Risen Lands

The **Risen Lands** exclusion zone is an area of Aerb where the dead come back to life - as shambling, aggressive corpses with glowing red eyes.

## Geography

Generally, the Risen Lands has similar terrain to the Midwest of America. Roads are normal asphalt, with double yellow lines running down the middle and power lines running alongside. Buildings are generally in disrepair. The Risen Lands at least partially encompass the “Aleister Duchy”, and were also a former territory of the Kingdom of Francorum.

### Comfort

The town of “Comfort” in the Risen Lands is dominated by three giant grain elevators, each with a large antenna marked with floating, rotating blue sigils. Other landmarks include a mechanic's shop,, a courthouse, a shire-reeve's office, a pet store and a clothing store. Half of the buildings in the town are made of cobblestone, with thatched roofs, and they are generally separated from one another by thin sidewalks. Cars lie abandoned in the streets.

### Silmar City

Silmar City is a walled city whose skyline is defined by six corporate castles, great structures of stone. The high stone walls around the city are not unusual for cities in Aerb. The main entrance to the city is blocked by thick, wide metal gates glowing with sigils.

The city's streets are laid out organically, and the addressing system refers to the city blocks rather than the streets. The commercial districts have many shops selling magical services. The density of dwellings is high enough that there are no suburbs.

The Sarkan river flows past Silmar City, close enough to touch some of the walls. The sewers of the city emerge by the river and provide an alternate way inside.

### Sorian's Castle

Sorian's Castle is one of the six corporate castles of Silmar City. Like the others, it is a massive structure built mostly out of stone. The building has its own stone walls, gate, and interior courtyard, and housed hundreds of people. The castle has twenty-one floors, and the top floor of the castle contained a secret facility established by Anglecynn to research the magic of the Risen Lands. The facility is a grand, open space occupying most of the top floor.

## Magic

The region that became the Risen Lands contains a magic called the “necrotic field effect”, which may have existed before the exclusion zone was created. The current extent of the necrotic field effect is the result of an attack targeted towards Silmar City.

The magic of the Risen Lands creates a particular kind of zombie; a variant designed by Juniper Smith for a first level *Dungeons & Dragons* dungeon crawl. Unlike traditional zombies, where the head is their weak point, these zombies can only be killed by piercing the heart. Damage to these zombies' heads can cause their glowing red eyes to fade without killing the zombie outright.

If enough zombies collect in one place, they begin to coordinate and merge into a "Zombie Voltron" (as dubbed by Juniper Smith). These creatures don't seem to be held together by anything other than magic, and can only be killed by piercing the hearts of each of their components. If two Zombie Voltrons merge, they are capable of pooling ten or so of their most intact components into a single monster. A "Greater Umbral Zombie" (as such creatures are called by the game layer) is much faster than a typical Zombie Voltron. The 'Biggun', which wanders the streets near Sorian's Castle, is a great agglomeration of undead that towers over buildings. All these combined undead are known as "umbral undead" or "umbrals", and they are more likely to form if the "unanimity of purpose" of the corpses was high, such as if they lived or worked together.

People don't much like it when you call them zombies, because it invites comparison to the eternally-suffering victims of Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle.[*citation needed*]

## History

At some point, the Host took to dropping their prisoners into the Risen Lands and letting them fight their way out. Taking the Fall "Graduation" rates steadily dropped, as food ran out and weapons and vehicles were taken. Goraion Amongst other prisoners, one of their planes carried Juniper Smith, Poul, Becca, Sly, Amaryllis Penndraig and the Fuchsia Coterie. Taking the Fall Thickenings Goraion

