The Thousand Kraje

Though this post is mapless and largely useless from a play perspective, I wanted to give my players a brief flyover of the setting that is to come. This post lacks in any crunchy details, but it has everything I've devised so far for our AFF setting (plus some bloody good art by Matthew Adams).

Without further ado, I present

The Fluid cultural and political successor polities of the Overkingdom now referred to as

The Thousand Kraje

An innumerable handful of kingdoms, free cities, crowns, marches, colonies, and petty empires once united under the simply-named Overkingdom. Stretching between the Wyrd-less realms of the north and the Greater Wyrd of the south.

The Wyrd.

Set between the Greater Wyrd and the Corelands, magic functions here, but civilization has rooted itself as well– albeit tentatively and often temporarily. The entirety of the world (and perhaps the universe’s) human population exists in these polities, considered barbaric by the outside world for their lack of racial union.

Rippling amidst these settlements and crawling between them haunts the Wyrd, where the borders between the magical and the mundane disappear entirely; the realm of the weird, malignant, and wonderful creatures of distant realms and ancient epochs. Whole areas exist where distant planes, ancient times, and strange creatures threaten the safety of the status quo. This cosmic gonzo produces an incredible density of adventures and locales to be charted and explored, even along the best-travelled roads of various Kraj.

The People.

Though various other races exist (strange, tainted, and sometimes entirely unique), they are without fail (and often itinerant) outsider minority to the diverse humankind that exist here. Humans themselves are in turn a divided and splintered minority compared to the races of the world, making them an ambitious and pugnacious people around others. Often, they fail to let sleeping dogs lie, proving themselves to other, more prosperous races; Lady Luck tends to favour them in this. Why she does this is unknown to all and bloody irritating to most.

Their Languages.

The people here generally speak Empiric, also affectionately known as man-babble, which is a pidgin of all the various other tongues spoken about the Kraje. (Based off of the super-cool Mediterranean Lingua Franca and Mozarabic). These other tongues are as widespread and various as the humans who speak them, sometimes differing between neighboring cities. If this bizarrely twisted linguistic map wasn’t enough, the other races who visit tend bring with them the other tongues of their people.