Perihelion

Hostile Aquisitions - The Corporate Cold War of the 22nd Century

Hi Golem, I'm still here, and don't worry; real life always takes priority!

Hostile Aquisitions - The Corporate Cold War of the 22nd Century

Works for me :)

Hostile Aquisitions - The Corporate Cold War of the 22nd Century

Interesting; plenty of directions to take 'sports' cybernetics ;) . I was considering something in construction and/or energy, with a heavy offworld presence. Maybe a space elevator, to make access to orbit and beyond easier...

Hostile Aquisitions - The Corporate Cold War of the 22nd Century

Sounds very interesting! Cyberpunk with a dash of Eclipse Phase, all leavened with lashings of dystopian corporate greed :) . I shall be keeping an eye out.

Space Colony RP

Also quite interested and will be keeping an eye out :) .

Through the Rifts: Progeny [Open!] [Co-GM Run]

The Shardspur, Aeviternal Expanse, Vershellen

The Shardspur was ancient. People tended to forget. Clinging to an unforgiving fragment of planar rock, surely the remnant of some much larger island shattered in a long-ago catastrophe, it sailed serenely through a plane of venomous, unmerciful light. Its foundations – the obdurate white granite so ubiquitous to Vershellen as a whole – had floated undisturbed for millennia before humans had ever set foot in the plane, and it bore its far newer burden of towers and bastions lightly.

The old fortress’ archaic battlements and ramparts scowled out at the bright, mad distance of the Aeviternal Expanse, and its rune-worked walls – many feet thick, hewn by desperate hands rather than the smooth precision of golemry or the surpassing skill of magic – bore the wild assault of the planar winds without complaint, as they had for nearly half a millennium.

Once, the Shardspur had been the last refuge of a people driven from their world by a calamity so great it threatened to end them all, but now…well.

The proud pennons of Vershellen – and House Hellebore – still snapped and raced from the squat towers that rose from the scree-littered slopes, the odd lufwood and seeking heartvine clinging grimly to the cliffsides, its garrison of Brass Legionnaires manned the walls with perfect precision and its bronze-dipped siege batteries kept a close and wary eye on the struggling trading settlement of Port Sunlight, but there was no denying that the Shardspur was a backwater.

And that suited Alexander Hellebore, by grace of the Crown Viscount Shardspur and – almost by default - Governor-General of the Expanse Aeviternal, down to the ground. He was a lesser scion of House Hellebore in many ways, a mediocre magister of the second rank – which still left him far above the common masses in skill and power – and without much in the way of besetting pride and ambition that characterised many born to his station. He had his fair share of luxuries, a secure position far removed from the cutthroat politics of his distant and glorious cousin the empress’ Court of Days, and his duties were, while useful, in truth not onerous or critical to the continued prosperity of the empire.

Yes, life was good.

His study was in the highest tower of the Shardspur – which wasn’t saying much, by Vershellese standards; it had been built long before modern reinforcing techniques and metamaterials had even been dreamt of, and so where newer mage spires soared up to the bright heavens, raised by tireless golems and powerful magic, the Shardspur squatted, bristling suspiciously against the world. Whilst the citadel-isle hadn’t seen a major renovation project in two centuries – and why would it? – successive generations had at least seen to the gentle modernization of the interior.

Thus, Alexander’s study was a comfortable place of plush crimson carpets and orphidax wood panelling, the poison radiance transmuted into harmless and rich blocks of vermillion light by the elaborate stained-glass windows, waves of sumptuous colour washing up the panes in an ornate display of the glassmage’s art. Magelights glowed warmly in baroque sconces, highlighting the archaic pale fan-vaulting that supported the roof and bathing his desk in abundant radiance.

A desk that was piled high with paperwork, brigaded by overstuffed bookshelves groaning under the weight of tomes, everything from the ancient and carefully-preserved handwritten vellum and leather to the more modern printed paper and cloth, to a few precious examples of memory-glass and manasteel, for the truly critical records. Even a sleepy, bucolic backwater like the Expanse generated tremendous volumes of paperwork – bills of lading, taxation records, reports from the small squadron of sky-cutters based in the Shardspur’s rudimentary docks, Courts of Appeal cases, maintenance requests…the list went on and on and on, all important work, all necessary work, but – and Alexander always felt a slight, glad glow – nothing that was critical. No princely magister’s pet projects needing immediate and total attention under the threat of annihilation, no political intrigue requiring the prioritization of this over that, none of the inevitable reprisals and recriminations…just the regular business of citizens sept to the House of Hellebore, the concerns of the few minor Houses that made their homes under that same imperial aegis and the yearly visit of the empress’ circuit rider from the capital.

Finishing the latest – a dispute over jurisdiction, of all things, of one of the essence-mills that powered the mana grid of Port Sunlight – and setting his seal with a sizzle of arcane sparks, Alexander rose from his chair with a sigh and padded over to one of the windows. A lingering touch, a mote or two of mana, and the dense scarlet cleared and paled obediently, letting him – if he was careful, and didn’t spend too long at it – take an unfettered look at his province.

At this time of year, the light, the endless, all-pervading light of a million stars, was tinged green and gold and the winds were heavy with the promise of life. Everything grew when the skies were saturated with virescence, farmers delighting as their crops exploded out of the ground like fireworks and gardeners despairing as their fiercely parterred and pleached arrangements were swallowed beneath the relentless tide of new growth. The air was heady with the sweet scent of exile’s roses running wild, carried through the long-defunct Gate – which resided not a stone’s throw from the Shardspur, a vast and empty arc – from Gaia as a memory of the lost homeland and distributed everywhere the empire found purchase.

The Aeviternal Expanse wasn’t the heart of the empire, it wasn’t the Crownsward with colossal, glittering Cynosure at its heart and a sky dreadnought hovering protectively over every trade-lane, but it had been settled for a long time. The worst of the local fauna had long since been exterminated, brought low by sword and bow and desperate spellfire in the earliest days of Vershellen, the wildwoods which had run rampant over the larger islands tamed and brought to heel with axe and saw and the untapped demesnes roaring with magical flux capped and channeled, their riotous, surging energies directed to civilisation rather than the birthing of fresh arcane horrors.

Placid homesteads stood, plumply self-satisfied, on the choiciest of isles. Fields – bright and living green, orderly and tame – spread like blankets across once-wild landscapes, and, on the closest, Alexander’s keen eyes could even spot the tireless forms of golems tending to the crops, blessedly unaffected by the venomous light. Pot-bellied skyships puttered between the islands in the sky, their holds filled with the agrarian bounty of the Expanse and their spun-light sails straining against the load.

Yes, they weren’t the most valuable of cargoes – that honour undoubtedly went to the Days mined and refined in the Far Reaches – and perhaps Port Sunlight didn’t, as a consequence, make the kind of princely profits that greater trading ports in other regions of the empire took for granted, but it was safe and it was calm and it was his. Nothing exciting happened in the Expanse, not really, and Alexander was just fine with that.

It left him plenty of time to cultivate his roses.

Alas, such idyllic times were not to last. Alexander Hellebore’s warm, sloe-brown eyes were turned away from the Gate - its soaring magnificence rendered a mundane part of the background by time and familiarity - when the wound in the world first tore itself into existence once again, but his senses were sharp and he felt the colossal bloom of power – vast even for Vershellen - as it swelled to a gargantuan crescendo.

He hit the floor rolling, even as the shock of the discharge blew the windows in. A hail of crimson razor-shards buried themselves deep into the panelling and more showered down around him even as, from somewhere within the depths of the castle, an alarm not heard in anyone’s lifetime howled to life, screaming up and down the scale and raking across already-frayed nerves.

A second-rank magister he might have been, and far removed from the courtly intrigue that meant death or razor-honed reflexes, but his power was as responsive as ever, surging forth in a spreading wave of pale glacier-gray fire, fighting back the siren song of the unfettered light now pouring in through his study windows. He gritted his teeth and poured out more; the Shardspur wasn’t large enough, or populated enough, to warrant a full city-scale shield; they relied on the runeworked walls and stained glass to keep them safe. Now, half that protection was gone in a single instant, and if he didn’t act fast, his people would start to suffer for it. Light-madness and vitrification, neither pleasant and both ultimately fatal if allowed to fester.

“Not on my damned watch,” he growled, still prone on the carpet, face a mask of strain as he struggled to maintain a shield larger than anything he’d attempted before. His people below were utterly defenceless against the light, just as they had been in the earliest days of Vershellen; it fell to him, the ranking noble and representative of the empire, to do his duty and defend them as best he could. As only he could.

As he pulled himself to his feet, cursing his own overindulgence, the doors burst open and two gleaming Brass Legionnaires stormed in, their longswords of curdled light out and glowing, ready to skewer any attacker. “Excellency!” one of them boomed, in the resonant steel-on-steel tones that all the imperial golems tended towards. Woozily, Alexander noted the rank markings and ornamentation to the sculpted breastplate; the captain of the guard herself. “Are you unharmed?”

