Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 70

Enemies of God and King

(Thanks to everyone who contributed to the 'Good Monsters' post two weeks ago.)

Despite the Eclipsed Kingdom being the safest, most eminent, most holy and well-protected land in any reality, there are still those creatures and beings which, either from perverted nature or deliberate choice, act wilfully against the laws of both God and King.
Though, as a requirement of analysis, we must break down different castes and clans of heretic, and though exact knowledge of their plans and behaviours may be useful to the agents of the Holy Inquisition, we should never forget that the defining fact of heresy, is that it is heresy. There are no boundaries to sin and all heresies are ultimately One.

Vere Agentia
The Vere Agentia are Agents of the Spring Court, the so-called ‘Seeds of Spring’ or ‘Green Royalists’. The order of the Inquisition tasked with their destruction is the Ordo Vere.
When it was discovered that the rulers of the Spring Court were forming secret factions of dreaming Souls in preparation for an Unconscious  Revolution, Saint Scaedwian judged the Royal House of spring as traitors in the Black Assizes and they were dragged to their eternal imprisonment
Thus followed the Green Winter and the Spring Crusade. Though this was swiftly won, some hardliners escaped to hide in the depths of the forests, mountains, moorlands and swamps. Some are even said to have retreated to the oasies of the Iron Sands.
Some of the Vere Agentia can temporarily restrain their verdant nature and hide amongst the common autumn or winter plants. Though continual suppression has driven them deep underground they now form a dispersed network of terror cells, striking random targets before disappearing back into the forests and moors. Their aim is nothing less than the restoration of the Spring Court.

Crypto Ents
These fiendish trees simulate an Autumnal sleep before breaking out in verdant leaves when no-one is around. The congregate in secret valleys or hide in sinkholes to plan and plot. If you are forced to arrest one, be extremely circumspect, they are extremely strong and very difficult to burn.

Deep Cover Dryads



These Dryads can remain undercover as Autumn Court or even Winter Court loyalists for years without giving away their deception. They collect information and disperse it to other members of the Vere Agentia, aiding them in avoiding capture.

Seed Dryads
These literal 'sleeper agents' have also proven difficult to unearth (THIS IS NOT A PUN). These Dryads choose to remain in their seed form. When the coast is clear, they crack open their seed pod to take a look around.
They are no larger than the smallest shoot. Still attached to their seed shell, they move around and, if detection threatens, they retreat inside the seed. In this guise they can ride around inside the pocket of a Knight and listen to what they say.
The most dangerous and expert seed Dryads are dandelion and sycamore, they are both capable of gliding on the wind and can find their way anywhere, and escape just as easily.
The Beetle Knights were formed specifically as counter-espionage units to deal with the threat of Seed Dryads and other traitors of the Small Realms.

Satyrs and Fauns
These apparently-friendly rapists lure churls or innocent maidens into the forest with their piping and dances before brutally assaulting them. Kill on sight.

Woodwose
Homeless and ignorant forest churls with green beards who clothe themselves in ragged plant matter and burlap sacks. Also rapists. Dangerous when they gather in numbers and should be regularly hunted by any local knights. The church does not classify Woodwose as either human or intelligent and there is a permanent bounty of 5gp for each Woodwose beard (so long as the face is still attached). The Chivalry may make whatever use of them they wish so long as they carry out regular culls and some knights carry their collection of flensed beards tied to their rear pommel with the flayed faces hanging down their horses flanks.

Summer Elementals
The only reports of Summer Elementals are fragmented. The colour blue is mentioned regularly, though not the blue of the Eclipsed Kingdoms but another colour much closer to white. Some stories speak of a terrifying yellow light and a godless sky and of the overwhelming noise of Avis Infernalis.
They are rumoured to have been summoned or created as a form of terror weapon against the Winter Court and even the most potent members of that court fear the power of these beings to reduce their frozen hearts to puddles in their chests.

Haereticorum Ineptias
The Haereticorum Ineptias are ‘Nonsense’ beings or Unreasoning Heretics. The order tasked with their discovery and destruction is the Ordo Ineptias, made up of perhaps the subtlest and most intellectually brilliant of the Holy INquisition, though sadly also the one with the highest rates of terminal madness.
One of the greatest dangers to the Eclipsed Kingdom is the lack of seriousness and piety with which the peasant classes go about their duties. Despite very strong prohibition by the church and repeated warnings of sinful corruption, the belief in ‘Silly Creatures’ or ‘Fool Beasts’ continues in the labouring classes and, perhaps, even deepens in intensity.
It seems that no matter how strongly the church abjures the Haereticorum Ineptias, the ignorant and simple cling ever more deeply to their childish, inane, yet dangerous myths.
The dangers of the Haereticorum Ineptias are;
·        Belief in these creatures means the peasant class my hesitate in reporting the presence of clearly heretical beings when encountered, and may in fact assist them.·        Many are much more dangerous heretical creatures than they seem, even sometimes Avis Infernalis.·        They are destructive to trust in decent authority.·        They do not respect the right of property.·        They are corrosive to the fear of God which forms the basis of faith.·        They consistently subvert the sound judgement of the courts.·        They are beyond any law.·        They are ridiculous and injurious to the dignity of the churches Holy Inquisition.·        They seek to have the World Turned Upside Down.·        They are unforgivably silly.

Baku  Baku the Dream Eater by HyakumonogatariThese intelligent, shape changing, tool using magic elephants are extremely cunning, always in disguise as another kind of being and extremely potent in combat when revealed. They are Haeretica Majoris to the first extent and no Inquisitor or Knight should ever confront them alone.
The Baku are rare but ferocious supporters of heresy and are famed for offering aid to those whose aim is the betrayal of Gods law and the overturning of all social order. It is believed that several noted Haeretica Majoris have escaped the Lords judgement only through the aid of these creatures.
Their usual mode of deception is to change shape into giant hairy monsters of ridiculous pattern and hue, or into boisterous Woodwose or Hairy Men with strangely pigmented hair and skin. They can be easily given away by their vibrant colours, their ridiculous and inconsequential attitudes and by the fact that they have no visible means of economic support or place in the feudal hierarchy.
Common peasant names include “Hurly-Burlys”, “Wildys”, “Jumblies”, “Big Bad Boys”, “Bafflers” and “Grimblesnatches”.

Hollyphants
The small size of these golden-furred flying elephants (about 2 feet long) should in no way distract the Inquisitor from their very clear danger. Despite their size they are certainly Haeretica Majoris with a wide selection of immunities and magical powers. Thank Azathoth they are unable to change shape.
Like the Baku, these creatures should be confronted only by a fully-prepared detachment of His Majesties Holy Inquisition.
Common names among the Churl class are “Bibbly Bobs”, “Little-Man-There’s”, “Brave Baron Bees”, and “Little Bad Boys”.

Foo Creatures
These beings can come in a form similar to dogs or, much more dangerously, those alike to lions. In either case they have much larger, blunter heads than usual, with wide-set googly eyes and ridiculously large smiling mouths with oversized fangs. Their hind legs are canine and the forelegs leonine. They have bush-tipped tails. They come in a wide range of colours, none natural.
Thanks be to Azathoth these creatures cannot fly or change shape, neither do they have the wide range of magical abilities of the Baku or Hollyphant. Nevertheless, they are still dangerous opponents, capable of disappearing from view and travelling by unknown means. Both versions are much stronger and more intelligent than their material counterparts.
These creatures can often be found protecting criminals, escapees, heretics or places of heresy. Thankfully they are quite rare.
Peasant names include; “Jim Dogs”, “Foolish Hounds”, “Hairy Hairy Howling Lads”, “Tommy Big-Teeth” and “Fools Pity”.

Blue Dogs and Yellow Bears
Though Lycanthropy is almost always considered a Divine Blessing, bringing the one transformed a little closer to the Lord, there are a few, lesser spoken-of, forms of that condition which can have a perverse and disordering effect on the spirit.
Most will be familiar with the Noble or Lordly forms of Lycanthropy, those of Raven*, Fox and Tiger, and with the Churlish or Common forms, those of Rat, Bat, Boar and Wolf, but there are, in fact, heretical forms of this condition.
Those transformed into Were-Bears will, during their Change, turn a golden yellow and develop an obsession with honey and sloth. Though these creatures are renowned for their Fellowship and Easy Manners, no-one should be in any doubt that their Liberal Habits and Lax Spirit form a basis for Sin and make an open door for Heresy. They are often found making friends with, or permitting the society of, Heretical creatures and characters and their Sad Addiction to the substance called Honey means they can be easily compelled to unwise, and even treasonous action by its presence.
Those transformed into Were-Dogs will, during their Change, turn a pale and ridiculous blue colour and adopt a manner both liberal and delirious. These Blue Dogs are known to have smiling faces, long limbs, fur like hairy rugs or rough clouds, lolling tongues, galumphing strides and daft pants. Although they are less physically dangerous than the Yellow Bears, they are also less slothful and more given to impudent heresy and disorganised crime. They are not wise dogs.
Were-Bears are referred to amongst the Peasant classes as “Eating Mister Mustard”, “going to see”, or “knowing of”, some “Fat Lads” or as “Going Roly”. Were-Dogs are referred to as “Wearing Sky Trousers”, “Forgetting to Shave” and “Voting for a Bowl”.
(*The existence of these houses being the reason that Ravens, along with Crows, due to the Emir of Crows, are not classified as Avis Infernalis but as Feathered Bats.)

The Roly-Poly Bird(The reader should be aware that this creature may or may not be Avis Infernalis and those subject to the Oath of Saint Vish should read no farther.)
From Les Enfants Terribles theatre companyThe Roly-Poly Bird is a ridiculous blue birdlike creature with a luxuriant and oriental multi-coloured many-feathered tail, a bold crest and a long neck. Every other aspect of its description differs from incident to incident, leading some to suspect that it may be another creature in disguise (see ‘Couatl’ below).
The Roly Poly Bird has been named and noted as an accessory in numerous criminal and heretical acts, including, but not limited to, aiding in the escape of heretics and criminals from custody, aiding the targets of the Holy Inquisition and the Ordinis Carcere and persisting in Ridiculous and Provocative Acts.
It’s powers and capacities are unknown and it has evaded capture in every instance of contact. Treat with extreme caution.
The Roly Poly Bird is referred to by the Peasantry as “The Roly Poly Bird”.

The Jub-Jub Bird
(The reader should be aware that this creature is almost certainly Avis Infernalis and those subject to the Oath of Saint Vish should read no farther.)
Due to its extreme rareness, danger and lethality, almost nothing is known of the Jub-Jub Bird. It may not even truly be Haereticorum Ineptias, being Avis Infernalis. The only details recorded are that it prefers isolated areas, that it has a shrill voice and that it lives in perpetual passion.
Any Knight, Inquisitor or servant of the True God is required and requested to report any perceived contact with a being they believe to be the Jub-Jub Bird to His Majesties Holy Inquisition, unless it definitely is a bird, in which case it should be ignored.

The Opinicus
Though possibly Haeretici Ferrea, the ridiculous and contemptable nature of the Opinicus  classify it also as Haereticorum Ineptias since no creature of similar arrangement could reasonably exist except as a deliberate and Heretical affront to, and mockery of, the True God.
The Opinicus has a camels body and neck, a monkeys head and limbs and an eagles wings. These wings are not useful in flight but despite this the Opinicus can travel both invisibly and through the air. It has a fiendish yet asinine intelligence and plots continually to subvert Holy Law and the rule of the Sleeping King.  From the Monster ManualThe Opinicus is said to lair in the ruins of the Empire of Suleiman and may be allied with that exiled Tyrant or may be a creature of his Sorcerous Wife. It is defended by various magics, including the ability to ejaculate a poisonous and nacreous yellow light from its eyes.
This creature is referred to by the Bedouin as “The Caliph of Paupers”, “The Poets Dog”, “Sunken Ship of the Sky” and “Lord of the Slaver, Slave of the Lord”.

Haeretici Ferrea
Named not only for the Iron Sands which they still lay claim to, but also for the strength of their heresy, the Haeretici Ferrea consist of those still loyal to the defeated ‘Emperor’ Suleiman. For this they are called ‘The Heretics of the Iron Sands’. The order of the Inquisition tasked with their destruction is the Ordo Ferrum and it has amongst it several devout Efreeti, the Dervishes of Azathoth, some Rakshasa and many Bottle Knights.
Before the coming of the True God, Suleiman ruled a wide empire, including all of the land currently occupied by the Emir of Crows. His power was such that it took seven Cold Crusades over several centuries to effectively break his might and drive him back to the doors of Akka.
Even now, the Empire of Suleiman still technically exists. At the height of the Seventh crusade the Grail Knights watered the blood of his Imperial Guard onto the very seal of his throne room and both the Sorceress Esmerillion and the Emir of Crows duelled magically with the Queen Nicaula. The Emperor himself had entered the fray when news reached Esmerillion of the beginning of the ‘Schism of Virgins’ and the entire Crusade was ordered to retreat.
Suleiman placed his unbreakable seal on the doors of his palace and no force has penetrated it since then.
The Haeretici Ferrea are unique in that they are not an insurrectionary conspiracy, a collection of disparate individuals or a terror network but are an actual military force in miniature. The shattered core of Suleiman’s Empire still remains and many creatures and people of the Iron Sands still owe him secret loyalty. Caches of his secrets and weapons still exist in the ruined cities of his Empire, guarded by his unbreakable seal. 

Suleiman, ‘Emperor’ of Akka
The Emperor has the body of a Bull, the wings of an Eagle and the bearded face of a man. He was famed for thousands of years as a just and wise ruler, a mighty warrior and a master of many magics. He spoke the language of Birds, Djinn, Devils and Ants. He commanded the Arch-Devil Asmodeus who, bound to his will, served him for many years as Vizier, before his ultimate betrayal and escape at the height of the fourth Cold Crusade.
Suleiman can read minds, scry his enemies, see the future in a limited way, turn invisible, teleport at will and no doubt perform other miraculous actions. His seal is unbreakable once set and can be used to bind creatures like Devils or Djinn if they are subdued first. At the height of his power he commanded the direct loyalty of men, centaurs, birds, djinn, devils and ants as his subjects.

Queen Nicaula of Saba
The Queen has the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle and the face of a beautiful woman with long hair. Like her husband she is known to be a master of many magics, a wise ruler and a deadly fighter.
When the Queen came before Suleiman she thought at first that the glass floor of his throne room  was water and, fearing to tread upon it, she raised her robe. Seeing her beauty, the Emperor requested her hand in marriage. She accepted, providing he could prove his knowledge by answering her questions. That night she asked him two hundred and ninety nine questions and he answered them each in turn, but as the sun was about to rise, the Queen said she was tired and must sleep and that she would ask the last question the next night. The Emperor acceded to this.
When the next night came she said that as she slept it had come to her in a dream that her final question was much more complex than she had previously realised and asked if she could make some addendums to it. The Emperor agreed to this. She then placed before him, in turn, two hundred and ninety nine more riddles and mysteries, each more complex than the last. He resolved each one but, as the sun rose she again said that she was tired and that she would ask her final question the next night.
This went on for two hundred and ninety nine nights. On the three hundredth day the Emperor requested of his Devil Vizier Asmodeus that he create a mirror and take it to the horizon to reflect the light of the rising sun before it rose. Asmodeus flew to the horizon on wings of midnight black and, with some difficulty, held up his cyclopean mirror. As the Queen saw the dawn light rising in the east she said again that she was tired and would ask her final question the next night.
“It is of little consequence,” said Suleiman “I shall turn back the dawn.” And he rang a silver bell. Hearing this, Asomdeus dropped his mighty mirror, it fell to burning pieces in the sky and where it landed it formed the Selenium Isles, and darkness and starlight again filled the sky.
“Please, continue with your question.” Said Suleiman. The queen had no choice but to do so and after it was answered the Emperor said “Now. I have answered your three hundred questions and your eighty nine thousand four hundred and one addendums. I have asked you only one, and you have answered it. But I would sooner hold back the sun forever and condemn the world to eternal night than to compel the wisest and most beautiful creature who sprang from that earth against her will, so I shall ask again, and you may answer however you wish; will you make yourself my wife?”
Queen Nicaula replied that she would and the sun rose. And that is how the nations of Akka and Saba were united.

