Fogbank - The Five Syndicates

 When the world fell to flame and fire and war, many fled to the perceived safety of the subterranean world, especially the gargantuan caverns which hold the Blackwaters, a massive underground sea with its own ecology. The greatest of the subterranean cities was Fogbank - so named for the rolling fogs that surround the island most of the time. The island on which the city is built rests in utter blackness, so the dark and the fog are pierced by the bright lights of the city, a city which never sleeps. This is the city of Fogbank, the bright jewel of the Blackwaters, the greatest city under the earth.

The Elves of Saga

 Previously, we've discussed the Dwarves of Saga, the world's most powerful and advanced people (according to the Dwarves, anyways). In that post, I mentioned how many fantasy settings seem to have an overabundance of different kinds of Elves - wood elves, dark elves, blood elves, sea elves, and so on. This is my take on Elves, or at least the Elves found in the world of Saga.

The Elves of Saga are the most widely varied of any folk in the world. While there are broad trends in Elvish culture, Elves are so fiercely individualistic and ever-changing that establishing a single truth about Elves as a whole is nearly impossible. While Dwarves and Men are consigned to labor under the established laws of reality (Men have some sway over such things, but that is a subject for another time), Elves shape reality with their belief, making it conform to them, rather than the other way around. 

The Ghostly Magic of Ectophagy

 Though part of human culture for many centuries prior, the existence of Ghosts was not conclusively proven until 1886, when famed Occultist and Spiritualist leader Charles Cornelius Ward was able to produce a "physical" sample - the world's first Ectoplasm. This discovery led to a boom in popularity for the Spiritualist movement, which swept across the United States and Europe as interest in the world of Spirits became part of the public zeitgeist. As increased study of the newly discovered phenomenon continued, the production of Ectoplasm became cheaper and more widespread. It wasn't long before the first "Ghost-Eater" was born - a human being with the ability to utilize injested Ectoplasm to accomplish wild supernatural effects.

The increased interaction between the Spirit World and Earth began to weaken barriers which had kept the two worlds apart, and creatures of Spirit would occasionally begin to cross over, manifesting as monstrous Ectoplasmic forms, and wreaking havoc in their confusion and frustration. Humanity addressed this problem the way they knew best - not by ceasing to explore their new discovery, but by weaponizing the abilities of the Ghost-Eaters, putting them to work against wandering Ghosts, as well as utilizing them in more human-focused conflicts, be those military or against rogue Ghost-Eaters involved with criminal elements.

Redesigning D&D 5th Edition - Starting with Classes!

 I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was a child, but I didn't really come to understand the mechanics and design of the game until I started DMing using the newly-released 5th Edition in 2015. That was when I started taking an interest in not only running the game, but changing it, making my own additions and modifications to the core in order to turn it into the experience I wanted it to be.

Since the release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (2020), I've been unimpressed or outright disappointed by most of the new releases for 5th Edition, including the outright revision of some existing mechanics, advertised as "optional", but taken as the default option going forward. Suffice to say, it got me thinking about what I actually wanted from the game, from its core options, and from its future. It got me to re-examine some of my assumptions about what worked and what didn't, and how I might change things to work more to my liking. I decided that, even if nothing more than a design challenge for myself, I wanted to redesign 5th Edition into something I was happy with. This series will be doing just that.

Infernalis - A Hierarchy of Demons

Though they may seem wild and chaotic (and in truth, they certainly are), Demons also have a hierarchy by which they operate. It is not a construct of society or logic, but an immutable part of their being, forcing them into an eternal contest of strength, wits, and the unrelenting drive to raise their own station at the expense of others. This organization is known as the Infernal Hierarchy, and a Demon's place in it determines their power.

When a Demon is spawned, it comes into being with a number. The higher a demon's number, the less powerul the Demon is, and the lower the number, the stronger the Demon. The only way a Demon can rise in power is to wholly consume the essence of a higher-ranking Demon - their body, memories, and even personality. In doing so, the Demon's number rises to that of their prey. However, they do not only inherit the power of their prey's former number, but also imprints and fragments of their memories and personality. In this way, higher-numbered Demons are almost immortal amongst their kind, as the higher the number and power of the Demon consumed, the more powerfully it will imprint upon its new host. The cruelty of the Infernal Hierarchy ensures that even when Demons of weaker numbers triumph, that victory is short-lived.

Infernalis - Devils That Dwell Among Us

 The Demons first arrived during an event that would come to be known as the Infernal Incursion. It is still unknown exactly what caused the Incursion event, though a number of high-ranking Demons are suspected as culprits. The exact motivation behind the triggering of the Incursion event is also unclear, though it is believed to be part of some larger infernal power play, introducing living mortal souls to mix as some form of trick or advantage in a grander scheme. Whatever the cause may have been, the results have been clear - a partial merging of the mortal and demonic planes, an overlap allowing Demons to escape the tortures of Hell and find greener pastures preying upon the living. Millions upon millions of Demons swept from their home and into ours, bringing with them chaos, destruction, and a total upheaval to the world as it existed before. To many religious types, this event was the prophesied end of days, the scouring of the sinful from the world. For a time, lots of people bought into that idea. Wars raged against supernatural creatures once thought to dwell only in heavy-handed morals and nightmares. Famines and disease killed nearly as many. 

Amercana - The Pentagon

No secret history of a magical otherworld existing alongside our own is complete without government meddling. After all, a government will seek to know all of the goings-on within its borders, and eventually, it will stumble across magical elements that the population doesn't know about. What that government will decide to do with its newfound access to the magical world depends heavily on the government in question - exploitation, experimentation, diplomacy, declarations of secret war, and so on.

The United States government never went through this process of discovery. It knew about the magical world well before it gained its independence from Britain in its revolution. Its founding fathers were members of secret orders, hidden lodges, and occultic brotherhoods which sought to understand the world that existed alongside our own. When the nation came into its own, and its government began to crystallize, it needed a bureau to handle supernatural (or thaumaturgical, as was the preferred term) matters. Thus, born in the fledgling America was the first instance of the Pentagon.