He brushed a few slivers of glass impatiently out of his clothes and skin. “I’m fine.” A drop of blood swelled, slowly, from his nose and burst, unnoticed, on the floor, and a headache began to pound meanly at his temples. “We need to get everyone out of the light; I can’t hold this forever.” An admission of weakness that would be unthinkable in normal times, but the golems were loyal, far more so than beings of flesh, and the Brass Legionnaires had unflinchingly served the House of Hellebore since before the empire existed.

The captain saluted, sheathing her sword in one fluid movement. “Evacuations to the inner citadel rooms are in progress, milord.” She paused, as though the next was physically painful to her. “The…event…has shattered our crystal balls and transmission wafers; our coordination and communications are not…what they should be. We are fortunate the mirror-streams remain unaffected, or else we would be reduced to runners and written messages. It is making matters more chaotic than is optimal.”

Alexander shook his head. “At least people are moving,” he answered, quietly thankful for the efficiency of the legionnaires. “And get someone to silence that wretched shrieking; I can’t hear myself think for the racket!”

He allowed himself to be quickly hustled away from his ruined towertop retreat, down into the bowels of the citadel and away from the poison light which had, in the space of seconds, gone from a mostly-abstract concern, a mundane fact of life rendered irrelevant by the march of progress, to a sudden and pressing danger once more.

Blessedly, someone managed to shut off the screeching klaxon, but the quiet was short-lived; the centrepiece of the inner citadel was a vaulting, windowless chamber usually used for storage and now full of fearful cries and the shrill chatter of the Shardspur’s fleshy population. Around the edges the Brass Legionnaires formed a bristling, spiky cordon, protecting their frailer counterparts and ready to cut any invading arcane monstrosity – or light-maddened soul - to ribbons.

Questions assailed Alexander on all sides as he strode confidently into the hall, the very picture of a noble magister defending his charges, the image only slightly marred by the stubborn ooze of blood from his nose and his bloodshot eyes.

“What’s happening?”

“Are we under attack?”

“The glass-”

“The Legionnaires bundled me here-”

“I demand-”

“Silence!” His voice, made sonorous and resonant with a cantrip every mage knew, shook cataracts of dust from the high vaults and instantly silenced the jabbering crowd. “For the time being, all windowed rooms and passageways are off-limits to anyone unable to manage a full-body lightshield. No, I don’t know exactly what’s happened, but it’s big and it involves the Gate.” Internally, Alexander shook his head at that; for five hundred years and change, the Gate had been a big floating relic, no longer understood and certainly no longer functional. “I will be calling Cynosure and the Admiralty for immediate reinforcements, and to the closest arsenals for whatever Brass Legionnaires can be spared. In the meantime-”

He continued, spouting off a litany of orders and instructions with the instinctual, habitual ease of one born to rule, and under his spreading mantle of opalescent shields the garrison of the Shardspur hurried to obey.

Sky-Cutter HMS Skylark, The Gate, Aeviternal Expanse, Vershellen

The sky-cutter was a swift thing, one of the smallest skyships in common usage throughout the empire. Without exception they were sleek, the better to cut through the air, with a veritable cloud of golden spun-light sails to drive them through the endless heavens. A single rank of shard carronades lined its lightly armoured brass-dipped hull; cutters were customs vessels, designed for the chase and for close-range boarding actions with their contingent of winged Brass Legionnaires. The portholes, deep-sunk and with armoured coverings, glowed like rubies, and half a hundred painstakingly-carved sapphire eyes sat in rune-carved sockets all across the hull, a way for the crew inside to see and track their environment without being exposed to its insidious touch.

On the bridge of the Skylark, the continual matter of navigating the vessel through the high empyrean continued unabated, running like clockwork as the ship neared the colossal portal. The crew of winged bronze golems, their patterns specially lightened and stripped down to save on weight wherever possible, moved with lithe tread and utter certainty of purpose, trimming a great bank of light-sails here, adjusting a pulley-weight there, staring intently at readouts projected onto quicksilver mirror-pools, whilst in the centre of it all a tight knot of Brass Legionnaires bristled.

This was all so exciting! Amelia Salomé-Hellebore was at the centre of the tumult, her eyes almost as bright as the reflected glare from the legionnaires’ decorated plate. She was a young sorceress, as these things went, skin the colour of chocolate and hair the Hellebore white, marking her as a member of a cadet branch of the imperial House, and she’d demanded a place on the expedition, when the initial panic had died down.

There had been such tiresome arguments! But, eventually, stodgy old Viscount Shardspur, bleeding from the nose at the effort of shielding the whole citadel with his magic, personally – she’d not thought the man had the power in him to do it, let alone hold the spell - had been swayed and, at the centre of a prickling square of Brass Legionnaires, she’d been escorted into the only sky-cutter (and, indeed, the only skyship) currently in the Shardspur’s little dock, heading straight for the swirling viridescence that snapped and crackled and roared the music of the spheres from between weather-beaten spires of granite and marble.

A buzzing hum seemed to shake the universe as the brave Skylark approached, everything vibrating to some unknown note. The captain said something, she was sure of it, bronze fingers dancing across flaring, erratic controls, but it was lost in the rising drone.

Magic lay thick on the air, almost as dense as it was around Cynosure or one of the princely ports, and Amelia laughed at its chocolate and cinder-toffee taste on her tongue, the sensation of plunging into an endless ocean of it.

A cascade of images tumbled through her head as she swam through the currents; all she would have to do is reach out her hand and they – for she could instinctively feel the forged-metal glow of her golems’ souls – would be there, and not here. There was an abandoned city, being reclaimed by the stop-motion advance of the jungle; another rainforest in the middle of what looked like a serious cloudburst, then a sickly and graspingly hungry, green-lit darkness she shied away from, a swampy marshland that seemed to go on for ever, more and more came and swirled about her in a complex and shifting mandala, each eager, each keen, resonant with power and pregnant with possibility.

Sky-Cutter HMS Skylark, Gaia

The good ship Skylark, trailing viridian streamers of energy from every spar and an excess mana-charge crackling across its gleaming hull, burst out of the great Rift and into an unfamiliar sky. Blue, blue, blue, a great wash of azure blankness with only a few cotton-wisp clouds to break up its alien monotony, no constellations burning bright in eye-catching patterns, no siren-song music of the spheres.

Just…blue sky and yellow sunlight, filtering in through the watching eyes embedded in the skyship’s hull, rolling madly in their sockets as they rushed to drink in the new place. Blue sky and yellow sun above, green grassland and forest below – and, in the clearing far beneath, tiny figures, rendered comically small by altitude but still visible and growing larger as the ship descended, its gold-gossamer sails of spun light brushing the tops of the trees.

Anticipation, fear and wonder all warred inside her head and raked their phantom fingers up her spine. The great rip in reality was, blessedly, stable behind her, the way home remained open, and – glory of glories – the unknown unfurled itself majestically before her.

There was opportunity here, if she had the spine and stomach to grasp it. Viscount Shardspur’s orders might have been to reconnoitre and report back as quickly as possible, but this?

“Take us down,” she commanded. “We shall see what denizens inhabit this place, and what they might tell us of it, before we return to Vershellen in triumph! We make history today, legionnaires; they’ll carve your patterns on the Roll of Honour for your parts in this!”

Through the Rifts: Progeny [Open!] [Co-GM Run]

The Empire of Vershellen

Governmental Form

Imperial Magocracy

Demographics

Human

Population:

13 million

Plane Description

Plane Description

The Rift through which the desperate column of refugees that would become Vershellen escaped led to a place quite unlike the old homeworld. The sky – luminous and lit with strange stars and streamers of incandescent energy that tugged and played with the mind – stretched off into sanity-twisting infinity. The land, by contrast, was reassuringly familiar, although shattered and scattered through the hostile heavens as though by some uncaring god’s hand.

Everything from lone mountains to continental landmasses, complete with cascading rivers, forests and rolling plains, all of it hanging suspended in the immaterial firmament. The air was full of raucous, alien calls and the land carpeted in unfamiliar plants.

More than that, though, magic roared through the plane. An endless torrent, a vast ocean needing but the faintest touch to leap to hand; every spellcaster found their power profoundly magnified. Spells that used to require days of ritual and many skilled participants giving their all now needed a word and flick of the hand from a mediocre practitioner, and wonders that previously defied conception were now within reach – if the refugee-colonists could survive long enough to make them.

Which was not at all a given; quite aside from the mind-bending luminous reaches of the endless sky that took more than one refugee into their endless grasp, sanity and reason erased by the poisonous light, practically every local life-form had some form of arcane power. Even the plants were infused with it, their powers and properties unlike anything the refugees had experienced. Gaia’s nature had been fecund and kindly, whereas their new home was an altogether wilder thing. Enslaver orchids, bloodroots, vampire thorns…and they were just some of the tamer flora the first unfortunate expeditions found. Even the more beneficial finds were, often as not, a double-edged sword, made so by the energy that infused them.

These days, the plane looks far different from that untamed wilderness – at least, in the nearer reaches. Skyships ply the trade lanes between vast and shielded island citadels, whilst the pleasure-palaces of the sorcerous aristocracy gleam, filigree-fragile, in the poisonous light. Cities bloom on the islands, the once-wild forests cut and coppiced into submission, and docks festoon the aerial coastlines.

