Under Sleeping Suns: The Late, Great, Rajual DaCarda

I was going to write a protracted essay on the evils of the Racial Monoculture in Fantasy RPG's, and how desperately I've rallied against that in Under Sleeping Suns and The Wild Frontier, but I decided instead to write about perhaps the single most influential historical figure in Under Sleeping Suns who wasn't an Eternal King, empowered with power stolen from the Gods Of The Kever upon their deaths so long ago. So, instead of an essay that would have spent a long while preaching about how Monocultures as the default standards for Non-Human races might be easy, it's certainly not realistic, you get a character piece about a man who helped define an era - and who may even have left some fairly dire warnings in the works of his last twenty years of life.

When developing Under Sleeping Suns, the foremost thing I wanted to focus on was the sense of discovery, enlightenment, and overall "we're coming out of a really horrific and bad time and into one of hope, optimism, and change" that essentially gripped the entirety of Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa during the Renaissance. Sure, it wasn't all bells and whistles and golden coins for the masses – The Catholic Church got some of its most devastatingly wretched practices during this time, and there was certainly no shortage of racism, cruelty, inequality, and the other evils of society – but here's the thing: Life was (generally) getting better for everyone. For the first time in a long time, the common person might have time for that most unheard of all things: Leisure. Which lead to another nearly unheard of quality for the common folk: Learning.

When you combine those two things, you end up with a lot of people knowing a little about a lot of things. You end up with people learning for the love of it, going out of their way to start gathering knowledge, so that they might better themselves and have a chance at making a better life for their family. During the Renaissance on our own Earth, the literacy rate skyrocketed. It was still nowhere near the saturation we have today, mind you, but with the development of the printing press, books were suddenly cheap to produce and the demand skyrocketed – both for the ability to obtain them and the ability to read them. Now you had music, now you had poetry, now you had fictions and histories and everything associated with them.

To bring this sort of thing about in the game world, then, I needed a lynchpin figure. Someone who could look around him and gather all of these various things together into one great whole about him and say "Hey, folks, look what we're doing here. It's this pretty great?"

Enter the figure of Rajual DaCarda.

Son of a fairly wealthy family, young Rajual was not content to live the life of an idly rich merchant prince, and set out to better himself in any way he could. He studied the sword from any schola that would take his money (and there were more than a few of those). While doing this, he studied the arts of sculpture and painting with multiple masters, learning the arts of form and motion. He challenged the Guild System to become an established and respected engineer, and wrote a body of literature that to this day has yet to be matched in volume and depth by any of those seeking to rise to or surpass his level. And this was before he turned 30.

At age 40, writing in his treatise "On The Rebirth Of The Livelihood Of The Mind," DaCarda coined the term "Re-Nascent Life" - The Rebirthed Life, or Renaissance - as the state of enlightenment and learning that was taking hold of his beloved Cualish Free States and their allied nations of Angarn and Cymrik (DaCarda frequently spoke of the people of Vetris in the north, but usually only in such terms as "Uncouth," "Bare-chested oafs," and "Do know how to drink"). He pointed to the marvels of engineering, literature, and art that had been birthed from the minds of men and women who, prior to this particular era of history, would have gone undiscovered due to their creators having had no such opportunities. He espoused the education of every male and female child of every family, regardless of their level of social strata, as the only way to ensure that this boom in creativity continued unabated. Although the Church Of The Nine already gave schooling to all children four days a week for six months in the year, DaCarda campaigned (unsuccessfully) to have the school week expanded to five out of six days a week, year-round, with exceptions only for holidays and deaths in the family. He would go to his grave insisting that he was right about this, but would accept that some battles could not be won by even the greatest of men.

DaCarda established multiple schools of art and literature, and was an accomplished playwright and poet. He was known as a patron of inventors and musicians, frequently inviting dozens of each into his various villas and cottages so that they might have places to live while pursuing their master works. He frequently funded orphanages for entire years at a time, and would pick one a month to visit, where he would stay the length of the month, teaching the children on days they were not learning at the Temple Of The Nine.

