Version 0.12 · not yet playtested
The default setting for Wizards & Lizards. The rules are setting-neutral; this book is the world they were tuned for. Take what you like, change the rest.
It is an age of wonders, and an age of heroes. Handgonnes crack on the drilling-grounds where the new gunners learn their trade, the colleges burn late over old titan-lore and the working of magic, and in every city a living god looks down from the high temple and keeps the dark outside the walls. Mortals still go out past that light to win names the songs will keep. Scholars call the age Theogonia, the time of the gods’ dominion; everyone else calls it simply the shining city-states, and means by it a hundred free cities, each its own small nation, each lit from within by a power that walks among its people.
For most who live behind a god’s walls, it is the best of times. Trade moves on good roads and busy canals, the feast-halls are full, the forges never cool, and the patron’s festivals come round bright and loud. A citizen of the shining cities can live a whole prosperous life and never see the thing the songs are really about.
But a god’s reach ends at the edge of its city’s light, and the world beyond is old and dangerous. That is where this game is played.
The shining cities are a patchwork, not an empire. Each is ruled in its own way, the goddess permitting; they trade, scheme, feud, and ally, bound to one another only by a shared culture and a shared kind of faith, much as the city-states of ancient Greece were. No single crown sits over them, and, as the next chapters explain, none ever can.
This world has three things worth understanding before you play:
Each has its own chapter. After them come the cities themselves.
Gunpowder is young, and crude. The firearm a person carries is the handgonne, a short iron tube on a pole: slow to charge, loud, and wild past a stone’s throw, as much a terror as a killer. Heavier work belongs to the bombard, a great cast tube a city or an army hauls to a siege, throwing dressed granite balls to break a wall. The shot is stone by choice: cast-steel balls would be a prince’s extravagance to spend by the wagonload, and packed-powder shells are as apt to burst in the cart as over the foe, so few captains trust them.
Good steel, too, is scarce. The richest ores lie deep, and no forge has yet mastered them at scale, so common arms are iron, fine city-steel is named, costly, and worth a line in a will, and a titan-forged edge is beyond any price. It is a world of fifteenth-century shapes, plate, crossbow, and the first guns, that still half-remembers the age of bronze in the worth it sets on a good blade.
Every city-state has a patron, a god or a goddess who is not a distant idea but a present power. The patron is the city: its protector, the source of its luck and its craft, and the voice its council listens for when the hard choices come. A city is only as alive as its god, and the people know it.
Most days the patron keeps to the high temple, felt more than seen, a warmth in the sanctuary and a steadiness in the city’s affairs. But at the great festivals, and in the hour of real crisis, the patron takes physical form and walks among the people: the Walled Mother pacing her ramparts in armor of gray iron, the Lamplighter going lamp to lamp down a frightened street, the Bright Forge setting a scarred hand to the bellows of the master foundry. To stand in a god’s presence is the central fact of life in the shining cities, the thing the festivals are for and the thing the enemy most wants to end.
A patron gives a city three things:
The dread that sits under all the brightness is simple: a city without a god is a city in decline. Let a patron be slain, bound, exiled, or merely forgotten, its festivals let lapse, its temple gone cold, and the city begins to fade. Trade falters, walls crack, the bold leave and the desperate stay, and within a generation the place is a haunted shell on the frontier, one more ruin for the next age to wonder at. Keeping the god is survival, not piety.
Whatever its name and nature, a patron is served by the same three sworn roles in every city, the triad that recurs across the playbooks:
Not every servant of a god is one of the three, and not every adventurer serves a god at all. But where a patron acts in the world through mortal hands, it is most often through a Shield, a Hand, or a Sword.
Before the living gods, the world belonged to the titans: the elder gods of empires now vanished. The temples teach that the city-gods rose by casting the titans down, breaking their power and declaring them defeated and beneath the new order, and taking the conquered peoples’ worshippers, temples, and even their names as trophies. Whether this was a true war in heaven or a mortal conquest dressed in divine robes, no living scholar can say, and few are foolish enough to ask aloud in a temple. What is certain is that the elder empires fell, and their gods with them, and the world that remained was emptier and, for a time, safer.
The titan empires are mostly lost to legend, their true names and borders gone. A handful are remembered, by occultists most of all, because their ruins still hold things worth dying for:
Where the cast-down powers went is not a mystery, it is a location, and the storm-titan and the war-titan above are both still in the world under other names. That is the next chapter.
What the titan age left behind, ruined temples, clay tablets in dead scripts, weapons that should not still be sharp, spirits still bound to their old oaths, is the deep quarry of the occult. A working grimoire from the age of titans is worth a duchy and, very often, a quick death. The arcane colleges are built on such finds; so are the worst of the cults. This is the lore behind a mage’s Old Lore and the stolen titan-age grimoires, and it is the lure that draws delvers into the most dangerous ruins on the frontier.
The titan age had empires. This age cannot. A living god in every city is a guarantor of the balance: the gods check one another, and each patron defends its own, so no power, mortal or divine, can swallow the rest. The wars of the shining cities are real, but they are wars between cities, not the building of an empire over them. Should one city ever find a way to break that balance, to bind or devour the gods of its neighbors, it would be the end of the age, and the beginning of something the temples pray never comes: a new dominion of titans, with a living face.
There are many shining cities; these seven are the ones this book details, each the seat of a patron already named across the playbooks. Their names are Balkan-Hellenic, their patrons various, their characters distinct. A campaign needs only a few; the rest are rumor and road signs until you want them.
| City | Patron | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Branigrad | The Walled Mother | A hill-fortress city, martial and gray; the Shield’s heartland. |
| Dritsa | The Lamplighter | Lamplit streets and a sleepless watch; here the dark never wins. |
| Drymos | The Green Lady | A half-wild city at the faewood’s edge, fae-touched and strange. |
| Vodena | The Drowned Saint | Canals and dockward chapels; a harbor city of water and trade. |
| Halkis | The Bright Forge | The artificers’ city of foundries and colleges, where borrowed fire burns brightest. |
| Heliara | The Dawnbringer | A militant sun-cult city of holy light; the Sword’s heartland. |
| Dikaia | The Just Scales | The city of law, courts, and the magistracy. |
A shared faith in living gods does not make a shared government, and the variety is deliberate, a source of friction, intrigue, and adventure. Among these seven alone:
A new city for your own table is, in the end, just three choices: a patron, a name, and a way of being ruled and fed.
The shining cities are points of light. Between them, and beneath them, lies the dark the gods hold back, and the moment you pass out of a patron’s reach, the world stops being safe. This is where adventurers earn their name, and where most of play happens.
Three kinds of place turn deadly fastest:
The three above are destinations. The road between them has its own quiet problem, and it is the one nobody reports, because there is nothing to report.
A long-haul company sometimes loses a piece of the road. Everyone agrees on where they set out and where they arrived. Nobody can account for four days. The horses are not tired, the bread is not stale, and the only person who is certain something happened is the one who cannot say what. Most of the time nothing follows from it. Sometimes the one who was certain is not quite the same afterward, and cannot be got to say why.
This is Gaap, the Walking Star (see The Hundred and Eight), who carries people between kingdoms in an instant and leaves them insensible while he does it. He is not hunting anyone. The road is simply his, and people are on it.
The un-returned, and the returned. Because he must eventually put back everyone he takes, in the exact spot he took them from, a frontier hamlet’s worst-kept custom is its ledger of the overdue: everyone lost on the road, by name, and it is never closed out, no matter how many years pass. Striking a name off is the worst luck there is. The reason is that once or twice a generation somebody walks out of the dark into the precise place they vanished from, mid-sentence, unaged, still carrying the thing they were carrying, and expects their supper. Sixty years is common. Longer happens.
Put one in front of a company and watch what they do with it. They are not undead, not possessed, and not lying. They are only very late, and somewhere in the part they cannot remember, they saw something.
A company sets out from a safe city or a frontier holding, delves into one of these places, and, if it is wise and lucky, returns. Sessions are expeditions: self-contained ventures into the dark and back to the light. The world remembers what you do, the map you draw, the vault you emptied, the thing you woke and did not kill, so the frontier grows more known, and more changed, the more it is played. (The rules for running an ongoing frontier, a shared map and a home base that grows with use, are a campaign-frame supplement; see the design plan.)
