#cobrinseil — Public Fediverse posts

Cities of Cobrin’Seil: Pinexci

Bidestra is a continent of two dozen or more nations, but those nations are not the only centres of power. For all that a nation may claim to territory wide and vast, sometimes small, defensible cities and their local powers exert enough power that the country can make no demands of it. Cities with sufficient population of a certain skillset are siege-resistant and often need to manage their own affairs directly, which means that many cities in Bidestra serve as independent powers of themselves. For the most part, the countries around them regard this as a deal, rather than a problem; a city-state can serve as a concentration of value that then benefits the surrounding nation, assuming a certain amount of alignment. What’s more, many city-states are part of the Eresh Protectorate and connected to one another with the best highway on the continent.

Not all cities, though, are Eresh cities. Some are entirely independent, either because they have a stance against the Eresh Protectorate, or because they do not want to meet the standards required by the Protectorate, or because the Protectorate does not want to contend with them. Some, however, are independent because they don’t care about anything the Eresh Protectorate offers, or their political bodies are too unstable to reliably form a relationship with the Eresh Protectorate.

Such as Pinexci, the City of Gold and Chaos, whose king has been hidden by a series of conspiracies for over seventy-five years, in order to keep the government’s actions safe and secure. Don’t worry, though – there are definitely messages coming from the throne, sent through the dozens of noble families that are in place to enact that will.

Welcome to the masquerade!

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Camu Natish

Curling up and around the Turoc Coast, the long-grass plains of Foh-Lah Rah-Jah-Pha-Urd strike a sharp, dividing line, wriggling across the ground like spilled liquid on a map that has had a chance to dry. That is the boundary of the cursed desert Selpera, the grave of an exploded god. It creates one of the harder boundaries in the continent, where no guards patrol it, but nobody wants to cross it. Selpera does not stretch forever, though, and on its far side, it runs up to the Guszon range, over which is the last nation with access to the turoc coast: Camu Natish.

Tiny Camu Natish, a nation of rivers and coves, an archipelago in disguise, the scuffed elbow of the continent of Bidestra, Camu Natish! Possibly the youngest nation on the continent, Camu Natish was a nation controlled by a psionic monster, an Aboleth, only sixty years ago. One revolution later, and a period of energetic rebuilding, and now Camu Natish is a nation, a nation of cities and towns and an enduring, angry now.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Ghare

https://cobrinseil.invincible.ink/nations-of-cobrinseil-ghare/

Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Ghare

Introduction

Most maps of Bidestra start at the northern boundaries; they show the Middle Kingdoms and their northernmost borders, and beyond that, just whiteness. Many who grow up seeing such maps assume that the whole top of the world is one large expanse, a snowy cap. Tales of the olden times speak of the ‘roof of the world’ or ‘god’s spine’ or ‘the eternal wastes.’ So few of those stories talk about the nation that is there, the nation that saved the world, and continues to save it, with the relentless toil that is killing a god, and keeping it killed.

So few appreciate, and so few recognise the ferocious power of the land of Ghare.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Foh-lah Rah-Jah-Pha-Urd

https://cobrinseil.invincible.ink/nations-of-cobrinseil-foh-lah-rah-jah-pha-urd/

Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Foh-lah Rah-Jah-Pha-Urd

There is a timeline of empires on Bidestra. There was the First Elves’ attempts to own it; there was the Tiefling Empire, if you believe in it. There was the empire of Fuszaint, the most recent one, in its miserable decline. But before Fuszaint, there was the first great Human Empire, the empire of the creatures known now as Ogres, Ogre-Magi, Hags and their ilk; it was the Empire of the Urd. What it was, though, is not as important as what remains of its greatest seat, its capital, its palaces; for they are gone now, torn apart by nature itself, stripped of its identity, and returned in safe pieces to the loam that they once polluted. This is what remains. This is the land that outlasts empires, the trees that do not need anyone to speak for them, and the great regrowing that must be done to restore the scarred land. This is Foh-Lah Rah-Jah-Pha-Urd.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Honaj

https://cobrinseil.invincible.ink/nations-of-cobrinseil-honaj/

Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Honaj

Let me take you afar to a wonderous placeOf sunshine and flowers and sands,Where the land has a scar cut deep in its faceIt was broken, and yet it standsWhere water is bitterAnd honey is sweet,And the blade of the prince gleams brightDock your boat, come ashore,Have a drink, have one more!And begin your Honaji new life~!

