Welcome To The New Kingdoms!

Now all vision is shroud-devoured, all songs

Shorn of true music, crumbling to echoes.

Beasts, black of soul weave woe in cold shadows,

Mean hearts march caparison’d in ancient wrongs.

No more the bright silver call of morning

Horns. The gate of welcome, enwebbed with fears

Shuts against hope, honour’s glories fallen.

This storied land, a mirror seen through tears.

So, I’m taking a brief break from my Deductionist conversion to introduce the world of Verkhun and, more particularly, the New Kingdoms. I won’t at this point get into the underlying cosmology: I just want to talk about the Kingdoms themselves. They’ve been the site of my campaigns (and 250,000 words of a fantasy series, currently in abeyance) for almost a quarter-century. I don’t think that Verkhun is a particularly novel or unique setting, but I like to think that it is, for the most part, a thing well made, crafted with a certain amount of anthropological rigour, hopefully some imagination and a great deal of enjoyment.

The New Kingdoms themselves occupy the south-eastern corner of a large continental landmass, about equidistant from the equator and the southern polar regions (as a native of the antipodes, I couldn’t escape my southern hemisphere roots!) They’re actually the residue of an empire that fell apart nearly two millennia earlier, hence the ‘New’ Kingdoms moniker, although it’s a misnomer for some of the lands. They’re also ‘new’ in a double sense: since they first formed out of the ruins of the old empire, the great disaster known as Shroudfall ripped the world apart, toppling other realms and sweeping the New Kingdoms with catastrophic waves of chaotic magic. Civilisation teetered at the limits of endurance but held on – barely – and the lands were forever altered, even where their borders and geography had remained comparatively stable. Thus the second, and perhaps deeper sense of ‘New’: even those lands with a long and rich history are confronting a world vastly changed, and striving to master a reality that challenges all the assumptions of the past.

For the most part, the New Kingdoms occupy a temperate and benign environment, although they are framed by high mountains, harsh desert and wide seas. The region is - particularly since Shroudfall - one of the few areas in Verkhun where reasonably intensive agriculture, commerce and industry is possible on a large scale, and it is one of a few precious lands where civilisation is still in the ascendant (although threatened on many fronts, both within and without).

So that's a very brief introduction to the New Kingdoms. I could, I suppose, start with a wider lens and give a gazetteer-like tour of the New Kingdoms, but I'd rather do things a little differently. Instead, I'm going to start small,and gradually broaden things from there. The next post on the New Kingdoms will look at the comparatively isolated hamlet of Chelmsey.