Quote from: Rincewind1;500975Sure, sure, I understand - the man eating cow is a bit bizarre, but not (too) laughably bizarre. I'll leave you to your work then. I presume you considered some variation of "Skaven" as city predators?

Yeah, the gnomes and the servants of the Black Vermin Gods fill that role.

Places to Go, Things to Kill

The Order of Five

High Kaddish destroyed the Cities of Night using terrible curses cast by its war-wizards. Many died in the fighting, or in the intervening centuries, but five still live, the five most powerful Kaddish wizards known. Two still live in Kaddish, one is constantly traveling the world, and the other two have established strongholds in the Dawnlands from which to pursue their esoteric studies. In all cases, locals have learnt to leave them alone, and the wizards mostly reciprocate. They do not act in an organised way since the fall of the kingdom of High Kaddish, and in times past they have occasionally had what they consider minor spats, but which appear to observers as vicious magical wars. While not true demigods (all were born more or less mortal), they consider themselves equal in rank and power to them, and are capable of backing up this claim with force. All have founded various orders, groups and cults to teach their techniques to others, though these are mostly autonomous.

All five occasionally hire adventurers to perform various tasks, for which they pay in wonders and favours. Each one has assumed a mononym to hide their true identities and to avoid being dragged into the civil conflicts of the Orthocracy, and poets have decorated these with epithets to add to their glory.

Bashiraith Gate-Builder

Bashiraith is the master summoner of the Order. He called the dark star down that slew Tlana, and he broke the barrier between the real world and the Hivehome in Tabal. After the end of the wars between High Kaddish and the Cities of Night, he built himself a floating palace of spheres nested inside one another with which he travels the world. When he wishes to, he can tuck it into a pocket, but when he withdraws it, it is larger than the Palace Eternal in Dwer Tor. Inside, the palace is filled with curios of his travels, a tastefully extensive library, an extremely complete zoo, a harem of bizarre composition, a varied wardrobe and gates to other realms.

Bashiraith appears as a halfling with black, curly hair that flows down over his shoulders. His eyes are completely black and drip acid (which he is immune to) when he is angry or sad. He favours short-cut blue silk robes with a matching accessories (often a fez, gloves and sandals). He is known to be a hedonist of the most scandalous sort, and a considerate magnanimous host.

He is an expert in the Psychomimetic school, and is the discoverer of the process of creating and controlling tulpa-shoggoths, amongst others. The Saeclonian Sodality of gnostics claims descent from one of his pupils, and they are capable of speaking to him wherever he is. While capable of mighty magic, Bashiraith is more likely to humiliate and infuriate those who anger him than kill them. His jokes can be cruel, and sometimes capricious.

Hrainthir Mad-Singer

Hrainthir is a gnostic's gnostic, specialising in complicated and elaborate curses, mind-affecting magic and changing fate. He sealed the undying inhabitants of Wanad in their city for all time, and he made the people of Balwan run through their streets naked and murderous in suicidal enthusiasm. He appears to regret his service to High Kaddish, as he left the city at the conclusion of the war, and now lives a solitary existence next to a desert cave.

Hrainthir appears as a bald, green-skinned elf of advanced age and poor hygiene. He mostly wears tattered rags, or goes naked as he feels. His skin is sometimes covered in elaborate silver tattoos that glow with magical power, and sometimes in sores and boils. He is morose, fatalistic, pensive, and speaks haltingly. He wants to be left alone to pursue his studies in peace and quiet. He is easily mistaken for a somewhat-deranged hermit. Anyone who hears him speak on two consecutive days goes irrevocably insane. He lives with a single apprentice, a young shifter girl named Eater-of-Winds, who he claims is his daughter. He has a collection of rocks that he picks out of the desert sands, which he occasionally gives as gifts to visitors. The rocks are completely mundane, but it is extremely prestigious in Kaddish and Dwer Tor to own one.

Hrainthir is skilled in all three magical schools, and is sought out by the gnostics of Dwer Tor for his thoughts on the magical theory behind that school. His text "On Forming True Names" is still used to teach new Logokratonic gnostics the basics of the discipline.

The Order of Five (cont.)

Nasuul the Tomb-Breaker

Nasuul is the master fabricator, transmuter and alchemist of the Order. She transformed the people of Dabawa into shadows, and flooded Djala with corrosive quicksilver. Since the end of the war, she has lived at the bottom of the Dawn Lake in Kaddish, in a palace made of bronze and defended by clockwork soldiers and golems. She has become obsessed with the secrets of the Dawnmen, and dispatches agents to recover or study their artifacts and tombs on a regular basis. She is not above slaying lesser wizards if they stumble across a find and refuse to share it with her.

