Welcome to Lakhanavati

Welcome to the new world. Watch your step.

Lakhanavati is a new land, born from the carnage and cataclysm of the End of All Things. When the failed apocalypse didn't end the world, it instead created a new one - a singular existence where every plane, every pocket dimension, every godly realm and secret hell were now broken and smashed together. Out of such a singularity, a different world arose, one that doesn't play by old rules.
Less than a century has passed since Lakhanavati rose from apocalyptic ashes. It is a land of plenty, and of danger, a land made from the broken remnants of other worlds and the old mortal realm, of ruins ripe for plunder and new, powerful forces that seek to rule it.

by Miguel Eins

The Lands of Lakhanavati

The ground in Lakhanavati is still cooling from the apocalypse, the many pieces settling into place. It is a vast and wondrous place, where the old rules of geography are treated more like suggestions than facts. Lakhanavati is divided into two great continents with the Iron Ocean between them, with a myrid of islands, floating dead gods and unstable old realms of power aplenty. Several satellites move between the two continents, orbiting high enough in the sky to claim a position of influence, but not so high they are not part of the daily life. The weather, when not whipped into a frenzy by spell or magic disaster, is relatively mild and the climate warm and comfortable.
In Lakhanavati, there is trade and travel, war and bloodshed, discovery and ancient secret in undiscovered ruins, and always - magic and treachery.

Lagash, the New City

Lagash is the greatest city of Lakhanavati, a vast cityscape that is home to countless souls. It sprawls across the eastern island of Lakhanavati and have covered it almost entirely in a broken, patchwork manner. Much of the city is built from the debris of other realm, mixing the architecture of old temples with giant bones of dead titans, cobblestone streets and dead god-machines. Its people have scavenged and refurbished for decades, building an uneven home from the End of All things.

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It is a chaotic jumble of a city, under the rule of the Emperor-Wizard who oversees his city from the Imperial Hill. A nation within a city, Lagash is one of the greatest powers of Lakhanavati, and would be even greater were it not so torn by internal rivalries.
In Lagash, giants and human, elves and monsters all make their home in an uneasy cohabitat. Like the city itself, its citizens are from a thousand different worlds. The Emperor cares not where his subjects are from, as long as they obey. It's a place of freedom, if you have the money and power to enforce your will, a place of oppression if you can't. It's cosmopolitan, but filled with tension and hate. Powerful but divided.
Should the city ever find true unity, there'd be no one in Lakhanavati who could stand between them - but fortunately for everyone else, that seems unlikely.

As the greatest power in Lakhanavati, Lagash is an axis around which the other powers maneuver. The emperor trades, deals, and wars with every other power.

Currently, Lagash is at war with the giants of Ur, the many quarrelsome factions in the Mountain of Scars, and have an uneasy peace with the Ahvaz Coalition after a catastrophic war.

The Mountains of Scars

A titanic chain of mountains, divided by a number of powerful Scars that carve their way through reality, the Mountains of Scars stand as a bulwark in the north-eastern parts of Lakhanavati. Untamed and untamable, they are wild lands of magic and monstrous god-things that claim bits and pieces as their own fiefdoms. Bandit clans and forgotten things both huddle in caverns or in hidden valleys within its vast reach, while expeditions from every corner of Lakhanavati come here to try and claim a part of its wealth for themselves.

The Mountains are charged with powerful magic. Fractured as it is by Scars, the land within each are often heavily tainted by magic in a dizzing array of ways. From Death-tainted Shards where mountain-peak slowly calcify to bone, to the Starfire volcanoes, the Mountains hold perhaps more magic than any other part of Lakhanavati... Offering great opportunity and peril in equal measure.

No single power holds sway over the Mountains, but countless minor factions vie for power and compete with intruders from afar. It is a place of constant skirmishes and great, terrible beasts.

Axiom

A more or less intact piece of some Hell, Axiom sits off the southern coast of Lagash. It's flames have cooled in the water, creating jagged beached of black obsidian and trenches of blood-drinking coral. The honey-comb walls are pitted and scarred both from when the Axiom was shorn from its place in hell and thrown to Lakhanavati, and the battles that followed. The inside is much larger than the exterior would suggest, a writhing and multi-layered descent far into the earth that isn't accessible from outside the Axiom.