Not all, though, is a triumphal sign of imperial prosperity though; in the far distance, visible on a good day from the Gate itself, a sullen abyssal wound bleeds purple, eye-searing unlight – the Black City. Once one of the most powerful and influential Principalities, back before the imperial unification, now an impossible ruin swallowed by the success – or failure – of their last experiment with Rift magic. Staring at the abyss for too long is unhealthy; it draws the eye in with tantalising glimpses – a spire here, windows ablaze with purple reflections, a colonnaded promenade there, a skyship dock with tyrian-scrawled pennons flying proud…enticing reminders of what the Black City once was, and drawing a perennial tithe of the young and the desperate to plunder the possible riches there.

None have ever returned.

Then, too, there are the arcane currents that rush through the endless sky; the squalling Rose-Wind, sweeping in from the western expanses, full of flowers and glass knives; the insidious Roaring Deeps that deafen with internal thunder, others.

History

History

Following their landing and the destabilization of the Gate which had brought them away from the Cataclysm, the refugee chain fractured into factions, each aligned with a sufficiently powerful sorcerer or sorceress able to protect them from the mind-twisting planar illumination and the magically-charged flora and fauna. Each group laid claim to an island of their own, and for a time there was the peace borne of a desperate need to survive.

The isles of Vershellen were, at that time, entirely wild and untamed. Forests of millennial growth dominated the largest islands, never having known the chop of an axe or the hum of a buzzsaw, nourished to truly gargantuan size by the plentiful mana. Lakes teemed with monstrous fish, the rivers ran wild and free, and powerful animals utterly unknown to the settlers roamed the plains and high mountain passes.

It was only through enormous effort and relentless application of arcane might that the settlers had any chance at all. Even the light of the plane was inimical, in time, the uncertain illumination of possible stars in the endless sky slowly warping unshielded minds to insanity and unprotected flesh to glass. Many of the oldest tombs in Vershellen are more like sculpture galleries than crypts, housing rank upon rank of exquisite glass statues.

Naturally, as the protectors and providers for the rest of the refugees, the mages rapidly assumed positions of power and prominence. Hard to gainsay the sorcerer whose power keeps you from vitrifying, after all. The islands, separate and isolated in the endless sea of stars, all went their own separate ways, raising stained-glass spires to the sky and digging deep into the flying bedrock. Towns and cities grew up under the glittering aegis of the mage towers, whole communities born and raised in service to their sorcerous overlords.

Magic flourished, too; more and more Vershellese developed the talent as time wore on and births began in a plane saturated by it. Many took up service with the princely Houses founded by the original magi, forming the start of the middle classes of Vershellen, but others found their skill and ambition too great to be satisfied with mere service.

There were plenty of other islands, new territories to be conquered and jealously defended; waves of explorers left the first isles on rudimentary skyships, heading for distant lands to raise their own banners, their own Houses.

Although the plane itself appeared infinite, no-one wanted to venture too far from the safe havens of established islands, too far out where skyships could fall prey to the myriad and undocumented horrors of the Deep Sky. Thus came the first true conflicts, first between pioneers claiming the same piece of floating rock and then, later and more seriously, between lesser scions of princely Houses seeking to expand their House’s power and prestige.

Thus did Vershellen settle into its Principalities; vast constellations of islands bound together and moved by magic, all under the rule of a sorcerous House. Each warred against the other, as often as not, with words and trade embargoes and sabotage, espionage, all-out warfare with skyships and landing marines and, at the last, with magic enough to split the skies and rip whole islands apart. Proud and fiercely independent, it seemed as though the seething, simmering cauldron of rivalry and splendid isolation would last forever, the Principalities expanding endlessly through an infinite sky, each one jealously hoarding secrets and lore, sorcerer-lords and ladies sniping with one another over arcane minutiae whilst their oathbound lessers spilled blood and treasure in their name.

No lore too dangerous, no arcana too forbidden; in the bright, mad heavens the ancient magi soared to dizzying heights and plumbed the very darkest depths. The catalyst for empire arose out of the internecine warring between the Principalities; the proud island-citadel of Scintillance, home and fortress since time out of mind for House Hellebore was assaulted by their enemies in a particularly brutal clash. For five days the colossal landmass wore a corona of weeping flame as the cities burned and the proud spires melted like candles in a furnace. Hurricanes of razor-glass butterflies scythed through the city streets, turning them into charnel ruin as hordes of summoned and bound monstrosities rampaged as they willed, wrecking years of painstaking spellwork in moments and letting the poison light pour down, untrammelled and untamed onto unprotected Hellebore citizenry. Skyships bristling with cannon and mortar tumbled aflame from blazing Hellebore docks, and in five Red Days the heart of the ancient and princely House of Hellebore was left a tumbling wreck. The other princely Houses – even those entirely uninvolved in the attack – were quick to capitalise on weakness, vassalizing and taking by main force what they willed even as Hellebore reeled in shock.

It was not a common fate, to be sure, but hardly unheard of in the Principalities. The older and larger realms had a gentleman’s agreement – now lying in tatters – but such upsets had occurred before, and life carried on as usual after a period of adjustment. However, the young ruler of House Hellebore was a sorceress of uncommon talent even amongst the Vershellese sorcerer-lords, and had no intention of taking the attempted extermination of her House lying down. From a hidden border citadel, she laid her plots and plans, carefully hoarding and husbanding her power and her intentions, all the while forming alliances, pacts, oaths of assistance and internal networks that spread all throughout the domains of the very Houses that had laid her own so low.

The final spark to the catalyst was an event as perplexing as it was catastrophic. It may, perhaps – and the imperial archives remain stoically silent on this – have been the result of a Hellebore saboteur, an infiltrating agent seizing their chance, but whatever the impetus the final result was undeniable. Megara was one of the original Principalities, ancient and vast and glutted with centuries of accumulated wealth. Its sorcerers were skilled, very skilled, and had for near a century turned their bright gazes towards the inactive Gate, working diligently at unravelling the mystery of mysteries – for the grand sorcery which had forged them and in so doing had brought an escape from their doomed world had been lost in the chaos of the evacuation. However expansive a cage – and to all intents and purposes, Vershellen was infinite – it was still a cage, and the lordly rulers of Megara could countenance no shackle or limit to their ambition. Thus, their mages laboured in libraries and laboratories throughout the great city-continent, working to unpick a dimensional puzzle few could even wrap their heads around.

Megara – and the loose association of Principalities it led, by default if nothing else – had been the primary instigators of the attack on House Hellebore. What the hypothetical infiltrator did – or whether it was supremely unfortunate coincidence – no-one can say, but one day the entire island conurbation…twisted. Millions of tons of rock and metal and glass shrieked a dreadful death-cry as blackness ripped its way into existence across the luminous sky, a voracious and hungry abyss that consumed the ancient Principality – and many of its closest attendant vassals – whole. The wound and the ruin – the Black City – remain to this day, a visible reminder of the dangers of Gate magic gone wrong (or worse, horribly right).

Into this power vacuum stepped the resurgent House of Hellebore. It wasn’t enough to regain their former status, oh no. Hellebore skyships were suddenly everywhere, and their immaculate envoys negotiated ceasefires, trade deals, alliances, sweeping up lesser Houses in a new and building movement. It wasn’t plain sailing; many and proud were the Principalities who wanted nothing to do with the frightening new thing the House of Hellebore was becoming. Those – with the characteristic ruthlessness of a Vershellen magister – were made examples of.

Skyships turned lesser strongholds to burning rubble with their cannons and spells, whilst the greater ones found themselves fighting an unending tide of metal. Golems, cast and sculpted like humans writ large, engraved with spelleater wards, unfeeling and unflinching and unaffected by the poison light. And all, to a perfectly-formed legionnaire, loyal to Hellebore and her dogs. Still worse were her spells, shatteringly powerful and breaking even the most potent shields like glass.

Before such puissance, the Principalities bowed or were destroyed, one by one.

At the end, from the smoking husk of the Vershellen Principalities, the empire was born, and has so far endured for two centuries.

Culture and Society

Culture and Society

Vershellese society is defined by magic. Their home plane is almost explosive with it, the air and water and land all saturated with mana. Much of it was inimical to life as the refugees knew it, or at best indifferent when they first arrived, exhausted and afraid. The spellcasters who fled through the Gate, though, found their powers magnified manyfold. They were able to beat back the monsters and pacify the land with their arcane knowledge and, when that failed, through prodigious application of spellfire. Thus, the expedition coalesced around them, the first leaders who would go on to become the first sorcerer-lords and ladies.

Traditional lines of authority quickly eroded; old power and nobility and a line stretching back a thousand years didn’t matter, only the ability to shield against the invidious radiance that permeated the plane, and the powerful monsters glutted on unheard-of amounts of mana did. Those with the power and skill to do so were few and far between, prideful and insular in many cases; there was no one overarching authority that all acknowledged. The flying islands of the plane only enhanced that tendency to insularity; each wizard-lord and lady gathered to themselves a retinue of loyal – and terrified – retainers from the refugee train and struck out for the nearby islands in the sky.

