Under Sleeping Suns: The Wind Began To Howl

I've spoken previously (here, here, and here) about the Cosmological makeup of Loris, and have gone on a few talks about the interaction between The Waking World, The Veil, and The White – It's safe to say that by now there's a good sense that The Waking World and the "higher" strands of The Knot have their junctures and their chasms: there are places in the world where The Knot is stronger, and places where it is weaker. In these places, the spirits of The Veil are able to cross back and forth between their home and the world of mortals. The Veil stands as a deliberate barrier between the world of Man and the world of other things.

Stop and consider for a moment, if you will. If the historians and scholars are correct, then The Gods Of Light And Darkness set The Knot in place, stripping each strand out from a far more chaotic and unified reality, and basically completely rewrote what was an entire universal order. That takes a lot of power, and a lot of effort, and it raises a lot of questions. How did the Gods – who, let's remember, set up The White as their own domain, from which they should never be able to reach The Waking World – exist not only in The White, but also have physical forms upon The Waking World with which to eventually wage the war that led to The Sunfall?

One obvious answer is that the legends are mere parables and that the Gods didn't actually come down from on high to wage a war. But there are just as many points of interest and evidence to show that exactly that happened: The Gods Of Light And Darkness existed in flesh-and-blood form upon the face of Loris, and interacted with their worshipers daily. Some scholars will point out that as the Gods Of Light And Darkness set The Knot in place, that surely they must have known some way of traversing the barrier of The Veil to get from The White to The Waking World. Surely, as The Knot was their creation, they knew the secret methods to get around their own restrictions. In other words: the Gods most likely cheated.

This line of thought, of course, brings up another set of questions and concerns, namely: what about all those dark, unspeakable things they cast down into The Lower Dark, and the nightmare creatures that inhabit The Howling? If the Gods could circumvent The Veil and come and interact on the surface of Loris, what about the unknown darkness lurking in the other two strands of The Knot? If, today in the Age Of The Nine, the songs of The Nine can reach out through The Veil and reach the hearts and minds of mortals, who is to say that the songs of evil creatures, from deep within The Lower Dark, cannot pierce The Howling and do the same?

It's this sort of thinking that keeps young philosophers and priests awake at night, let me tell you.

Along with a contingent of reassuring, parental-voiced elder priests, I would like to be able to say "Oh, don't worry about that, The Knot is secure, and the denizens of The Howling can only affect you through your dreams, or in indirect, archaic ways or only at certain points of ancient power." But, well, that would be a lie.

Just as there are places and conditions in which The Veil touches and intersects with The Waking World, and just as the sixth layer (the "spirit path") binds the five strands of The Knot together, there are inevitably going to be more than a few times and places that creatures from The Howling make their way into the world of Man. The creatures of nightmare have their special paths and doorways into the world of terrified children and the valiant parents who protect them (or die trying, sometimes all too literally).

When I set out to craft the world of Loris into a campaign setting, one of the things that I decided, very early on, was that I didn't want a game world in which the adventurers got their jollies (and large portions of experience points) by beating up short, ugly people with bad teeth and inexplicable treasure hoards. The primary conflict in Loris is between the hearts and minds of other people, people who (with one or two exceptions) look like everyone else. Basically, I didn't want a "monster-fueled economy," I wanted a world in which you couldn't tell if someone was evil just by looking at them and saying "That's an Orc, it's guarding a chest, kill it!" For one thing, that chest might have been a family heirloom, and for another thing, you and your buddies are the invaders in this frontier fort, bucko. Well, you get the picture.

As Loris is a world that runs in cycles (or at least, appears to be), and one of the primary points of each cycle is a war in which one half of the world goes for the jugular of the other half, I wanted to have the "monster" population be different from the normative tropes you'd find in just about any other Fantasy RPG. Shakespeare's "The Tempest," along with the cinematic homage "Forbidden Planet," are two of the primary sources of inspiration for the way that things work in Loris. Specifically, the concept that Man is his own worst enemy, and the dark fiends of his own psyche are the ones that do the most harm. With this in mind, I decided that the "monsters" in Loris would tend to take the form of other people: most often the Kolanthans, but frequently people in normal society that just happen to be terrible, foul-hearted jerks. This is why there are no ancient forests full of Elves, no mountain halls where the Dwarves keep their own council, no happy vales with their comfortable Halfling homes. No, Man rules Loris, and Man is the elder race on her surface. The Haran and Ulehu are ubiquitous, but go largely unnoticed (on a good day) by most of Humanity. They've been slaves, targets of violence, and the recipients of overt apologies from more than one King. From the perspective of the Haran and Ulehu, Mankind is probably the meanest, nastiest monster on the face of the planet.

With that knowledge, then, comes the additional knowledge that there are things out there, in the dark, that would happily slip into your skin while you slept, hollowing you out and eating your memories, only to get up in the morning and pretend to be a loving father to your now widowed and orphaned family. Just as there are kindly, caring, benevolent spirits that cross over from The Veil in the form of ghostly animal guides, luck-spirits, Brownies, and the like, there are also cruel, vindictive, malevolent entities that would just as soon feast on the fear and terror they can cultivate from you and those around you. The denizens of The Howling are the bringers of nightmares, fomenting unease, discord, and wickedness wherever they can. The darker they can make the world, the more they feast, the stronger they become.

And that's part of the key to the way things work in Loris, really: The Nine will point out that not even Magicians can truly make something from nothing – Magicians tap into cosmic energies and shape them, just as priests draw from the energies of their own faith and the faith of their flocks to bring about miracles. The spirits of The Veil and The Howling create neither good nor evil within the hearts of Man: they can only augment and feed what is already there. Where there is good, the good spirits and powers blossom. The opposite is also true: where there is evil, the darkness grows and feeds the dark spirits, empowering and emboldening them. It gives them form, and purpose. It leads to the rise of men who shed their skin under the light of the three moons, becoming wolves that terrorize the villages of the hills. It brings about the skulking, skittering footfalls of swarms of insects that rise up from the underbrush of the darkened forest and scream with the voices of a million wrongfully executed men. It unleashes The Starving Man upon the bedrooms of naughty children, where he will leave the youngster dead by morning, belly eaten clean through to the mattress.

It is for this reason that the Houses Of The Nine do their best to instill strong senses of morality and decency upon their flocks. They cannot forcibly curb the dark urges of Man, but they can instill a sense of community and harmony within their supplicants. They can remind them that the strength of the good in the world is only as strong a frightened child's resolve. The emotions, actions, and will of the people of Loris, then, actually shapes what happens in the world around them. Where there is goodness in the hearts of the people, the world prospers and light shines. Where there is darkness, so there is the growth of evil. And just as with the "soft spots" in The Knot where the creatures of The Veil can sometimes cross, so too there are those places – wicked trees gnarled like grasping claws, or swamps and mires seemingly intent on letting no man through their depths unscathed, or caverns that breathe like a living thing – where The Howling and its terrors become all too real.

With all of this said, it should be evident that these incursions by creatures from The Howling are just as rare as those of their counterparts from The Veil. The influence that those dark things have on Man is usually quite small: more often than not, the cruel landowner who beats his servants does so because he's a terrible person, not because he has been possessed by an evil spirit. As said before: Man is probably the meanest, nastiest monster on the face of the planet.