Previously in our Torg readthrough:
Having covered the primitive reality of the Living Land and the pulp reality of the Nile Empire, this time we reach Aysle, the cosm of high fantasy where dragons soar in the sky, evil wizards raise the dead, and bold knights sally forth to do battle with the goblin hordes. And to make it more personally exciting, it’s all going down in my neck of the woods, since Aysle has flopped down over Scandinavia and the British Isles. So let’s see what’s going on in the old homestead!
To start with, we’re reminded that Aysle actually does not have a High Lord at present. It used to, though. Five hundred years ago, the necromancer Uthorion lead an invasion into Aysle from his native cosm of Orrorsh. He fought Pella Ardinay, champion of Light, and seemingly she won and routed his invasion – but actually, he had possessed her body and then killed his own to take control of the cosm. He ruled for five hundred years during which he corrupted the land and led multiple invasions into other cosms under the guise of “civilising them.” Then he got bushwacked by some Storm Knights at the end of the Possibility Wars series of novels, and Ardinay regained control, still connected to Uthorion’s Darkness Device and thus technically the High Lord despite being unqualified due to failing the whole “irredeemably evil” criterium. Meanwhile, Uthorion cheated death yet again by taking over the body of a Viking chieftain (because Aysle has Vikings, somehow), and is now scheming to take his dark evil power back.
Got all that? Phew.
So basically, Britain and Scandinavia aren’t being invaded in the same way that America and Africa are – Uthorion can’t push the borders while he lacks his Darkness Device, and he wouldn’t be able to extract possibility energy from new territories even if he could take them – but they are stuck in the middle of what amounts of an Aylish civil war. And there’s nothing on the telly anymore!
The actual cosm of Aysle is a flat world where the sun rises and sets by going up and down a hole in the middle like a yo-yo. There are people living on both sides of the disc, with one side being Upper Aysle that’s populated mostly by humans, and the other side being Lower Aysle that’s populated mostly by giants. The underground is the Land Between, which is populated mostly by dwarves. The giants used to rule all of Aysle, but then a human hero named Dunad did something heroic and it became possible to learn magic. Giants aren’t smart enough to be good at magic, so they got fireballed all the way back to Lower Aysle, at least until Uthorion took over and started pandering to them.
There are also elves who hang out on their own continent being snooty, as well as “half-folk” (harpies, minotaurs, satyrs, centaurs, etc; things that are shaped half like humans and half like some kind of animal) and “lesser folk” (trolls, gnomes, kobolds, ogres and other things that seem like someone had taken a human and hit her with an ugly stick – they’re not inherently evil, but they are sufficiently discriminated against that they have few reasons to be nice) . Also, Vikings are considered their own race, mostly because the other humans don’t want to admit kinship with them, and there are barbarians (like Vikings, only more generally chaotic than straight up evil), freetraders (who trade in stuff, including slaves, so they’re a bit shady) and corsairs (who board and plunder others, but they also free slaves from the freetraders, so they’re not all bad).
Again, thanks to that ancient human hero I mentioned everyone in Aysle is a little bit magic, as in, everyone is born with a single point in a magical skill and a single point in a magical knowledge. The two may or may not fit together enough to allow for any actual spells to be cast, it depends on precise day and time of birth. It’s a very bad omen to be born with a point in the Entity knowledge, which governs demons, ghosts, golems, and other things that should not properly be.
Religion is your basic fantasy polytheism whereby there are Gods of Honour who want to spread wisdom and enlightenment, Gods of Corruption who want to smash stuff, and Gods of Balance who try to mind their own business. Dwarves have their own gods, but they believe that they created the world and then sort of lost interest and wandered off, so screw those guys and focus on learning engineering, basically. The elves have a special order of monks who wander the world and learn about stuff, and those monks apparently warrant a special subsystem to represent their powers of discipline and enlightenment despite numbering about fifty worldwide. Because this is Torg, and everything needs its own subsystem!
The human parts of Aysle are ruled by six noble houses, three of whom are still Honourable and three of whom have grown Corrupt. The only two that are really particularly interesting are the Tancreds and Vareths. The Tancreds are a Corrupt house whose patriarch has served Uthorion for five hundred years in return for immortality, but with Uthorion’s depowering he’s now turned from a handsome young man into a twisted old one and has locked himself in his mansion. He’s also the brother of notable NPC Tolwyn of Tancred, who is one of the few from the original novel trilogy who actually turns up in the game a lot. She’s Ardinay’s second-in-command, so there’s some sibling yin-yang going there. The Vareths are actually a dwarven house that have been granted rule of human lands, and are also big on raiding the Lands Between for dwarven slaves. They are obviously Corrupt and the other dwarves are in rebellion against them.