The highest work an adventuring company can do is the oldest work in the world: to found a new city. On a tamed stretch of frontier, with a holding grown into a town, the final and hardest step is to secure a patron, to awaken, bind, or draw a god to a new temple and persuade it to stay. Succeed, and a new light kindles on the map: a city that will protect, guide, and empower its people, and push the dark back one more march.
It is no small thing. It is, exactly, what the living gods did when they cast down the titans and made the age of the shining cities. To found a city is to take up that ancient work in mortal hands, and to risk, if it goes wrong, waking something that should have stayed beneath.
The full rite, the five great works and the three ways to secure a patron, is the campaign capstone in Founding a City, built on the stronghold rules.
These are the mythic threats of the dangerous between: the things that hold the ruins, haunt the battlefields, and stalk the wilds beyond the gods’ walls. Each is written in the engine’s shorthand (see the SRD, Harm and Danger): a tier and one true sentence.
What is not in here. Everything below is a creature, something a company can meet, fight, and be finished with. The hundred and eight are not creatures: they are named intelligences with a want and a compulsion, the adversary of a whole campaign, and the shape one wears this week is any tier you like (the shape is not the demon). They are in the next chapter, and in full in The Hundred and Eight.
Minotaur — Greater. A bull-headed man that never loses your trail in its maze and does not tire; its goring charge down a straight run hits hard and knocks you flat. Fight it in the open where it cannot corner you, or break its line of sight in the turns of its own labyrinth.
Harpy — Common. A filth-winged woman-bird that fights from the air (foes without reach or a bow strike it a die worse) and snatches a victim aloft before dropping them; its shriek leaves the squeamish frightened. Ground it or bring it down with arrows.
Manticore — Greater. A man-eater that toys with its food: it looses a volley of tail-spines at range or drives in a sting whose venom is Ongoing (a wound each exchange, past any armor, until you tend it). Close the distance or make it flee.
Griffon — Common. A proud, fiercely territorial eagle-lion that strikes from a dive. A griffon taken as a chick and raised true becomes a prized and loyal mount, won by patience, not the spear.
Stymphalian flock — Common (a swarm). Bronze-feathered birds that rain a volley on the front rank each exchange; arrows glance off the metal plumage, and their numbers press you (outnumbered). A single bird cornered is nothing; the cloud is the threat, and loud noise or any area effect scatters it and ends the volley.
Centaur — Common. Horse-bodied raiders of the high country, met as a war-band: they loose bows on the move and gore in on a full charge, wheeling out of reach. Pin them against terrain or trip their legs and the speed that makes them deadly is spent. A few elder centaurs are wise teachers, met in parley, not battle.
Pegasus — not a fight. A winged horse of the high springs, swift and skittish; it flees skyward rather than fight, and whoever gentles one at its watering-place with patience and a golden bridle wins a mount that outruns anything on the frontier.
Nemean Lion — Greater. A great lion whose golden hide turns every edge, only a crushing blow harms it (a maul, a wrestler’s choke, a rockfall, a hard throw, even its own claws; blade and arrow shatter and glance away). Telegraph it: the first spear snaps and the first arrow bounces. Choke it, drop a cornice on it, or wrestle it onto its own talons.
Great Boar — Greater. A god-sent boar the size of a bull; its goring charge down a straight run hits hardest and knocks you flat, and it fights on past wounds that would drop a lesser beast. Meet it behind braced spears and hounds, not in the open.
Not every danger in the dark is a wonder. Some are only tooth, hunger, and number, grown bold where the gods’ light does not reach.
Cave Bear — Greater. A shaggy giant of the deep dens, ill-tempered and territorial; it mauls with both paws and a solid hit grabs to crush. Nothing magical, only huge and angry. Fire and noise turn it more surely than steel.
Forest Spider — Common. A hound-sized hunter in the high branches; it casts a web (the caught are Entangled, held until they tear free, and a heavy strand catches two side by side), then falls on the bound, its bite leaving Ongoing venom. Fire frees the caught faster than struggling.
Cave Spider — Lesser (a swarm). Pale, quick, and many, boiling out of the cracks to swarm a lone torchbearer from every side (outnumbered); a bite leaves a lesser Ongoing venom. A few in the open are nothing; a nest sprung in the dark is the danger, and light and flame cow them.
The waste has its own small, savage peoples. None is a match for a hero one to one; the danger is the pack, the ambush, and the dark.
Kobaloi — Lesser. Spiteful little cave-folk, the root of every nursery warning, that infest old mines and cellars. Dangerous in numbers and ambush only: they fling stones, foul the water, snatch a loose pack and bolt, and break the moment the leader falls or the torches turn on them. The frontier’s commonest foe, and its commonest theft.
Cynocephali — Common (a pack). Dog-headed savages that run the roads in howling packs; first blood drives them wild, and outnumbering a foe is when they are deadliest. Craven alone, merciless together. Break the pack or fell the largest and the rest scatter.
Out past the breakwater, and in the black water beneath the ruins, the old serpents keep their reaches.
Great Python — Greater. A constrictor long enough to ring a courtyard; a hit grabs and crushes (Ongoing while it holds, past armor) and drags the caught toward deep water. Strong but single-minded: free its prey and it must begin the grip anew.
Cetus — Dire. The sea-drake of the deep coast, to which doomed cities once chained their daughters; its maw swallows a grabbed man whole. It cannot leave deep water, so the shallows and the shore are your allies, as the old heroes knew.
Scylla — Dire. Six-necked, she snatches anything passing her sea-cliff, and she cannot leave her rock, so this is a fight to survive and pass, not to win: row hard, weather the snatch, and she falls behind. Telegraph it: the strait’s far shore holds Charybdis, a whirlpool that swallows a whole hull, so the narrow water by her cliff is the only road, and a few of the crew are its toll.
Hippocampus — not a fight. A shy, quick fish-tailed sea-horse that draws the chariots of sea-powers in the old hymns; it flees rather than fights, and a netted, gentled one is a swift mount for coastal water and a prize to any harbor city.
Gorgon — Greater. Meet her eyes and begin turning to stone (a first failure staggers you; a second petrifies, out of the fight until she dies or a remedy is found), and her snake-hair bites Ongoing venom. Counter, telegraphed by the statues frozen mid-flight around her lair: fight with averted eyes or watch her in a mirror. You strike a die worse for fighting half-blind, but you cannot be turned to stone.
Basilisk — Common. A low, eight-legged reptile whose stone gaze works like the Gorgon’s, and whose breath withers green things around its den. Counter: its own reflection petrifies it; a polished shield turned its way ends the fight.
Cockatrice — Common. A vicious rooster-lizard, easy to mistake for livestock; on any hit you stiffen toward stone (a second failure petrifies). Small and fast, it is past you before you place it.
Lamia — Greater. Woman above, great serpent below, lairing in the titan ruins; a hit grabs and crushes, and her beguiling voice charms you (you cannot harm her and treat her as a friend) until she or her brood spills your blood.
Empusa — Greater. A blood-drinking undead beauty whose charming gaze works like the Lamia’s, and whose kiss drains life (a hit marks a stress that will not clear until you rest in safety). Counter: daylight is poison to her, a wound she cannot mend, so hold her till dawn or drag her into the sun.
Siren — Common. Her song draws all who hear it helpless toward her, charmed onto the rocks or into the water. Counter: stopped ears, wax, a loud drum, a deafened champion, and the song cannot take you.
Sphinx — mostly a parley. She bars the road and asks a riddle; answer well and she may let you pass or even help. Answer poorly and she falls on you with lion’s claws and a withering word that leaves the boastful frightened. The riddle is the point of her.
These rise thickest on the haunted battlefields, where a quarrel of gods or empires was decided and the dead were never laid to rest.
Shade — Common. Ordinary steel passes through it; only fire harms it (a torch, a blessed flame). It cannot be grabbed, tripped, or felled, and its chill touch drains warmth (a hit marks a slow-clearing stress).
Drekavac — Lesser. A small, hollow-eyed thing, the unquiet spirit of a child dead before its naming-rites, that runs shrieking the night roads; its wail leaves those who hear it frightened, and the old folk hold it an omen of a death to come. Frail and fleet, it can scarcely wound and bolts from any who stand firm. Counter: it cannot bear light or the turn of day; its true unmaking is to lay the nameless dead to rest with the rites it was denied.
