The World of Darkness

Jadwiga · Oct 1, 2021

Faction Name: Pandæmonium
Government: Theocratic Anarchism
Capital: Marca-Tre-Spade
Territories: The Underworld (Id, Dis, The Thirteenth, etc)
Population: ~40 million
Goals:

Peaceful cohabitation
Survival
Defense against incursions from the World of Light
Reverence of the Holy Queen

History: The counterpart to the World of Light, the World of Darkness is the Underworld to the former's Overworld. Many of the realms within it are themselves counterparts to those on the other side of the world, bearing some resemblance while going in an opposing direction. These worlds differ in their characteristics, but often feature tremendous vegetation that makes navigating them treacherous, and casts much of the surface in varying degrees of shadow.

Within these individual realms, life is conducted in a chaotic but largely pacifistic manner - hierarchies are eschewed in favor of various means of fluctuating leadership - divination, martial meritocracy, economic competition, free-love communism, etc. This leaves the realms largely fragmented both internally and as a coalition, with governance often only rising to a level of a familial head or trusted village elder.

In the spaces between worlds, various other structures persist - many the detritus of the Protoculture and other societies lost to the void. At the heart of the World of Darkness is one large example known as Marca-Tre-Spade, which has come to serve as a gathering place for regional leaders. Ever looming over it is Castello Soletta, a temple to the goddess of the night - the Holy Queen, Emmerololth.

Name: Lilith
Age: Unknown
Gender: Female
Height: 6'5"
Weight: 200 lbs
Eye Color: Red
Hair Color: Black
Description: The high priestess of the Holy Queen. The most powerful being in the World of Darkness beyond the goddess of the night herself. Lilith is a tall and exceedingly solid figure, built with the muscularity of a beast of burden or living statue. Her presence casts no discernable shadow save the roiling mass perpetually on her back. Horns, blades, and leering eyes jut from the mass of chaos that makes up the latter half of her being. Within her native realm, she wields magic and reality with all the potency of a Pillar, yet she makes no effort to conform the swirling storms of aether to her design. She merely serves as the steward of the Holy Queen's temple, holding court and delivering the will of the Goddess to those who attend there.

Mobile Weapon: Pandora

Castello Soletta
The temple of the Holy Queen. It is from here that her High Priestess hands out interpretations of the faith, mediating disputes and helping inform gatherings of the regional governors of the will of the Goddess of Night. The three-spire structure is an emulation of Cephiro's Etherea Castle, and its looming presence inspired the name of the continent around it - Marca-Tre-Spade, the Mark of the Three Swords.

Dark Knights
Height: ~22 meters
Weight: ~60 tons
The empowered forms of the Warriors of Darkness. Generated from the soulstones they carry and the memories of the Void within, these titanic forms are the black mirror to those of the Warriors of Light. Yet, where the soulstones of the Eorzean Alliance are as static as the Light, these are as volatile and mutable as the roiling dark. As several of these stones have been passed down over time, their individual appearances have begun to vary from their original parameters. At times when the user's spirit is particularly strong, and they infuse a particularly high amount of their essence and ego into the manifestation, the parameters can mutate further in unpredictable ways. The one commonality is their general size, their appearance as a completely armored figure, and their wielding of bladed implements as their primary armament.

Jadwiga · Oct 4, 2021

Subfaction Name: Dis
Government: Matriarchal Communism
Capital: Svijit
Territories: The World of Dis
Population: ~2,000,000
Goals:

Survival
Pacification of competitors

History:
Dis is a world of towering wooden spires - all of them naturally occurring. The trees that grow in this land are so tall that few living souls have actually seen the ground they originate from. It doesn't help that the further down one traverses, the darker and more tangled the bases become, until the passages become a labyrinth of deciduous corridors amongst the trunks and root beds. Waterways wind as freely through the towering trunks as branches and vines, and most of the fauna has long since adapted to either fly or climb from limb to limb.

The dominant species is the Ijudi, a race of tawny, pointy-eared, fleet-footed race who spring from the narrowest branches and swing from the most fragile vines as easily as walking or breathing. To watch their society in motion is to behold feats akin to spider monkeys or seasoned sailors. While they live in vertical cities strange about the canopies, walkways and flets are somewhat sparse and slender. External spaces are given almost entirely to vertical movement via the natural structures. When more substantial conveyance is required, they rely upon simple winged boats to ride the waterways and glide between spires.

Like most of the World of Darkness, their society is decentralized. What organization exists is often based around individual spires, or sections thereof. Individual settlements manage their own affairs. Culturally, the Ijudi tend to resolve disputes with displays of amorousness rather than violence, saving their martial abilities for hunting and fending off predators. This free-love tendency leads to the placing of greater value on their females as lifebringers and nurturers, and thus a deference to maternal and matriarchal wisdom.

Dis tends to be a very gray and brown world, whose passages become more contorted and labored the further down one travels. At the top of its endless expanse of trees are settlements that feature broader landings due to a relative lack of overhanging canopy, while the majority of settlements beneath them are entirely ropes, rigging, vines, and aqueducts outside their internal spaces. Near the bottom chambers become more deciduous, even petrified, and ever more bizarre in composition.

Name: Zelja Zavicaj
Age: 138
Gender: Female
Height: 6'1"
Weight: 140 lbs
Eye Color: Amber
Hair Color: Raven
Description: A wide-roaming, wayfaring Ijudi, Zelja is one of the finest and most accomplished archers in the World of Darkness. Born in her homeworld's largest settlement, Svijit, she rose to prominence in her youth as a hunter and nature guide to the lower realms. Her restlessness for exploration (and aversion to the handsy nature of her fellows) led her to delve ever deeper into the mysteries at the heart of her world, and eventually to discover means of traversing the rift to others. She has since come to spend more time abroad than at home, and become a routine operative for the High Priestess.

