Scimitherasia
Artist @boagnnnn
Lore Background: An Altaniri noble lady visiting some minor Second People's ruins. The Second peoples (despite what the name implies as it refers to their status) were the first human inhabitants of the Janedi Peninsulla.
In ancienint times which predate history they carved giant faces and carved mysterious writing into every large rock in the southern peninsulla.
By the time the Greenhanded men arrived the Second Peoples aka. Manyfaced men had become sick and degenrated living in isolated villages where most were strongly disabled the land was sickly with only the blessing of the holy Baobal of the Greenhanded men reviving it although the old curse still lingers in places.
The Alteniri are different. A young race, all direct descandants of the Golden Emperor who centuries ago united the Janedi into one Empire. He and his 15 000 wives gave birth to a new race. This makes all Alteniri royalt and gives them unique status as being allowed to marry outside their race without losing status within the Janedi racial caste system.
Alteniri are talented in magic and live with their head above the clouds. They are plagued by dreams of a land above the clouds and a desire to return to it. The nominal Capital of the now strongly decentralsied janedi Empire thus is built to resemble a city made from clouds. Still many an Altenari set out looking for that place climbing mountains and dying in the prozess.
This lady here? She has left the capital for some reason... who knows why. Maybe it is to meet a foreign noble, maybe just for tourism. She appears to not be very impressed by the ancient ruins of the second men.
Artist @ZeFellowBud
Lore Background: Pictured a Witchelven Privateer. Since the Morlloux came and the Witchelven Empire lost it's dominance the Padashahadin ordered the distribution of Privateer Licenses. They may keep and legally sell any loot obtained from western ships and western nations including slaves.
She can be seen holding a bottle of bottle of wine made from pink grapes a popular product from the western Isle. The script on it actually means something in the witchelven conlang, which has it's own unique script. She's dressed up quite a lot for a witchelf which means she's either quite a low ranked witch/noble or it's cold outside...
She is wearing quite typical witchelves clothing. Mostly black/dark with colourful trinkets attached. Witchelves all have pale skin and cant get tanned, qye colors range from blue to green and hair is always black with exception of nobility which can have white or black hair. A lot of people say all witchelves look the same, even other elves.
Each Witchelven Pirate fleet has at least a few elves as they are the only ones who can attune to the living crytals of the Padashahadin lineage giving the witchelves a reliable way to navigate despitet heir nation not having access to astromances. (stars and comasses can't be used for navigation in the setting due to the stars dancing and ambient mana disturbing compasses)
Witchelves have many disadventages compared to western navies. Navies function on leavy system simmilar to feudalism making assembling a large war fleet a slow and complicated prozess furthermore lack of canons makes their ships unable to compete in an outright war as they learned during their involvement in the War of the Golden Spoon.
As such the Witchelves encouraged Privateering which takes adventage of the high skeed of their types of ship with their ships also being less disadventaged in small skirmishes.
Artist @WhiteDogStudio3
Lore Background: A woman from the Swan Tribes of the Surkhtie States. She specifically is part of a balancist Sect as can be recognized by her attire. Her attire carefully weighs natural elements and unnatural elements. Cyan and Brown. Metal and tribal decorations. Her left arm is left bare and in tribal annortments and is used for magic as she's a low rankign withc while her right arm is covered and decrated in metal trinkets meant to bring her luck in use of her firearm.
The firearm itself has all it's wood dyed bright red as a firearm retaining the color of natural wood is considered bad luck.
Her neck is long and decorated to appear even longer empahcising her heritage as a member of the Swan tribe. She also is shown wearing white make up with black markings aroudn her eyes. that's because she is on special duty thus is more dolled up than usual. She's standing guard beneeth the Saint-Skin bannetr a relic made from the flayed skin of a Saint. It's a a great honor to be assigned this duty.
Most Swan-Tribe members live as slaves under the Witchelves thus ones living among the Surkhites tend to be great advocates for fighting against the withcelves.
