CastleGreifenghast

The world was apparently created ninety-two million, eight-hundred and three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-one years ago.[1] It’s artificial nature is clear from any map: continents are regular, as are mountain chains, moving in straight lines and circles (not spheres) and it is also square and flat (which observation of the celestial spheres has demonstrated probably isn’t the norm). The elves and dwarves generally say that they made it, but this might be a lot less impressive than it first sounds: they generally say that they made it for someone,[2] and their actual metaphysical role might be similar to building contractors.[3] Furthermore, it is also known[4]—according to both Eldritch tradition, certain scientific observations of natural and unnatural philosophy, aeonic whisperings[5], and more recent direct prodding of the extra-planar by organisations such as ImCom[6]— that the world is not the creation, being instead a ‘secondary world’ or ‘subcreation’ within an

The basis of any advanced manufacturing economy is the guild, as it has been for thousands of years. At its basic level, a guild is a group of craftsmen who band together to protect their businesses, ensure quality control, represent their trade, train new apprentices, and provide welfare for their members. As the world grew smaller and the outputs of manufacturing grew exponentially during the heady days of the Alchemical Revolution, more sophisticated guilds grew in importance in most developing economies. Guilds shifted to building factories, rather than be outcompeted by private businesses, and in most of the civilized world—outside of the planned economies of the magocracies and Naithair, where guilds and private businesses compete—retained their edge as the primary form of major urban economic entity. Guilds can act as any combination of regulatory bodies, associations of smaller businesses, or as worker-owned commercial entities in their own right. They commonly have their own

The world is flat and square, as has been known to most of its present civilizations for thousands of years. Given the predominance of spheres in the heavens, this is generally taken as proof as its artificial nature by natural and unnatural philosophers alike. This has naturally raised the question of who made the world, and why, which has had a variety of theological, scientific, and occasionally just crazy explanations. The End of the World is frightening place, the air thin, the sky fading from blue, to purple, to a star-studded black. Exactly how the water that goes off the edge gets back is not entirely understood, although there are theories that it pools under the world before being heated and propelled back up as clouds due to the interference of the sun. ‘The Circle of the Lands’ is the term generally given to the continents lying in a circle that stretches seven thousand miles from the Axis Mundi. The climactic conditions in these lands are generally well understand; weather

Money, it is said, makes the world go around.[1] It is also said to be the root of all evil, which comes as a great comfort to Ug son of Og, whose head was bashed in with a rock by his cousin Ag for ‘looking at his bird.’[2] Several aeons after someone may or may not have eaten an apple they weren’t meant to, people came around to making cities and farming and stuff. This required a more complex system of exchange than ‘I have flint, you give mammoth steak?’: thus, money was invented. It took many forms across the world. The early sirens used sea shells, the various Havahic Dynasties that dominated the Inner Heart from the literal beginning of the human race to the Amazonomachy moved from clay tablets to bronze coins, and Old Mu used gold. Currencies came and went with peoples and empires, for millennia. Then came the Eldritch Empire. The transcontinental state built by the Nameless Emperors of Zeiggard introduced the largest and most effective standardised currency system the world

The Mages’ International, commonly abbreviated to ‘Magintern’ is the primary world vehicle for Sorcerery, the belief system advocating revolutionary magocracy as predicted by the Prophecy and the science[1] of Dialectical Immaterialism and embodied in the Magical Revolution. To those less enamoured with jargon, it is the organisation that ensures the Inner Circle of the Sorcerous Axis maintain their control over their sphere of influence and try to spread it to achieve the Universal Revolution. Claiming a universal mandate, the Magintern does not acknowledge any limits on its ability to fund and support Sorcererous revolutionaries in those polities outside of its control; its members include not just the ruling bodies of the various magocracies, but also underground covens and militant magical organisations across the world. The Prophecy was made around one hundred and fifty years ago, in the year 3,848 etc. AM. As the world grew smaller various schools of magic began learning from

A map is always wrong. On a map the superpowers look like monoliths; vast, featureless, homogenous. They are actually incredibly complicated systems, agglomerates of subordinate entities into a wider whole. In fact it is probably more accurate to think in terms of concentric circles of power projection emanating from the seats of particular empires, or networks at influence creeping across the world; at the outer fringes of these empires there can be overlap, resulting in zones of lesser or greater density of control. For example, the Republic of the Seven Seas is composed of seven semi-sovereign seas splayed across half the world’s oceans, which are in turn divided into smaller captaincies and vast areas of incorporated ocean; in turn the RSS sits at the head of the morass of colonies, protectorates, territories, protected states, mandates, and associated states officially called the ‘Commonwealth of Oceania’. The same is true of the Sorcerous Axis; All-Axis entities such as the

The economics of the Sorcerous Axis exists in two mutually contradictory states. Firstly, there is the economy as it ideologically and legally exists in state regulations. Secondly, there is the economy as it actually exists and functions. According to state propaganda, the Sorcerers’ Axis is a utopian world of plenty that has abolished scarcity and greed alike through the universalisation of magic. Suspicious-minded observers would note that this propaganda very closely corresponds to the Prophecy that led to the creation of the Axis in the first place, while bearing almost no reality to how the Sorcerous state actually works. A problem faced after the Magical Revolution was that the Prophecy didn’t actually provide terribly much in the way of concrete details as to how a fully magical economy was meant to work; the Prophecy ‘proved’ that it would work, but the revolutionaries didn’t know how it would exactly work. The vision was essentially a cornucopia endlessly giving forth plenty;