The High Houses
At this time humanity is dominated by the high houses: human sub-breeds that have aligned themselves to one of the four Cabals, collectives of godlike beings who together make up a pantheon known as the Coterie.
Entry into the high houses isn’t optional, it’s a birthright, and not easily counterfeited. The attention of the gods manifests in their chosen subjects through physical and metaphysical adaptations: the scions of every house have at least a minor boon to evidence this patronage. Each gift is attuned to the sacred element of their Cabal and varies in potency depending on the level of that house's favour. While the lesser houses of the Sheyac display some innate resistance to heat, for example, the exalted harbingers of the Sheyac Cabal's House Borclava are able to create and survive spectacular feats of spontaneous combustion.
At the same time the world remains rife with humans as you know them, poor in godly gifts and divine attention. While the vast majority live under the auspices of one of the houses, more or less willingly, they know that they will never rise higher than their meagre birth allows. The masters only confirm this, naming the godless masses the unointed, for they have no god-given soul to carry between lives. They exist as grist to the mill of generations; as brute meat to be cast against each other in trivial wars.
The high houses paint a simple picture, but on the fringes of society it becomes increasingly clear that there are more forces at play than they would admit. Where the houses have for centuries cowed their unointed with spectacular magics, now a new caste arises amongst the godless – those who, through exposure to inexplicable forces or through prodigious feats of will, have bent the world with their minds. Unfettered powers move through the unointed populace, manifesting in the form of arcaniacs, stirring a people who thought themselves forsaken to ever more courageous acts of self-realisation.
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The Cabals of the Coterie
The Sheyac
The Pazuitics
The Pazuitics
Aligned with the god Sheyac-Razjein – the image of fire – and his kin, the Sheyac have come to well reflect the burning ambition and fierce energy of their adopted element. The people of their houses are possessed of a formidable vigour, and a lust to excel above their rivals that often brings them to prominence. Chief amongst the Houses
Aligned with the god Sheyac-Razjein – the image of fire – and his kin, the Sheyac have come to well reflect the burning ambition and fierce energy of their adopted element. The people of their houses are possessed of a formidable vigour, and a lust to excel above their rivals that often brings them to prominence. Chief amongst the Houses of the faction are the Rava Chi’en, a people rife with gifted artificers, inventors, and delvers in ancient technologies. Beneath them are a hundred houses keen to excel themselves in Chi’enene eyes. Of these, the Borclavoi are the most significant and the most quarrelsome: a militaristic society whose priests have been known to literally self-immolate with the power of their faith.
The Pazuitics
The Pazuitics
The Pazuitics
A generally ascetic, statuesque people, the followers of Pazu and his heavenly faction remove themselves from the baser concerns of mankind as far as they are able. But the more they spurn the support of the unointed, the more the masses flock to their banners. Their aloofness breeds all kinds of rumour: often their unwanted vassals imag
A generally ascetic, statuesque people, the followers of Pazu and his heavenly faction remove themselves from the baser concerns of mankind as far as they are able. But the more they spurn the support of the unointed, the more the masses flock to their banners. Their aloofness breeds all kinds of rumour: often their unwanted vassals imagine that the Pazuitics have secret knowledge they are willing to share with only the most devoted, that their apparent indifference is some kind of test. Less often than not, they are correct. Typically gifted in all matters aesthetic, the Pazuitics all dance to the tune of high house Verguille, whose strategists and diplomats are the envy of most every rival.
The Nethermen
The Pazuitics
The Nethermen
Every Netherun house has at some point been the focus of a child’s nightmare or a campfire tale of terror. Wedded to the earth, with many of them living deep within it, the Nethermen have a few habits that make them easy targets for such stories. None more so than the Unger, their highest house, whose people carve the soil as easily as a
Every Netherun house has at some point been the focus of a child’s nightmare or a campfire tale of terror. Wedded to the earth, with many of them living deep within it, the Nethermen have a few habits that make them easy targets for such stories. None more so than the Unger, their highest house, whose people carve the soil as easily as a common man does waves. Dwellers on the surface have little interest in Unger's persistent efforts to unearth the deep-buried legacies of past aeons. Instead they spread terrifying tales of their fearsome warrior caste, the Solderunger, Built for combat, broad and hugely muscled, they are indeed powerful, but much worse than that, it is almost impossible to fight the forces beneath one’s feet.
The Jard
The Pazuitics
The Nethermen
Where the other Coteri gather a collection of houses and disperse them amongst their pantheon, the Jard long ago dispensed with such formalities, and united under one banner, that of Jardmugan, the One God of All Waters. The people of their houses bred together, diffusing myriad traits across nations and generations. Fortunately for them,
Where the other Coteri gather a collection of houses and disperse them amongst their pantheon, the Jard long ago dispensed with such formalities, and united under one banner, that of Jardmugan, the One God of All Waters. The people of their houses bred together, diffusing myriad traits across nations and generations. Fortunately for them, the heredity of the stronger houses won out, and the Jard, as a people, are now a proud race, towering over their physically inferior rivals. On the other hand, the more nuanced gifts of the old Jardic houses have waned through the blood, so while physically impressive, and terrors at sea, the Jards have come to be seen as stultified giants. They rarely set foot on land, as far as anyone can tell, and so exist largely outside of the politics of the houses.
The Gravemarch
Those who array themselves against the Cabals seldom do so with lasting success. The military might and unrivalled magics of the high houses soon put rebels in their place: on pikes atop city gates, or atomised over battlefields.
No house has ever fallen to unointed forces, and until recently none has ever had cause to truly fear it might. All’s Well That Ends finds you in more troubled times, with sedition fomenting all the way from frontier outposts to the underbelly of every city, even reaching into many a fortress.
Merchants journeying between houses vanish on well-lit roads; the heirs of house nobility are found dead in the supposed safety of their beds; garrisons on the fringes of contested lands disappear to the man, and one house falls upon another for vengeance’s sake.
It is only a matter of time before those who sow this discord show themselves in number enough to reap the rewards: they style themselves the Gravemarch, knowing and not caring that such insurrection will not go unpunished.
Mamekanda
Not only the world, but the skies are very different to what we know. Our moon is gone, in its place: a being understood no more by the astronomers of the Rava Chi’en than by the worms of the earth.
This is Mamekanda, the Aether-Wyrm.
Looking up at it, it is impossible to ascertain how far above the world it floats, or how massive it may be. From some angles it is the bones of a dead dragon the size of a mountain chain, from others it is a fortress of stone and metal, bristling with armament. Others argue it is a frozen ship of the gods, a spur of shattered planetoid, a plume of lava caught in orbit, the mother of all avr.
As yet, none know for sure, and no shortage of brave fools have died trying to solve the mystery. The earth is spattered with failed ascents, and while the current interest in man-bearing balloons holds some promise, still none have come close to realising their prize.
Everyone alive reveres Mamekanda to some extent; most with a polite nod in her direction of a morning, some going as far as a genuflection or other minor ritual on sight of her. Among the arcaniacs, there are those who associate their powers with her influence. They seek to establish her among the pantheon, in a new, superlative Cabal of her own.
These zealots stand to form a new high house, obtaining, they imagine, souls and eternal life as a result. These are the Occudians, more despised by the established houses than any other unointed save perhaps the Gravemarch. More troubling still, their powers are far more formidable than the average arcaniac’s, to such a degree that it seems ruling out Mamekanda’s influence is increasingly naive.