The Hieronhortean Energy Deficit

Perhaps the biggest mystery of the predatory lands of the protectorate of Hieronhorte is the very fact that its broken ecology can sustain so many large predators when the perennial ash clouds and black mist make the existence of plant life and therefore herbivores impossible in the whole area.

This is further evidenced, though far from explained, by the extraordinary amounts of toxins the tissues of most hieronhortean living beings, feeding on other predators accumulate, to the point that their meat is often outright poisonous for common humans. Savages and especially ogres are no exception. Their meat is almost as poisonous as that of many of the monstrosities of the protectorate, though they seem to have developed a partial resistance themselves, just like they adapted to the cold temperatures without having to wear extra layers of clothes.

Just like traditional thermodynamics alone cannot explain this latter adaptation, traditional biology alone cannot explain an ecosystem of predators consuming other predators and still somehow generating enough calories to keep these beings running. This problem is known as the Hieronhortean Energy Deficit. A number of theories and in fact entire camps have emerged over the years trying to explain this mystery.

At one of the extremes stand those that argue, backed by fossil, yet sparse evidence, that the area was once a lush jungle, not unlike that of Malahs Kovoss, that went through a slow but sustained process of  increased volcanic activity that eventually resulted in the Hieronhorte of today. This process, they believe, was slow enough to give the living creatures in it time to evolve and adapt to the new environment, with many migrating underground.

Plentiful schools of fish, plankton and even pods of whales are known to feed most of the maritime creatures near the coast of this protectorate. Some caverns are known to be hosts for sprawling fungal masses and molds feeding on detritus and nutrients in the water, and vast colonies of bacteria are known to sustain the closest thing to grazers, mostly echinoderms and worms deeper around the numerous hydrothermal vents. Even the most generous estimates however couldn't sustain even half the wildlife inhabiting the area, unless the unexplored depths of the protectorate are much bigger than believed and saturated with these things.

At the opposite end of the spectrum of theories stand those that defend a faster hieronhortean cataclysm. They believe the volcanic change that befell the protectorate was quick and wiped out the vast majority of native living beings. They disagree on what caused this cataclysm exactly, with the most popular theories pointing to saurians and sub-saurians as punishment and a strategy to keep their former masters away respectively, but most of them agree that conjuration played a large part in it, propitiating and accelerating the latent volcanic and tectonic threat.

Many of the often unnatural-looking creatures prowling the hieronhortean underground are in fact explained as beings either created or brought into this world through conjuration. Detractors argue that creating or summoning beings from scratch, let alone a whole ecosystem, is well past the capabilities of any human, which at most allow someone to lure and coerce them into service, especially in the absence of hoards of gold or other materials heavy in Arkhe to consume in the process.

Then again, defenders argue, this would actually explain the scarcity of gold in The Steppes and the known world as a whole.

This theory however suffers the same problems as its counterpart. Rough estimates of every known past gold deposit and the maximum total amount possible to have ever existed in the planet is nowhere near enough to justify even half the creatures known to inhabit Hieronhorte.

This leads to a third, perhaps bigger problem, the fact that even both theories combined could not explain the totality of the creatures in the protectorate, so the energy deficit debate rages on unsolved.

The Melody of the Magical Tree

A popular stallian fable of unknown authorship goes as follows:

 

There once was a giant magical tree where all the most wondrous and colourful songbirds of the world made their nests. The tree was 7017 metres tall and had razor sharp needles and thorns covering its trunk, the cones and nuts in its branches opened up every day to reveal all of the seeds in the world, and it granted the birds a wish every 7 years in exchange for their songs. For countless generations the birds lived a life of joy and happiness that gave their songs an unparalleled beauty and cheerfulness.

One day, when the birds were singing one of their songs, they noticed the rest of the animals of the forest trying to listen below. The birds were sad for them, because they couldn't listen to their songs very well all the way down there and wolves and lynxes ate the other animals whenever they tried to come out to listen, so the birds decided to call an assembly to discuss using the upcoming wish to the tree to give those forest animals wings, so they could join them and better listen to their songs.

All the birds agreed except for the swallows, which argued that it was a dangerous and reckless idea. The swallows were the most inquisitive of the birds. They always asked questions that made all the other birds feel uncomfortable and traveled all over the world to verify the answers they were given rather than take them at face value, but the other birds were tired of their negativity and skepticism, so they rejected their opinions.

- You are just jealous, chirp, chirp! -argued the singing kwillings in their flawless lyrical voices- Because your songs aren't as pretty as ours, so you don't want the other animals to know, chirp, chirp!

- You are just evil, puff, puff! -continued the huffy puffys indignantly ruffling their little chests- Because you eat living things like the wolves and the lynxes, so you are one of them, puff, puff!

- You are just sad and lonely, whirl, whirl! -said the dancing thipityps with a little jig- Because your feathers aren't as colourful as ours, so you can't stand seeing others happy, whirl, whirl!

The birds thus voted in favour of granting wings to any forest animal that didn't feed on fellow sentient beings so they could join them up in the tree. The forest animals rejoiced and danced in the air with their new wings to the beautiful songs of the birds.

But the egg-eating snakes got wings as well, and they ate all the eggs of all the nests of the birds while they sang their songs for their new friends.

Without offspring, all the wondrous songbirds succumbed, and the magical tree, deprived of the beautiful songs, withered and died with them. Only the swallows survived, because they knew of other places to find food and nest. And yet still, to this day, they migrate thought half a world every year during the fall to visit the place of the magical tree, bringing and planting all kinds of seeds so that one day the magical tree can grow back and the world might once again get to hear the melody of the magical tree.

The Enlightened Manifesto

There are as many different ways to see the world and proposals to make it better among those influenced as there are influenced individuals, so we can't speak of a single unifying principle like the Promise Doctrine for those loyal to The Court.

There is however a semi-fabled text, known as the Enlightened Manifesto, of ultimately unknown authorship, that has been often cited to discredit the Promise Doctrine. There are many publications circulating around libraries and bookstores under this title, each one from a different author, often claiming to be the one true artificer of the manifesto, but these are all believed to be reflections of the original text at best and outright hoaxes at worst.

The original text wasn't a book at all, but a series of letters sent to notable influenced business people and aristocrats over the course of several years. Their existence was only made public when a mysterious fire destroyed a veshite aristocrat's house. The fire conveniently took place during the course of a widespread miner riot in Ill-Vess, quickly consuming the entire building before the busy authorities had time to respond.

By the time firefighters got there, the whole place was little more than smoking cinders. Among these, they found the charred corpses of the aristocrat, his family, and an unidentified adult partially melted to a metal safe. It is when the relatives of this aristocrat opened the safe that they discovered part of the letters, though these relatives announced the letters were stolen a few weeks later, allegedly before they had the chance to copy or even study them. The actual content of the surviving letters was thus lost amidst a sea of sensationalist journalism, wild speculation and probably a hefty dose of misinformation as well.

The refutation of the Promise Doctrine however is remarkably similar in all the contemporary texts and, unlike all the other claims, has never been publicly denied by these "accidental" receivers of the letters.

The many forms of the Enlightened Manifesto defend that the use of a strong military force as deterrence is not only a waste of resources better allocated to other ends, but that paying the largest beastfolk clans tribute would guarantee the safety of The Steppes just as much by but a fraction of the costs. Furthermore, any system created and operated by humans is by its very nature imperfect, rendering large armies an unacceptable hazard that could be used to oppress its own people or precipitate a war against others as command over them passes through different hands. More ominously, the manifesto also claims that the kinds of threats an army is prepared to deal with are but a mere and insignificant fraction of the dangers to which humans are exposed at any given time.

A similar argument is made against the drive to explore the world, but with notable differences. By the same principles, the Manifesto warns against the consequences of the wrong people gaining control over the knowledge and artefacts of the saurians or feyfolk, but their solution is not to stop looking for them, rather to harshly regulate this search, allowing only what they call the enlightened to access the findings. Only the enlightened, they claim as a regrettable but unavoidable fact, are prepared to process, analyze and deal with these deeper truths and powerful relics and use them for the greater good for everyone. The enlightened, the letter purportedly explained as an example, are already on the verge of gaining the power through these means to "neutralize" the beastfolk menace more easily than any army ever could.

It is because of this that the enlightened and the rest of their goals must remain hidden, for the very knowledge of these goals, they claim, endangers their mission and humankind as a whole. Just like one wouldn't give a loaded gun to a toddler no matter how much they love them, the enlightened will continue to nurture and work to keep other humans, their children so to speak, from harming themselves, among other things by restricting access to these dangerous artefacts.