Centaurs
The Centaur tribes made up the majority of the Empire of Suleiman and though many have been destroyed or driven off a small population still haunts the Iron Sands, moving mainly by moonlight and hunting with their compound bows. As well as this, the Emperors Imperial Guard of bearded, bronze-armoured heavy cavalry still exists, though they are rarely seen outside Akka.

Hybsil  Remember these weird little guys?

These small antelope-centaurs stand in a similar relation to normal Centaurs as Halflings do to Man. They were too insignificant and too numerous to bother exterminating and an itinerant population still live between the oasies of the Iron Sands. They hunt birds with their small bows and, for this convenience, are ignored by the Crow Knights. They may still owe secret fealty to Suleiman and are often suspected of being spies despite their formal declarations of piety.

Bedouin
The Bedouin tribes have all sworn faith with Azathoth and loyalty to the Emir of Crows but they are a perpetually fractious, proud and dishonest lot who almost always define themselves against whoever is currently in power. When Suleiman ruled they were a constant thorn in his side with their raids, thefts and intercene tribal wars. Now that he is gone many wear his seal in secret and speak of him as “The Desired One”.

Ants
Both the normal sized and the larger intelligent Formian Ants were said to have sworn fealty to Suleiman in ages past. Since the Seventh Cold Crusade no agent of the Eclipsed Kingdom has been able to communicate with the Queen of the Formians in her hidden city to find out where her loyalties (if she is even capable of such a thing) lie.


Avis Infernalis – The Parliament of Birds
The Ordo Infernalis is unusual in that it is made entirely of, and lead by, women, commonly Nuns of Saint Vish or other devout ladies.
(Any reader who has taken the Oath of Saint Vish should read no further but skip straight to Haeretici Caelum below.)
Ever since the Regrettable Crusade of St Fugol, the Avis Infernalis have been the abjured enemies of the Eclipsed Kingdom.  It is extremely difficult for servants of the True God to discover any meaningful information about this trackless and placeless enemy. Of all the enemies of God and King, these are those whose motivations are most difficult to discern, whose plans are most challenging to counter and whose capacities are most unpredictable.
Even the existence of the “Parliament of Birds”, its location, forces, intentions, members and organisation, is unknown. We subsist only on rumour.

Phoenix
This deceptive, intelligent, heretical and evil bird is considered to be a Prime Agent of Aerial Heresy. It is fortunate that the creature is only very rarely sighted within the Eclipsed Kingdom. No force sent to attack or restrain the Phoenix has ever returned and the only remains recovered have been badly burned so it has been assumed that the creature is connected somehow with fire.
Prioress Groöb of the Nuns of Saint Vish has suggested that the name ‘Phoenix’ is merely a title passed on from bird to bird as each ascends to a position of Arch-Heresy. This would make sense of several incoherent rumours about the creature.

Simurgh  From the 'Simurgh' Persian RestaurantThis ­extremelyheretical and evil creature plays some kind of vital role in the hated Parliament of Birds. Though little is known about it, evidence suggests that it is a skilled sophist and deceiver as it has been able to persuade several driven and focused servants of God to deny His truth. It has been claimed that the Simurgh is in fact ‘many birds’, which is either inane and obvious deceit or proof that this name applies to a secret sub-faction of the Parliament of Birds.

Roc or Rukh
This name may be that of a single species of Avis Infernalis or may refer to a range of species of similar gigantic size. The Rukh therefore can be considered as any bird large enough to carry a fully armoured knight and mount off in its claws. Thankfully these birds are rare. When they do occasionally make their nesting places in mountainous areas in or adjacent to, the Eclipsed Kingdom, the Nuns of Saint Vish are quickly summoned and directed to assault and destroy such creatures.

Owls, Eagles and other common Infernal Birds
These creatures, though apparently of only natural shape, sometimes exhibit disturbing and unnatural intelligence, awareness or size. These can include unusually large owls, intelligent storks, storks which vomit boiling water, giant storks, red hawks and enraged ostriches of the Iron Sands.

Legendary and Imaginary Avis Infernalis – Aarakocra, Garuda, Swanmays and others
Numerous other forms of Avis Infernalis are rumoured to exist in distant nations and climes. It has been claimed that a race of “Bird-Men”, having the wings and heads of birds, but the form and wits of men, exists and is called the “Aarakocra”. The “Garuda” bird is described in varied and conflicting ways but is always described as a being of magical power and often as a servant of heretical pseudo-gods, a race of women able to transform into swans or other Infernalis via magic has been spoken of in ballads.
It might be assumed, firstly, that these creatures are clearly imaginary, and secondly, if they are real they are so rare and unlikely to be encountered that no attention need be paid to them. However, the reader should consider what a terrible disaster could result if Avis Infernalis of significant power and intelligence should make their way to the Eclipsed Kingdom in force….

Haeretici Caelum
The Haeretici Caelum include heretical creatures of the Air which are not Infernalis. This includes the Haereticum Dracones.
If the Vere Agentiaand the Haeretici Ferrea are defined by their loyalty to a particular doomed cause and the Haereticorum Ineptias by their anarchic, persistent, but unstructured disobedience, the Haeretici Caelum are like some of the more intelligent Infernalis in their planned, intelligent, direct and continued opposition to the rule of the Sleeping King and the spread of the True Faith. Though their methods are various and their numbers are few, have no doubt, they aim at the overthrow of the Kingdom and the destruction of the Church.
However, since the Caelumand Dracones are not Infernalis, though they tend to be occupants of the air, they can be freely acknowledged and hunted by the Chivalry of the Sleeping King. It remains only for the Holy Inquisition to discover and locate them so they may be destroyed. Though they are uncommon they are all extremely deceptive, intelligent and cunning.

The Criminal Ki'Rin
This creature is an irritating and inexplicable, pompous, harassing, liberal, heretical, superior and exasperating being. Its form is alike unto that of a horse though its head is horned. Its coat is of golden scales. It skips and gallops through the sky with the greatest of ease. It exhibits some control over weather, can disappear at will and possesses a wide range of other magics. It makes a speciality of tempting servants of the True God with illusions and the creation of material goods which, the greater the substance they seek to counterfeit, the more quickly they return to their ethereal form.
It is known to have assisted criminals, escapees and heretics and to have penetrated even to the heart of the Kingdom itself to obstruct the due performance of justice and avert the necessary destruction of traitors and thieves. It has, on multiple occasions, dared to lecture and condescend to agents of the Black Church and to criticise, in detail, the Faith of the Black God before escaping in a puff of smoke.

The Couatl
This creature is widely suspected to be the true form of the Haereticorum Ineptas known as the ‘Roly Poly Bird’.
In its true guise the Coatl is a kind of winged and feathered Wyrm with a preference for warm and torpid zones. It has a venomous bite and, like many heretical creatures, is capable of disappearing at will. It can seemingly change shape as and when it desires. It possesses a wide range of unpredictable magics
The creature is known to have a high opinion of its own status as an agent of culture and learning and it is possible that it could be tempted, tracked and trapped by an agent of the Church able to engage it in scholarly or cultured discourse and argument.

Zoloto Daraniya Hiranyam Gulp - the Golden Wyrm
One of only two unconverted wyrms still at large in the Eclipsed Kingdom, the creature known as Zoloto Gulp must certainly spend almost all of its time in a false shape, presumably that of a man, since it has not been seen at large for several hundred years.
Neither has it been revealed and caught, or its rumoured treasure-palace found.
Based on its previous behaviour, Zoloto Gulp must still exhibit some keen interest in trade and capital. (Sadly ignoble enthusiasms for a creature of its size and potency.) Before the arrival of God, the wyrm was the chief banker to the court of the Sleeping King and often appeared before him in the form of a plump and hearty merchant lord, bearded and fat and bestrewn with golden chains. It is from this period that most of our knowledge of its behaviour comes.
Though no Inquisitor or knight has yet revealed him, it is thought that they have come close on at least two occasions, once by tracing rumours of a banker who secretly ate gems and once, hundreds of years later, as the ‘Lord of the Yellow Hall’, a feudal lord of a marginal realm famed for his gift-giving and good luck.
Wherever Gulp is now, it is unlikely that he has been completely unable to abandon his passion for generosity, his obsession with sound finances and his love of luck and gaming.
If any agent of the Holy Inquisition does locate Gulp, they should immediately and secretly summon as much aid as possible. Beneath his deceiving guise Gulp is a gigantic, millennia-old creature capable of incinerating, poisoning and tearing apart scores of Knights in a moments notice.


Kypria Contortrix Aes – the Penny Wyrm
Kypria is the only Dragon in the Eclipsed Kingdom to live openly as a Dragon and as a Heretic. It is believed she does this specifically and only to irritate and mock the Holy Inquisition.
On at least seventeen occasions since the coming of the Black God, Aes has revealed herself and predated openly upon both the Chivalry and the Clergy, stealing vast amounts of currency and valuable property. On each of the seventeen times she has been traced to her hidden lair by servants of the One God, only for the only treasure discovered being a gigantic pile of pennies and a very artfully devised trap to spring, killing or crippling all present.
Obviously, after the first five or six incidents of this type, the agents of the Holy Inquisition realised that they were inevitably being lead into a trap and began to take elaborate counter-precautions in order to discover and evade any possible snare or device.
Regrettably, Aes had anticipated those precautions and, in every case, the actions taken by the Holy Inquisition, be they magical, practical or intellectual, were precisely the ones required to activate the trap she had prepared.
After her latest appearance a Conclave of Wyrms was called by the Black Pope herself in which the wisest minds, greatest magicians and most intelligent lords would gather to discuss and devise a means to discover and destroy her trap before it was sprung.
The conclave is now in its fifty-sixth year and, after several schisms and purges, is close to delivering its Final Plan for the destruction of the Penny Wyrm. (Although a supressed and minority faction believes that the Conclave itself isthe trap this time and that there is not actual trap in the dragons mountain lair.)
In the intervening time Aes has continued to prey upon the local hierarchy and has been engaged with militarily on several occasions by the Chivalry, who were all regrettably and horribly dissolved by her acidic breath, which she then used to burn insulting and provocative messages into the grass.
Any subject of the Sleeping King is expressly forbidden from attempting to penetrate the stronghold of Kypria Contortrix Aes until the Conclave of Wyrms brings forth its judgement.

Haeretici Minoris
These heretics are, in the large, imbued with only minor powers to confound and rebuke the agents of order and law. Likewise they are generally incapable of any sustained intelligent action in the pursuit of their heresy. Unlike the Haereticorum Ineptastheir flailing misadventures are not carefully disguised anarchic timebombs of conspiracy, they are simply stupid.
It is arguable as to whether some of these creatures are truly intentionally heretical or simply dangerous animals but they have all, at different times, been classified by the Holy Ordos as enemies of God and King and there they shall remain.

Moon Dogs.
Moon Dogs, due to their power and intelligence, are not truly Haeretici Minoris but have proven impossible to classify anywhere else.
These very magical, powerful, ethereal dogs hate and despise the faithful servants of the Black God. They can be distinguished by their vaguely human faces and prehensile hands. They are sometimes seen walking on two feet. Their colouration is dark grey with deep black mottles. They have amber eyes, are intelligent and can speak.
Moon Dogs have a limited capacity to change shape but are known to make only brief and conditional use of it, unlike the Baku who can remain in human form for days, or weeks. They prefer to avoid strong light and possess a number of illusory magics to aid them in evading the Holy Inquisition.
They persistently and fearlessly assault the agents and servants of the Black Church and assist those attempting to oppose its rule.

Monkey Men
Monkeys are thankfully rare in the Eclipsed Kingdom, usually inhabiting the forests on the edge of the Iron Sands and the Oasies therin. Though they are only occasionally encountered there have been reports of a race of Monkey Men with human wits whose behaviour and manners are Foolish in the Extreme.
This race has on many occasions expressed distain and contempt towards the Holy Church and has publicly denied any fealty towards the Sleeping King. They have engaged in ridiculous and sustained boasting matches with any Knight who chooses to converse with them and have claimed numerous divine and magical powers. There is no evidence for any such capacity amongst the Monkey Men and they should, and must, be ignored.

Blink Dogs
Though of near-human intelligence and capable of a limited teleport capacity, these creatures prefer to avoid inhabited areas and are not much of a threat. They have proven impossible to fully wipe out.

Pseudodragons
These extremely annoying creatures were briefly popular in the Eclipsed Kingdoms as pets for noble children. When it was discovered that some of these creatures were leading children into heretical opposition to their parents the whole species was ordered to be exterminated. Some did escape and must have provided a small breeding population since they have become endemic vermin in a few forested areas.

Grims
Small-scale shadowy shape-changers able to disguise themselves as dogs, cats or owls. Must be caught and killed before the sun rises or they will heal any damage inflicted up until that point.

Thaw Mephits.
This very low form of demonic or devilish creature occasionally escape into the Eclipsed Kingdom and harass the Winter Court by quietly melting ice behind peoples backs.

DCO Reformation

If there is one complaint we hear almost daily from the Hipsters of the OSR its that you have Too Much Money.

"Shut up and take my money!" You scream as you weep from the open leg sores brought about from the giant bags of gold you carry banging against your thighs as you walk.

Some of you can't even open your own wallets any more becasue they are jammed with black Amex Credit Cards and 100 dollar bills, many of you can't even publicly say where you are going on holiday as rumours of your presence in a country will create preemptive inflation booms and crash the economy and a number of you have complained that the market for platinum war suits for your genetically engineered monkey gladiators is totally glutted.

Well worry no more, Scrap and I are teaming up with Hydra Co-op to put together a new edition of Deep Carbon Observatory.

Our hope is that the new edition of DCO will be produced alongside, and come out in the same format as, Broken Fire Regime, so if you want to you can buy them alongside each other. These will make two adventures in an intended four-part series which should one day be;


Deep Carbon Observatory - Earth and deep things. (I know the flood is the famous but but come on guys, look at the title.)Broken Fire Regime - Fire. Littoral Storm Corsairs - Pirates in the envelope of a Gas Giant. Air.Unsleeping Oceanic Athenaeum - Water/The Oceans.

(These will almost certainly be A4 to give Scraps images more room to breathe, to have more of them on there and to have a greater interrelationship between informational segments.)

These would be sequels in the way that the Mad Max films are sequels. That is, they would have a similar tone and could all be set in the same world, or versions of it, but they do not necessarily lead directly on from each other. (Though they could).

If we get all the scheduling right, the new DCO and BFR should hopefully be available around the end of the year.

I'm not intending to do any massive additions to DCO, but, I know a lot of different people have run it, with very varied effects, and I would like to re-write it a bit to try to resolve some of the most common issues with the text.

What I'd like to do is put together a list of the most common issues and go through them one-by-one, producing an official Mark 2 draft and make that the basis of the new version.

SO;

If you have any comments on DCO, or suggestions, or just things you found awkward or want changed then please send them to pjamesstuart at gmail dot com with the subject heading; DCO REFORMATION.

