Scholar Notes

The Empire’s laws are mandated by the Empress herself, a series of Imperial decrees known as Imperial Common Law. These decrees constitute a simple bill of rights for all Imperial citizens, ensuring basic rights such as the right to a fair trial and a total ban on slavery. The Confederated Kingdoms may have their own local laws regarding trade, taxation and other more material matters, but Imperial Law overrides all others, often to the chagrin of their rulers.

The League of Free Peoples and Nations encompass a large range of nations and kingdoms. Though most maintain soft borders in accord with the ties that bind the League together, some maintain firm and competing territorial claims, and grudges as old or older than the League itself can cause conflict between different peoples. Border skirmishes and outright war are common, and the balance of power can shift quickly.

The Dreadhorde include some of the few people that can be considered “native” to the Wargrounds, insofar as any mortal folk can belong to such a place. Among them are shamans and cabalists who can read the currents and eddies of the wild magic that rules there and find the safest places to make camp in the endless magical roil.

The capital of the Empire is High Imperia, located on Arebnak’s eastern coast. It is there that the Empire’s many colleges, guilds, and labour unions will usually house their main offices, clustering close around the Imperial Palace where the Empress resides. The Empress only rarely makes public appearances, and an Imperial citizen will be lucky to hear of her appearing before her subjects once in a generation

Though the League of Free Peoples has no single, centralized capital, the city of Great Terkissa is considered by many to be the de facto seat of power, as an important trade hub and the place where the tenets and rules of the League were laid down and written into law. Placed on Terkissa Bay off the Sea of Ink, ships from the Endless Isles and even from the Empire itself enter its ports to trade for exotic goods.

Cults, iconoclastic orders, and particularly brutal and cutthroat mercenaries regularly find themselves drawn into the Wargrounds. Driven out of their home nations, these renegades have nowhere else to go but the chaotic and inhospitable lands, and whether through dark pacts, pragmatic cunning, or or simply being cowed into submission by greater powers. That these groups form into one dreadful whole seems to be a fact of the Wargrounds, and they make up the horde portion of the Dreadhorde.

For the time being, the Empire and the League exist in a state of fragile peace that some might more accurately call a stalemate. Over the past thousand years, both sides have incurred into the other’s borders to annex territory and settle accounts of blood and honour. However, as the Wargrounds goes through ebbs and flows of power and chaos, bottlenecks have formed to the north and south, making mobilizing armies increasingly difficult. Instead, the great powers have turned their attentions to the Wargrounds itself and the opportunities to seize power it offers in the form of ancient magics and technology. To this end, small bands of warriors are commissioned to sally forth into the Wargrounds on expeditions to recover these treasures and prevent their enemies from doing the same.

The dead do not rest easily in the Wargrounds. Wild magics may compel the dead to rise, both spectral and corporeal, creating roaming throngs of zombies and wailing hosts of spectres. Necromancers can exploit these energies and raise undead minions of their own. These same energies make the fallen slow to fully die, spirits lingering within dead flesh. Skilled healers and thaumaturges can restore what would usually be lethal injuries, pulling their allies back from Death’s threshold.

To enforce Imperial law and settle civil disputes, High Imperia maintains a College of the Laws, where experts in law both Imperial and local are trained and given the authority to pass verdicts on any Imperial citizen. These Magistrates travel the length and breadth of the Empire and assist in settling local disputes. They have a reputation for being strict at best and draconian at worst, delivering harsh verdicts and serving as judge, jury, and, when necessary, executioner.

The nations of the Free Peoples are free to enforce whatever border law they desire under the terms of the Pact, and travel from one place to another is common. However, unlike the Empire, the Free Peoples lack a single, unified currency. Barter is common, as is using Imperial coinage as a de-facto currency, but a merchant in the League will often carry a wide variety of coins and know their value in gold down to the hundredweight.

The Empire maintains a standing army of soldiers under the Empress’ own banner, recruited from its many provinces. For every soldier a member nation raises for their own muster, one must be sent to High Imperia to join the Imperial Legions. Regiments are deliberately made of soldiers from across the Empire with different cultures and languages. To overcome these differences, Imperial soldiers are subject to strict tenets of discipline and taught a new shared language, Soldatencant

The League of Free Peoples is unified under the rules of an ancient Pact, sworn by its members millennia ago. The tenets of this pact are carved onto menhirs across the landscape in an ancient and nearly forgotten runic script. When a member nation of the League breaks faith with the Pact, the runes upon menhirs throughout its land glow ominously, and ill fortune begins to afflict its people with disease and famine. When a fellow member of the League is threatened, the menhirs light up like beacons, guiding the League’s armies to where they are needed. These standing stones are maintained by orders of stonemasons and historians who keep preserve the secrets of the League’s founding days.

Within the Dreadhorde, the overall leader of a given group of outcasts and barbarians is usually referred to as the Dreadlord. Though there have been many Dreadlords and often there are more than one, each Dreadlord considers themselves to be The Dreadlord, pre-eminent among all others, and assume total and brutal control over their followers, leading them on vision quests through the Wargrounds, driven by their delusions of grandeur and dark desire for bloodshed and violence.

For the warbands that enter and adventure within the Wargrounds, standard coinage carries little value. Instead, they trade in Marx, a catch-all term used for a variety of coins found within the Wargrounds itself, infused with magical energy . These coins take many shapes and sizes but all carry a similar magical aura that makes them singularly desirable across Arebnak for use in magecraft and industry. Most have been worn down to smooth metal slugs by the passing of strange aeons, while rarer examples may bare the faces of long dead monarchs, words in forgotten languages, and other, stranger images.