Basic Island, by Mark Poole (Source)

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Winaleon (and Aazum)

It’s always a lovely day in Winaleon. The bees are buzzing, the fields are growing, the coin is flowing. Winaleon, Winaleon, beautiful Winaleon, with its golden days and its golden words. Winaleon is the safest place in the world, a land of gentle slopes and careful lawns, all tended and cared for, so that the children of Winaleon have so safe an upbringing that not even night itself dares touch them.

Winaleon is a land so perfect that the sun never sets on Winaleon.

Ever.

Art by Jeremy Paillotin, Shire Terrace (MTG)

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Xwera

Are you free?

I ask you this, I ask again, are you free?

If you live under a king, if you live for coin, if you live for a church, then are you ever truly free? You can be free to taste the boot above you, but are you free?

Can you take your weapon and your wits and walk into the wilds and make your own way, know your own self, and share in your spoils without anyone demanding or commanding how it should be done? Can you call yourself free when your own death isn’t even something you can trust, and where you might just fall because a guard or a thug or a brute took a liking to hurting you? Don’t you want the purity, the honesty, of knowing your death comes from the quarry you hunt, that you did something wrong, you slipped at the wrong time, that you weren’t as good as you thought you were, and that your death is something you deserve and that you chose?

Come to Xwera.

Be truly free.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Fuszaint

Bidestra is a cradle and grave both of empires. Some are completely collapsed, gone beyond all signs or showing, like the Urd, or the First Elves, or the Tieflings. They stood tall and proud and asserted themselves rulers of the whole continent — but now, they are nothing but ancient statues in lost glades and the broken histories of deranged libraries. Only one Empire, in the history of Bidestra, has conquered the continent, and then, with wisdom and care, chose to withdraw, to become just another nation, and to maintain its place as first amongst equals, after bringing language, roads, medicine and currency to all corners of the continent, and only that Empire, the mighty Fuszainti Empire, can thank their current king for his choices two centuries past that led to this current glory.

Glory, glory, glory, to Fuszaint, and its ever-living, eternal Knights and King!

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The Nations of Bidestra

I pulled up the mic, and spoke of the contintent of Bidestra today. Then I transcribed what I spoke, and did my best to corrall that into a description of places I care about in my D&D world.

Also, this is a long one without much in the way of images. I imagine this as a script for a video that slowly rolls around the map, but I don’t have a map, so… readygo.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/the-nations-of-bidestra/

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Cobrin’Seil Heritage: The Cwmdyri

In building out the continent of Bidestra, I found numerous places where either historically I had already placed ‘merfolk’ or ‘sea elves,’ or new places where such creatures made sense. I already have a Cobrin’Seil race of creepy, deep-sea monster people, known as the Hadalan, and I love them dearly, but they’re meant to fulfill the role of a spooky monster people. They’re not the friendly neighbourhood fish-folk, those are the terrifying fish-folk for freaks.

I needed something new to fill this space.

Some explanations first though:

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The Horrors of Godhood

It is a fearsome thing indeed to find yourself in the mind of an evil god.

Content Warning: I talk about evil gods for a bit. That’s going to involve some brief discussions of horror topics, like stabbings and murders and slavery.

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Border and Boundaries and Beyonds

Discussions of Cobrin’Seil often default to talking about Countries and cities. This is reasonable, as cities are so full of people who are willing to write things down and Countries are likely to spend time and effort ensuring everyone knows what they are. After all, if nobody knows that you’re a Country, you probably aren’t a Country. Countries are a shared fiction that everyone agrees to, and there are some complications in Cobrin’Seil that come from the exceptions to this rule. There are some Countries with strange political situations exacerbated by the insistence that a Country doesn’t exist (such as Visente refusing to acknowledge the nation-state of Hecsenfore as a body politic), or worse that a Country nobody can agree upon does exist (such as treaties with the land occupied by the ruin of Selpera, despite that land being absolutely blasted dry and mostly full of magical radiation).

