See also: Olori FAQ. The breath of Olori. For GMs: GM Guide.
The world of Olori is ever-shifting. The planet rumbles a greedy rumble; the earth quakes, avalanches consume, sands shift across its face, consuming old terrain and turning over new. The world echoes with the scars of ancient battles of magic long since buried, its very being tearing itself apart to reveal itself anew. The world of Olori molts, its cities living on the breath of its death throes.
The people of Olori are alone. Citizens of independent city-states live lives sequestered away from those of others, drifting on temporarily-stable blocks of land, their city limits all they have to call their own. With arable land a tale of the history before history, only the varied Guilds can keep the people fed. With the constant onslaught of the unnatural creations Olori belches forth - the assail of undead ghouls, packs of monstrous dire wolves, and hundreds more - they struggle to even keep their cities safe.
The heroes of Olori are the only thing keeping the world aloft. Adventuring into such as hot deserts; pallid swamps; vast mountain ranges; wild savannahs; infected, chitinous plains; cancerous, bloated valleys; bleeding, ragged forests of hearts and veins and bark, beating blood and sap through tortured wood-flesh - the heroes of Olori are known to venture into wicked terrains and return safely, with their spoils safely in hand.
The essence of Olori, life of the world and its people, is pumped out through the same veins that spit out its black curses on its inhabitants. Networked out into fallen temples of the swamps, black sandstone keeps of the desert, and haywire towers of maddened forest-dwelling sorcerers, adventurers seek out the central altars, bleeding crystals, and perfect hemispheres which contain the essence of the world that their people so desperately need.
The seers of Olori tell the fortune of each crumble of their world. They look to the winds and speak perfectly true words about their source, and when that source will find its way past. They tell how the essence of Olori manifests; whether there are crystals which require a simple plucking from their hovering shell, or an altar which requires the dedicated channelling of an invoker of Olori, or that the essence is itself in the vengeful monsters of the temple or keep or other artery of Olori.
The invokers of Olori draw and handle the breath of the world from its alveoli. Dedicated to their craft of tending the soul-flames of the beacons of the Cities That Were, they lack true magic - but no wizard can pull forth the essence of Olori from her evil, malignant altars, nor can they stoke the burning flames which keep Olori's curse away.
The cities of Olori are known as the Cities That Were, for they continually crumble and they have long lost the magnificence of the ancestral homes of the people of Olori. Overlooking the vast, lifeless expanses which surround everything, they shift but are not overcome, for the soul-flames of the beacons keep their borders intact and repel the darkness of Olori from their midst.
This work is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Authored by J.R. White.
See also: Olori FAQ. The breath of Olori.
See also for GMs: GM Guide