The year is 9984 AD (After Deluge). The clock reads two minutes to midnight. The guns of the Western Phalanx and the Symbiocombinist Intermarium bristle
at one another across the steaming gulf of the Mesonesian Sea. Serried
rows of Azimuti cataphracts crowd the hardstand of staging grounds and
forward operating bases on the Damascene-Orthox border, waiting for the
call to action - Radic ekranoplans churn up milky spindrift contrails as
they carve up the blue waters in endless military exercises,
noctilucent cores ticking away in their sleek ceramometallic bellies.
Proxy wars in Cthonia, terrorist actionism in the Argolith, coups and
color revolutions in the Aeonics, endless political violence in the
Interdark—all the armaments of this bloody hundredth century lie poised
to go off, annihilating the known world in an orgy of noctilucent
destruction. How did we get here?
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| The Big Fucking Mappe |
The Short War & the Long War
The current international order was forged in the crucible of the Solar War
of 9923-9944, sometimes referred to as the Panpelagic Conflict in stuffy academic texts, which saw the last of the Sun Kings fall after
four-hundred years of divine righteous kingship. The four initial
antagonists were Great Azimut and the Crown Entente powers of the Grand Principality of Ormillión, the Divine Sybilline Empire, and the Oblas Mandate.
The former represented the waxing power of bourgeois æquital fructism,
the latter three the waning strength of the old solar monarchies.
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| The flags of the initial Solar War combatants - Azimut, Ormillión, Sybilline, Oblas |
Over the twenty-year course, these alliances were tested, reorganized, calcified, and broken. The Radical Revolution of '27 tore open a new front as the fructists and coronists alike fought to stamp out the dual scourge of combinism and symbionism and retake their maritime colonies from the Free Radas; Sybilline underwent a fructist-democratic reform and shifted loyalties, forming the nucleus of the Western Phalanx; Ormillión's spine was broken in the three-day Battle of Ballistree, the largest and most costly cataphract battle in history which saw the Ormilláis chivalric class ultimately decimated at the hands of the endless waves of Azimuti conscript-catanachs. Ultimately, the two great victors of the battle were capital and international symbiocombinism—after the Unconquerable Sun had been bombed out of Oblast airspace and the noctilucent blackout had settled, a bipolar world had emerged, split between the old superpower of Great Azimut and the rising new beast of the Free Radas.
It might fill you with foreboding to know that this twenty-year convulsion is colloquially referred to as "the Short War."
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| Azimuti & Radic flags |
Fructism is broadly what we would understand as "capitalism," the mode of production associated with the dominance of the commodity-form, the transfer of surplus labor-value from the proletariat to the bourgeois capitalist class via the mechanism of commodified wage labor, &c. It derives its name from the principle of
fructus, one of the three rights constituting private ownership of property (this is real, go look it up), and was first coined by æquite philosopher and economist
Balane Nouvelle, writing under the pen-name
Adam Cadmon in the declining age of the Orthosybilline Empire. It was adopted most eagerly in the lands that would become Great Azimut, where a weak aristocracy and swelling class of æquite burghers took up the torch of free commerce and splintered the thousand-year empire in the War of Continental Independence.
Symbiocombinism is a portmanteau of symbionism and combinism, two major antifructist Shakyist ideologies which have somehow managed to not explode into pointless and cataclysmic infighting (this is the most idealistic element of the setting by far).
- Symbionism broadly constitutes the "peasant movement," an agrarian revolutionary ideology based on land reform, environmentalism, and maintaining traditional treaty obligations to the spirits of the land. It's something like Maoism, something like Georgism, something like animism.
- Combinism broadly constitutes the "proletarian movement," an industrial revolutionary ideology based on workplace democracy, vanguardism, and forge-cultism; the name comes from the famous, doomed Navis Combine. These guys are kind of like fairly orthodox Marxist-Leninists if Bukharin had won the post-Lenin power struggle—you might also compare the dominant strain to Dengism.
Along with militant antifructism, the main thing that unites these two philosophies is a shared intellectual tradition; both have their roots in the socioalchemical writings of 99th-century concretic philosopher
Shakya bint Petram, whose landmark treatise on the fructist mode of production,
The Book of the Tree of Life and Death, formed the basis of all later Shakyan political economics and also ushered in a concretic methodological revolution in the field of socioalchemy. Her work, in turn, was based on the New Law movement of the early 99th century, and the late 98th-century works of Isambard de Jing.