That the world is a container of Countries which recognise one another and assert their importance over spaces defined on a map is very much a Human one. Some researchers resist this description, and want to use the term statocentricity to force the conversation to consider this structure necessarily unrelated from Humans. Still, the number one culture responsible for the current modern idea of Countries are Human cultures, and historically speaking, they have not been good at recognising other ways people organise their lives and communities.

The three largest and most commonly known forms of these non-Country bodies are:

Orc Accords, wide-spread populations with shared communal goals but little communal demand for power.

Elvish Homesteads, large central locations that sustain a population without a need for external support.

Gnoll Trails, the paths of Gnolls that aggressively defend their borders before moving on for sometimes years at a time.

Content Warnings: There’s an attempt to make the language in this article discussing non-Human cultures not feel like racist biological field notes, but I can’t promise I’ve done a perfect job. There shouldn’t be any mention of material I’d normall consider triggering but if you don’t like this kind of framing.

Engagement Warning: At the time of writing this warning, this draft is over seven thousand words long. What’s more each section features a list of example spaces to be that are designed to excite the imagination when you’re thinking about places you can be from or things you can do to make your character cool – but, as presented, are ultimately just piles of Proper Nouns in a Dungeons & Dragons setting you’re pobably not playing in. Basically, this is a chonky one.

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https://press.invincible.ink/border-and-boundaries-and-beyonds/

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Munificence, a Governmental Sleight

Any attempt to define ‘typical’ opinions in Cobrin’Seil must first acknowledge that such a definition depends entirely on whose voices are being considered. Most analyses focus on Bidestra — likely because it’s home to large human nations that produce a wealth of published material. Naturally, those books are mostly read in Bidestra, and primarily by speakers of Bidestran Common. It’s a vast population with diverse cultural perspectives, but any investigator could declare an idea ‘normal’ and still find a random community on the continent whose worldview is entirely different. Even concepts that seem universal — like nations or people — aren’t! The people of Mertzenne have no government, those in Lagan have no currency, and the people of Uxaion have no hope of ever joining the Eresh Protectorate.

Still, if you mapped Bidestra and shaded every region considered a monarchy by any definition, at least half the continent would be covered. Cobrin’Seil undeniably has monarchies — plenty of them! But what it means to be a monarchy is far more complex. Monarchies present themselves as simple systems of governance, yet they’re more like a writhing mass of competing ideologies hidden beneath a single fur-trimmed robe.

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https://press.invincible.ink/munificence-a-governmental-sleight/

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Building Armies for Army Builders

Army Building fascinates me. Not Army Building the game process that players do to play a game of something like Warhammer 40k. That’s something you do if you are interested in and good at tactics and strategy games, which I need to make very clear I am not. I did collect Tyranids for a while there but I had those models for twenty years and played them twice, before finally realising I was doing them a disservice and tried to sell them on to someone else who could appreciate and love them. Plus in that whole time, I played a bunch of Magic: The Gathering so it wasn’t like I was against playing head-to-head strategy games, but the way I could be bad at Warhammer impressed me in hindsight. There was an immense skill gap between me and a basic starting player.

Not that kind of Army Building.

Army Building is a game play form and I find it interesting to watch other people do, but what I find even more interesting than that is the layer above it of Army Building as a Game Maker. That is, I will often imagine ‘what if I could give people a setting I’ve made as a place to play tabletop miniature war games.’

