World lore · 6 min read
Factions: Iron Heartland, Azure Isles, Umbra Magni, Nord-Vast & Vorngard
Public lore preserves the setting's disagreements and uncertain histories.
Iron Heartland#
The ork homeland of citadel-clans, iron law, and practical statecraft — rebuilt after both Khavari devastation and the annihilation of the king and high command at Magnus Prime. Held together by fortress houses, forge leagues, witness-oaths, and reconstruction councils.
| Type | Name | Base | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Merchant guild | The Furnace Ledger | Khar-Magren, Stonewake, the ore roads | Armories, caravan masters, and foundry owners keeping the Heartland's industrial arteries moving. Manipulate border scares, resettlement contracts, and procurement cycles to squeeze dependent marches. |
| State security | The Black Rivet Office | Citadel archives and inspection barracks | Internal investigators rooting out corruption, hoarding, and clan disloyalty. Honest officers are feared; ambitious ones can ruin whole fortress houses by calling an inquiry a patriotic necessity. |
| Mercenary caste | The Bastion Hammers | Veteran encampments along every major roadhead | Heavy infantry brokers leasing companies abroad under Heartland successor law. They bring wealth home but return with foreign habits, private loyalties, and dangerous political ambitions. |
| Secret lineage circle | The Ashen Tusk Concord | Ancestor halls beneath ruined auxiliary forts | Memory-keeping society preserving the true history of Iron-Bound service, Khavari devastation of the eastern homeland, and the humiliations that shaped later conquest. Suppress romantic myths about the western revolt. |
| Mage-engineer school | The Chain of Practical Fire | Military foundries and bridge academies | Battlefield artificers, bridge-builders, and ward-breakers treating magic as infrastructure. Disdain ornamental wizardry and clash constantly with high-elven magical aesthetics. |
| Noble coalition | The Twelve Anvils | Competing fortress houses of the interior and Ruinmarch belt | Unstable political dining table where fortress houses negotiate succession, tribute, and revenge without civil war. Every agreement backed by feast-gifts, witness-oaths, and the threat of private armies. |
Azure Isles#
High-elven maritime homeland of marble courts, fleet houses, ritual schools, and refined rivalries.
| Type | Name | Base | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fleet house consortium | The Azure Convocation of Keels | Tel Ivara and the deep harbors | Alliance of fleet-houses monopolizing blue-water trade, escort contracts, and chart libraries. Members feud artistically but close ranks whenever outsiders threaten Isles supremacy. |
| Arcane society | The Luminant Veil | Moon observatories and mirrored conservatories | Prestige schools of magic devoted to disciplined beauty, memory architecture, and long-horizon statecraft. Several inner circles hide forbidden work on emotional compulsion magic for diplomacy. |
| Spy ring | The White Wake Office | Messenger cutters and embassy chapels | The Isles' discreet intelligence arm, famous for knowing port gossip before the ships themselves arrive. Prefers leverage, scandal, and debt to open sabotage. |
| Noble salon bloc | The Houses of Glass Bloom | Marble villas, perfumed gardens, patronage circles | Culture-making aristocratic bloc deciding which histories, fashions, and political narratives become respectable. Can ruin careers with exclusion alone. |
| Underworld fraternity | The Velvet Reef | Hidden wine vaults below respectable waterfronts | Blackmailers, art thieves, and vice brokers thriving because the Isles insists it is too refined for vulgar crime. Specializes in stolen correspondences and disguised masterpieces. |
| Temple-mariner order | The Pilots of the Seventh Star | Beacon shrines and storm chapels | Semi-sacred fraternity of navigators treating open water as moral trial and celestial text. Sometimes oppose the fleet houses when profit threatens the sanctity of rescue and safe passage. |
Umbra Magni#
The eastern remnant that claims lawful continuity, bureaucratic order, and ancient imperial legitimacy.