The realm on Earth is next. Lady Ardinay has set up shop in Oxford outside of London and is cooperating with the British government from there. Most of the city is suffering from having gone medieval and losing electricity and so forth, but of course everyone has an extremely stiff upper lip about it. A bunch of giants have taken to wearing suits and getting jobs as bruisers for native crime bosses, so that’s a funny image. There are trolls and goblins in the London Underground. Scotland is mostly a pure Ayslish zone, so they’ve gone back to kilts and clan warriors. Trolls and dragons are common hazards up there.
Ireland had to call off the Troubles in response to the common enemy, and also because it’s too damn hard to make bombs work under the lower tech axiom. A bunch of Uthorion’s dwarves and giants were attacking Belfast when he lost the High Lordship and proceeded to start attacking each other instead, so right now the city is caught in the crossfire. Parts of Dublin are infested with ghouls ‘n’ goblins. The police asked some local dwarves for help and they initially agreed to keep the peace, but while on patrol they discovered the abandoned Guinness brewery and they haven’t been sober since. Heh. Ireland has also seen the return of the faeries – not from Aysle, though Aysle has them too, but native Core Earth faeries who had shut themselves in their own worlds to winter out the lowered magic axiom.
Scandinavia is under attack by Vikings, ironically enough. My native Sweden is implausibly holding its own, mostly because I think the writers were vaguely aware that we used to be a military superpower back in the seventeenth century and didn’t realise just how conflict-averse we’d gotten since then. Anyway, it helps that half of Sweden is still a mixed zone, so we can send JAS 39 Griffons at Uthorion’s dragons. We’re also exporting crossbows to Norway, who are doing rather worse and might fall soon since that’s where Uthorion hangs out. Okay, war profiteering, that does sound like us… Denmark is split in half between Uthorion and the Danish government and things are relatively quiet there for now. Finland is overrun by trolls, which mostly makes you feel sorry for the trolls, because Finns give zero shits and are already taking to the wilderness with skis and sniper rifles. Also, they’re getting some help from the Soviet Union, so that’s twice it’s gotten at least a tiny bit involved, I guess.
Culturally, Aysle is medieval but a little more historically so than your standard D&D – there are more burgher guilds and complicated feudal contracts and fewer absolute monarchs. Men and women are roughly equal, though, since magic is a great equaliser. In fact, skilled magic-users are considered the finest people of all, followed by brave warriors, followed by merchants and all that other riffraff. The economy is also on the magic standard, with the base unit of currency being worth the casting of a very simple spell.
World laws! Aysle is a cosm of moderate values in all four axioms – it’s got some magic, but it’s not all-powerful, it’s got some technology but only to the point of steam engines and primitive firearms, it’s got some miracles but the gods don’t physically walk the Earth, and it’s got some social development but people still have trouble with concepts like “multinational conglomerates.” It’s also got something called the Law of Observation which states that everything that is real must be possible to perceive and everything that can be perceived must be real, except for magic which runs on its own rules. I have absolutely no idea what that means, but okay.
There is also the Laws of Honour and Corruption which state that good and evil (in the chivalrous sense; Honour means acting like a just and gallant knight, Corruption means acting like a deceitful, bullying scoundrel) must make themselves visible, so theoretically all good people would be pretty and all bad people would be ugly. That obviously didn’t work for Uthorion, though, so when he set up shop in Aysle he snuck in a loophole whereby Corruption could be “siphoned off” into the land around you instead. That’s a large part of the reason why everyone went along with his rule as fake-Ardinay for so long; since she stayed beautiful even while wreaking havoc, they could only assume that her havoc-wreaking was, in some sense, the right thing to do even though they couldn’t figure out how. Anyway, now that Uthorion’s lost control, some places have gone back to the original programming while other places haven’t. So any Aylish zone will be either a beautiful, sylvan paradise where dark and twisted things hide in the shadows, or a wretched wasteland populated by people with fair faces and wicked hearts. That’s kind of cool.
People doing good or evil in Aysle also gain and lose points in traits called Honour and Corruption as they align themselves more fully with one or the other morality. Those traits provide bonuses and abilities as they increase; Honour lets you buff your friends, Corruption lets you harm your enemies. And yes, Ardinay has a hefty Honour stat and Uthorion has an even more intimidating Corruption stat, as you might guess. Like, Uthorion is literally so evil that people have been known to drop dead from his looking at them, whereby Ardinay spreads hope and joy by her every deed. Corny, but I love it.