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https://press.invincible.ink/building-armies-for-army-builders/

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Zrag’makh, the Iconic Orc City

It’s a fact well-understood that Orcs do not lack settlements, but Orc settlements tend to look very different to Human researchers’ assumptions. Sometimes these settlements are akin to networks of caves, and sometimes they use abandoned buildings or ruins. The way that Orcs are distributed over large spaces and typically nomadic means that it’s difficult to find anything that can be treated as representative of Orcish architecture. Statistically, given how often Orcs live in places abandoned by Humans or other cultures for being too difficult, there’s a serious consideration that ‘Orc architecture’ is just ‘an abandoned Human barn design.’

Furthermore, Orcs have different logistical considerations to the Humans around them. Orcs can travel further and faster, more conveniently and with less discomfort. This means that most Orcs tend to be more independent and their prosociality is less direct; Orcs will dump resources where they seem convenient, but aren’t inclined to spend a lot of time hanging around with one another. This means Orcs tend towards small purpose-driven groups with a common goal, and their settlements spread out across much larger areas, usually.

But it’s that usually that’s the trick.

There aren’t many large Orc settlements. But there’s at least one.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/zragmakh-the-iconic-orc-city/

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Raccoons, Goblins, Changelings

Something I pride myself on when I describe the heritages that live in Cobrin’Seil is that I don’t present cultures as monolithic or simple. I think that in the real world, humans have thousands of different cultural pockets and niches, and our evolution into the world as biological species brings with it all sorts of interesting weirdness, and if I’m going to talk about other species, it behooves me to ensure that I’m never presenting something that can have an ordinary life like a human as if that means it’s going to always be operating on a single, simplified set of cultural values. There are trends, and I present them, but I always strive to represent that the heritages of Cobrin’Seil are at least a little bit more complicated than our real world can be.

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https://press.invincible.ink/raccoons-goblins-changelings/

#Changelings #CobrinSeil #Goblins #WorldBuilding

Dal Raeda, The First And Greatest

I’ve written about Dal Raeda, before, in parts and in places. I’ve run games there. I’ve used it as the 0,0 of the great graphing calculator of the world, and it sets the ‘normal’ in Cobrin’Seil (my own D&D setting I’ve used for a long time) for me. It is obviously informed by the way I see the world, and the world I’m used to, and it is very much an attempt to do something for the baseline of European Fantasy that doesn’t just copy England or the edge of France the way that so many fantasy nations do. In this case it’s an enormous land mass with huge barely-connected provinces and an island off the southern edge, which I, an Australian, came up with independently and on my own.

However, prior to now there’s never been a comprehensive article explaining Dal Raeda as a nation; its outlook, its divisons, and the way I think a player should look at that part of the world.

Warning: This is a long post, and it’s about a place that does not exist. This is straight up just game lore and you might not even be playing a game that can use this kind of lore.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dal-raeda-the-first-and-greatest/

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On The Back Of A Massive Crab

Government systems in Cobrin’Seil take a variety of forms. It is a land with numerous monarchies, a few republics, and a host of more specific, particular power structures. There are communities of Orcs and Goblins that exist without government oversight, but, many point to, those are people who exist either without, or in surrogacy with existing, cities.

Still, there’s at least one city that doesn’t have a government. That’s the nation of Mertzenne.

Content Warning: The City-state of Mertzenne is an incredibly cool place that has a body of people living there who culturally believe they tore a god apart and ate him, which may not be your vibe.

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https://press.invincible.ink/on-the-back-of-a-massive-crab/

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Fluttering Groves

If you travel across the nations of Cobrin’Seil, in the forests that are a bit remote, away from the highways, places that get dark and stay that way long, you might find one of the settlements known as Fluttering Groves. Stories of the groves that reach back to the cities talk of places lit by luminous glowing fungi, houses built under their caps, or treehouses with large canvases for shared art, all peopled by delicate, pale coloured, glowing moth people, known by their gentle name, the Wheref.

Sometimes these stories mention stalwart defenders or powerful crafters in these communities, who look like they are made of silk and shell, long and rangy, with customised faces they shape themselves through crafting, and maybe even share their names, the Khess. Even then, sometimes in the Fluttering Groves, they can talk of the ooze people, the Ozu, slimes and goos that despite their liquid appearance, have their own distinct identities and love to talk, play, and create theatre.

