Setting

Fundamentals

• 

  The Choir Chamber
  Themes include the corrupting influence of wealth and power, testing the strength of familial bonds, the terrible up things people do as a result of trauma, and the general horrors of existing in a society.
• The World’s Ambience is byzantine, baroque, clockpunk, alchemical, lush, monstrous, and home to horrors beyond human comprehension.
• Politeia Thalastrios, also known as the Republic of Enemies, is a patchwork of individual provinces. Despite its size and allowance of feuding, the Republic’s government is able to hold power by monopolizing control of khaos; this world’s unpredictable and dangerous magic.
• Lyrios is the capitol province of the Republic, a wealthy center of trade and cutthroat politics. Its capital city, Lyre, is colloquially known as the City of Liars. Lyre is the heart of our setting and the focus of the cultural traditions detailed on this page.
• The Choir is the highest governing body of the Republic. Chorists are often at the heart of political maneuverings and treachery in Lyre. They remain in power due to monopolizing control over khaos, but they are ultimately a weak central authority.
• Factions are powerful groups that seek to further their own interests. The most famous factions are upper class families known as houses, but non-familial factions exist too.
• Our Magic System originates from khaos, which is a wavelength of light generally invisible to humans. Khaos is capable of mutating anything it touches, especially sapient creatures. It is too unpredictable to fully control, but through scientific study humans have developed many methods for coexisting.
  • Khaos leaks from Labyrinthine Rifts, tears in the fabric of reality that open and disappear at random.
  • Some people believe khaos is divine; most view it with a mixture of fear and awe.
  • There are a few vocations associated with khaos. Unnaturalists study the effects of khaos. Alchemists use khaos-touched matter to experiment and create new things. Reckoners seek to protect humans from the effects of rifts and rays of khaos. Seers attempt to use rifts and khaos to become closer to divinity and predict the future.
  • Esotericists believe that humans can gain godlike powers by studying khaos in order to fully control it. Anti-esotericists believe that this is dangerous and that human involvement with khaos should be limited, though opinions differ on how much it should be limited.
  • Following a magical disaster known as The Shattering that destroyed a palace in Miramatra, anti-esotericists introduced a series of laws known as the The Silver Edicts.
  • The Silver Edicts mandate that all practitioners of khaosic vocations much obtain Charters of Khaosic Practice after written and practical examinations, must report their findings to the Magistracy of Phenomena, and additionally limits the trade of khaos-associated materials such as fireglass

Lifestyle

Growing Up Lyrian

• Values impressed on Lyrians during their childhood include: duty to one’s family, duty to the Republic, the pursuit of glory, and the importance of both personal and familial honor. Collectivism is valued over individualism, i.e. if a person has to choose between doing what is right for their family versus what is right for them personally, they are expected to choose their family over their own needs.
• A well-rounded citizen should study most or all of the following subjects: philosophy, etiquette, reading, writing, languages (Lyriosi being the dominant “lingua franca”), public speaking and rhetoric, law, politics, finance, economics, history, and self-defense.
• Starting at age eighteen, characters can legally marry, own property, hold public office, and stand for elections.
• Older teens and young adults are expected to dedicate themselves to a form of service, either to the government or their faction(s). This could include a minor service role, scholarship, training/serving at arms, etc. and is said to foster purpose and dedication in young minds. Those who do not dedicate themselves to some kind of service are considered lazy.
• Marriage in the upper classes is considered a political tool rather than an expression of love. It can take place between two people of any gender and does not necessarily include sex or production of heirs — adoption is a common and accepted practice. Furthermore, affairs are acceptable as long as they are not publicly flaunted.
• Most people in Lyre follow one of the three most common religions: Stateraenism (focused on ideals of a self-balancing world; highly splintered by local practices and cults worshipping deities; historically absorbed numerous smaller religions), Shizenism (a descendant of Stateraenism that focuses on conflict between opposing forces and the duty of humanity to balance the proverbial scales), and the Church of the Clockmaker (mostly practiced by lower classes who believe in a now-absent deity who built the world as an extremely intricate clockwork machine).