That, the letters allegedly conclude, is "the promise to our children".

The Promise Doctrine

There are two things receiving a disproportionate amount of the limited manpower and resources of The Steppes; Defence and exploration, which allows its relatively meagre population to punch well above its weight in both fields.

This is commonly referred to as "the promise to our children", a term and doctrine popularized by the stallian diplomat Lenn Ranel, summed up as "to become strong, so that we might be spared of using force and understand the world, so that we might understand each other". The doctrine quickly became a leading principle among the different cities and was eventually adopted as something of an unofficial motto for The Court of All Humans.

The first tenet of this doctrine, that of military deterrence, is dictated by the fact that The Steppes are in effect undergoing constant, albeit low intensity warfare, for the most part not even against political entities with clear representatives with which they can negotiate, but instead marauding beastfolk bandits, ogres, beasts and hidden influenced organizations. All the while, the threat of a coordinated, overwhelming invasion by millions of armed beastfolk bandits always looms on the horizon.

Under these circumstances, it is argued, it is necessary not only to prepare for this doomsday scenario, but to make The Steppes as much of an undesirable target as possible to ideally avoid confrontation altogether. To this end, the different cities have been cooperating in creating technologically advanced and extensively trained armies with which to defend themselves and each other, promising unacceptable loses to any would be invader.

This cooperation, enforced by nothing but the knowledge that one city's fall would clearly announce their collective weakness to the beastfolk hordes, is symbolically represented for example in each city's naval ship full official designation, always containing the words "Intervention Fleet", signifying their design to intervene wherever needed rather than simply defend their own waters.

The second tenet could in fact be considered another mean to the same end. While deterrence is currently necessary and could work as a temporary solution, its cost would be untenable in the long run, so the doctrine envisions the need to understand the world as a whole in order to reach a more sustainable peace, which is ultimately what is called "the promise to our children".

This understanding involves plenty of academic and laboratory research, but it is more frequently portrayed as the much popularized archaeological, geographical and scientific explorations into the protectorates.

Each new expedition embarks, if one is to trust the tabloids, with the hope that it might be the one to discover this one new all-revealing piece of lost history, game-changing magical artifact or tide-turning saurian technology that will finally bring lasting peace and guarantee the protection of The Steppes. The members of these expeditions often become pop culture heroes and every detail of their private lives, whether known or simply rumoured, is prominently featured in sensationalist media.

It is rarely however that these dangerous expeditions come back with something other than uninteresting-looking artefacts or information useful for something other than long-term academic research, and often that they return with half or less of its members alive, if at all. This leads skeptics to point out that, just like the deterrence is nothing but an excuse to feed an overblown military-industrial complex, these expeditions are another waste and little more than a show to put on to entertain the masses, distracting them from more immediate social issues. 

Then again, it is not unusual for surviving explorers to talk about clear signs of recent looting or even the rare encounter with other, well equipped and armed humans in uncharted territories hindering their progress and sometimes even attacking them, so one could as easily argue that these expeditions are on the right track to something, if usually just a little too late.

Languages and Dialects of The Known World

The inhabitants of The Steppes speak the same language, simply known as the Common Language, which is actually a standardization of the beastfolk language. Beastfolk clans can understand each other and even speakers of the Common Language to a very reasonable extent. This is due to the fact that most commonly used words and mood-setters in inter-clan beastfolk diplomacy and dialogue, such as scatological references, sexual-related idioms and references to each other's mothers seem to have remained immutable over the years, perhaps for the common goal of easier understanding. As a general rule however, the farther a clan's territory is from The Steppes, the harder it is to understand them and the more alien their language becomes.

The first humans to flee from Malahs Kovoss and settle in The Steppes of course brought this language with them. One of the objectives of the foundation of the University of Stallia was to study and create rules to govern and standardize this Common Language. To an external observer, the Common Language and most of its dialects would have a hissing quality to it, with many seemingly unnecessary "s" and "h" letters in it. Most beastfolk claim that this is just how saurians spoke, but given the nature of the saurians' tridimensional writing, it seems unlikely that they could convey much of that information in a medium such as vibrations in the air. Steppe scholars are more inclined to believe that this is simply the result of beastfolk mutations, favouring certain kinds of sounds over others harder to vocalize without unchanged human bodies.

A few dialects and accents exist within The Steppes however, especially in isolated rural communities or where beastfolk are more abundant. This is particularly true about Arrakans, a city originally founded by beastfolk mutineers whose descendants were left mostly unchanged. Other people of The Steppes would define the Arrakensis accent as loud and barking and the first question first-time visitors in Arrakans often make is something along the lines of "Why is everybody yelling?".

Then there is the case of Hieronhorte, once more a mystery that refuses to have any light shed on it. The savages simply lack any kind of spoken language and communicate among each other through the most rudimentary ways, if any. This is in part because of how unwise it is to make any unnecessary noise in the predatory lands of Hieronhorte, though at the same time they lack a written language. In the end they just seem unwilling to communicate overall and  only very rarely even bother learning languages.

Ogres farther north, on the other hand, speak or rather grunt the only other known, non-beastfolk language. Again there isn't much coherence, but it seems to be a very basic language whose main purpose is to claim stuff and pick on fights. Time and again it proves hard to study their language not only because most humans only ever come into contact with a living ogre as their food, but because in radical contrast to the savages they seem to enjoy making noises and often don't really speak so much as they simply emphasize their emotions with random grunts and howls.
 

History and State of Telecommunications In The Steppes

The most rudimentary form of telecommunication to be found in The Steppes was the ordinary mail developed in a largely military fashion in order to coordinate the many tenant farmers on the public stallian crops and the stallian army. This ruthlessly efficient military mail service was much later exported to Tershelle-Val and is still maintained with typically stallian punctuality. Despite how seriously stallians take their mail and parcel delivery deadlines, other cities have never adopted this model, instead allowing civilian corporations to take over the endeavours.

The development of communications at a distance halted to a stop for many years after the establishment of the stallian mail service. Citizens of Arrakans have always appeared to have their communication needs covered with vigorous shouting and yelling, so there was zero development on their part.

It wasn't until the construction of the veshite-stallian railway that necessity pushed thinking heads to develop faster wire communications. The telegraph appears to have been conceived by observing "patterns in pulses of energy" inside barely functional saurian era machinery. The first telegraph was deployed along the railway as a way to convey quick information between Stallia and the different garrisons along the line concerning the construction's progress and above all enemy raids and attacks, shortening the different garrisons' reaction time.

It was later in Ill-Vess that the telephone was developed. For many years, Ill-Vess stood almost alone in the use of telephones while Stallia and Arrakans lagged behind. The city's response was the creation of the Veshite Telephone Company in order to lobby for the advancement of telecommunications all over The Steppes. The company has ever since diversified to adapt to newer forms of communications and their laboratories have been the driving force behind many innovations in the field. They are estimated to have built almost 80% of all telecom networks.

The latest development on the field was the wireless radio. Over the last few years the Veshite Telephone Company's laboratories have been refining and improving on their original designs to such an extent as to allow the implantation of relatively small transceivers not only on ships but also land vehicles and even planes or some unfortunate grunt's backpack. While originally conceived for military uses, forward-looking veshite and nivharian media tycoons were quick to seize this new invention and turn it into a mass phenomenon.

The nivharian case was especially dramatic, with hundreds of radio stations, some no bigger than a teenager's bedroom, sprouting like mushrooms, altering the city's profile with countless antennae and radio towers. The increasing number and power of receivers had however an unaccounted effect, showing all of The Steppes to be showered in radio waves emanating from nearby celestial objects, specially what has been deduced to be artificial satellites in low orbit, likely of saurian origin. These transmissions seem to consist almost exclusively of noise, but sometimes patterns can be recognized in them. Amateurs and laboratories all over the place have been trying to decipher these transmissions ever since without any proven success.

The Veshite Telephone Company is of course leading all the efforts and has in fact undertaken the self-imposed challenge of communicating with the sources of these transmissions. For this purpose the company has been developing new technologies outside the telecommunications market strictly speaking. For example, the use of radio waves to detect objects at a distance seems to be undergoing testing stages and is widely believed to have already been employed for military purposes and even to aid in the location of these orbiting bodies.
 

History and State of Medicine in The Steppes

There is currently no consensus on how to treat many sicknesses inside The Steppes and of course each city has a slightly different way of seeing things.


