Two Cults

Harry Corr

Archon Aspirants

No one truly knows what god or daemon the great idols lying toppled across the landscape are meant to depict. They have the shapes of humans, but few can look upon their monstrous masks and be unafraid.

The few ancient texts which speak of them are sealed by Thronecult edicts so strict that none now remember the reason for them. They speak of a priesthood who once served the great Demiurges. Of the awesome power these gods of war once wielded. Of how, in a time of need, the Archons would wake the sleeping titans and call upon them to walk.

Those who dare to follow in the Archons' footsteps take their name, seeking the lost knowledge of how to wake the idols. Those discovered by the Lords are put to death. For it is said that those who walk the Archon's path shall be bound forever by the dark destiny of a cruel angel....

Abilities and equipment as relic hunters.

Black Blades

All are raun. None will share their secrets with one of the Skyborn, on pain of death.

They trace their origin to the Zoah. Those in the Tower Lands today have been long cut off from their forebears by the Stormwall, save for the few who make the journey by ship. They wage their war still, in secret. Traveling as solitary preachers, they move among raun communities on this side of the Wall, spreading the truth to those who will listen.

They alone remember what was lost--what the Skyborn took from them. How the world was broken. How the gods were butchered. They see how the Skyborn teem and multiply even now, a plague that walks and speaks. How the raun of the Tower Lands are deceived. How they forget.

The Black Blades will remind them. And when they remember, the gods shall be avenged.

Strength d6 [Fighter 4], speed 30', unarmored, staff or Black Blade kindred, morale 9. Master fighters. 3d6 Đ.

Often accompanied by raun disciples (as bandits).

Black Blade Kindred

A buglike creature about the size of a spread hand, with six spindly, three-jointed legs like grasping fingers, no visible head, and a thin tail ending in a foot-long black stinger. On the underside of the body, a slit opens into an orifice from which several thin nervous tendrils can extend. A raun skilled in kinbonding can connect with it by this means. Within the Tower Lands, only the Black Blades themselves still know of this technique.

When wielded by a kinbonder, the legs grasp the forearm and the tail rests in the wielder's hand. From there it can extend to a surprising 30' length, functioning like a whip, with the stinger as a blade. Any stung are poisoned, dead in 1 round on 5-in-6 [save vs. poison].

If not bonded to a wielder, dies in 1 week.

The Black Blades are sworn never to wield their kindred against another raun, nor use any edged or piercing weapon against one, even in self-defense. They will always seek to resolve conflicts with raun nonviolently. If pressed, they will resort to their staves, fighting to disable.

Warfare

Armies

There are no standing armies in the Tower Lands. Armies are assembled as gatherings of feudal retinues; each lord calls on their knights, who call on their friends among the peasantry and their slaves to accompany them, all with whatever wargear and provisions they can afford to bring from their homes. Each liege is responsible for paying their own retinue, usually from shares of whatever pay they receive from their own liege.

By longstanding tradition inherited from Old Kingdom law, every house in the realm is required to maintain, at minimum, a spear, helmet, and shield, and to provide one able conscript at their liege's request. While villagers still train with regular formation drills just in case, in practice, most lords will only conscript from among their serf farmers as a last resort, since that means fewer people to work the land and pay taxes. Most soldiers are drawn from the freefolk, with well-off town houses maintaining sometimes significant wargear and training their youth for service. These semi-professional fighters form the backbone of most Halish armies.

A single knight with their retinue is called a lance; this is the smallest level of organization in a Halish army. A lance is a logistical grouping, not a tactical one, used mainly when describing the overall strength of an army. The traditional lance is composed of a mounted knight in heavy armor; a second cavalier in medium or light armor, who might be lowborn or a highborn squire learning from a veteran; three or four foot soldiers with medium or light armor; two lightly armored archers; and at least two slave porters, one each for the knight and the second cavalier. In addition to their warhorse, the knight traditionally brings a riding horse and a pack horse, and the second cavalier brings another pack horse. Today, with the collapse of the Old Kingdom's military economy, most knights would be lucky to field such a retinue. More realistically, most modern lances include an armored knight with a warhorse and a pack horse, three or four lightly armored foot soldiers, an archer, and perhaps two slaves or other support personnel.

