The Valdrin Codex
Nothing was lost by accident. What survives here survived because someone in a chancery, a hold or a temple decided it should, and everything they left out is still out there, unwritten and unreconciled.
Stories
Reports, ledgers, sagas and journals. Five things that happened, or were written down as though they had.
The Third Tide
Set down for readers by Meriel Cobb, schoolmistress at Fairwater
Vuskar lost a hundred and forty one ships sailing west, and mourned every one of them. This is the story of the girl who had never seen snow, the keeper who counted the dead, and the night Krowth found out.
Harken's Landing
A debt, a bay, and a chart that has never once been corrected
Sir Ambrose Harken took the first Aethrassian charter to Meridia and named nothing. A clerk in Vaurmont named it for him, off the margin of a map he drew wrong on purpose, and two hundred years of captains have been sailing around a shoal that is not there.
The Record at Eerie Peak
An assessor's report, Durrenhold archive, filed and not acted upon
A hold went quiet. The dwarf sent to find out why discovered that nothing had gone wrong with the dwarves, and everything had gone wrong with the wall.
The Ninth Verse of the Hafnvar
A harbour tally from Fairwater, kept nineteen years, and the saga it kept failing to disagree with
A Vuskan longship has sailed the northern run for two hundred years and has never once come home short a man. A clerk who counted them for a living worked out why, and then he stopped counting.
The Worked Place
From the journal of Brother Anselm Vey, missionary of the Sacred Light, recovered from his effects
A missionary spent a season arguing theology with orcs who would not argue back. So they walked him six days into the back country and showed him the only surviving record of what was done to them.
The Garden at Vellisch
Ninety-one years of colonial dispatches, in which nothing whatsoever occurs
A Lyaudite river colony was never attacked, never besieged, never betrayed and never lost. It simply stopped being Lyaudite, and no clerk in Grismere has ever been able to say on what day.
Races
Cultures forged in famine, war, and sometimes, prosperity.
Dwarf
The stone does not remember the hammer, only the chisel.
Tenacious and proud, dwarves are an ancient people of stone, iron and tradition. They live in great underground holds, where generations of miners, masons and smiths have built upon the work of those who came before them.
Elf
Nobody can name the day it changed hands.
Elegant and long-lived, elves are masters of magic and art. They live in harmony with nature and value knowledge over strength.
Giant
Stone is not in a hurry, and it arrives regardless.
Arrogant peak-dwellers who see all other races as insignificant specks. Giants cultivate arts of stone and storm, believing themselves the true heirs of the world while considering the affairs of 'lesser beings' beneath their notice.
Goetern
Patience is a virtue. It has a limit, and the limit has an address.
The Goetern are peaceful yet fierce mountain folk, skilled farmers and hunters, bound by strict traditions and unyielding in defending their homeland.
Halfling
The same wound, and a thousand years to disagree about it.
Born of elf and human blood yet rejected by both, halflings exist between worlds they were never meant to inhabit. A perfect balance of their parents' traits, neither fully human nor fully elf. Clever, resilient, and self-reliant, they thrive using wit to carve a place of their own.
Human
They will not live to see the roof. They cut the stone anyway.
Versatile and determined, humans are known for their adaptability and ambition. Although short-lived, their achievements often span generations.
Factions
Crowns, clans, companies and outcasts. Some send charters. Some send raiders.
Aethras Kingdom
Everything here has a price, and the price is knowable.
Chivalry in Aethrassia is a matter of appearance, not practice. Their court is ruled by seals, favors, and quiet payments, where a knight’s loyalty is purchased as readily as a magistrate’s judgment. Their colonies serve as currency in a larger game of power, land granted to secure obedience, markets bled for revenue, titles sold to those who can afford them. Yet the old victories still matter. The crimson griffon carries history with it, and to march beneath it overseas is to act in the long shadow of kings.
Bloodhound Brotherhood
Take what you can hold. Answer for none of it.
The Bloodhound Brotherhood is a loose confederation of raiders, smugglers, and killers bound by shared rules rather than shared ideals. They live by taking what they cannot earn and enforcing their own brand of order where law has failed or fled. Loyalty to the Brotherhood matters more than mercy, and betrayal is answered without hesitation. To the Bloodhounds, theft and murder are not crimes, but tools, and survival belongs to those willing to use them.