DaCarda is responsible for the phrase "A Man should not be only one Man, he should be as many Men as he can hold in his heart." To DaCarda and his disciples, this was a mantra of a personal plurality - a dedication to the concept of continuing one's pursuit of knowledge and learning throughout life, ceasing only upon death. A devout follower of The Nine, DaCarda believed that when he rode the River Of Fate down to the throne of Shakur, The Restbringer, God of Death and Justice, that he would go before that final arbiter with a heart as full of life as he could muster. He would show the Righteous Judge that his heart was bursting with life, and that he had earned his rest and his peace. To DaCarda, the ultimate sin was that of ignorance. "We worship Gods," he wrote. "That are lead by Wisdom, tempered by Arts, guided by Medicine, and forged in Strength. They are kept sane by Mirth, and kept whole by Love. They know Justice and they know the face of the World. If we are to stand before them as spirits, we should show them we've taken their lessons to heart. We should at least have died trying."

For all of his devotion and piety, however, DaCarda saw that certain traditions and social norms were in fact holding he and his contemporaries back in the realm of learning and discovery. For a full ten years of his life, DaCarda campaigned against the Church Of The Nine, seeking to overturn the laws and prohibitions against the study and dissection of the dead. A practice long held to be sacrilegious and bordering on a form of spiritual evil, DaCarda pointed out that the prohibition had been enacted due to the remembrance of the practices of certain of the Eternal Kings - the Books Of The Nine professed quite clearly that upon death, the body was but an empty shell. Nowhere within the Book Of Shakur, nor any of the other Books, was it stated that the spirit remained within the flesh. Unafraid to face imprisonment or excommunication, DaCarda's campaign was ultimately successful, and opened up an enormous avenue of learning for physicians and even the order of the Woundhealers, themselves. His original manuscript on the function of the various muscles, bones, and tendons of the body quickly became required for all healers seeking to serve in the Allied Armies against the Kolanthans in the Great War.

For all of these qualities, DaCarda was not without his flaws. A sad factor to his makeup was that for the bulk of his life, the man so beloved by many was an avowed Human Supremacist. DaCarda's philosophy ran toward the bigoted, and walked well over that line in many cases - going so far as to suggest that it was in the nature of the Haran and Ulehu, those two companion races to that of Man, to be naturally lazy, indolent, and prone to larceny. The reason their lot in society had never progressed past the squalor and poverty of the "Small Quarters" of the cities and outlying communities, he professed, was because it was merely who they were - they could no more change their basal natures than a single man could change the coastline of a nation. To DaCarda, for the bulk of his life, he saw them as an addendum to society, an afterthought of creation - their small stature belied their small spirits. And though he wished them no ill will per se, to DaCarda they were little more than highly advanced animals, living on the shirttails and castings-off of Humanity's greatness. Patronizing at best and offensive at worst, DaCarda penned a series of books on the Supremacy Of Man in which he outlined the natural and rightful primacy of Man upon Loris, stopping well short of the cries for purging and cleansing the non-Humans from the face of the world, such as found in the bloodthirsty rhetoric of the Kolanthans and their Inquisition.

It would be in the last forty or so years of his life, during what is called his Reflection Period, that DaCarda would recant this entire philosophy, and viciously attack any of his disciples who still espoused it. Penning a series of essays on the subject, DaCarda denounced himself and his own mind during that era of his existence, calling himself "a man who saw through untrue eyes," and "a puppet to the machinations of an older, darker world." Spending a large portion of his personal fortune, DaCarda negotiated with collectors, printers, and personal owners of his earlier works, and bought back every copy of those works he could, and had them destroyed. His newer essays, in which he attacked and dismantled every point of his earlier works, became masterwork examples of logical debate and deconstructive argument practices - used even today, a hundred years after his death - in the halls of higher learning.

The poems, fictions, and plays of the latter half of DaCarda's Reflection Period adhere to this, as well. His final series of plays, an eight-piece work that track a singular antagonist known simply as "The Villain," take the audience from dramatic reenactments of The Sunfall, the cataclysm that brought about the end of the Kever Age, to the final undoing of Elari Rex, The King Of Books, an event that would presage The Rain Of Glass and with it the ultimate destruction of Harak-Ur. The Villain, who is never called by name within any of the plays, but who is known in each of them as "Vorasi," an old Kever word for "Starving," treads softly and carefully through each of the plays. His presence goes unnoticed in each of the eight works, save by the pure - be they pure in innocence or pure in corruption - whereupon he turns them to his own ends, leaving them alive and distraught with the knowledge that they must live to tell the tale of The Villain to the next victims in the next play. Ultimately, in the final of the eight plays ("The Dark"), The Villain Vorasi is revealed to be the secret editor and censor of the very books that make up the entirety of the Great Library Of Kings. He is revealed to be affecting the life and perceptions of the daughter of the Head Librarian, as well as being clearly in league with the Shadow of the King Of Books. Manipulating not only the Shadow, but also the Head Librarian and The King Of Books himself, The Villain is shown to be the architect of the evil that has spread throughout each of The Eternal Kings, and is responsible for the devastation of not only Harak-Ur, but that of Kever ages past.

