Bazmund — Roleplayer Guild

Broken Skies

War in the Eversky

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Greetings and welcome, friends, to an RP based on the universe in which I plan to write a novel. Let me start by saying that the novel itself will take place a fair while after the events this RP pertains to, so it's more than unlikely that any character made here will feature - but what is quite possible is that your actions will affect the novel itself, so choose wisely.

In the next hider, there is a rough summary of everything that has occurred in the world, from the beginning of its history post-sundering to the day this RP begins. It's by no means perfect, but it will serve its purpose. For those of you coming here directly from the interest check thread, everything within it was in the op of that thread so there's little point in reading it. It hasn't changed.

Between 1000 and 1500 years ago, the world shattered. 

An event now referred to as 'The Great Sundering' tore the crust of the planet apart, rending rock and splitting earth, pulling it all down into an endless abyss, never to be seen again. What little was left behind was in the form of floating islands, never more than a few tens of kilometres in diameter - with hundreds of kilometres of Cloud Sea between them.

Needless to say, for a very long time the few peoples that had survived were quite lonely - and indeed, the Eversky is a quiet and lonely place, with neither the winds to guide airships at speeds where they might soon reach their neighbours, nor the resources for an engine that might propel them there - but people adapt. There were many years of simply subsisting, with nary a word between towns - decades, even, when people started to believe that they were truly alone. But almost a hundred years after the Great Sundering, when people had finally gotten used to the life they'd been given, someone found it.

In the year following the discovery of the Upper Luft - a series of slipstreams in the stratosphere high above the Island level, finally allowing for real travel - nations began to form themselves around the largest hubs of civilisation, developing distinct cultures and ideals. In the East there grew the Iron Dominion, an industrial and scientific parliamentary republic built around the ideal that the strongest, most opportunistic people should rule. They are expansionist, they are imperialist, and their ultimate goal is dominance of the Eversky. To the West, there lay the Oakheart Sovereignty, a noble kingdom of antiquated knights and their feudal system, fueled by old tales of glory and chivalry. They believe in kindess, honour, and knowing one's place.

Travel using the Upper Luft was greatly restricted by the fact that the wind currents it provides, whilst highly advantageous for those looking to reach their destinations within the year, are much too fast for a typical dirigible to withstand. Those few who tried to use balloon based craft to sail away on were quickly torn out of the sky - and sent down below, towards the cloud barrier that exists between the Eversky and what remains of the ground, through which no living soul has ever returned.

No. To access the Upper Luft, you required a more advanced kind of airship.

One with a supports made of floatstone, a kind of metal that - under the correct conditions - exhibits the tendency to become lighter than air. An airship with a sufficient quantity of floatstone in its construction is more than capable of using the Upper Luft to traverse the Eversky.

And because it is impossible to remove the floatstone from an island without risking it sinking, floatstone quickly became the topic of bloody conflicts.

After a series of Luft wars between the Dominion and the Oakheart Sovereignty, which resulted in an approximate 25% decrease of the known human population, the World Court was created with the goal of keeping the peace between the two superpowers - both of which now covered thousands upon thousands of square miles of airspace. For a while, all parties involved were committed to remaining at least broadly peaceful, the memory of the last Luft war fresh in their minds during the first summit of the Sky Nations - but it has been hundreds of years since the World Court was created.

Since then, there has been revolution in the Oakheart Sovereignty, with the last crown princess of the Oakheart family breaking away from the royal family and becoming one of three co-founders of the Red League, a new superpower operating on restrictive - but ultimately fair - socialist principles. The World Court too has seen insurrection, as their top peacekeeping forces began to play with artefacts from the time of the Sundering, and succumbed to a strange kind of madness, becoming devoted to an unseen crew of Gods, and fiercely protective of all knowledge of what really happened during the Great Sundering - thus forming the fanatical religious organisation known only as The Heavens' Eyes.

But worst of all, war is once again brewing - this time over something far more serious than Floatstone.