Over time, each settled land developed into the personal demesne of a powerful mage. Spires soared up to the maddening heavens, even as castles and walls and defensive bastions were chiselled out of the living rock of the islands, along with colossal defensive wards and other ritual spellwork, channelling and amplifying the power of the attuned mage. Those first spellcasters founded the princely Houses of a sorcerous aristocracy, usurping within a single generation the powers and privileges of the nobility and elevating their power and control over their subjects to a degree undreamt-of. After all, they were the only ones capable of powering the wards and defences that leached the starry poison from the light and vaporised the monsters that regularly assailed the fledgling settlements.

In Vershellen, then, magic is everything. The overwhelming majority of the citizens have some ability to work it, to take the currents of mana which rampage through their plane and cast a good few spells, even without the centuries of arcane infrastructure which have been developed there.

The greater the ability to cast, or the greater the affinity for difficult forms of magic, the higher their status in Vershellese society. Indeed, to compare the regular citizen of Vershellen to one of the sorcerer-lords is akin to comparing a candle to the sun. Where the average resident might dabble in the arcane, the aristocracy positively swims in it, the planar magic changing them as much as they change the plane itself. Generations of people have spent their lives sheltering under the protective aegis of one magister or another; many Vershellese still think of themselves as sept to a particular House and Principality first, and a citizen of their empire second.

Magic both stratifies and levels Vershellese society; if you have powerful magic in Vershellen, you matter, no matter what background you have, and magic doesn’t seem to care about gender or sexuality either. If you have a mere dribble of talent, though, better learn some other useful skill and make yourself useful to a true magister.

The strange properties of the plane also influence their society in more subtle ways; magic is the sovereign defence against the sanity-stealing light and its poison glassy touch, of course, and so it is a badge of status in Vershellen to wear as little as is safe. Citizens and common mages may – and do – cover and cloak themselves, and vie for power and position in their own shadow-games that ape those of their betters through volume and colour and cut, but for the aristocracy nothing whispers power and wealth louder than skin bared to the poison light with no ill effects. What they do wear is fine, to be sure, rich and sumptuous and with all the decadence befitting their station, but no magister worth their title would ever stoop to cloaks and capes, to ermine robes and multi-layered ballgowns, to all the trappings of rank in other lands.

Governance and Politics

Governance and Politics

The Empire of Vershellen is ruled from the glittering stained-glass spires of the Whisper Palace in the grand city of Cynosure. The Court of Days dances attendance at the foot of the Constellation Throne whilst shadow wars play out between the House of Blood and the House of Commons in the opulent Parliament.

All bend the knee to the imperial throne; golems and skyships and island-shattering spellpower make sure of that, at least on the surface, but below the serene shallows the cutthroat political engine of Vershellen roars away unabated, oiled with blood and watered with tears. Princely Houses vie for position and power, new-minted magisters strike out across the infinite skies for pastures new, and everywhere the mages plumb the depths of the universe for knowledge.

The Empress Maia

Her Imperial Majesty Maia, of the House of Hellebore, Warden of the Heavens and Queen of Days, the effulgent Empress of Vershellen and her Principalities. Also called the Winter Empress, as much for the snows and blizzards driving in from the Deep Sky at her coronation as for her appearance. She looks like a young woman in the first flower of adulthood, and, unusually in this plane of fiercely abundant light, bears skin the colour of snow and hair a bare shade or two darker.

Her eyes are the clue that not all is quite as it seems; in an almost childlike and unlined face they sit, ancient, the pale and distant grey of a glacier, cool and calculating and remotely ruthless. Her smile, though, is bright with all the promise of summer and her body inviting, and that is enough for many, even those who really should know better.

She is, as with all the high aristocracy of Vershellen, a powerful sorceress. Long immersion in the torrent of magic which roars through the plane – and judicious use of the Days refined in the far reaches of her domains – have preserved her youth and beauty long past the natural human lifespan; quite how long it can be extended is one of the many unknowns. She is known to be skilled in the creation and use of golems, and is a particularly talented glassmage, too. She sponsors many types of arcane research in the universities and laboratories of her domain, too – not all of them under the aegis of House Hellebore.

Technology and Magic

Technology and Magic

Vershellen’s magic – and its princely magisters – is perhaps its most defining feature. It’s woven into the very fabric of their plane, their infrastructure wholly entwined with it; essence mills churn at every endless waterfall and mana collectors gleam on every suns-drenched hilltop, funnelling the raw possibility of creation into their owners’ grand workings. Miles of sorcerous ritual anchors honeycomb the great island citadels, crackling and snapping with cold fire as the ambient magic of the plane surges through them, hundreds of magical effects propagating from each enormous array.

Magic is as much a tool of peace as war; ploughshares draw life and nourishment through the soil as they go, whilst forges blaze to white heat at a whispered word, suckling greedily at the essence grid for the raw power to convert into flame. None of which is to say the mages of Vershellen have neglected violence, oh no. Some – like the empress – delight in golem legions, or armies of oath-bound servitors. Others, sheer arcane might manifest as the elemental forces of nature skewed to extreme violence, and every shade in between. Enchanters press skeins of power into the very artifacts they imbue; cannons roar with volcanic fury and spew magma in luminous torrents and swivel-mounted carronades scythe decks clear with barrages of razored glass.

Skyships.

Military Overview

Military Overview

The Golem Legions

Golems are one of the Empire’s greatest assets. Tireless workers, they toil in foundry crucibles in temperatures that would kill a human instantly. They labour wreathed in poison clouds, on new islands exposed to the venomous glassing light of the plane, in places where the tempo of production must never, ever cease. More than that, though, golems carved with spelleater wards and chains are one of the primary methods of warfare between the magisters of Vershellen.

There are as many varieties of golem as there are stars in Vershellen’s endless skies, of course, but the empire, at least, as part of an effort to simplify their own logistics, tends to a few archetypes rather than a dazzling specialist panoply of different variants.

The best and most enduring are the Brass Legionnaires, ensorcelled steel creations aping the human form, appearing as plate-armoured knights dipped in sorcerous brass, for better protection against the vitrifying glare of the plane. They are graceful and quick, belying their sheer mass, well-armed and supremely well-armoured, lavishly ornamented with scintillant arcane sigils. Forged in the great presses of Vershellen’s arsenals, the Brass Legionnaires are implacable, loyal defenders of the empire. Attended upon their creation by skilled animators - a well-respected and well-paid profession in Vershellen, ensuring the engines of industry thunder ceaselessly - they are fluid and adaptable and tireless, machines honed and improved down the centuries for slaughter. The Brass Legionnaires are the front-line soldiers of many an imperial island, fighting back the tide of arcane horrors birthed from abundant and untapped places of power and making sure that even the most humble Vershellese citizen sleeps safely in their bed at night.

The standard-pattern Legionnaire is armed with an enchanted longsword and a thick steel heater shield, emblazoned with either a princely or imperial coat of arms and impressed with enchantments for strength and protection both.

Legionnaires patterned for long-distance warfare, meanwhile, have superior vision and are more dextrous than their imposing forms might suggest, and can be found wielding a wide variety of ranged weapons. A favourite – beyond the standard crossbows – are shardstaffs, long polearms that project bursts of vitrifying radiance.

Some few Legionnaires are patterned for siege warfare, too; something of a rarity in Vershellen, where skyships and magisters can lay waste to an island in minutes. On occasion, though, such wholesale destruction is deemed unwarranted; perhaps there exist priceless relics or archives of lore whose destruction cannot be countenanced, or the island-citadel in question is desired as a strategic base. In those instances, Vershellen calls upon its siege golems.

Colossal in size, many times the height and bulk of a man, they are blasted out of the obdurate white granite so common to the isles, their forms refined and honed through flaying magic until a perfect colossus strides free of the quarry, shaking the dust of its creation from its enormous feet. Many bear catapults and ballistae on their broad shoulders, the pauldron facsimiles large enough to handle such weapon emplacements with ease, whilst others heft gargantuan battering rams or rely on the crushing power of their fists.

Skyships

By far the vast majority of Vershellen’s skyships are traders, pot-bellied hulls of buoyant lufwood and spun-light sails, built as large as economics dictates to haul as much as possible through the skies between princely ports. Tea and spices, arcane reagents, sky-silver, gems, ore…the number and variety of cargoes is staggering.

Many of the rest are pleasure craft, toys of the nobility, elegantly crafted yachts of spun glass and crystal, fast and opulent. There can be no standardization of these vessels, not when lavished with magisterial attention, but they are vessels of pleasure and not of war. Reinforced and shielded they might be, to guard against opportunistic assassination, but they are no purpose-built engines of war.

Those that are are by far the rarest. Layer upon layer of brass and bronze-dipped steel, glittering with runework and reflected light. Slab-sided mountains of reinforced metal, scrollworked cannonry bristling at every opportunity, sailing the littoral of light as a potent reminder of just what power Vershellen can bring to bear, should it be necessary. The most powerful princely Houses have their war-cruiser squadrons, to show their flag and enforce their will on their far-flung holdings, but only the empress can afford the expenditure, both arcane and mundane, for a true sky dreadnought. The nascent Imperial Armada has each and every one of the bare handful completed so far, the empress’s mailed fist championed by the dreadnought Her Majesty’s Displeasure; an apposite name if ever there was one.

