The World of TWE

"I am about to go the way of all the earth. Be a man, my son, and do what Lae requires of you. As for me, I will not be able to rest with my fathers while my old enemies are still among the living. Do not hesitate. Use your wisdom. Swear to me that my old enemies will go to their graves in blood and tears. Only then will you be strong enough to rule my kingdom. Only then will Lae's face shine upon you. The way of the earth is death and the way of the throne is blood. Be willing to sacrifice lives on the altar of history and the ages will know your name, as they will know mine." Keloved the Righteous, second High Prince of Koveyah.


For four hundred years the land of Chaesharin has known war and little else. The Shadow Crescent, caught between the towering Mountains of Sin in the East and the roiling sea of Tai in the West, is host to five great kingdoms whose histories are written in blood. Atri in the southwest, ancient and steeped in animal mysticism, who has built a majestic kingdom on the backs of imported slaves and built an iron army out of magicked foundries and river powered factories. Isstiliph, the giant serpent peoples from across Tai, who brought strange ways and strange inventions with them, and quickly carved a place for themselves by the shores of the sea with their savage tactics. Lock in the northwest, cosmopolitan traders and masters of the sea, whose iron banded ships bring prosperity or ruin at their captain’s flamboyant choosing. Lisrai in the northern foothills of Sin, scholars and warrior poets, spies and collectors of secrets, who are called hedonists by some and dilettantes by others, and who have a talent for noble excess in all its forms. And Deiyeh in the southern cliffs of Sin, where pastures meet endless deserts, and where all forms of asceticism and martial zealotry find their home in the ever sharp blades of the priestly nation.

Each of the five great kingdoms is headed by a great god, called a dalaihal, who lies in the deepest recesses of each kingdom’s capital temple. In Atri there is Amenisis, the hyena headed god of mystic knowledge and shifting sex. In Isstiliph there is Dagger, the fish god who swallows the souls of his enemies. In Lock there is Vaal, who wields a spear made of tempests and hurricanes. In Lisrai there is Haj, the dreamwalker, who plants visions and hallucinations like seeds in a garden. And in Deiyeh there is Veye, the blind god, who abhors disorder in all its forms. The royal cults of each of the five great kingdoms agree that the dalaihal are the primordial creators of the world. It was the dalaihal who fashioned the sapient kinds out of their own breath to fight a mythic war against the mother of monsters, and to keep kaidir, the dalaihal’s will and commandments, which bring balance to nature and plenty to the land of Chaesharin. But the royal cults all self-interestedly disagree about which of the dalaihal should rule over the others, and by extension, which great kingdom should rule Chaesharin and the wider world of Hadam.

Each royal cult spins tales of its own dalaihal’s superior virtues and benevolence towards its people, as well as of the dalaihal’s mastery over divine powers that the other dalaihal could not hope to match. The proof of these divine powers are said to be the kelai, relics gifted to the royal cults by the dalaihal and unique to each great kingdom. The priests of the royal cults parade these relics before their people and demonstrate their power in festivals of revelry and magick. But the kelai require a profound sacrifice from their people in order for the relics to be of use. Three times a day, every day, the people of every great kingdom stop what they are doing and perform an intricate series of daipelah, hand prayers, which convey individual reverence to the gods through sign language. With the daipelah performed, the people of each great kingdom forfeit their dreams, which they tithe to the royal cults to collect, condense, and liquefy into the dark emerald fluid of magick that powers the great kingdom’s ever expanding supply of kelai. None of the common people of Chaesharin have dreamed in nearly four centuries, though many would say they are happy to pay the price in service to their great kingdom’s infinite war effort.

But something is wrong in the Shadow Crescent in the absence of dreams. Something even more wrong than the wars without end and the poverty and brokenheartedness that results from it. For where there are no dreams, demons, called shaed, flourish. Whether the shaed break free from the prisons the dalaihal put them in, as the royal cults tell it, or whether the shaed themselves are manifestations of the royal cults’ arrogance and oppression, as a few others whisper, broods of demons walk the land of Chaesharin. Shaed do not haunt dark or death filled places, nor do they execute random violence on hapless passers bys, rather, shaed seek to be bound to some sort of contract with those desperate enough or ambitious enough to cry out for their services. The shaed always fulfill their vows, to the letter of the agreement and not an inch more, and all the while they reap the misery and the discord they cause, and in the end, they turn and devour their supplicants before venturing off in search of another with the will to contract with them.

But there is one sort of being that the royal cults preach against with even more vim and verve than demons, and that is the aihalan. The royal cults admit the aihalan’s existence, grudgingly, and explain them away as the unfortunate offspring of dalaihal and women of sapient kinds who were too lustful in their hearts and their clothing. The aihalan are apparently minor gods who are commonly featured in peasant folklore as tricksters and jesters, and who mock those in power and champion the causes of the poor. It is for this reason, this blasphemy, that the royal cults ostensibly condemn the aihalan, but beneath this surface of manufactured outrage lies something more dangerous. The aihalan create vaishineph, returned souls, resurrected members of the sapient kinds to whom the aihalan grant a portion of their semi-divine powers. Vaishineph have their blood replaced with manna, have no need for food, water, air, or rest, and gain the power to Whisper words of command to different objects and elemental forces in the world. An aihalan will gather half a dozen vaishineph to themselves and form a rebel cult, tasked with acts of infiltration, sabotage, spying, theft, political manipulation, and assassination, all directed at the royal cults and their resources. The aihalan bid their vaishineph to undermine the war making powers of the great kingdoms and the common folk’s faith in the kingdom’s dalaihal, and to raise populist movements that cease to practice the daipelah, and deny the royal cults the substance they need to power their kelai.