Todorci — Common (a spectral troop). A wild hunt of faceless cloaked horsemen, led by a great limping black horse, that rides only on certain unhallowed nights; its charge tramples and the press of riders catches two side by side. Spectral, it cannot be grabbed or felled and hunts only those caught in the open after dark. Counter: it cannot cross a threshold, a roof, or hallowed ground, and the first cockcrow scatters the whole troop; the lame lead horse telegraphs that the hunt is abroad. The fight is to reach shelter, not to win.
Battlefield Wight — Greater. The war-dead risen in rusted panoply, fighting the old battle forever; rusted plate turns blade and arrow, but its brittle bones cave to a crushing blow (a maul, a rockfall, a hard fall). It cannot be frightened, and each round it stands, its keening rouses another of the fallen.
Fury — Greater. A winged spirit of vengeance that fixes on one oath-breaker and hunts only them; its whip entangles, and it knits its wounds shut each exchange. Counter: steel will not lay it to rest, only answering the crime it came to avenge.
Vrykolakas — Common. A village dead that would not stay buried, walking by night; a hit grabs and bears you down. It cannot cross running water. Counter: it lies helpless in the grave by day, and is unmade for good only by fire or the rites that unseal its tomb, else it rises again the next night.
Vukodlak — Greater. A living curse, not a corpse: a villager who at the full moon sheds the man and runs as a great wolf, fast and hard to corner; a solid bite may pass the curse to you. It knits its wounds shut and ordinary steel barely slows it, but a silvered edge deals a wound it cannot mend (fire, too, stops its healing). Counter, telegraphed by the barred doors and silver charms the village hangs: by day it wears a human face, so learn which of them it is before the moon rises, and meet it with silver.
Ghoul — Common. A gray, grave-robbing eater of the dead; a paralyzing touch freezes you (a second failure leaves you unable to act until you shake free or an ally pulls you loose). Ghouls hunt in packs around battle-graves and flee a torch and a holy word. Out in the waste that bred them they run to a cleverer, hungrier kind, the Ghul of the Road.
Psoglav — Greater. A solitary horror of the sunless caves, the lone-hunting cousin of the Cynocephali: a one-eyed dog’s head of iron teeth on a horse’s hind legs, that gnaws the dead in its lightless den. Its iron bite shears through mail and a solid hit grabs to worry the caught. Sun-shunner: in bright light or against a raised flame it is dazzled and cowed (it strikes a die worse and gives ground toward the dark). Counter: bring strong light and drive it deeper, or face it in the open by day.
Tomb-Bound — Greater. A king of the elder empires bound in wrappings to guard his tomb forever; his withering grasp lays a slow curse (Ongoing that will not clear while you remain in the tomb, and stacks). The dry wrappings part and close against blade and arrow, but go up like old linen at fire. It cannot be frightened and will not leave its charge: slow, certain, patient as stone.
The Kosovo Maiden (Kosovka devojka) — not a foe but a sorrow: the shade of a girl who walks the battlefield at dusk with water, wine, and bread, seeking the betrothed who never came home. Accept her cup and it clears all your stress and staunches your wounds (a Dying one she steadies, though she cannot call back the truly dead), and she can name every body on the field and the road out the dead do not watch. Blades pass through her grief; to raise a hand against her mercy is a black mark the field’s dead will not forget. Counter: find her betrothed among the fallen, return his token, or only tell her true how he died, and she finds peace, and while her blessing holds the restless dead let you pass.
Some of the mighty dead were never only dead. A champion laid in a great barrow and fed with offerings and oaths becomes a power in the earth: a blessing to those who keep the tomb, a terror to those who break it. Each cannot be frightened, and on its own grave-ground knits its wounds and strikes the harder; lure it off that ground, or honor it rather than fight, and it is far the lesser danger.
Hero-Shade — Greater. The risen shade of a deified champion, mighty as it was in life and bound to its grave-mound. Counter: it would far rather be honored than fought, pour a libation, name its deeds, return what was taken, and it may give a boon or an oracle in place of battle; or lure it off its grave-ground. Defile the tomb and nothing will appease it.
Marko Kraljević, the Sleeping Champion (a named Hero-Shade) — Dire. The mightiest of the chthonic heroes, laid asleep in a moss-grown cave with his piebald horse Šarac, to wake when the world has need. His mace shears through any armor and hurls a foe back; roused, he rides Šarac, who leaps three spears, and never tires. Deathless: beaten down, he laughs, salutes the worthy, and returns to his sleep rather than perish, so he cannot be truly slain. The point of him is the meeting: wake him with honor, pour wine, name a wrong that wants righting, and he may ride out once at your side, the frontier’s mightiest arm; a graceless waking earns a brawl, not a boon.
Miloš Obilić, the Martyr in the Tomb (a named Hero-Shade) — Dire. A knight wrongly named a traitor, who rode alone into the tyrant’s camp and cut him down before he fell. Trial of faith: he knows a lie spoken at his bier at once, and falls without quarter on the slanderer, the oath-breaker, and the betrayer of kin. The martyr’s boon: come wrongly accused and seeking to clear your name, or swear a hard oath before him and mean it, and your next blow against a tyrant or great foe lands as a Masterstroke.
Banović Strahinja, the Forgiving (a named Hero-Shade) — Greater. A knight who forgave his carried-off wife when his kin bayed for her blood. Trial of mercy: slay the helpless or the yielding on his ground and he turns implacable; show quarter and he names you friend. The forgiving boon: stay a killing hand, ransom a foe, or pardon a wrong, and once a foe you offer quarter must yield, and he lifts from you one curse or the lingering weight of a grievous deed (clears an Ongoing curse and all your stress).
Tsar Lazar, the Martyr-King (a named Hero-Shade) — no battle. The sainted prince who chose a heavenly crown and the grave; a serene, numinous power, he cannot be slain and lifts no hand against you, met in reverence like the Sphinx. His tomb is the one safe place on the haunted field: no shade, wight, or unhallowed thing can cross into it. The choice of kingdoms: renounce a worldly reward for a greater good and his benediction wards you (you cannot be frightened, and the first wound you take in a righteous cause is turned aside, until you rest) and he speaks an oracle. Rob or profane his tomb and the blessing turns to a curse: the holy ground fails and the dead it held off come flooding in.
The titan age left its watchmen behind, and they do not know the age is over.
Bronze Sentinel — Greater. A mindless, tireless automaton of a titan vault whose heavy bronze turns aside blade and arrow (only magic, or the lever below, bites). Counter: a single ichor-seal at the heel or nape, marked by a glowing seam; pierce it with a called shot or a clever climb and the bronze runs empty.
Living Caryatid — Dire. A temple’s pillar-maiden, statue-still until the temple is robbed; she grabs and crushes but cannot pursue past her own threshold. Near-invulnerable stone: only the one element bound in her making harms her, and the sanctuary’s frescoes telegraph which (she was quenched in seawater, say, and so dreads it).
Lamassu — Greater. A winged bull with a sage’s bearded face, set at an elder palace’s gate to weigh all who enter; once a fight it speaks a word of power that leaves every foe before it frightened and driven back. Proud and lawful, it would sooner test a trespasser with a hard question than gut one; answer its challenge and it may stand aside.
Scorpion-Man — Greater. Man above and great scorpion below, keeping the mountain gate where the sun goes under; its tail strikes from a space off and leaves Ongoing venom. It will name the peril beyond to the rightly-purposed and let them pass, but turns back any thief.
Ushabti Host — Common (a swarm). Little tomb-figures that wake by the dozen to bury intruders under sheer number (outnumbered); each is brittle, but the host presses again and again. Counter: shatter the taller scribe-figure at the bier that calls them, marked by its scroll, and the rest fall lifeless.
Scarab Swarm — Lesser (a swarm). A living carpet of sacred beetles that clings and bites through every gap (Ongoing while you stand in it); a single blow only clears a patch. Fire, water, or smoke scatters them faster than any blade; the peril is being caught in the open.
The marches of Drymos and the deep wood are the Green Lady’s, and her people keep their own law.
Dryad — Common. Rarely hostile unless her oak is threatened; she steps between nearby trees, and trespassers in her glade wander it lost and charmed. Harm her tree and she fades, but so, often, does the wood’s patience with you.