The first physicians of The Steppes were literally butchers serving in the stallian army whose particular set of skills seemed to be the most indicated at the time to perform the necessary battlefield medicine during the struggling first years of the city. They performed plenty of amputations right on the floor of the trenches, but ultimately managed to save few lives. Since it took very healthy individuals to survive these butchers, it is believed, this influenced the current stallian healthcare with its heavy focus on the preventive through a healthy lifestyle, diet and exercise.

When something similar to scientific progress started to take place during the following years, the figure of the barber-surgeon eventually emerged. These individuals, sometimes through training and sometimes through self-perceived talent, removed undesirable things from people's bodies, be that hair, decayed teeth, excessive blood or gangrenous limbs. A few of these individuals still thrive to this day especially in Arrakans, where they serve as something in between folk psychologists, charlatans, surgeons and singers. They are not particularly good at any of these fields, but they are often able to keep a secret, which is an attractive trait for crooks.

Medicine as a science took off in Ill-Vess. The quest for a greater knowledge on the human body led to a series of unpopular experiments and procedures practiced on both living and deceased individuals that caused the public to call for legislation. This legislation only caused the rise of grave robbers and the schism of the so called "Stitcher" doctors, which continued to pursue their amoral goals in an undercover way. The term stitcher originated in a veshite tabloid article, which originally assumed a serial killer was stitching together pieces of their victims, but the name stuck around ever since. These stitchers consider regular doctors hypocrites for benefiting of their research while condemning it, while the establishment blames stitchers of simply repeating useless, poorly controlled experiments on humans which they claim are nothing but cruel tortures on disguise.

As technology advanced, new medicines and equipment has been put into the service of medicine. This expensive equipment made necessary the creation of hospitals, as opposed to physicians working from their own homes. The first hospital was built in Nivhar not that long ago, followed by Ill-Vess' and the smaller imitations on other cities with lesser resources.

X-rays are all the fad, there are about half a dozen different types of antibiotics in use, optical microscopes are used to perform a series of medical analyses, and surgical procedures with a varying degree of success are performed regularly, more often than not in clean rooms.

The latest development in medicine is the differentiation of a significant number of nivharian physicians from the veshite model to seek a more psychosomatic approach, putting together psychology, sociology and behavioral sciences. This branch is too young to prove itself,  but other cities remain skeptic so far.

A lot of research has of course been put into the workings of samples of the beastfolk mutagen, which has given researchers a significant insight about genetics. But current instruments are not powerful enough to make much practical use of this.
 

History and State of Manned Flight in The Steppes

Let's cover some miscellaneous lore topics in to kill some time until the release.


The first manned flight in recorded history above The Steppes was that of an unidentified contraption assumed to be operated by at least 2 beastfolk. The event took place shortly after the foundation of Stallia and involved the sight of what was described at the time as "a fireball or meteor" that streaked across the Stallian airspace and touched ground a few kilometers east in a wheat field. The explosion and subsequent fire caused the device and its occupants to be spread over a 800 meter radius, leaving little to study. Historians to this day argue about whether this was a poorly operated savaged saurian era flying machine or an oddly-shaped rocket with beastfolk strapped to it for some reason.

During the first desperate years of The Steppes no man-made machine significantly lifted off the ground neither in Stallia nor Arrakans. During the construction of the Veshite-Stallian railway there were attempts to use observation balloons as some kind of mobile watchtowers. They were generally tied to escort wagons, but the weather often grounded them as they approached the hieronhortean lands, where they were most direly needed.

During its first years, Ill-Vess also failed to develop a sizable number of aircraft for the same reason. The weather just did not allow a local market of lighter-than-air or wood and canvas machines to develop.

The advances necessary in metallurgy to make air transportation possible, although veshite in origin, did not arrive until the time Nivhar was being constructed. The city received the know-how when veshite industries poured in. The entrepreneurs quickly realized that the mild weather of Nivhar was perfect for the new machines, and so the nivharian aeronautical industry and its flying culture was born.

Soon all the young people in Nivhar were trying to learn how to pilot an aircraft. The "air craze" resulted in landing strips in almost every villa or hamlet surrounding the city and farmers were soon fantasizing about the (mostly imaginary) wonders of airborne agriculture. Acrobatic air shows were all the rage and you could hardly watch an action movie without at least a dogfight in it, sometimes involving no other weapons than the pilots' bare hands.


Presently, because of the coastal location of the main centers of trade, most flying takes place in seaplanes. Ill-Vess is particularly partial to flying boats as their mountainous terrain limits their available space for sizable landing strips. Arrakans, on the other hand, is more interested in floatplanes, with several smugglers already specialized in delivery of small valuables through the use these nimble machines.

Airstrips further inland in The Steppes are mostly reserved for military operations, since neither Stallia nor especially the embargoed Tershelle-Val offer many commerce opportunities. The military's interest is both in logistics and the fact that planes equipped with retractable gears can easily outperform those that are forced to drag their floats around all the time.

Ill-Vess has been forced to solve its spatial problems with the development of rotor aircraft and helicopters, but this technology is still in its infancy and still subject to the weather. The technologies to manufacture turbine engines and metal fuselages approach optimization in The Steppes, but jet engines are still only in the fantasies of reclusive engineering types. The hypothetical invention of a functional jet engine would revolutionize flight and, along with the use of saurian alloys, theoretically allow the creation of much bigger, faster and durable aircraft.
  

Feyfolk and Fey Worlds

Feyfolk is the all-encompassing term used to define a series of unknown intelligences that seem to affect the workings of the game's world by unknown means.

Feyfolk manifest themselves in a number of ways. The most common way, the one that first comes to the mind of the layperson, is through household or workplace mischief and the alleged "baby swaps", but this is almost always the work of human pranksters, forgetfulness and sometimes downright stupidity.

Another way for feyfolk to manifest is through dancing lights in the sky, especially around certain areas. These lights are relatively frequent, so their existence is not contested, scientists of The Steppes simply aren't sure what they are yet. Some conjurers claim that the existence of these dancing lights mark the spots where some fey worlds and the human one come close or even intermingle. According to these theories, the lights would be a byproduct of the "partial existence" of these beings in this world and humans probably generate similar ones in the fey worlds.

A number of people, in fact, claim to have been abducted by these visiting feyfolk and carried into their worlds. One of the distinctly recurring features of these abductions is the sometimes visible aging of the abductees, which is especially noticeable in children. There are reports of children missing for as little as a few days, returning later aged as much as a few years. Often, these people show an assortment of mental illnesses and prove unable to adapt to their native environments anymore.

Even if these abductees are not mentally ill on their return, they are almost inevitably unable to convey their experiences in these fey worlds in a coherent manner for different, often creative ways. Some are rendered dumb, some return without a tongue or hands, and yet others experience physical pain or simply start to sneeze uncontrollably whenever they try to remember or tell anything about these places.

The line between some feyfolk and the outer lands' beings is fuzzy. The main difference would be that the beings of the outer lands exist mostly in this world, while feyfolk come from the fey worlds. Furthermore, the opinion of otherworldly feyfolk towards humans seem to be as a rule even more indifferent and unconcerned than that of the outer lands' beings.

As for what feyfolk are exactly or how do they look like, it's impossible to tell. The kinds of feyfolk species and worlds are virtually infinite, and sometimes so radically different to the world of humans that they are unfathomable. Many unexplainable natural phenomena in this world and probably in others are actually believed to be the effect of unintended interactions with intelligences so different and alien that they are unable to perceive each other.
 

Hieronhorte; Oil, Ogres and Savages

While compiling the in-game lore, I noticed that the issue of Hieronhorte wasn't well explained, so here's a Lore post about it to fill in that gap.


The protectorate of Hieronhorte, to the north of The Steppes, encompasses at the same time the most mysterious and most dreadful lands of the known world.

On the surface, the rocky, mountainous terrain is covered by a layer of ice and ash and is nearly totally barren of life. What appears to be out of control volcanism deeper into the protectorate causes the sky to be constantly darkened by clouds of ashes. These thunderous clouds cause hail the size of golf balls when up in the sky, or a thick, noxious black fog when they are closer to the surface. Fortunately for The Steppes, regular southern wind patterns keep most of the ashes at the other side of the mountain range.

This territory is also known as "The Predatory Lands" because there are virtually no plants and therefore no herbivores. Those few, bizarre creatures that still cling to life are all predators trying to eat each other first. Most of these creatures inhabit the hieronhortean underground, where the environment is slightly more bearable. Hieronhorte appears to host a sprawling underground system that remains largely unknown to The Steppes, but harbours both the hieronhortean savages and the ogres.