The Axiom is half-alive, its interior walls warm and wet to touch. They move, grow, die, and consume, making an unusual home for an unusual people of demon-possessed humans. The End of All Things were unkind to devils and demons of all kind - once immortal and secure in their own nightmares realms, they've now felt the sting of mortality and those who first did were terrified. When the Axiom landed, the demons and devil inside struck an unusual bargain with the humans nearby for the survival of both, and the Axiomites were born.
The Axiomites are humans with devils inside them, sheltering the demonic spirit within their flesh in exchange for power and magic. In the past, such a possession would have been a one-sided deal, with the demon in control, but those days are long gone now. Robbed of so much power, the demons were reduced to bargaining, and a new people were born.

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To everyone else, the Axiom is an uncomfortable, foul-smelling place of organic structures, municipal organs, and carefully tended gardens of flesh and bone. To the Axiomites, it is a sanctuary, and they guard their living host with fierce determination.

Axiom's ruler, Tukulti the First, has held the throne since the beginning and they are the first and most powerful union of demon and human. Shrewd but cautious, Axiom maintain neutral relations and trade with everyone, though the pirates ofthe Iron Ocean remain a constant, hated threat.

Qinlang

Hovering a mile above the ground like a rough-cut jewel, the frozen moon of Qinlang is an enormous, uneven and jagged land of golden ice. When the End of All Things came, not even the suns were safe - one died and its last beams of light flash-froze as they crashed towards the ground, stopping dead in the sky.

by http://www.tribalartasia.com/

Since then, the Qinlang have been burrowed and excavated by a dozen or so different people who now make their home in the sun-catching, golden ice. When cracked right, the ice released the sunlight inside, allowing its denizen to harness it as a source of energy... Or direct it as weapon.
Though distant, Qinlang is not removed from the day to day affairs of Lakhanavati. They descend from on high on dragons, winged monsters, and artificial wings to raid or trade, sailing back up with on slow-moving barges pulled by cloud-whales. In turn, the offended power below sometimes scourge the City of Ice with powerful spells from below.

Qinlang needs water to grow and siphons a great deal of it from the Iron Ocean, freezing it to expand new structures on Qinlang, replace golden ice that has been excavated, or reinforcing the outer layer of their floating home with thick, protective sheaths of ice. One day, the last of the sunlight trapped in ice will be released, and Qinlang will be a dead place, much more cold and much more bitter. Until then, they are a powerful player in Lakhanavati.

Ur

Across the Iron Ocean from Lagash, the lands of Ur are a mix of mesas, rocky hill lands, towering mountains, verdant valleys, and deserts. Though less hospitable than the lands across the ocean, the coastline of Ur holds some of the most verdant jungles and farms in Lakhanavati, allowing its inhabitants to draw great wealth and luxury out of their hardscrabble land. Ur is ruled by giants who command a serf-class of lesser beings, mostly humans, by supposed divine edict. With no gods there to argue against them, the Giants of Ur have cast themselves as the last - and only - divine creatures still alive in Ithekshem. The humand toil among the coasts and rivers to feed the insatisable appetites of their overlords - sometimes with their own flesh.
Ur is at war with nearly everyone else, driven by a combination of hubris and hunger. Within their own lands, rebellion brews as great banquet feasts drain entire villages of every soul and every ritual sermon require yet another tax, another sacrifice, another victim consumed by hungry giants.

by Miguel Eins

The Iron Ocean

The great span of water between Lakhanavati named for its unusual weather - waves that somtimes solidify into clashing blades, pitted weapon and other relic of wars fought in the End of All Things. Entire rivers of steel-tainted waters flow within the ocean, their edges cutting ships and creatures that draw too close.

Many times the size and depth of either continent on its sides, the Iron Ocean is home to countless small empires and fiefdoms. Merfolk live in the coral shallows, trading or warring the landwalkers of Lakhanavati, while the abyssal depths are ruled by more alien things. Entire swathes of the ocean is ruled by an ancient, spell-casting Kraken who extorts anyone who would travel across its domain, while the pirates under the Queen of Tides spread terror where-ever the waves touch.
Despite the dangers, the Iron Ocean is a busy place. Merchants ply the waves between different cities, merfolk hunt and scavenge among underwater ruins, undead monsters rise to threaten everyone with alarming regularity. When the weather turns foul, the iron in the water sharpens and the rain become like daggers.