Sexuality & Gender

• "Male" and "female" were historically associated with the reproductive organs of one's birth. Over the centuries, this slowly evolved. Stateraenism, while rooted in the days of strict gender binary, emphasized that balance was important, indicating a need for equal rights regardless of reproductive organs or gender roles. Shizenism encouraged further expansion of these ideas: that one choosing to identify as a different gender or none at all are normal and necessary for the balancing of the cosmos, and that a person can even achieve perfect balance within themself instead of relying on other individuals to be their "opposite." And finally, scholars made it known that it is possible to be born with more than two configurations of genitalia, in addition to introducing reliable birth controls and hormone alterations derived from magical plants.
• In current society, the dichotomy of man and woman is not entirely gone. However, it is far less rigid than times past. Gender is no longer taken seriously as a formal classification; it is seen as multi-faceted, fluid, and performative.
• Your character’s sex and gender does not determine anything about their inheritance or opportunities in life.
• Romantic and sexual relationships with anyone of any gender are completely normal.
• People who are unable to have children, biologically or by choice, can legally adopt.
• Contraceptives and hormone-altering magical plants are readily accessible.

Disabilities

• Due to the prevalence of warfare and mutating magic, it is very normal to run across characters who may look visibly different or have a physical or mental impairment.
• Disability aids are widespread, though their quality and affordability vary.
• If you wish to make a disabled character, be careful that any disability aids they have don’t erase the disability. Aids should be adaptations to make living easier, not magical solutions to make them “normal.”

Technology

• Lightcages, batteries created when obsidian absorbs rays of khaos. Lightcages are an emerging technology that is extremely rare and expensive, mostly used by the very wealthy and plagued by safety concerns.
• Antibiotics and other healing materials obtained from khaos-touched plants and animals
• Running water, indoor heating, and plumbing in major cities; water wheels powering mills in areas with running water
• Clockwork machines (sometimes powered by lightcages) of varying intricacy that can tell time, raise and lower lifts, play music, and entertain people with writing automatons
• One-shot, slow-loading firearms; they are difficult to aim and widely seen as inelegant and ugly
• Plate armor, resulting in the increasing use of crushing weapons rather than cutting ones; though swords are still carried for self-defense
• Air travel, through use of dragons

Travel

• Sea travel and trade is one of the most important features of the Republic.
• Because khaos is difficult for humans to detect, it can be dangerous to travel on foot without a trained protector, known as a Reckoner. Reckoners understand how to find and close labyrinthine rifts, and are able to defend against the more hostile effects of khaos.
• An alternate, far more glamorous form of travel is available to the wealthy and influential: dragons.

Dragons

• Dragons are a status symbol due to their usefulness, but also because they are difficult to care for. Wealthy and influential families strive to have at least one dragon capable of air transportation. It is also possible to obtain smaller dragons for companion animals.
  • While it would be handy to use dragons as beasts of burden to transport cargo or perform farm labor, this is virtually unheard of. People own dragons to show off: using a dragon to till a field would be like using a sports car to haul firewood.
• Dragon husbandry and handling comes with many difficulties. They have unusually high infant mortality rates and attract numerous khaosic parasites, both of which can be mitigated by human care. Additionally, dragons are said to be prideful and demanding of respect: people who abuse dragons are known to meet quick and grisly punishment.
• Their connection to khaos is of particular interest. Dragons have a transparent second eyelid whichenables them to see the rays of khaosic light invisible to most humans. They use this to find and locate labyrinthine rifts, where they bask in the khaosic light. Scholars belief that khaos acts as a vital supplement for dragons because they deteriorate without regular exposure (similar to vitamin C in humans).
• Varieties of dragons span from miniature to enormous, feathered to scaled. The largest domesticated dragons are able to carry up to four fully-grown adult humans. Dragons evolve far more rapidly than any other known animal; scholars believe this is because of their adaptation to use khaos as a vital nutrient. This makes it very difficult to pin specific breeds, though they are sometimes classified by their size and utility; e.g. courser dragons are valued for speed.
• Drakonauts – dragon riders – are respected and in high demand to transport people and messages via dragonback. They communicate with their mounts via touch and verbal cues; a strong bond of trust is needed in a successful dragon-drakonaut pair.

