The Great Wizard of the Empire of the Crimson Throne was once asked by a woman of noble birth at an imperial ball why the world of the old ones burned away leaving those people who didn't die in the initial destruction cowering like rats in the sewers and deep, dark places of the land below and turned their steel and glass monoliths to desiccated ruins. His nature was a ponderous one, and nearly half the night and most of the party had passed before he deigned to answer in his somber, lonesome manner. He at last replied that it was said by some that the old ones had unleashed weapons like thunder numbering greater than the grains of sand in the Wastes upon one another, dooming themselves alongside their enemies to what they had assumed would be an absolute end to life on the planet entirely.

Others claimed that the world had been besieged by outsiders, creatures foreign and alien to the world, of steel and glass or of a reticulated pallor and stooped height who flew through the air like the birds of old once did, though on disks of steel whilst launching a barrage of toxic darts and projectiles upon the land below. The Cults and Evangelists claim that the old world had faced judgement by Goddesses or Gods too numerous to count in the retelling who had struck them down for deigning to create the monoliths so high as to touch their heavenly planes. A few hermit Wizards claim that the planet had simply grown too hot for its own good, and the Earth Mother's fever had burned away the parasites that plagued her, humanity included, much as the sick develop fevers to burn away the bad blood within.

The noble woman who had asked thanked him for his response, but noted that he had not spoken aloud which of these theories he subscribed to. The Great Wizard responded that the world of the old ones had passed because they had grown too concerned with the construction of their ever more skyward towers of steel and glass to notice the problems left unaddressed mounting up around them, just as the Empire was doing now. This was treasonous speech and without so much as packing his belongings the Wizard descended from his place at the dais and turned from the Empire, disappearing into the wastes. This was the night that the war began.

No one knows why the world of the old ones burned away, regardless of the Great Wizard's statements that night. What the wizards and elders across the Wastes do agree upon, however, is that the world was once a lush, green, vibrant paradise, trees grew tall as buildings and grass sprouted from the soft soil underfoot so far as the eye could see. Birds flew through the air, and rows of wheat were cultivated next to fields of cattle. This world is long since gone. The trees burnt away first, and the ash that was spawned from this World Fire took to the sky above never to fall back to the land below. With the virtual disappearance of the sun beyond the Ashen Curtain the grass, the wheat, and then the cattle all turned to desiccation and slow rot until one day there was no more, and never would be again. With the death of the wheat and the cattle, the loss of the forests and the perpetual twilight spawned from their ashes it is said that the Wizards of the Old World tried in a combined effort to turn the tides, releasing a plague upon the ash above in an effort to force it to fall back to the ground and reveal the sun clearly for all the world to see once more.

Millions of those left alive gathered in the outdoors, masked to stave off the worst of the smoke and ash and brimming with a hope that their world might be returned them. The skies fell, and the greatest combined cheer the world had ever heard erupted from every part of the world as their nightmare had at long last came to an end. It wasn't until it was too late that they realized what was falling from the sky was eating away at their flesh. The acid rain lasted a full month, and with it the birds would never be seen again, the oceans turned to boiling cauldrons of pink sea foam and rot, and the sickness spread on the winds from the carcass of the combined children of the sea carried away most of the humans who had managed to survive the acid rain.
In the end it was not the strong, the fighters, the great among humanity who carried their species flag into the next world. It was the weak, the sick and the scared huddling in sewers and caves who inherited the future.

As the sun faded into a distant memory and the Ashen Curtain pervaded for years and then decades the very composition of the planet changed. Where once soft ground and plant life reigned supreme over the ecosystem, the deserts stretched outwards from their borders and engulfed everything in sight, turning the surface to sand and death. The only rain that falls here does so sparingly, and what pours down is acidic to the touch and all too fatal over extended periods of time. There is still water, buried deep beneath the sands and the earth and ruins of the old world below that, and insects alongside reptiles have managed to subsist off of these sources of liquid water alone, alongside those humans who still remain. In the darkness life has changed the underdwellers, their children, and their children now having grown to adulthood beneath the sands and without having ever seen the sun. Sickness is rampant, medicine is either non-existent or relegated to the Wizards and their noble patrons, and death is only a cut from a sharp rock or a broken ankle from a misstep away. Poverty and malnutrition is an even more crushing systemic issue, and with little to do to remedy it and less desire on the part of those who have their fair share to risk it by fighting on behalf of those below them there is little reason to think that anything is going to change anytime soon.