Additional Information

Maia is far older than she appears. Most of the aristocracy and some of the middle classes are.

Vershellen mines Days in the far reaches of their plane, where Time gets funny. This is not a fun profession.

Through the Rifts: Progeny [Open!] [Co-GM Run]

Any chance of a refresh of the Discord link?

Through the Rifts: Progeny [Open!] [Co-GM Run]

Ported over from the interest check:

The Empire of Vershellen

Governmental Form

Imperial Magocracy

Demographics

Human

Population:

13 million

Plane Description

Plane Description

The Rift through which the desperate column of refugees that would become Vershellen escaped led to a place quite unlike the old homeworld. The sky – luminous and lit with strange stars and streamers of incandescent energy that tugged and played with the mind – stretched off into sanity-twisting infinity. The land, by contrast, was reassuringly familiar, although shattered and scattered through the hostile heavens as though by some uncaring god’s hand.

Everything from lone mountains to continental landmasses, complete with cascading rivers, forests and rolling plains, all of it hanging suspended in the immaterial firmament. The air was full of raucous, alien calls and the land carpeted in unfamiliar plants.

More than that, though, magic roared through the plane. An endless torrent, a vast ocean needing but the faintest touch to leap to hand; every spellcaster found their power profoundly magnified. Spells that used to require days of ritual and many skilled participants giving their all now needed a word and flick of the hand from a mediocre practitioner, and wonders that previously defied conception were now within reach – if the refugee-colonists could survive long enough to make them.

Which was not at all a given; quite aside from the mind-bending luminous reaches of the endless sky that took more than one refugee into their endless grasp, sanity and reason erased by the poisonous light, practically every local life-form had some form of arcane power. Even the plants were infused with it, their powers and properties unlike anything the refugees had experienced. Gaia’s nature had been fecund and kindly, whereas their new home was an altogether wilder thing. Enslaver orchids, bloodroots, vampire thorns…and they were just some of the tamer flora the first unfortunate expeditions found. Even the more beneficial finds were, often as not, a double-edged sword, made so by the energy that infused them.

These days, the plane looks far different from that untamed wilderness – at least, in the nearer reaches. Skyships ply the trade lanes between vast and shielded island citadels, whilst the pleasure-palaces of the sorcerous aristocracy gleam, filigree-fragile, in the poisonous light. Cities bloom on the islands, the once-wild forests cut and coppiced into submission, and docks festoon the aerial coastlines.

Not all, though, is a triumphal sign of imperial prosperity though; in the far distance, visible on a good day from the Gate itself, a sullen abyssal wound bleeds purple, eye-searing unlight – the Black City. Once one of the most powerful and influential Principalities, back before the imperial unification, now an impossible ruin swallowed by the success – or failure – of their last experiment with Rift magic. Staring at the abyss for too long is unhealthy; it draws the eye in with tantalising glimpses – a spire here, windows ablaze with purple reflections, a colonnaded promenade there, a skyship dock with tyrian-scrawled pennons flying proud…enticing reminders of what the Black City once was, and drawing a perennial tithe of the young and the desperate to plunder the possible riches there.

None have ever returned.

Then, too, there are the arcane currents that rush through the endless sky; the squalling Rose-Wind, sweeping in from the western expanses, full of flowers and glass knives; the insidious Roaring Deeps that deafen with internal thunder, others.

History

History

Following their landing and the destabilization of the Gate which had brought them away from the Cataclysm, the refugee chain fractured into factions, each aligned with a sufficiently powerful sorcerer or sorceress able to protect them from the mind-twisting planar illumination and the magically-charged flora and fauna. Each group laid claim to an island of their own, and for a time there was the peace borne of a desperate need to survive.

The isles of Vershellen were, at that time, entirely wild and untamed. Forests of millennial growth dominated the largest islands, never having known the chop of an axe or the hum of a buzzsaw, nourished to truly gargantuan size by the plentiful mana. Lakes teemed with monstrous fish, the rivers ran wild and free, and powerful animals utterly unknown to the settlers roamed the plains and high mountain passes.

It was only through enormous effort and relentless application of arcane might that the settlers had any chance at all. Even the light of the plane was inimical, in time, the uncertain illumination of possible stars in the endless sky slowly warping unshielded minds to insanity and unprotected flesh to glass. Many of the oldest tombs in Vershellen are more like sculpture galleries than crypts, housing rank upon rank of exquisite glass statues.

Naturally, as the protectors and providers for the rest of the refugees, the mages rapidly assumed positions of power and prominence. Hard to gainsay the sorcerer whose power keeps you from vitrifying, after all. The islands, separate and isolated in the endless sea of stars, all went their own separate ways, raising stained-glass spires to the sky and digging deep into the flying bedrock. Towns and cities grew up under the glittering aegis of the mage towers, whole communities born and raised in service to their sorcerous overlords.

Magic flourished, too; more and more Vershellese developed the talent as time wore on and births began in a plane saturated by it. Many took up service with the princely Houses founded by the original magi, forming the start of the middle classes of Vershellen, but others found their skill and ambition too great to be satisfied with mere service.

There were plenty of other islands, new territories to be conquered and jealously defended; waves of explorers left the first isles on rudimentary skyships, heading for distant lands to raise their own banners, their own Houses.

Although the plane itself appeared infinite, no-one wanted to venture too far from the safe havens of established islands, too far out where skyships could fall prey to the myriad and undocumented horrors of the Deep Sky. Thus came the first true conflicts, first between pioneers claiming the same piece of floating rock and then, later and more seriously, between lesser scions of princely Houses seeking to expand their House’s power and prestige.

Thus did Vershellen settle into its Principalities; vast constellations of islands bound together and moved by magic, all under the rule of a sorcerous House. Each warred against the other, as often as not, with words and trade embargoes and sabotage, espionage, all-out warfare with skyships and landing marines and, at the last, with magic enough to split the skies and rip whole islands apart. Proud and fiercely independent, it seemed as though the seething, simmering cauldron of rivalry and splendid isolation would last forever, the Principalities expanding endlessly through an infinite sky, each one jealously hoarding secrets and lore, sorcerer-lords and ladies sniping with one another over arcane minutiae whilst their oathbound lessers spilled blood and treasure in their name.

No lore too dangerous, no arcana too forbidden; in the bright, mad heavens the ancient magi soared to dizzying heights and plumbed the very darkest depths. The catalyst for empire arose out of the internecine warring between the Principalities; the proud island-citadel of Scintillance, home and fortress since time out of mind for House Hellebore was assaulted by their enemies in a particularly brutal clash. For five days the colossal landmass wore a corona of weeping flame as the cities burned and the proud spires melted like candles in a furnace. Hurricanes of razor-glass butterflies scythed through the city streets, turning them into charnel ruin as hordes of summoned and bound monstrosities rampaged as they willed, wrecking years of painstaking spellwork in moments and letting the poison light pour down, untrammelled and untamed onto unprotected Hellebore citizenry. Skyships bristling with cannon and mortar tumbled aflame from blazing Hellebore docks, and in five Red Days the heart of the ancient and princely House of Hellebore was left a tumbling wreck. The other princely Houses – even those entirely uninvolved in the attack – were quick to capitalise on weakness, vassalizing and taking by main force what they willed even as Hellebore reeled in shock.

It was not a common fate, to be sure, but hardly unheard of in the Principalities. The older and larger realms had a gentleman’s agreement – now lying in tatters – but such upsets had occurred before, and life carried on as usual after a period of adjustment. However, the young ruler of House Hellebore was a sorceress of uncommon talent even amongst the Vershellese sorcerer-lords, and had no intention of taking the attempted extermination of her House lying down. From a hidden border citadel, she laid her plots and plans, carefully hoarding and husbanding her power and her intentions, all the while forming alliances, pacts, oaths of assistance and internal networks that spread all throughout the domains of the very Houses that had laid her own so low.

The final spark to the catalyst was an event as perplexing as it was catastrophic. It may, perhaps – and the imperial archives remain stoically silent on this – have been the result of a Hellebore saboteur, an infiltrating agent seizing their chance, but whatever the impetus the final result was undeniable. Megara was one of the original Principalities, ancient and vast and glutted with centuries of accumulated wealth. Its sorcerers were skilled, very skilled, and had for near a century turned their bright gazes towards the inactive Gate, working diligently at unravelling the mystery of mysteries – for the grand sorcery which had forged them and in so doing had brought an escape from their doomed world had been lost in the chaos of the evacuation. However expansive a cage – and to all intents and purposes, Vershellen was infinite – it was still a cage, and the lordly rulers of Megara could countenance no shackle or limit to their ambition. Thus, their mages laboured in libraries and laboratories throughout the great city-continent, working to unpick a dimensional puzzle few could even wrap their heads around.