The royal cults try to deny the existence of vaishineph, and pass their disruptions off as terrorism masked in the garb of mysticism, but the royal cults themselves believe in vaishineph. Every royal cult has a group of elite warriors, armed and trained to hunt and kill the vaishineph. These Jade Men roam the land, seeking out vaishineph and their aihalan, and exploiting the aihalan’s care for the commonfolk to bring the vaishineph out into the open. The Jade Men also capture, experiment on, and contract with the shaed to aid in their efforts. The Jade Men use the most lethal and disastrous kelai, and consider collateral damage in the pursuit of vaishineph to be a sacred offering to their respective dalaihal.

The life of a vaishineph, even outside the contests with kingdoms, cults, and demons, can be troubling enough and strange enough as it is. Vaishineph are aware of other aihalan and other rebel cults of vaishineph, though it is only in the rarest circumstances do the groups collaborate or come into conflict. Groups of vaishineph are also diverse, with members of every class, race, and gender, in bold defiance of the rigid social structures the royal cults impose with their kaidir, and vaishineph must struggle with their own deeply ingrained prejudices as they cooperate with one another. Vaishineph also remember nothing of their former lives except for the moments immediately leading up to their deaths, and these events rarely make sense to them, as they cannot remember the identities of those involved or the circumstances in which the memories take place. Yet as the manna stirs in the vaishineph’s veins, as they grow in power and as the Whispers become second nature to them, they begin to remember more and more of who they were. All vaishineph inevitably encounter a moment when they realize that there was some great horror, tragedy, or loss in their former lives that they desire to atone for. Vaishineph realize that this need for atonement is why they accepted their resurrection, perhaps even why they were chosen by their aihalan to begin with, and their quest against the royal cults becomes more personal as they find ways to atone for their past lives while carrying on their subversive campaigns.

Even as vaishineph and their aihalan wage these wars against war, the long term goals of the aihalan remain mysterious. Some aihalan explain that they are biding their time until the return of a truest god, who will wipe away the tears of the world and set all things right. Some aihalan seem to believe that, if only the royal cults can be routed, the dalaihal they serve will wither away and peace will reign in the kingdoms. Some aihalan seem to have no ambitions at all beyond causing as much chaos as possible, or their motives are based in personal vendettes against certain greater shaeds or certain leaders within the royal cults. The five great kingdoms have fought for four hundred years, and perhaps longer still, and it takes a lot of faith for the vaishineph to rise above the natural gloom and cynicism of standing in front of the unstoppable force that is conquest. And the vaishineph have heard, just as everyone has heard, of rumors of a sixth kingdom on the far eastern horizon, twice the size of all the five kingdoms combined, with armies of millions and kelai that can rend the world asunder. The royal cults say, and the aihalan do not refute, that the sixth kingdom may be servants of an ancient evil that sleeps within the center of Hadam, the same mother of monsters that the dalaihal destroyed and scattered to the corners of the world in mythic times. If it is true, then the efforts of the vaishineph and aihalan in Chaesharin might mean nothing at all, if such a force sweeps through and reduces the Shadow Crescent to a salted ruin.

But whether or not that is true, whether or not a vaishineph finds atonement or makes an impact in the war of five kingdoms, whether the aihalan are benevolent gods or bastard divinities in disguise, whether the royal cults are right and submission to the dalaihal is the only good, or whether the sacrifice of the common folk’s dreams is just and war is a sacred right, all these questions and more are for the answering of players and gamemasters in The Way of the Earth. Players in The Way of the Earth take on the role of one of these vaishineph in the Shadow Crescent, and a group of players together forms a rebel cult. Raised, empowered, and charged with making peace through chaos, players in The Way of the Earth fight, manipulate, and Whisper their way in and out of danger in stories of dark fantasy adventure in an ancient world at war.

The Way of the Earth is set in Chaesharin in the year 3051 after creation. One year prior, a powerful relic was fired into the eastern side of the Naisi peaks in the northern reaches of the Mountains of Sin. The weapon split the peaks in two, carving out a valley of molten glass wide enough for an army to march through. The blast was heard as far west as the Emetsai islands north of Atri’s shores, and ash filled the sky for hundreds of miles in every direction. The moon was bathed in red and the sun in violet. No fish was seen in the waters of Tai for a week afterwards. Spies from all five kingdoms have witnessed scouts from this sixth kingdom passing back and forth through the valley. Lisrai, nearest the breach, has built a line of fortresses across their end of the Valley of Broken Mirrors, as they are calling it. For the first time in two centuries they are openly calling for military alliances, as they stand to be the first kingdom conquered. The five kingdoms of the Shadow Crescent have been flung into chaos, some considering negotiation, some sending regiments at Lisrai’s invitation to occupy the fortresses, most plotting for how they might use this to their own advantage.  Is this the perfect time for the vaishineph to strike at the fragility of the five kingdoms and lay their dalaihal low, or is this the perfect time to reconsider the ultimate purpose of the vaishineph?