Tag Archives: Usurper’s Palace

The coldest winds blow across the old ocean. The boats turn towards that widening gyre. The spiralling waters underneath the Palace of the dead buck and roil, as the players in place similarly whirl and dance around one another. Ullaine’s curse, the fascination with Planeswalkers, has a reckless cadre of resistant planeswalkers returning to the plane. The Outlanders have brought their war to the docks. The Vast are rising and coming with them are the greatest and oldest things that hate the designs of Gansukh, and all while a small number of heroes run into the Palace, to try and convince the Usurper that it’s time to go – or else.

The centre cannot hold.

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In a world of adventures and conspiracies, with competing factions of shape-shifting identity thieves, there is always a chance that something can go wrong, that even the best and most elaborate plan can be thrown into disarray. There is no magic you can lay out that’s so reliable it won’t have someone finding a way to pick at it, to undo it, to render all your own planning, your own strategy for nothing.

Sometimes it’s for the subtlest of reasons, the positioning of a Masqued knife in the right dinner meeting that means a careful machination simply fails to happen. Sometimes, a goon from another world can show up, and out of sheer pique, decide to punch you in the face.

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The Usurper’s Palace’s doors hang open. The gates of death are but another place that determined souls and desperate damned can find their own way out. A soul extracted from its husk can struggle over the threshold. The very nature of death, with the Usurper holding the Palace as they do, leads to the sloshing life and the unnatural growth around the world. The Outcasts’ lands have hydras erupting from the ground, as death itself fails to take hold.

It is a world where death struggles to last.

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Do you remember?

Do you remember those ancient stirrings, things in the vast, the great shadows cast along us?

Do you remember what it was like to look at the rolling ocean, and recognise your own smallness? The way that the strongest person you knew was probably still nothing compared to the ferocious power of storms and nature and the horrors of our own fears?

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The Masqued shed their old identities to become anyone; known mostly for masks they wear that distinguish them from normal partygoers on the Palace Boats. The Faceless have masks of wood, bone, and dirt, or create faces that look like animals just because they know it is hard, otherwise, to tell where to look when you talk to them. Some take on forms designed to express an identity that demonstrates their skill, their aesthetic sense. But then there are those, in these same magics, who have their identities shriven from them – people who need magical aid to restore themselves to being a person again, people who somehow are there, but not, manifested to the world but done so without an identity. It is a strange thing to have every name, and stranger still to have none.

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While the Outlands rage at all sides, as the Vast’s people slowly gather themselves to respond to the Ice Palace and the open door of death in the Usurper’s Throne, what are the Palace boats doing? What of the culture of Vampires that scourged a whole mountain range and ruined forests of centuries of growth, how have they prepared for the obvious oncoming war?

They haven’t.

They’ve been busy.

They’ve been busy fighting with one another endlessly about who, exactly, is the most royal member of all these Royal bloodlines.

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The Palace boats like to pretend they’re free from the concerns of lands. They like to imagine that the vampire estates are free and fluid and empowered by dangerous ideologies. They’re not subject to things like the weather and the mountains and the demands of forests and birds. But they’re not the only people in the world, and it seems that for all of their exclusion and demands, for all of their superiority and aloofness, there are always going to be people ready to reach out, and with fire and rage, bring them down to earth.

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Strategies and tactics abound in the many different types of war across the Usurper’s domain. Some are wars, some are politics, some are wars that don’t ever get fought because things are addressed ahead of time. The point is, it’s one thing to establish a powerful offensive, but it’s another, and far more dangerous one, to establish the boundaries of careful hate.

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Whether at the behest of crown or land, there is war afoot. While the dead refuse to stay in their ends, the Palace’s open gates stream with painful memories, old wounds that refuse to close, injuries that have yet to face justice, and the great Palace boats make war on one another as a matter of sport. Weapons, hands, presence and pain, all are being prepared for the great clash that waits to begin anew.

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Few things can create stupid decisions like romance. Across the Palace boats, there are so many conflicting relationships, whether they be romantic or pragmatic or both, and the tempestuous manner in which these relationships are set up, secretly or publically. Of course, there may be some reason why the vampires of these Palaces, eternal and timeless, seem so enraptured by an immediate need to court – but perhaps it’s just the fashion for the time?

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Across Achresis, there are ruins of the great scourge, machines left scattered and broken with the heavy machines of a war made to strip the forests. The refusal of the dead to die seemingly foments ancient mythical spirits that want to punish those that try to live eternally. New forms of life take on famliiar shapes. Wherever you are, it seems, there’s always a reason for everyone to have a Best Friend.

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The territorial oceans of Achresis, known to the groundlings as ‘the Vast’ are dotted about with islands and estates, each one populated with the landbound lords considered too weak, too poor, too unimportant to command one of the vast, splendid Palace Boats. Great, towering constructs, many storeys tall, liners with whole permanent populations of courts, mages and warriors and spymasters alike carrying the great fist of the Crown of Blood to where it can most exult in its excesses or express its displeasures.

They say vampires can’t cross running water, but it’s another thing entirely when the water moves underneath you. The Crown of Blood, a title inherited by the Vampire who has at the moment, gathered the most of the true royal bloodline, speaks of who gets to wield the authority of the people. Coup after coup after coup, bloody and unreasonable, has set the Vampires of the Palace Boats at each other’s throats for generations, while they gorge themselves on lesser bloods and royal jellies for decadence’ sake. The needs of servants are done by Husks, soulless bodies that work off the debts of the living, and the energies of spirits are put to power great magics. Each Palace has its own character, its own tone, its own rebellions.

There are many things to occupy the royals of the Crown of Blood, of course. There’s a great iceberg burst from the sea but five years ago, and immediately captivated a school of vampiric artisans and researchers, who set to making it a beautiful ice palace, where research into the strange ice’s properties and inhabitants could continue apace. There’s the games of chance at the casinos, or the games of statecraft with the Masqued, the unidentifiable spies of the Crown. There are pursuits on land, exploring the scourged barren lands that were once ‘Outland’ territory, with its scattered barbarians and outcast god, where you could be the first to make a unique kind of Vampire. There’s of course, the fad for romancing planeswalkers in the name of reckless love.

And of course.

In the centre of the ocean, over the vast, dark spiral in the water, there stands on mighty columns, there is the six-sided shape of the Palace of the Dead, whose gates have been held open, and through which spirits struggle to fly, and whose largesse has ensured the steady flow of magic, and the denial of death. The Palace boats do not go near the Palace, knowing it is through respect to its King, their bounty is assured.

Everything is good, if it’s good for you.

And nothing at all is going to change that.

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