You can also leave comments here or on G+ but sometimes people will see an issue they agree with and either not comment or simply plus one it, which means their opinion may get lost.

Anyway, thanks for your attention and thanks to everyone who helped to make DCO such a successful project for its size, I (and Scrap) really do appreciate it.

Philosobaker

Orders of Chivalry in the Eclipsed Kingdom

It’s good to be a knight, and every knight has a coat of arms, a lord to belong to and underlings to boss about. But what’s even better is to have a cool symbol and a special club to be in. Here are some of the more well-known of the innumerable orders of knighthood in the Eclipsed Lands.
The Higher Orders of Knighthood
Eclipse Knights – The Ut Tenebrae
The Ut Tenebraeor "Eclipse Knights" are figures of myth and terror.
No-one knows how one becomes a member or who makes up the order. It is rumoured that the Ut Tenebrae are eclipsed Selenians and their full-face helms are strangely distorted, larger than any human head would require. No-one has ever seen the face of an Eclipse Knight and lived. No-one has ever encountered an Eclipse Knight in combat and lived. They leave behind them only bodies, and usually not even that.
It is known that there are only ever 13, that they work for, and report directly to, the Black Pope of Azathoth, that they recognise no other authority of any kind, that each one rides a white Peryton, that they have never failed to take an assigned target and that they are all were-moths, with each mount and rider capable of transforming into a moth on command. It is for this reason that no-one in the Eclipsed Kingdom will ever speak a secret when moths are nearby.
The Black Pope herself often has multiple white moths flapping about her person or perched upon it and a papelonné of argent moths on a sable field makes up the arms of the Ut Tenebrae.
The Ut Tenebraeexist outside and beyond the normal orders of Knighthood in the Eclipsed Kingdoms, poised as a terror weapon and unspoken threat over the heads of even the most powerful lords.

Grail Knights – The Calicem Servi
The Grail Knights or Calicem Servi are the pinnacle of Holy Knighthood attainable by a mortal being. They epitomise absolute faith and unquestionable piety combined with incredible courage, skill at arms and the greatest heights of honour and chivalry. As well as this, many are deeply skilled in Philosophy, Theology, History and Poetry. To join the Grail Knights is the greatest achievement of which most Knights can conceive. Each one has proven themselves the first of heroes on multiple fields and the truest servants of Azathoth in the greatest tests of faith.
The Grail Knights serve the Fissure King and the Grail in which he holds the Black Seed of Azathoth. It is this seed which provides much of the growth and fecundity of the Eclipsed Kingdom. It is also the direct and literal body of God.
To even be accepted as a supplicant a potential Grail Knight must enter the presence of the Grail and ask its Question. What the question is, and how it is asked, must be discovered by the Knight. Many knights who were sure they knew the Question found themselves unable to ask it in the presence of the Grail as they were spiritually impure, and some who had no idea of it before they saw the Grail itself, found the Question leap into their minds in its presence due to their Faith and the will of God.
There is little shame to failing the Test of the Grail and many famous and heroic knights have failed. To be stricken dumb before divinity is simply the natural reaction of a mortal being.
The Grail Knights guard the Grail and have the ultimate duty of securing living foetuses for the annual gift to Azathoth (may he await us but a little longer).
They ride horses of enormous strength and, unlike most orders of Knighthood, wear metal armour. This metal is marked with the black Verdigris of Azathoth, a sacred decay which forms an eight-pointed star. Each holy act performed for the True God creates another spot of decay upon the armour, which gradually spreads its arms over time. Only when the armour is completely black will the supplicant be considered a full Grail Knight. Once it is full-sable, this holy decay inures the armour against all manner of harms, magical, mortal and divine.
Through their daily and continual prayer and contemplation the Grail Knights are gifted a tiny fraction of the Power of God. It is said they can, by considering the distance between two places and deciding that it does not exist, effectively teleport to any place they have not already been. (Once they have been there they are too aware that it is real and the same method will not work.) That they can, by selectively ignoring a law of nature, choose the relative direction of gravity that applies to them, effectively galloping their horses up walls or across ceilings (or up the walls of the Great Fissure). That they can summon enormous strength to bash down doors or fell giants, (by ignoring the mass and substance of the target) that they can make themselves invulnerable to harm and time, that they can choose to ignore the reality of certain objects or concepts, making them unable to effect the knight at all.
However, a Grail Knight may only do one of these things at a time.
There have never been known to be more than 100 Grail Knights and their total numbers are probably much lower. Their arms are an argent cup on a sable field.

Silent Knights – The Ordinis Carcere
The Silent Knights or Ordinis Carcere are the servants and heralds of the Sleeping King. Generally they obey his Half-Sister, the Sorceress Esmerillon, but technically they take their orders only from him and, should he contact them himself in a dream, or if they believe he has done so, a conflict may emerge between the two authorities, as it did in the tragic ‘Schism of Virgins’ which nearly brought the Eclipsed Kingdom into a state of full civil war. (Only averted by Saint Widhewo, see ‘Saints of the Black Church).
The Silent Knights are the largest of the high orders of Chivalry, numbering several hundred, perhaps a thousand individuals. While nominally equal they are broken up into several ‘circles’ or levels of hierarchy based on experience and general capacity.
The primary purpose and duty of the Silent Knights is to guard the Court of the Sleeping King and at any time at least one third of the Order is present there. In relation to this, they must keep the court continually supplied with bards who will be chained in the presence of the King to pipe tunelessly and preserve his sleeping state. The bards wear out relatively quickly and their ruined husks are cast aside meaning that the Silent Knights must quest continually for more bards to fill the hall. Since the bardic population of the Eclipsed Kingdom was exhausted some centuries ago, a large proportion of the Silent Knights are on permanent mission in other realms, either buying, or capturing bards to bring back.
The final duty of the Silent Knights is the source of their second name, the Ordinis Carcere. Since the Eclipsed Kingdom subsists on labour provided by those who dream in dungeons all over the world, it is the job of the Carcere to make sure that as many people as possible, in as many places as possible, spend as much time as possible sleeping in dungeons. This can lead to them ‘hiring out’ to outside kingdoms to hunt and bring back prisoners and bounties so long as they are imprisoned, and even assisting dungeoneers or adventurers who intend to penetrate very deep underground complexes. (They are also suspected of bricking up or caving in the entrances to those dungeons once enough people are inside).
This makes them the most familiar face of the Eclipsed Kingdom to those outside its borders and has given them a reputation as ruthless and effective bounty hunters and thief-takers, true servants of law and authority, with very reasonable rates. (The money is irrelevant to the Ordinis Carcere, all they care about is the punishment.)
Despite being great in number, the Ordinis Carcere are still individually very powerful, noble and dangerous knights, though less supernaturally empowered than the Calicem Servi or the Ut Tenebrae. To gain entry to the order is by no means simple and only the greatest and most loyal need apply.
The Silent Knights wear pale white bone china plate over a mail of white lilly-petals held together with silver thread. They have cloaks of white-mouse fur. They are usually allowed to use their own weapons and these tend to be glass or porcelain. They are allowed to keep their own arms, in part, their shields are bisected with one half being the original symbol and background and the other being half a half-closed purpura eye on a sable field.
It is by the grace of the Sleeping King that the Silent Knights are afforded their first, or common name. So long as they choose to make no sound, they will make no sound at all. That is, if they do not speak or deliberately make a noise in any way, all of their movement or actions, whether mounted or unmounted, in whatever weather or conditions, will be utterly and absolutely noiseless. Should a Carcerebreak their oath, they must return to the Sleeping King and be shriven before they are allowed to re-take it.
Silent Knights often keep halfling, goblin or crippled jongluers and fools to speak for them to the outside world. The knights communicate amongst themselves in sign and the higher circles are said to have their lips stitched shit and their tongues removed.


The Lesser Orders of Knighthood

Knights of the Autumn Court
The Riders of Air and Darkness
The Sons of Air and Darkness are the personally selected champions of Queen Mab when she is in her Autumn Court. They can be an extremely unusual and eclectic group, the Queen is whimsical in her selections and it is by no means unusual for interesting visitors to her court to find themselves geased into this Order of Chivalry for a specific quest, despite having nothing obvious to do with it.
The stories of the Riders of Air and Darkness are extremely varied, and often picaresque. Despite their unusual membership, they do have a reputation for solving problems and meeting challenges, though rarely in any way that might be expected. They have been defeated and driven off numerous times, only for the long term result of their failure to assist the Autumn Court. They have also won against insane odds numerous times, despite being made up of verifiable nutbars and a bunch of people who happened to be hanging around. They are very often miniaturised, either to fight important battles in the Small Realms, to fulfil important quests at the miniature scale, or for tactical usefulness when dealing with creatures of the sizeable realms.
Often these riders are enchanted with particular powers, and given highly particular conditions under which they must quest. They might give the ability to ride through the air at night, but told they must bake a pigeon pie each day (a challenge considering the Oath of Saint Vish), or given the ability to transform into shadows, but told they must complete their quest each dressed in one particular colour, and no other.
The arms of the Riders of Air and Darkness are sanguine leaves patterned on a sable field and anyone who has served in this Order may include the sanguine leaf in their arms. Those who do always have an interesting story to tell.

The Knights of the Silver Bough
The Knights of the Silver Bough were the order that, long, long ago, educated the man who would become the Sleeping King in chivalry and knighthood. When he fought to unite the shattered realms that would become the Eclipsed Kingdom, they were the first order to support him and many of the future orders of chivalry were based on their example.
It is only this storied and ancient lineage, along with the protection of the Queen of Air and Darkness, that has kept the order of the Silver Bough safe from the Black Church.
Once they were the only force for justice and mercy in a merciless and ruined land and now, in the heart of an insane and shattered reality watched by a mad god, they still try to perform that role. Despite the fact that, as members of the Autumn Court, they owe fealty to Queen Mab, and that through her they are sworn to the true faith, they are widely suspected of heresy, (especially by the Monks of St Korbin).
The Order is made up almost exclusively of Fey and of a few aged knights from small but once-proud families with ancient histories. Among its human and half-elven members, the principals of the order are passed down only from father to son and many of the mortal members were formally adopted into fey families and educated by them.
The arms of the Knights of the Silver Bough are an argent bough on a dark-sanguine field.
The Church suspects that the Knights of the Silver Bough are in some way connected to an even-more secret and much smaller order called ‘The Order of the Fall’, either that they are the highest circle of the Knights of the Silver Bough, or some kind of radical splinter faction.

The Order of the Fall
The Order of the Fall are knights aligned with the Autumn Court who have become fractured in time. They live their entire lives with full knowledge of their whole existence and exact knowledge of their own deaths.
Because a member of the Order of the Fall is aware of everything they will do and experience, if, in the later period of their life, they meet a much younger member of the order, that young person can give them messages from their own life, telling them of things that will occur even after their death.
This process can be repeated multiple times in sequence, across multiple lifetimes, with one member passing knowledge gained from their own future ‘back up’ the chain in the form of a story or advice, with the details becoming more accurate and pertinent the closer the chain of knights comes to the described event.
There is a sense in which this has already happened, as each knight knows in full what message they will receive and which they will bestow, but that does not mean it still hasto happen. Each knight must fulfil their destiny, even if it is a dark and paradoxical one, so that the chain of transmission is not broken.
The Order of the Fall is looking for a way to defeat Azathoth, and may already be enacting a plan to do so, one stretching across a millennia of autumns.
This Order has no arms as its existence is a closely guarded secret. The secret sign of membership is allowing a single leaf to fall from the hand and not breathing or moving until it touches the ground.

Knights of the Winter Court
In winter, the court of Queen Mab becomes a much darker and more savage place. The poetry and ballads of the Nuns of Fogamar gives way to the plainsong of the Nuns of Eusia. Manners become sharper, faults more lethal and humours more cold.
Legally and in feudal terms, the Queen Mab of the Winter Court is entirely different to the Queen Mab of the Autumn court. Loyalty to one is not loyalty to another, friendship with one is not friendship with another. The two courts can oppose each other, though they will never meet.
Anyone working for the Autumn or Winter court is well advised to finish their quest before the season changes.

The Knights of Hearts Desire
The Knights of Hearts Desire ride horses which seem to have been bred with Pertytons. Through they have no wings and cannot fly, they have horns, the heads of stags and the shadows of evil men. They are sharply intelligent and eat only hearts.
The knights who ride upon them serve the Queen of Air and Darkness directly, though usually in a rather brutal way. They are said to be men without mercy, through not without honour. They love to hunt through the snows, chasing the winter fox and arctic hare for mile upon mile, tireless, until they pin them down and tear them open in the snow, feeding their terrible horses on their tiny hearts.
They hunt men, or women, just as well, and those who offend the Winter Court should fear for there is usually only one sentence or judgement given in this season.
The arms of the Knights of Hearts Desire are a heart of Or on a field of Gules.


The Band of Frost
The Band of Frost are a select group of fey and insane men whose hearts are as cold as ice. They breathe ice crystals and icicles hang tinkling from the horns of their horses. When a horse of this band places its hoof upon flowing water, the water will freeze solid instantly, meaning they can gallop across flowing rivers, or even oceans.
The Band of Frost come mainly in the dark, they are agents and carriers of madness. It is said that their arrival is heralded by a face of frost in glass, a crude image that melts into a scream.
They are claimed to be illusionists, capable of casting visions and sensations into the minds of their quarry, even if far away. They may create the image of a safe village or familiar town, or a friendly castle with a brawny and cheery lord, so that those they hunt will stop fleeing, thinking they have found safety, only to slowly realise, as the places and people around them decay into deranged impressions, that they are talking and dancing with no one, chewing on twigs instead of roast beef, in a cave and not a hall, that a face of frost is forming on the cave wall.
The Band of Frost are followed by huge primordial wolves from an age of ice. Each wolf is blinded in both eyes with an iron nail and the red rust from the nails runs down their grey snouts. The wolves will speak in a low growling voice and will promise to let their quarry go if they only pull one nail from their eye. This is not true.
Unlike the Knights of Hearts Desire, the Band of Frost do not hunt for specific reasons. They hunt whoever they wish, however they wish, for whatever mad reasons come into their head, though they are still sworn to obey the Queen of Air and Darkness and, if she orders them directly to harm, or not harm, a particular person or group, they must obey.
Of course this might mean actually finding the Queen of the Winter Court and persuading her to care about whether you live or die, and she is neither as interested in the world, or as merciful as the Queen of the Autumn Court.
The arms of the Band of Frost are indecipherable. They seem obscured or somehow blurred and no-one can quite make out what they may once have meant.