Artist @NemoralisA
Lore Background: A wild Bloodox being attacked by Tkgerian Galopping Bats.
Both species are native to the shifting Steppe however due to domestication by Ogres the species has spread all thoughout the old world including the Gnoll Empire. Bloodox are the perfect farm animals for these brutish species as they can survive their handler thoughtlessly attacking them in their stupidity...
Bloodox are a species which adapted to the presence of predatory bats in the shifting steppe by developing blood sacks growing on it's back which store large amounts of excess blood so it may survive attacks.
While a defense mechanism the species benefited from this as Tkgerian Bat packs have been observed attacking any other predator including humans, elves or goblins trying to hunt Bloodox.
Tkgerian Galopping Bats are the largest species of bat found in the world. They are known for having only relatively small hives and their stronly regressed ability to fly. They are barely able to glide. They move in packs of 6-12 individuals but multiple packs usually cosnitute a Hive of a few dozen members. As most bloodbats of the Shifting steppe they posess metal teeth and feed on blood storing it in inflatable sacks. They can also make simple structures out of meral containing wax.
Artist @Seoh_Officiall
Lore Background: The giants always envied the quick wits of the other races. The high giants equally smart, but slow in their reasoning and action the lesser giants completely less intelligent.
The great land of the giants is gone. Only the lost Giant's Coast remains and the Pillar Islands of the Cyclops.
Great vertical towers poke out of the sea and cut the clouds. Above the clouds live the descandants of lower giants, kin to the Ogres - the Cyclops.
Even in their own myth it is known they made a pact with something. A pact which gave them the ability of unpararelled focus which makes them lose out on all other things.
All Cyclops are savants, they dedicate their life to one hobby, living isolated lives pursuing their Focus, their single craft upon which their single eye focuses.
There is no states, no nations no villages, even families are rare. Only spread out huts on the odd empty land inhabited by a single cyclops and his herd of sheep. At the center of it their worshop, the center of their passion.
The Pillar Islands are a shadow of a world long gone. Wierd rounded islands connected by bridges wide as a peninsulla and so old they look melted from geologic prozesses. islands where only grass grows and sheep graze. Flowers and Birds the ognly invaders to this isolated paradise, until a few years ago. Morlgua has carved ports into the sheer basalt walls and brought it's watres. The ability of divine single focus has been harnessed. The Morlgua provide reources, food and blueprints and the great Cyclopean blacksmiths craft them wonder-weapons no human blacksmith could ever make all in a hut made of stone.
Artist @_headofthedead
Lore Background: In the Crimson Swamp, an Itzimpiliy stands over his defeated enemy, a golden knight from the Thirteen Monasteries.
"His stone expression was motionless, as always, reflecting the perfect form known to his shard of the whole.
What fools these mortals must be. Your cages of steel and gold do nothing but shield the mortal flesh that is meant to kneel before the divine. How can a shell of mimicry hope to stand before one who is eternal stone throughout?
The stone man's rage had faded as the man's flesh turned to mush from the raging plague seeping from his cracks. He now lay below him, where he should have been from the start. Mortals exist to kneel before the gods and to receive gifts in exchange. So why do they choose to be made to kneel instead?"
Lore: The Itzimpiliy are ancient living stone men from the northeast of the New World. They believe themselves to be shards of a single god who shattered when he fell to the mortal realm. Once, their form was perfectly uniform, shards waiting to reunite.
However, their loss in the War of the Fire-Rose made them swear temporary servitude to Aka, the Serpent of Discord, in exchange for his salvation. When they emerged, they no longer remembered their faces, and the vile snake god took his price.
Not a single depiction of their true divine form remained. Now they no longer look alike, each shard conjuring a different, nearly arbitrary divine form to recreate.
Wherever they go, they are reminded of their failure, for as Aka, a god, lies hidden in the divine realm, his presence has changed the swamp to mimic his form.
