⭗ REDIRECTIONS: XXXV ⭗

⭗ MIXING LONGWINTER WITH THE ELECTRUM ARCHIVE ⭗

“You can read it in the sands. The people of the desert have heard her whispers for a long time. Mankind has taken too much, and delved too deeply into The Realm Beyond. Great powers are moving beyond the veil of our reality, and when they exert their will, the cataclysm that will follow will rival the breaking open of the Embermount. Ask those who worship The Soul of Glass and they will tell you the same. The ink has been our undoing, and even if the Elders return in our darkest hour, I don’t think it will be enough to save us from what is coming.”

            -High-Seeker Martinus of the Children of the Crimson Moon

⭗ WHAT IS THIS? ⭗

I finally got around to reading through the two zines in The Electrum Archive series by Emiel Boven & Ava Islam and I absolutely fell in love with the world they have created. As you’ve probably guessed, I love these wonderful little settings that fall under the Science Fantasy / Dying Earth subgenres, especially those inspired by sources like Nausicaa, Moebius, Ultraviolet Grasslands, etc.

I also like to mix these things together and write about it. As such, it hit me that there are some really fun ways that Luka Rejec’s Longwinter Setting could mesh with the world of Orn from The Electrum Archive. 

⭗ THE CONCEPT ⭗

The most straightforward way to play Longwinter in the world of Orn is probably to make the Barony of Brezim it’s own area. When players are done with the hot and sandy desert nomad life, they could be venture to the far north and experience a completely new environment to test their survival skills. Winterwhite herself (the main force driving the icy changes of Longwinter) could certainly be seen as a Monarch Spirit coming in from The Realm Beyond and bringing the extreme cold of Longwinter with her. Perhaps her shrine (and her influence) are strongest in Brezim and as she gathers her power and manifests through from The Realm Beyond, she might extend her wrath beyond Brezim and into the rest of Orn, turning the whole world on its head. 

Imagine if Titan Port, in the middle of The Electrum Sea, got its first snow in centuries. Imagine the chaos, the portents, the people desperately clawing for certainty as the temperature drops suddenly. Imagine a frigid wind sweeping down from the sky as wild clouds gather into the shape of a woman’s face and wild cackling can be heard on the wind. Fog banks unlike anything in the recorded history of Titan Port sweep over the plateau, shrouding the streets and providing cover for great white bats and snow worms that hunt the unwary. The Warlocks who peer into The Realm Beyond during this icy night see only chaos when they inhale the Elder Ink, and in the morning, even some of the drunks and beggars who sleep in the streets have frozen solid. The statue of the titan wears icicles like a beard and mothers wail over lost children taken by the frozen dead in the night. 

Some elements may need to be re-skinned (or indeed, the whole campaign of Longwinter could be reskinned to fit with the desert setting of The Electrum Archive) but none of this would be all that difficult. 

Baronials could be the “better off” folk associated with the merchant houses while the Oldsettlers could be the common folk of places like Titan Port. Wolffolk could be replaced with the hardy, feral ink seekers and those who worship the Soul of Glass. The “Old Architects” of Brezim (and their ruins) could easily be reskinned as the people of fallen Maldrazagar who escaped and have unnaturally increased their lifespan with the heavy, questionable use of elder ink. Old Architect ruins could also make great stand ins for Elder ships as well.

Including the Irr could offer its own interesting dynamics in context as well. Personally, I think the easiest way to include them is to use them as an omen of how dire things could become. Perhaps observing that something really crazy is going down, the Irr might withdraw entirely to their Sunless Princedoms to wait out whatever fate awaits the humans on the surface. Whether or not they allow any humans to come with them is up to you. Maybe the rich bribe their way under the surface, or maybe the Irr develop a strict, no-humans policy and seal every way in or out of their domain.

Even Winterwhite herself could be reskinned as The Soul of Glass grown angry, threatening to trigger another cataclysmic eruption even larger than that of the Embermount. Sandworms could take the place of Winterwyrms. Hawks with feathers of void glass could take the place of the white birds that gather when Winterwhite is near. Perhaps her cultists rise up and become wild, clashing with the other factions of Orn as each makes desperate betrayals and allegiances in what certainly would feel like the end-times. It could get really, really messy very quickly.

Maybe as a side note, if you want to run a really, really dire campaign, you could reskin Longwinter as an apocalyptic bone spore outbreak. In this scenario, The Order of Ilsaar has fallen. Spore-riddled sleeper agents of the Mycelium Consciousness have toppled the monastic order and scattered it to the winds. Infected leaders of merchant houses start to make devastating mistakes, hesitating in ways that allow the infected to sweep into Titan Port and other enclaves in and around The Electrum Sea, ushering in a new outbreak on par with the one that ended the Trade Era. By the end of the scenario, and in the most desperate moments left to the people of Orn, bone spores might fall from the sky like snow, covering everything while the heroes make one last push to rally the survivors of The Order of Ilsaar. Will they be able to drive the Mycelium Consciousness back into the Elder Vault and save Orn, or will they perish valiantly while the world is buried under a flurry of fungus?

⭗ WHAT ARE REDIRECTIONS? ⭗

My goal with REDIRECTIONS is to add my own contribution to the Psychedelic / Heavy Metal / Ligne Claire art RPG space.  Much in the way that people inspired by Tolkien’s style helped give birth to the modern genre of High Fantasy, the style of Jean “Moebius” Giraud (and others like him) seems to be spawning a sort of genre of its own right now, and I want to expose more people to the wonders of it. I want to share it. I want to be a part of it. Most of all, I want it to grow.

    REDIRECTIONS is a collection of wondrous places and resources presented in story format (as a game in play, specifically traversing the universe of UVG (Ultraviolet Grasslands) but it is also kept more general for your own RPG characters to visit and explore regardless of the system you use. Each place is unique and wholly original, with a bevy of interesting stories, plot hooks and characters to color your experience. 

    If you like these posts and find them useful, let me know! 

    While the images (not the text) of prior posts in this series have been created in collaboration with AI, I have been working to learn how to draw and so all of the images in this post were ones I drew by hand. I still enjoy collaborating with AI to make pretty pictures, but I also I greatly respect the skill of people who work with pen and pencil and have the skill of hand to make things from scratch. I’m still learning myself.

    This is a series, and each entry is numbered. If you like things like this, please support the true artists whose works are part of the genre, such as the works of Moebius, Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands, Luke Gearing's Acid Death Fantasy and Raw Fury's game SABLE.