Setting: The Remains of Mythren

The Remains, as the broken world is called by those living in it, consists of everything outside of the Wheelhouse and its Sanctuary Cities. Sundered land masses, called “drifts,” are all that is left behind by the cataclysm. Some of the drifts are enormous, like continents in size, while others are more like fractured pieces of a whole.  Each drift consists of different terrain and environments, providing a wide variety of lifestyles for those who dwell upon them. Out here there is no law of the land, no High King or Queen, and no order, save for what the individual towns create for themselves. The inhabitants of the Remains are forced to fend for themselves against marauders, outlanders and the monsters—both in creature and human form—that wander the dangerous roads. Time has brought people together, but scarcity of supplies and distrust continually tears them apart.  Loyalty is rare, given begrudgingly at times to good providers, or demanded by local tyrants. But out here, the notion that “nothing lasts” is etched into the collective conscience. Even the most brutal tyrant will see their rule broken, and even the most fortified town will know a raid.

It is a world built on the ashes of greatness, after all.

The aftermath of the Breaking left a fragmented world inhabited by disjointed people and occupied by tangible relics that shattered through the thin veil of one reality and into the next. The remains of impossible structures jutted from the ruin of broken earth, standing as a testament to mortal man’s overreach. As the years passed, these things were scavenged, weathered, or destroyed, but their appearance left an undeniable impression, and many of the towns in the world abroad stand as tributes or reminders to those incredible sites. 

Typically the towns found in the Remains consist of inns, taverns, brothels, apothecaries, merchants and tradesmen. Some have churches that worship a vague and faceless entity known as the “On-High,” and most have a deeply seeded distrust of all things related to the Wheelhouse. Despite their basic similarities, however, each of these towns are distinct in every aspect from their layout, style, history, and demeanor. Much of this comes from the influences they have seen from colliding realities and fey worlds that resulted from the apocalypse known as the Breaking of the Moon. 

Inhabitants of the Remains have moved like magpies into the abandoned dwellings and locales of long-lost cities that still stand. New structures incorporate elements of old Mythren: inns built scavenged stone walls or age-old columns of once beautiful structures, streets cobbled together using the bricks of long lost roads, cracked faces of once-great statues layered into fortified walls.

These towns are poor reminders of what once may have been, but the haunted faces of the inhabitants—a mix of ethnicities and mingled races forced to interbreed solely for some hope of survival—show a grim  resignation to this shattered reality. Their existence lies in the shadow of broken dreams from a broken world.

Travel through the Remains, be it the patchwork roads or the shattered debris-filled void of the Upfall, is an invitation to danger. But despite the promised peril, it is here among the wreckage of all that once was, that the truths of the ancient world still linger.

Todd VanHooser

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