To outsiders, the true domain of the Itzimpiliy is forgotten. They are a god of art, theater, and song. Yet now, all men know them for is the forging of stone and wielding of plague. They are no longer a god that can be loved.
Artist @WhiteDogStudio3
Lore Background: The amazons are one the Trent vassal tribes and one considered particularly beloved by their living-tree masters. The dryads to Trants what angels are to gods are said to be based on them.
The Amazons were once an order of female monks who rejected the practice of witchcraft common among the Lamia and men of the new world's far south. Eventually the 6 fells came to collect what had accumulated in seamingly cheap contraqcts over centuries. Hell opened, the lamia went extinct and the few surviving humans were reduced to cattle.
Only the women of the order traitors to their kin due to the neutrality in the war between flame and stell and poison and wood remained. With no choice they became servants of the treant and why they themselves boast as being the last true humans of the Ind they can hardly be considered more human than the cattle-bred humans living in demonic servitude. Amazons rarely look older than in their 30's even when not far to death from old age, their pregnancies are counted in weeks not months and their strength and size both are above that of other humans. Their men look more akin to halflings than humans few, sickly, short in stature and living short lives.
Most distinctive among their traits however is not what they are born in. But what they recieve as gifts. Living amber weapons are a great gift and honor to recieve from the Trents, the Amazons are the only tribe in which all members recieve one. (except men, they don't count). Amber claws and teeth woven in their flesh. Truly living they can grow and shrink at command and heal when damaged.
They are a pride of any amazon warrior, as they recieve their claws upon reaching adulthood, when they leave their father's hut and set out into the deep jungle.
Artist @Seoh_officiall
Lore Background: "Tell me, what is a mage but one who steals from the gods? Hated by all of creation, for he makes himself a usurper of the very things that fuel the cosmos and the world. Then tell me: why shall Vzdoruye bow before Okhost when it can surpass it?"
These were the words of the Grandmaster of Vzdoruye when he understood the nature of the Rapþsiipdur. When he who stood at the precipice of Lichdom chose instead to look beyond it.
Vzdoruye is one of hundreds of schools of black magic, created by mages not good enough to remain in Okhost after graduation. Once loyal advisors to the Goblin Khans, they found themselves forced underground and hunted down by the followers of the Black Goat in Ruskata. Their research eventually focused on history, and they excavated a burial mound of the Rapþsiipdur. However, rather than an army of skeletons, men with dead bodies yet living souls remained—golden needles with unknown symbols tethering all their souls within the body of their lord.
This was not mere necromancy. This was another way toward eternity, another ascension toward Lichdom outside of the black books of the ancient Khenomeric Empire.
At first, the resurrected raiders had little interest in the mages. However, as older and older mounds were discovered, the "causality" of their return began to make sense. And as the heroes of the past returned, their oppressed living descendants joined them, wishing for independence.
And thus, slowly, an alliance of four was born: the black academy rejected by the faith of the Black Goat; the ancient raiders chasing an ancient prophecy of the godless faith; independence fighters; and various religious and ethnic minorities; all enemies of the Tsaristaya.
In all that, one name began emerging over and over: the Golden-Faced Girl, a minor deity in the late pagan faiths, a myth in the old faith, and finally a site of pilgrimage; one among many in the age of the worship of forefathers. And one of the undead, so ancient his men wielded bronze not iron, knew where it was: in a cave by the sea within the borders of the Belaran Empire, accessible only at low tide.
It was a site of pilgrimage, forgotten over time. Yet when the alliance arrived there, they stood; a complex of ancient wooden buildings, wood drenched in salt so it might never rot. As if frozen in time. Walls of the caves covered in paintings which may themselves have come from the age when dragons and trolls warred, but they spoke not of dragons and trolls, but of men and gods. The men once killed the gods as gods killed men, though "man is weaker" now.
A myth from the Godless Faith on the walls, mixing ancient runes and paintings: a man with an axe and a god fading into nothingness; a child with a chopped-off face and a thousand more behind her.