Notable Traditions

• Blood Covenants bind two or more people together; breaking a blood covenant is said to invoke divine punishment. Those who are bound by blood covenants can feel the emotional state of those they are bound with; pain in one means pain in the other. These effects are heightened around khaos. Covenants may last for an entire lifetime or only for as long as a contract is specified. It is considered unwise to have multiple ongoing covenants, as the conflicting emotions can be difficult to bear, but it’s not unheard of.
  • Forming a blood covenant literally involves drinking each other's blood.
  • Marriage ceremonies do not have to involve blood covenants, but they usually do; to leave it out is to imply that the union is not expected to last or be particularly close.
• Bed Alliances occur when two parties sleep naked in the same bed together (with weapons beneath the bed) to seal a negotiation or alliance. Though bed alliance ceremonies do not necessarily involve intercourse, it is still used as a joke. Marriages do typically involve a bed alliance ceremony, but again, involved parties are not required to have sexual intercourse.
• Quests of Penitence are undertaken to regain reputation for oneself or one’s family following a loss of honor. A difficult task testing moral character can either be chosen by the person undergoing the quest, or (preferably) given to them by someone they wronged as a form of conditional forgiveness.
• Ancestor Rooms display death masks and other mementos of deceased family members, commemorating their accomplishments and encouraging future generations to be worthy of appearing alongside them.
• Trial by Khaos, an alternative to assessing a defendant’s guilt and simultaneously doling out reward or punishment, involves exposing them to a large amount of khaos and waiting for the outcome. These can be simple affairs, or involve building entire labyrinths.
• Profanity in Lyre:
  • Brute/brutish, beastly, and barbarian to describe something or someone who is uncultured and disgusting, and insults more popular with the upper classes.
  • Ass, asshole, and any other word used to describe the human posterior or feet (associated with dirtiness) are quite popular.
  • Piss, shit, and anything referencing excrement is considered particularly inelegant and lower class. An enemy might be described shit-eating and piss-drinking; shitting/pissing is also used similar to the way we might use fucking.
  • Words for genitalia such as cunt and cock are considered amusing and silly more than insulting or disgusting.
  • Fuck describes particularly raucous sexual intercourse; sex is not considered particularly dirty or taboo in Lyre, so it doesn't have the same weight as in our world when cursing
  • Bitch is not really used at all in this region, given the lack of institutionalized misogyny.
  • Bastard is a rather old word which lost its bite many hundred years ago.

More on Magic

• Khaos is capable of altering people and other living things in many ways: physical or psychological, visible or undetectable. Some people do not even know they are affected, and traits can be passed down through bloodlines.
• Khaos touches should have some kind of narrative or symbolic significance to a character. They can offer some kind of advantage or make life easier, but they should always have a downside, caveat, or cost. This cost can be immediately obvious, or something hidden that builds up over time.
• Small alterations to psychology and appearance are most common. The more noticeable, supernatural, or akin to a controllable “power” they are, the rarer. If in doubt, consult with other members.
• Anything that could be seen as a “power” must have limitations that make their influence relatively contained. The maximum sphere of influence is roughly 10 feet around an individual.
• Khaos touches are never completely under human control; they are affected by factors such as emotions and body chemistry. Control requires training and emotional discipline.
• Being touched by khaos is accepted by society at large, and visibly affects perhaps a third of the population. However, some people and cultures are not as accepting. As a general rule, the more noticeably supernatural or “inhuman” someone is, the more controversial their existence.
• Do not try to use khaos touches with the intent of “breaking the setting” or having an advantage above other characters. Banned concepts include time manipulation, teleportation, mind reading, or anything that allows your character to control others.
• Even more detailed information about magic can be found in Phenomena Uncanny.