These hieronhortean savages barely amount to a civilization. They lack a language and live in isolation from each other, rarely and only reticently gathering in large groups. They absolutely hate noise, as in their predatory native land, being noisy usually means getting eaten by some lurking creature. The only way in which a regular hieronhortean savage communicates is by for example banging two rocks together. The message would be roughly translated as something like "leave now or die horribly".

While these savages show themselves, in their own way, friendly towards humans of The Steppes, the so called ogres further north, arch-enemies of the savages, chose to take the opposite stance. Large, ponderous, ugly, hairy and with tiny eyes, the ogres seem to be starting their own evolutionary path away from regular humans. Unlike the savages, ogres seem to have accomplished a certain degree of civilization, a language and the construction of primitive tools.

They seem to hail from the so called Deep Hieronhorte, a barely trodden region well under the sea level and therefore featuring a highly increased atmospheric pressure and greater temperatures. According to what few accounts exist, which can be counted with the digits on one hand, the experience of walking in these lands is literally nightmarish, as it feels almost like walking underwater.

Most humans captured by ogres probably end up in this place. Ogres love regular humans a little too much and in the wrong way. While beastfolk despise humans and capture and torture them out of spite, ogres are naturally cruel creatures with a taste for human flesh. Any human that happens to be captured by an ogre is kept as something in between a plaything and livestock.

This doesn't look like a place worth settling into, but as the exploration of Hieronhorte got underway, huge deposits of oil and gas were found practically all over the place. These resources are scarce in The Steppes, but of the utmost importance for maintaining the defensive effort. Unfortunately, the presence of humans also stirred the ogres and, with human livestock apparently becoming more fashionable after the first captures, warbands started to descend from the north with the express purpose of enslaving more humans. Presently, the most daring ogres have reached as far as the mountains of Ill-Vess.

Many claim that the exploitation of these resources has therefore done nothing but open a second front for the already besieged Steppes. The hieronhortean oil and other resources are at the same time indispensable to keep the beastfolk menace at bay nonetheless, and simply abandoning the oil fields won't be enough to appease the already prodded ogre hordes, so there is no turning back for The Court in Hieronhorte anymore.
 

The Retribution War and the City of Tershelle-Val

"Retribution" is as ubiquitous a concept in tershere aristocrats' speech as "individual rights" is for nivharian ones.

With just 45.000 individuals, Tershelle-Val is the smallest city of The Steppes. Furthermore, it only belongs to The Steppes nominally, since it is actually located west in the mountain range that serves as a natural border with the protectorate of Malahs Kovoss.


With the New Court in Nivhar, the nivharian aristocracy continued to push for greater individual rights throughout The Steppes. There was nonetheless continuing resentment in Stallia and, to a lesser extent, Arrakans and Ill-Vess. These cities, or rather, the population that remained in them, grudgingly followed in on the new capital's steps, achieving a reluctant but significant spectrum of individual freedoms not unlike those of Nivhar

Given the increasing prosperity of The Steppes as a whole, however, not only beastfolk bandits, but also refugees were now starting to flock on the frontiers. Beastfolk are modified humans, so they were never technically excluded from the universal human rights heralded by the nivharian aristocracy, but this was a bone of contempt for reactionary aristocrats and the population that suffered the worst in the hands of beastfolk bandits.

As soon as beastfolk refugees, lifelong survivalists, wanderers and opportunist, started to pour into The Steppes, cultural conflict started to develop with the more law-abiding, sedentary inhabitants of The Steppes. These refugees' apparent inability to adapt to society and reject violence did nothing but to aggravate the problem.

The hard-working, no-nonsense stallians clashed particularly hard with the beastfolk refugees, especially as they proved unwilling to work in the tenant farming system. Rather ironically, the by now completely unmodified humans inhabiting Arrakans, themselves descendants of beastfolk, also clashed hard against the new refugees. Almost as unruly as the refugees themselves, arrakensis citizens have always defined themselves as the most loyal to The Court and were simply unable to stand for what they perceived as parasitism on the part of the new refugees.

The main cultural problem was that beastfolk vagrants had by then developed a deeply opportunistic behaviour, a behaviour they absolutely needed in order to survive in the jungles. For them, lone young men and women were easy chances to mate, stray pets and children were an easy protein intake, and anything that wasn't nailed to the floor in the streets or backyards was potentially useful furniture or construction material. Entire native collectives eventually became radicalized by these continuing offences and prone to violent organized responses in the form of vigilante posses.

But the worst was yet to come. The refugee problem truly threatened to overwhelm The Court as literally millions of beastfolk gathered ever closer to the frontiers of The Steppes following the favourable reports being spread by beastfolk bandits, smugglers and refugees alike.

This was the ultimate nightmare for the reactionary aristocracy of Stallia and Arrakans and a sticky situation for everybody else. The Steppes, with less than a million inhabitants, was simply unable to support, defend or police such a population of starving, warring and unruly individuals. This time, not even a tenant system would suffice, as the land itself was unable to yield enough food to sustain such a large population, even supposing they would all choose to peacefully adapt and cooperate.

These refugees, however, were still human and were entitled to protection and nourishment by The Court of All Humans, so there was no easy way out of this a situation.


While most of The Court and the aristocracy argued, the reactionary elements of the stallian and arrakensis aristocracy snapped, seized a large part of their cities' military, and went rogue.

Soon before the first reports reached The Court, a large section of the stallian and arrakensis military had launched a punitive, two-pronged attack westwards into the protectorate of Malahs Kovoss. Arrakensis ships climbed the Arrakans river while a stallian army swept the border southwards in order to drive both refugees and bandits away from The Steppes. Both armies agreed to employ the most ruthless means possible in order to leave as long a lasting mark on the beastfolk psyche as possible.

The remaining aristocracy was dumbstruck, outraged and furious at such an unilateral, murderous and potentially calamitous action. All forces on The Steppes were immediately mobilized in order to hunt down the rebels and defend the borders against the very likely retaliation of the mayor beastfolk clans.

Ill-Vess and the remaining forces of Arrakans sent vessels and troops to chase the arrakensis rebels upriver. Navigation was, however, nearly impossible at some points because of clogs created by piled corpses and old ships purposely scuttled in order to hinder pursuers. Southwards, Nivhar and Stallia put up a combined land force to search and confront the stallian rebels. The rebels left behind a similar trail of burning encampments and mass graves.

The 5.000 surviving stallian rebels out of the initial 15.000 were eventually located entrenched in the formidably fortified encampment of a beastfolk clan after liberating and recruiting over 20.000 human slaves eager to take arms in what they called "The Retribution War". An uncomfortable siege by the nivharian-stallian forces, which were forbidden to shell the emplacement, ensued.

Up north, after grueling months of scuttled wreckage removal, the veshite-arrakensis fleet and ground forces finally caught up with the rebel arrakensis fleet in a large lake next to a shore encampment. The arrakensis rebels seemed to have lost many vessels but suffered few loses, with at least 20.000 weary, ragged individuals inhabiting the encampment.

At that moment, the loyalist arrakensis fleet, ignoring all orders from their much more numerous veshite counterparts, advanced upon the encampment. Only 32 gunshots in quick succession were heard coming from the camp. The arrakensis fleet wavered, but it did not return fire. When the loyalist captains, lifelong acquaintances and friends of the rebel captains, resumed their advance and descended into the camp demanding an explanation, as observers on board the veshite vessels report, they openly wept.

It was then learned that the arrakensis rebel attack, claiming to be over 15.000 strong, was actually the bluff of just over 3000 old fashioned pirates in the arrakensis navy. The last 32 surviving rebels had just committed suicide after confirming the approach of their comrades. The 20.000 remaining individuals were, here as well, all also former slaves recently liberated by the arrakensis rebels. The severely undermanned and over-supplied rebels' last mission was their safeguarding until the forces of the court inevitably arrived.

The 3000 original rebels had commandeered the supply-ladden ships, with nothing but skeleton crews. This ruse exploited the lack of serious arrakensis military censuses. The rebels hoped to train the liberated slaves into efficient sailors, but they didn't have the time nor the manpower after fevers and beastfolk attacks decimated them.

The siege of the fortified rebel stallian position, meanwhile, continued with great reluctance. The liberated slaves up the Arrakans river, learning of the news, were gradually transported at their own request into Nivhar.