These two clashing ideologies form the opposing poles of the postbellum world, the dynamo for the forty-year arrested conflict known as the "Long War."
The Shape of the World
It's like this:
It's a hexagonal plate. Azimut, the Radas, the Sun Kings - this is all the upper world, the world of blue sea and blue sky, with a hot sun and hemmed in by ice-walls. There's a whole other land on the underside, past the separating layer of the Interdark, referred to as Cthonia by the topsiders—this land has a gelid shadowcasting antisun, a blazing firewall at its borders, and a flat white daytime sky. Gravity "flips" at the median line, at the dead center of the Interdark. Above the Sun and below the Anti-Sun are "Heaven" and "Hell," inhabited by modron-angels and slaad-devils, respectively. Around the suns, created by their corkscrewing ontoaetheric emanations, are the gyres, which keep things whirling ever round. Finally, at the very top and bottom of the world are the star-studded black firmament and white atrament; nobody knows all that much about them, since the stars shoot lasers at anything that gets too close.
Modern science is now acutely aware that the hex is only a small part of the larger world - gyronautic probes have observed an fathomless tesselated honeycomb-grid of hexes beyond the wall. Extramural exploration is still in its infancy—building a vessel capable of escaping the vortex of the gyres is inordinately difficult and expensive, and tunneling through the walls comes with its own host of hazards.
In theory, you could "escape" the hex via the Interdark, which is open on the sides—indeed, many creatures have—but this is no less hazardous. Many of the most dangerous creatures and intelligences of the universe are drawn to dwell in this no-man's-land, supping on the enormous ergogradient that transfers heat from the cold icewalls to the burning firewall. This is the kind of place where the average wandering encounter HD is, like, 15.
Great Azimut
The wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. Something like America by way of France by way of bubble-era Japan. She was born in the harsh Orthosybilline hinterlands during the War of Continental Independence in 9706 AD, and it was her gallowglasses that saw the Emperor executed by scaphism and the Winter Sun permanently extinguished. She emerged from the Solar War triumphant and hungry, having lost her overseas colonies but gained massive swathes of the wealthy, temperate Eostrelands from Ormillíon.
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| Incomplete land of Great Azimut, exclusing the Antemuralian Territory. Cities, roads, etc... not exhaustively filled in. |
Her capital is rainy Navis, where the President and the Sidereal Assembly sit; her largest city is the ex-Ormilláis capital of Réalta, something which causes the Navigates (the demonym for Navis-dwellers) no shortage of ill-feelings. So total was her defeat of her erstwhile neighbor that the Ormilláis monarchy resides in Réalta instead of the diminished Oestrelands rump-state, enthroned within the prison-palace at the mouth of the Peregrin River, kept alive solely to keep the Midnight Sun burning over the City That Never Sleeps. Other major world cities within her borders include Les Séraphins, Ballistree, Sanktierre, and Kuronevre.
Azimut is the de-facto leader of the Western Phalanx (WestPhal), a NATO-esque collective defense organization comprised of signatories to the Treaty of Sankt-Guianne. Major signatories include: Jenieve, Ysja, Damaskos, Rûnya, the Argolith, Sybilline, Karsht, Altioc, Kyrn, Niban, Bisr (Republic of), Uncari, Vipasse, Hith, Eblis, Deme, Vraso, Iqiru, Hazido, Yrn, and South Nyava.
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| Rough map of allegiances - WestPhal in green, Intermarium in orange. |
As an economic power, many of the world's most powerful corporations and commensalities are headquartered in Azimut, including Black Snow, the public-private contractor that serves as the Azimuti intelligence service, having won a state-issued monopoly in the Contract Wars after the infamous "Bloody Boardroom" massacres in the Ventôse of '63. As a cultural power, much of the world's music, film, theater, and drugs flow from within its borders. As a military power, she boasts the most well-trained and well-funded cataphract corps in the world, is heavily invested in the intermediate-range missile leg of the noctilucent triangle, and is behind cutting-edge experiments into applied fulminance, dracoweapons, and translocative magecraft, thanks to her large strategic reserves of red mercury.
Angels & Demons
It is necessary to note that "angel" and "demon" are (topsider) human appellations - the preferred internal nomenclature is Modron and Slaad. The Cthonians refer to them as "daevas" and "asuras," and have a generally pessimistic approach to the moral quality of the whole lot of them.
The Modrons are geometric mechanical beings who claim to have been constructed from prima materia by the godhead itself. They reside within an icosahedral megastructure hovering in the eye of the gyres above the Sun, and descend to the Earth for missions of varying scrutability.