Mobile Weapon: Svyatibog

Jadwiga · Oct 4, 2021

Subfaction Name: Id
Government: Tribalism
Capital: Paspeiouk
Territories: The World of Id
Population: ~1,000,000
Goals:

Peaceful communal isolation
Trade (If contact cannot otherwise be avoided)
Subsistence

History:
Id is a wide-open world of solitude and nativism. Its skies rotate between liminal color bands in a cycle analogous to day and night, yet it rarely becomes markedly brighter or darker. Within this twilight realm, the sprawling forests, rivers, and bogs teem with an equally colorful medley of flora and fauna, with fungi forests and wild woods intermingling with grassy clearings and small, sedate villages. More than any other place in the underworld, Id teems with aether and mysticism. Yet it is this eerie quiet, this peculiar verdancy and ease of magic, that also drives so many of its residents into fierce isolationism.

Left to their own devices, the Chawon that inhabit Id are creatures of little natural inhibition - given to passionate emotions and rapid aggression. With the world's natural glut of physical and metaphysical resources, there's little reason to fight over land, and religious beliefs are mostly shared across the realm. That leaves only power and pettiness as drivers of conflict - but when even small conflicts can rapidly escalate into devastation, the inhabitants have learned it's best to keep their social constructs as small or fleeting as possible. To this end, their hierarchies over daily life largely remain at a more easily managed village level. Some regions go so far as to coordinate in larger coalitions, but this form of feudal cooperation tends to be very loosely operated.

Name: Manon Delanoir
Age: Unknown
Gender: Female
Height: 5'7"
Weight: 130 lbs
Eye Color: Indigo
Hair Color: Raven
Description: Quite separate from the indigenous Chawon, Manon is an anomalous woman who has come to call the remote world of Id home. A loremaster and keeper of arcane secrets, she jealously guards her privacy and that of her library, content to oversee her book stacks for eternity with little contact from any other living souls. Her peculiar existence is closer to that of the High Priestess or the Voidsent - an immortal aberration who came into a role that suited her, albeit one far more solitary and peaceful than her fellows. The breadth of her knowledge is second to none in the Underworld, and thus she serves as instructor and mentor to those referred to her - as few indeed can find her on their own.

Mobile Weapon: Epona

Name: Tama
Age: Unknown
Gender: Female
Height: 5'4"
Weight: 110
Eye Color: Violet
Hair Color: Raven
Description: An Ijudi-turned-voidsent who serves as Manon's assistant.

Mobile Weapon: Dantalion

Jadwiga · Oct 5, 2021

Subfaction Name: The Voidsent
Government: None
Capital: None
Territories: The Thirteenth
Population: Unknown
Goals:

Malice
Consumption of aether
Destruction of the Light

History:
There was a time when what is now known as The Thirteenth was a thriving world unto itself. That time is so far in the past, however, that its true name and any remnant of its people or culture are long lost. What survives is less a world than a turbulent sea - a churning, swirling abyss of corrupted creatures and desecrated ruins. Those who dare to travel to it find themselves in a never-ending gale of pure, unfiltered darkness, and if not properly shielded they will be corroded until they succumb to its chaotic nature.

What survives there cannot be called human or human-like. The denizens are malignant beings of instinct over thought, driven to gorge themselves on the forms of aether their world lacks. They fight relentlessly within The Thirteenth, and when released into other worlds, they corrupt and consume with a limitless appetite. Worse, the strongest individuals that can actually achieve (or retain) sentience only have their intellect bolstered as they slake their thirst for aether, making them even more dangerous. Such beings crave the destruction of all that is not like themselves, contorting other life into abominations with a singular glee.

Name: Kai Serin
Age: Unknown
Gender: Female
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 120 lbs
Eye Color: Periwinkle
Hair Color: Raven
Description: One of the last native inhabitants of the Thirteenth to retain her original form - if not her original mind. When the planet fell to its current state, she was one of the few to be rescued by virtue of being spirited away shortly before its demise. She largely came to live on Id under the patronage of the Holy Queen, eventually become a friend of the loremistress hidden there. Her attempts to return home have met with mixed success - while she was able to brave the chaos and keep a semblance of self externally, her internal identity was warped and contorted, turning her into a Voidsent in human guise. She has since become a master of scrying and shadowcraft, one of the foremost stealth and observation mages in the underworld.

Mobile Weapon: Shadowkeeper

Name: Kuro
Age: Unknown
Gender: Female
Height: 6'5"
Weight: 170 lbs
Eye Color: Xanthic
Hair Color: Silver
Description: Little and less is really known about the background of Kuro, aside from she identifies as a DRAGON and is one of the few beings to be able to survive the toxic atmosphere of the Thirteenth unassisted. She has come to use one of the larger surviving ruins as her hideout and personal aery, availing herself of the local population of draconian voidsent and grooming them as her minions. Most of her time away from her nascent kingdom she spends dispatched to Earth or the Overworld as a scout for the Holy Queen or her High Priestess. On such forays, she often wanders off on side jaunts of graft and banditry for her own amusement.

Mobile Weapon: Enryugo (as Yoryugo)

Search

The World of Darkness

Jadwiga

Member

Jadwiga

Member

Jadwiga

Member

Jadwiga

Member