Once in Nivhar, the survivors practically stormed The Court, demanding an end to the siege on their liberated brethren. The stomach-churning tales of beastfolk cruelty and slave exploitation had a profound impact on the psyche of both the aristocracy and, above all, the general public. It was known by then that captured humans were ruthlessly abused and traded as any other good by beastfolk bandits, but the reality was more serious than perhaps even the rebels expected.

At that point, it almost came as a sudden realization to many that the refugee problem, previously threatening to overwhelm The Steppes was, at least in the short term, resolved.

The initial attacks of the rebels are calculated to have taken the lives of between 10.000 and 20.000 beastfolk bandits and refugees. But what truly drove the beastfolk off the borders was the subsequent mobilization and deployment of the rest of the forces of The Steppes, which the clans believed to be a larger scale continuation of the first murderous attack.

As the rumours spread through the protectorate, the different bands and refugees fled convinced that these solders, like the first ones, were out to get them. The much feared beastfolk retaliation as well failed to materialize because of the lack of understanding and cooperation between the different beastfolk clans. But this unprecedented mobilization was costly and it consumed many valuable resources.

The liberated slaves, however, despite their meagre manpower, offered themselves to patrol the border and keep "the beastfolk menace" at bay. This was a concession The Court was not willing to make, but many of the former slaves still took up arms and succeeded in making their way into the fortified encampment in the mountains, still under siege by the nivharian-stallian forces.

Completely forbidden from harming these popular heroes, the loyalist nivharian-stallian forces ended up lifting the siege and returning home. More revengeful, liberated slaves gradually found their way into the fortified mountain city now known as Tershelle-Val to join their brethren and the few surviving stallian rebels.

Presently, the city is a militarized society composed of soldier-citizens that takes on the self-proclaimed role of protecting The Steppes from the beastfolk menace. The rebel stallian aristocrats represent the city in an ambiguous an unique situation, since Tershelle-Val is not technically recognized by The Court. Nonetheless, the sympathetic native stallian aristocracy, and to a lesser extent the arrakensis one, allow the tershere representatives to vote as stallians or arrakensis and regularly bestow merits upon them.

Tershelle-Val, despite its relative insignificance, is therefore currently the cause of the most heated arguments inside The Steppes, dividing the population into those strongly opposed and those strongly in favour of them and their ruthless ways.


These events took place a few years before the Anamnesis cycles started. To this day, there are still highly debated and contested signs that the much feared retaliation by the mayor beastfolk clans upon The Steppes is, after all, a matter of time.
 

The New Court and the City of Nivhar

Once veshite industry and Ill-Vess as a whole started to pick momentum, both Arrakans and Stallia were flooded with more resources than they could possibly spend.

This triggered a wave of great endeavours and exploration. The most notable endeavour was the construction of the "perfect city", that would later be called Nivhar. A coastal city south east of Stallia, Nivhar is currently the largest city of The Steppes by far with more than 485.000 inhabitants.

The initial project envisioned pretty much tearing down the squiggly, crooked Stallia and rebuilding it using a more organized layout, but there was such a strong opposition on so many levels that the construction of a new city was favoured instead. This new city would be built around a central axis, the so called Spinal Avenue, from which smaller avenues would stem. The whole concept was highly symbolic and propagandistic, symbolizing the blooming of a new era for The Steppes and humankind.

The city enjoyed a milder climate than any other city of The Steppes, a more efficient layout and, once it was connected by railroad and the maritime commerce started to grow, more business opportunities as well. As soon as the nivharian economy really launched, disgruntled stallian tenants relocated as independent farmers, arrakensis traders and entrepreneurs moved in fleeing from the city's lawlessness, and many former, destitute veshite land owners sought a new life in the city. As a consequence, Nivhar became a cosmopolitan city with strong aspirations that started to envision itself as the pinnacle of humanity.

There was a strong sense that everything had to be perfect from the beginning, and the surest way at the time seemed to regulate every aspect of life in the new city. This feeling was somehow compounded with a strong desire for a wide range of individual rights. As a consequence, a corpus of entangled and often contradictory laws concerning every imaginable issue was quickly created and expanded over the years.

The perception, specially in the eyes of those that chose not to move into Nivhar, is that the nivharian bureaucracy became a monolithic entity unable to take any kind of fast or decisive action. Any such attempt is after all met with delays or obstructions by swarms of lawyers and rivalling lobbies looking to further their interests.

Armed with these very lawyers, the increasingly large nivharian aristocracy eventually wrestled control of The Court from Stallia. There wasn't much the stallians could do to prevent this course of events once it was actually but grudgingly put to vote. Nivhar was larger, had a better emplacement, and was after all composed of people from all the other cities. A new, larger and grander court building was therefore built in Nivhar, while the old one was transformed into something in between a community centre and a storage building.

The only thing Stallia was given in exchange was a botanical garden with all its maintenance paid inside the patios of the building. Something that the austere, down to earth stallians consider a waste of perfectly arable land anyway.


Soon enough, the new court, following the nivharian spirit, set forth in a crusade to guarantee the rights of humans everywhere.

In sharp contrast to the aggressively autocratic and isolationist stallian court, the new nivharian court set its sights further beyond The Steppes. Since there were trace populations of unchanged humans in these areas, mostly in the form of savages and enslaved individuals by either beastfolk bandits or ogre warbands, The Court of All Humans established a protectorate in each of these territories in order to legally accommodate these people and try to enforce their welfare.

These were laborious endeavours given the vastness and hostility of the surrounding territories. It soon became clear that these territories, separated each by their respective mountain ranges, could be divided into 2 very distinct categories with very different needs.

The lands west of The Steppes were to become the protectorate of Malahs Kovoss. A nearly impracticable jungle grown over the ruins of the now long-gone saurian civilization and inhabited by unknown thousands of warring beastfolk gangs.

The lands north of The Steppes, on the other hand, were to become the protectorate of Hieronhorte. A tundra of ashes covered by an almost perennial hailstorm. Whenever the hail storm stops, black, noxious fog seeps into the surface from the sprawling and unknown underground.


Meanwhile, strong reactionary movements started to grow in Arrakans and specially in the emasculated Stallia.
 

The First Contact with Hieronhorte and the City of Ill-Vess

The first relocation of refugees organized by The Court was a strategical investment into what would in time become the city of Ill-Vess.

Ill-Vess is currently one of the richest cities of The Steppes. It boasts a population of about 265.000 individuals, its factories account for about half of The Steppes' industrial output and its mines supply most of its ore and coal. The land surrounding Ill-Vess can hardly be classified as part of The Steppes in any way, but neither can it be considered part of the neighbouring Hieronhorte.

On the surface, it is a rocky, coniferous peninsula northeast of Arrakans separated by the so called Veshite Sea, actually an overblown bay, but still connected to the mainland by the nearly impracticable mountain range that separates The Steppes in its broadest sense from the ashen tundra of Hieronhorte.

This land was first discovered by arrakensis pirates, but it remained neglected for several years because it was deemed uninteresting, cold and depressing. Once Arrakans was integrated into The Court, however, stallian expeditions started to prospect this territory, easily managing to locate massive deposits of coal, iron, silver and other valuable materials.

An organized colonization attempt, however, was delayed because of the considerable logistic burdens imposed by the stormy Veshite Sea and The Court's lack of resources at the time. Basically, all the responsibility for transporting and supplying colonists and heavy machinery fell on the ragtag pirate fleet of Arrakans, with predictably lacking results.

But the raw materials of the veshite underground were too important to be overlooked, so The Court instead envisaged an alternate, grander plan, embarking on its first great engineering feat.

The primordial Ill-Vess was therefore, to all effects, a small engineering settlement with the sole task of building a railway through the mountain range connecting the region with The Steppes. A stallian team meanwhile started construction on the other end of the planned railway, while Arrakans was simply expected to supply the reduced veshite team.

This was a lengthy endeavour that shaped the industrial character of Ill-Vess. The construction was delayed by beastfolk raids on the stallian side, but what truly shocked the public were the first reports of the hieronhortean terrors that the veshite team faced.

People at the time eagerly devoured the progressively more exaggerated stories of mysterious savages, destructive ogres, lurking horrors, murderous monsters and gruesome plagues that threatened the vital railway's construction, thus triggering the infamous proliferation of veshite tabloids.

Once the railroad was complete and both teams had celebrated their belated meeting, Ill-Vess was temporarily militarized in order to be prepared for the influx of immigrants. The railroad was regularly patrolled by armoured trains and large parcels of land were generously handed to refugee tenants in order to boost the colonization process. This is when the first active collaboration between hieronhortean savages and The Court was observed, with savages spontaneously rallying to confront an ogre ambush on an armoured train carrying soldiers into Ill-Vess. Significantly, during the railroad construction per se the very same savages were known to have simply sat back and watch as ogres attacked the hapless engineers.