Deep below the surface, in the complex network of basements of the old world ruins and natural cavern complexes a civilization beneath the sands slowly dies in the Wastes. Karitos, or so the locals have seen fit to name it, was supposedly a beautiful place once, somewhere people from across the world came to see. A vast and beautiful network of caves lined with gorgeous forests and ample room for people to camp, hike, explore. In the modern day travelers who pass through one of the above ground entrances to Karitos have a thirty percent chance of dying within the week. There is no unified governing force here, and the citizens are factitious, paranoid and unlikely to trust one another let alone outsiders long enough or far enough to let them breathe the same air as themselves so long as it might take for the stranger to state their business. Still, travelers come to see Karitos, even after the world burned and the buildings above collapsed into the cave system.

Travel across the Wastes is dangerous, but does occur. There are several operating caravans in the sand, plying their wares and using mobile contraptions of bronze, iron and scavenged old world materials to transport goods and for protection from sandstorms and the rain while under the open sky. There are even two known societies who live primarily above ground, and who have begun the arduous practice of pushing back the sands and replacing them with potential food sources. The vast majority of the human population live a far less glamorous life, of course. Most have little in the way of skill or holdings, and primarily subsist by catching and eating insects and lizards, taking their skins to tailors and selling them for what little they can get and paying ten times the cost for a useful patch of reptilian leather in return. Perhaps so many as one in twenty people have an actual skilled trade, usually that of the smith or tailor, and the rest are comprised of the warriors.

Be they salaried Freehold guardians, hereditary slave holding overlords or mercenaries traversing the wastes in search of employment they practice a trade that has never quite lost its effectiveness. Population is good, and professionals are better, both being a part of this game, but at the end of the day if you can't keep what's your's and take from the next player you aren't going to go far in this world, and the primary focus of this game is going to be these warriors.

“Oh shit Liliya, I forgot I was reading an interest check! I was lost in your engrossing storytelling and the fate of these poor post-apocalyptic schmucks!” You’re too kind Miss/Mister Reader, but yes, this is an interest check for a game. @Doc Doctor and [@ELGainsboro] are partnering with me to create a persistent setting for some Arena Roleplay, which will have some Nation Roleplay elements and probably be something that is either super interesting to you or really totally not.

There are Advanced elements to the setting of this roleplay, but they are entirely relegated to the setting and overall lore of this particular universe. There is really only two or three paragraphs of information besides this interest check that would be required knowledge for any player, and I don't want any part of this story to get in the way of the players having a good time which, besides placating me and Doc's insatiable bloodlust, is really all that matters.

That being said I intend on putting out ten thousand or so words of lore separated into overviews of the different factions, superpowers, important characters, and the history of how this world came to be in the sorry state it has found itself, so if you as a player live for rich settings and plots of intrigue then you should be able to feel right at home here as well. Because I don't want to scare anyone off with complex maths (the horror!) and such the primary mechanics will be relegated to the background and mostly dealt with myself, and unless number crunching, variance and finding the most valuable combinations is really your thing then you probably won't ever need to see anything with numbers in it except this very specific point: this is a gang versus gang roleplay, there are superpowers who will occasionally offer work to one gang or another which may affect your income and the number of soldiers fighting alongside your gang, and if you want to take part in it you will need a small unit of characters to be able to fight and die taking and protecting important points along the complex underground network in Karitos.

These characters don’t need to be very well developed, and outside of your primary cast or even your leader figure they may well be virtually faceless NPCs if that’s how you prefer to roll, but I’m going to expect that you understand that because you are leading a unit of combatants that they will all have their needs and wants to take into consideration, will need to be fed, armed, armored, etc., and that your faction’s overall health and progress is being measured by the amount of control you can exert over a large amount of human beings and centers of production, you don’t need to see any of this if you don’t want and it won’t affect you or your faction’s ability to compete, but it is there in the background. Otherwise I strive for realism, the technology level in the city is around late medieval sans gunpowder weapons, and there is no such thing as magic or superpowers. The city of Karitos is supposed to be located in what used to be Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, and if playing humans who don’t have superpowers isn’t terribly interesting to you I don’t blame you, sword fighting in text format isn’t for everyone, but it’s what this game is basically all about.

It's basically October, right? And so Karitos has entered it's Season of Dying, and the myriad rituals and traditions which surround the season have begun. The Elders, Cults and Wizards are burning ceremonial bonfires and spreading the ashes upon the holiday masks and costumes worn by the locals to stave off the Outsiders, dark denizens who poison water sources and hide your missing shoes that may or may not exist, but are mostly used as a tool to scare the masses either way. Feel free to join in with the rest of Karitos and celebrate the end of Summer, and the beginning of Autumn with your characters as well as the players in the OOC section whenever that goes up. We're working on some kind of reward that is fulfilling for roleplaying the season out well and working it into your characters without it actually affecting the IC or your chances at victory in the game, probably something art related, so we'll keep you posted on the particulars. In the meantime here's some fluff (oh no! more fluff!?!?) to keep you distracted or help you sleep in the meantime.