Cults and esoteric orders devoted to dark gods proliferate across Arebnak, forming and gathering in isolated places in the wilderness or in secretive corners of its cities. When these iconoclasts are discovered and their hunters fail to fully to destroy them, these cultists will often flee into the Wargrounds, seeking cover within the chaotic deluge of magical energy. The bloody practices and sacrifices of these fanatics can often have a profound effect on the eddies of sorcerous power of the Wargrounds, which gives some the delusion that they can control them, or are otherwise chosen by their patron for greater things.

Throughout the Empire, trade is conducted using a single, standardized currency: The Imperial Talent. Essentially a small rod of electrum, Imperial Talents are marked with the seal of the Empress and enchanted to be unmeltable and unbreakable except by an Imperial Banker (or a skilled and unscrupulous mage). Being so valuable and therefore impractical to use, most day to day trading in the Empire is done in Imperial Scrip, promissory notes issued through the banks promising the holder the written value in Talents, usually in the thousandths.

One of the more virulent and repellent phenomena to emerge from the Wargrounds are the Whispering Oaks, mutated trees with bark that splits apart to play host to sap-drooling maws. These numerous mouths gibber and murmur, babbling out false prophecies and demented untruth in harsh, guttural whispers, lending the arboreal abominations their name. These barely-audible ravings can ensnare the minds of the unwary and foolish, causing them to stand before the tree and listen for days on end until they eventually die and are quickly grown over by the tree’s roots, nourishing it and adding another mouth to the idiot chorus.

Arebnak plays host at times to divine forces, manifesting as demons and angels. Their forms are numerous and varied, and at times the distinction between the two is largely academic. Indeed the arrival of an angel spells doom for a town, city, or even whole country just as the arrival of a demon does. Whether these powerful magical beings are truly avatars of the gods is also a matter for debate; though many match the descriptions found in religions across the continent, others defy description, and worshippers can be punished or rewarded as accorded by their inscrutable whims.

The Empire permits freedom of religion for its subjects and many different faiths and demi-cults proliferate under its auspices. However, the largest and most widespread is worship of the Empress herself as a physical god, her rule divine. Empress worship goes by many names and takes many forms, whether she is worshipped as a god alone or incorporated into an existing folk pantheon as the new chief deity. The Empress has been declared the wife of so many ruling gods and goddesses that the collective pantheon is known as the Divine Consorts, taken as proof by the faithful that Empress’ rule extends beyond the physical and into the heavens and afterlives

The western side of Arebnak consists of vast, untouched hinterlands and wilderness. Few roads link the many nations and countries of the League of Free Peoples, and many isolated areas are the homes of communities small and large that know little of organised rule. Brigand troupes, nomadic clans, esoteric religious orders, and many more make their homes here, acknowledging no rulers. As dwellers of the League, however, they too are bound by the Pact, and may emerge from the wilderness to plunder the Wargrounds when they have the need.

There are many orders of mystics and sages throughout Arebnak, dispensing esoteric lore and wisdom both true and dubious. Among the most well known if not most common are the Order of Spore Seers. These seekers of truth collect various strains of fungus, mould, and mushroom, consuming hallucinogens to divine the future and brewing potions of incredible power and effect. Some even host fungi upon their own bodies, sustaining mycelial growths and fruiting caps with their own life force. Though their future sight may be blurry at best, their knowledge of alchemy is unmatched across the lands.

The history of Arebnak is fragmented and scattered at best. There are several different calendars, origin myths, and accounts of ancient days that mix history and legend into a blurry histiographical mess. While many are content with their local and biased reckonings, groups of historians and archivists exist that desire to sort out the true past of the continent. The Conclave of Librarians is one of the most widespread and well known, travelling scholars that offer access to their mobile repositories of knowledge in exchange for information of any kind from their visitors. Eclectic in the extreme, these compilations are often apocryphal, and a lifetime of sifting through fact and fiction leaves most of these Scholars eccentric, at best

Officially, there is no peace across Arebnak. The Empire and the League have never formally declared an end to their ongoing war, with the Empire continuing to assert the Empress’ claim to the western portion of the continent and the League acknowledging no right of conquest. However, for nearly a century, the two powers have been in a state of stalemate with limited open military action. Trade, at first cautious, is now conducted openly between member states of both factions. Each side commits greater and greater resources to plundering the Wargrounds in search of some kind of military edge that will finally tip the scales and allow the war to resume in their favour.

Civil war has plagued the Empire for much of its existence. The loose but bureaucratic structure of the Confederation puts a lot of friction upon the moving parts. Neighbouring states, with the only other choice being long, slow, officially overseen diplomatic procedures, will often turn to open warfare with one another. The same is often true for the League of Free Peoples, where disagreements may erupt into outright conflict even with the guiding principles of the Pact. Mercenary companies do a roaring trade, from small brigand outfits of under a hundred men hired by low level aristocrats to large, professional regiments of trained and drilled soldiery in the employ of monarchs. When the war business is slow, many mercenary crews test their mettle and seek fortune in the Wargrounds, maintaining their reputations and keeping their skills sharp.

The Wargrounds are dotted with ruins of all kinds, which emerge from the tumultuous landscape as if they had always been there, only to vanish back into the roil after a month, a week, a day or even mere moments. Abandoned hamlets, entire cities bearing the marks of destruction, and particularly the crumbling remains of forts, castles, and bastions dot the land and inevitably attract the interest of warbands within the Wargrounds. The more intact forts are used as temporary bases by expeditions and are sometimes subject to sieges by other groups hoping to winnow out the competition for their own purposes.