Finally, the eldest of the revived remembered. He rushed to the largest building of them all, the Hall of Echoes. And he opened the door. There they still sat: a hundred dead who are one, and a single young girl with a golden face.
So first entered the ancient Rapþsiipdur, then their living descendants by blood, and lastly the Vzdoruye, who kneel before no god.
"I shall be hidden, and I will be forgotten. But because I am forgotten, I will be found once more when the sleeping warriors return to fight the last war of this world; and one of many for the gods."
~a prophecy of causality
Artist @Metal_Head_Cr
Lore Background: A Meoswaerum nobleman taking a stroll.
Meoswaerum is also known as the Fungal Kingdom. It's a nation that entered the Qifu - the Dargon throne's sphere of influence long after the dissapearance of the Dragons.
Meoswaerum nobility quickly adopted the teachings of Taisen synergising them with their faith in the mushroom god Enei - a god that demands the subjugation of nature and the focus on fulfilling ones duty in this life.
All nobility practice so called 'high myconic magic' which specialises in controlling a type of mushroom that can zombify humans and animals. Each noble themselves is infected with the fungus since birth requiring a constant controll of their magic to keep themselves from turning into an undead. This self-infection however gives them a type of attunement with the undead they controll allowing for much more precise control. It also allows one ot use their own blood as a weapon to spread spores and to use the fungus in their flesh to heal wounds. An extreme case of this happening was a mage surviving his own decapitation by catching and quickly rettaching his own head. In less extreme cases Meoswaerum mages walk around with spare zombified hands, fingers and tongues hidden within their flowing rhobes to quickly replace in case of injury to permit them casting again.
As all mages they suffer from physical weakness and frailty and lack the ability to practice martial arts. However unloike other mages they are very hard to kill and can rapidly turn you into an undead if their blood smeared rapier as much as grazes your skin making them surprisingly dangerous in melee combat.
The Meoswaerum peninsulla is one grand salt march where nobles live in castles on manmade hills and pesants live in treehouses. The only roads are greatly elevated wooden palisades high enough to remain above the sea even in the months where the entire peninsulal sinks beneath the waves.
Undeath is an act of mercy for a soul trapped in a body having not finalised it's duty can't miove to ther afterlife and is forced to rot inside the body in agony slowly being destroyed or turning into a vengeful spirit. As such is there any kindness greater than to let one finish his earthly duties even if he failed? To save their very soul? Not it is the very pride of a nobleman.
And so we see a nobleman on a stroll with his servant. Dressed in fine clothes he clearly expects to meet someone. The sun is shining, the sea is calm and even some ripe strawberries hanging from a wild vine came to greet him. It's a nice day.
Artist @Seoh_officiall
Lore Background: A young Sarkation noble lady on an excursion. Encountering a threttening individual, then she blows his head of. A surprising recent trend among young nobility following the Church of Divine Duality. (CoDD)
The CoDD is the most followed faith in subcontinent of Scimitherasia. It values enforcement of civilized values at all cost. It also strongly gender's it's roles with maitainance being a task for women while conquest or expansion the task for men. So while men will go out to catch savages, women will do the same with criminals. Of course usually these things are handled via arrests and following that a court procedure.
Many a young noble however wishes to get a taste of it. As the printing press has spread so did books about daring heroes taking justice into their own hand! And here we see the result of such tales - an inspired young noblemwoman:
Laint Iscoje Illva Rwoiaswalf a young lady of house Rwoiaswalf who snuck out in her prettiest dress and with a stolen blunderbus. It's the first person she killed.
Some notes on apperance: Her hair is not naturally pink. All followers of the CoDD shun natural things including bare untattooed skin and undyed hair. Similarly natural colors are shunned green and brown are outright banned and more dull shades of blue and yellow are associated with peasantry. Her tattoos mimick patterns more common among elves featuring complex mono-colored patterns tying her (albeit distantly) to the old elven lineages of the the cities.