Drip. Even in those most hallowed of moments the cave sounds refused to give way to silence. It was rare that even a fleeting moment passed in Karitos when nothing at all was stirring, buzzing, pounding. Here there was no night and no day, no busy times of industrious working and no peaceful times of quiet and sleep. It had only been three weeks, but already the darkness had stripped away those animal notions of the passing of time, all it gave in return being the dark, and the maddening drip of the walls crying over this great hall of the dead. All that remained of the before time was the remembrance of why he had come to this moratorium in the first place. The seasons had for the most part burned away along with the rest of the Old World, but there were subtle changes in temperature and patterns of rainfall that could be recorded even with the Ashen Curtain hiding the sun and stars the elders claimed lay above them in the heavens, and they were still recorded each in their time. This was the season of dying. The old world would have been harvesting their crops and preparing for the season of the dead in this time, warding the Outsiders from their homes as best they could with ghoulish visages of monsters and apparitions plastered to their persons and bedecking their halls. Would he survive the Dying Season to see another Season of Birth? Had his decision to seek out this great cairn doomed him to join its spirits in the other place? He couldn’t say. Warriors, thugs and mercenaries had gathered alongside the smiths, the tailors and the common rabble in the Heart of the Mountain as the wizard, young and female which in addition to the ritual across class lines came as a shock to the man whose birth in the Freehold of Liz’Baton reminded him that back home such a sight would have surely sent the Freehold Elders to riot, continued in the arduous practice of burning collected heaps of human waste to ashes before spreading the ashes over the masks, trinkets and bodies of the assembled.

Eadweard knew of the wizards and their prominence in the Southern Freeholds, he had met several and even received minor medical treatment from one in Rough Falls Farm while under contract to their Gentleman, though he had never much liked them. Back home it was the Shepard who would have been preforming the ritual for the members of the warrior class, the most prominent White Hair of the Liz’Baton Noble families, and he wondered if this woman no older than he was could command the same powers to ward against the Outsiders as any of the White Hairs of his people. It didn’t seem likely, but it stood to reason that if they had been students of the Great Wizard who had reintroduced metallurgy and discovered the Bull Who Lived they might just have some secret power his people weren’t informed of. The Empire of the Crimson Throne had pushed all the way up to Liz’Baton during the reign of The First Bull, and it had only been because of the White Hair’s ploy to send their own people to join the ranks of the Empire in the guise of escaped slaves and common laborers to learn of their magic, or at least their ability to combine copper and tin into shaped bronze, that they had been able to defend the Castle and push back the invading force, ending the first Crusade and maintaining the Freehold’s independence. He had been told that this wizard was the youngest of Aberforth’s proper pupils, and that she had only arrived in Karitos a few days before he had. Whether she was here to gather information on the city for the Empire or because her loyalties between Aberforth and the Empire were too questionable to keep her in the capital but not so questionable as to rid themselves of her permanently he couldn’t say, but everyone seemed to have an opinion. She would be invaluable to him and his ilk, of course. No doubt half of the mercenaries in Karitos today had come because of what her arrival to the town meant for its future prospects. If she was here it meant that Karitos held something valuable to the Empire.

A place like this, rife with competing factions and nothing even remotely resembling a government would make an appetizing prize for the Empire assuming they thought they could take it without a fight. Or, a fight waged by their armies anyway. They would pour resources into the gangs who, left with more fights to wage then they had warriors to fight them, would be hiring mercenaries in record number. This was made all the easier and all the more profitable with the arrival of the wizard. Officially their lot did not take sides or hold political beliefs, of course that had been drawn into serious question when their leader walked off into the Wastes and started a rebellion against the Empire, but what this had meant for mercenaries from just South of here to the Noosh’Val lands and beyond was that a single person could travel freely across borders and collect ledgers of information while being required to give that information to each competing side. This was not always a welcome proposition for the factions involved, and many refused the wizards though doing as such also meant their skills and magic would not normally be available to you and would be available to your enemies, but this was universally valuable to mercenaries. They simply had to give their name, equipment, place of birth and experience, usually recorded in left ears, to the wizard and they would mention them to the faction leaders across the Wastes. Show up with the marked patches of snakeskin and speak the word received with your bill of hire at the location specified and you had a job. Sure beat hanging around Gilly Tables waiting for someone to line the assorted mercs up against the wall, measure you up and pick the ones they wanted before sending the rest of you back to the tables. The wizard had finished her ritual and approached him, a pinch of the ashes from the censer in her right hand. He knelt, got on one knee and looked down while offering his right hand palm up and the rabbit mask he held in it towards her. He hoped that Providence forgave him for accepting her magic.