And it seems that it might just be up to you to stop it.

These next hiders contain more in depth explanations of the current state of the Eversky, as well as some information pertaining to the capabilities and cultures of the three major nations, between whom war may be brewing.

The Iron Dominion

The Iron Dominion has been called many things - fascist, authoritarian, unnatural - but it has never been called heartless. This is because it bears its heart for all to see, and its heart is the city of New Pierstrand, a technological and industrial marvel, easily the global hub of innovation and science. It is a tall and compact city, making full use of every inch of space it is afforded, never permitting land to go unused. When a building falls into disrepair, or is abandoned, Parliament will buy it cheaply and have it redone, only to be sold again at a higher price - though this only happens rarely, for no citizen of the Dominion likes waste, and they are a resourceful and hard working folk.

Their society is separated distinctly into three social classes - the Uppers, middles, and the Lowers. The Upper class has to it the feel of a decadent but intellectual Victorian gentry, obsessed with genius and innovation, whereas the Middle class are permitted to enjoy the finer things in life so long as they maintain the efficiency of the factories and act well as managers and supervisors, and the lower class has... well, much the same feel as any working class, ever. For the most part, they accept this arrangement, and either manage those below them, or are managed by those above them; however, it is far from unheard of for members of one class to move to another. If a worker should become a manager, they would subsequently find themselves enjoying the luxuries of a middle class life. If a manager should apply themselves, and create something new, they would be hoisted by their coat tails into the world of fine wining, fine dining, and eccentric inventors.

You get the point.

The seat of their power is in Industry House - more commonly referred to as the Iron Parliament - where their chiefest officials convene daily to discuss the state of the Dominion, and insult the members of other parties. Currently forming the Iron Government is the PIP - or rather, the Party for Industry and Progress. They identify as centre-right, and mostly stick to it, but their policy of ruthlessly industrialising new lands to their East, combined with the typically arrogant testing of the other two nations' defenses by skirting their borders day and night, has made them increasingly unpopular with their people. There are rumours that the current Prime Minister, and her Chancellor of the Executeur, would be willing to start a war in order to delay the oncoming general election, and gain more time to solidify their position with the working classes. Their chiefest opposition, the Labourers and Workers Unionist party, has called this publicly, and had several popular politicans imprisoned for threatening national security as a result.

The rumours are looking truer and truer by the second - and starting a war would not be hard for the Iron Dominion. 

Their navy is the second largest in size, and indisputably the most powerful currently active in the Eversky - with the exception of the World Court's, which is now controlled primarily by the Heavens' Eyes.
 They employ rifled guns, mortars and howitzers, and advanced repeating weapons, in concordance with the most efficient engines currently possible, and ship-based armour that is best described as completely stunning. Their only true weakness is in their strict adherence to doctrine, and the relative weakness of their Floatstone-enabled forces, restricting their mobility. Other than that, it is unwise to engage their forces head on, no matter who you are; you shall surely lose.

The Oakheart Sovereignty

The Oakheart Sovereignty are called what they are because that was the name of their first King - King James Oakheart - a simple and kind man who led his people out of the mists of the Sundering, to prosperity and strength in their new home, a series of closely neighbouring islands known to outsiders as the Fracturlands, but known to the Knights and Serfs of the Oakheart Sovereignty as the place where King James of the house Oakheart reigned - the Oakheart Sovereignty. 

However, following the Sundering itself, an event that caused magic to permeate and fill the world and act upon it in unpredictable ways, as well as split the Earth and replace it with sky... their people were not the same. Indeed, the Oakheart Sovereignty were particularly affected by this, for they had been the closest of the Three Nations to the original source of the Sundering's magic - though they did not know that. Shortly after their establishment as the ruling force in the Fracturlands, they experienced the first and greatest impact of magic.