Megara – and the loose association of Principalities it led, by default if nothing else – had been the primary instigators of the attack on House Hellebore. What the hypothetical infiltrator did – or whether it was supremely unfortunate coincidence – no-one can say, but one day the entire island conurbation…twisted. Millions of tons of rock and metal and glass shrieked a dreadful death-cry as blackness ripped its way into existence across the luminous sky, a voracious and hungry abyss that consumed the ancient Principality – and many of its closest attendant vassals – whole. The wound and the ruin – the Black City – remain to this day, a visible reminder of the dangers of Gate magic gone wrong (or worse, horribly right).

Into this power vacuum stepped the resurgent House of Hellebore. It wasn’t enough to regain their former status, oh no. Hellebore skyships were suddenly everywhere, and their immaculate envoys negotiated ceasefires, trade deals, alliances, sweeping up lesser Houses in a new and building movement. It wasn’t plain sailing; many and proud were the Principalities who wanted nothing to do with the frightening new thing the House of Hellebore was becoming. Those – with the characteristic ruthlessness of a Vershellen magister – were made examples of.

Skyships turned lesser strongholds to burning rubble with their cannons and spells, whilst the greater ones found themselves fighting an unending tide of metal. Golems, cast and sculpted like humans writ large, engraved with spelleater wards, unfeeling and unflinching and unaffected by the poison light. And all, to a perfectly-formed legionnaire, loyal to Hellebore and her dogs. Still worse were her spells, shatteringly powerful and breaking even the most potent shields like glass.

Before such puissance, the Principalities bowed or were destroyed, one by one.

At the end, from the smoking husk of the Vershellen Principalities, the empire was born, and has so far endured for two centuries.

Culture and Society

Culture and Society

Vershellese society is defined by magic. Their home plane is almost explosive with it, the air and water and land all saturated with mana. Much of it was inimical to life as the refugees knew it, or at best indifferent when they first arrived, exhausted and afraid. The spellcasters who fled through the Gate, though, found their powers magnified manyfold. They were able to beat back the monsters and pacify the land with their arcane knowledge and, when that failed, through prodigious application of spellfire. Thus, the expedition coalesced around them, the first leaders who would go on to become the first sorcerer-lords and ladies.

Traditional lines of authority quickly eroded; old power and nobility and a line stretching back a thousand years didn’t matter, only the ability to shield against the invidious radiance that permeated the plane, and the powerful monsters glutted on unheard-of amounts of mana did. Those with the power and skill to do so were few and far between, prideful and insular in many cases; there was no one overarching authority that all acknowledged. The flying islands of the plane only enhanced that tendency to insularity; each wizard-lord and lady gathered to themselves a retinue of loyal – and terrified – retainers from the refugee train and struck out for the nearby islands in the sky.

Over time, each settled land developed into the personal demesne of a powerful mage. Spires soared up to the maddening heavens, even as castles and walls and defensive bastions were chiselled out of the living rock of the islands, along with colossal defensive wards and other ritual spellwork, channelling and amplifying the power of the attuned mage. Those first spellcasters founded the princely Houses of a sorcerous aristocracy, usurping within a single generation the powers and privileges of the nobility and elevating their power and control over their subjects to a degree undreamt-of. After all, they were the only ones capable of powering the wards and defences that leached the starry poison from the light and vaporised the monsters that regularly assailed the fledgling settlements.

In Vershellen, then, magic is everything. The overwhelming majority of the citizens have some ability to work it, to take the currents of mana which rampage through their plane and cast a good few spells, even without the centuries of arcane infrastructure which have been developed there.

The greater the ability to cast, or the greater the affinity for difficult forms of magic, the higher their status in Vershellese society. Indeed, to compare the regular citizen of Vershellen to one of the sorcerer-lords is akin to comparing a candle to the sun. Where the average resident might dabble in the arcane, the aristocracy positively swims in it, the planar magic changing them as much as they change the plane itself. Generations of people have spent their lives sheltering under the protective aegis of one magister or another; many Vershellese still think of themselves as sept to a particular House and Principality first, and a citizen of their empire second.

Magic both stratifies and levels Vershellese society; if you have powerful magic in Vershellen, you matter, no matter what background you have, and magic doesn’t seem to care about gender or sexuality either. If you have a mere dribble of talent, though, better learn some other useful skill and make yourself useful to a true magister.

The strange properties of the plane also influence their society in more subtle ways; magic is the sovereign defence against the sanity-stealing light and its poison glassy touch, of course, and so it is a badge of status in Vershellen to wear as little as is safe. Citizens and common mages may – and do – cover and cloak themselves, and vie for power and position in their own shadow-games that ape those of their betters through volume and colour and cut, but for the aristocracy nothing whispers power and wealth louder than skin bared to the poison light with no ill effects. What they do wear is fine, to be sure, rich and sumptuous and with all the decadence befitting their station, but no magister worth their title would ever stoop to cloaks and capes, to ermine robes and multi-layered ballgowns, to all the trappings of rank in other lands.

Governance and Politics

Governance and Politics

The Empire of Vershellen is ruled from the glittering stained-glass spires of the Whisper Palace in the grand city of Cynosure. The Court of Days dances attendance at the foot of the Constellation Throne whilst shadow wars play out between the House of Blood and the House of Commons in the opulent Parliament.

All bend the knee to the imperial throne; golems and skyships and island-shattering spellpower make sure of that, at least on the surface, but below the serene shallows the cutthroat political engine of Vershellen roars away unabated, oiled with blood and watered with tears. Princely Houses vie for position and power, new-minted magisters strike out across the infinite skies for pastures new, and everywhere the mages plumb the depths of the universe for knowledge.

The Empress Maia

Her Imperial Majesty Maia, of the House of Hellebore, Warden of the Heavens and Queen of Days, the effulgent Empress of Vershellen and her Principalities. Also called the Winter Empress, as much for the snows and blizzards driving in from the Deep Sky at her coronation as for her appearance. She looks like a young woman in the first flower of adulthood, and, unusually in this plane of fiercely abundant light, bears skin the colour of snow and hair a bare shade or two darker.

Her eyes are the clue that not all is quite as it seems; in an almost childlike and unlined face they sit, ancient, the pale and distant grey of a glacier, cool and calculating and remotely ruthless. Her smile, though, is bright with all the promise of summer and her body inviting, and that is enough for many, even those who really should know better.

She is, as with all the high aristocracy of Vershellen, a powerful sorceress. Long immersion in the torrent of magic which roars through the plane – and judicious use of the Days refined in the far reaches of her domains – have preserved her youth and beauty long past the natural human lifespan; quite how long it can be extended is one of the many unknowns. She is known to be skilled in the creation and use of golems, and is a particularly talented glassmage, too. She sponsors many types of arcane research in the universities and laboratories of her domain, too – not all of them under the aegis of House Hellebore.

Technology and Magic

Technology and Magic

Vershellen’s magic – and its princely magisters – is perhaps its most defining feature. It’s woven into the very fabric of their plane, their infrastructure wholly entwined with it; essence mills churn at every endless waterfall and mana collectors gleam on every suns-drenched hilltop, funnelling the raw possibility of creation into their owners’ grand workings. Miles of sorcerous ritual anchors honeycomb the great island citadels, crackling and snapping with cold fire as the ambient magic of the plane surges through them, hundreds of magical effects propagating from each enormous array.

Magic is as much a tool of peace as war; ploughshares draw life and nourishment through the soil as they go, whilst forges blaze to white heat at a whispered word, suckling greedily at the essence grid for the raw power to convert into flame. None of which is to say the mages of Vershellen have neglected violence, oh no. Some – like the empress – delight in golem legions, or armies of oath-bound servitors. Others, sheer arcane might manifest as the elemental forces of nature skewed to extreme violence, and every shade in between. Enchanters press skeins of power into the very artifacts they imbue; cannons roar with volcanic fury and spew magma in luminous torrents and swivel-mounted carronades scythe decks clear with barrages of razored glass.

Skyships.

Military Overview

Military Overview

The Golem Legions

Golems are one of the Empire’s greatest assets. Tireless workers, they toil in foundry crucibles in temperatures that would kill a human instantly. They labour wreathed in poison clouds, on new islands exposed to the venomous glassing light of the plane, in places where the tempo of production must never, ever cease. More than that, though, golems carved with spelleater wards and chains are one of the primary methods of warfare between the magisters of Vershellen.

There are as many varieties of golem as there are stars in Vershellen’s endless skies, of course, but the empire, at least, as part of an effort to simplify their own logistics, tends to a few archetypes rather than a dazzling specialist panoply of different variants.

The best and most enduring are the Brass Legionnaires, ensorcelled steel creations aping the human form, appearing as plate-armoured knights dipped in sorcerous brass, for better protection against the vitrifying glare of the plane. They are graceful and quick, belying their sheer mass, well-armed and supremely well-armoured, lavishly ornamented with scintillant arcane sigils. Forged in the great presses of Vershellen’s arsenals, the Brass Legionnaires are implacable, loyal defenders of the empire. Attended upon their creation by skilled animators - a well-respected and well-paid profession in Vershellen, ensuring the engines of industry thunder ceaselessly - they are fluid and adaptable and tireless, machines honed and improved down the centuries for slaughter. The Brass Legionnaires are the front-line soldiers of many an imperial island, fighting back the tide of arcane horrors birthed from abundant and untapped places of power and making sure that even the most humble Vershellese citizen sleeps safely in their bed at night.