From this point on, perhaps in part thanks to the silent savages' incomprehensible and unexplained aid, the settlement of Ill-Vess started to thrive, but the first years were chaotic. With former tenant farmer refugees suddenly finding themselves in control of vast underground coal deposits, the veshite economy fluctuated wildly until the most shred individuals among the lot started to amass capital and property and subjugate the rest. The long shadows of this process and the resentment it created are the direct cause of the ongoing class struggle and polarization of the veshite society.

The settlement was eventually recognized as a city of The Court and its defence was gradually transferred to its own fledgling forces. The aristocracy of the city back then, just like today, consisted mostly on engineers, since they gathered the most merits during the creation of the vital railway and it is their continuous efforts that keep the city's industry and pride up and running.

Presently, the city of Ill-Vess is second only to the city of Nivhar in inhabitants, but it surpasses the latter in other areas, most notably industry. Both cities are currently engaged in a fierce but largely harmless rivalry over this and other matters.
 

The Stallian Enlightenment and the City of Arrakans

In the previous lore post, we saw the origins of Stallia and its actual state, but we skipped its heyday because it is deeply intertwined with the history of Arrakans.

You know Stallia as "The Cultured City of Stallia" because of the generally polite, if dry, but humanities-minded population. This is generally true of a relatively large percentage of the population, but it is also an overstatement originated in Arrakans.

Arrakans is a chaotic city, currently counting with some 80.000 inhabitants, that undergoes steep economic ups downs tied to maritime commerce.

The city was built further east of Stallia in the sandy delta of the Arrakans river, which is as bad an idea as it sounds. The exact date in which the first camp or settlement that could properly be considered Arrakans was founded is unknown, but it happened sometime during the second migration wave into Stallia during one of the few organized beastfolk attempts to overtake the city.

The plan called for a huge confederation of pirates descending the Arrakans river in order to strike the defenceless tenant refugees east of Stallia. It was supposed to be a short journey yielding plenty of booty, assuming that the Emial river that crosses Stallia was connected to the Arrakans river, which it wasn't. Those in charge of the expedition, however, stubbornly refused to acknowledge their mistake until the delta and consequently the sea were reached, leaving them with little room for further argument. By that time patience and supplies were all but exhausted, so the ruthlessly conscripted and underpaid crews mutinied and cast their leaders into the sea. The crew then chose to settle there, fully aware that they'd be executed if they returned empty-handed.

Meanwhile, the stallians remained blissfully unaware of the destruction they barely avoided.

It was years later, once the frequency and violence of the beastfolk attacks on Stallia started to diminish, that Arrakans was discovered by the expeditions sent into The Steppes to locate potential new settlement areas for the tenant refugees. Stallians were shocked to find beastfolk and unchanged humans cohabiting together in relative harmony and heated argument ensued at all levels of the stallian society.

Some argued, inspired by the lack of aggressiveness in these initial, cautious contacts and the idea that other settlements might be found in the area, that Arrakans could be turned into an ally and become an example for others to follow. On the other hand, those still wary of beastfolk wanted to use the presently overblown military prowess of the city to wipe this settlement off and, in fact, start a massive counterattack on the beastfolk as a whole. After months of arguing, The Court of All Humans opted for the diplomatic approach and started talks with Arrakans.

Meanwhile, the arrakensis remained blissfully unaware of the destruction they barely avoided.

Arrakensis people proved to be extremely easy going and easily enticed, so in less than a year their city was fully integrated into The Court and had developed a representative aristocracy of its own. To accommodate Arrakans and other future settlements, The Steppes as a whole stopped being called Stallia and the first court building was erected in the city of Stallia as the first permanent seat of power.

This is known as the Stallian Enlightenment, when the city, while still markedly austere, became considerably demilitarized and embraced those intellectual endeavours they considered practical.

Arrakans, true to its passionate nature, has ever since gone through phases of keen enthusiasm and deep disillusionment towards The Court.

When Arrakans is undergoing a phase of enthusiasm, aggressive raids and punitive expeditions are carried upriver into beastfolk territory so arrakensis can prove themselves to be the most stalwart. This was specially true during the city's first decades with the The Court. On the other hand, when they feel The Court is not benefiting them enough, the citizens vent their frustrations on the aristocracy of the city, sometimes violently. Because of this tendency, the arrakensis aristocracy is forced to rule through subterfuge and more subtle, indirect means, often giving outsiders the (only slightly) wrong image of being a lawless city.

Curiously, violence in Arrakans is almost exclusively feud-based and therefore targeted mostly towards other native arrakensis. As long as they don't have a reason to hate somebody, arrakensis citizens and even soldiers tend to simply live and let live, which is nice, but makes them unreliable allies on the battlefield.
 

The Beastfolk Theocracy and the City of Stallia

The city of Stallia is the oldest city of The Steppes. There was in fact a time in which the whole of the area presently known as The Steppes was simply called Stallia, but the city is currently a skeleton of itself with a population of just about 60.000 individuals.

The history of Stallia starts shortly after the collapse of the saurian civilization. The remnants of the saurian civilization crumbled when the last warlord, Draknharn, mysteriously disappeared leaving humanity to fend on its own. This event triggered a very turbulent era in which, unfortunately for modern scholars, most existing records were destroyed and very few new ones were produced.

This period is known as the Beastfolk Theocracy. About the one thing modern scholars know about this brief era is that the cult to Draknharn was as omnipresent as schism and internecine wars were, resulting in an accelerated collapse. The current massive beastfolk cults like The Church of the Glorious Draknharn, hierarchical structures in which priests hold absolute power over their subjects, are believed to be remnants of that era.

It is believed that at this time the altered humans known as beastfolk first appeared. This could have been the cause either of some emergent theological concept, a commercial scheme, or a combination of any other factors. With the appearance of beastfolk, it is presumed that, for some compound reason, their current hatred towards unchanged humans followed.

With these events on the background, small groups of outcasts, escapees and renegades started to settle in The Steppes fleeing from the Theocracy.

The Steppes were back then, as they are now to a lesser extent, a barren semi-arid wasteland. No saurian or beastfolk population is known to have ever settled inside this uninteresting, resourceless land, so the runaways were largely left alone and deemed not worth the trouble of chasing. In this manner, the first subtle, gradual migration of humans into The Steppes took place, in which an estimated 10.000 to 20.000 individuals started to create small bordering settlements.

By the time the second migration took place a few decades later, a good chunk of those settlements had combined into the city of Stallia. The first records of this era speak of the Beastfolk Theocracy as a bygone society and provide modern scholars with a similar picture to the one they are familiar with. That is, one of warring clans and constant warfare, but in a greater scale.

As conflict intensified and refugees started to pour into The Steppes, they started to flood the streets of the fledgling and unprepared Stallia.

In response to this compound problem, The Court of All Humans was hastily formed. On the one hand, neither the supplies nor the infrastructure of the city could sustain an influx several times larger than the city's population at the time. On the other hand, those refugees were often closely followed by marauding beastfolk clans in hot pursuit.

The strategy The Court adopted would shape the character of Stallia and lay the foundations of its grain redistribution system. The society was militarized and all \"impractical\" pursuits were set aside. An organism was then created to forward and accommodate new refugees as tenant farmers in the vast flatlands east of Stallia, the area farthest away from Malahs Kovoss and the beastfolk peril, where they would cultivate the land to feed themselves and the military.

This worked well enough to, at the very least, fend the numerous but uncoordinated waves of beastfolk bandits, prevent starvation and, above all, give modern humans a chance to survive. But the old traditions die hard and Crops and Cultivations of Eastern Stallia continue to maintain the widely criticised and ruthlessly enforced grain redistribution system. These past events have also shaped the stallian psyche into a dry, austere and down-to-earth one into which hard labour and historical knowledge are the most valued virtues.

As new cities were founded (more on that in future posts), more lively individuals were glad to leave boring Stallia behind, so the character of those that remained was accentuated all the more. From that point on, the city gradually fell into stagnation and a progressive lost of political relevance and manpower.
 

Narcotics Regulation and Consumption in The Steppes

It's still a few days until the next release is ready, so we'll bridge that gap with a lore post.


While tobacco is simply unknown as a drug in the known world of the game, brewages and other drugs such as opiates are occasionally manufactured and consumed, specially by beastfolk.

