The Riven Lands

[Mulk he/him]

Ages ago (well, like three years or so) someone prodded me to put details of my own homebrew world together into a post here.  For a variety of reasons I never got around to it and these days I spend more time on Discord than I do here.  But here we go.  The beginnings of this go back to a piece of paper I started to draw on randomly in October of 1992.

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The world was once round.  All the oldest records we can find agree on this, and they speak of being able to sail into the sunset until you come back around to the starting point. Now we are bounded by extremes we dare not or cannot cross...to the West lies the endless ravenous falls of Karkos, to the North and South the hideous cliffs fall away into nothing, and to the East the Sunrise Swell whose currents prevent all from approaching to see what might lurk beyond. While I and others theorize a planet of six sides, no one has returned from over the edge to tell the tale, so we may never know for sure...   

Elias the Wanderer.

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The planet has no name, per se. The Riven Lands is a convenient descriptor given the current state of the world.  It was created by twin deities long back in time as a globe somewhat akin to hours around a sun similar to ours, before one betrayed the other and tried to claim the planet as his own.  Their fight marred what is, what was, and what will be.  When Kiroen took his last wound he fell unconscious and Creation itself arose in his defense, cradling Kiroen so he might heal, trapping the Traitor (whose name is lost) within a prison of pressure and fire and stone.  It is believed that the fate of the world rests upon whether the world can hold the Traitor at bay long enough for Kiroen to recover or not, and that their bodies lie trapped somewhere within the world itself.  Those with knowledge and wisdom teach that order aids Creation in its task and chaos harms it.

The result of the fight was a misshapen world no longer globed in the midst of space, but vaguely cube shaped. Massive upheavals changed the shape and topography of all of the known landscapes, slew an uncountable number of people and animals around the whole world, and rendered the majority of the world uninhabitable, there being two facets of the cube that can sustain humanoid life, two others that can sustain some variations of plant life and some smaller animals and birds but nothing in the way or larger life forms, and two that are basically huge, rushing waterfalls that kill just about anything larger than krill that runs through them.  Most history is told from the perspective of those on the top - the larger populations, the better known cities, were on the top of the current world, and they view the underside as a possibility, even a probability, but still mythical nonetheless because it may as well be the far side of space for all they can reach it.  What ISN'T mythical is so strange as to be beyond belief in places: impossible cliffs, a giant rift in the middle of the ocean, plains lifted up far above sea level and other mountainous zones brought low, zones of rock that morphed into a much harder and denser substance, not to mention the changes to the humanoids and life upon the face of the planet.

RACES
First are the Oraen (the Ones), the oldest and proudest people of the world, and also the most powerful and longest lived, the eldest of them exceeding the span of a thousand years of vigor ere they begin to wane.  Known as dwarves to the other races, they are powerful priests of the deep and of the light, of craft and of the heavens, and belief and tradition are wound into every facet of life and work from birth until death.  For them, a mere two full life spans have passed since the great betrayal.  Many of their race were twisted into a darker, slighter form that cleaves to the darkness under the world, despising the free air and the other races as they gnaw at the bones of creation.  While the Oraen give them a descriptor simply meaning Not Us, to the rest of the world they are called darkeners, gnomes, vile-dwarves, rock demons and other even less hospitable terms.

Next come the humans.  Goraedos to the Oraen, living 90 to 100 years commonly and occasionally nearing 150, possessing skill in elemental magics, they are inventive, stubborn, persistent and more.  Huge swaths of them were also changed, becoming what are known as the twisted ones, the goblins, ur-human, the Hordes.  As a whole they war with humans and any they find on the lands, save at one place in the whole world.

Those we would call elves are known to the world as the Kelldorae, the Kind Fae, they who are one with nature.  Possessing many shamanic and nature based magics, they are less numerous, longer lived than humans but less than the dwarves and taller than either though a dwarf pound for pound would be stronger.  Their twisted kind became the Uilleach, the troll, the Wicked Fae, the Hunger of the Swamps.   Much more rare than either of their other warped kindred, they made alliance with the goblins near the land in which they live and raid together with them.

RECENT HISTORY

The cataclysmic events that warped the world are far enough back they are beyond living memory of even the longest lived and so are depending on where you are in the world a matter of recent history (if a dwarf or gnome) or a matter of legend (if human, elf or their twisted variants).  Of more relevance to the current state of the world, around a century before the present one named Dolen Oraenacus came to power in dwarf lands, and after consolidating nearly all of the dwarves under his rule (a process which took more than fifty years, dwarves being dwarves), led them on a rule of terror and destruction such as had never been known at the hands of that people, becoming known to all others as Dwarfendark.  A charismatic speaker and demagogue extraordinaire, the dwarves threw aside eons of discipline and order and became a rampaging horde, culminating in the utter destruction of the powerful and formerly allied human nation Tirimar.  Their remnants planned and carried out a raid to assassinate Dwarfendark, after which the dwarves fell to infighting, and then to abject horror at what they had done.  The Tirimarian raid escaped in the chaos following the assassination and fled across the ocean. 

