The Old Isle:
Books in use: Labyrinth Lord; Tales of the Grotesque and
Dungeonesque; Realms of Crawling Chaos; LL Advanced Edition Companion
Some influences: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville; The Crucible by Arthur Miller; HPL fiction; Solomon Kane Stories by
REH; The Monk by Mathew Lewis; Castle
of Ontoranto by Harold Walpole; Dracula by Bram Stoker; Frankenstein by Mary Shelly; Gotham by Gaslight and Hellboy by Mike Mignolia; The Crooked
Man by Mike Mignolia and Richard Corben;
Corben horror comics; Gangs
of New York; Sleepy Hollow; the scientific revolutions of the 19th
century; the demise of the geocentric model of cosmology; the Torah; the rise of
the Creationist movement and the implied logic behind it.
Character Generation:
Select a race from RoCC; a class from the AEC; roll a background and a dark secret from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque
Myth (?): Long ago, annoyed by the chatter of his worshipers,
the Entropic Lord destroyed the world with a great deluge. The peoples of
today’s world are descendent sof the flood’s survivors.
Recorded History:
Although, with exception of a few human settlements, the Old
Isles were largely uninhabited when first discovered some 600 years ago,
evidence of a former occupation remained. Ancient tumbledown ruins lay inland,
sunken structures were and still are, seen along the coasts and even upon the
floor the open ocean.
Settlers from the Urveon Continent arrived en mass roughly
50 years after the island was discovered, bringing their religion, (the Humble
Church of the Hidden Way) and semi-industrial technology with them. The islands’
human inhabitants either fled into the woodlands, or assimilated with the new
masters of the islands. The latter process turned out to be surprisingly seamless, perhaps due to the church’s perspective that all mortal beings are
equally despicable in the eyes of the Entropic Lord and must be brought into
the fold if his attention is to continue to be averted.
200 years have past since the last contact with Urveon. No
ships sent in that direction return.
Industrialization has taken off in the last 50 years.
The year is now 4880 AD [After Deluge].
Population: the total population of the islands is ~1
million, a full 80% of the population lives in the industrial city/port of
Stoker on the North Island (place holder name).
Races (in order of population size): White apes; Sea Blood; Humans; Sub Humans (not an actual species, but the victims of a communicable
curse).
Technology: early industrial, steam cars, trains, (sporadic)
telegraph; clipper and steam ships. Cottage industry still in competition with
industrial production from household and craft goods, but losing ground.
Religion:
The First Commandment: Thou shalt not make thouself known
to the Entropic Lord.
The Humble Church of the Hidden Way does not worship the
Entropic Lord. Instead it teaches the doctrine of spiritual stealth. The
ultimate goal is to keep the Entropic Lord from paying attention to the world
and its inhabitants, lest he bring about another flood or a like disaster. Clerics
of the order actually cast spells in an effort to deplete the world of magical
energy. Magic Users however violate the laws of space-time by bringing
additional magic into creation when they cast spells and are thus despised as
witches and the enemies of life.
Prayer is the ultimate blasphemy, as it is an attempt to
engage in direct dialogue with the Entropic Lord; and the true name of the
entropic lord is the Church’s greatest secret. Only the most depraved
individuals would whisper it.
True believers spend at least two hours a day engaged in a
meditative process known as purging in
which they attempt to blank out their thoughts and suppress their personality
in an effort to keep the world quiet and once again, avoid the attention of the
Entropic Lord.
Apostasy is however on the rise as “reason” and science
attempt to define the world in non supernatural terms within educated urban circles and secret pagan religions based upon faith and worship fester along the backstreets and in the countryside.
The outward manifestation of all this is almost identical to
hard core Puritanism. Everybody wears black all the time too.
Society is a mix of Victorian Style formality (upper class); early Industrial Revolution, urban despair/debauchery and decay; and rough and tumble frontier rusticism.
Weather: The Old Isle lie deep in the southern hemisphere,
but are warmed by a jet stream type wind. The great ocean known as God’s Gulf is
extremely turbulent and stormy.
Next (before I go to bed even, a map)
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