These last works of DaCarda are, to this day, the source of great debate. Never before in any of his plays or fictions had he recycled a character so eagerly, and never before had he bothered with such consistent and persistent themes in his work. A champion of diversity, to see such a constant theme throughout a long series of plays strikes most who study DaCarda as unusual, to say the least. "The Dark," especially, is the source of much debate, as The Villain states clearly that all of his works will need to be repeated in the coming age, and that he will travel hidden with Man and the Small Cousins out of this Land of Kings, out into the Safe Havens, and there - like a spider - he will lay his web once more. His final actions are to call the "writer" of the play out onto the stage, whereupon the two spit upon one another, draw their swords, and begin to grapple as the curtain falls. To many, this shows that DaCarda was grappling with his own guilt over the diatribes and disservice he had done to the Haran and Ulehu for most of his life. To others, it is a metaphor for the very act of writing such historically influenced plays in the first place - the writer must wrestle with the history and truth of the thing in such a way as to make it entertaining, and not merely yet another lesson in history. Still others hold that DaCarda was leaving a clear message about the nature of Humanity and its inherent spiritual battle between good and evil. Whatever his intention, the world may never know.

On his death, DaCarda left behind a legacy of over two dozen children (legitimate... mostly...), none of whom would ever go on to inherit his lands or his fortune. Upon his death, the entirety of his property was given over to the City State of Carth, where he had been born and made his home for the entirety of his hundred and twenty-eight years of life. DaCarda's incredible longevity (he made it over twice the lifespan of most men of his time, and was known for the robustness of his form well into his seventies) has been the source of much debate - there are those who think he was a Black Blood, descended from the Line Of Kings, while others believe that he must have used some manner of alchemical concoction or magic to lengthen his life. His diaries give no indication of either of these courses, however, giving the indication of a man who thanked The Nine every day for his incredible lifespan. Following his death, the monetary portion of his fortune was doled out evenly among the Haran and Ulehu citizens of Carth, with stipulations that half of each purse was to be used to build up their homes and boroughs "to a standard of pride." Interestingly, DaCarda left some two-dozen manuscripts unfinished, each written in its own particular cypher, of which only one key has ever been found. When it was translated, the book was discovered to be a transcription and translation of the latter history of Kever, or at least DaCarda's imagined version of such a history. If it is a factual transcription, the work that DaCarda was using as his source material has never been found.

Rajual DaCarda, born in AY 10, died in AY 138. Fathered twenty-nine children, grandfather to many more. Engineer, artist, poet, swordsman, and renowned speaker. Found justice and equality in his heart before his death, and, ultimately, the driving force behind the continued push toward learning and enlightenment among the people of the known world.

Under Sleeping Suns: Coming Up From The South

When crafting the history and feel of Loris, the world on which Under Sleeping Suns takes place, I promised myself that I would craft it as if I was building the next Star Wars, and not the next Dungeons & Dragons. I wanted a world that gave out enough information to get the players and GM's from Point-A to Point-B, and get them excited about discovering things. I wanted a world that was rich in history and had plenty of things to discover and dig up. I wanted ancient temples buried by the sands of time, legends and myths of times long past, and - much like the real world - I didn't want a lot of people in the game, be they Player Characters or Non, to know about them.

One of the things that has always bothered me about the histories and details of ancient empires in Fantasy RPG's is the infallible depths to which they can be plumbed by the player characters. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy reading about the scrupulous and meticulous details of the many thousands of years of history in, say, The Forgotten Realms, or Middle Earth just as much as the next guy. I like knowing that "The Days Of Thunder" took place approximately thirty-five thousand years before the start of Dale Reckoning. Trust me, I think it's cool, knowing those details. But honestly, as a player and a GM, I don't need to know them. They're the realm of the game creator, something to use when generating the adventures and villains and ultimate perils for the game world. The problem here is that once it's written down in a format for players and GM's to read about, it becomes common knowledge, and once it's common knowledge, someone will bring it up in game by way of a flawless, factual recounting of events.