## References

1. ↑ It had some of the hallmarks of Midwest gas stations, like the cheap cinder block construction and the unadorned metal doors.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 1: "Taking the Fall"
2. ↑ It looked like the kind of tiny town that you could find all over the Midwest in general and Kansas in specific, a place that existed mostly because there was a limit to how far farmers were willing to drive for groceries, gas, and a haircut.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
3. ↑ The road running by the building looked like normal asphalt, with a double yellow line down the middle. There were power lines running alongside the road and cars sitting in the parking lot, though there was something off about the shape of the cars, not just their 1950s style but something having to do with the way the hoods swelled up.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 1: "Taking the Fall"
4. ↑ All of it was in a total state of disrepair; the grass I’d been moving through was two feet high and there were weeds surrounding the building where they’d managed to grow up between the cracks in the sidewalk. The building itself was covered in grime and two of the windows were busted out, with shards of glass visible on the ground.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 1: "Taking the Fall"
5. ↑ There was no reason that they would necessarily be called sheriffs, let alone shire-reeves … and yet as I edged closer to the building, I was able to make out the faded lettering stuck to the window, which did indeed say “Aleister Duchy Shire Reeve’s Office”.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 3: "Solely Responsible"
6. ↑ “Well then, let’s get moving,” said Clara. She began pulling out a long drawer of organized cards from the cabinet, and that was when I realized that this library used actual card catalogs, because it obviously didn’t have a computer system. “Now, the hope is that it’s not unique to the Risen Lands. They’re a former territory of the Kingdom of Francorum, so we can probably start by, ah -- here.” She pulled out a card and showed it to me. “Start with Diagnostic Manual of Fatal Diseases of the Bretaigne Continent and Zorish Isles. Come find me if you’re having trouble.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 38: "Don't Split the Party"
7. ↑ “Comfort is this town’s name, and from what I saw while I was falling, it’s the only place of note for a dozen miles,” she replied with an arched eyebrow. “You missed the giant sign?”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 3: "Solely Responsible"
8. ↑ Three giant grain elevators dominated the town, but again there was a note of the exotic, because each had a large antenna rising up from its side, marked with floating, rotating sigils that were barely visible by the unearthly blue light they cast.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
9. ↑ The nearest building looked like some kind of mechanics shop; there was a large folding door by the road and while the vehicles in the parking lot were rusted out, some of them also had doors off the hinges and open hoods in a way that suggested some of the disrepair predated whatever it was that had happened here.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
10. ↑ The building I was looking for was sitting right next to a small, two story courthouse. It only vaguely resembled the courthouses back home; the whole thing was like a pyramid with its top cut off, and instead of faux-Greek columns it had arches coming down from the top and arcing into the ground. The flagpole with a tattered bit of red still hanging to it and large bronze statue of a man were enough that I was fairly certain that it was a courthouse.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 4: "Reaver"
11. ↑ The place I was looking at had a symbol of a triangle inset with a mushroom instead of the pointed star that sheriffs in America used, and the coloring of the cars out front was light blue with black stripes.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 4: "Reaver"
12. ↑ Across the street was a building helpfully labeled “Pet Store” with the door hanging half off its hinge, and having no better option, I trundled toward it.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 5: "Goraion"
13. ↑ There were two people ducked down in the back of the clothing store, one a pallid boy clutching a stomach wound and the other a girl with a scar running from the side of her mouth to just below her ear.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 5: "Goraion"
14. ↑ Now that I was paying more attention, I saw something I’d missed: half the buildings were made of cobblestone, with thatched roofs.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 3: "Solely Responsible"
15. ↑ There were alleys, but they were wide ones, and except for the main street, the buildings were spread from one another with narrow strips of sidewalk between them.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 4: "Reaver"
16. ↑ There were cars lying abandoned in the streets, the same kind I’d seen at the gas station with convex hoods, and most of the frontages were wrecks of broken glass.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 4: "Reaver"
17. ↑ I’d expected Silmar City to resemble Wichita or Omaha, differing mostly in a few small details, which had been the general theme I had seen thus far. Instead, there were no less than six thirty-story tall castles in place of skyscrapers and a twenty-foot tall stone wall forming a loose circle around the city.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
18. ↑ “The defense is general,” said Amaryllis. “A wall of this nature isn’t difficult to build and maintain for a corps of steel mages, not in the post-Bessemer era, and they can move it virtually at will in order to allow for expansion. Besides, it’s useful to have a city with clearly defined ingress and egress points, not just for taxation of goods, but to control the movement of population.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