Naiad — Common. The proud spirit of a spring or pool; her charm-song is gentler than the Siren’s but works the same, and angered she drags a foe under in her water.
Satyr — Common. Goat-legged and mischievous more than murderous, but a band in the deep wood is real trouble; their pipes stir sleep or wild dancing (you are staggered while the music holds).
Vila — Common. A wild, beautiful spirit of the high pastures, far kin to the Green Lady; watch her dance-ring and be drawn in, charmed and helpless, until dawn or the ring is broken. Break in uninvited and she whirls too quick to follow (foes who cannot match her strike a die worse). Gentle to the courteous, merciless to the rude.
Marsh-light — Lesser. A cold flame that bobs over the fen feigning a lantern; follow it and wander ever deeper into the mire, charmed, until you are sunk to the knees or worse. It can scarcely harm you; the bog is the killer. It shrinks from cold iron, and a steady, doubting head sees through the trick.
Kallikantzaros — Lesser (a swarm). A spindly underground imp that creeps up in the dark of midwinter to sour the milk and gnaw at the roots of things; one is a nuisance, a band a night of ruin. Simple-minded: set them counting grain and they forget themselves till cockcrow, and they bolt from fire and a blessed hearth.
Between the living gods and mortal men move the daimones: spirits that carry prayers up and dooms down. They are rarely a fight and almost always a bargain.
Daimon — Common (rarely fought). A messenger-spirit of the middle air that comes to strike a bargain, deliver an omen, or hold an oath; harm done to it breaks the thread it carries, which the gods mark. Met in words and offerings, or sent away by the true name of the god it serves. Cross it, and the oath it kept turns on the oath-breaker.
Daimon of Longing — Common. A barefoot spirit of desire; meet its eye and be charmed with a yearning it names, drifting toward what you most want, heedless of the danger between. Counter: it has no hold on a heart already fixed on something greater, a sworn purpose, a true love, an honest grief.
Golden Shade — Greater. A soul of the lost Golden Age, set by old decree to watch over mortals and deal out good fortune; where it keeps its charge it shields the worthy (turning aside the first harm an honored guest takes) and turns ill luck away. It strikes only to drive off those who defile its charge, and cannot be bribed or beguiled, only satisfied or shunned.
Trade and conquest dragged stranger things home than gold: powers of the elder empires of the east and south, met now as relics, captives, and curses.
Simurgh — mostly the meeting. A vast, ancient bird of the far mountains, wise beyond any beast, who gives counsel, healing, and a single feather that calls her once at need to those she judges worthy. Roused she is terrible, but the point of her, like the Sphinx, is the meeting, not the kill.
Div — Dire. A pale, horned mountain-demon of the eastern wastes; its stone-hard hide turns aside blade and arrow (only magic, or a lever, bites), it hurls boulders and men alike, and its roar blinds a foe (you cannot see, striking two dice worse, until it clears). Cunning as it is strong, it bargains and lies.
Gallu — Dire. A faceless bailiff of the underworld, loosed by a broken oath to haul one named soul back down; it cares nothing for the rest, and against its quarry the grip is sure (a hit grabs, and each exchange it drags the caught toward the nearest way below). Deaf to mercy: it neither eats, sleeps, takes a bribe, nor can be frightened, and steel only slows the errand, put down, it re-forms and comes on again. Counter, telegraphed by the debt that summoned it: pay what the dead are owed, offer a substitute in the marked one’s place, mend the broken oath, or unmake the warrant by the god that sealed it.
Roc — Dire. A bird great enough to darken a valley and bear off an ox in each talon; a hit grabs you and carries you aloft, out of the fight and a long fall from safety unless you are freed fast, and from on high it looses boulders. It nests on the one peak no one dares climb, atop a fortune in bones and cargo.
South and east of the last god’s wall the green gives out, and the caravan roads run for days between wells. That country has its own people: the jinn, made of smokeless fire where men were made of clay. They hold the wells, the lone thorn-trees, and the sand-taken ruins, keep an oath to the letter and no further, and cold iron alone they will not touch. The desert’s law is the caravan’s law: ask leave at a well, name yourself at a threshold, pour out a share before you drink, and most of what lives out there will let you pass.
Jinni — Greater. A person of the smokeless fire keeping a well or ruin as its right; it goes invisible at will (foes who cannot find it by dust, sound, or scattered flour strike a die worse). Weakness: cold iron deals a wound its fire cannot abide, and an iron nail driven at its threshold pins it out of its own house. Oath to the letter: a bargain struck binds it absolutely and not one hair past its wording. Met in words, leave asked, a share poured; foul its well and you have made an enemy that knows the road home better than you.
Ghul of the Road — Common. A shape-changing thing that squats where two roads meet and hunts by trickery, wearing a borrowed face, a stranded woman, a lost child, a comrade’s voice in the dark, to lead the kind off the road. Telegraph, the one thing it cannot hide: whatever shape it wears, its feet stay a donkey’s hooves. Counter: name it aloud and it must drop the shape and fight in its own starving hide; and the old caravan wisdom is blunt: strike a ghul once and it dies, strike it twice and it rises whole, so land the blow and do not strike again.
Nasnas — Lesser (never alone). Half a man split crown to crotch, hopping the dunes faster than a whole man can run, crying in a voice like a man calling for help; hard to lay an edge on, it closes when your back turns and tears at what it grabs. The cry that draws you to one draws its band; no danger at all to a party that stands in the open and keeps its circle.
Hamah — no fight. A gray owl that is the soul of a murdered man, circling the place of the killing all night crying give me drink; while it cries, no rest clears stress within a night’s walk, and the company wakes as tired as it lay down. It will show you the body, the killer’s road, and his house, though it has no words but the one. Killing it only silences the cry, not the crime. Counter: it drinks once, of the blood of the one who spilled its own, avenge the murder or lay the murderer before the Just Scales, and the owl goes quiet.
Ifrit — Dire. The mightiest of the jinn, a pillar of black smoke and cinders sealed away in the elder empires’ worst age. The company will almost never pick this fight; they find a stoppered jar, a graven ring, or a lamp, and someone opens it. Three services: freed, it owes its freer three by the ancient covenant, and it hates the debt, hearing every word and granting exactly that. Roused, it comes apart into a fire-devil that blade and arrow only tear, its touch setting Ongoing fire; to cut it you must make it stand in a body, speak its true name, hold cold iron across its path, or pour the libation it is owed. Counter: it is not killed, it is put back; the seal that held it still works, and a company that finds the vessel’s inscription before it finds the stopper has the fight already won.
The letter of the wish (d6). When a service is asked, give exactly what was said and let the wording pay for the rest.
| d6 | What the ifrit heard |
|---|---|
| 1 | The thing itself, whole, and set where you cannot carry it from. |
| 2 | The thing, taken from someone who will come for it. |
| 3 | A word with two meanings, and it takes the other. |
| 4 | All you named and nothing you assumed. Gold, no scales. A door, no key. |
| 5 | At once, before you were ready, and where you stand. |
| 6 | Faithfully, gladly, and in full, because it has counted, and this was the third. |
The Dire-tier terrors. Give each room to breathe, a lair, a counter, and a reason the company cannot simply trade blows until it falls.
Play the great ones with cunning, not just bulk. A warlord or beast-king lets its retinue bleed the party first, hanging back to taunt and pick off the wounded, and steps in only when the tide turns, or quits the field to hunt the company another day. Bring it in early against a larger band, late against a small one.
A lone foe is a fair fight for only about one party size at a time: more hands cut a fixed thing down faster (see the Musa entry’s Scaling the duel). To make a single boss threaten a larger company, give it a retinue rather than a bigger blow; numbers, through the outnumbered rule, are what turn a solo into a real fight.
Chimera — Dire. Three heads, three threats: the lion bites, the goat gores and knocks you flat, and the serpent breathes fire down a line that catches all in its path (Ongoing). It presses relentlessly while all three live. Counter: the heads can be cut away one at a time, and each felled head is a threat gone with it.
Hydra — Dire. Many-headed, biting from every mouth at once; sever a head and two grow back, more mouths and more bites, unless the stump is seared. Telegraphed by the old charred stumps along its neck: bring fire to cauterize, or it cannot be killed, only fed.