A group of lances under a single lord is called a company, with the lord taking the role of captain. This is the main tactical grouping of a Halish army. When arranging for battle, a captain usually won't deploy their lances as lances, but will instead break up each type of soldier--light cavalry, heavy cavalry, archers, and infantry--into one or more tactical groups called cohorts, each led by a sergeant. Traditional wisdom is that you need one sergeant for every cohort of ten warriors. The Tower Lands are hilly enough that cavalry battle is often impractical, so knights train for mounted and foot combat equally and may deploy in either role; when fighting as infantry, they'll often serve as sergeants of infantry cohorts.

Armies larger than a handful of companies--that is, a few hundred to a couple thousand fighters all told--are rare in the present age. Where a lord calls up their knights in force, leaving few to guard their lands, they might have an impractically large company; in that case, they'll often break up their force into several companies captained by their favored retainers. If such a group of companies is part of a larger army, rather than an army in its own right, it's called a battalion.

Quite often, an army won't be drawn up entirely by a single lord from their own vassals; lords going to war love to call on their friends to join in and bring their forces along. When this happens, if there isn't a clear hierarchy among the lords joining in, supreme command of the army usually falls to the one whose idea the campaign was. However, fights between lords over who's in charge are one of the most common ways Halish armies dissolve.

Logistics and Strategy

Every army lives and dies by its baggage train. Camp servants, porters, and quartermasters--most of whom are usually slaves--are a vital element of any force, and prime targets for attack.

When an army is on campaign, soldiers with scouting and wilderness experience will be deployed as vanguards, ranging ahead of the main force to harass the enemy, targeting their supplies, their stragglers, and their morale. This often involves burning villages and killing farmers who the enemy would rely on to supply them. One of the most important pieces of strategic wisdom every Halish lord learns is, "The best place for any army is on someone else's land." This way, when the enemy--or, indeed, your own soldiers--go around pillaging local villages for supplies, it'll be someone else's serfs they're doing it to.

When an enemy shows up on your doorstep with an army, they're traditionally supposed to come right to you, call you out of your citadel, call you a bitch, and challenge you to come out and fight them. If you refuse, they might park their army down at your doorstep and dig in for a siege, at which point you'd better hope you either have enough supplies to outlast them or have some way of getting more that they don't know about. Alternatively, or at the same time if they can spare the forces, they might go riding around your lands burning down your farms and killing your serfs, hoping to force you to come out and deal with them before they leave your fief a barren wreck that won't make you any money. Only if they're very confident and have the right siege equipment will they try to attack your walls; defense is always much easier than offense.

Skipping the "riding up to your doorstep and calling you a bitch" step and going straight to the "riding around murdering your serfs" step is considered a dick move, but it happens fairly often.

Tactics

The most important thing to understand about Halish warriors is that they are fucking stupid. The Halish don't go in much for things like "strategy" and "planning" and "force organization"; they find all that stuff super lame. Battles are, first and foremost, opportunities for knights to demonstrate their personal prowess, shed lots of blood, and win glory. Concerns like strategic objectives and state interests are distant second priorities, if they think about them at all.

Usually, when two Halish armies meet in the field, the battle will start out with infantry forming opposing shield walls and marching toward one another, with archers taking shots from the flanks and light cavalry, if present, doing ride-by harassment with javelins. Meanwhile, the heavy cavalry, if present, will gather in their cohorts and get ready to charge the enemy's infantry line. If both armies have heavy cavalry, the two will usually meet in the middle of the field, at which point things will dissolve into a bloody, chaotic melee with zero organization or tactics beyond every knight fighting to unhorse as many opponents as possible. This is most knights' favorite part of a battle.