The standard-pattern Legionnaire is armed with an enchanted longsword and a thick steel heater shield, emblazoned with either a princely or imperial coat of arms and impressed with enchantments for strength and protection both.

Legionnaires patterned for long-distance warfare, meanwhile, have superior vision and are more dextrous than their imposing forms might suggest, and can be found wielding a wide variety of ranged weapons. A favourite – beyond the standard crossbows – are shardstaffs, long polearms that project bursts of vitrifying radiance.

Some few Legionnaires are patterned for siege warfare, too; something of a rarity in Vershellen, where skyships and magisters can lay waste to an island in minutes. On occasion, though, such wholesale destruction is deemed unwarranted; perhaps there exist priceless relics or archives of lore whose destruction cannot be countenanced, or the island-citadel in question is desired as a strategic base. In those instances, Vershellen calls upon its siege golems.

Colossal in size, many times the height and bulk of a man, they are blasted out of the obdurate white granite so common to the isles, their forms refined and honed through flaying magic until a perfect colossus strides free of the quarry, shaking the dust of its creation from its enormous feet. Many bear catapults and ballistae on their broad shoulders, the pauldron facsimiles large enough to handle such weapon emplacements with ease, whilst others heft gargantuan battering rams or rely on the crushing power of their fists.

Skyships

By far the vast majority of Vershellen’s skyships are traders, pot-bellied hulls of buoyant lufwood and spun-light sails, built as large as economics dictates to haul as much as possible through the skies between princely ports. Tea and spices, arcane reagents, sky-silver, gems, ore…the number and variety of cargoes is staggering.

Many of the rest are pleasure craft, toys of the nobility, elegantly crafted yachts of spun glass and crystal, fast and opulent. There can be no standardization of these vessels, not when lavished with magisterial attention, but they are vessels of pleasure and not of war. Reinforced and shielded they might be, to guard against opportunistic assassination, but they are no purpose-built engines of war.

Those that are are by far the rarest. Layer upon layer of brass and bronze-dipped steel, glittering with runework and reflected light. Slab-sided mountains of reinforced metal, scrollworked cannonry bristling at every opportunity, sailing the littoral of light as a potent reminder of just what power Vershellen can bring to bear, should it be necessary. The most powerful princely Houses have their war-cruiser squadrons, to show their flag and enforce their will on their far-flung holdings, but only the empress can afford the expenditure, both arcane and mundane, for a true sky dreadnought. The nascent Imperial Armada has each and every one of the bare handful completed so far, the empress’s mailed fist championed by the dreadnought Her Majesty’s Displeasure; an apposite name if ever there was one.

Additional Information

Maia is far older than she appears. Most of the aristocracy and some of the middle classes are.

Vershellen mines Days in the far reaches of their plane, where Time gets funny. This is not a fun profession.

Through the Rifts: Progeny

And here's my WIP, following the trend :) .

The Empire of Vershellen

Governmental Form

Imperial Magocracy

Demographics

Human

Population:

13 million

Plane Description

Plane Description

The Rift through which the desperate column of refugees that would become Vershellen escaped led to a place quite unlike the old homeworld. The sky – luminous and lit with strange stars and streamers of incandescent energy that tugged and played with the mind – stretched off into sanity-twisting infinity. The land, by contrast, was reassuringly familiar, although shattered and scattered through the hostile heavens as though by some uncaring god’s hand.

Everything from lone mountains to continental landmasses, complete with cascading rivers, forests and rolling plains, all of it hanging suspended in the immaterial firmament. The air was full of raucous, alien calls and the land carpeted in unfamiliar plants.

More than that, though, magic roared through the plane. An endless torrent, a vast ocean needing but the faintest touch to leap to hand; every spellcaster found their power profoundly magnified. Spells that used to require days of ritual and many skilled participants giving their all now needed a word and flick of the hand from a mediocre practitioner, and wonders that previously defied conception were now within reach – if the refugee-colonists could survive long enough to make them.

Which was not at all a given; quite aside from the mind-bending luminous reaches of the endless sky that took more than one refugee into their endless grasp, sanity and reason erased by the poisonous light, practically every local life-form had some form of arcane power. Even the plants were infused with it, their powers and properties unlike anything the refugees had experienced. Gaia’s nature had been fecund and kindly, whereas their new home was an altogether wilder thing. Enslaver orchids, bloodroots, vampire thorns…and they were just some of the tamer flora the first unfortunate expeditions found. Even the more beneficial finds were, often as not, a double-edged sword, made so by the energy that infused them.

These days, the plane looks far different from that untamed wilderness – at least, in the nearer reaches. Skyships ply the trade lanes between vast and shielded island citadels, whilst the pleasure-palaces of the sorcerous aristocracy gleam, filigree-fragile, in the poisonous light. Cities bloom on the islands, the once-wild forests cut and coppiced into submission, and docks festoon the aerial coastlines.

Not all, though, is a triumphal sign of imperial prosperity though; in the far distance, visible on a good day from the Gate itself, a sullen abyssal wound bleeds purple, eye-searing unlight – the Black City. Once one of the most powerful and influential Principalities, back before the imperial unification, now an impossible ruin swallowed by the success – or failure – of their last experiment with Rift magic. Staring at the abyss for too long is unhealthy; it draws the eye in with tantalising glimpses – a spire here, windows ablaze with purple reflections, a colonnaded promenade there, a skyship dock with tyrian-scrawled pennons flying proud…enticing reminders of what the Black City once was, and drawing a perennial tithe of the young and the desperate to plunder the possible riches there.

None have ever returned.

Then, too, there are the arcane currents that rush through the endless sky; the squalling Rose-Wind, sweeping in from the western expanses, full of flowers and glass knives; the insidious Roaring Deeps that deafen with internal thunder, others.

History

History

Following their landing and the destabilization of the Gate which had brought them away from the Cataclysm, the refugee chain fractured into factions, each aligned with a sufficiently powerful sorcerer or sorceress able to protect them from the mind-twisting planar illumination and the magically-charged flora and fauna. Each group laid claim to an island of their own, and for a time there was the peace borne of a desperate need to survive.

The isles of Vershellen were, at that time, entirely wild and untamed. Forests of millennial growth dominated the largest islands, never having known the chop of an axe or the hum of a buzzsaw, nourished to truly gargantuan size by the plentiful mana. Lakes teemed with monstrous fish, the rivers ran wild and free, and powerful animals utterly unknown to the settlers roamed the plains and high mountain passes.

It was only through enormous effort and relentless application of arcane might that the settlers had any chance at all. Even the light of the plane was inimical, in time, the uncertain illumination of possible stars in the endless sky slowly warping unshielded minds to insanity and unprotected flesh to glass. Many of the oldest tombs in Vershellen are more like sculpture galleries than crypts, housing rank upon rank of exquisite glass statues.

Naturally, as the protectors and providers for the rest of the refugees, the mages rapidly assumed positions of power and prominence. Hard to gainsay the sorcerer whose power keeps you from vitrifying, after all. The islands, separate and isolated in the endless sea of stars, all went their own separate ways, raising stained-glass spires to the sky and digging deep into the flying bedrock. Towns and cities grew up under the glittering aegis of the mage towers, whole communities born and raised in service to their sorcerous overlords.

Magic flourished, too; more and more Vershellese developed the talent as time wore on and births began in a plane saturated by it. Many took up service with the princely Houses founded by the original magi, forming the start of the middle classes of Vershellen, but others found their skill and ambition too great to be satisfied with mere service.

There were plenty of other islands, new territories to be conquered and jealously defended; waves of explorers left the first isles on rudimentary skyships, heading for distant lands to raise their own banners, their own Houses.

Although the plane itself appeared infinite, no-one wanted to venture too far from the safe havens of established islands, too far out where skyships could fall prey to the myriad and undocumented horrors of the Deep Sky. Thus came the first true conflicts, first between pioneers claiming the same piece of floating rock and then, later and more seriously, between lesser scions of princely Houses seeking to expand their House’s power and prestige.

Thus did Vershellen settle into its Principalities; vast constellations of islands bound together and moved by magic, all under the rule of a sorcerous House. Each warred against the other, as often as not, with words and trade embargoes and sabotage, espionage, all-out warfare with skyships and landing marines and, at the last, with magic enough to split the skies and rip whole islands apart. Proud and fiercely independent, it seemed as though the seething, simmering cauldron of rivalry and splendid isolation would last forever, the Principalities expanding endlessly through an infinite sky, each one jealously hoarding secrets and lore, sorcerer-lords and ladies sniping with one another over arcane minutiae whilst their oathbound lessers spilled blood and treasure in their name.