Cyclops — Dire. It sweeps with great blows and flings rocks that knock you down. Strong, slow, and not at all clever. Counter: blind the single eye, a called shot, a brand, the old hero’s ruse, and it flails at nothing it cannot grope.
Mountain Giant — Dire. Stone-skinned: blade and arrow only chip it. A sweep of its arm catches two side by side, it answers the distant with boulders, and it tramples the fallen. The tallest and hungriest thing on the frontier short of a dragon.
Drake — Dire. A lesser dragon, and lesser is relative. Its furnace-blood shrugs off fire, but the cold it hates bites it hard. Every other exchange it breathes a cone of fire that catches all before it (Ongoing), and its first sight leaves the unready frightened. Coiled atop a hoard of titan-gold. (For the warden-kind that protects a land rather than ravages it, see the guardian zmaj.)
Guardian Zmaj — Dire (often an ally). A warden: a wise, ancient serpent of storm and sky, taken for the soul of a great ancestor, that keeps watch over a valley or bloodline. Its lightning breath strikes down a line (a solid hit knocks you flat), and fire cannot harm it. Where it guards its charge it will not be driven off. The point of the zmaj is the meeting: it would rather weigh a trespasser with a hard question, or take up a worthy cause and fight beside the company, than against it. Win its favor with honest dealing and it is the frontier’s mightiest ally; come as a thief and its lightning is the last thing you see.
Aždaja — Dire. The guardian zmaj’s black twin and the truth behind every drowned-village tale: a vast, foul, many-headed serpent of fen-pools and flooded caverns that crawls out to burn the fields and devour the folk. It bites with each head and heaves up a single gout of fire that catches all before it (Ongoing), and its maw swallows a grabbed man whole. Pure malice: it cannot be reasoned with, bribed, or turned. Counter: sever its heads to thin its bites and choke its fire, and its old enemy the guardian zmaj is the surest ally against it.
Zduhać — Greater (an ally, not a monster). A mortal born with a gift, a weathered countryman whose soul rides out in the storm to battle the Ala and steer its ruin off his fields; while he is gone his body lies cold and deathlike. Soul untethered: do not move, turn, or wake the sleeping body, or the soul cannot find its way home and the man dies. He comes far more often to help than to harm, and steel finds him only while he wears flesh.
Ala — Dire. A weather-demon of black cloud and serpent-heads that rides the hail down to beat the harvest flat; each exchange it looses a battering squall on all in the open (the prone and the roofless fare worst). Body of cloud: blade and arrow only tear wind, and lightning alone answers it. Counter, telegraphed by the dead-clear eye at the heart of its wrath: it is the dragon’s old enemy, rouse a guardian zmaj or a great eagle against it, call it by name to turn its cloud onto the barren mountains, or meet it with lightning, and it flees rather than be unmade. Its first sight leaves the unready frightened.
Baš Čelik (“Steel-Head”) — Dire. A winged demon sheathed in steel from crown to heel, a thief of brides and breaker of oaths; a hit grabs a foe (or his chosen captive) and bears them aloft to his mountain hold. Steel hide: no ordinary weapon bites the plate of him. Life elsewhere: his soul does not sit in his body, so beaten down he only scatters to wind and reforms whole at his lair, unless his hidden life is first destroyed. Counter, telegraphed by the one caged bird he guards too well, the fox no hound may touch: his life is hidden in a bird, in a fox, in a far mountain. Hunt it down and the steel falls empty at a touch; fight him before then and you only buy time.
The Hidden Life (Baš Čelik’s soul-vessels) — not foes but the puzzle his lair telegraphs. Run them as a chase, not a battle. - The Fox — the outer vessel, impossibly quick; it cannot be run down by speed alone, only trapped, gulled, or caught with the help of a swift beast it cannot outwit (a loosed hound, an eagle, some creature the company once spared). It has no fight in it. Brought to bay and slain, a bird bursts from its body. - The Bird — the life itself; freed from the dying fox it climbs for the open sky, and if it breaks line of sight it bears the soul to a new hiding place and the hunt begins again. Catch it, and in that instant, however far off, Baš Čelik drops dead where he stands.
Musa Kesedžija, the Three-Hearted — Dire. A mountain outlaw and the finest blade on the frontier, a brigand by trade but a man of his word who fights any champion fairly and scorns to be mobbed. Three hearts: the bards’ warning is true; empty one and he only reels a moment before the next drives him on. The snake-heart: in the third beats a coiled serpent, and as it wakes he turns terrible, striking twice and hardest when nearest death (a Partial against him then still costs you). Counter, telegraphed by every tale of him: you may spend everything and not outlast all three hearts, so it takes an ally’s aid, a vila’s whisper, a second blade as the snake-heart wakes, to tip it. Honor him fallen; he was a better man than his trade.
Scaling the duel: a lone foe is a fair fight for about one party size at a time, so the three hearts are pitched at a small band. For a larger company, either keep it a true duel (one champion faces him while the rest are held off by his men, a hostage, or a clock, and the “ally steps in” is a second PC tagging in as the snake-heart wakes), or make it a fight, not a duel (stand a few of his outlaws at his back, one real blade for each hero past the second, so the company cannot all fall on him at once). This is the general method for any solo Dire champion.
Zmaj Ognjeni Vuk, the Fiery Dragon-Wolf — Dire. A living champion got by a zmaj on a mortal woman, dragon-marked, his blood furnace-hot; a war-captain met as a rival warlord or, his respect won, the staunchest sword at your side. His hot blood shrugs off fire, but the cold it hates bites him hard. Once a fight he looses his sire’s flame in a cone (Ongoing), and the more he bleeds the worse he fights, half-wounded he cannot be frightened and presses harder. Counter: mighty but mortal, he tires and bleeds like any man, and cold undoes him, ice, a winter stream, a frost-ward, quenches his fire and his fury both. Beat him fairly and he may yield, even swear to you, sooner than die.
Relja the Winged — Dire. A champion of the old court and a companion of Marko’s, borne on wings won in a deed long told; he fights from the air and lights where he pleases (foes without reach or a bow strike a die worse), stooping to drive his lance home for extra force and knock a foe flat. Proud and courteous, far more often met in parley or at your side than across the field. Counter: his wings are his whole edge, so ground them, a thrown net, a snare, a clipped pinion, or a fight pressed into a low cave where he cannot stoop, and he fights on as a mortal knight, hard but no longer untouchable.
There is a count that every occultist arrives at, by whatever road, and it is always the same count. One hundred and eight. That is how many of the old powers went under the world when the young gods took it, and it is how many are loose in it now.
They are the setting’s great adversaries. Any one of them is a season of play; any three of them is a war. The full roster, with all hundred and eight named and described, is its own book, The Hundred and Eight. What a Theogonian knows about them is thinner: what they are, where they came from, and that the colleges will not discuss it.
The seal is at Eridu, the first city, and it is open.
The temples teach that the young gods cast the titans down and that this was the end of the matter. It was not. The cast-down powers were put somewhere, into a vault under the oldest ruin there is, and the arithmetic of who went in is the count above. Note the order of events, because it is the part that keeps occultists awake: the vault is older than the gods who used it. They did not build the prison. They found it standing, already built, already meant for something.
It was opened from the outside, by a man who had every warning and opened it anyway. Which century, and whether he was paid, is argued about by people who have staked reputations on the answer. What is not argued about is what happened next. They did not come out in ranks. They scattered, and nine hundred years under a stone did nothing for anyone’s willingness to cooperate.
There is no infernal court. No throne, no hierarchy, no dark general to overthrow at the end of a campaign. The ranks the old grimoires record, king and duke and marquis, are titles of courts that fell with their empires. A demon who insists on being called King is insisting about an office that has not existed since its city died. Some of them do not know. Some know and insist anyway.
A demon is a god that lost its city.
The temples’ own histories say the young gods took the conquered peoples’ worshippers, their temples, and even their names as trophies. Set that beside the first thing every Theogonian learns, that a city without a god fades, and the unstated half of the doctrine is obvious. A god without a city fades too. It starves, it goes strange in the dark, and it keeps every particle of what it was except the part that was kind. It does not die of it.
