Exploring Ancerra: Difference between revisions

 

Ancerra is the planet on which MythCraft’s adventures begin. This chapter offers detailed information on forty-seven nations that occupy Ancerra’s biggest continent, Gathandia. Ancerra has many explorable regions beyond the oceans that surround Gathandia. Indeed, Ancerra has five moons, three of which have breathable atmospheres and vegetation. You should feel free to make up interesting environments for your players to explore, but the information in this wiki section will give you plenty of specific material to work with if you run your games on the continent of Gathandia.

Many scholars believe that the enormous machines that orbit dormant in these galaxies will one day awaken again and either set their galaxies back in order or break out of Avadria, bringing the plane’s desolation to the whole multiverse.

'''Thyre.''' Thyre, last fortress of the scattered Avadri resistance, lies at the intersection between Avadria and the long-forgotten Fundamental Plane. The entire planet has been converted to a colossal warcamp, radiant structures forming a majority of its observable landscape. The air and sky are near absolutely pure. The Avadri guardians who are still alive dwell within this bastion.

The Celestial Sea is a vast planar ocean that connects the Prime Existence, Avadria, Everwilds, Inferno, and Iztari. It allows safe travel between planes without having to travel through the dangerous Pale, which envelops the Celestial Sea on all sides beyond the planes.

A soul is the Essence cultivated within a single living creature. One soul cannot live multiple times, because when a creature dies and their Essence returns to the Celestial Sea, their Essence doesn’t remain stuck together. This makes resurrection impossible after a number of years, depending on how long it takes for a Soul’s Essence to dissolve back into the Celestial Sea.

This is also why some Resurrection results in a person having their personality changed, some of their memory being lost, or some other combination of unique mental/personality challenges: a person’s Soul might have begun to dissolve, and when they are forcibly resurrected back into a body then the process might bring back their incomplete Essence or might bring other ambient Essence (perhaps Essence that was once part of a different soul and still has different memories and personality associated with it) back into the same body.

The Everwilds are an endless tangle of dramatic natura llandscapes. Sprawling deserts, enormous forests full of towering trees, blizzard-scoured tundras, and impossibly deep oceans all jumble together in an illogical swirl. While towns and settlements exist in the Everwilds, it is truly the domain of nature. Each natural environment is at its most dramatic in the Everwilds.

Much of the Everwilds is a collage of dramatic natural landscapes that do not follow the natural laws of weather and terrain. Jungles may border on tundras, which might in turn give way to tropical archipelagos. However, the six Archfae Conclaves exert significant influence on the land immediately around them. The natural environment around each conclave reflects the general disposition of the conclave’s members.

Durlossoth, the Black City, is an endless collection of tightly packed stone buildings in various stages of [[decay]] and ruin. Occupying the whole of Melaneth, the Black City is full of nonsensical alleyways that twist between structures of no unifying architecture. Overhead, a cloudy sky is stuck in perpetual twilight. The streets seem to shift around its lost wanderers, keeping souls from ever finding their way out. Pale-skinned Melaneth fiends stalk the shadows as gaunt, hunched figures of bone and sinew with hollow eye sockets and twisting voids of blackness at their cores. They are just as likely to welcome you with disingenuous fang-toothed smiles as they are to jump upon you with hooked claws and crude weapons. The buildings themselves come in every shape and size but always contain neglected furnishings of gnarled black wood.

'''The Obsidian Palace.''' At the heart of Durlossoth stands a grand palace carved from one solid piece of obsidian. Fortifications and spires loom over the ruined buildings, sprouting countless ballista and defensive emplacements. These sit unmanned and forgotten. The great obsidian gates are left ajar so that any who come upon the palace may enter freely. Inside, grand halls stretch for miles with all the trappings one might expect to find from noble holdings, each room seeming like the occupants left only moments before. Great paintings depict unidentifiable conflicts, the spilling of blood, countless representations of suffering, and twisted portraits with screaming faces. At the center of it all is the throne room of Sahrnulothon, Prince of Ruin.

The embodiments of plague and infection, the fiends of Phlegmereth lurk in the silent bog of Xarnoas. The landscape of Xarnoas consists of flat, sparse boglands covered in a sea of needle-sharp blades of grass, occasionally interrupted by stagnant pools of icy-cold water. Xarnoas is almost completely silent aside from the buzzing that emanates from thick clouds of stinging insects that swarm across the waterways. Very few creatures live in this miserable place, but that does not make it any less dangerous. Large ambush predators vaguely reminiscent of crocodiles lie in wait in the shallows. Bulbous mounds of fungus sprout whipping protrusions that infect any they sting with rotting, transformative growths. Diseases are rampant here, and every paper-thin cut leaves a body in life- threatening danger from infection.

The jungles of Ogshora, also known as “the Red Glade,” dominates the domain of the Sanguineth. Thick, hot air chokes fetid waterways of coppery red liquid similar in taste and smell to mortal blood. These streams flow around large copses of fleshy, tumorous growths that resemble mangrove trees. Blood-sucking leeches, giant bloated ticks, toxic frogs, and swarms of carnivorous birds are some of the creatures one might encounter in these horrid jungles. The plant life is just as deadly.

The dramatic and beautiful plane of Iztari is home of the celestials. The plane is structured as an enormous, gently sloping mountain that never becomes too difficult to breathe despite its great heights. The snow at the peak of the mountain is pleasantly cold but never causes serious frostbite. Similarly, the whitewater rapids that cascade down the mountain never drown anyone, as the water is magically breathable. Various celestial creatures dwell on the different elevations of the mountain. Ponycorns graze in the lush foothills, Chamroshes Sphinxes soar above the treetops, Daeva and Narai splash in the waterfalls, and the Celestial Council oversees it all.

The Pale is the space in between. It is the edge of creation. Whatever darkness is to light, the Pale is to reality. It is a blank canvas to the most powerful gods, and incomprehensible to most mortals. Eldritch beings lurk within the Pale as crawling things hide in the shadows.

What lives in the pale could drive most intelligent beings insane by simply gazing upon it. What comes out of the pale are nightmarish, otherworldly outsiders that are hard to even keep record of. Even the words on the page crawl. Beings without powerful magic to shield their mind cannot enter the Pale.