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For sailors, there's rarely a dull day on the Iron Ocean.

There are numerous factions in the Iron Ocean, many who never see the light of day or breathe air. The most powerful are the Queen of Tides, the Coral Mountain dwellers, and the merfolks ruled by the dread, great Kraken.

Esarhaddon

South of Lagash and just outside its sprawling, broken city-scape, Esarhaddon's boundry begins as the forests grow dark and oppressive. Between its few, great fortress cities lie a great unbroken wilderness, home to terrible beasts and undead haunts alike. Even the sun seem to shun this place, with only feeble light grazing the earth on even the best of days. For all its gloom, Esarhaddon is a prosperous place, a land of great order and law. Everyone knows their place here and the Black Inquisition ensure they remain in it.
Esarhaddon is ruled by a powerful vampires and nature spirits who have divided the land between them. The undead rule the cities, its crypts, its markets and industries, and the wild belong to the spirits. When Esarhaddon marches to war, it is a strange sight - undead hordes supported by walking forests, wild animals both living and dead, lead by ghouls and druids.
Everyone has dealings with Esarhaddon and nobody trusts them. The vampires have spies in every other land, in every possible place. Their spies and agitators are seemingly everywhere, promising immortality to any dupe fool enough to believe it and serve them to earn it. They have few friends, but are too powerful to just ignore or destroy.

Ashur-Baran

South of Ur, Ashur-Baran was once connected to the same continent but all such land has been razed and sunk beneath the Iron Ocean in the constant wars with the giants of Ur. With a much more temperate and forgiving climate, Ashur-Baran is home to gently rolling hills, low mountains, and mild weather. The land is occasionally broken by some relic from the End of All Things, most notable the titanic sword embedded into the center of the island, around which the rulers hold council.

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Ashur-Baran is not a single nation but a confederation of seven city-states, each ruling a part of the island. Although they spend almost as much time quarreling with each other as they do with outside forces, every time their island home is truly threatened, they're united in anger. They are a motly crew - former gods, powerful mages, ambitious mortals - with some of them even surviving the End of All things for settling where they are now.
One of the least powers of Lakhanavati, Ashur-Baran relies heavily on its powerful coalition rulers and the sites of power across their island to remain a player. They are tenatively aligned with Lagash, who see them as a useful tool to keep Ur occupied and distracted. In turn, Ashur hopes to use the wealth and power of Lagash against the giants and stay off their dinner table.

by http://www.tribalartasia.com/

Places of Power

As every extradimensional place turned inside out and flayed across the new lands of Ithekshem, magic found new and exciting ways to manifest.
Leylines are channels of power, criss-crossing Ithekshem in unpredictable and chaotic patterns. They're less like arteries, and more random pulses of powerful magic. Some are permanent and in their place like a river, while others fade when some flare-up of magic ends or writhe like snakes in destructive storms of power.

Demesnes are more potent and rare, places where power pools to great depth and changes the fabric of the land around it. These are places like lakes turned into mercury, waterfalls that fall upwards, uneasy graveyards where no one rests easy, and countless others.
Such domains are highly sought after by wizards and other magic-wielding creatures hoping to turn these wellsprings of power to their own ends.

Shards are larger swathes of region - entire countries or mountains may fall under one - colored (some would say tainted) by some aspect of Magic.
A Shard of Fire is hotter and drier than geography would dictate, while a Shard of Death is a miserable place of disease and short lives.

Scars are open wounds in the world, places where different places of power clash against each other. These places are unstable, where reality is broken and fragmented by the friction of different kinds of magic.
None are safe, and many form the boundries of nation-states more readily than any mountain or ocean.

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Places of Power: Death

Even before the many wars of the current day, millions died in the lands that would become Lakhanavati. Their souls were scattered far and wide, many losing themselves to the chaos of the End of All Things, becoming fused together soul-stuff.
There are many such gatherings of souls in Lakhanavati, all personality or ego long dissolved, leaving behind nothing but a unquiet power for the next war to cause the next crop of deaths.

Denizens of Lakhanavati

Screambeaks

Making their home in the jungles of Ur as well as the chaotic spirals of Lagash, flock of Screambeaks are scattered across Lakhanavati. Particularly notable are the Reaving Screaming Beakers, Screambeaks who live in the Iron Ocean's many coral spires and towers, and whose voices are the sound of Lakhanavati's birth. It is not a pleasant one, often cutting victims apart.