Knights of the Iron Sands
The iron sands of the Eclipsed Kingdom were once the empire of the Lammasu Suleiman and his sorceress Shedu queen. They ruled a nation of centaurs and many crusades were fought to evict them from the holy lands of the Eclipsed Kingdom. Though their former country was gifted to the Emir of Crows as thanks for her aid in the wars, these Haeretici Deserto still trouble the penumbral zones today.
The following orders serve the Emir of Crows in the Iron Sands.
The Crow Knights
The Crow Knights (the name now applies exclusively to these knights and not to anything else, see ‘the oath of Saint Vish), ride fleet black horses with rams horns who race over the desert sands like shadows fleeing the sun.
The speed of their steeds is legendary and the Crow Knights are famed in the Eclipsed Kingdom for being experts with their compound bows, archery usually being a tertiary skill amongst the chivalry.
The Crow Knights serve the Emir of Crows by fulfilling her hunger for broken hearts. They range all over the world for the specific purpose of breaking them. This is a more specifically difficult thing than is commonly understood. At least one of the principals must be in a state of True Love and either be betrayed, bereaved, abandoned or ignored, or think they have been, so that their heart breaks.
This being done, a Crow Knight will offer to take away their pain. If they accept, the Crow Knight will reach into their chest and pull out pieces of their broken heart. They will never love again, or feel the pain of lost love.
The simplest way is to kill the less-loving lover, but if the other principal finds out the Crow Knight was responsible, they may refuse to deal. Another simple way is seduction, but young girls can be unreliable and, though they can be easily hurt, they may not fall fully into True Love.
For these reasons, the Crow Knights of the Iron Sands are experts in the social aspects of knighthood. They are deeply courtly, perceptive, intelligent, sensitive, multilingual and well-attuned to political and social situations.
The pieces of the broken hearts go first to the Emir of Crows, who eats them, (they are the only meal she can digest), then the remainder are traded to the rest of the Eclipsed Kingdom where they make up a large part of the magical economy. Many spells can be improved or assisted with a piece of a broken heart, a whole heart can cast a low version of ‘limited wish’ if the magician is willing to fully destroy it and fey, and goblinish savants, will always accept pieces of a broken heart as payment, even if they will take nothing else.
The Crow Knights do not have a coat of arms like northern knights, instead they have round shields with silver script running around their edges giving their family, descent and name. These are always written in code so that victims cannot trace a knight who offended them.

The Bottle Knights
When the Emir of Crows arrived in the Iron Sands she found the place overrun with Centaurs and Genies. The Centaurs were sworn to a heretical king and, unlike the fey of the central kingdom, the Genies were rarely willing to listen to the gospel of the True God.
She used one problem to solve the other and the most intelligent of her followers became the first Bottle Knights, her primary weapon against the Centaurs of Suleiman.
Bottle Knights are, magicians, scholars or magically-knowledgeable individuals. Each one rides a tamed and captured Genie bound in the form of a steed. When the knights stop to rest, the genies go back in their bottles, only to be decanted when needed, hence the name.
Every kind of Genie may be captured by the Bottle Knights and the nature of the steed they ride can depends on the personality and nature of the djinn they have bound. Efrits tend to create fierce black-haired red-eyed horses, suitable for combat and war, Marid create bluish camels, Dao make stocky, slow but incredibly strong ponies and the most prized, Djinn, form grey or white racers of incredible grace and speed.
The genies hate their captors but they are securely held by the contracts formed by the Bottle Knights. The knights themselves are famous for their wisdom, intelligence, cunning and jurisprudence. They often act as lawyers in the Eclipsed Kingdom.
The steeds of the Bottle Knights are capable of performing certain magical and extra-natural actions on command, depending on the kind of Genie and its power, but the knights themselves must always be extremely careful and utterly precise in their instructions as, if they find a loophole, the genie will either flee, or turn upon their master.
Like the Crow Knights, the Bottle Knights have no coat of arms, they are quite distinctive though and, of course, each one always carries their bottle.

Other Orders
The Knights of Misrule
The Court of Misrule was begun by the bastard son of the Sleeping King and still serves its descendants. It occupies the fortress-town of Carnaticum and the place is consumed by an unending masque, a party from which none may flee.
In Carnaticum the low are raised high and the high are brought low. The ugly, hideous and churlish are placed in positions of honour and the noble, beautiful and well-bred are masked and pantomime obedience.
In reality of course invisible lines of power run through the never-ending masque and the descendants of the sleeping king jockey continually with each other for power. The place is violent and decadent, consumed with paranoia, derangement and glamour. No-one can ever be totally certain who anybody else is and everyone operates under multiple levels of identity and deception. Fortunes can be made in a day, love affairs made and broken in hours. The black bargemen of the Carnis river who come to the docks (but no further) every morning, never fail to receive fresh bodies for them to take away, dead either from suicide, syphilis, poison or stiletto wounds. And, more rarely, killed in duels or jousts.
Knights venture out from this court, sometimes on the typical feudal business of a knight, and sometimes to fulfil inane, poetical or ridiculous bets, challenges or riddles, things which, in the Court of Misrule, can be routes to power and wealth, or traps and the final acts of long plots which lead only to destruction.
Knights familiar with the Court of Misrule habitually go masked and affect the motley of jesters, wearing bells and multi-coloured stripes and cheques. The common people are terrified of these riders and they have a reputation as ruthless and crude assassins, hunting and killing either for coin or for obscure and riddlesome causes of their own.

The Iron Men
Despite the Eclipsed Kingdom being a very repressive patriarchy in which the gender roles are both extreme and separate, knights often behave in a way that could be considered…. fey. Often because they are fey, and more generally because a certain degree of swanning around and mooning about with poetry is considered pretty normal for a noble man. The standards of beauty also tend strongly towards the feminine, with slenderness, smoothness and grace in dress being considered noble male qualities.
For everyone that is, except the Iron Men. They are one of the few groups in the Eclipsed Kingdom who behave in a way that a modern observer would regard as typically masculine. They make quite an extreme point of it in fact, and are one of the only standard bearers for ‘real’ masculinity in the Kingdom. They like beards, brawn, boasting, wrestling and chopping wood and they will not let anyone forget it. They are extremely sensitive and utterly humourless about all of this.
Absolutely no-one in the Eclipsed Kingdom cares at all about their rather strained performance of masculinity and they would persist as nothing more than a fringe group if it were not for their very anti-fey stance. The Iron Men stand for manhood and humanity against the perversions and quasi-femininity of the Fey kind.
The fact that almost everyone in the Eclipsed Kingdom has at least a drop of Fey blood has had no effect on the small, but continual, membership of the Iron Men. Some guys are just into that, regardless of the circumstances. Some Fey are even into that, though that does tend to creep people out a bit.
The Iron Men wear iron armour, which they allow to develop a layer of rust. They carry iron weapons (and wooden sticks to beat away churl beasts when they get close) and their horses are shod in iron. They serve a lord named Iron John who lives in a castle of rusted iron beneath the surface of a lake and who has red skin and a mane of white hair and who is usually boldly naked. Absolutely everyone in the Eclipsed Kingdom thinks Iron John is just a really weird fey except the Iron Men who think he is just so masculine and powerful that he seemslike a fey to those who do not understand.
The popularity of the Iron Men ticks along at the bottom of the social scale until particularly savage winters, when the Winter Court is at its most dangerous, or in other circumstances where fey are acting as a real threat, in which case they become just-about-tolerable. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Red Knights
A red knight is one that has taken the Red Oath and sworn anti-fealty, promising to accept no order and serve no lord. This done, they paint their armour bright red and, usually, take up a form of banditry in a forest somewhere.
The nature of the Red Oath is that, for as long as the swearer takes every challenge given, accepts no order and shows no loyalty, they cannot be harmed by any order given or by or through any feudal loyalty.
This means that if a lord hears that a Red Knight has taken up residence near their castle and is preying upon travellers and churls nearby, they cannot order any of their Knights to deal with it. Neither can they simply describe the situation to their already-loyal knights and hope that they deal with it as this means the Red Knight is likely to be invulnerable to them too.
The chivalric logic of the Red Oath is that it means feudal lords will be faced with problems which they must deal with personally. The lord can’t order anyone to go out there, but they can go and fight themselves, one-on-one, as a knight should. Therefore the nobility stays strong and does not rest on its laurels. It also ensures that even very poor knights have some redress against the most powerful of lords. As it is very difficult for Red Knights to team up or league with anyone (they cannot show mutual loyalty or agree to take any order) and since the fact that they can never be loyal means very few people will willingly follow them, this limits the damage that they can do and assures that they exist only in ones or two’s.
In practice there are a variety of ways of dealing with the problem, including quietly hiring mercenaries on the side (a good job for adventurers), tricking the Red Knight into accepting some token of obedience or showing loyalty to someone, or simply capturing them (they cannot be harmed but they can be caught) and dumping them into a prison, or in a cage under the surface of a lake.

The League Of Honour!  
(The exclamation mark is part of the name.) The League of Honour is made up exclusively of Goblins riding pigs. They quest endlessly for truth, justice and the welfare of maidens, widows, orphans and the oppressed. They are generally despised, even by the low status churls for whom they are often the only knights who are willing to help. Even the dung-man doesn’t want his daughter rescued by a fucking Goblin.

The Knights of St Gorgoth
The first knight of Saint Gorgoth (see Saints of the Black Church) was said to be one of those who came upon the dead body of that saint and formed the order in his memory. Most histories place those knights as exclusively the Calicem Servi so this is probably bullshit.
The Knights of Saint Gorgoth are a solid, conservative and well-established order with no strictures more difficult than that of generally being a knight. They do a great deal of mutual congratulation, secret handshaking, toasting each others self-control, congratulating each other on their modesty and courage and generally making quite a show of being knightly.
To get in you need to sponsorship of a current member, to preferably be from a good family and it helps to have done something publicly brave and chivalrous. On a handful of occasions the order will promote someone purely on the basis of being a good knight, on the same basis that the British honours system will occasionally reward someone for doing something worthwhile just so the whole enterprise doesn’t end up looking too much like the mutual back-slapping exercise it very evidently is. Still, entry to the order can be a useful thing for a young and upcoming knight.
The symbol of the order is not any part of a Coat of arms, but a black snakeskin worn as a baldric. They have the longest, most drawn out and most ritualised swearing-in ritual of all the orders of knighthood, even the verifiably-magical ones. They also have the most elaborate and convoluted hierarchy with fifteen circles of seniority and three ‘houses’.

Saints of the Black Church

Saint Gorgoth
It was shortly after the Apocalypse war, when the Eclipsed Kingdom was only recently eclipsed and when the Black Church was freshly founded when an arch-heretic from a foreign land presumed to rob God of his sacrifice and endanger, not only the Eclipsed Kingdom, but the whole world.
This heretic defeated all Knights sent against him and nearly escaped with the young lady before, at the borders of the Kingdom Saint Gorgoth fell upon him. The two battled for many hours and Gorgoth was pierced many times with lance and sword. Despite this, his faith in Azathoth never faltered. When the first Grail Knights found his corpse, his black blood. and that of heretic was spread over half a mile of mountain. They feared that the Gift of Azathoth had escaped but, listening, they heard her cry.
With his last act, Gorgoth had taken her into his cavernous maw but, crucially, not swallowed her. There she remained, trapped behind his sword-like teeth as if behind prison bars. The Grail Knights were able to retrieve her and, before she gave birth, they took her to the Cathedral of the Black Pope and her foetus was removed and the first sacrifice offered to Azathoth, thus assuaging his divine anger for another year.
All praise to Saint Gorgoth, he whose faith never faltered and which was able to overcome even his own near-infinite hunger. Truly the greatness of the Lord is beyond any earthly accounting.
Gorgoth is held by all Knights of the Eclipsed Kingdom as a symbol of courage, loyalty, self-control and faith in God, all of the most central and powerful elements of chivalry, and for that reason, is considered the epitome of Knighthood. (see ‘Orders of Chivalry).
Though there are many more Knights of Saint Gorgoth than Monks of Saint Gorgoth, there is a small order, occupying only one small monastery, whose speciality is the Language and Behaviour of Wyrms.
(Most Knights of Saint Gorgoth are surprised to find out that this order of monks exists, and disappointed to find them extremely dull and concerned only with the language and history of lizards, Wyrms and Snakes.)
The sign of Saint Gorgoth (for Monks) is a curled black dragon pierced by many barbs and his monks wear the common black habit of the clergy.


Saint Eusia
It was the Lady Eusia who learnt the language of the wind and preached the gospel of Azathoth to the snow itself, thereby converting the Winter Court, and the Queen of Air and Darkness in her Winter self, to His worship. She also preached the Apocalypse through Light, predicting that the end would come through a blinding effulgence.
Because of this, her memory is sacred to the Winter Court and the habits of her nuns are white, like the snow. The Nuns serve as ambassadors to the Queen of Air and Darkness during Winter and it is claimed the greatest of that order has cold skin, walks barefoot on the snow and cannot feel the cold. The Abbess of the order has a formal position on the Winter Court.
The sign of Saint Eusia is a Blue Hand on a white background and she is associated with Wind, Cold, Languages and freezing to death.

Saint Korbin
It was Saint Korbin who preached and lead the great crusade against Summer, thereby driving that rebellious and heretical season and the court thereof beyond the boundaries of the Eclipsed Kingdom. By his great efforts Summer has never come again.
In the reported words of the Black Pope Herself, the Monks of Saint Korbin are “Bearded, bald, intolerant, illiterate and strict. An iron rod in the hands of the church”. They maintain an oath of illiteracy, passing on the Gospel of Azathoth through speech from monk to monk. Their hymns are mighty, dark and terrifying to hear. They keep a constant watch for any evidence of the return of Summer. They were the only order to argue for the total destruction of the Spring Court instead of its imprisonment and they regard any evidence of Spring, Birds or Heresy as clear evidence of slipping moral standards in the Eclipsed Kingdom.
Though they are not anOrder Militaris the Monks of St Korbin will give their blessing to the few knights who meet their very high, and very strict standards of faith and behaviour.
The sign of Saint Korbin is a black sword piercing a yellow sun and he is associated with strength in piety and endless warfare against the so-called 'natural' forces of the outer world. His monks wear a rough habit of black rope or wool and go barefoot.

Saint Sceadwian
It was Sceadwian in his position as Holy Judge of the Black Assizes who broke the back of Spring, imprisoning its Court beneath the earth until God should descend and ensuring the Eclipsed Kingdom would be all but free of this criminal, heretical and rebellious Season.
For this reason the Monks of Saint Scaedwian are allowed to incorporated the colour green (usually a criminal colour) into their habits. It is common for a Monk of that order to have a habit bisected down the centre, with one half green, the other black.
The Monks of Saint Sceadwian are famed for their knowledge of canon law and most Judges of the Eclipsed Kingdom, either secular or religious either are or were a member of the order, were educated by them or are advised by one.
The sign of Sceadwian is a tree with one half green with leaves and the other bare. He is associated with the fair and indifferent judgement of god and the church and with opposition to the terroristic and criminal Court of Spring.

Saint Fogamar
It was the sacred Abbess Fogamar who preached the gospel of Azathoth to the Autumn Court and to the Queen of Air and Darkness in her Autumn self, converting them to His worship. (The Queen had already been converted in her Winter self by Saint Eusia.) The Nuns of Fogamar are ambassadors to the Autumn Court and the Abbess of the Order has a formal place in that Court which she must exchange yearly with the Abbess of the Order of Eusia.
Saint Fogamar converted the Autumn Court through poetry, (her seventeen sacred psalms are recorded in full in The Book of Fogamar), and for that reason the order is well respected by Knights for that chivalric value and sometimes sought after for Feathersmithed swords and shields.
The nuns of Fogamar wear a standard black habit and veil but they are allowed to carry and play instruments, so long as they are only of wood, are stringed and have no neck. There have been accusations that Bards have escaped the Calicem Servi by retreating to the Nuns of Fogamar and joining the order and relations between the two groups are strained for this reason.
(Though they are not an Order Militaris, there have been, famously, Seventeen Knights of Saint Fogamar, each of whom bore feathersmithed arms and armour poetised with lines from one of the seventeen sacred psalms. Each set was unique and the Knights did various heroic deeds before being lost to time and mischance. The seventeen sets of arms and armour they bore are still at missing somewhere in the world and if re-assembled, the Knights of Saint Fogamar could potentially ride again.)
The faithful of the Nuns of Fogamar cannot truly die of age, they only dry out, shrink and wizen like Autumn trees, growing knobbly and black. Old nuns are placed in the Abbeys Autumn Maze where they stay unmoving, gradually becoming smaller, more shrunken and woodlike, often mistaken for roots.
Fogamars sign is a Lyre. The habits of her nuns are a very dark brown, lined with autumnal red. She is sacred to the writers and divine poets of the Church and is revered by the Autumn Court.