Roughly two-thirds of the remaining dwarves returned to their roots vowing never again to do as they had done, while about a third of them maintained the ways Dwarfendark introduced.  The schism between the dwarves is hot and bitter, but the dwarves are so scattered apart and so resistant to being ruled by one voice anymore that the more honorable dwarves cannot gather the forces to effectively deal with their cousins, and knowing this the dark dwarves are unwilling to press too hard at any one location lest they arouse enough ire to invite their own destruction, so they are more a danger to nearby non-dwarven nations than to other dwarves.

Unknown to the rest of the world, the survivors of the destruction of Tirimar escaped entirely and found a new home, well hidden from much of the world.  They also founded a new organization to work for order and against chaos, named rather grandly the Knighthood of Cristhorn, though three parts of this order are not classical knights and one whole branch is more devoted to trade and intrigue.  Even their military arm is as aimed at covert consulting/support for allied nations, spying and weapon and tactical development as it is toward classic open warfare and pitched battles.

MAGIC

Magic has evolved along four different lines in this world, in a total of nine different magical schools.  The first is priestly magic, drawn from the essence of Kiroen, and is primarily but not exclusively the realm of the dwarves.  The second is elemental, the schools of fire, water, air, earth, time/space, thought.  This is the realm of the humans generally, though other races do occasionally draw from it as well.  The third is nature-based magic, magic that channels and draws upon the power of nature and natural entities.  This belongs to the elves - no other race has ever learned this magic without an elven teacher, and few other than elves or very ancient dwarves achieve true mastery of it.  And fourth is sorcery, magic drawn from the essence of the Traitor and able to be enhanced by devouring the life force of a chosen sacrifice, nine realms in all.  Sorcery is addictive and darkening in its very being, those who begin this path are eventually warped by it physically and mentally, and while return out of the darkness is possible, it is harder the deeper in you get.  Sorcerors are hunted by nearly every living being on the planet, saving those forces who buy into the desire for power and back them up, and are usually solitary (not meaning only one at a time, there are quite a few of them around, there just aren't groups of sorcerors in general anywhere)

[+ILuvHats he/him]

This sounds like a cool world. It feels very Tolkienesque in some ways based on the races and the archaic language you used in describing the world, but it still feels original. So it sounds like the history you’ve described occurred on only one of the two inhabited facets. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s on the other one?

[Mulk he/him]

RAFO...

kidding (mostly)!  The other one I'm treating mostly as mystery for the time being in its specifics.  In part because I've not spent nearly as much time on it, in part because what I have decided may change, and in part because that sort of mystery about things that may not be known lends a weight to such things and an openness to interpretation that I found attractive long before Brandon Sanderson was ever published. Here are the general details that are mostly all I share about the bottom side:

There is land down there, there are people down there of a variety of races, who feel much about the other inhabited side as those on the other do about them.  It's also more chaotic, less organized, the land being more archipelagic and peninsular than is true above, where there are several larger continents, and save for a few remote dwarven enclaves the ongoing skirmishing, fighting, raiding has mostly removed from them the desire to learn and know history or other more esoteric pursuits, in favor of seafaring, tech for assault and defense and such.  Only the dwarves retain any communal knowledge of the world's history, and then only those that haven't fallen to the roving warfare of the intervening millennia.  Comparing it to feudal Europe but with the land barons, dukes and so forth instead being seagoing pirates in nature and their grand fortresses instead of castles on mountains or hills being floating armadas and natural harbors wouldn't be too far amiss. 

Every couple of centuries or so someone gets swept over the western falls and somehow survives the trip to the bottom, or the same from the bottom up their analog on the other side of the world to the top, but as everyone 'knows' that no one can survive the trip, the rare people who do are treated as insane or eccentric, and even that assumes they survive long enough to make contact with people on their new side of the world - those coming from the bottom to the top often run afoul of the great rift nigh to Cristhorn and perish there, and those going from the top to the bottom are often seen as just another ship to be raided and are captured/destroyed.

At some point I'd love to convert my paper map into some sort of map making program but I've not the time or resources for that so it remains a large amount of taped together notebook paper that I doodled on.  I'll sketch in the nations as they currently are, alliances, trading and so forth.  I never wrote the story I intended to write for this world, but I have run tabletop RPG games in it, so there's a lot of granular detail available.

[+ILuvHats he/him]

39 minutes ago, Mulk said:

At some point I'd love to convert my paper map into some sort of map making program but I've not the time or resources for that so it remains a large amount of taped together notebook paper that I doodled on.  I'll sketch in the nations as they currently are, alliances, trading and so forth.  I never wrote the story I intended to write for this world, but I have run tabletop RPG games in it, so there's a lot of granular detail available.

If you're looking for some map creating software, I've used inkarnate in the past. The free version isn't terribly flexible, but it is intuitive and the maps look very nice. For reference, here's my very amateurish attempt at mapmaking using the program (please bear in mind I only spent 2 hours messing around to make it before judging it ). If you want to see pro maps, I particularly like this one. Theres plenty of other examples online too.

[Mulk he/him]

I looked at it a couple of years ago or so, and the lack of an undo tool frustrated me so much I quit messing with it after a bit.  It just never failed that I made an inadvertent click that undid/wiped out/rewrote a section that was difficult. Did they ever resolve that?