Nasuul appears as a tall, beautiful Burnt woman surrounded by scintillating auras of blue and red light. She has a scar from above her right eye to her jaw that has filled in with a bronze colour that she does not bother to heal. Her "clothes" are diaphanous strips in bronze and silver that orbit around her, with the orbits changing as her mood does without regard to modesty.

Nasuul exceeds at the Sarxian school, though she is also trained in the other two. She taught Guravius, who founded the Academy of Guravius, and Ulmeric, the famous author of "On the Essence of the World", as well as many others. From time to time she will emerge from the lake and lecture at the Academy. She is known as a brilliant pedagogue, bringing to it the same determination and analytic mind that she does to everything else. She is forbidden to travel to Dwer Tor by the king of that city after she slew the divine hero Survankara, her former lover.

Randulthine, Lady of Ash and Stone

Randulthine is the paragon of elemental control. The water, fire, earth and air in their pure forms respond to her every whim. She burnt Dlak, and flayed the people of Jakan with the whirlwind of glass shards. She delighted in this destruction and nearly put the entire Dawnlands to the torch before Zulaith dissuaded her. At the end of the war, she traveled south to the Stormbreaker mountains and raised Randulthinvarnir, the Mountain of Randulthine, from the rock. Many claim she still has plans to devastate the Dawnlands, and is held back only by the existence of the other four.

Randulthine appears as a beautiful statue or porcelain casting of a human woman, except her eyes with blaze green with sorcerous power. Randulthine forms clothes as needed out of her stony flesh, but rarely departs from traditional fashions. She is known as vengeful, cruel, and greedy, but she always honours her word.

She is an expert in the Psychomimetic and Sarxian schools of sorcery, and designed the modern versions of the spells by which elementals are summoned in those two schools. She had a son with Zulaith called Vorus, who became a famous poet in High Kaddish, and for this reason she offers guest-right to poets and bards who she encounters. The Dravindi Fraternity was founded by her pupil Dravind, and she keeps them for company at Randulthinvarnir.

The Order of Five (cont.)

Zulaith the Patriot, the Righteous Shield

If the Order of Five can be said to have a leader, then it is Zulaith. He is unquestionably the most powerful of the five, and the others are his students (Bashiraith, Hrainthir, Nasuul), lovers (Randulthine, Hrainthir), or friends (Nasuul, Bashiraith). Only his personality and charm welded the disparate group together, and it was his proposal that they should settle the Wars of Night and Day in favour of High Kaddish that led to the extermination of the Cities of Night. He also played a critical role in the triumph of the revolution that established the Orthocracy, refusing the king's command to annihilate the rebels despite centuries of otherwise unquestionably loyal service to the bearers of that crown. Since then, he has refused to participate in politics.

Zulaith is the most mundane in appearance of all five gnostics. He appears as a heavyset middle-aged human with sparse, mouse-coloured hair who wears grey robes with a kufi, gloves and boots in the same colour. Gnostics in the Orthocracy often wear similar clothes in imitation of him, despite the association of grey clothes with poverty. His personality is a cipher, calm and reserved in public and situations of crisis, with a mild ascetic streak by Kaddish standards (no one has ever seen him drunk).

Zulaith invented the distinction between the Sarxian, Psychomimetic and Logokratonic schools of sorcery, codified the differences between them, and wrote several important spellbooks, including the Zulanthine Catalogue. His influence draws pupils from across the Dawnlands, even from the Hill People, to the Orthocracy. His school, the Zulaymna, continues to be at the forefront of magical innovation, though Zulaith himself teaches on a small number of personally chosen pupils. Should he need to, he could potentially reunite the Order of Five, but he has shown no interest in doing so.

The Order of Five aren't evil wizards per se, but it's important to remember that they are ruthless and dangerous weirdos in a world that doesn't tolerate weakness. They can be patrons, antagonists, allies, McGuffins, etc. as the DM requires. When I think of how they interact, I picture it as half Rhialto & co. from the Dying Earth series and half H.P. Lovecraft.

The Forgotten Kingdoms of the Dawnlands

Despite the conviction of most contemporary inhabitants of the Dawnlands that the same states and people have endured over the centuries, their fingers locked around one another's throats, the actual historical facts generally do not bear this out. The kingdom of High Kaddish varied dramatically over its history, the Cities of Night waxed and then waned, the Forest Dreamers united politically only thirty years ago, and even Dwer Tor's colonies were founded in the living memory of the oldest dwarves. And beyond these, many other kings and khans have risen and fallen in turn, their memories preserved only by sages. These are some of the more interesting.