Saint Culix
The Half-Elf Saint who preached to the Magicians, the gender of Culix is unknown, as are details of exactly what he or she preached. They were known to be a potent Magic-User and a servant or apprentice of the Lady Esmerillon, half-sister of, and Sorcerer to, the Sleeping King.
Most versions of the Book of Culix suggested that he, or she, converted the magicians through a combination of philosophy, trickery, riddles, force and promises of magical power. The common lay story holds that Culix attempted every method possible to move the weak faith of the Sorcerers and expended tremendous force in attempting to compel them, but only ultimately found success through trickery, as the Sorcerers respected the multifarious cunning of his, or her, schemes and agreed that only someone with divine inspiration could have produced them.
The monks, and nuns of Saint Culix, wear standard habits of black, but are allowed to embroider the insides of their outer cloaks with sliver signs of their magical capacities. Most members are magic users and scholars of some kind and their Priory’s and Monasteries are even more extra-dimensional than most places in the Eclipsed Kingdom.
The sign of Saint Culix is a bolt of lightning twisting back on its own path. Sometimes Culix him, or herself is shown grinning. They are either being accidentally struck by their own spell or cunningly warding off someone else’s spell. The exact status of the lightning and its relation to the saint is part of the Mystery of Saint Culix.
Culix is sacred to Magicians and Sorcerers of all kinds, or at least they claim he is to the Monks of Saint Korbin when they come knocking.

Saint Szyszczak
The child saint who converted the wise to Azathoth with her sacred screams, which blotted out all rational thought and revealed the primordial and absolute reality of nothingness.
In the early years of the Black Church, many holy men and philosophers came to debate the new Priests of Azathoth (in between mutual crusades and counter-crusades). They thought to use their legalistic and abstract tools of rhetoric to sow doubt in the minds of the holy and to overturn the word of god and at the time some of the freshly-enlightened were not yet wise enough themselves in the ways of the world to refute them, and some did doubt.
Then Szysczak came among them. She was but a child at the time but she was rich in Faith. She spoke not to the heretics, nor did she argue, but revealed the Pure Truth of Azathoth through her divine and continual scream.
·        On the first day of her scream, many doubted her and tried to dissuade her. They said amongst themselves “why is this girl screaming?” and “why is she here?”·        On the second day of her scream, some fled.·        On the third day of her scream, the heretics said amongst themselves “she is soon to die, for no-one, man or beast, can scream continually for four days and live”.·        On the fourth day of her screaming, yea, many of the heretics pleaded and begged with her to stop, and many wept, yet the faithful were emboldened.·        On the fifth day of her screaming, all fell silent and some went mad for they felt the eye of the Lord upon them.·        But on the sixth day, they Saw and were converted to the True God, and wept bloody tears of joy for they had seen the Darkness Beyond All Things.
The Nuns of Saint Szyszczak are famous for their screaming sermons and, at the alter of Szyszczak, there has been a continual scream, renewed in shifts, ever since the Saint Herself walked the earth.
The nuns of Saint Szyszczak are permitted habits of dark and bloody red and she has many lay members, the Flagellants of Szyszczak, who follow in their path. Her symbol is a screaming mouth.



Saint Fugol
Saint Fugol preached and lead one of the Regrettable Crusades and is both famous, and infamous for this. His actions lead directly to the Oath of Saint Vish (see below).
Due to their heresy, their greed and their indifference to law, Saint Fugol preached against the birds, and all the creatures of the air. He was able to summon enough support for this cause amongst the Churls and Chivalry to launch a Crusade against the Air.
The crusade met with initial success but, after several million birds had been destroyed and driven off, there came a plague of bugs which consumed more of the kingdoms crops than the birds ever had. St Fugol intensified his preaching, promising that he would locate the heretical Parliament of the Birds and bring it to heel. His entire crusade was enchanted and galloped up into the sky.
No-one is sure what happened in the sky but seven days later the crusade returned to the Eclipsed Kingdom with enormous velocity and power, splattering knights all over the countryside, causing enormous damage to life and limb and annihilating two thirds of the Chivalry (either through falling or impact damage) of the entire realm. It was judged, (by Saint Vish, see below) that Saint Fugol had preached a False Crusade, causing Azathoth to turn His eye from His knights. However, the initial part of the crusade was never formally abjured and so his presence as a Saint of Azathoth remains.
A small Monastic Order of Saint Fugol perseveres, believing that he battles even now against the evil Parliament of the Birds, (his body was never found), and that only through his courage and sacrifice does the Eclipsed Kingdom endure this menace. They do still maintain some small support as it is unquestionably true that the unspeakable creatures of the air are a minor, but uncontrollable source of heresy in the Eclipsed Kingdom.
Saint Fugol’s sign is a Broken Wing and the habits of his Monks are lined with feathers, but the Chivalry abjure his order due to the disaster of the Aerial Crusade and the Oath of Saint Vish.

Saint Vish
It was Lady Vish who proposed what come to be known as ‘The Oath of Saint Vish’ in which no man of the Eclipsed Kingdom would allow themselves to recognise the reality, substance, nature or existence of the creatures known as ‘Birds’.
In the deep shock and sorrow following the Crusade Against the Air, almost every remaining male in the Eclipsed Kingdom took the oath and, since then, no man has directly acknowledged the existence of birds or, as they are known to the church, the Avis Invernalis.
This, and the continued existence of Aerial Threats, lead to the creation of the Nuns of Saint Vish, the Order of the Bird-Murderers, or Avis Infernalis Interfectores. This order is the closest that the Eclipsed Kingdom comes to an Order Militaris of women. They are an armed group which supports the battle against, and destruction of, the menace of birds or “wing’d beings” of any kind in the Eclipsed Kingdom. It is an endless and brutally-fought conflict which can never be fully recognised by the authorities as each man has sworn never to acknowledge the existence of the creatures against which the order fights.
The Nuns of Saint Vish commonly do not wear habits, finding these impactable in their work. Instead they go lightly armoured on mules and carry the symbol of the Black Claw reaching Upwards from the Earth.

Saint Widhewo
When, during the ‘Schism of Virgins’ an almost total breakdown of communication and trust between the Lady Esmerillon and the Silent Knights began to factionalise the kingdom, leading it to the brink of total civil war, (As opposed to the near-continual wars of oppression, suppression and succession which make up part of its common background), it was the wisdom of Saint Widhewo that unified the two parties and returned peace to the Eclipsed Kingdom.
It is said that Widhewo travelled himself, alone, either in reality or dream, into the presence of Azathoth himself and there was given knowledge to repair the kingdom.
Whatever gospel was bestowed upon Widhewo to preach, it was too much for a mortal mind to comprehend without breaking and his first sermon in the Court of the Sleeping King killed nine in ten of those present, caused the King to turn in his sleep, savagely maimed the Lady Esmerillon, sending her into shock for fifty years and drove most of those who remained mad.
After his sermon resolved the Schism of Virgins, Saint Widhewo was taken away by the Grail Knights and kept in the Monastery of Mazes. He was served directly by the totally mad, who communicated his words to the partially mad, who gave them to the slightly mad, who repeated them to the Eccentric Laity. For this reason he is called ‘The Lonely Saint’. Though Saint Widhewo himself has Returned to Azathoth, his Monks continue the organisation he gave them, being lead by the most mad and praying still inside his maze.
The Sign of Saint Widhewo is a skull with flowers for eyes and his Monks are permitted to wear whatever they think necessary at any time, though the Eccentric Laity to usually wear habits of deep black.

Saint Adiaphor
Adiaphor is a minor saint. As a Knight he was carried off, fully armoured, including his mount, by one of the Avis Infernalis of gigantic size. All present at the time remarked on how fully Adiaphor held to the Oath of Saint Vish, he looked neither up nor down, nor acknowledged the gigantic claws grasping him, neither did his expression or demeanour change but he continued to spur his horse to gallop, looking straight ahead, as if nothing had taken place.
When the Nuns of Saint Vish eventually defeated the Avis Infernalis in question and recovered his body from its mountain eerie, they found it miraculously unchanged. He was still atop his loyal steed, still staring directly ahead, still smiling vaguely, and quite dead, though uneaten.
This was hailed as a Sign from Azathoth for only That One can master such total indifference to either life or death.
Saint Adiaphor is hailed by Knights as the Saint of Divine Impassivity. He also has a small order of monks who do not care about anything. Their habits are black originally, but become grey with dust and webs over time. His symbol is a half-closed eye.

Saint Dröm
The Moon-Blue saint or the Dreaming Saint, Saint Dröm was a dungeon dreamer from a distant realm who found himself incarnated in the Eclipsed Kingdom due to the power of the Sleeping King.
Though he occupied the lowest of positions the seed of True Faith burned in his heart. Saint Dröm attended to the sermons of the Black Church, and he did more than attend, he questioned the priests closely, asking them ever more penetrating and revealing questions as to the nature of God.
Though he was but a churl, and a dreamer to boot, the priests were impressed with the seriousness of Dröm’s attention and, over time, the answers to his questions brought him further and further up the hierarchy of the church until he stood before the Thirteen Cardinals of the Black Church themselves.
Seven of the Cardinals advised that Saint Dröm be permanently and repeatedly executed for daring to come before them, but, before the vote was counted, the Black Pope herself, the Pontifex Nigrum in Tenebras Exteriores, came amongst them. She spoke directly to Saint Dröm and the power of her presence was so great that he fell upon the ground and swore faith in Azathoth forever more.
At that moment he disappeared, and he did not return.
It was assumed at the time that Saint Dröm had probably died from a heart attack after witnessing the near-divine presence of the Black Pope, or that he had simply been woken in the dungeon he slept in and had been released.
It was only much later that news of Saint Dröm reached the Eclipsed Kingdom. Dröm was the imprisoned heir to a mighty empire in a distant land. His parents had been assassinated when he was but a babe and he had been blinded and cast into the darkness to eat bugs and lick slime from the walls. After a series of sanguine civil conflicts wiped out most of that empires nobility, Dröm was released from his dungeon and restored to the throne as the Blind Emperor.
The people of that empire were astounded at his learning and composure for he had been kept hidden in the dark for all of his life yet he spoke like an educated man and seemed well informed on matters theological and philosophical. The people rejoiced at this for they saw it as a consequence of his Imperial blood.
In fact, these were the lessons of the Eclipsed Kingdom and of the Black Church. Saint Dröm never forgot what he had learned in the kingdom of the Sleeping King, he did not apostatise his faith in Azathoth, but neither did he reveal it. Instead he waited and ruled wisely, slowly seeking out those who might be receptive to the True Faith and building shadow networks inside the state.
Invisibly he embroiled the Empire in various conflicts, draining its strength and exposing its people to the true nature of Chaos. Over the years his cult spread and found followers in many of the noble houses. Dröm founded the Inquisition to seek and destroy his own cult, secretly the Inquisition itself was an agent of the same power, seizing the most potent servants of Azathoth and bringing them before the Blind Emperor to be bound to his service.
When the time was ripe, Dröm revealed his true self and openly expounded his belief in the Demon Sultan Azathoth.
Regrettably, but predictably, the pale and shallow souls and intellects of men were unable to sustain such a faith and, in their weakness they sought to deny Azathoth and turned against their Emperor. In a cataclysmic war he was brought down and martyred for the Black God.
The story of these events only reached the Eclipsed Kingdom many years later but when they were confirmed Saint Dröm was formally beatified and an Order founded in his name.
The habits of the monks of Saint Dröm are a dark blue and he is sacred to the dreamers, and it is due to his example that dreaming souls are accepted into the clergy of the Black Church.
The symbol of Saint Dröm is a blank and sightless eye with a pupil like an eclipsed sun.

Feathersmithing in the Eclipsed Kingdom

Metal; It’s Lack Of Use
Before Feathersmithing can be described, the strange status of Metal in the Eclipsed Kingdoms must be discussed.
Metal has never found its place in this realm, especially in the field of arms and armour. Blacksmiths do exist but are regarded as a poor cousins to the much-more respected Feathersmith.
Metal and iron tools are made for some practical uses (locks and hinges for example), but the arms and armour of the nobility is invariably Feathersmithed. (With some notable exceptions like the Grail Knights and the Iron Men.)
The reasons for this are various;

1.     Fey Ancestry
Ever since the Sleeping King was awake, and perhaps earlier, the chivalry of the Eclipsed Kingdom have interbred with. Several noble houses are Half-Elven and even most common people often have a drop of Fey blood. The touch, taste and, in some cases, the mere presence of Cold Iron is deeply disagreeable to these individuals. Although alloys like Bronze are regarded as less unpleasant there is no fashion for metal armour amongst the Fey-blooded and many will regard its presence as an insult and a threat (precisely the reason the Iron Men prefer it).

2.     The Churl Beast
The creature called the 'Rust Monster', while rare in other realms, has always been relatively common in the Eclipsed Kingdom. It is popularly known that, if a metal weapon or tool is left for long enough and rusts completely under the earth, a baby Churl Beast will hatch from it.

A Churl Beast

The barrows of the ancients, as well as the vast and bloody battle plains of the Apocalypse War, are home to many decaying weapons and hives of Churl Beast worm and shift there in the black soil, licking at the rusty creeks still running with the rust of those Cyclopean conflicts.
The peasant class have long been accustomed to keep their own Churl Beasts and it’s not unusual to see one tied up outside a hovel or ale-wifes home. Packs of feral Churl Beasts often roam the edges of large villages and 'Churl Beast Fights' are one of the few sources of entertainment the peasant class have (other than thinking about decay, see below).
No true knight would lower themselves to physical combat with someone else’s Churls (though they may have to use force of arms to exercise justice upon their own), neither would they ever be vile enough to make use of such a villayns-pet in combat or to gain advantage over another knight, but the wide spread of the creatures and their general commonality cannot but have had some effect on the validity of metalwork as a technology.
Most peasant villages have little or no metal for instance, their door hinges being leather and rope and their ploughs being black oak. (The story of the unwatched Churl-Beast eating the pots and the Churls returning home to find their food all over the hovel floor and the utensils gone is an always-hilarious and well-worn punchline.)

3.     Rust Bloods
(See 'human races’). Whether Rust Bloods exist as a result of Fey Ancestry or as a result of Churls becoming too intimate with their beasts over several generations, they present another barrier as, if they are the target of metal weapons, they may decay them when struck, and if they seek to make use of metal armour, they may destroy their own protection by bleeding on it.

4.     Magnetic Sands
The Iron Sands to the south of the Eclipsed Kingdom where the Bottle Knights and the Emir of Crows range across the red dunes are, in some places, partially magnetic. This presents a challenge for the metal-clad knight. These sands are sometimes collected and sold, they can be placed in bags and used as handy 'spoiling weapons' against those who wear or wield metal as a tool.

5.     Acidic Rain And Microwave Storms
The weather and pressure fronts that emerge and condense while the black form of Azathoth is in the sky, blotting out the sun, often have unusual effects. Rains from these storms are mildly acidic and cause various complex kinds of rust and decay (see Rust - a peasant obsession), there are also seasonal winter Microwave storms emanating from the body of the black god causing water-based beings to suffer heatstroke in the snow and making all metal arc with dangerous sparks.