Any child born after the Sundering would not be simply male or female, but a human or a dryad, too. Within the first three generations, all of their women had become creatures from myth, whose lives were greatly extended, and bound to the souls of trees. Their skin became gently green around their hands and feet as they grew older, and their maintained a constant appearance of youth until their deaths - which did not come until their trees passed too. The trees also felt this change, however - many of them began to walk. The changes kept coming, their world slowly becoming saturated with the eternal and everlasting force of magic. There were dragons as well as the Ents, but also there were elves emerging amongst them, and fae and spirits too. They were the first people to come to grips with magic, bound either in artefacts or created by man - and it is a legend that it was from the Fracturlands that the first Sky Whales emerged.

But then, Sky Whales are just legends themselves.

In all of this change, the only things that did not become so different were the men. A few of them would go on to call themselves elvish, yes. Some would become wizards, true.

But most of them were unchanged entirely.

And so the greatest tragedy of all befell them - the King, as Kings do, died. His Queen did not. As if the death of their beloved monarch had not been enough, the Queen did not emerge from her chambers for weeks - and her children, Arthur and Arabella, could not bring themselves to speak of it.

But life goes on, and young Arthur became a great king too. Arthur Oakheart. In fact, the Oakheart dynasty continued healthily for many generations - until Jane Oakheart. 

But that is a story for the Red League to tell.

The Oakheart military wears plate armour, and mail shirts. Their firearm technology is limited, but they make up for it with an excellently disciplined and skilled army of conventional soldiers, equipped with basic rifles, as well as longbows and swords. Their airships are heavily armoured and slow, but almost all of them are floatstone-based in their construction, permitting them to use the Upper Luft to move about the world. Their ace card, however, exists in the form of the Dragonriders, who ride dragons. These dragons are not small, they are big - big enough to tear smaller airships from the sky completely - and they spit fire hot enough to melt men alive. These dragons are also capable of surviving flight in the Upper Luft, permitting their riders to use them for devastating strikes with unprecedented range. The only thing that these knights cannot use this for is a surprise attack, however. That would be against their code of honour.

The Oakheart Dominion observes the feudal system, in which the Lords and Knights are in possession of all, and the serfs are in possession of none. Despite this, chivalry and generosity are the dominant traits of the nobility here, and nobody who works is allowed to go hungry. For this reason, the majority of the people are mostly satisfied with their lives. The seat of their power is Ethelon, the capital city and home of the current King, King Ralen Pinestock. He is an unmarried King and this does not sit well with the people, but is otherwise a peaceful and wise man with the potential for a long and healthy reign ahead of him. It is for this reason that, as long as Ralen Pinestock, last son of the Pinestock house, remains king, the Oakheart Sovereignty is unlikely to go to war. But there are those within the Sovereignty that plot against him - and more than that, the Oakheart Dominion are the strongest opposition to the rise of the Heavens' Eyes outside of the city of Solace, and though they remain relatively unaware of the true threat they possess, the Heavens' Eyes are already making plans to destabilise the Sovereignty. What's worse, his likely successor is a hyper-nationalist, likely to respond to the usual Dominion displays of strength, and the Red League's very existence, with war.

The Red League

The Red League are hard-leftists. They are ideologically homogenous, and have managed to build their economy successfully through a carefully managed combination of market socialism and state regulation. Formed primarily of rebel serfs from the Oakheart Sovereignty, but also a significant portion of the Iron Dominion's leftist workforce, they exist in the south of the Eversky, where they migrated following the dual-revolutions in the Iron Dominion and Oakheart Sovereignty, coordinated and led by... Jane Oakheart.

The only reason that the current monarch of the Oakheart Sovereignty is not an Oakheart is because precisely 30 years ago, almost to the day, the last heir of that line went down the Revolutionary path. Jane Oakheart was the sort of princess who went out and lived the life of a human being - despite being a dryad and not strictly speaking human - and was absolutely disgusted by the relative deprivation of the serfs. A month before her father's reign ended, and he died, she and a small team of other egalitarian revolutionaries started a riot in the main square of Ethelon, with the goal of placing the nobility under arrest, and emancipating the people.

