical philosopher, experimental magician, alchemist, methodically mutating yourself into something new.
- The Mystic - listener and witness of the flow of time, reader of the moment before it happens, already always where you are most needed.
- The Shifter - rogue, charmer, sideways problem-solver, slipping into an animal form when human is the wrong shape for the situation at hand.
- The Vessel - a conduit for a force you barely understand, a speaker with the gods and the forest and the dead, slowly losing your agency to the source of your power.
- The Warrior - a whirlwind of focus, mastery, and violence, shaped by a dangerous world for deeds worthy of song.
The traditional class breakdown is, roughly:
- Arcanist: Wizard
- Mystic: Monk/Bard
- Shifter: Rogue with Animal Shape
- Vessel: Warlock/Cleric
- Warrior: Fighter/Paladin/Ranger/Barbaria