Peasant men and women usually wear hats. Here the man seems to lack piety for he wore no hat and let his pants turn brown. So he deserved to die no matter what really. Tattoos from the lower class tend to be crass yellow or blue lines done haphazardly with some more faithful peasants tattoing their entire skin and shaving their body hair.
Artist @Pazc188049
Lore Background: It's a Gnoll... fertility(?) ritual. To understand what is going on I need to explain the Gnoll lifecycle. Gnolls in the humanoid form reproduce asexually. When they die their flesh turns into maggots which then grow into about dog-boar sized females and master sized males. With the female Gnollhound then each growing a few new Gnolls which kill and consume her upon bursting out of her stomach. It's kind of like jellyfish with a sexually and asexually reproducing stage of life.
So the celebration here is the ceberation after winning a war between two Gnoll tribes. The greatest warrior of the enemy tribe is strung up high on poles loaded with food so that his maggots may grow big and fat before falling into the flesh-pit to compete with the gnollmaggots of the lesser kin. This is both a festival of ridicule where the dead enemy is mocked, belittled and their body profaned as much as it's a fertility ritual where prayers of strength are offered to the maw so the next generation of the tribe may be strong.
And so it's one grand feast where all eat until their bellies are full, all fight to re-establish chierrchy in the tribe and all pray and offer sacrifice to the great Maw the god of the Ogres so thy may get it's blessings.
Artist @NemoralisA
Lore Background: A creature with the unceremonious common name: Rape Mollusk
Rape Mollusks are a semiaquatic race which spends their time in the deapths of the ocean. They are omnivorous beings reminiscent of smimes, slugs and squids. Originally their bodies were too soft to effectively move on land so they chose to reinforce their body and tentacles with stabbed in bones, rocks and sticks.
As a sentient race they are also not above using scavenged weapons.
Rape mollusks while not completely deaf are hard of hearing and can't speak. Their eysight is however great with their entire body covered in small photo receptors not just their large eyes. This allows them to expertly camouflage. Though as they communicate via emitting light from their chest light-producing organs you usually notice them right before they attack. (due to the light sensitive cells in short distances they can communicate without looking at each other too.
Now to the name. Rape mollusk: as some species of sea slug IRL rape mollusks reproduce by having fencing duels and using their rapier-like penis to stab their opponent. Unlike sea slugs however who are hemaphroditic they are technically speaking all male as their female reproductive organs have athropied.
Worry not however because whatever target they stab and and insert sperm into will also experience their reproductive tracts mutating. While not leathal a female of sufficient size will endlessly produce glowing rape mollusk eggs to lay in water (always has a strong feeling of thirst, birth every few days). Males are less lucky, especially mamalian ones. The reproductive organs being outside of the body will swell unreasoably and will burst and be completely destroyed after just one birthing cycle resulting in castration and potentially death.
Despite being weird gruesome creatures, they are sentient enough to (rarely) engage in trade or to find work as mercenarries. Rape Mollusks offering trade likely means some sort of natural dissaster occured in their deepsea lands, however they don't tak about it.
They are found in the costs around the central parts of the southern old world. Anywhere from the Gnoll Empire all the way to Midnat.
Artist @Metal_Head_Cr
Lore Background: A Ruskatan witch encountered a Sarkation knight. Not a pleasant situation for either of them.
One on patrol in contested land hoping to come back having found nothing. The other on her way to a harvest festival.
In most situations the match-up between a single scimitherasi knight and a single Rustkayan witch favors the knight. Ruskatan magic has few attack spells instead being focused around haunting, espionage, surveilence and utility. Ruskatan witches can hang cut of ears and poked out eyes on trees and see andf hear from them as if they were their own. They can chop of leggs to put them on huts to make walking war huts. Some attack magic however exists. Expensive and hard to cast.
A witch facing a knight needs to first of all obfuscate her spellcasting. So she casts a minor spell to make hands crawl by her command (a spell which because significantly more useful since grenades were invented) the price for it a mouse's broken neck.