So each of the hundred and eight wants one thing, and they all want the same thing: a city. Not the world, not the end of everything. A city, with a name on it, a festival in its calendar, and a people who say the right name at the right hour. Ruins, relics, murdered priests and bargained souls are all means to it. There are only so many shining cities, and there are a hundred and eight claimants, and that arithmetic is the whole of the danger.
Their grievance is true, which is what makes them so difficult to argue with. Nobody on the priestly side even denies the theft. It changed nothing about what nine centuries in a vault did to them. A wronged thing is not a good thing, and a company that mistakes the first for the second gets the education it paid for.
Of the hundred and eight, Theogonian scholarship has matched exactly four to the titan age, and three of those matches are recent enough to still be disputed.
Furfur, the Axis Star, the storm-titan of the Storm-Throne, whose capital was Kanesh. He is the one of them who wants no city that currently exists. He wants his own back, and so he is a patron: he funds expeditions to the ruin, he is generous to anyone who talks about refounding it, and he has nine hundred years of patience. He cannot lie inside a drawn triangle, which means a company can verify his terms and find them honest, over and over, right up until they succeed.
Vine, the Level Star, the war-titan of the Lion-Throne, whose ruin is Kalhu. He took every city that empire wanted and it kept none of them, because he must throw down any wall named to him, including his own. The young gods never had to out-fight the Lion-Throne. They only had to get its titan asked about Kalhu. The black stone lions at Kalhu are what he left standing.
Gaap, the Walking Star, the titan of the Charioteer Kings, whose seat Washukanni no living map can find. The old books show him walking ahead of four great kings, which is the match nobody argues with. He carries people between kingdoms in an instant and leaves them insensible and ignorant while he does it, and there is always a stretch of the journey nobody remembers. That is why no map has Washukanni. It is not lost. It is unrememberable, and the Charioteer Kings did not fall so much as travel out of the record.
His compulsion is the part a company can use: he must return anyone he takes to the exact spot he took them from, eventually, and eventually is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Every scholar who went looking for Washukanni and did not come back is not dead. They are due back. Some of them are centuries overdue, and one of them has seen the place.
That is four out of a hundred and eight. The other hundred and four are in the world under names nobody has connected to a fallen empire yet, and that is the ordinary state of the scholarship rather than a gap in it.
Half of the hundred and eight answer to two names, and this is the reason for every locked drawer in the colleges of the peninsula.
The old powers were worshipped from the western seas to the far east, and each end of the trade road wrote them down differently. The west kept personal names, with courtly ranks attached. The east kept offices, the star each power sat in, recorded as a title rather than a name. Where both halves survived the journey you have one figure with two names, older and stronger than the ones that came down half.
A true name binds, and half a true name binds halfway. A scholar holding the western name can compel such a demon to appear, to answer, and to keep the letter of a bargain, and nothing further. The half that came down the eastern road is not bound at all, and is free to act while the western half stands politely inside the circle. Every disaster in the literature of summoning is a variation on this one mistake.
This is why the storm-titan of Kanesh is not named aloud in polite company, and why the colleges keep its sign in a locked drawer rather than burning it. The sign is a working seal. Saying half of the name is worse than saying none of it, and burning the drawer’s contents would mean nobody could ever say the whole.
The frontier is full of lesser seals holding lesser things: a shrine floor laid over a battlefield’s dead, a stone lid on one bound spirit, an ember in a socket keeping a hill quiet. From the outside they look the same as the one at Eridu.
A company that has pried up a small seal and walked away from it has learned exactly the wrong lesson, and there is no reliable way to tell the difference before the lid comes off. That is the most useful caution on the frontier, and almost nobody takes it.
None of the hundred and eight open with violence, because violence does not get you a festival. It arrives as a benefactor: a patron, a physician, a foreign creditor, a brilliant tutor, a cure for the thing your daughter has. The offer is real and it works, which is the point.
Then, in order: dependency, the quiet removal of whoever noticed, the substitution, and at last the festival. It takes years, and what it costs in the meantime is a small piece of the city’s relationship with its own god, so the first symptom is not a monster in the street. It is that the lamps are dimmer, and the god is a little harder to hear at the temple, and nobody can quite say when they learned the new hymn.
A campaign can break in at any stage. Breaking in at the last is a siege. Breaking in at the first is a mystery that nobody believes.
Gear is what a hero spends, and treasure is what refills the purse. Run them together and they become the quiet puzzle that gives a delve its tension: every torch burned, wound taken, and spell cast is a resource gone, and what the party hauls home is what lets them go out again. This chapter gives the market of the shining cities and a set of treasure tables to stock a delve.
Coin is the drachm (d), the common silver. A laborer earns a drachm or two a day; six small obols make a drachm, for the price of a torch or a cup of wine.
Gear does what it plainly does; there are no damage numbers, because a blow is a blow. Weapons matter for reach, hands, and the fiction; armor is the one cushion.
| Item | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Light weapon (dagger, hatchet, sling) | quick and quiet; thrown or slung | 2 d |
| Medium weapon (sword, spear, mace, bow) | the soldier’s arms; a spear keeps reach, a bow shoots | 10 d |
| Heavy weapon (greatsword, halberd, maul) | two hands and room to swing; crushing | 25 d |
| Crossbow | ranged, punches through armor; slow to span (a turn to reload) | 30 d |
| Windlass arbalest | ranged, punches through anything; very slow to span | 75 d |
| Ammunition (a quiver, a pouch of stones) | — | 1 d |
| Light armor (leather, padded) | worn armor: turns aside the first wound each fight | 10 d |
| Heavy armor (mail, scale) | worn armor: the first two wounds each fight | 50 d |
| Shield | with light armor, the first two wounds; a bulwark in a line | 5 d |
| Item | Use | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Torches (bundle of six) | light; fire against the dark | a few obols |
| Lamp oil (flask) | a lantern’s night; a thrown flame | 1 d |
| Lantern | steady, hooded light | 5 d |
| Rope (50 ft), spikes, hammer | climbing, delving | 5 d |
| Rations (one week) | food on the road | 2 d |
| Bedroll and camp kit | a night’s rest in the wild | 1 d |
| Healer’s kit (a few uses) | aids a short-rest recovery | 10 d |
| Thieves’ tools | quiet lockwork; disarm traps (Agility, and permission to try at all) | 15 d |
A handful of cheap tools that deal no damage but buy control, thrown at short range or scattered underfoot. Each is a spent resource, you carry only a few, so they win a moment, not a battle; the full effect is on the item’s gear card.
| Item | Does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Net | thrown (short): Entangles up to four crowded foes; each is held, and rolls a die worse at anything, until it tears free | 5 d |
| Bola | thrown (short): Snares one foe’s legs; it cannot close or flee, and rolls a die worse, until it works free | 2 d |
| Caltrops (a pouch) | scatter a patch underfoot: a foe that crosses picks its footing, a die worse to do anything else that turn | 3 d |
Reclaiming what you throw. Gear that is thrown or placed rather than drunk or burned, a net, a bola, a scatter of caltrops, spent arrows and bolts, is recovered after the fight as a matter of course: the party gathers its tools before it moves on, so a net bought once serves delve after delve. The GM calls one lost only when the fiction demands it, no time to search in a running fight or a pursuit, or the thing is wrecked beyond use (a net burned through, caltrops trodden into deep mire). A consumable that is used up, a healing draught, a flask of fire, a torch, is simply gone once spent. (The combat simulator models this the same way: a thrown snare’s charges refill between fights, not within one.)
Each of these answers a resource the dungeon drains. Stock a party with too few and a delve bites; with too many and the tension goes slack.
| Item | Restores / does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Healing draught | mends one step of the harm track, one drink (the harm dial) | 15 d |
| Tonic / smelling salts (3 uses) | clear 2 stress (the nerve dial) | 8 d |
| Antitoxin | ends one Ongoing venom, or a die better to shrug off poison | 8 d |
| Holy oil (a flask) | coats a weapon: counts as blessed flame, harming the dead and anything only fire or magic can | 12 d |
| Alchemist’s fire (a flask) | thrown: a burst of fire, a wound to a spot and sets it Ongoing (burning) | 10 d |
| Spell-component pouch | common reagents to anchor lasting spells; restock in town | 20 d |
A night’s lodging, 1 d. A temple Tend from a Hand, a donation of about 10 d. A porter or torch-bearer, 1 d a day; a hired spear for a delve, 10 d and a share. Passage and a frontier guide, what the road will bear.