Metal; It’s Occasional Use
Despite all of this, metal is still occasionally used in weapons and armour. It is an extremely cheap and easily worked material. Arms and armour are often brought in from outside the kingdom and if a foreign noble of high status wears it then a knight can hardly ask them to abandon it. It must have been in more use in the past as Barrow Mounds and the battlefields of the Apocalypse War have huge metal deposits and, while it is noxious to Fey, it is also very useful against Fey and while no decent Lord would be see using it for that purpose, they could certainly have the occasional piece lying about, and if they were attacked by wild criminal fey, and if they happened to use to to defend themselves, who could argue? Peasants are allowed to wield weapons (one per household) and some have swords or hunt with metal-tipped arrows. It can be useful in armouring men-at-arms cheaply and forest criminals often use fragments of it.
In the major towns Craftsmen do exist who can lacquer and coat arms and armour so that it might better resist the touch of the Churl Beast and the Acidic rains. It can be extremely expensive.

(Side Note; Decay - A Peasant Obsession)(With thanks to Scrap Princess)

Since there is almost nothing entertaining or interesting for a Peasant to do, and with the active encouragement of the Black Church, who view contemplation of decay as a reasonable form of lay-worship of the Black God, the Peasant or Churl class of the Ecllipsed Kingdom have developed an obsession with, and complex folklore of, Rust.
A well-known pastime in a poor village is simply watching something very slowly decay. Groups of both ancient and very young peasants can be seen around ale-homes, quietly drinking and watching an inanimate object slowly succumb to time. The various states and levels of decay are sometimes the only real news or source of novelty in a village.
Folk wisdom states that as wood rots to form fungus, metal rots to form rust, and as there are many kinds of fungus, there are many kinds of rust, made up not only of the 'pure' or essential nature of the decay itself, but of the transmission of memory or selfhood from the decaying object into the substance of the decay. One kind of rust affecting a metal sword, for instance, with its memory of murder and power, being quite different to the same rust affecting a pot, with its experience of cooking and food, and this will be expressed in the nature of the Churl Beast that hatches from such an item, which is what gives those beasts their names; “Cook Pot”, “Door Key” etc.
This is proved to be true by the existence of multifarious forms of rust. Green Rust, Cherenkov Blue Rust (which decays metal so quickly that it pops out of existence), Umbral Common Rust, Orange Speckle, Rainbow-Stainer, Duller, Smot Yellow, and many many more. Certain kinds of black verdigris naturally form an eight-pointed star on smooth metal and are known to protect against rust, held as being a blessing from Azathoth, confirming that the owner is faithful to the black god. (The armour of the Grail Knights is prepared specifically to form a base for this effect.)
Some rusts are fast growing crystals that are dangerously sharp. There are also ethereal rusts that spread from metal to the senses making them unable to perceive or process certain impressions and Tetanus is known to be rust trying to control the body of the sufferer. Various different kinds of diseases are thought of as Flesh Rust, including "Rust Lung", "Rust Eye", "Red-Bone" and "Rust-Waste" in which, on death, the body collapses and swarms of woodlouse-like Churl-Beasts swarm out from the corpse, or, it is whispered, sometimes animate the corpse in the night, creating the mythical and much-feared "Man-Of-Rust", A “Rust Knight” is a heavily rusted suit of metal armour which, unable to birth its beast, or perhaps poisoned by the dark memory of its use, animates in a similar way. While its reasonable for a Churl to attempt the destroy a “Man of Rust”, a “Rust Knight” can only be fought and defeated by a knight, the situation must be analysed to see which of these is the case.
None of this is of any consequence or interest to the Knightly classes who are universally indifferent of, and contemptuous of, the peasent obsession with rust.

Feathersmithing Itself
Finally we come to the primary point.
Feathersmithing is the art of making arms and armour from the soft.
There are laws and limits to the art, sumptuary, social and supernatural and a firm hierarchy of materials and craftsmanship which denote the status and power of the wearer, with the usual complex and sometimes counter-intuitive interpretations. It is, of course, always good to have very high status armour, but it is very bad to wear armour "above your station". Conversely, very old low-status forms of terracotta or glass can, because of their age and storied past, be considered very high-status. Knights are often in disguise as lower-status knights for various complex chivalric reasons and plenty of stories are about knights who foolishly or arrogantly judge their opponents on the basis of their armour. The 'green-leaf' mail of the forest knight has an association with criminality, but also with glamour, speed and daring. A wealthy knight might wear their great-great-great grandfathers stoneware plate, a very callow knight may be able to afford a mouse-embryo skin cloak. Status is an obsession for all but counter-messages and the concept of the 'Fair Unknown' is a continual opposing theme.

Attaining Feathersmithed Work
Feathersmithed arms and armour can only be produced by the Goblinish savants of the Eclipsed Kingdom, each piece is an individual work of art for a particular person. The price for the construction of a piece of feathersmithed armour is usually significant either in coin, broken hearts, service or simply impossible conceptual items (a worms cough, for example).
The only respected means of attaining feathersmithed work are;
·        Win it in a joust or duel.·        Inherit an ancestral piece.·        ‘Retrieve' some from the horde of a monster of some kind (so long as it is quite clear that the Knight in question was there primarily to defeat the monster and only picked up its horde afterwards to stop it falling into the wrong hands).·        Be presented with it by your feudal (or in some cases, religious) lord. ·        Perform an impossible deed.·        Retrieve an impossible conceptual object (a worm’s cough, for instance).·        Pay for it in broken hearts.·        Pay for it in coin.


Materials
The standard rule of enchantment is that the more frail, brittle, expensive and rare a material is, the more powerful the enchantment that can be cast on it. The more of its strength and force the item receives from its actual material form, the less powerful the magic and the lower the status.
Popular materials include ceramics, glass, paper (poetised), tree bark, (wooden items with actual non-magical structural integrity are described as 'Thick Wood', so a shield of the bark of a silver birch is different to a 'thick wood' shield), flower petals, feathers, embryo skins, corneas, spider webs, ice and sometimes snake skin.

Mail-Equivalents
A popular mail equivalent is a hauberk of autumn leaves held together with thorns. Mail of rose petals or water-lily petals. Spider-webs kept whole and attacked at the web-ends with the spiders own broken limbs are an expensive mail. Snake skins with the heads left dangling can make a savage 'wild mail' and glass beads are a cheap version.
Feathersmithed cloaks are popular, provide protection equivalent to mail and are often made of a similar range of materials but feather cloaks and cloaks of embryo-skins are popular (mouse embryo skins are sufficient for a common knight, only high nobility can afford a cloak of human embryo skins). Human or animal Corneas stitched together with virgin-hair make a noble cloak.

Helm-Equivalents
It's rare for knights to wear a full-head helm of any kind. Feathersmithed Crowns or Circlets fill the same role. Crowns of Flowers, crowns of thorns and crowns of Ice are popular. Masks of crystal, of carved ebony or bone, of ceramic and of glass will only protect the front of the face  (a True Knight should always be head-on to their enemies anyway so this is acceptable).
Helms made from the same materials as plate are sometimes worn.  Plate-Equivalents
‘Full’ Gothic plate is incredibly rare and most knights wear a breastplate, along with some vambraces and greaves, over mail.
Ceramic is a popular material and comes in several forms;
- Earthenware. Thicker, heavier, cheaper, typically darker, orange or red. (Though, some ancient Earthenware pieces have storied descent.) Is usually glazed. Can be given an iridescent glaze.
- Stoneware. Slightly more expensive and slightly lighter. The lightest is still dark grey. May or may not be glazed.
- Porcelain. Almost always white and often translucent. Often painted in blue-on-white patterns with a transparent glaze but can be un-glazed. Can be painted in any colours.
- Bone China. Always made with bone dust from human bones. The whitest, thinnest and most translucent as well as the strongest. Often left its original colour to confirm its quality.

Glass is another common material, often used for shields. Glass can be clear, crystal, smoky and stained either with one colour or, for wealthy and storied knights, a full stained-glass image.
Ice can be a material equivalent to glass and is favoured by knights of the Winter Court.
Bone itself is an occasional material, more often used in weapons than armour, though the scrimshawed bones of a mighty beast can be a (somewhat unfashionable) suit of plate.
The bark of the silver birch is sometimes used, usually for shields rather than plate.
Paper is commonly used in Shields and Swords. Some paper armour is relatively common, but, 'Poetised' paper can be extremely uncommon and valued. Paper inked with a poem describing the qualities of the object in question, be it shield or sword, is considered to be imbued with the power of the verse, the quality of the item therefore depending on the quality of the poem (poetry is considered a chivalric value). Poems by the most respected or brilliant poets are therefore much sought-after. (A poem will only work once for the item it is written for). Poems written by the Knights Lady (if she has a talent for it) are a respected source of power for a Feathersmith. Some stories involve poor knights having only paper arms nevertheless achieving great deeds due to the poetic abilities of their True Love.

Some Examples
We might therefore imagine a 'Common' Knight of the low nobility wearing a hauberk of autumn leaves with a painted stoneware plate, a shield of silver birch bark and a paper sword with a common poem by a Monk of St Gorgoth.
A 'high' knight could wear a mail of orchid petals held together with the cut fingernails of his Sworn Love, translucent plate of Bone China with the bone powder provided by a beast or person killed by an ancestor, a cloak of stitched-together human embryo skins, a crown of thorns (to symbolise humility) and wield a shield of smoking ice and a sword of stained glass.
A low, criminal or 'forest' knight might wear a mail of green leaves (green being the colour of criminality in the Eclipsed Kingdom), a terracotta breastplate, a metal helm, a bronze-reinforced thick-wood shield and a club made from a hardwood root, topped off by a cloak of stolen silks.
Though each of these knights would, in game terms, have a very similar 'armour class', in terms of status and chivalry they would barely be considered the same kind of being.

Races of Men in the Eclipsed Kingdom

Most human lines in the Eclipsed Kingdom have, at some point, interbred with various Fey, Elves, Goblins and Souls, not to mention the varied blessings of Azathoth which can be bestowed on his faithful. 'Pure' human lines no longer fully exist in the kingdom, though there are a handful of houses and families which pride themselves on their apparent humanity.

In reality, concepts of race have little validity compared to Feudal obligation. What matters overwhelmingly in social situations is which lord you pay fealty to, or if you are Clergy, through which Bishop or Order you offer your service to the Black God.
Nevertheless, there are some racial, or race-equivalent distinctions;
SOULSThe lowest form of Churl is a Soul, Sleeper or Dungeon Dreamer. These are the dreaming selves of every individual dreaming in every dungeon in the world, brought here by the power of the Sleeping King.
Though not technically slaves (Slavery is illegal in the Eclipsed Kingdom, all are spiritually equal before Azathoth, that is to say; nothing), Souls are serfs, attached to the land where they incarnate and belonging to the Lord of that land. Nevertheless, they do have a legal existence and though their sleeping lives are ruled almost totally by their Feudal lord they also come under that Lords protection, meaning no-one but that lord or their agents is allowed to exert force over them.
Likewise, they cannot be bought or sold (though they land they are attached to can be). In addition, they can always appeal to the Black Church in religious matters if they wish and may not be denied access to worship (of Azathoth).
Souls are somewhat blue-tinged and semi-transparent, seeming always as if they are lit by moonlight. They exist in the Eclipsed Kingdom for only as long as they are asleep in their dungeon. This makes them unreliable (and often despised) workers, but this is balanced somewhat by the fact that, though they can be psychologically and spiritually crushed by fear and despair, they cannot truly physically tire.
Due to the enormous gravatic pull of of the Sleeping King, Souls usually cannot wake up when they want to, though most will wake up eventually. Souls can be killed in the Sleeping Kingdom, this sometimes causes a heart attack in the Souls body, ending their existence for ever, but in most cases the soul will wake up from their nightmare at that point. When they fall asleep, they will return to the same nightmare and must face whatever punishment they have already earned.
It's very rare for a Soul to gain any kind of status in the Eclipsed Kingdoms, but it is not entirely impossible and there is no absolute legal limit set upon them, should some high-status individual, or the Church, choose to raise them up in their service. 
CONCEPTUALSSouls can sometimes prove fertile with living people in the Eclipsed Kingdoms. The children of such a union will be partly conceptual, shaped from a dreaming mind and real flesh. They always have some moonlike or translucent aspect to their bodies, either eclipsed eyes, glowing shadows, translucency in daylight, silver skin or something of the kind.
Since part of their substance is non-corporeal, Conceptual souls can be badly maimed if no-one alive believes that they are real. If no living person believes in the existence of a Conceptual then the non-physical parts of them will fade out of existence and they will usually die. Half-Souls will die immediately, quarter souls will be maimed and die in minutes or seconds, eighth souls may live for hours, One-sixteenth souls can survive for days and one-32'th souls, who had one dreaming great-great-great grandparent may survive in-full.
The same effect will take place if a Conceptual ever leaves the Eclipsed Kingdom and the dream of the Sleeping King.
Perhaps because of this, those with conceptual descent are often driven to make as strong an impression on the world as they can. These individuals often grow into Magic-Users or Priests in the Black Church.  BLACKHEARTSThese living people pump shadow instead of blood but other than this making them rather sallow, mad and wrecked in the head there is nothing else unusual about them. 
RUST BLOODSThese individuals have extremely bright red blood which rusts any metal which comes into contact with it. This may be due to a hereditary infection by, or microscopic form of, the Churl Beast, popularly known in the outer lands as the 'Rust Monster'. 
PICTS Tattoos in the Eclipsed Kingdoms can be hereditary, and often skip generations, leading to some children being born fully tattooed. These are referred to as Picts. In modern times tattoos are often assumed to relate to criminal activity and outlaw status so Pictish children are viewed as potential troublemakers. This is unfair as most hereditary tattoos come from the deep history of the Eclipsed Kingdom, from before even Rise which came before the Fall which came before the Sleeping King. The tattoos on Pictish bodies may be from this time and can have sacred knowledge contained in symbols familiar to those of the Barrow-Mounds, though tattoos can also be much more modern.
Some children born with sacred tattoos or those suggesting occult knowledge can be hunted by Magic Users, Fey Lords or their agents. Some wise Picts have spent a lifetime unravelling the mystery of their own tattoos, though most end up as outlaws, criminals and forest people. 
GOLDEN-BONES These may or may not be a real race or sub-race, but it is popularly believed that some people can be born with golden, or part-golden bones. If anyone believes themselves to be a member of this class they will do everything they can to disguise it, for obvious reasons. 
GOBLINISH Goblin DNA is parasitic and recessive, meaning that two unsuspecting parents can have a Goblinish child. These children always come in one of two forms.
The first form of Goblinish child is born hunched, ancient and visibly old. These are always savants of some particular material skill or craft, anything from blacksmithing to wood working to weaving to feathersmithing to goldsmithing to anything which can be performed with the hands. Over time many can develop magical qualities to their crafts. They are no more or less likely than anyone else to be born 'evil', though they do have very difficult lives due to their ancient forms and hunched bodies.
The second form of Goblinish child is born beautiful and androgynous, with fair and charming features pleasing to all. They are invariably scheming, amoral, flighty, cackling narcissistic sociopaths who cause nothing but trouble for everyone around them. Despite this, their parents, lovers, spouses and children never fail in their affections for the beautiful Goblinish child no matter how much wrong they do.
It's not uncommon for Goblinish children to be born as twins, in which case usually one will be a prematurely hunched and aged savant and the other will be an androgynous and glamourous sociopath. Their fates will always be linked.
If one Goblinish person has children with another Goblinish person, the result will be Goblins. 
BORN WITH IRON SHOES To be "Born with Iron Shoes" is a popular expression in the Eclipsed Kingdom but also a literal truth. These children always turn out to be very strong, hardy, aggressive and brave. Though they are also often sad as they usually kill their mothers at birth, iron shoes being incompatible with the human womb. Despite this they are no more likely than anyone else to be either good or evil. Nevertheless, stories and tales will usually accrue to them.
Those born with Iron Shoes usually keep them with them as a keepsake. Some seek the shoes in order to do magic upon the person they were born on, or assuming that the shoes give some kind of immunity or power. This is foolish, but half-true. The shoes possess no magical power at all and will in no way assist a magic-user in affecting their birth-owner, but, they are also generally immune to all magic.