| Type | Name | Base | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bureau ministry cabal | The Office of Quiet Revision | Aurux Spire and district scriptoria | Archivists and legal editors quietly altering precedents, maps, and titles to preserve the illusion of uninterrupted imperial order. Weaponize paperwork more efficiently than most kingdoms weaponize armies. |
| Spy service | The Gray Laurel | Customs courts, caravanserais, pilgrim hostels | Most feared civil intelligence network in the east, structured around dossiers, interception, and kompromat. Field officers pose as tax examiners, translators, or notaries. |
| Mage bureaucracy | The Meridian Custodians | Survey towers near restricted ruins | Technically minded order monitoring ancient engines, seals, and road wards inherited from older imperial eras. One cannot effectively govern Umbra Magni without them. |
| Merchant patent league | The Golden Seal Syndics | Licensed depots along the eastern roads | Monopolists operating under revocable state patents binding wealth tightly to service. Many secretly resent the state but profit too much to rebel openly. |
| Hidden opposition | The Hollow Diadem | Burial catacombs, school basements, confiscated villas | Coalition of reformers and memory-keepers believing Umbra Magni preserves order at the cost of living truth. Brave, divided, and catastrophically penetrated by informers. |
| Noble command circle | The Bastioned Purple | Old provincial military houses | Senior martial lineages who see themselves as the spine that kept civilization from total collapse. Tolerate civilian administrators only so long as the army remains fed, honored, and obeyed. |
Nord-Vast#
Mythic north of winter forests, giant-roads, dream-lakes, and isolated warding traditions.
| Type | Name | Base | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warden circle | The Pine Oath | Forest keeps and lake shrines | Decentralized compact of hunters, path-wardens, and oathkeepers maintaining monster roads and winter sanctuaries. Practical, local, and deeply suspicious of southern administrators. |
| Mercantile caravan | The Amber Sledge League | Seasonal trade camps | Merchants moving amber, hides, resin, whale oil, relic bone, and northern medicines by sled, river, and pack beast. Know more hidden passes than most armies. |
| Mystery order | The Dreaming Antler | Moonlit clearings and old stone circles | Visionary society interpreting dreams sent through deep winter; claims the land itself warns of future fractures. Some chapters are benevolent; others sacrifice certainty for power. |
| Raider fellowship | The Frost Crows | Coastal halls and black-sailed inlets | Darker counterpart to honorable northern clans, trading in raids, salvage, and hard bargains. Sometimes sell prisoners south, which makes them hated even by their neighbors. |
| Bloodline council | The Lakeglass Kin-Moot | Ancient hall-sites around mirror lakes | Noble assembly where inheritance is half genealogy and half remembered oath. Feuds can last generations without ever quite becoming wars. |
| Scholarly salvage band | The Rune-Break Company | Ruined waystations on giant-roads | Excavate old northern works for wards, maps, and saleable curios. Usually one bad choice from waking something best left under ice. |
Vorngard#
Prestige-seeking raider sea-clans of the Whale Bone Sea.
| Type | Name | Base | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sea-clan syndicate | The Oar-Tally | Whale Bone Sea harbors | Accounting fellowship turning raiding, tribute, and whale harvest into something almost like law. Their ledgers decide who is owed glory, silver, and vengeance. |
| Assassin-skald order | The Quiet Verse | Feasting halls and ship-funerary circles | Poets, poisoners, and memory-keepers who kill only when the saga demands correction. They believe an unavenged insult curdles a people's fate. |
| Mercenary fleet | The Bonewake Brotherhood | Longship musters in the thaw season | Coalition of captains hiring out abroad when local raiding yields thin returns. Foreign coin enriches Vorngard but also imports dangerous new loyalties. |
| Shrine order | The Keepers of Deep Salt | Storm shrines, whale-bone chapels | Religious fraternity interpreting omens from storms, strandings, and the behavior of deep-water beasts. Even war-kings hesitate to ignore them. |
| Smuggler circle | The Hearth Net | Dockside households and market barns | Domestic-seeming network controlling food, hidden coin, safehouses, and prisoner exchanges. Many captains discover too late that the people who provision their ships also govern their fates. |
| Foreign spy lodge | The Southwatch Guests | Officially a hostel for traders | Deniable listening post where rival states buy and sell information about clan politics. Half the hall are spies; the other half are pretending not to know it. |
About this entry
Public in-game encyclopedia. Website edition: 10 October 2026.
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