It was not a success, as the nobility remained firmly in place, but Jane Oakheart was more than successful in liberating half the serfs under the control of the Ethelonian nobles, and she went on to lead them around the country, liberating others, and decimating the Oakheart military capabilities.

With the Sovereignty weak, the Dominion poised themselves to strike - and were met with a revolution of their own.

A radical leftist leader, Jack Kinz, was successful at last in uniting the fragments of the socialist working class, the liberal middle class, and those rare emancipatory upper class individuals, and he then led them into Industry House himself - wherein he personally beat the Prime Minister unconscious.

A month later, the hard-left Red League was formed of Oakheart serfs and sympathetic knights, and Iron workers and engineers. It remains strong, operating with an immense surplus of resources, and stunningly little ideological conflict - possibly due to the charisma of their winning leader, still young at 46, as far as Dryads go, complete with idealism and tireless energy.

Their military is equipped with a strange mix of Sovereign and Dominion technology, utilising both an element of magic, and an element of industry - often melded together well enough that they cannot be told apart. Their soldiers wield the same style of rifle as the Dominion, albeit with a replica design that could be called poorer by comparison, and their ships are equipped not only with cannon, but flame and boarder too. Most importantly, whilst their fleets are overall less powerful than the Dominion's, they are both more numerous and more inventive in their strategy - and their dragon riders are equally as capable of using the Upper Luft to carry them as the Sovereignty's are.

The seat of their power is the Red Congress, in Union Square, in the city of Ventura. Ironically, they are the most stable of the three nations, with a well loved leader who has no immediate thoughts of war, violence, or aggression. However, shadows move with purpose through the city of Ventura, and a rising storm that has so far seen no recognition is beginning to swell. Dark forces are at work here, to bring the peace crashing down by any means necessary - and, if not seen for what they are, they will succeed, and the Red League will take up arms again.

And if the Red League takes up arms again, the world shall surely see war.

And now for a brief description of the current state of the World Court, and their resident extremist religious sect, the Heavens' Eyes.

The World Court

The Heavens' Eyes

The World Court is an organisation consisting of independent government and military force dedicated to ensuring fair representation for all nations in the Eversky, created after the immense death tolls of the first Great War. Despite the real world reputation for this sort of regulatory body, they are very good at their jobs, and have celebrated 360 years of continual nonaggression between the three nations just this past weekend. Their dedication to their jobs, plus a healthy dose of centrist idealism, and a ruthless willingness to use their military clout to enforce peace, have made them a very, very good thing. They are based at Solace, the neutral city of the world, where all nations - not just the big Three - are guaranteed fair hearing. It is one of the biggest, nicest places to live in the entire Eversky, and as a result has seen a surge of economic growth in the last few decades. It is now the most developed city out there - barring the Iron capital, but it doesn't have any smog issues, which makes up for it.

It is also where you start.

The World Court has a tendency to outsource smaller jobs when they can, which is how people like you tend to come into their service, being paid to travel the world and sort out diplomatic disputes between smaller islands or city states unaffiliated with the Big Three - or to hunt pirates, which you've probably done too.

Recently, they have been outsourcing more and more work, because of the growth of the Heavens' Eyes.

The Heavens' Eyes are an extremist religious sect that exists within the intelligence division of the World Court's government. They were originally the head officers for the gathering of intelligence, and monitoring the activity of the Big Three, but at some point... they changed. They began hoarding magical artefacts like madmen, and recruiting others within the World Court's hierarchy to do the same, all the while gradually increasing their grip on information, and knowledge.

They started burning books - not frequently, just occasionally - about a year ago. This is the point at which the World Court's secular side began to panic, and realised that they'd slowly lost control of their Courts. 