Officially, with the exception of opiates in the form of painkillers, The Court of All Humans enforces through the whole of The Steppes a teetotalism with an strictness and enthusiasm that varies from one city to another.

This is most successful in Tershelle-Val and Stallia, cities that culturally consider all forms of intoxicants to be "beastfolk poisons". The official stance of The Court stems in fact from the days of The Old Court, located in Stallia, and is considered anachronistic by a large section of more cosmopolitan cities such as Nivhar and Ill-Vess.

There is then the approach of Arrakans which, as per usual, manages to irritate both sides at the same time. Most arrakensis citizens, as an old city itself, are also culturally disinclined towards drug consumption. But in their "live and let live" approach to issues, the authorities make nothing but token efforts to stop the smuggling of brewages and other drugs.

This is an important leak in the system, as Arrakans is not only a hub of maritime commerce connected with both Nivhar and Ill-Vess, but it provides a gateway for beastfolk smugglers through the Arrakans River, which reaches into the unknown depths of the protectorate of Malahs Kovoss.

The jungles of Malahs Kovoss, under the control of the warring beastfolk clans, is where most of the narcotics consumed on The Steppes are produced. This is so because it is actually cheaper to smuggle the different clans' wares than to produce them locally, specially under the secrecy required because of these laws.

Some clans have grown extremely powerful because of this smuggling. This fact, above morality or productivity issues, is the main argument of both detractors and defenders of the institutional teetotalism.

Detractors argue that by removing these laws and producing alcoholic drinks inside The Steppes, the stronger smuggling clans will lose power and eventually collapse into smaller, more malleable ones. Defenders, on the other hand, argue that those entrepreneurial clans are precisely the less aggressive. Because of their regular trade with The Steppes, they restrain themselves from attacking their clients, unlike the ruthless systematic plundering of those clans without any economic interest on The Steppes.

Cutting that trade short now, defenders argue, will potentially radicalize the stronger clans, encouraging them into using their substantial forces to plunder The Steppes for profit.

The whole thing is therefore a pretty sticky situation that goes beyond moralism and from which there is no short-term solution at sight.
 

Thieneres, Kurkhs and Enzels

I shall now explain the differences between the Thieneres, Kurkhs and Enzels that you probably saw mentioned several times inside the game.


There has been at least 7 different human races in this world, but only three of them survived to witness the cycles and the first Anamnesis. Their origins are hard to trace and, like saurians, they don't seem to have originated in a natural way, which brings some validation to the beastfolk creation myths that attribute the saurians with the creation of humans. Renascents are not able to shed any light on this matter as they are not older than the first Anamnesis, but it is widely believed that there might be at least some truth to the whole thing.

Archaeological evidence speaks of widely diverging races without any clear connection inhabiting the area of The Steppes and Malahs Kovoss at clearly differentiated intervals of time. They all suddenly spurted and vanished as suddenly leaving but their bare bones, and it is quite possible that some didn't even leave that much behind. The beastfolk usually blame those races' disappearances on their respective follies for failing to fulfil the requirements of their saurian masters and creators. According to beastfolk myths, a varying number of human races were just discarded and wiped out through some unspecified method.

A popular theory worth noting in this matter, which originates from abducted individuals, is that either one or several of these vanished races either became or joined the so called fey folk.

Most modern humans are in any event anatomically far from any of these races. The inhabitants of The Steppes have gone through heavy interbreeding during the years and the characteristic traits of each of the surviving race became diluted.

The most primitive and less intermingled humans are to be found in Hieronhorte among the savages. By contrast, also in Hieronhorte, an isolated group of Kurkhs started their own evolutionary path of adaptation to become the ogres, but they are not a real race on their own yet.

While not universal by any means, certain physical and psychological traits can help to ascertained most individuals' ancestry.

Thieneres are considered to be the oldest surviving human race and the second oldest to ever exist. Their numbers are few and they can only be found in The Steppes and very rarely in Malahs Kovoss. They can be easily identified by their large, wholly black eyes and their reduced size.

They are not just short with their 1.5 metres of height of average, but they look like scaled up versions of themselves since their physique is as a rule slim and athletic. Pure Thieneres have been known to be as small as 1 metre tall and to have been almost unable to digest red meat, but most modern individuals are almost as capable meat eaters as anybody else.

They have a reputation for being diligent and tame, almost to the point of being sheepish. It is for these reasons that they are most often found supporting The Court rather than The Influence and that they are usually treated with care and even condescendingly. Notable Thienere renascents include Feelias, Thianneh, Lenn-Ranel and Rhaeslyevh.

Kurkhs are believed to be the fifth oldest race and are currently doing well enough in numbers and future prospects. They tend in fact to be the industrial and military backbone of any community, as they are usually significantly larger and stronger than the other races.

A modern Kurkh from The Steppes can measure up to 3 metres in height, but most won't make it past 2.2 metres. It is not unusual for purer hieronhortean Kurkhs to be as much as 4 metres tall and to be considerably bulkier than other races. Hybridization however has been favouring smaller and more sinewy individuals in The Steppes.

Their strength never made them necessarily dumber or less intellectual than the other races, but they do tend to be patronizing, stubborn and ruled by a strong sense of honour, which often makes them the most radical individuals to be found among both stalwart and influenced sides. Some notable Kurkh renascents are Achasban, The Lambda Swashbuckler, Akhdan the Maimed and Rhasmos

Finally, the most recent and populous race of all seven are the Enzel. The hybridization of The Steppes has revolved around them as they stay at an average of 1.8 metres in height and offered a healthy middle point between the 1.2 metres of height of pure Thieneres and the 3.5 of pure Kurkhs.

As a result, typically Enzel characteristics can be found to a greater or smaller extent in most modern humans of The Steppes. Their ears are slightly pointy, their canines are slightly elongated, and they often feature a pattern of grey marks on their skins. This pattern can take any form. The most usual is for small dispersed patches around the body, but some individuals, usually purer Enzels, can have large portions of their bodies covered in spots or stripes.

They are considered to be lecherous (for obvious reasons), and uncommitted. Purer Enzels are also believed to be cruel, antisocial and even predatory in nature. Notable Enzel renascents are Ehn-Vaen, Gelss, Volverlhiarth and Mealessea.

Saurians and the Origins of Modern Humans

Let us now clear some doubts about the commonly mentioned saurians.

The saurians are considered to be among the lesser of those greater beings worshipped by influenced individuals and particularly by beastfolk. Among those beings, they are the ones most directly connected with modern humans. Not only did their technological remnants trigger the industrial revolution in The Steppes, but it is in fact believed by many that modern humans are an artificial creation of the saurian race.

Nothing is known about the saurians' sudden disappearance and beastfolk lore altogether denies it. Their history is lost to humankind but there is no evidence of a large number of these beings ever existing despite their advanced technology. It is believed that saurians, in fact, did not originate in this world, at least not in a natural way.

The hard fact is that they lacked the numbers or even shape to manipulate tools or develop a civilization, but they somehow acquired advanced technological knowledge.

Beastfolk creation myths are contradictory and confusing, but there seems to be a certain consensus in the fact that before humans existed, the saurians either emerged or descended from the stars into this world. Their purpose is never specified, but it is always stated that they brought with them the "subsaurians", a lesser race that built and operated most technology for them.

For reasons that vary from one retelling to another, subsaurians either deserted or were vanished into the underworld of Hieronhorte, which by that time was still a lush, warm jungle similar to Malahs Kovoss, were the saurians continued to thrive. The fact that Hieronhorte, the current tundra of hail and ashes, was a jungle before recorded history has often been attested by scientific expeditions.

Although saurians are depicted as colossal four-legged reptiles, subsaurians must have necessarily been completely unconnected. They appear to be only slightly larger than humans and have a slippery eel-like body with large jaws, eight eyes and two sets of four radiating, clawed tentacles protruding from their upper bodies. Their morphology suggests that they would be exceptionally well adapted to the unexplored and sprawling underworld of Hieronhorte.

It is at the point in which the relationship between these two species ended, so beastfolk lore goes, that humans were created to replace the subsaurians in their tasks. It is a particular saurian, Draknharn, which is considered to be the creator of modern humans, which were based on the remnants of ancient, bygone native beings, the so called primigenial humans. Virtually nothing is known about these creatures though.

Again, after this part, each version of the tale begins to differ wildly from each other. For some reason, however, it is never explained when or why did the beastfolk acquire their mortal enmity towards the humans of The Steppes.

The truth is, however, that there is no such thing as a separate race of beastfolk. All beastfolk are born human in appearance.