Some Horses of the Eclipsed Lands

(I'm aiming to eventually get this to 100.)

Famously, the 'horned horses' of the Eclipsed Lands are, in fact, a kind of steady-breeding horse-goat hybrid. They have the eyes and feet of goats and the bodies of light Arabian racers. They are often highly polycerate with goat beards. They tend to be a little less full-chested than 'normal' horses with a lower top speed, as well as being extremely wilful, disturbingly intelligent and difficult to tame, but they are famously adept climbers and leapers, many are able to scale trees and almost-vertical cliffs with an Eclipsed Land Knight on their backs.

Because of this, the Eclipsed Lands are one of the few places where the power of Cavalry can be projected as easily into mountainous areas as on the plains and where retreating to rugged terrain will not afford infantry any advantage.
(The ballad of Sad Alec famously has its hero fleeing from the Knights of the Eclipsed Lands through a forest at night and his pursuers leaping from branch to branch in the canopy above, sending down spears "like rain and autumn leaves".)

This may be one of the reasons that the age of Chivalry has never come to an end in the Eclipsed Lands and why the highly-trained horseman has never been displaced as the chief agent of war.

Eclipsed Land steeds are also famous for breeding with various fey and monsters and for getting mixed up with different curses, prophesies, fates or divine and demonic forces. A common boast of the horse-seller in Ekliepsis is that of a "Guaranteed Un-Prophesied Horse", a promise rarely kept. (It's also popularly claimed that half-elves like to fuck their horses, which is what leads to their fey, intelligent and unstable nature. This is (probably) slander. (Goblins will sometimes just straight-up fuck their horses. Or pigs.)






Goblin Horse. This apparently beautiful creature is a huge wattled pig with a glamour cast on it. Everyone except the rider/owner can see through the illusion. The beast is a loyal and hardy creature though.False Princess Horse. On command can take the form of a beautiful prince/princess in full Disney regalia. Still has the intelligence of a horse.Underverse escapee. Piebald, pink-eyed and white skinned. Can find its way in the dark easily, half-blind in daylight.Shaved and tattooed with wings. Can Feather Fall.Heart pumps shadow instead of blood. Crepuscular, around dawn and dusk is twice as fast and strong as a regular horse, can't gallop in direct light. Normal at night.Horse of the Autumn Court, on command can transform into a wizened old oak tree 20ft high, Handy, can climb it or tie other horses to it. Can transform rider at the same time but there is no way for them to give the command to change back.Horse of the Autumn Court, can transform self and rider into autumn leaf and ride on the wind. Any damage suffered by leaf also suffered by horse and rider.Pictish horse. Is actually a simple glyph of a running horse on a flint stone. Can transform on command and be put in your pocket. Will wash away in rain and fears it.Horse of the Winter court. Can transform self and rider into a flurry of snow and ride on the wind, but if the snow melts, the horse and rider die until next winter.Horse of Dark Intelligence. Can understand and follow abstract ideas and complex verbal orders but only if they lead to harm, otherwise, has only the intelligence of a horse.Widow-Maker. Hates marriage generally. Will kill any married person who tries to ride it. Don't take it to a wedding.Can adjust their size to any rider, and therefore cannot be overloaded by the rider alone (but can be by extra weight). Could also suit miro-fairy rider or halfling.Ghoul Horse. Has transparent skin and will eat dead flesh. Otherwise a 'normal' Unseelie Horse.Jotunn Horse. Is actually a freshly-born foal, though of giant size, so currently of usable size for a human. Will ultimately grow to the size of a long-haul truck. May have a Jotunn looking for it.Mane of serpents. Not that bad once they get used to you, and so long as you stay out of their way. Will poison attack unknown rider. Looks really cool.Dawn Horse. Can leap from one mountaintop to another visible from that point at the moment the light touches it.Dusk horse, can move at the speed of the shadow that crosses the land as the sun falls, but only in that direction.Sea Horse. Can gallop over the sea so long as it does not stop, but cannot cross freshwater.Half-Zebra. Literally, divided right down the middle. Zebra half is rebellious & won't take direction but spells have to be cast on both halves of the horse to take effect.Elfish horse. Knows one Lvl 1 spell and can level as a spellcaster if its rider shares their XP.Blind Horse. You have to guide it carefully. Can speak and understand complex ideas, still has drives and loyalties of a horse though.Fat Pony. Witless,charmless, dumb-looking and slow but powerfully enchanted to be invulnerable to harm. Charm does not apply to rider.Arabian horse. Can't climb like an Eclipsed Lands hybrid but can outrun any equivalent animal over a flat surface. Very handsome.Chivalrous Horse. Reasonably smart. Fast, Capable and strong. Used to belong to a noble knight and would much rather be performing chivalrous actions.Sorrowful Beast. Visibly mourns for the dead, likes hanging around graveyards and gothic scenes. Choleric and slow to act. It's tears can heal certain madnesses.Charming Horse. Extremely polycerate with silver bells hanging from its many horns. These bells charm lesser Fey and please the greater, they also make the horses location extremely obvious.Part-Peryton horse. Extremely horned like a stag, bird-claw feet, has the shadow of an evil man. Eats hearts and needs one every three days at least. An extremely high-status beast. The Knights of the Winter Court are said to ride these.Reflected Horse. This horse can carry its rider into its own reflection, either staying in place within the reflected surface or, if that surface extends, like a flat river or lake, running along it as an image of itself.Pseudo-Skeletal horse. This horse has black hair with a white pattern that looks exactly like the skeleton of a horse. Undead will favour this creature and tend not to attack either it or its rider.Hunting Horse. This horse can smell and track one highly particular social group of people. I.e. virgins, widowers, priests, false knights etc and will tend to do this if it isn't being made to do anything else.Iron-Hooved Horse. This horse has deliberately been shoed with iron hooves, making it very hard to guide or trick into the Otherworld, both useful and potentially limiting considering the extend with which the Otherworld and this one interpenetrate in the Eclipsed Lands. Fey will fear and hate this horse and its kick with be potentially lethal to them.Silent Horse. Not actually literally silent like the horses of the Silent Knights but a common name for an unusually intelligent horse that can understand human language and complex ideas, though unable to speak.Tongued Horse. Intelligence of a five year old child. Can speak in a hideous goatlike tongue.Demonic Horse. More so than most Eclipsed Land Hybrids. When angered or excited breathes brimstone and smoke and leaves burning hoofprints in the earth.Perverse horse. Hairless and pale with rather sensual features for a horse. Extremely long purple tongue, feathered mane, rider generally assumed to be 'up to something' in both the good and bad sense. Rust Horse. A non-uncommon hybrid. Extending proboscis does rust-monster damage to armour and metal. Less useful than might be expected in the Eclipsed Lands, see section on armour.Famous Horse. This horse belonged to a well-known knight of the Eclipsed Lands who had particular relations with and attitudes to, every major faction and many noted individuals. Many people will assume the rider is that knight in disguise and even though who do not assume that will usually want an explanation of what happened to them and how the PC ended up with their horse.Riddling Horse. A particular kind of savant, this horse can, when confronted with any two choices, always pick the most beneficial option. When confronted with more than two possibilities or an indistinct number this ability dissapears. There is a sub-breed of Riddling Horse which possesses this ability with three and not two choices. Both are valued animals in the Eclipsed Lands considering the amount of Fey dickery that goes on.Quest Horse. The knight who owned this horse died half-way through a quest and this horse will be unhappy and generally bring bad luck until the quest is complete. If the rider does complete the quest the horse will become extremely loyal and very lucky."Goblin" Horse. Quite different to the Goblin Horse described above. This horse does result from a Goblin fucking a horse, either craftily in the night or just as part of a relationship. These horses are always paradoxically beautiful and slender but also crafty, scheming, dishonest, tricky and greedy. If this horse impregnates another horse (or becomes pregnant) the result will be goblins. These horses laugh and will laugh compulsively at a funny joke. A serious duty of a Joungleur or Fool in the Eclipsed Lands is to tell any beautiful horse jokes to test it for Goblin blood. 

A KINGDOM OF THE MAD ON THE MOONS BLACK SIDE

The Dark Side of the Moon is populated by, and composed of, the dreams of those who sleep in dungeons. Anyone dreaming in a dungeon dreams of this place and cannot leave it in their dream. Which makes dungeons a doubly bad place to be.
This place is lit only by starlight and stolen mists, but it is also an area of this world, a land which grows more powerful and who's borders interpose with ours as shadow moves across the dial of the moon like the lateral blinking of a lizards eye.
The vision-people of the moons black side are moon-dragooned and serve as churls in the Fractal Baronies of the Unseelie Chivalry, knights who kneel to Barons bound in loyalty to the Court of the Sleeping King.
The Sleeping King dreams his fortress and his court and the hypnagogic dreamscape of his lands and if he wakes all will disappear and chaos will snap the scales and break the balance of the political moon, bringing disaster to the star-lit sands. Therefore he is lullabied by an endless supply of hollow-eyed holocaust-bards snatched from their homes and stolen from their lands by the soft-shoed Silent Knights whose cloaks are stitched from the skins of embryonic mice. Rows and rows are carted to the Kings court on the dark side of the moon, chained and forced to pipe without rhythm, tone or tune until the all go mad and die, then the bard-corpse is detached and dragged away only for the bard to be replaced.
But this is not the only palace in this land, and not the only lord.
There is the Court of the Moon, rumoured to be ruled by a masked Selenian Queen, and the Knights of the Moon ensure a constant supply of new dreamers and new lands by venturing out into the waking world and lending their services as bounty hunters, cops and prison guards.
Anyone dreaming in any dungeon, anywhere in the world, lends their strength to the Kingdom of the Mad and so it serves those Knights that as many people as possible should be imprisoned for as long as possible as deep as they can possibly be.
They care nothing for innocence or guilt, only imprisonment, and there are many in the world who share their view, and are keen to call upon their blades of smoking glass and their moon-bronze chains.
Wherever the dungeon dreamers are, erupt blocks of Piranesi-buildingforms, impossible labyrinths of black stone, impossible archways and infinite rooms. These are the result of the dreams of the long-term dungeon-doomed, and the deeper and madder their imprisonment is in our world, the more magnificent the palaces they build in theirs.
And there is the Court of the Grail. The Sacred Bowl filled with the ever-replenishing black spit of God, hurled out as he shook his many-angled prison somewhere in the cosmos-core, beyond the reach of reason or measurement, hopefully never to escape.
The Holy Sputum breathes out the Verdant Land. Even without sunlight or warmth, the monstrous life-giving  power of the black spit is so intense that all over the dark side of the moon, trees and plants of primitive and eldritch kind boil up out of the lifeless white sand, black grass grows and nodding vein-blood-purple orchids burst their sacks.
by Beth Moon
So due to these three horrors, the mad visions of the Sleeping King, the nightmare memories of the dungeon-churls and the awful verdance of the black gods spit, life, and economy come to the moons blind hemisphere.

THE KNIGHTS OF THE MOONS BLACK SIDE
The preferred mount is a horse/goat hybrid with enormous polycerate horns, the eyes and legs and hooves of a goat and the body and speed of a slender Arabian steed. They can climb anything, perch anywhere and can chase escaping dreamers by leaping from branch to branch through the forest canopy, and by dancing from arch to arch in the Piranesi-dungeons.
The hearts of these Knights are so cold that they can freeze the water of an ocean as their horned horses hooves press against its waves, they can sweep out of the sea on frozen tides clad in rosepetal mail held together by thorns, or armoured in mantis wings pinned by the biting heads of ants, holding shields of glass with porcelain swords.
Amongst their orders are Mad Knights, men who were good knights and went mad, now believing impossible things, heroes who forgot themselves or those who were never knights at all but simply believe they are, driving only by the power of their delusion, Elvish Knights from the Otherworld, spirits of Autumn and Winter who hate mankind and mans imaginings, masked Knights of Misrule who’s king rules hidden from an endless carnival of death, Grail Knights, brave and honourable men who serve and protect the spit of god that brings life to this cold land, who’s eyes see only dying worlds  and cracked realities, and Goblin Knights, Goblins who have gone completely mad and sworn themselves to tell the truth and do only good, and who have been forced from Goblin lands, cloaked in clanking tin armour, mounted on pigs and told never to come back.
The Oaths and Orders of these knights are various and awful to a man.

Order Thing you have to do Power you get Lost by The Order of the Cold-Heart Break the heart of someone in love with you. Own heart freezes, gain ice powers. Falling in love. The Order of Discord Always lie. Can change shape at will. Telling the truth (trapped in current shape). The Order of Strife Never courteous, always contemptuous. Doors & locks fly open for you, can’t be trapped by anything. Saying please/thank you/just being polite. The Order of Pandora Cruel to women. Love curse/Charm powers. Kissed by a maiden of their own free will/kind to a woman. Order of Hate No friends. Immortal/immune to harm/blades. Share a fire/food with someone/help them/allow yourself to be helped. The Band of Ashes and Sparks Condemn the innocent, free & assist the guilty. Elemental immunity, can’t drown, burn, fall, be crushed be earth or stone. Giving a true or fair judgement, helping an innocent person.
Never wash/be clean. Invisible at will (but they can smell you coming). Cleaning yourself, even a small part. The Knights of Anarchy Never take and order and kill any social superior on sight. Can’t be killed by any royal authority or command.ie. if a king/queen says to someone “go and take out this deadly knight in my forests” that command can never be fulfilled. Allow a king or queen to escape your sight/swear loyalty to any feudal hierarchy/be loyal (could even mean keeping a coin with a king or queens head on it, rule revealed by Knight leaving certain kinds of treasure behind)/obey an order. Waste Knight Live only in the waste-lands. Perfect hunter, can always start a fire/find shelter/can’t die from exposure. Spend a night in any built dwelling/eat cooked food. Red Knight Challenge everyone on the slightest pretext, never turn down a challenge and never show mercy to a foe. Decapitation Strike, like a Vorpal Blade effect on any blade you pick up. Show mercy, behave honourably to a defeated foe. Moth Knight, Barrow Knight etc Swear fealty to a particular enchantress of wizard. Can polymorph into a particular thing. The Barrow Mages sworn Knights can turn into autumn leaves and float away/escape/sneak up on you but you can spot them in summer & early spring. Disobey your wizard.

Wondrous Bullshit - A Review of "Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange".