However with her voice she casts a second spell: krirkil eomji kushtkji = twist his neck (the red symbols manifesting in the air. it's a phonetic inscription, in the Ruskatyan script)
The price a mortal's life. A price she cannot pay so she does somethin called a 'witch's gambit' she pays for casting the spell by it's outcome. A risky strategy that if it failed would result in a serious injury to her. Probably worthwhile considering lettin the knight get to her would be no better.
For some general Rusktaya lore. It's a matriarchical nation of witches who worship an entity called the black goat. They unified into one nation after managing to expell the Western Goblin Khanate, but retaining it's governance structure.
Stigmata of the black goat are a pile of horns replacing a limb you have in exchange granting you magic powers tied to it. her obscured left hand is actually just a pile of sprouting horns hence she can controll and summon left hands.
All men in Ruskata are expected to pay a 'tax' once they turn 16. It can be either a hand, foot, eye, tongue or ear. Some more zealous men will offer a whole arm, leg or even their jaw. The only exception are the Imperial consorts of the Tsaristaya's Harem.
Artist @NemoralisA
Lore Background: A Land-Orca devouring a blackie. In the far north of the shifting steppe, the land becomes too cold for bats, ox and horse alike to live there. In the furthest north the snows remain all year round and in winter the ice grows so stiff even the steppe's shifting stops replaced with ever droaning sounds of rubbing and cracking.
In those frozen lands the Elves and Goblins alike has to find a replacement for their trusty horses - or maybe those were the originals. Land-orcas are among the smaller land whales, although they are the largest land-Whales capable of surviving withotu assitance (larger types like Aulugas and Humpers require entire goblin tribes to help sustain them and they would have long gone extinct without them)
In the very deapths of winter the only reliable source of food become the blackies. Bizzare creatures which look like multiple grown together octopi which are near black in coloration and with eyes randomly growing out of parts of their body. No matter how you cut them up they will rapidly start growing into a full blackie. (as you see a severed tentacle already grew an eye and if it reaches the sea in time a bouth will soon follow). Despite their gruesome apperance and potential danger larger specimenscan pose they are an important food source for semi-aquatic langwhales and mortals alike.
Artist @NemoralisA
Lore Background: This is a so called Khenomeric Draconid. During the height of the Khenomeric Empire the school of Green attempted to create beasts of war based on parts scavanged from dragons. None could even come close to the dragons, most of these bests died out, but a few types went feral and still live in former lands of the Empire unscourged by the Gnoll menace.
Some have become tamed by the Wood Elves of the Labyrynthian forest aka 'the last curse of the green'.
Artist @ChorilateLight
Lore Background:
The Auluga Landwhale. The largest lndwhale and terrestial creature within the setting or Arm igniatu/ Landwhales are a relic from a time gone by when the whole world was covered in dark snow.
Aulugas are filter feeders feeding on black algae which grows in the snows of the northern Shifting Steppe. The beast is severely oversized for the amount of algae and snow present these days as such it's diet is usually supplemented by blood and milk being fed to it by it's symbiotic goblinoi denizens.
Northern Goblins are said to be the original goblins. All of them center their existance around landwhales, however Auluga herding tribes are rare with most tribes being centered around smaller predatory types of landwhales such as the Land Orca. Unlike their warlike ocusins from the south the Steppe Goblins who ride horses and create great Khanates the northern goblins are more peacful, not the Land orca Riders, but certainly the Auluga herders.
Aulugas are highly inteligent creatures that are said to live as long as a milenium.
This colony is traveling into the far north where the steppe gives rise to permafrist and some minor mountain ranges. Here at it's coldest the Aulugas can feast on black snow even in summer. Unlike this colony which is quite small a lot of Auluga herder tribes will have a main villahe on top of the auluga, but also a larger nomadic host traveling alongside it on lesser land whales. Similarly this individual has quite a natural apperance, possibly influenced by nature-worship practices among this goblinoid troops. It is however not rare to see the fur of the landwhale dyed, trimmed or woven into braids.