Eldrin
No wall, no treaty, no moment at which to object.
The Eldrin walk as if the soil itself bends to carry them, their beauty and grace masking an indifference as deep as the roots of their forests. They see the world’s wild edges as extensions of their domain, and their colonies are rarely settlements in the human sense, they are curated expansions, sculpted glades and perfect rivers, claimed not with walls but with the quiet certainty of ownership.
Forlorn Outcasts
We will answer it with a house, and another house.
A faction born of human and elven blood, carrying a heritage neither side fully accepts. Branded an abomination by some, the Forlorn Outcasts endure in the space between rejection and resolve. They pursue coexistence not as compromise, but as conviction, believing that something new can be built without erasing what came before. Their path is one of resilience and restraint, seeking to heal old wounds while refusing to answer hatred with fire.
Free Western Colonies
Nobody granted it. That is why it holds.
Practical necessity and mutual dependence shaped the Free Colonies from their earliest days. Governance grew out of shared risk and negotiated obligation. Their settlments grew in a quiet expansion that left self-rule entrenched long before the wider world acknowledged it.
Gorehorn Clan
You are worth the effort. That is the compliment.
The Gorehorn Clan lives by violence as others live by law. Minotaurs of immense strength and fury, they hunt, fight, and clash for sport, honor, and dominance. Every battle is sought, every skirmish welcomed, and rage fuels them as naturally as breath. Tradition and instinct temper their fury, forming a code understood within the herd but terrifying to all beyond it. To face a Gorehorn is to confront not just brute strength, but the deliberate, calculated force of creatures who revel in the fight.
Religions
Ten answers to the same question, nine of them armed.
Atheism
No one is listening. Act accordingly.
Atheism is the absence of belief in the existence of gods. It's not a belief that there are no gods, but rather a lack of belief in any deities. Atheists may hold various perspectives on morality, purpose, and the nature of reality, often finding explanations for these concepts without relying on supernatural or divine beings.
Aurism
The smallest kindness is the whole of the work.
Candles flicker in quiet halls while soft hymns drift over stone floors. Aurists wander fields at dawn, gathering the fallen leaves, tending to small wounds, and planting seeds in fertile soil. Joy and comfort are their offerings; laughter, their prayer. Even the simplest kindness feels heavy with sacred weight, and those touched by Aurism carry warmth into shadowed corners of the world.
Church of the Anvil
Flesh is clay. The hammer is the prayer.
The Church of the Anvil holds that flesh is clay, weak and fleeting, and that only iron and fire can temper the soul. The body is a vessel to be reforged, hardened, and perfected. Each hammer strike is a prayer; flesh is weak, steel eternal, and only through iron can one become unbroken.
Idurism
Gods are lies. Only the dying is real.
They do not pray, for gods are lies. Blood and bone mark the path they tread without concern, for life itself holds no meaning, and all around them exist merely as a canvas for the art of dying.
Order of the Sacred Light
Mercy is a blade, and it is held the same way.
They march in white robes, voices raised in endless chant, wielding mercy like a blade and sin like a shield. The faithful scourge themselves to cleanse what cannot be forgiven, and their altars are filled with both tears and flame. Salvation is a path walked in discipline, and the unseen hand of the Light guides every humble act of devotion and cruelty alike.
The Hallowed Path
No god waiting at the end of it. Walk anyway.
A godless moral code teaching that all life is a journey toward personal perfection through discipline and virtue.
Regions
One hundred and twenty-one divisions of two continents. The lines are newer than the ground.
Aestelmar
A small forested island in the far southeast, out beyond the last of the mainland, wooded to the water on every side. It has no harbour and ...
Amberpine Forest
Inland forest of tall resinous pines, the ground beneath them thick with needles and almost bare of undergrowth. The resin runs amber in the...
Ang-Zhar
Dense inland forest at the southern edge of dwarven country, dark and level, with no significant relief in it. The name is dwarven but the r...
Angthal
Deep northern forest, thick and old, laced with fast rivers coming down off the range above. The trees are enormous and the canopy closes ti...
Arumen
A deep, silent wood of iron barked trees, where the Green Maw's decay was finally halted. The name, now worn to Aranum, it's suggested it on...
Ashreach
A narrow wooded peninsula reaching into the eastern sea, water on three sides and forest to the waterline on all of them. Storms cross it en...