Arcanoplasm

Birthed from magical friction and pollution, Arcanoplasm roam the Mountains of Scars among the many places of magical power, feasting on raw arcane energies and any mage unlucky enough to be in the way. They've become a nuisance within Lagash, formed from careless mages discarding the remnants of various magical experiments. Bounties for slain or captured Arcanoplasm are almost as high as the risk of dying when attempting it.

Dracorachnids

Stalking, horrible terrors, these draconian-spider things stalk the mesas and deserts of Ur, capable of bringing down even the ruling giants of the land. Great hunts are sometimes organized to ride out in the wild and bring the fight to the Dracorachnids, and their bodies fetch high prices in marketplaces across Lakhanavati.

by Pixabay

Abyssal Harvester & Larvae

These demon-spawning monsters are scattered here and there in Lakhanavati, but appear in great numbers in Axiom. There, Axiomite raiders feed captives or purchased slaves to the monster to birth more demons. Even so, humans outpace the demons many times over, threatening the fragile peace within Axiom with demands of a new social order.

Lakhanavati

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Minor Regions

The Graveyard Halls

Labyrintine, cramped, and oozing with foul magic, the Graveyard halls run underneath much of Lakhanavati. They are connected to every grave and tomb across every nation, sometimes colliding with the underground works of cities like Lagash or the Maggot-Folk Burrows. Every now and then, the tunnels converge, deep underground, in vast pits and tomb-cities, where the Graveyard Halls citizens make their home. Most are ghouls, crawling dead, or other creatures of the grave, but life is nothing if not persistant. Every where and there, Maggot-folk dig through to the tomb-tunnels and establish colonies, earth elementals make lairs and cause entire cities to collapse.

Maggot-Folk Burrow

Like the Graveyard Halls, the Burrows is a region entirely underground, but limited mostly to under the Mountains of Scars and parts of the northen Iron Ocean. It's named for its inhabitants, maggot-wrangling, troglodyte-like who are only rarely seen above ground. Every now and then, greed compels the above-worlders to descend into the Burrows to see what wealth they can extract from it. In response, irate Maggot-Folk have been known to launch punitive raids against surface settlements, but often without knowing exactly who wronged them.

by Miguel Eins

Chaldar

Just north off the coast of Ashur-Baran, Chaldar is a corpse of a city. It was a titan of divine origin and power who fell in the End of All Things, its flesh turning to stone and jewel, now hollowed out and transformed into a city. It's bones have becomes spires, towers, walkways and streets, arteries where once pumped divine blood now ferry goods or citizens. Its beating heart is a Divine Demesnes of incredible power, although its beat slows with every passing year. Although they're a minor power in Lakhanavati, they occupy a comfortable position of neutrality - too valuable for anyone to really threaten - except for the Iron Ocean's pirate armadas. Chaldarians hate the pirates with a passion and will go out of their way to ruin their day - and with the divine power of their home city, they have plenty of means to follow this passion.

Phobos

A castle-sized chunk of unidentified biological matter, Phobos travel in an erratic orbit between continents and across the Iron Ocean around its center. It's home to an insectoid species of monster who have formed a symbiotic relationship with some manner of fungi, and infected mycelium is often seen buldging out of gaps in carapace or sprouting from their heads in fungal spires.
When Phobos appears, an attack is likely imminent. Worse, whatever the bugs are or whoever controls them have enough magic power to deflect the few serious attemps made to bring it down for good.

Deimos

Deimos is a perfectly smooth, sphere of mirror-sheen glass that travel in what appears like a regular orbit around the whole of Lakhanavati. No one has claimed to be the creator of the sphere, and no one's attempt to steal it from its orbit have yet succeeded. Whatever it is, no one trusts it for a damn minute not to be trouble.
Deimos has been in the air since Lakhanavati was formed. Some believe it is the eye or even soul of some dead god, others some sort of magical experiment, waiting to explode when the time is right.

Just as the dust has settled from the last war, Lakhanavati prepares for the next. This time, there's something different in the air - somehow, the stakes are higher. Every kingdom and every city-state look to the future and see only crows on the horizon, eager for a feast that may well turn all of Lakhanavati into a graveyard. Armies are marshalled, magic gathered, weapons forged and spells are bound into stone. A war is coming, one unlike any seen since the End of All Things.