19. ↑ The gate in front of us was made of metal and glowed with sigils similar to the ones that I had seen on the grain elevators in Comfort.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
20. ↑ ***Quest Progress: Out of the Frying Pan*** - The main gates into Silmar City are blocked and you lack the capability to breach them. Find a secret entrance in order to get inside.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
21. ↑ The streets of Comfort had been in a nice, ordered grid like I was used to, but Silmar City took what I thought of as the Paris approach, where blocks were arranged in awkward wedges and streets were a spider’s web.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 11: "A Winding Course"
22. ↑ The first thing I noticed was that the streets weren’t labeled. Instead, each block had a name on it, and the streets were merely the unimportant void between the blocks. That was the Japanese addressing system, and I was pretty sure that it would have thrown me for a loop if I hadn’t discovered and used that same system for a handful of major metropolises in my D&D games.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 11: "A Winding Course"
23. ↑ Silmar Velocity Services, Planus Tattooing, and Eckhart Prognostications all caught my eye, but I moved past them when I saw nothing immediately interesting inside.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 11: "A Winding Course"
24. ↑ The name Able & Adler Booksellers was emblazoned across the front window, which was dirty but unbroken, and within I could see books on display, plus row upon row of full shelves behind them. I unlocked the door by shooting a hole in it, then went inside to see what I could find. My breath caught when I found a full section labeled “Magic”.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 11: "A Winding Course"
25. ↑ There were nothing like suburbs outside the city walls and very few buildings in general, save for a tiered parking garage some distance from the gate and what looked like an administrative building near that.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
26. ↑ “Is there a river near here?” I asked.
“The Sarkan,” said Amaryllis. “It flows past Silmar City, on the other side from us. The walls actually touch the riverbanks there, I believe, with a bridge over it. What are you thinking?”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
27. ↑ ***Quest Progress: Out of the Frying Pan*** - The sewers of Silmar City are relatively unguarded. Make your way through them and out into the infested city.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
28. ↑ I’d already seen it on the map, and it wasn’t too much larger than I was prepared for, which is to say that it was incredibly large and worthy of being called a city within a city. The walls were high and had arrow slits starting at the second level, with everything below that being solid stone wall.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 13: "Time Out"
29. ↑ The front of Sorian’s Castle was a massive portcullis that rose up almost twenty feet. It was down, but a corner of it had been bent outward, enough that you could have comfortably driven a van through it. Beyond that there was a courtyard, and only then did I see the glass frontage that I expected from a skyscraper, even if it was hidden in a cove and most of the glass was broken. Light was coming in from the third floor of the castle, which seemed to consist mostly of pillars rather than walls, at least from where I was standing.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 13: "Time Out"
30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 “The corporate castles are death traps,” said Fenn. “Funny enough, they weren’t designed with the living suddenly becoming the undead in mind. There were a few hundred people living in each of them. When the buildings lost power, they switched to a backup, and when that backup eventually failed, all the doors opened, as a fire safety measure. Well, that meant that the undead were free to roam, but their stochastic motion meant that they all ended up in the same spots, and since they all lived and worked together, unanimity-of-purpose is higher, which means more umbral undead than you might otherwise expect from a highly populated area.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 12: "Life of the Party"
31. ↑ “Meet up,” Amaryllis agreed. I could see the way she clenched her jaw. “Twenty-first floor of Sorian’s castle, that’s where the facility is. I’ll … I’ll try to wait for as long as I can, if I can’t make it back.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 10: "Sewer Rat"
32. ↑ Anglecynn had established a research base within Silmar City to study the effects of the necrotic field effect.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
33. ↑ “Loot,” said Fenn. “Let me look around here and grab some valuables we can hawk in the Jewel.” She trotted off to snoop around this large room, which I gathered from some equipment off to one side had once been the research facility. Before that, I could only guess; the lobby said it was the office of someone important, but everything else said it was an open living space for a king or CEO.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 14: "ELEVATOR facts"
34. ↑ “I would rather stick to telling you the things that could save our lives in a crucial moment rather than going over esoterica about the necrotic field effect present in the Risen Lands.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 8: "Diamond and Iron"
35. ↑ Anglecynn had established a research base within Silmar City to study the effects of the necrotic field effect.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 9: "Making Magic"