No lore too dangerous, no arcana too forbidden; in the bright, mad heavens the ancient magi soared to dizzying heights and plumbed the very darkest depths. The catalyst for empire arose out of the internecine warring between the Principalities; the proud island-citadel of Scintillance, home and fortress since time out of mind for House Hellebore was assaulted by their enemies in a particularly brutal clash. For five days the colossal landmass wore a corona of weeping flame as the cities burned and the proud spires melted like candles in a furnace. Hurricanes of razor-glass butterflies scythed through the city streets, turning them into charnel ruin as hordes of summoned and bound monstrosities rampaged as they willed, wrecking years of painstaking spellwork in moments and letting the poison light pour down, untrammelled and untamed onto unprotected Hellebore citizenry. Skyships bristling with cannon and mortar tumbled aflame from blazing Hellebore docks, and in five Red Days the heart of the ancient and princely House of Hellebore was left a tumbling wreck. The other princely Houses – even those entirely uninvolved in the attack – were quick to capitalise on weakness, vassalizing and taking by main force what they willed even as Hellebore reeled in shock.

It was not a common fate, to be sure, but hardly unheard of in the Principalities. The older and larger realms had a gentleman’s agreement – now lying in tatters – but such upsets had occurred before, and life carried on as usual after a period of adjustment. However, the young ruler of House Hellebore was a sorceress of uncommon talent even amongst the Vershellese sorcerer-lords, and had no intention of taking the attempted extermination of her House lying down. From a hidden border citadel, she laid her plots and plans, carefully hoarding and husbanding her power and her intentions, all the while forming alliances, pacts, oaths of assistance and internal networks that spread all throughout the domains of the very Houses that had laid her own so low.

The final spark to the catalyst was an event as perplexing as it was catastrophic. It may, perhaps – and the imperial archives remain stoically silent on this – have been the result of a Hellebore saboteur, an infiltrating agent seizing their chance, but whatever the impetus the final result was undeniable. Megara was one of the original Principalities, ancient and vast and glutted with centuries of accumulated wealth. Its sorcerers were skilled, very skilled, and had for near a century turned their bright gazes towards the inactive Gate, working diligently at unravelling the mystery of mysteries – for the grand sorcery which had forged them and in so doing had brought an escape from their doomed world had been lost in the chaos of the evacuation. However expansive a cage – and to all intents and purposes, Vershellen was infinite – it was still a cage, and the lordly rulers of Megara could countenance no shackle or limit to their ambition. Thus, their mages laboured in libraries and laboratories throughout the great city-continent, working to unpick a dimensional puzzle few could even wrap their heads around.

Megara – and the loose association of Principalities it led, by default if nothing else – had been the primary instigators of the attack on House Hellebore. What the hypothetical infiltrator did – or whether it was supremely unfortunate coincidence – no-one can say, but one day the entire island conurbation…twisted. Millions of tons of rock and metal and glass shrieked a dreadful death-cry as blackness ripped its way into existence across the luminous sky, a voracious and hungry abyss that consumed the ancient Principality – and many of its closest attendant vassals – whole. The wound and the ruin – the Black City – remain to this day, a visible reminder of the dangers of Gate magic gone wrong (or worse, horribly right).

Into this power vacuum stepped the resurgent House of Hellebore. It wasn’t enough to regain their former status, oh no. Hellebore skyships were suddenly everywhere, and their immaculate envoys negotiated ceasefires, trade deals, alliances, sweeping up lesser Houses in a new and building movement. It wasn’t plain sailing; many and proud were the Principalities who wanted nothing to do with the frightening new thing the House of Hellebore was becoming. Those – with the characteristic ruthlessness of a Vershellen magister – were made examples of.

Skyships turned lesser strongholds to burning rubble with their cannons and spells, whilst the greater ones found themselves fighting an unending tide of metal. Golems, cast and sculpted like humans writ large, engraved with spelleater wards, unfeeling and unflinching and unaffected by the poison light. And all, to a perfectly-formed legionnaire, loyal to Hellebore and her dogs. Still worse were her spells, shatteringly powerful and breaking even the most potent shields like glass.

Before such puissance, the Principalities bowed or were destroyed, one by one.

At the end, from the smoking husk of the Vershellen Principalities, the empire was born, and has so far endured for two centuries.

Culture and Society

Culture and Society

Vershellese society is defined by magic. Their home plane is almost explosive with it, the air and water and land all saturated with mana. Much of it was inimical to life as the refugees knew it, or at best indifferent when they first arrived, exhausted and afraid. The spellcasters who fled through the Gate, though, found their powers magnified manyfold. They were able to beat back the monsters and pacify the land with their arcane knowledge and, when that failed, through prodigious application of spellfire. Thus, the expedition coalesced around them, the first leaders who would go on to become the first sorcerer-lords and ladies.

Traditional lines of authority quickly eroded; old power and nobility and a line stretching back a thousand years didn’t matter, only the ability to shield against the invidious radiance that permeated the plane, and the powerful monsters glutted on unheard-of amounts of mana did. Those with the power and skill to do so were few and far between, prideful and insular in many cases; there was no one overarching authority that all acknowledged. The flying islands of the plane only enhanced that tendency to insularity; each wizard-lord and lady gathered to themselves a retinue of loyal – and terrified – retainers from the refugee train and struck out for the nearby islands in the sky.

Over time, each settled land developed into the personal demesne of a powerful mage. Spires soared up to the maddening heavens, even as castles and walls and defensive bastions were chiselled out of the living rock of the islands, along with colossal defensive wards and other ritual spellwork, channelling and amplifying the power of the attuned mage. Those first spellcasters founded the princely Houses of a sorcerous aristocracy, usurping within a single generation the powers and privileges of the nobility and elevating their power and control over their subjects to a degree undreamt-of. After all, they were the only ones capable of powering the wards and defences that leached the starry poison from the light and vaporised the monsters that regularly assailed the fledgling settlements.

In Vershellen, then, magic is everything. The overwhelming majority of the citizens have some ability to work it, to take the currents of mana which rampage through their plane and cast a good few spells, even without the centuries of arcane infrastructure which have been developed there.

The greater the ability to cast, or the greater the affinity for difficult forms of magic, the higher their status in Vershellese society. Indeed, to compare the regular citizen of Vershellen to one of the sorcerer-lords is akin to comparing a candle to the sun. Where the average resident might dabble in the arcane, the aristocracy positively swims in it, the planar magic changing them as much as they change the plane itself. Generations of people have spent their lives sheltering under the protective aegis of one magister or another; many Vershellese still think of themselves as sept to a particular House and Principality first, and a citizen of their empire second.

Magic both stratifies and levels Vershellese society; if you have powerful magic in Vershellen, you matter, no matter what background you have, and magic doesn’t seem to care about gender or sexuality either. If you have a mere dribble of talent, though, better learn some other useful skill and make yourself useful to a true magister.

The strange properties of the plane also influence their society in more subtle ways; magic is the sovereign defence against the sanity-stealing light and its poison glassy touch, of course, and so it is a badge of status in Vershellen to wear as little as is safe. Citizens and common mages may – and do – cover and cloak themselves, and vie for power and position in their own shadow-games that ape those of their betters through volume and colour and cut, but for the aristocracy nothing whispers power and wealth louder than skin bared to the poison light with no ill effects. What they do wear is fine, to be sure, rich and sumptuous and with all the decadence befitting their station, but no magister worth their title would ever stoop to cloaks and capes, to ermine robes and multi-layered ballgowns, to all the trappings of rank in other lands.

Governance and Politics

Governance and Politics

The Empire of Vershellen is ruled from the glittering stained-glass spires of the Whisper Palace in the grand city of Cynosure. The Court of Days dances attendance at the foot of the Constellation Throne whilst shadow wars play out between the House of Blood and the House of Commons in the opulent Parliament.

All bend the knee to the imperial throne; golems and skyships and island-shattering spellpower make sure of that, at least on the surface, but below the serene shallows the cutthroat political engine of Vershellen roars away unabated, oiled with blood and watered with tears. Princely Houses vie for position and power, new-minted magisters strike out across the infinite skies for pastures new, and everywhere the mages plumb the depths of the universe for knowledge.

Technology and Magic

Technology and Magic

Vershellen’s magic – and its princely magisters – is perhaps its most defining feature. It’s woven into the very fabric of their plane, their infrastructure wholly entwined with it; essence mills churn at every endless waterfall and mana collectors gleam on every suns-drenched hilltop, funnelling the raw possibility of creation into their owners’ grand workings. Miles of sorcerous ritual anchors honeycomb the great island citadels, crackling and snapping with cold fire as the ambient magic of the plane surges through them, hundreds of magical effects propagating from each enormous array.

Magic is as much a tool of peace as war; ploughshares draw life and nourishment through the soil as they go, whilst forges blaze to white heat at a whispered word, suckling greedily at the essence grid for the raw power to convert into flame. None of which is to say the mages of Vershellen have neglected violence, oh no. Some – like the empress – delight in golem legions, or armies of oath-bound servitors. Others, sheer arcane might manifest as the elemental forces of nature skewed to extreme violence, and every shade in between. Enchanters press skeins of power into the very artifacts they imbue; cannons roar with volcanic fury and spew magma in luminous torrents and swivel-mounted carronades scythe decks clear with barrages of razored glass.

Skyships.

Military Overview

Military Overview

Cannon and mortar-armed skyships, golems, powerful mages