You can say "It's the GM's job to nip such things in the bud," and you'd be partially right, but it also falls to the game creators and the genre writers to dole out only as much information as the players and GM's could conceivably need to make the game interesting. Instead, by giving the full rundown of such things in the form of complex and intricate timelines in which we learn all the fiddly secrets of Things Gone Before, we not only lose the sense of uncovering the mystery of the ages, we also end up with the question of "how do all these people know all these details about things so long past, when in the real world, most of us can't even remember what happened 20 years ago without a reminder?" Think about it - you're playing a character in a game, and unless your GM lays down the law and says "Your character really can't know that," if you've got the skill and make the roll, typically speaking, you know at least something about the subject. Countless are the times that I've been in a game with such a rich and detailed history, and had another player - whether playing a bookish, learned Wizard or a pretty dimwitted brute of a fighter - bring up that the character they're playing has the History skill, and shouldn't the character know about (random tidbit of really obscure history) with a roll of 19 on the die? And really, such things are completely contrary to the lens of history as viewed from a real-world perspective. Let me explain.

Ever heard of Catal Huyuk? I'm betting that the majority of you haven't. The only reason I know about it is because I took seven years of History and Civilization courses in college. It's widely recognized as one of the first cities, if not the first city, in the world. It existed between 7500 to 5700 BCE, and housed over ten thousand people at its height. It was structured in a manner completely unfamiliar to the other, later, neolithic settlements: it didn't have any special housing for the religious or ruling classes (if indeed there were any), it had no streets as we know them, and citizens would frequently have to travel through their neighbors homes to get in to their own dwelling. And get this: it lasted for nearly two thousand years. The site has been getting dug up in earnest since about 1993, and the archaeologists tearing it up are pulling up more and more knowledge about it every day. And here's the thing: We still don't know everything about it. In a game setting, though, all it would take would be one really good roll, and the PC would get all the interesting data about Catal Huyuk, right down to the knowledge of where to go looking for the Sacred Dingus Of Plot Advancement. Yet, in the real world, we're sitting around scratching our heads, saying to one another "Well, crap, once we get about nine-or-so thousand years back, we really don't have a lot to work with. Time for educated guesses!" It's because of this inexorable fact:

History. Eats. The. Evidence.

Dirt accumulates. Pottery breaks. Organic trash decomposes. Buildings get ruined in earthquakes. Farmers steal stones from sacred circles and use them to make cattle pens. The world is a lived-in place and it is never static and stagnant (unless, you know, magical spells cursing the entirety of the Nation Of Plot-topia to stay at exactly fifteen minutes after sunrise on the day of the Spring Equinox).

And that gets us down to the whole point of this entry.

When I started working on Loris,  something I wanted to provide my players was that sense of a lived-in world, as I've said. I wanted to get away from the idea that the PC's could go adventuring and find an ancient temple complex with all its mysteries and secrets intact, traps waiting for the eager young tomb robber to trip them. I purposely shied away from that, because in the real world, that is not what happens. In the real world, Sayif the brash young thief is told "Do not go to the tomb of the Pharaoh, for if you do, and you take any of the gold therein, you shall be cursed! And DIE!" But Sayif goes anyway, and what does he find? He finds the corpse of another robber, who tripped a fiendishly clever device in the ancient, long-abandoned tomb. Sand and the decay of decades, centuries even, of neglect have worn down the reliefs and battered away the ancient symbols of warning that once decorated the walls of this place. Sayif gingerly picks his way past that corpse, but only after stealing the few pieces of loot the previous man had gathered. Sayif finds more corpses along the way, and more sprung traps, but stops short of trying to break into the actual tomb. After all, his pockets are full of gold already, and he's lived longer than anyone else who's tried. Sayif cuts and runs, and lives to tell a tale of bravely facing the ghosts of all those dead tomb-robbers, and how he saved the gold (and himself) from their wretched clutches.

Does doing this to the player characters remove the adventure from, well, the adventure? When they find an ancient temple with all the traps tripped by previous invaders, or all the hazards having fallen to the degradations of time, does that mean there is nothing for them to do? No, absolutely not. Consider: those rotten and snapped ropes that once held the two-tons of limestone in place - you know, the ones that will crush such foolish invaders as yourselves? Those ropes have, by rotting and snapping, served to drop those same slabs of stone into what would have otherwise been a perfectly passable corridor. The PC's must now find a way to get through that room - or find another, potentially more hazardous - way to their destination. When you accept that, unless there is a secret order of fanatical priests and workers diligently maintaining these things long after the fall of their civilization, time passes and things break, many more adventure seeds can be born than the typical "You travel to the tomb of Khut-Rasis, last of the Golden Pharaohs, and there, you find traps! And mummies!" tropes that we're so used to.

