This page details some concise answers to story questions.
This section describes particular elements in the story of Olori.
"The world of Olori is ever-shifting"? That's metaphorical, right?
No. The world is an active physical threat.
Without a beacon to keep the ground under you stable - paralysed, really - Olori will crumble beneath your feet, turning into two cliff faces, crushing your bones into splinters, and dissolving into sand. It will form pits of acid to swallow you into a subterranean vat of boiling lava. It will conjure diseased trees to knock over boulders that roll down vast, smooth ramps, colliding with you and vaulting your ragdoll body far through the air.
Every minute, the path back changes. Without a seer who knows the path-beyond-sight, an adventurer will be lost, for no landmark lives any great length of time; and a lost adventurer, whose beacon and breath runs out, is a dead adventurer.
What can a character do with the breath of Olori?
The breath of Olori is a valuable material, especially relative to its size and weight.
The Guilds use the breath of Olori when enchanting equipment, while citizens use gold as representations of wealth.
Gold and breath of Olori are treated identically for adventurers when interacting with the Guilds for the purpose of purchasing equipment. Though breath is itself lighter than gold, an adventurer will usually carefully store it in a light mantle, albeit not so light as a few coins.
What are the beacons?
The term "beacon" is usually used to refer to the soul-fires themselves (technically the true source of the beacon's effects), as well as the great towers on which they sit.
Beacons (more precisely, the soul-fires of the beacons) are fuelled by the breath of Olori and tended to by the invokers of the Guilds. While powered, they stabilise the ground around them. In effect, this makes cities internally stable relative to other parts of the city, but doesn't prevent a city from drifting like a raft on the sea.
Beacons are also the generators of food, drink, medicine, and other material goods. Invokers tend to the soul-fires, deciding what products come out and what breath remains unspent.
What are the Guilds?
A Guild can be any organisation in a city responsible for the keeping of at least one beacon. They take a variety of forms and can differ between cities to a large extent; some are controlled by the city-state, others are highly capitalist, yet more are tended by religious societies...
Who are the invokers?
The invokers are sorcerer-savants, incapable of true sorcery - the intuitive invocation of magical rituals - but with an intense familiarity with the behaviour of the world of Olori. Invokers are at times thought to resemble druids, due to this connection with Olori - but rather than working with nature, they apply their perfect knowledge toward its subjugation. They purify the dark breath of Olori with their power, and then burn it away to protect their city.
Only a human can become an invoker, for their short lives are burnt away as fast as the essence of Olori. This kinship with their work amplifies their power; longer-lived races are only a tiny fraction as effective, and few Guilds accept any. Human invokers generally begin their work at age 15.
Who are the seers?
The seers are the most exceptional of invokers. Not only familiar with the behaviour of the breath of Olori, their perspective has become broader, and they can also see the shifts in Olori itself. They see the movement of terrains and the birth of nearby arteries of Olori. They predict the onslaughts of Olori's vile curses, for they can feel the breath of Olori, hot and foetid, with which come its vile minions on their missions to propagate hatred.
Seers are remarkable, yet not an uncommon sight. An invoker generally ascends to seer status after about 15 years through practice and expertise. Few invokers are seers off the bat, and few of those who die of natural causes had never become seers.
What are the arteries of Olori?
The arteries of Olori are the sunken temples, the black keeps, the subterranean labyrinths, the foetid caves that Olori spits up to the surface from its depths. The arteries of Olori bleed out life onto the landscape around it, spreading the plague of its monsters to our cities. They hold the alveoli of Olori, the life-giving deathwishes that Olori builds in the vain hope of destroying us.
What are the alveoli of Olori?
The alveoli of Olori are those containers of the breath of Olori - unholy pools of blood, symbols of death and pain, ragged ancient tapestries, statues of law and chaos - which Olori generates and places in its arteries. They are both the direct source of those that attack us and the sole source of the only thing which keeps us alive.
What is the breath of Olori?
It is all we need to survive.
This section talks about a bit of the larger scale things about Olori. This happens to usually still be pretty small.