Weykuln

Five hundred years ago, the kingdom of Weykuln was once home to mountain men, orcs and hobgoblins, and stretched over the area between Moon Peak, what is now the Maruk Bastion, and south to Jakan at its greatest extent. It was a barbarous, backwards place without cities, where feudal chiefs and a class of professional warriors lorded over a population mostly composed of slaves and peasants. It alternated between being a tributary of the Cities of Night and High Kaddish, and each time it switched the bloody civil war that resulted weakened it further and made it more dependent on the winning patron. It was eventually destroyed during the Wars of Night and Day when waves of hobgoblin warbands came south through the northern mountains, overwhelming armies depleted by the most recent succession struggle. To this day, the land is split between the victorious tribes.

Hazilua

The Hazilua were a tribe of elvish schismatic nomads who broke away from the Cities of Night around the time that civilisation was entering its bloodiest and most violent phase seven hundred years ago, known as the "Years of Knives and Teeth", in which a population explosion led to a collapse of the food supply, and roving bands of marauders swept the plains for victims to dragged back to Dlak and devoured by the starving masses. The Hazilua appear to have rejected the worship of Eternal Night, and fled to the north-eastern plains and coast, near where Jarek the Snake now reigns. They were fine metalworkers who worshipped the Blind God and the Headless God, and who carved stone pillars to mark boundaries and distances within their kingdom. Their kingdom lasted about a century before vanishing for unknown reasons.

The Lost City of Varmayanka

Varmayanka the Mad was briefly king of Dwer Tor about four hundred years ago. He is known as the Mad for his belief that Dwer Tor's site was cursed. At incredible expense, he had a city built in the Stormbreaker mountains by hundreds of thousands of slaves and helots, many of whom perished. Once complete, he ordered the entire population of Dwer Tor to move there, and to never return to Dwer Tor. At first the city complied, but thousands starved to death during the first winter, as crops could not be brought in efficiently from the colonies, and the soil was unable to sustain intensive agriculture. This caused a civil war, which led to Varmayanka's death, and when he died, the population emigrated en masse to the old city. His city remains, guarded by ghosts and the unburied dead slain in the war. Varmayanka is also remembered as the king who cemented Dwer control of Moon Peak, tearing it away from Weykuln in a short-lived war to raise the capital he needed.

The Cattle Men

The existence of the cattle men is preserved only in a handful of obscure myths which are mostly ignored as contrary to history. Prior to the settlement of the Plains of Kadiz (then heavily forested) by the Children of Night, they were inhabited for several centuries by tribes of peaceful gnolls who lived in small towns built of stone. They are known as "the cattle men" because the Children of Night slew and ate them prior to the foundation of the Cities of Night. The few who were enslaved are believed to be the origin of the gnollish population amongst the Children of Night. Most of their buildings are long gone, either destroyed by time or war, but the occasional ruin has managed to survive.

Kadhrek

In its day, Kadhrek was the second city of High Kaddish, a port on the coast visited by Salt Men, Forest Dreamers, and even the occasional ship from the empire of Kalak-Who-Blinds. Though never as large as Kaddish, it was still one of the larger cities of the Dawnlands, about the size of Dwer Tor's metropolitan populace. It was destroyed during the Wars of Night and Day (approximately 300 years ago) by the war-wizards of Dlak, who merged the entire populace together into a single protoplasmic blob of living flesh and then fed it to their gnollish and hobgoblin regiments. Once they had devoured it, the city was burnt to the ground, and the smoldering stones thrown into the sea. The ruins of Kadhrek can still be found easily, though locals avoid the place as cursed.

The Horde of Bullat Numir

Bullat Numir All-Khan was born a humble human field slave in the hinterlands of Balwan six hundred years ago, but by his death, he was the supreme lord of the Dawnlands; of man, elf, halfling and dwarf alike. In Kaddish he wore a robe in Kufi, in Dwer Tor a toga, paint and feathers amongst the forest tribes, and the bearskins of a king in the Cities of Night. The Peace of Bullat Numir meant that a child could walk from Tlana to Kadhrek unescorted without fear, albeit the child would have to follow the rows of crucified rebels Bullat Numir lined the way with. Bullat Numir's only failing as a ruler was that he could not bear sons, and upon his death, his generals and lesser khans (all married to his daughters) tore the plains apart in a mad slaughter for rulership. None succeeded, and within a generation it was if Bullat Numir had never existed. His tomb has never been found.