What's Unique about Racedis?

This page is designed to break the 4th wall heavily and communicate directly with the players, especially the GM, not as adventurers but as real humans with lives on Earth, who might be interested in playing here.

Why tell a story here?

## Campfire Civilization

*Tower of Babel, Sharn, Sigil,*

1. The dearth of country-based division and warring civilizations
2. Conflict from within

If the story of the Tower of Babel hadn't ended in discord and fracture, this would be the result - all the people of Racedis recognize The Towers as the heart of civilization.

The flame of civilization burns brightly from one place in Racedis. The Towers are vast and their population enormous, but just beyond the outer towers is a true wilderness with rugged settlements testing their endurance every day against the hardships of frontier living. Some call the settlements in the Frontier - from tiny homesteads, to \_ villages, to \_ towns - "embers", because they they burn with a dim light of civilization without ever matching the blaze of the Towers.

> Shaghai sprawl with NYC height and *beyond...*
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With thousands of districts, each with a dozen towers or more, Racedis Towers is a truly unlimited sprawl for adventures in magical metropolis. It would take lifetimes to see the whole city. Sword and sorcery campaigns delving dungeons within and below towers, heists on dragons in human form, settling disputes between districts, or becoming rulers of districts might span generations of adventurers and explore less than 100 districts. It is an endless canvas of spires and skybridges. And with the exception of the deadly drop just over every railing, it will feel much as any fantasy city! The smell of fresh loaves from the bakery, the CLANG of a blacksmith, and the rattle of your cart over the cobblestones... its all there. Your adventures may take you to fortified walls, enchanted libraries, crumbling abandoned spires, smoky taverns, and cobblestone courtyards. Because of its size, there's **also** plenty of room for stranger districts. Perpetual snow, floating towers, temporal anomalies, buried portals to other realms, even entire sections of the city that can

The Frontier too is an unending expanse of wilderness, an open book for adventures in the wild. While there are no other cities, there may be frontier towns and walled keeps to visit, attack, defend, or even own. While the Towers are divided into Districts, the Frontier is much more casually demarcated into Territories. A Territory may be a mountain range, a strip along a river, or even a loose boundary around plains and forests. Geological features often influence the drawing of Territory lines, but they may be cultural or political as well.

## The Grand Fable

*The Weave, Physics, The Matrix, the malleable world, real-world belief*

Racedis can be anything you want. Canonically, it is governed by something other than physics, something other than the Weave, something even more fundamental than the gods themselves. There is no deeper power than the Grand Fable. The people of the realm have very little understanding of the Grand Fable, but they understand that their legacy, their belief, and their impact have power. The most scholarly of arcane and academic minds have scratched only the surface. While often abstracted as an infinite tome, upon whose pages are written the beliefs of the people. It is not a tome of truth; it collects those things that many in Racedis believe fervently.

This powerful force of nature is not subject to the gods or any other power in the Realm, except possibly the Gray God. The gods gain their power from it, in fact. As many people believe in the might or magic of an individual, that individual's lines in the Grand Fable will speak of power, and that power shall become real in that individual - even so far as to become a god. Places and things too can have power, if their lines in the Grand Fable speak of such things.

## Magic: Its Popularity, Presence, and Practice

Magic is steeped into the stones and rivers of Racedis. The Towers especially endured a period of magic marked by wild and unfettered spasms of magical influence, during an age when the Grand Fable of magic was almost entirely unwritten. Great and powerfull spells, cast by mages of great infamy, sank into the foundations of the Towers and forever changed the timbre of magic in the realm. They did much writing on the subject of magic, scrawled in scrolls in hurried hand, but much of this text is lost to time.

In recent times, mages of Racedis are attempting a more tempered exploration of the bounds of magic. Certainly, fewer wild magic talents exist; those mages that do achive true mastery over the practice of magic are few and far between. Much more common are the mild magical talents, with a trick or two at which they excel, and may indeed incorporate into their trade. Some say that a baby born in a district that recently experenced a work of Grand fire magic may be able to produce sparks with the cracking of their knuckles.

The divisions of magic have become more clear over time. Arcane magic, divine magic, bardic magic - all these have their own practices and legacies. The most significant division in magic in these times is the magic of the Towers vs. that in the Frontier. Magic in the towers is, by necessity, a much more precise and studious pursuit. The latent magic entombed in the stones and skybridges of the Towers by mages and their wild works of old may interfere with the casting of new magic. A mage must study this interference or risk their spellwork leaving their control. Energies carried by forgotten spellwork still move great currents of power throughout the city, but so much competing force tends to cancel out and present a facade of stability. Only a studied viewer can see the tumult. For this reason, mages in the Towers tend toward private study, but the first new magic academies are starting to emerge after an age of untempered magic.

Magic of the Frontier is a more pure expression of raw power. Rustlers, druids, and others who practice magic in the Frontier must have the fortitude to harness enormous magical forces - Season storms, places of power, and forces of nature - to produce practical effects rather than utter destruction. The purity of magical energies in the Frontier is the driving factor for continuing the wandsmithing tradition in the Frontier rather than the city. To load so much energy into material vessels would suffer from the interference in the Towers.

## Season Storms, Celestial Bodies, and the Passage of Time

*The hourglass/tumbleweed motif, light forecasting (Who is responsible?), Treasure Planet, Chaos Orrery,*

Seasons move in Storms across the Realm. A Summer Storm usually preceeds an Autumn Storm, but the four usual seasons (and a few exotic ones) roll across the Realm like tumbleweeds, rolling over and past one another in a slow tumult. By the natural rhythms, and the efforst of Storm Shepherds, seasons generally pass in the cycle of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, but this cycle can be interrupted or delayed at any time. A series of Spring Storms may be a great blessing for growers, while a sudden and unexpected Winter Storm can be devastating.

Time passes differently in Racedis. The passage of time is marked by seasons, but it might be more accurate to say that seasons are the horses that draw the wagon; areas that have seen the *usual* cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter will appear have experienced about a year of time. However, in places that have seen many Season Storms in quick succession will experience greater change; a Winter Storm lodged in a mountain range may cause in habitants of the territory to experience a suspicious lack of change.

The stars over Racedis change constantly. They can be good predictors of the passage of seasons and time, but for this same reason they are largely useless for navigation. Stars shift, appear, and blink out seemingly at random. The sun is the most consistent celestial body, as the 7 moons orbit around it and one another.

[Re-focus the later writing on this page to accomplish the primary aim of this page: Why should I play here?]