Shortly after birth, parents eagerly modify their offspring through the use of mutagens in order to avoid even looking like their hatred enemies. These mutagens, in the form of small vials of crystal clear, inodorous liquid, appear to be regularly supplied by an unknown source that is sure to be making a huge profit, since most of the beastfolk clans' expenses are spent into acquiring this mutagen.

This hints at the fact that somewhere in The Outer Lands, saurian technology is still working and whoever or whatever is operating it, is steadily extracting resources from The Steppes through the marauding beastfolk bands.

For this reason, in beastfolk lore, the disappearance of the saurians is denied. They believe Draknharn is the source of the mutagens and is sure to one day come back to reclaim its rightful land and restore its glory.

Non beastfolk influenced individuals like to cling to this idea as well and often cooperate with beastfolk bands. Their belief is that saurian guidance is actually lenient and wise, while subsaurians are simply treacherous and unreliable. The Court, of course, considers subsaurians potential allies and has at times even attempted to contact them or at least confirm their existence, but the hieronhortean underground is even more hostile to humans than the surface is.

It is believed however that there is some sort of connection between the equally puzzling hieronhortean savages and the subsaurians. Subsaurians are often portrayed as behaving exactly like the savages do after all.

This leads many to believe that the unconditional and spontaneous assistance of the savages to The Court originates in fact from subsaurian minds and devices, but that's a different story.
 

The Court, The Steppes and the Meritocracy

Resuming the Lore where we left it:


The Steppes is the encompassing term used for those lands occupied by the five cities. An estimate of 80% of the human population, about 950.000 inhabitants, is located in this area of approximately 75.000 square kilometres, or what's the same, about the size of the Benelux. The rest of the human population consists of a rough estimate of hieronhortean savages, captured humans, and an assortment adventurers, pirates, and colonists living in the protectorates and the outskirts.

The geography of The Steppes varies from semi-arid to sub-tropical, but as a whole the terrain and weather is much milder than that of the largely untraversable protectorates or The Outer Lands. It stretches barely 200 kilometres inland and is surrounded by mountain ranges.

Both The Steppes and the islands of Anamnesis experience weeks of longer nights alternated by weeks of longer days. This is why the different weeks are represented as weeks of daylight or nightlight. A night will not last longer than 4 and a half hours during the zenith of a daylight week and vice versa.

The Steppes are therefore a very scarcely populated enclave for a reduced human population in an otherwise hostile world.

The Court of All Humans is the political entity that theoretically governs over humanity as a whole. This organization coordinates the industrial and military efforts of the five city-states and the protectorates and oversees the well-being of its citizens. Its closest historical counterpart would be the League of Nations, except that this one works to a certain extent because of its reduced size, the existence of powerful foreign dangers threatening its members, and a negligible history of internal armed conflicts between humans to date. During each of the game cycles, this relatively peaceful coexistence between humans is put to an end with the arrival of The Influence.

For supporters of The Court, it is because of The Influence that all violence among humans exists to begin with.

The Court is ruled by the aristocracies of the five cities. It is a meritocracy, so this aristocracy must be understood as a rule of the best in its original meaning as explained in the wikipedia page, and is not to be mistaken with a plutocracy or an hereditary nobility. Aristocrats are not born but elected, and as you've probably experienced inside the game, they can be paupers and still possess a considerable amount of political power.

The title of aristocrat is bestowed upon those individuals that prove themselves worthy through remarkable accomplishments, and in this way merits are gathered or lost by existing aristocrats as well. Aristocrats can therefore be anything from extraordinary soldiers, brilliant scientists or daring adventurers. A certain degree of nepotism and corruption does exists inside this system, which is again blamed by stalwart aristocrats on the arrival of The Influence.

Merit is thus the degree of trust and therefore power that The Court bestows upon an individual.

At the time in which each game takes place however, The Court is under great strain. Except from the pseudo-society of the savages of  Hieronhorte (to be explained later), all other forces are either openly hostile or harmfully uncaring towards The Court and humanity as a whole. Of these hostile forces, The Influence is the only one that would allow the continuing existence of humanity in relative freedom under the rule of greater beings. The rest either seek the species' outright destruction or systematic exploitation.

From the west, The Steppes are constantly raided by gangs of beastfolk bandits. There are hundreds of millions of beastfolk all over the jungles of Malahs Kovoss and their constant infighting is pushing them further into The Steppes each day. If allowed, they would wipe out the humanity they so thoroughly hate, but not before wiping each other out.

Meanwhile, from the east, the perpetual storm raging over the tundra of Hieronhorte conceals countless unknown horrors stalking just outside civilization, barely kept at bay by the savages. The least dangerous of these horrors are the so-called ogres, large hominids with a taste and liking for humans. If allowed, they would turn humans into little more than livestock.

Under these circumstances, the thing The Court needs the least is the infighting generated by The Influence. To better understand and perhaps counter this force, the best they can do is to send expeditions into The Outer Lands following any lead. The Anamnesis is certainly a good lead and might prove to be their best bet at the time.

It is in this context that many adhere to The Influence in order to seek the protection of the greater beings to save themselves, even if it means the destruction of society as they know it.

Conjuration and The Outer Lands' Influence

The concept of conjuration in Anamnesis ended up deviating significantly from its historical counterpart and instead encompassing the renaissance concepts of both natural and ceremonial magic, which can be found bottom lined here.

As I said, conjurers and renascents understand the world well enough to take Arkhe and reshape it through willpower. Arkhe is to be found in everything and can technically take any shape, but that reshaping is not an easy task for human minds. It requires large quantities of Arkhe and wastes much of it in a process which takes days at a time of constant and exhausting mental work. This is the main reason for the game to be measured in weeks and not days.

Dreams are supposed to be a mirage of a mundane person's conjuration potential in Anamnesis. Just like you might learn to modify an ongoing dream, conjurers change the world around them through a much more refined process.

Conjurers can technically do as they please with the world's Arkhe, but a direct approach is impractical and inefficient. You could for example summon your own dungeon/fortress, but this would take years of both preparation and actual ritual, a ritual that could easily crumble down at any point as it happens when the influenced aristocrat summons units. It is therefore much easier to bind units to perform the work manually if you want a large building done. Just the same, it is easier to bind units into your command and induce likely accidents to kill your enemies than it is to summon a fireball to smite them.

The only efficient way for humans to use conjuration is to take Arkhe from materials that concentrate as much of it in as little space as possible, gold being the best resource for this, and slightly tweak the world around them.

You can see the effects of this tweaking when committing Arkhe during combats for example. A large commitment might allow you to change reality just a little bit to give you an edge, enabling you to trigger things that were likely to happen to begin with. Veshite Underground Ops might find their gas masks punctured when using gas attacks, Mole People might become infected with vermin-transmitted diseases, etc.

There is the conventional way, to try to alter things by yourself using Arkhe (natural magic), and there is the assisted way (ceremonial magic) by contacting a more powerful being. When you see magic happening inside the game that costs no Arkhe and happens immediately, it means that it is the work of a different being than the conjurer.


These greater beings bring me to the next point, The Influence.


The Outer Lands' Influence is not a definite faction but an hypothetical driving force that stalwart units theorize is making the individuals of The Steppes turn against The Court and the meritocracy (these other concepts will be explained in the next Lore post).

Individuals tagged as "influenced" will show contempt towards the anthropocentric government of The Court and will instead favour the wisdom of greater beings. By greater beings these individuals mean chiefly the ancient saurians, which are believed to be the creators of the human race and are worshipped by the beastfolk (both concepts also to be explained in another post).

The alleged work of The Influence is noticed more strongly in peripheral areas of The Steppes, so it is considered to come from The Outer Lands.

The Outer Lands are all those territories that because of the geography, adverse weather, hostile inhabitants and, as some believe, the will of greater beings, remain unexplored. Compounding this problem is the fact that, unlike in our world, there is no known body of water interconnecting most of the game's world, with thousands of kilometres of frozen tundra or disease-ridden jungles standing in the way of exploration.

The Influence tends to be displayed as meaner, while the court usually restraints itself more, but overall I tried to avoid a complete moral bipolarity in Anamnesis. You might have noticed for example that Tershelle-Val and Malahs Kovoss, the respective exclusive origins for stalwart and influenced aristocrats, are both defined as "Brutal" in the character creation menu.

Influenced individuals tend to think little about human lives because of their belief in greater, more important beings and a blissful future for everybody under their protection. In their eyes, stalwart resistance to this theoretical future is causing much more damage on the grand scale than any individual human life is worth.