Whichever side wins the melee will rally and continue to charge the enemy infantry, which will often rout at about this point. Whether they hold their ground or not, the cavalry will slam into their lines and cut down as many as possible, killing anyone who tries to break and flee. This is most knights' second-favorite part of a battle. Those who get away will be mopped up by the light cavalry and archers.

If the cavalry melee has left the winner weakened enough that the enemy's infantry can hold off their charge, they'll break off and circle back behind their infantry line to rest. Knights consider it super lame to have to do this. The infantry lines will then finally meet, at which point the shield walls will push against each other and try to break open gaps to cause a rout. Victory at this point is determined by the morale and mutual trust of each infantry force; whoever breaks first loses. Those who flee can be cleaned up by the winning infantry, archers, and light cavalry.

If the terrain doesn't permit cavalry battle, things will basically proceed with those steps skipped. However, most knights find fighting in infantry formations turbo-mega lame, so they'll often rush off ahead to meet the enemy's knights ahead of the line and fight things out in duels. This is when they get to bust out all the fancy martial arts they spend so much time practicing.

No knight with any semblance of honor will ever, ever accept being deployed anywhere but the very front of an army during battle. This insistence has lost countless battles that could have been won. Knights would much rather lose gloriously than win by being lame.

You might be asking, are Halish knights all suicidal? Sort of, but not as much as it might sound. Keep in mind that with their heavy armor, and the prevalent tradition of capturing enemy knights to ransom rather than just executing them, knights are relatively unlikely to actually die in battle (at least compared to common soldiers, and no one cares about them). Nevertheless, being fearless and accepting of death is a huge virtue in Halish warrior culture. A knight whose liege dies in battle is expected to die with them, by their own sword if necessary; failing to do so is a grave dishonor, worthy of becoming an outcast.

Of course, that's all well and good in theory, but in practice, many knights who lose their lieges do choose not to go through with the whole honor-suicide part. Those knights tend to gather up their surviving followers and join mercenary companies of others like them, who end up forming an unsavory but vital resource for lords needing to strengthen their forces. Or they become bandits.

August Blog Bandwagon: Setting Pitch for the Tower Lands

We're doing setting pitches this month, so here's mine. I've been writing a lot about the Tower Lands lately, so hopefully this'll be a helpful summary for anyone just joining in.

As Mr.Mann has already pointed out, any good setting has more than one pitch. There's the ground-level view you give to players to get them on board with an adventure, there's the big overview you give to refs, and there's the behind-the-curtain commentary that dispenses with the flowery prose and puts everything in context. I'm gonna address each of these in order, plus the ever-popular Appendix N.

The Player Pitch

The caves of Roa Village are the only world you’ve ever known. Stone above, stone below. Humanity numbers five hundred and sixteen souls since Ged and Lani had their baby last week. By glowshroom’s light, you spend your wake-shifts in search of the earth’s bounty: gold and silver, iron and tin, and above all, the Glimmer, that sparkling treasure with its soft green luminescence, every find a blessing.

Under Chief Belar’s watchful eye and the masked gazes of the acolytes, the fruits of your labor are offered up to the gods, carried into the temple and never seen again. The elders speak of a world above where the gods dwell, a place of a thousand colors and a hundred thousand lights, where there are no walls and no ceiling. When someone asks if it really exists, the elders only shrug. All know better than to speak of it in front of the chief, or else earn lashes for turning their thoughts from work.

Three sleep-shifts ago, a whisper began to circulate. One of the deep teams uncovered something unbelievable: a new tunnel, unknown on any of the maps. Walls not of rock but of metal, gleaming silver, and light, not glowshrooms or even firelight, but a strange pale radiance from some unknown source.

You scarcely dared believe it…but there it is before your eyes. A fissure in the rock, and within, those gleaming silver walls, smoother than those of any cave.

What secrets do they hold?