There is a long chapter on the theory and mechanics of magic, which doubles as a general one for the cosmverse as a whole since most cosms have the same magic (albeit at different strengths). And… it’s something, all right. I’ll try to summarise…
Everything in the world is broken down into “magical knowledges” that are connected to each other in various ways. At the very highest level, you get the “Essences” of Life, Death, Time, and True Knowledge. Those are a little misleadingly named – Life is more like “creation” or “pure goodness,” Death is more like “destruction” or “pure evil,” and True Knowledge is more like “space” or “matter.” From those come the “Principles” of Light, Darkness, and Magic. Light and Darkness are the ways that Life and Death express themselves within the material universe embodied in True Knowledge, which means that Light encompasses things like truth and positive emotion, while Darkness is lies and negative emotions. Magic is the way that Life develops over Time and so is the way things actually happen and evolve. Life, Death, Light and Darkness further give rise to the Living Forces, which are all animal life, while Time, True Knowledge, Light and Magic create the Inanimate Forces that are all things elemental and material (which by this system includes plant life). Living Forces and Inanimate Forces further break down to seven different kinds of living beings and six elements (fire, water, earth, air, wood and metal).
To cast a spell, you need to have some training in both a magical skill like Divination, Conjuration, Apportation and Alteration, and the magical knowledge that governs the outcome of the spell. You want to cast a fireball, you need the skill of either Conjuration or Alteration, depending on approach, and the knowledge of Fire. Easy enough. But to create a spell, you not only need all four skills, but you need three knowledges – a pattern knowledge for what you’re targeting, a mechanism knowledge for what you’re actually doing, and a result knowledge for the outcome. So if you want to turn a man into a frog, you’d need Folk for pattern (because you’re targeting a sentient being), Aquatic for result (since you want to turn him into an amphibian) and probably Life or something for mechanism (since you’re imitating evolution by turning one life form into another).
There is an insanely involved process for figuring out how hard the spell would be to create, which involves the metaphysical distances between the knowledges and the route you take through a diagram to walk from Folk to Life and then back down to Aquatic. Add that to rolls upon rolls, and insert some special theorems to bring the difficulty down to something reasonable, possibly at the expensive of adding special conditions and requirements to the spell, divide the result between spell difficulty (how hard it will be to cast) and spell backlash (how much it’s going to hurt if you don’t do well enough at it) and you end up with a way to use magic to accomplish precisely what you set out to!
Or you can just pick a spell out of a spell list and cast it by rote, like a normal person. Honestly, it’s probably less of a headache by far. Much like the gizmo construction system in The Nile Empire, this seems less like something that’s going to be actually used and more like something that exists to explain why things are the way they are. And, honestly, I do appreciate it from that perspective – it’s kind of cool that magic isn’t just a flat list of effects, but there is an entire metaphysic behind it that makes you feel like a wise arcane scholar when you delve into it. And, hey, if you do go through the trouble and your character has crazy-high stats, you can actually go around casting free-form spells, just like in Mage: the Ascension! The GM is instructed that any player who wants to create a spell at the table has to do so entirely without the GM’s help, though, which honestly seems perfectly fair. You want to play at being a super-nerd, you’d better have done your own homework!
Creatures of Aysle! Humans have slightly higher maximum stats than humans do elsewhere, because everything is a little more heroic in Aysle. Elves and giants are even better, but they are also reliant on magic to make their superhuman abilities possible; non-Storm Knight giants can’t operate for too long outside of Aysle, because the moment they disconnect that pesky old square/cube law kicks in and they can’t support their own weight anymore.
Goblins are a lesser folk that didn’t exist before the invasion, when a bunch of Chavs suddenly shrunk and got pointy ears. Which I think is probably kind of classist and insulting, especially since goblins are described as having “a penchant for evil,” but I still think that the idea Cockney-spouting goblins is kind of hilarious.
Aysle also has dragons, one kind per element. Air dragons and water dragons are evil, fire dragons are good, plant, metal and earth dragons aren’t really one or another but you shouldn’t try their patience. Faeries (both Earthly and Ayslish), likewise, are divided into elemental families. They are kind of small and feeble on their own, but they have the ability to join together in casting spells, so they’re very powerful in groups.
Like all the Possibility Raiders, Uthorion can grow gospog thanks to the Gaunt Man. His look like big-ass wolves at early plantings and then gradually turn more dragon-like in later ones. The Wild Hunt makes a return from the novels, as a bunch of demonic flying huntsmen, though they seem a bit nerfed – in the novels, they were practically unstoppable and cut a swath through modern armies, here they seem more like fairly hefty monsters but not much else. They really can fly at speeds approaching a fighter jet, though, so I guess there’s that…
You get your basic fantasy equipment section, only made slightly more interesting by the descriptions of faerie arms and armour, and then the book ends. Hmm. I’ll admit that I enjoyed it – Aysle is fairly typical fantasy world, but it’s got just enough historical British and Germanic touches to keep it from feeling like a straight D&D clone, and the way the fantasy aspects and the modern aspects are starting to mingle in an almost Shadowrun-esque way is fun. I’m kind of noticing the absence of the kind of guide to setting adventures there that you got for the Living Land and the Nile Empire, but then the next book, Queenswrath, is all about adventure ideas so I guess that works out. Stay tuned for that one.