36. ↑ “Silmar was the site of the attack that created the Risen Lands,” said Amaryllis.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 8: "Diamond and Iron"
37. ↑ Come to think of it, I had done that in a D&D session once, a first level dungeon crawl.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 1: "Taking the Fall"
38. ↑ I aimed my machete at Split-Face’s heart, and I was just in time because he lunged at me a split second later, spearing himself straight through the chest. He stopped moving almost instantly and slumped to the floor with my machete still piercing him. That was when his red eyes finally faded to a milky white.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 1: "Taking the Fall"
39. ↑ I swung at the zombie again, hitting her in the temple this time, and one of her red eyes flickered out like a light. I wasn’t sure quite what that meant; when I had made my own version of these zombies, their eyes were nothing special and the glowing effect was purely cosmetic.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
40. ↑ It was a blackened creature of corpses, with eyes as large as headlights and a body so big it would had have a hard time hiding behind a gas station. It was moving far faster than the zombies had moved, slamming down its fists and dragging itself to make up for a back leg that was crooked and broken.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
41. ↑ Where they had been pressed up against each other before, now they were starting to coordinate somewhat, crawling over each other or shifting out of each other’s way. The crowd was forming a tight knot of zombies that seemed more concerned with each other than with me, their movement slightly away from me, in fact. I realized what was happening just as I fired my pistol again and killed one of the closer undead. There wasn’t really anything that I could do about it at that point though; the undead were fused together, lifting up their makeshift torso, and spreading their fused together limbs. Zombie Voltron 2 was slowly coming to life.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 5: "Goraion"
42. ↑ It wasn’t anything more than a collection of corpses, not that I could see. There was no stitching holding it together, no barbed wire running through it, and not even any visible strands of unearthly purple light. It wasn’t clear how the corpses were stuck to each other either, since they weren’t gripping each other, and there was no real rhyme or reason to their arrangement. I had no idea how it had been made or formed, but at a good approximation someone had taken a giant mold of a creature with four nominal limbs and poured corpses into it. Some of the pieces that made it up still twitched.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 5: "Goraion"
43. ↑ I had a moment of hope, but all that happened was that one of the corpses which made up the necrotic abomination fell to the ground. I had seen the hole this time, right through the chest of that zombie … oh. Piercing a zombie through the heart killed it, this creature was made up of zombies, therefore all I would need to do was pierce every one of its hearts to kill it. One down, fifty to go.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 5: "Goraion"
44. ↑ If they had looked like they’d been molded from someone mashing bodies together, this new thing instead looked like the product of careful deliberation, as though someone had picked out the ten most intact bodies and put them together like they were working from factory instructions. At the front there were three human heads all facing toward us, their bodies trailing behind them to make up parts of the thing’s legs and torso. All glowed red as it looked around and tested its step. Then it began running.
“It’s faster than us,” I called out to Amaryllis.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
45. ↑ But before we could start moving, a wave of corpses came around the corner, eerily silent as it set down one of many limbs, carefully placed so that it avoided cars and lampposts. It was almost two blocks away from us, but my heart was hammering in my chest. This thing was only vaguely shaped like a creature. The arrangement of the dead within it had suggestions of arms and legs, and the eyes were so blindingly bright that I had to force myself to keep looking in its direction.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 13: "Time Out"
46. ↑ “So what would you have done if one of the umbral undead came after you?” asked Fenn as we walked back toward where her party was apparently waiting.

“I can outrun them pretty easily,” I said. “Same as you.”

“The big ones, sure,” she replied. “But they can spawn little ones, made up of fewer bodies but more perfectly crafted, and *those* not even I can outrun, which means that you’d have no chance. I’m assuming that you haven’t encountered one, because if you had you’d know your plan was basically suicidal.” - Chapter 12: Life of the Party
47. ↑ “They’re not exactly patrolling creatures, and if someone had come by any, that were standing near the entrance would have been drawn out. If someone had gone running past, even past lesser umbrals, they would have been drawn inside.” - Chapter 13: Time Out
48. ↑ I swallowed hard. “We, uh, don’t say the z-word?”
She slowly lowered her gun again as her pale blue eyes searched my face. “I didn’t believe you, when you said that you were a dissident. I know that things have gotten bad, especially for the poor, but … there are still traditions worth keeping. There are still rules worth following.” Her eyes left mine as her thoughts went elsewhere.
“Uh,” I said. “Okay. I really didn’t mean anything by it. I didn’t know that calling them z-um thing like that would be a big deal.”
“That’s the whole problem,” she spat. “It’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, assuming that there aren’t reasons.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 3: "Solely Responsible"