The Ref Pitch

The Tower Lands are part of the continent of Urd, on the world of Arai. Their name comes from the Towers of the Gods, five enormous, ancient structures said to have been built by the primordial First Ones who shaped the world ages ago. The rulers of the Tower Lands are the Deathless Lords, five immortal sorcerer-kings who each control one of these Towers. With mighty magics and wondrous relics at their command, served by power-mad sorcerers and enchanted superhuman warriors, the Deathless Lords are worshiped by the common people as gods in their own right.

The sages call the present age the Interregnum--a fallen age. Centuries of war between the Deathless Lords for control of the realm have left the Tower Lands shattered. Beyond the walls of the great cities that gather at the feet of the Towers, villages shine as points of light amid deadly wilderness, surrounded by their ruined neighbors. Armies march on campaigns spanning generations, no longer remembering who or what they fight for, burning all in their path. Desperate bandits, hungry beasts, treacherous daemons, and magical weapons now beyond the Deathless' control stalk the roads. Few dare to travel far from their homes, though things are little better in settled places. The lords who serve the Deathless feast off the labor of serfs and slaves. Bloodthirsty knights take what they want at the point of a sword. Corrupt temples bleed the people of tribute. Those unfortunate enough to lose their lands and families, to be touched by curses, or to speak out against their oppressors are cast out, left to fend for themselves.

The Tower Lands are about the size of Greece. The landscape is varied, but in broad terms, it's warm, dry, mountainous, and coastal--like the northern Mediterranean, though the plants and animals mostly aren't those of Earth. The aesthetics and culture are a mishmash of classical, medieval, and pulp sword-and-sorcery trappings. Knights wear plate armor and wield longswords and polearms, while gunpowder is unknown. Feudal sorcerer-warlords rule walled cities maintained by slave labor. People offer sacrifices to legions of gods great and small under the instruction of secretive cults.

Ruins of the First Ones and countless ages since litter the landscape. Within lie forgotten treasures, powerful relics, and lost secrets. Such wonders speak of a better past, a time when people lived in peace, prosperity, and hope. Those brave enough to seek them must contend with devious traps, ancient guardians, and baleful curses, but the rewards can be great. The Deathless Lords covet the treasures of the ancients, while intrepid relic hunters risk all to claim what they can carry.

The people of the Tower Lands call themselves the Halish, hundreds of tribes and clans united by shared language and customs. Most are human. There are also the raun, the horned folk. Many raun live within Halish communities and embrace that culture, and those who do are generally accepted as Halish in their own right. Others keep to their own enclaves in border villages and nomad bands, where they are said to keep strange, barbaric traditions and worship false gods.

Though the Towers are the most spectacular symbols of the gods' power in the world, perhaps the most truly wondrous is Dust. This substance, gathered from ancient sites or refined from rare minerals at holy shrines, is said to be the First Ones' wisdom in physical form. Using the art of tuning, sorcerers imbibe Dust to partake of that divine wisdom, engraving their will upon it with secret meditations, chants, and hand signs and unleashing its power to bend the elements and occult forces to their service. The Deathless Lords and their servants covet Dust above all other treasures; so highly is it valued that the common folk use it as currency in trade.

In a village deep underground, mine slaves who have never seen the sky unearth a strange new chamber. Within lie wonders beyond their imagining, and dangers that may be their end. For those who survive, a path awaits into the world beyond, to stand beneath all the lights in the sky and, perhaps, to challenge the gods themselves...

The Real Talk

The Tower Lands are secretly a sci-fi post-apocalypse. Not the gonzo rayguns-and-wizards mishmash kind, at least not overtly--more the Dying Earth sufficiently-advanced-technology vibe. The power of the ancients genuinely looks like fantasy magic even to us as a modern audience, and all the sci-fi is masked with an archaic surface aesthetic or else so weird that it's not clearly recognizable.

Arai is an alien planet; the raun are the indigenous sapients. The First Ones were humans who came from a spacefaring civilization and built a bunch of shit before that civilization collapsed or somehow fell out of contact. Dust is nanotech that tuners program with bio-hacking. The relics of the ancients include power armor ("enchanted plate") and particle beam rifles ("magic staves"). Daemons are AIs. No one alive now remembers this, not even the Deathless, who came around long, long after it happened; some raun cultures who preserve the most of their ancient history will say that they were here in the Tower Lands first and humans came from elsewhere, but that's the most they know. If you're running stuff in the Tower Lands, don't tell the players this, and don't go out of your way to drop obvious hints; let it be background for them to work out if they care.