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| Behold: a Planetar |
These range in body-plan from small cylindrical courierforms to octahedral aetherocrystalline Planetar warforms which route beams of furious plasma through transdimensional conduits to the heart of the sun to cubic seraphs with thrusters inset in each face to massive Dyson-spheroid Solars studded with esoteric theotechnological immanentizer devices. The Modron were those who handed down the divine right of kings to the solar monarchies, who kindled five new suns and granted them to five human kingdoms to shine evermore on their domains so long as their dynasty yet sat the throne. They are still fairly pissed about the development of æquitism, and will routinely beam intrusive techno-coronist thoughts into random peoples' brains in the hope that one of them will become ardentized and commit a terrorist bombing.
The slaad are anurid creatures who are awfully cagey about their origins. They live in exile beneath the gelid antisun and are consummate shapers of flesh and bone—though, ironically, they are completely unable to alter the ugliness of their own forms. They hatch broods from their back, squirt pressurized beams of boiling alkahest from their eyes, and tempt mortals to sin for their own amusement.
The Modron and the Slaad have an ancient rivalry of cataclysmic proportions. The scars of their antediluvian battles are literally carved into the shape of the world. Their turboweapons remain buried in sunken vaults. Their one joint project, the
protomen, are the cause of all there is to come.
Magique
Magic is divided into two categories - Gnostic and Occult. Gnostic magic is the coherent realm of gramarye and goety, the sorceries that are broadly compatible with a rational-scientific epistemology. Occult magic literally runs on secrecy—the fewer people know a particular spell or working, the more powerful it becomes. The former is taught in academies and madrassas, the latter is the subject of conspiracy theories.
Both branches of magic have a defined Goal, in the same way that alchemists have the general goal of attaining the Magnum Opus.
- Gnostics seek, naturally, Gnosis—they believe that, would someone attain perfect knowledge of all phenomena, they would also have perfect understanding of all sensuous quality attached to existence, in essence attaining the subjective perspective of God and allowing for Henosis: unity with the godhead.
- Occultists seek the total erasure of the perceiving self, essentially attempting to turn themselves into philosophical liches—if awareness interferes with the occult, then the greatest occultist of all must not even be aware of her own spells as she casts them.
The Four Fuels
Modern day alchemy has identified four major fuel sources:
- Black naphtha, which has the property of combustion - this works more or less exactly the way gasoline works in our world, and is of similar extraction.
- White powder, which is cooked up from a mixture of phosphor and saltpeter and has the property of fusillance. When ignited, white powder goes up in a small green-white flash and a big bang of pure kinetic force. White powder is the dominant fusillant used in thunderarms and bombs; white powder guns have minimal muzzle flashes (mostly a blur of displaced air) but extremely loud reports. While muzzle heating is not a major limiter on fire rate, vibratory resonance can shake guns and bones to pieces if allowed to build up unchecked. Also, since this is the 80s, it can of course be snorted for a wicked high.
- Yellow gold, which has the property of noctilucence. When refined into heavy gold and subjected to N-ray bombardment, gold is debased into depleted gold (or "pyrite," in proper scientific parlance) and releases enormous quantities of noctilucent energy. A noctilucent detonation looks like an immense gold-white flash, like firelight glinting off a coin magnified to unimaginable proportions. As the blast subsides it gradually tarnishes into that purple-green-white-blue-pink octarine color you see when you press on your closed eyelids, except it's not an artefact of vision damage, it's the world that sees it that way. Finally, the octarine fades away leaving dense clouds of fuligin blackout, which disperse according to wind, blanketing the land in darkness and making the nights longer, the days colder, the shadows deeper, and the faces of strangers subtly more menacing.
- Red mercury, which has the property of fulminance. When correctly triggered, red mercury erupts into jagged-edged arcs and filaments of bloodred lightning that leave behind splinters and faults in space as they flicker in and out of existence. These discharges are enormously energetic, and degrade the fabric of the local metric as the redout builds up. This is the rarest and most potent of fuels, only used in cutting-edge technology and weapons research, and the most powerful of sorcerous rites.
I'm Getting Bored of Writing
I'll post another one of these sometime. I have no idea how to write a fucking settingpost—this is deeply ennervating compared to just thinking about things or riffing with friends about fantasy bullshit. Shoutout to Loch, Purplecthulhu, PriestessofSpiders, Eos, Louis, Archon, and probably at least one other person I'm forgetting right now for chatting about this setting with me in DMs.