Treasure is the other half of the resource puzzle: it is how the party refills health, stress, components, and consumables, and how it funds the growing base that an extended (West Marches) campaign is built on. Roll it, or pick from it; the dice are all ordinary d6.
Pick the tier from what the party just overcame, and roll.
| Hoard | Coin (drachms) |
|---|---|
| A purse (one foe) | 1d6 |
| A cache (a den, a minor foe) | 2d6 × 3 |
| A lair (a standard delve) | 3d6 × 10 |
| A rich hoard (a Greater or Dire foe) | 3d6 × 50 |
| A titan-vault (a campaign find) | 3d6 × 200 |
Portable wealth, easy to carry, sold in any city. Roll for what a hoard’s non-coin worth turns out to be.
The everyday useful find. The bell curve keeps the common things common.
Roll two d6, the first as tens, the second as ones (so 11–16, 21–26, … 61–66). The deeper and older the place, the more the GM should let the party reach the high end. The titan-relics here are the occult prizes that the colleges and cults kill for, and the fuel of a campaign’s great work.
Charms and trinkets (11–16)
Oils, draughts, and alchemy (21–26)
Fine and blessed gear (31–36)
Occult curios (41–46)
Lesser titan-relics (51–56)
Wonders (61–66)
One relic is never a random find. A seal-stone is a shard of the black vault stone out of Eridu, off the seal that held the hundred and eight, and there are perhaps a few dozen genuine pieces in the world against a brisk trade in convincing gravel. Place one deliberately, when a campaign is ready for it.
It is not a weapon. It does not burn demons, ward a door, or add so much as a point of damage. What it does is remember what it held. Laid where one of the hundred and eight has been working, or pressed against the thing itself, a seal-stone gives up that demon’s full name, both halves of it, western and eastern together. Nothing else in the setting reliably does. Since a true name binds and half a true name binds halfway, a genuine seal-stone is the difference between a company that can make a bargain stick and a company that thinks it can.
This is also where the colleges’ locked drawers came from: every sign in the warded cabinets of the peninsula was copied off a seal-stone by somebody, and the copies are inert. Only the stone answers.
The costs. A real one is faintly warm and never cools. Any of the hundred and eight can feel one coming from a long way off, so carrying it makes the bearer findable by exactly the things it names, and a demon that knows you have one will move against the stone rather than against you. Buyers for it include several parties who should not have it. And a fake is indistinguishable until the day you stake something on it, which is the whole reason a company will eventually go looking for the quarry it came from.
Treasure is a lever, not a reward. To keep a campaign’s resource puzzle taut:
The prices, the hoard tiers, and the stronghold costs are tuned to one target: a delve should nearly pay for the next, with a little left to grow on. The whole loop, in average drachms:
| The party… | …earns or spends |
|---|---|
| clears a standard delve (a lair) | ~105 d coin, plus a cache or two, often a draught or antitoxin found in kind |
| restocks after a hard delve (four heroes) | ~50–80 d: a few healing draughts at 15 d, oil and torches for coppers, an antitoxin or a flask as it was spent |
| banks the surplus | the tithe (10%) feeds the Treasury; vote a deeper share to build faster |
| raises a facility | Tier I ~100 d (about one delve’s coin), Tier II ~400, Tier III ~1,200 (a campaign’s saving) |
So the loop is self-funding yet stays taut: a draught is a real slice of a delve, not pocket change, which is what keeps the harm and stress dials honest. A working company is one good haul from ready and one bad night from desperate. The leaps up the stronghold tiers come from the rich hoards, a Greater or Dire foe’s 3d6 × 50 or a titan-vault’s 3d6 × 200, not from grinding standard delves. Keep that shape when you retune: if surplus piles up with nowhere to spend, open the next base tier or the next city rather than cutting the coin.
The College Tome is the great encyclopedia of workings, the master copy kept and forever added to by the Artificers’ College at Aegina, its leaves and fair-copies the prize of every city’s casters. A caster’s reach is only as wide as the workings they have learned, and what they know, they copied from the Tome (or, rarely, added to it). This is the recommended spell library: the pool a caster draws from. A player notes the ones their character knows on the character sheet, gaining new ones from a teacher, from a found leaf of the Tome, or as a caster’s growth allows, and may invent new workings with the GM’s approval, priced against the magnitudes below.
What is not here: a tradition’s signature cantrip and a caster’s at-will tricks are part of who the character already is (the Magic Traditions supplement gives each tradition its free cantrip). A cleric’s Tending, a paladin’s Lay on Hands, the small always-on gifts, cost no stress and are not listed here. This grimoire is the open library of the larger workings a caster reaches out for.
To cast, hold the working’s source, mark 1 stress, and roll Will (the caster’s gift). Read the two best dice as ever: Success, it lands clean; Partial, it lands but bites back, a cost, a smaller effect, or a second stress; Failure, it slips and the fire may Warp. A Greater Spell costs 2 stress; a Ritual none (worked over long calm minutes, never in a fight). Magic is magical harm, so it bites what shrugs off steel, and the harm it deals is a plain wound, the same one step everything else deals. A working that lingers is held by Concentration (it ends if you cast again, are taken out of the fight, or let it go) or anchored with the named component, so it stands on its own. See the core casting rules and Authoring Magic in the SRD.
Overreach, or a Failure on a hostile casting, and the borrowed fire answers in its own tongue. Roll or choose:
A company that holds the frontier long enough will face the oldest work in the world. Beyond the bigger fort and the deeper vault lies the one thing the living gods themselves did at the dawn of this age: the founding of a new city. It is the mythic capstone of a West Marches campaign, the moment the points of light spread one march farther into the dark, kindled by mortal hands.
This chapter is the full rite. The frame is in the stronghold rules
(supplements/30-stronghold.md, Founding a city);
here is how Theogonia plays it out. It changes no character mechanic.
Characters do not grow more powerful for it; what grows is the
company, the map, and the company’s
place in the world. A founding is told in the same coin the campaign
already runs on: the fortnight, the downtime project clock, the position
ladder, and the expeditions between.
A stronghold cannot simply declare itself a city. The work begins only when a holding has truly come of age:
If any of these is missing, the founding is not yet a project. It is a list of adventures to go and earn.
Founding is a grand project, far larger than any facility. Treat it as five great works in sequence, each its own grand project clock (the eight-segment clock of the downtime rules, project clocks), filled over many fortnights by the company, its hired hands, and its allies. No phase fills by labor and coin alone: each is gated on an expedition, the way a Tier III facility is gated on a won component. The clock is the building; the adventure is the key.
| Phase | The great work | Its key (the expedition) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lay the foundation. Choose and consecrate the site; raise the temple shell and the first walls. | Clear the chosen ground of whatever already haunts it: a frontier delve to break the old claim on the place. |
| 2 | Raise the temple. Build the high temple and the first ring of the city around it. | Win the temple’s heart-relic: an altar-stone, a titan-bronze keystone, a sacred fire (a titan’s coal; see The Far Lamp). |
| 3 | Draw the god. Secure the patron by one of the three rites below. | The rite’s own arc (Awaken, Bind, or Draw); the heart of the whole work. |
| 4 | Draw the settlers. People the city; set its rule and its economy; open its market and its roads. | Earn a population: escort a caravan of colonists, break a road, strike a charter with a mother-city or a guild. |
| 5 | Repel the challenge that comes. A founding never goes unanswered. Meet what the new light has stirred. | A set-piece defense or reckoning (below), run on the core rules. |
A founding takes a campaign’s final arc, not a season. The GM paces it, interleaving the great-work clocks with ordinary play, so the city rises in the background and the keyed expeditions become the headline sessions.
Phase 3 is the heart, and the choice that shapes everything after. There are three ways mortals have brought a god into a new temple, and they are not equal. Each is a different adventure, a different kind of god, and a different price.
Rouse a sleeping or local power: a half-forgotten godling, a genius loci, the spirit of a spring, a mountain, an old battlefield, or an ember of the deep past left burning on the frontier. You do not bring a god from elsewhere; you wake the one already here and make it patron.
Take a wild or titan-remnant power and bind it to the temple by rite and relic, as the conquerors of the elder age bound what they overcame. The fastest road, and the most powerful god.