The Tower Lands started out years ago as my attempt to build a D&D setting that broadly conformed to the basic assumptions of the game and took the premises in interesting directions. D&D has always been a game with a by-default post-apocalyptic setting, with points-of-light settlements amid howling empty wilderness, littered with ruins of past glorious ages hiding forgotten treasure. That's the place I started from.

The main twist I introduce is that the PCs the players actually play aren't the first group of "PCs" to come around in the world--that's what the Deathless Lords are. They all started out as adventurers exploring the megadungeons of the Tower Lands, the Towers themselves, and eventually did what all good adventurers do, take the motherfuckers over and establish them as their own strongholds. With all that power and treasure, they graduated to domain play, and now the PCs are living in their campaign world, at the bottom of the social ladder they've climbed and enforced through violence and conquest--again, like all good PCs.

The Deathless being PCs is also why they're all so batshit fucking crazy.

You may have noticed that the player pitch doesn't really include almost any of the information from the ref pitch. See, I sort of lied: there really is no "player pitch for the Tower Lands." One of my favorite things in fantasy is worlds that aren't what they seem at first glance--I adore the feeling of picking up a new story and thinking, "okay, I see what this is doing," and then turning the page and going, "what, WHAT?" The Tower Lands, with its whole secret sci-fi history, is meant to facilitate that experience. This informs how I present it to players: incompletely, like the Three Blind Men with the Elephant.

The starting adventure introduced by the pitch above, with the players as underground-dwelling mine slaves who have no idea the surface world exists, is meant to give them an entry point to the world knowing practically nothing about it. They can then discover the world along with their characters through play. So they don't get a pitch that explains the broad outlines of the world to them. They're thrown into the dungeon of the starting adventure, and if they survive and make it to the end, they're thrown even harder out into the wider world and literally see the sky for the first time. It's a moment that's meant to provoke two responses: "Holy shit, this world is not what we thought it was," and, "Who the fuck is responsible for keeping this from us?" That's how play starts.

One very important part of the secret history is that no one will ever know what the First Ones' civilization was actually like. There will never be a clear answer for whether they were violent colonizers who broke the world or peaceful explorers whose creations have only become weird and dangerous because of whatever collapse happened. This is intentional. The First Ones represent that lost glorious past every D&D setting is obsessed with, but as we've all become more aware of as the discourse around fantasy has evolved, that past is often not as glorious as some would like to think. The Deathless Lords themselves and the whole society they've built are obsessed with the First Ones' glorious past, worshiping them and cursing the present age for falling from the heights they achieved. The Deathless Lords are also assholes. Does that mean the First Ones were too? It's undeniable that the First Ones were powerful, but does that mean their age is something the PCs should aspire to restore, or is everyone better off moving on and letting the past die? I don't know, and I'm never going to decide for the players. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what the past really was--what matters is what the people of the present, including the PCs, do with the world that past has shaped.

Appendix N

In chronological order by first publication.

• A Princess of Mars (literature, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912)
• The Dying Earth (literature, Jack Vance, 1950)
• Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (literature, Fritz Leiber, 1970)
• Berserk (manga, Kentaro Miura, 1989)
• Dark Sun (RPG materials, TSR, 1991)
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (animation, Gainax, 2007)
• Infinity Blade (video game, Chair Entertainment, 2010)
• Kill Six Billion Demons (webcomic, Tom Parkinson-Morgan, 2013)
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (video game, Nintendo, 2017)
• NieR: Automata (video game, Platinum Games, 2017)
• Jujutsu Kaisen (manga, Gege Akutami, 2018; animation, MAPPA, 2020)
• Elden Ring (video game, FromSoftware, 2022)