World lore · 4 min read
Factions: Khavari, Pashara, Akesh & Voided Zone
Public lore preserves the setting's disagreements and uncertain histories.
Khavari Khanates#
Steppe confederations of motion, tribute, horse wealth, and memory sharpened into politics.
| Type | Name | Base | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Horse-market cartel | The Red Felt Market | Mobile fair-camps and river crossings | Commercial heart of the steppe controlling remount sales, grazing rights, and escort guarantees. Can starve armies simply by redirecting horse supply. |
| Shadow courier ring | The Hollow Spur | Relay camps beyond mapped roads | Clandestine message and smuggling system crossing the steppe faster than formal embassies. Serves khans, rebels, merchants, and foreign agents at different prices. |
| Blood oath society | The Mothers of the Black Tent | Central ancestral encampments | Hidden but decisive political circle of senior women preserving marriage law, hostage custom, and feud boundaries. Even conquering khans ignore them at their peril. |
| Mercenary tumen | The Dust Lances | Seasonal war camps | Professionalized mounted force fighting for outside rulers when internal confederation politics cool. Their veterans return wealthy and dangerously independent. |
| Spirit order | The Sky-Rib Shamans | Sacred hills, storm camps, bone circles | Network of ritual specialists interpreting weather, migration, and battle fortune as one continuous language. Some truly commune with the land; others are expert political dramatists. |
| Foreign office | The Bent Standard | Embassy caravans that never stay still | Mobile diplomatic and espionage bureau studying neighboring states to exploit their habits. Prizes grudges, supply timings, and patrol rhythms over maps. |
Pashara#
Silk roads, satrapal contracts, scholarly wealth, and urban intrigue.
| Type | Name | Base | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Merchant house league | The Sapphire Measure | Samirath, Ispareth, caravan depots | Trade dynasties specializing in credit instruments, convoy insurance, and regulated luxuries. Often fund both sides of a border war so long as roads survive. |
| Scholar-sorcerer college | The Peacock Archive | Library gardens and tiled observatories | Brilliant and vain order binding astrology, jurisprudence, and ritual mathematics into state service. Their rivalries are as dangerous as any battlefield. |
| Knife guild | The Sand Veil | Bathhouses, theaters, perfume courts | Refined assassination tradition treating murder as curation of political excess. Prefers public elegance and private deniability. |
| Satrapal noble bloc | The Forty Gardens | Country estates tied to irrigation and tax rights | Regional noble houses whose legitimacy rests on keeping water, orchards, and caravans functioning. Conservative in public; ruthlessly innovative in private finance. |
| Underground fraternity | The Copper Door | Workshops and cellar shrines beneath artisan quarters | Labor-mutual network hiding runaways, funding strikes, and stealing back sacred techniques from monopolists. Polite elites dismiss them until a whole district stops working. |
| Counterintelligence bureau | The Ink Falcon | Registry offices and censor halls | Anti-spy office fighting intrigue with ledgers, sealcraft, and patient records comparison. Can ruin a conspiracy with one mismatched signature. |
Akesh#
Solar dominion of radiant courts, desert routes, temple power, and stern legitimacy.
| Type | Name | Base | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Temple order | The Dawn Crucible | Veyr al-Nur and provincial sun courts | Militant religious-administrative order arbitrating doctrine, taxation, and moral legitimacy. Their best members are incorruptible; their worst weaponize holiness for factional gain. |
| Merchant caravan guild | The Lantern Scale | Oasis chains and glass-road stations | Caravan masters moving luxury goods and army grain alike across punishing terrain. Their route captains know which oasis can be trusted and which can be bought. |
| Shadow society | The Shade Beneath Noon | Cooling vaults, cisterns, undertemples | Hidden fraternity sheltering the politically unwanted and trading in secrets the daylight state refuses to acknowledge. Some cells are noble; others are predatory. |
| Assassin fraternity | The Ember Needles | Pilgrim inns and mausoleum precincts | Precision killers specializing in poison, heat, and ritual timing. Frame many murders as divine judgment. |
| Noble military house bloc | The Sun-Lion Standards | Fortress estates on frontier marches | Border commanders combining aristocratic prestige with crusading self-image. Often clash with temple bureaucrats over who truly defends the realm. |
| Mage-craft society | The Prism Athanor | Glassworks, alchemical courts, light laboratories | Alchemists and sun-mages turning light, heat, and mineral lore into prestige industries and dangerous weapons. Their experiments sometimes leave parts of the desert permanently strange. |
Voided Zone & Shattered Isles#
Ruined imperial woundscape of pirate colonies, salvage states, cult enclaves, and impossible geography.
| Type | Name | Base | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salvage brotherhood | The Iron Grapnel | Ruined harbors on the safer island edges | Brutal but indispensable fraternity recovering stone, bronze, charts, and sealed mechanisms from imperial ruins. They swear never to open certain classes of vault, which means someone always eventually does. |
| Pirate-colonist council | The Ash-Port Assembly | Half-fallen colonial districts built atop older ruins | Civic shell created by descendants of failed colonists who survived by becoming pirates, dockbuilders, and smugglers. Proof that settlement and piracy in the isles are now inseparable. |
| Forbidden cult | The Choir of the Last Echo | Collapsed basilicas, flooded senate vaults | Cult convinced the Voiding was interrupted apotheosis rather than punishment. Its rites attract scholars and madmen in equal measure. |
| Spy exchange | The Broken Semaphore | Old watchtowers with relit signal mirrors | Neutral market for island intelligence, sea-lane warnings, and relic rumors. Assassinations here are rare only because everyone needs it to keep existing. |
| Mercenary divers | The Pearl Knives | Black-water anchorages | Salvage-and-assassination company trained for ship cutting, underwater theft, and midnight harbor work. Expensive because almost nobody else can do what they do. |
| Ruin-law society | The Custodians of the Ninth Seal | Archivist enclaves inside intact imperial substructures | Severe order insisting some island complexes must remain sealed no matter the profit involved. Many mock them until they see what came out of the last broken vault. |
About this entry
Public in-game encyclopedia. Website edition: 10 October 2026.
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