Nobody really knows what the Heavens' Eyes are up to, but it remains that they have so far instated laws against the gathering of Floatstone, or the use of it in ship construction - including limiting the big 3 in terms of how many of their ships can be Upper Luft capable - as well as started a total ban on speculation about the Ground. Because the Ground doesn't exist. You shouldn't be thinking about that. That kind of thinking is dangerous, and they know when you're thinking about it. They just know. They started as intelligence officers, and as a result their grasp on the flow of infomation around the Eversky is unrivaled. There are rumours of Heavens' Eyes officers who can peer into your mind from afar, even, and pick out treachery from honesty, lies from truth - or simply drive you mad entirely.

Those are just rumours, though.

But nonetheless, with the Heavens' Eyes now having seized effective control of the World Court by gaining a majority on the executive council, and having it turn away from keeping the peace and towards policing thought, knowledge, and science, going so far as to execute heretics...

Those who remain loyal to the original purpose of the World Court are forced to take unorthodox routes to success - even under the surveillance of their former comrades.

And now for some brief descriptions of the races.

Humans: Seemingly bland and distasteful, humans still represent the stalwart spirit of their kind, and are remarkably hard to kill. They become attached to their peers easily, and don't live very long. There is a saying in the Eversky about humans; 'Where there are Humans, there is hope.' For humans can survive and prosper in the harshest of places - and when they do, they will always make them friendlier for all, regardless of whether they meant to or not.

Dryads: Exclusively female, with a strong tendency towards young and petite builds, Dryads draw their strength from nature - in particular, from trees - and are known to be playful, excitable, and long-lived. They enjoy almost total immunity to disease and poison, and are superb shots almost by default - but take severe penalties to physical strength and endurance. Additionally, their trees cannot live without them - and nor can they live without their trees. For this reason, it is no uncommon to see Dryads wearing a cutting of that tree under their clothes, or in their hair, to preserve it should the original fall. Dryads are also prone to melancholia and emotional instability when they are far from land, but most modern dryads have overcome this by drinking tea, which seems like a strange way to overcome poor mental health unless you are also a Dryad. Dryads are also known for being innately able to communicate with Ents - though ents are rare outside of the Fracturlands.

Elves: They're sleek, graceful, and elegant. Nobody in the Eversky would ever say no to an elf propositioning them. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they are reknowned for their charisma, grace, and elegance. Many of the world's diplomats are elvish, or half elvish, and they have been crucial to defusing several tricky political situations in the past. They also take a natural bonus to their dexterity, but a natural penalty to strength much like a Dryad. On top of this, while they enjoy generally greater magical potential than most, they are not quick learners, and do not usually change quickly - or react to it well - as people. They are tall, slender, and elegant, usually, and lack the body diversity of humanity due to a smaller gene poole.

Dragonkin: An extreme rarity among the descendants of the Oakheart Dominion's first dragontamers, these are exclusively men whose predecessors became closely bonded to their dragon mounts, and spent enough time with them that they underwent further mutation by means of a pathogen carried by all dragons. These individuals can communicate well with dragons - though not mentally, as the mental language of a dragon is incomprehensible to a human - and are naturally received well by all species of dragon except for the Nightspawn, which is known to be aggressive to all who approach it. Dragonkin do not exhibit any physical mutations apart from a slight tendency to be ginger, or have ginger streaks in their hair. They are almost always in a state of near perfect physical condition, and heal quickly - particularly when in close proximity to dragons. However, all dragonkin are very dyslexic, without exception, and also show higher than average rates of autism. They can still read, but with difficulty - and they have a tendency to deal poorly with overstimulation, and other people. Proximity to dragons can help them with these symptoms, but don't expect to find dragons easily, even as a dragonkin.

That's about it. I think. Let me know if you have any questions.

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"Quip"

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EDIT: The colour used in the new template is lightsalmon, but you can use any you like as long as it's readable.

Alright, that's all I have to put here. Please apply as soon as is convenient, remember that typical forum rules apply as always, and the GM's word is final.
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