I mean bullshit in a specific sense, that fudgy fairyland between genuine folklore, attempts at real history and self-confessed fiction. The place in which Geoffery of Monmouth and Erich von Danekin both make their home.
"Tales" is a collection of Arabic stories discovered by Europeans in 1933 in a manuscript created somewhere between the 14th and 15th centuries based on an original collection which probably came from some time in the mid 10th century with the whole thing translated into English for the first time in 2014.
The title page is missing, half the manuscript has been torn off and lost, the name of the person it was inscribed for is smudged and illegible and the scribe didn't seem to really know what they were doing so they get basic details wrong and occasionally drop us in and out of the stories at odd points.
We are talking here, of something like The 1001 Nights dirtbag tabloid cousin in which the fine qualities of relations between stuff have perhaps been sacrificed in the interests of having just more stuff.
This translation is half-way between "official" academia and popular taste. If you are used to the slightly bowdlerised, abridged and already somewhat-posher 1001 Nights then this may strike you are being janky, common, hectic, oddly written, uneven and really really rapey. There are some complaints about it being a bad translation on Goodreads, it’s possible those people are translation experts but to me it looks more like an accurate translation of a very weird original with all of the strange qualities of medieval text and the sketchy writing left intact. If you are an academic reader, well, if it’s your subject you probably already know about it and have the academic version. If you are an educated nobody (most of my readers) then it should be good enough for you. There is a half-decent index, that excellent intro and a list of potential extra reading.
There is a very good introduction by Robert Irwin, one complete enough that it’s hard not just to summarise it when talking about the text.


Boring Liberal Prophylactic First
There's lots of actual-rape where the writer calls it that, rape which writer didn't think was real rape but anyone reading it now certainly would, creepy stuff with slaves, lots of rather worrying stuff with slavery generally, lots of misogyny and some anti-black racism.
Christians, bizarrely to me, come out pretty well. Christian monks get rolled out as figures of wisdom, one of the final tales has a romance between two Christian rulers in Egypt I think? The storyteller does have the Christians having a chat with an idol of Baal, but this is represented as being just the kind of things Christians do sometimes? Who knows with those guys.
The literary quality of the tales varies, but if you are an omnireader then the interest in the tales is continuous since even the bad ones give us a glimpse into a really alien and strange world. The morality in the tales, and of the tales, is a little disturbing to modern senses.
Well that's your lot. I put that stuff in for honesty and so anyone sensitive to that stuff isn't tricked into buying it.




Cool Stuff For D&D Types.
Put simply, if they ever re-do the Al-Quadim for 5e then whoever does it will have to read this first. It has All New Ancient Stuff in it, and how often do you get to say that there is New Ancient Stuff?
And there are a lot of Things. Especially the kinds of Things relevant to TRPG's.


Treasure Hunting
Several of the stories in the middle are concerned only and entirely with treasure hunting in ancient tombs. These are so much like a game of D&D that it's fucking ridiculous and also, when you think about it, kind of interesting that they are thatmuch like a D&D game, not only in incident but in the character of the seekers.
The adventures tend to be a bit railroady, usually an Ancient Text is discovered or translated by a handy monk and then out heroes are off on a journey to a forgotten mountain or something. Usually the POV character is following someone who reads from a specific book or text and uses this to find the dungeon and predict its dangers, so, a wierd statue or iron door is discovered and the leader figure checks it out in their book, tells our hero what to do, usually some redshirts doubt their wise guidance and are tempted by gems and die to prove how dangerous the dungeon is and how cunning its creators were. Then they do things the right way and the poison gas or whatever stops and they can move on.
Rather than describing I will display;
               "When he got there he halted at its foot and asked the monk where they should go. The monk told him that what they were looking for was in a cave in one of the gullies, and the emir told his men to scatter and look for it. They spent the day investigating the mountain but when they came back they said: "We saw nothing but a lot of gullies, all of which looked alike." "Is there a sign that marks this gully out from all the others?" the emir asked the monk. "Yes," he said, " for opposite it is a huge stone snake with a frog in its mouth and a scorpion on its head." "That's what you must look for," the emir told his men, and after three days of searching they found it in a large wadi, with the gully lying opposite the statue. When they looked they could see a great stone. There was writing over the door of the cave, and on the summit of the mountain was a huge statue on which birds were perching. There were rings with iron chains attached to the place on the mountain.
               'The emir marvelled at the statue and told the monk to pull on the chains. When he did the secret place opened up, and a flight of steps could be seen leading to it. "Go up," the emir said, "for through the help of God we have got to where we wanted." We went on up to the stairs and after climbing some two hundred steps we came out at a fine square room with three open doors, near each of which was a closed door. In the middle stood a giant statue of gilded brass with what looked like a covered bowl on its head, which it was holding with its hands.
               'When we got to the middle of the room and approached the statue, the monk took one of the emir's servants to go up to the closed door and strike it with a pick. He obeyed and struck a great blow, using all his strength, but at that the statue threw the bowl down from its head, revealing a pipe from which water flowed. We were in great danger, and the monk began to go round the room until he caught sight of a barred window. When he opened it the statue fell to its knees with its mouth open, and the water started flowing into this until it had all gone from the room.
               We gave thanks to Almighty God for this, and the monk told us there was nothing else that the statue could do. he ordered the servants to break the locks on the doors, and when they did we opened them and went into the rooms behind them. In them was more wealth than had ever been seen and in indescribable quantity of jewels. We almost died of joy but the monk told us: "Take care that no one takes the cover from the bowl and looks in or he will die." Some of the servants rushed up to it, each thinking greedily that none but he would remove the lid. The one who did looked inside and dropped down dead, after which the cover went back on the bowl as it had been before. The monk implored us if we valued our lives to leave it undisturbed or we would all die."
- and there we are. Listen to your Monk, fools.
One story has an actual NPC turn up, a horned magic man of an unknown species who lives around the dungeon mouth and whom the hero befriends to mixed effect.
Several tales finish with skeletons holding jade tablets describing the majesty of their former domains and giving exact circumstances in which one dead king thinks it reasonable to loot from his tomb. (All his family were losers and if you managed to break in and survive then you have already proved yourself better than them so feel free, but remember that treasure will only make you miserable in the eeeeennnnd).

Strange Islands
It’s a medieval standby but, thanks to their low latitude, the mystical islands from Arabic stories sound like much nicer places to stay than those in European Saints tales.
Get ready for castaways, more goddammn magic statues (I think *all* of the statues in this are magic), Jinn, freaky animals, odd currents, lost tribes etc. etc.
Speaking of which, there are lots of


Jinnnn!
One of my favourite parts is from the last story, (this is from a story *in* a story *in* a story, which is pretty much expected for "Tales"), the Princess Haifa has lost her Jinn lover who used to disguise himself as a white-footed deer in daytime and then get suggestive with her at night. She is wandering the world looking for him and encounters Hirmas, king of the ostriches (who is not an Ostrich);
"He wrote a letter, which he passed to me before summoning an enormous ostrich, which had lost all its feathers, leaving its skin smooth. He told it: "Take this human to the land of the old queen of the crows. See that she has an easy ride and come back quickly." I sat on its back holding on to its neck as it flew between sky and earth, keeping my eyes shut. When dawn broke it told me to open them and get down, for this was the country of the old queen. I dismounted and found myself in a red land with interlacing trees, some of which were red with red leaves and green citrus-like fruit. There were flowing streams with fish to be seen in the clear water feeding on the green weeds, while on every tree there were as many as a thousand crows, both black and piebald.
While I was in the shade of the trees, admiring their leaves and their fruit, I suddenly came upon a great red dome set over an ebony couch on which sat a grim-faced and frowning old woman wearing dyed clothes with ten jewelled bracelets on each arm, ten anklets on each foot and ten rings on each finger. She had a crown of red gold studded with jewels of all kinds. She held a sceptre of green emerald and flanking her on each side were two black 'ifrits with hooked iron clubs in their hands.
When she saw me she gave orders to these two who took hold of me and brought me before her. She addressed me harshly, asking who I was, where I lived, where I had come from and who had brought me to a land in which she had never seen a human before. I was so frightened by her and her appearance that I could find nothing to say in reply. She laughed more and she repeated: "Where do you come from and how did you get to my country?" This unlocked my tongue and I said: "I am al-Hafia, the daughter of King Muhallab of Persia. I fell in love with a jinniknown as 'the white-footed gazelle', and I went on to tell her everything that had happened from beginning to end until tears overcame me and I could no longer control myself. I then handed her the letter from the king of the ostriches. She took it and after reading it, she exclaimed: "Welcome to the letter and the one who wrote it!"
She went on: "I am the old queen of the jinn crows who part lovers and companions. My nature is rude and rough, and I have never shown pity to anyone. It is through me that husbands are parted from their wives, companions from companions, and lovers from their beloveds, and in every land I am represented by an emir of the crows."
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That's the coolest one but they do appear in a variety of roles, sometimes as transformed animals with mysterious agendas, sometimes summoned with the use of a magic pearl inscribed with one of the hidden names of god, sometimes as lovers and sometimes simply as super-toughs for those villainous types for whom having 1000 Malmuks with iron clubs just wasn't enough.


Superviallan Hot Girls
We have quite a few horny, evil, magic-using women who use their wiles to bang hot guys but one stands out for joyous, brilliant sociopathy. A girl so evil she gets her name in the title "The Story of 'Arus al-'Ara'is and her Deceit".
'Arus al-'Ara'is so dark that inside the nesting element that borders her story (I forget how many stories deep we go in this one, but it might be the most extreme of all the tales, a story in a story  in a story in a story, and possibly that one in another story) a caliphs daughter dies and he is so bereaved that someone promises to tell him the tale of 'Arus al-'Ara' as her deeds are so evil that hearing about them will teach him hatred for all women and girls. So, then he won't feel as bad about his dead kid.
The short of it is a child born under a bad sign and prophesied by 100 soothsayers to bring evil to her kingdom, compulsively fucks, betrays, outwits and murders a long long string of men. Along the way she also arranges the deaths of the 100 soothsayers as well as mass slaughter when she persuades a Jinn to burn her own city to the ground with magic sand because she was bored of it.
She ends up trapped on an island with her djinn lover until our hero gets washed up there. She hides him and sleeps with them both for a while, then gets bored of that and finds a way to kill the Djinn. Then she outright confesses her whole tale (this is about four or five stories down the stack).
She tells him outright that she obsessively sleeps with men and then, as soon as they irritate, oppose or bore her in any way, she arranges their destruction, and she's not promising to reform.
But she's hot so the guy takes her with him when he escapes anyway. You can probably guess the end of the story.
It's an interesting one as its written from a somewhat Lucifer-in-paradise-lost-esque perspective. Everything about the formal construction of the story tells us about how terrible she is but it’s pretty clear that the sympathies of the writer, and the audience, are with 'Arus al-'Ara', and not any of the string of boring men she destroys, and also because she seems broadly aware of her sociopathy, and almost a little sad, neither denying, declaiming or explaining it but simply describing what she is and has to be.

Treasure And Luuuuuxxxxurrrryyyy
The last thing of immediate interest to TRPG-types is the stupendous love of treasure, wealth, luxury, money and sweet high-status living. I seem to remember Rebecca West saying she respected the Islamic passion for luxury, (though she probably said it in a more flinty and condescending way) and that is seriously born out in “Tales”.
There is little here, of Christian worries about wealth and decadence. Having money is good. Having jewels and 'Robes of Honour' is good (people keep handing these out and I have no idea what they are), having more slaves is good, plus dancing girls, plus how about a private garden with imported wild animals, plus multiple thrones, one for when you are feeling merciful, and a death throne with an animatronic vulture that spits lead balls and two tigers (I couldn’t work out if they were automata or not) that tear to death those who have displeased you. (I did not make that one up, I think this one is from the story where a Prince goes to war with several ships full of Lions as his Vizier is a talking Lion, but the lions are beaten in combat because, to paraphrase his advisors; “Animals are dumb”.)
Five seconds of random flicking through got me this;
"When we reached the royal palace we went in and, after passing through a series of halls, we halted. Taking me by the hand, she lead me into a house the like of which I had never seen. It was like paradise, with walls plated with gold, and around it and them were statues of women each holding a musical instrument. It was furnished with all sorts of silk brocade, and at its upper end was a dais on which was a throne of red gold inlaid with various types of gems, sapphires, balkashrubies and emeralds.
The queen mounted the dais and took her seat on the throne, taking me up with her and seating me by her side, with her thigh over mine. For a time she issued commands and prohibitions, but then she called up a golden table encrusted with pearls and other gems, to which forty bowls of gold and silver were brought, containing various types of foods. As we ate she put spoonful’s in my mouth, and I kissed her hand until we had had enough. The table was removed, and we washed our hands after which golden trays were bought with scents, and then came girls carrying musical instruments, each of whom went up to one of the statues, with the girl carrying a lute sitting beneath the statue of a lute girl, the girl with a flute sitting beneath a flautist and the one with cymbals sitting under a cymbal player, each one underneath the appropriate statue. They all began to sing in unison until I thought the place was rocking with me as I looked at the splendour of this luxury."
In addition to this we find various magic crowns whose gems cast light that can stun all who look upon them, a variety of Jinn-summoning and controlling gems.




Interesting Structural Choices
From a writing perspective there are a lot of interesting things going on here.

Relentless Nesting
The most obvious and dominant distinctive element of the text is how willing the writer(s?) are to nest one story within another to an extent where the fracturing and interrelationships sometimes seem to take on a life of their own.
So, for instance, a sad Caliph will be unable to sleep and demand a story. His guys go and grab someone interesting-looking from outside, lets say a glass merchant. So ok, now the glass merchant has to tell the Caliph a story.
So they tell the caliph who they are and how they came to be here, and when he asks a question, well, it turns out that in important element of the Glass-Merchants life and adventures turns on meeting this unusual owl, that could talk. Well how did that happen? Asks the Glass Merchant of the Owl.
So now the owl tells you its story. We get that for a while, but it turns out that at one point the owl was trapped in a tower with a beggar, and the owl asks the beggar (in the owl’s story, which the Glass-Merchant is telling to the Caliph) for his story, so now we get the beggar talking.
But the beggar is actually a ruined prince, and to find out why he’s being transformed we have to have a bit about the family drama with the sorcerer who hates his dad, so the prince (before he became a beggar) says, “Hey dad, how about that sorcerer who hates you? What’s up with that?”
And the dad says, “Well son, that’s quite an interesting story….”
And on we go. I think the deepest down we ever get is about five stories in but I’m not sure.
You could do quite a lot with this I think. You have multiple layers of story and continuity going on at the same time. The effect is weirdly intense and strangifying and quite baroque, especially when combined with;

Poetry Bits
Well you can’t just talk about romance in normal language can you?
So several of the stories have big, BIG, chunks that are given in poetry. Either two lovers talk to each other in poetry, they send each other letters in poetry or, in one particular story, each and every element that either lover wears has poetry embroidered on it and every time they take a pice of clothing on or off, or use a high-status object (which also has poetry on it) the story breaks out into poetry again.
(The translator makes no attempt to rhyme or use any similar structure in the translated verse, but they don’t think it was very good in the original anyway.)
The effect of this is really really odd and interesting. It reminds me a bit of watching Gaszes 6-hour silent film about Napoloean. Something about silent cinema really slows down your cognition to a different rhythm and adds a certain kind of voiceless intensity you wouldn’t get any other way. Like it has its own cognitive pulse.

Person Shifting and The Lacunae
Either because the scribe didn’t really know what they were doing or because that’s part of how it was written, the person of description changes fluidly between described second person, described third person and first person.
So we could have the Glass-Seller above describing how he met the Owl, then him describing the owls adventure like a typical second-person narrator, then suddenly it shifts and we get the Owls voice.
Is the Glass-Seller mimicking the voice of the owl in front of the Caliph? Fuck knows.
We also get some charming lacunae in the text marked (lac) which makes the whole thing even more like a jumpy black and white film where some scenes have been accidently dropped.


All of this combined with the nesting above produces this byzantine structure and feel which meshes really well with the mad, luxurious, violent, precarious, magical culture of the stories. Strange and luxurious in description and luxurious and strange in form as well. If I was going to rip off the genre I would start with those structural elements and see what I could come up with.

Well that’s three hours and its midnight, so farewell.