Of course, many modern wizards and researchers think that Fluttering Groves sound so fancifully twee they’re probably exaggerated stories of unique encounters of single creatures, made into a shared storybook style space by bards trying to make places sound more interesting.

The Groves’ people don’t really care what bards say about them. They’re happy going about their lives together. This article is an explanation of these three linked people, for a 4th edition D&D campaign setting. If you don’t play that system, there’s hopefully some transferable information you can use if the idea captures you.

For now? It’s three people, one childhood as a pitch, and, honestly, trying to make something to impress my friend who’s an award winning writer for her work on Caves of Qud.

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https://press.invincible.ink/fluttering-groves/

#CobrinSeil #DnD4e

The Drow’s Dark Demense

‘Drow’ is a loaded, politically challenging term in Cobrin’Seil. The word brings with it stereotypes, and in a world where actually dangerous monsters exist, bringing the weight of a ‘monster’ to a culture of people who actually exist and have lives and jobs is one of the roots of how dangerous and harmful ideas get promoted and delivered. Cobrin’Seil has a dark history with how Orcs and Goblins have had to both claim some legal protections and recognitions across the majority Bidestran cultures, and it is this cultural darkness that encourages researchers to be careful and cautious in what they ascribe to ‘cultures.’

Here’s the rub: Drow refers to a heritage of modified Elves, yes, but Drow also is the term used to refer to the political culture and identity of Drow’ith’drow, the one Drow settlement from which the word Drow and its two pronunciations derivce, and whether or not any individual Drow complies with that political body, Drow’ith’drow is the primary Drow culture. It doesn’t matter if a Drow individual isn’t okay with isolationist expansionist imperialism, though, because the Drow culture as a whole is acting as if they are.

Presented here then is a guide to Drow’ith’drow and the Drow culture it fosters and protects.

Content warning: Drow culture in Cobrin’Seil is xenofascist and engages in slavery. This isn’t going to be weird about sex, I don’t think there’s room to talk about sex at all here. But still, it’s a culture with slavery, which can be not-fun to talk about, and brings with it an assumption that sexual exploitation is happening. Proceed as warned!

Engagement warning: Look, this is 5,000+ words, written as an in-universe explanation of a culture in Cobrin’Seil. It draws on ideas I like for Drow culture that separates them fron conventional depictions of the same. There’s a lot here and it’s designed to be at least a bit ambiguous while also describing a culture that sucks, so like, don’t expect to pop this one open and blitz through it in your lunchbreak and get a cool idea at the end.

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https://press.invincible.ink/the-drows-dark-demense/

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The Impossible Weight Of Love

There’s no Greater God of Love in Cobrin’Seil. In a Pantheon full of characters that embody easily explained, narratively significant ideas to a culture of people who love to tell stories, each one incarnated by a divine supernatural power capable of exerting its personality to influence those believes, it is a common point of research into the question as to why there is no great and iconic character to represent love itself.

The research is largely settled, mind you; the answers have been satisfyingly found, though there are always questrions of how and what they mean. No research is truly complete after all. But to understand the absence of the god of love, first, there needs to be an understanding of divine lacunae.

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https://press.invincible.ink/the-impossible-weight-of-love/

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Cobrin’Seil: Who are ‘Greater’ Gods?

From time to time in the conversation around Cobrin’Seil, I mention the Greater Pantheon. This idea, the notion of a Pantheon that is well known, internationally regarded and has a significance to most people, in most population centres. I’ve talked about how there is a world of gods, but that gods are not absolute, not in control of the reality but rather reflections of the lives of people.

But who are the actual gods in this Greater Pantheon?

First of all, there is no relationship between ‘Greater’ and ‘Power’ in the context of Cobrin’Seil. When people say ‘Greater Gods’ what they really mean are ‘The Famous Ones.’ The bubble of Greater Gods are the Gods that people can see as coherently making sense of their world, and there is an assumed balance or symmetry to them because people tend to believe that there is a symmetry or balance to the world. But this is always a story, and the stories are diferent from place to place, meaning that while the gods predominantly group into City Gods, Nature Gods, Mystery Gods and Evil Gods, there are almost always discrepancies in which category some people in some place think necessarily applies. This happens even within a community!