How does the economy of the cities work?
Adventurers are responsible for feeding and sheltering the citizens, for they are the source of the breath of Olori. The Guilds and members of the Guilds share in this responsibility, for they use that malleable material in order to craft the end products necessary for the city's function.
The citizens work using the tools produced by the invokers to maintain, improve, and expand the city, as well as to train their militia and, as the militia, assist in the defence of the city. They produce adventurers and military strength, as well as the necessary residential and logistical structure to sustain the manufacturing might of the Guilds and adventurers.
How does inter-city diplomacy work?
Many parts of Olori maintain little contact with other cities; it's hard to keep a relationship when physical distance and direction is ephemeral knowledge.
This section describes how to put the Radiant Planet to use in a home game.
How do I run a game in Olori?
Olori is exactly what you make of it: The core concept at its outset was to justify the "murderhobo" trope - that being, that since XP and gold are the only reward schemes in one of the most common gaming systems, and things like "home" and "marriage" contribute toward neither, most PCs just run around killing things and taking their stuff. (This is in contrast to the typical manner of resolution: Make the PCs not murderhobos, e.g. by changing gold or at least XP.)
So, in essence, a perfectly fine Olori game is to say "Your Guild, Arbitrary Guild Name, equipped you and sent you out to the Bone Forest. You have to kill things and take their stuff." A dungeon crawl, in essence (but now you're helping!). Indeed, the setting is heavily inclined toward dungeon crawls - though only a system can make them fun, and it's important to choose the correct system for one's needs.
However, a lot of Olori - in a metaphorical sense - is buried. (In the literal sense, too; the dungeons are buried...) The Cities, the Guilds, and the idea of the breath itself are all full of mystery: Why does the burning of the breath produce goods? Why must the Guilds back invokers? From whence does the breath come? What lies, buried far in the depths under the surface of Olori itself?
And so Olori is a setting which is actually more adaptable, not less. Indeed, there is not as much canonical material, but this allows a group to import whatever layers of interpretation one desires: Many times, a player might wonder what gods there are; this simplifies the mystery: "Use the realms of afterlife from our favourite setting." And so the question is fully settled with a single answer.
OK, but what happens? (What thematics should I use?)
Like I said, a game can be whatever one wants. Dark with rampant death and destruction? Sure. Intrigue, subversion of a City or its neighbours? Whatever. Lighthearted murderhobo abstraction? I won't judge; like I said, that's one of the points of it all. Lovecraftian exploration of What Lies Beneath? Okay, I guess, but make sure you're using the right gaming system if you want a good mechanical support to the story. Save the world? Awesome. I'm glad I could help.
The only constant, in Olori, is the transient nature of life. Olori is a harsh, radiant planet; things are built, and things fall - but this applies not just to Cities, but also to their inhabitants, and to their adventurers. Death is not trivial - but it is common. The City only lives because its adventurers passionately live and zealously die for it; a City That Was may only thrive when its members work, and in Olori, to work means to die.
Failure means the City shrinks. Failure means people - the poor, living at the perilous outskirts - die.
Life isn't as important, here, because things end, and often.
It's how we survive.
What Guilds are there? (How do I make a Guild?)
There aren't any "standard" Guilds.
This isn't like Wizard's Ravnica, where there's a set canon. Not only are there no canonical Guilds, but there are no canonical Cities: You have to make your (very lightweight; maybe 15 minutes' prep - there are a lot of resources for building an outline like this) campaign yourself.
That's not to say you can't use some that are pre-built for you, I guess. There's might be a place for that...
A GM-invite-only kind of place.
These are important questions from a bit of a metagame perspective that don't really fit into other categories.
What about high level casters? What about Teleportation Circles? What about Create Demiplane? What about Miracle? What-
They don't exist. Refer to Epic 6th for one example on how to implement this limitation.
Didn't you just rip off [redacted]?
There's a particular video game I keep being asked about. I have never played the game in question, and no part of the setting was directly or intentionally based on any part of any video game.