Petition an existing living god to extend itself into a new house: to send an aspect or a scion, or to sponsor a daughter-city under the mother-city’s patron, as the shining cities have always sent out colonies. The safest road, and the most political.
The three are the founders’ real decision, and they map onto the kind of company making it: the lore-seekers awaken, the warriors bind, the players of the great game draw. None is wrong; each is a different city, and a different story after.
Whichever rite, the new patron names a price to stay, a binding on the city for as long as it wants the god’s light. Roll, or choose what fits the power.
Phase 5 is certain: a new light on the map is seen, and contested. Build the threat from the threat tiers at a level worthy of a campaign finale (a Dire foe, or a host led by one), and give the defense a clear objective (hold the temple until the rite completes, protect the patron-fire, drive off the captain).
Any of the six can be the work of Vine, the Level Star, the war-titan of the fallen Lion-Throne and one of the hundred and eight. Everything the five phases build, he unmakes: he throws down stone walls, he finds occultists and hidden things unerringly, and he must throw down any wall that is named to him, including one he built himself. He does not need to besiege a new city. He needs somebody inside it to say, out loud, in his hearing, what its wall is called.
Used this way he turns the finale from a battle into a hunt for the mouth: the walls are coming down section by section and somebody in the founding company has been telling him where. It need not be treachery. Vine is a good listener and a generous employer of surveyors, and the person who named the wall may have done it a year ago, in another city, for money, and thought nothing of it.
He also pairs against Furfur, who may well have funded this founding (see The Far Lamp). One of the hundred and eight wants a city raised and another cannot let a wall stand, and a company that understands this can set them on each other. Setting two of them at each other’s throats is the only move that reliably works, and it has never once come cheap.
The founder’s taboo. This is why nobody who has built on the frontier will speak their own wall’s name aloud outside the gate. Walls get called the north work, the long gray, her arm, anything but the name in the charter. Educated people in the shining cities find the habit quaint.
A founding that holds turns the holding into a city-state, a new safe haven on the map, and opens a new frontier beyond it. Settle the rest as the campaign needs:
And it is never quite finished. The price must be paid each year, the bound thing strains, the leash pulls, the secret waits to be found. A founded city is not a trophy on a shelf. It is the next campaign’s home, and the next campaign’s trouble, kindled with your own hands.
A starter adventure for a new company of fresh heroes, one evening’s play. It teaches the whole loop, a parley, a climb, a fight you should not fight head-on, a puzzle-guardian, and a real choice, and it makes a fine first node of a West Marches map: a frontier holding to return to, with more dark around it.
The situation. Above the watch-hamlet of Straza, on the frontier of Dritsa (city of the Lamplighter), an old beacon called the Far Lamp has burned every night for longer than anyone’s grandmother can remember. It stands on a hill that was a battlefield in the god-war of the titan age, and as long as it burns, the dead of that field stay down. Three nights ago it went dark. The lamp-keeper, old Castor, has not come down the hill. And now, after sunset, the dead are walking.
The party’s task is simple to say: go up, find Castor, and relight the Lamp. What put it out is the adventure.
A dozen turf-roofed houses behind a thornwood palisade, every hearth and lantern blazing though it is barely dusk. The folk are frightened and have lit everything they own. They will tell the party, between them:
A roll to draw Bryda out (Will, and a friendly manner): on a Success she also recalls that a stranger, a soft-handed southerner asking after old shrines, came through a week ago and went up to see Castor. On a Partial she remembers it only as the party leaves, too late to ask more.
The path climbs across the old field. By day it is only a sad meadow of grass-grown mounds and a few green-bronze blades still standing in the earth. After dark, it walks.
Crossing at night, the party meets the restless dead. This is the teaching fight:
Either way, they reach the hilltop and the dark tower.
A square stone tower, Dritsan work, raised on a far older foundation, the cyclopean black stones of a titan-age watch-shrine. The Lamp itself is a great iron brazier at the top, cold and black.
1. The Lamp-Chamber (top). The brazier sits dead. There is no fuel-store, no oil; the Lamp never needed any, which is the first clue. Castor’s cloak is here, and his cold pipe, but not Castor. A lit hearth or brazier the party kindles here makes a safe place to catch their breath (clear stress, steady the nerves) before they go down. Use it; what is below is harder.
2. The Keeper’s Fate. On the stair, Castor, three days dead, struck down by something that hits like a falling wall (a clear sign: no blade did this). A roll to read the body (Wits): on a Success, the wound is a single crushing blow, and his hands are burned, as if he tried to carry something far too hot. On a Partial, only that he died hard and afraid, facing downward, toward the cellar.
3. The Broken Seal. The stair winds down into the titan foundation, into a round vault of black stone. Its floor is a great disc carved with a sun, and at the sun’s heart is an empty socket, scorched, the size of a fist. From the socket a hairline of cold light spreads in cracks across the floor. This seal held the field’s dead asleep, and the Lamp above was lit from what sat here. The socket is empty. Someone pried the ember out.
4. The Vault Guardian. When the ember left its socket, the shrine’s watchman woke. A Bronze Sentinel stands between the party and the socket, and it will let nothing approach. It is mindless, tireless, and its heavy bronze shrugs off ordinary blows, so trading hits is a long, losing game.
The counter is on its body, and the room shows it: a thread of the same cold light leaks from a seam at the nape of its neck, an ichor-seal. A called shot to the seam (a die worse to aim for, unless an ally pins it, grapples it, or drives it against the high ground of the stair), or magic, or fire, gets past the bronze and ends it quickly. A clever company drops it in a round or two; a company that only swings drops it eventually, badly hurt. Let them learn the difference.
5. The Ember-Socket. Past the guardian, the truth: clutched in the dust lies the southerner, the soft-handed stranger from Bryda’s tale, also dead, his hand still around a fist-sized ember that burns and is never consumed, a titan’s coal. He pried it from the socket to steal it, the Lamp went dark, the seal cracked, the dead rose, and the guardian killed him before he reached the stair. (He carries a letter of credit drawn on a Halkis college, his employer, your seed for next time.)
What else is on him, if they look. He was not a brave man and he took precautions. Chalked on the black stone beside him, half scuffed out, is a triangle, the kind a summoner draws to make something stand inside it and tell the truth. He drew it before he pried the coal loose, which means he was asked to report back, and he did not trust whoever was going to be listening. A sharp search (Wits, a Success) also finds, sewn into the lining of his coat, a small clay tablet with a sign on it he clearly could not read. Anyone who has studied in a college will know only this: that sign lives in a locked drawer, and it is one of the ones nobody says aloud.
Do not explain it in this adventure. A starter should end with the party holding one answer and one thing they cannot yet read. (For what the sign is, see The Hundred and Eight; the short version is that the buyer in Halkis is not the top of this chain, and what is at the top wants a titan’s coal for a reason that has nothing to do with selling it.)
The titan’s coal is the whole adventure in the party’s hand:
There is, of course, a third road, take the coal and find another way to seal the field (a god’s blessing, a Halkis-made replacement, a deeper bargain). That is a whole next adventure, which is exactly what a starter should leave behind.
If they relight the Lamp: Bryda’s promised coin and supplies; the standing welcome of Straza as a frontier base (a West Marches home node); a token of the Lamplighter’s favor at the GM’s discretion (a small blessing, a lamp that will not gutter). If they kept the coal, the reward is the coal, and the consequences.
Either way they leave with the southerner’s letter and its Halkis seal: someone paid good coin to have a titan-shrine quietly robbed, and they will want to know why their agent never came back.
Full entries for the Shade and Bronze Sentinel are in the bestiary; what you need at the table is the tier and the one true sentence:
Shade (Common). A cold-fielded dead that only fire fells: a torch, a brand, or a blessed flame drives it off, and ordinary steel passes through it like smoke. Its chill touch numbs the nerve as much as the flesh, so a blow from it also costs a mark of stress, slow to clear. It cannot be Grabbed or knocked down.
Bronze Sentinel (Greater; a Common for this starter). A mindless titan-age guardian whose bronze shrugs off ordinary blows; only a strike to the glowing ichor-seal at its nape, or magic, or fire, gets through, so pin it or aim for the seam.
Risen (Lesser; if you want more dead in the tower). A shambling corpse that falls to one solid blow and knows no fear. A handful, no more.