The setting for Weardcynn is implied within the main rules text. That doesn't mean there isn't a more coherent setting present. I am building this new earth in the image of William Blake's already fallen/always falling Albion with his Zoas and Emanations. In this telling, the fourfold giant that comes to know itself as Albion stirs from within a great deep, void, or unknowing. This is perhaps akin to a Big Bang moment, from which all things proceed, representing the division of all things from the singularity that birthed them.

Physics likewise infuses other aspects of this process. For each action, as we know, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and this remains so even in the stirring of Albion from the deep. Albion is the action that spawns the immediate reaction, and his equal and opposite, or his reflection or emanation, is known as Jerusalem. Here Blake is appropriating and reshaping Biblical concepts into something else, and I am preserving as much as makes sense for what I'm doing.

Now, the awakening of Albion and the casting of his reflection as Jerusalem represents the first Fall, because it results in immediate division of what was previously a unity. But Albion is not finished falling. In fact, he will continue to fragment into countless pieces, and some of those pieces claim dominion over the others or, in some cases, claim to have created them. The eight chief fragments of Albion are the four Zoas and their respective Emanations.

This continual falling or fragmentation is the ongoing Fall that is at the heart of what I call the Schismata (which is also the name for the set of mechanics that underlie this system). This is my own embellishment and has nothing directly to do with Blake. It represents the idea that everything is already fallen and always falling further from unity, and will continue to do so until the harvest after the Final Judgment reunites all of the fallen.

If this feels like a heady and abstract mythology (godlar), I agree. It is, however, the basis for what the Weardcynn believe about their own origins. In their godlar, the primary of which they call the Albiones Hweol (Albion Cycle), the Weardcynn believe that mankind (Manncynn) were the creation of the Zoa named Tharmas, and that they had been seduced away from (disunited) by the Zoa named Urizen. This culminated in the spoliation of the natural world, that aspect of Creation they inhabited, primarily through overuse and exploitation. In response, the Emanation named Vala beseeched her Zoa brethren to entrap Urizen and destroy his hold on the Manncynn. It was Luvah's fire and Urthona's hand that created the trap. Vala caused the earth to birth its own new champions, the Weardcynn, to hem in the Manncynn and watch over them until they could learn to aspire toward unity once more.

There is of course more than this, and I will work through how this looks in a concrete sense as I continue development and lay out the mechanical implications. For these, I will make use of Ed Buryn's William Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination. In the same vein as Invisible Sun (which has had a profound influence on the mechanics of this game), player characters will be able to use aspects of these tarot cards as mechanical touchpoints, not always to their benefit. The precise nature of these effects, however, are still percolating in my head. At the very least, I will have a spread of cards that makes sense for this game and use the positions of the cards to interpret how they influence the world at the moment they are laid out. Whether this can be done without vastly overcomplicating the system is still unclear.

I will undoubtedly return to this topic from time to time as I think about new lore and mythology pieces to slot in, but in no sense do I expect that players and GMs use the result of this work if they aren't interested. It is and will be a supplement to enrich their understanding of the implied setting.

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In mid-2016, I and one other D&D player formed a group whose membership fluctuated in the intervening years, though I'm happy to say that at least the two of us have remained constant fixtures and maintain our group even today. We started with a campaign of indeterminate length, with the promise that I would take up the second campaign at some future date. That date turned out to be much closer than I anticipated, and from November 2016 to January 2017, I furiously scribbled out a 47 page campaign setting for a world based on a handful of ideas and expanded on with a handful more. That world became Yer Shar, and it served as the setting for an epic campaign lasting nearly 3 years.

In its infancy as an idea, I started thinking about Yer Shar as one of four worlds, built on familiar elemental tropes. The structure of the world was inspired by one of the quests in the Neverwinter Nights computer game, as well as Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle. When I started thinking about it somewhere around 2008, my life was in flux, and the idea languished, starved of attention. Tellingly, I can't even find early drafts of what I wrote for it, though I'm sure I have a map somewhere.

I didn't start making connections again to the early material until late 2016. I was certain I wanted to do a sundered earth concept, and I pounded out 10 pages of draft material attempting to explain this cosmology. That original world was called Kalatoth (a suitably fantastic name, I guess), and it was almost a direct clone of the world of the Death Gate Cycle, with each of the spheres interconnected as a vast machine. But that's as far as I got with that line.

Eventually, what I settled on was this: Yer Shar is a simulated world predicated entirely on the exclusion of dragons, who in times before Yer Shar's creation were the literal oligarchs who consumed the world. Yer Shar was created as a bubble of safety against the dragons, who nevertheless sought entry by any means. This structure leaves plenty of open questions, but I sought to cover as many bases as possible with veiled literary and historical sources.

1. For the concept of the oligarchic dragons, and to make them truly monstrous, I relied on Elizabeth Sandifer's (Neoreaction A Basilisk) quotation of Nick Land (The Dark Enlightenment), who asserted that in the “approaching bionic horizon”, human mutation would give way to the truly monstrous. His go-to example was “face tentacles” (a nod to Lovecraft). But I posited that an aggressive miscegenation policy would seek to elevate the children of the most privileged so far beyond humanity as to make them unrecognizable. Dragons, then, were the oligarchs of the old world, going all-in on the monstrous as a means of preserving their bloodlines. In order to achieve and sustain their massive forms, they had to literally consume other people. In other words, the oligarchs would seek to make manifest the attitudes levied against them: if society calls them monsters, then they would be monsters.
2. Jean Baudrillard and Nick Bostrom provided the simulation basis for the world, especially taken as literally as possible. Everything from gods to magic became possible by harnessing simulated subsystems, often through collective belief. This was reinforced by a reliance on hypersigils (Grant Morrison, et al), whereby feedback loops between fiction and fact alter perceptible reality. In the case of Yer Shar, the largest such hypersigil is a multigenerational migration of people, ritually bolstering a now legendary defense against a half-remembered evil.
3. Simulation theory gives way easily to China Miéville’s literary definition of Jacques Derrida’s hauntology as “time out of joint, a present stained with the traces of the ghostly”, the undead past which refuses to die, or the unrealized/unrealizable future. In such a combination, nothing is lost, per se, even when time and life move on. This provides fertile ground for numerous forms of necromancy, but also facilitates other kinds of horrendous crimes perpetrated by absolute villains, as well as creative means of forgetting and being forgotten, truly and finally.
4. Another major strain of thought ran through a conflation of John Gray (The Silence of Animals, Straw Dogs, and others) with the cosmic horror of Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy against the Human Race). People who hewed to the conflated philosophy that resulted railed against the suffering of consciousness and promised an escape for those who were willing. Their methods included a form of astral travel facilitated by a plant known as Anti-Climacus, which was in fact Søren Kierkegaard's pen name for The Sickness Unto Death.
5. And finally, the original McGuffin of the world was a substance I called “albareum”, the concentrated essence of living things that facilitated large scale necromancy and which was found in abundance within dragon bones. Albareum is a Google Translation of “rosebud”, which was drawn from the film Citizen Kane.

The remaining development happened over the course of the campaign. I drew from as many historical sources as possible, trying to build regions that were coherent in both linguistic and cultural inspirations, though I took plenty of liberties along the way.

I have new ideas for Yer Shar and will likely continue working on it in different eras and more localized regions. It started as a generic fantasy world, but it continues to evolve.

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