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https://press.invincible.ink/cobrinseil-who-are-greater-gods/

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The Blind Patrons

In many ways, a Warlock represents an ideal kind of operator, for a powerful organisation that manages a wide variety of information sources and needs operatives that can be flexible and independent. Warlocks are good at negotiations, infiltrations, social presentation, and showing of force, and they’re also very good at finding a lone individual and making their life deeply suck through their magical powers. The only problem with recruiting a Warlock to do a job is you know you’re always subcontracting, as their Patrons’ demands will always supercede your own.

The Corporate powers of Cobrin’Seil, presented with this problem, went into the Warlock Patron business, and in the process created some truly fantastic technical devices that are only merely a little abominable. They crafted The Blind Patrons.

https://press.invincible.ink/the-blind-patrons/

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Cobrin’Seil: Where Stand Bones of a Dead God

Selpera is not a country. It is an absence of a country. It was a name, once. It was the name of a god that was a king that was an owner and that is now a grave. Selpera is the term given to the place where Selpera fell, or so people hope is true. At some point, somehow, the entity known as Selpera, a god, died. Or more specifically, and this is something most people can agree on, Selpera was killed.

Selpera’s death lead to an explosion that flattened a country and killed everyone in it, leaving behind a wound that not only scored the land and tainted and cursed what remained and grew in its place, but which left wreckages and chunks of broken unnatural meat in the landscape, giant gouging barbs and spurs from whatever it was that made up the body of a god. For a time, people would raid the remains for goods, would dig up chunks of godly matter and sell it to exotic traders for stranger purposes.

Many of those people, far away from Selpera, rich on their success, would die, later, agonised screams punctuating their confused, inexplicable deaths.

Selpera is a place where the gods of Cobrin’Seil learned that not only could they die, but they could be killed. The stories about what happened in Selpera abound, as Selpera’s name endures but their identity erodes into the mass of their own broken explosion. A god fell, and all that remains is the name on its grave: Selpera.

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https://press.invincible.ink/cobrinseil-where-stand-bones-of-a-dead-god/

Who Can You Eat?

I mean, just asking.

I’m not talking about metaphor, by the way. The farmer who grows the food that I eat spends moments of his life to create food that I consume, and one could hypothetically stretch the brain to say that in so doing I consume the farmer’s life, a little at a time, as if the farmer spent one minute of his — or her — life to extend mine by the same, and wheat grows one ear at a time.

I’m talking about the question, in your setting, of who can eat who?

Content Warning: I talk about cannibalism? Like, literally, actually cannibalism. Not vore, this isn’t going to be sexy for a particular category of people. Or maybe it is, I don’t know how you feel about my word choices. Point is this is about cannibalism in world building.

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#CobrinSeil #WorldBuilding

https://press.invincible.ink/who-can-you-eat/

Birds Aren’t Real (In Cobrin’Seil At Least)

Not all birds. No, birds are real and exist and are natural and common even.

But it’s the culture known as Aarakocra? Those are fake.

They exist, they’re not mythical, but they only exist because they were mythical. They do exist, though and that means that thanks to them being real, they explain the presence of something like them but that crucially isn’t them and doesn’t make sense anyway. This makes sense, I promise.

The important thing is this is all the Elves’ fault.

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#CobrinSeil

https://press.invincible.ink/birds-arent-real-in-cobrinseil-at-least/

UnFair Dealing in Cobrin’Seil — I

Amongst the poeple and places of Cobrin’Seil there is a conventional vision that regards the material world and the layers of magic upon it as being a real world that exists, and from there a number of subordinate or referential locations that defer to that place as prime. In amongst these places and planes, though there is one aspect that is so often […]

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https://press.invincible.ink/unfair-dealing-in-cobrinseil-i/