Not that I have anything against mummies.

But back to Catal Huyuk, now, and how it relates to Loris.

The world of Loris has about three and a half thousand years of "known" history. And I say "known" as to relay the idea of "Only about the last three hundred or so years are detailed in any real particularly good manner." These years are known as the Age Of The Nine, and are the time frame that matters most to the player characters - modern history begins here, with all the pressing concerns of the day that will drive the characters. The war against the Kolanthans in the south. The schism rising in the Cualish Free States to the east. The tales of a dragon rising from the ice in the north. The development of cannon and firearms. The fall from grace of magicians and their ways. The Kolanthan Inquisition. All of these things take place within a roughly three-century long span - plenty of time for kings to rise and fall, for traditions to be built or cast aside, and for incredibly bitter cultural hatreds to take hold.

What comes before the Age Of The Nine? Well, everyone who goes to church and school knows that before the Age Of The Nine was the Age Of Kings, and it's from there that the people of the Four Nations fled, running before the Rain Of Glass brought death and fire to Harak-Ur, Land Of Kings. No doubt, every school child knows, as well, that before that came The Journey, when the Good Kings, before they fell to evil, led the people out of Kever after The Sunfall. Before The Sunfall was the Kever Age, when there was but one sun in the sky, not two, and they say the Gods walked among the people, and bread rained from the sky. Man came up out of the South and into Kever, and from Kever moved East and North into Harak-Ur. From Harak-Ur, the people of the world moved West, into Angarn and Cuali and Vetris and Cymrik. This is the path of Man. Everyone knows these things, but only a scholar could tell you that there was a Library - the domain of the King Of Books - in Harak-Ur, that is rumored to still stand even to this day. It would take an even better scholar to tell you that the Library was supposed to have a complete copy of the Library Of Doan, Lord Of Light, that once stood at the heart of the Imperial City of Kever before The Sunfall wiped that glorious empire from the face of the world.

And really, that's all you'll ever get, as a player or GM, until and unless you need it. Why? Because it's not necessary for the enjoyment of the game. In that last paragraph, I've laid out several story seeds that give exactly enough information to start an epic campaign of exploration and discovery. Sure, I, as the creator, know what I want to do with all of those things. I know the full history of the game world, from the moment of its creation, to the reason behind the cyclical nature of all of these empire-destroying cataclysms, to exactly whom the Lord Of The Western Ride is sleeping with this week. But the moment I reveal all of those things - unless it's necessary to do so - the mystery is gone. There's nothing to dig up. There's no real sense of excitement to it, when the GM looks at the fully detailed list of dates and times and names, and knows that his players have probably read the same things he has, so they already know what to expect.

Instead of giving such lists, then, I have purposely kept the full history of Loris vague, indistinct, and maybe even a little contradictory. Where appropriate, details are kept and fleshed out, and made as distinct as they can be. But memory fades with time, and history is lost. Farmers dig up the sacred stones to keep their cows in. Tomb robbers carve out the gold from the stone doors of the tomb of the ancient warrior king, leaving only chiseled echos of the ancient warnings in their place. Time and weather wear away at the stone of the cliff, and break apart the ancient warning mosaic that tells of unholy things buried beneath the ground of the island just off shore. The world should be full of mystery, and that is what I intend to provide when this project is finally complete.

To All Things A Beginning

It's been far too long since I produced works of fiction, or gaming materials, for public consumption. I confess that I have been my own worst critic - defeating myself before I've even begun in most cases. I have been tending to the care and feeding of my Day Job for many years. I've been in a constant struggle with the aftermath of a relationship that nearly killed me. It has been a long, arduous struggle out here in the depths of space. This old atomic-powered rocket that I boarded so long ago has seen better days, but it's still here. And I'm still piloting it.

So, if you'll let me, my old (and new!) friends, I will sit here at this battered communications station and send you information and updates and details on the worlds that I've built in my head. I won't call this a triumphant return to glory. But I will call it a fresh beginning, and a new start. I'll speak to you, out here in the depths of space, and my words will travel the time and distance it takes to reach you, and together, we'll see what's out there.