Heya, Ian here again, kicking off the start of a blog mini-series “World Lore Wednesdays” - covering the lore and history of the “Sigil of Dusk” world. Here, we’ll go over the broad strokes of the world, including the broad arc of history, and the main players and events involved in shaping the world into what it is today. We preface this with some talk about how we approached lore building, and some of the motivations behind this approach.

(Skip down to the first heading if you don’t care about the meta-topics and just want to get to the good stuff)

So when starting a new campaign, one of the things I see newer GMs struggle with (myself included back during my first several campaigns) is dealing with the disconnect between what the Player themselves knows about the world, and what a reasonable character in the world might know about that world. Sure, Jim the accountant might not know about the tensions with the western nation of Amaria, stemming from The Mirror-Water Wars back in 253 of the Third Era. But Claxxod the Barbarian likely has friends and family who fought and died in the war, making his unintentionally friendly reaction to Amarian travelers weirdly out of character, and likely to prompt a ret-con .

So this begs the question - how do you handle this problem? Well, some campaigns, I just put the characters in a remote location divorced from the larger world and BS my way through the rest (which… isn’t great, unless you’re working in certain formats). By far the better solution, though, is sitting down with players, introducing them to the world, and giving them context about what kinds of ethnicities, races, cultures, and factions exist in the world around the campaign start. Then, you can talk through what makes sense for the player - which cultures map nicely to what concepts they devised for their upcoming characters, and what implications those choices present for their character.

In How Not to End the World, this process took the form of a gargantuan, 130 page shared doc - hammered out over the course of a few summer months - containing the sum of all knowledge any random citizen in the world might possess or come across about most major topics - gods, nations, history, landmarks, cities, cultures, races, and so on. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend that *length* of doc for most sane campaigns, but I would easily recommend that *process* - having the document available made it easy to get players on the same page and allow them to get comfy cozy with their culture, absent my participation (and, in fact, this might have worked too well, with my players not-unoccasionally presenting me with world lore I wrote but completely forgot about…)

But things get weird when you introduce an audience to the equation. I can share a doc I wrote in my free-time with my players - any mistakes can be clarified over text, and I trust them to overlook my bad jokes and questionable analogies. With viewers, though, things are a bit different - it’s still time-prohibitive to introduce the world through game-play (who’s got the time for that?) but also you all probably don’t want to put up with my constant typos, run-on sentences, and places where I accidentally get distracted and forget to finish what I’m

So, we decided to do a quick series on the history of Unatowa and what’s going on with the world - with this being the first installment! In this series, I hope to go over the world as a whole, its gods (which I hope to make an important part of our campaign’s story!), and finally the different countries and cultures. This will be an abbreviated version of the Campaign Setting and Viewers Guide we’ll be putting out later in 2020 in both print and digital forms (sign up for our email list below or join our discord to be kept in the loop!).

It’s also worth pointing out that, like the Campaign Setting and Viewers Guide, this takes place entirely from the point of view of a Towan commoner - which of course informs the tilt and flavor of some of the stories I’m going to be sharing with you.

Anyways, with that said - lets jump into:

The Word of Unatowa

While we refer to the campaign setting as a whole as “The Sigil of Dusk”, we call the world itself on which most play takes place “Unatowa”. On Unatowa, there exists two main races: Towans, and Ash’kin.

Towans make up the native inhabitants of Unatowa, born from the flames of The Dragon God Ur’Goth during The Dawn Growth in year 0. This consists of the most of the Pathfinder 2E races: Humans, Elves, Gnomes, Dwarves, and Halflings - Goblins are kinda a weird gray area. Beyond those, each race consists of a number of ethnicities depending on the continent or biome they live in. For instance, Elves in Relliven, a forest settlement on the continent of Irretai, look green and have almost leafy skin. Elves in Zet Prok, on the other hand, have pale grey skin (as featured on our resident Zetten Half-Elf, Pyotr) due to their mountainous heritage.

Ash’kin, meanwhile, were born of Achnikor just before The Wild Wars, taking place early in Towan history. These creatures, by and large, seek to take the world for themselves, engaged in eternal conflict with the Towan natives (even if relations had been relatively quiet up until recently).

We’ll go over each of the continents in turn with more in-depth explanations, but in short, we have:

• The nation of Irretai (on the continent of the same name) in the north west, consisting of dark-skinned, duty-bound traders

• The nation of Vezzeq to the south of Irretai, filled with the independent minded Vezzan people - currently ruled by a despot Half Orc after a coup near the beginning of the Era of the Waning Sun (the current era)

• The Continent of Songwind, containing the reclusive, family-oriented trappers of Rav’na, and the more festive and outgoing artisans of Marrôs.

• The nation and continent of Nit-Qu, shared with some Marren settlements to the south, but otherwise occupied by commune-based Qunnen towns largely focused around mining and trading.

• The Desert Country of Dirge, on the continent of the same name - a mysterious culture many view as backwards and exotic due to their blood rituals and disinterest in outsiders

• The mysterious, dangerous continent El’Hom, Land of Monsters - occupied almost exclusively by Ash’kin.

During the Wild Wars, both Ur’Goth and Achnikor raised up armies, as well as champions to their cause, known as Dragon Blessed. These Dragon Blessed received pieces of the dragons’ very essence, turning them into gods in their own right. These gods would come to lead the armies of their respective sides, clashing in grand conflicts all across Unatowa.

The war raged for an era. Generations came into existence, grew old, and died all while the conflict continued to burn all around them. Finally, the two sides clashed in one epic, world-defining battle. The struggle continued for quite some time, and at one point it seemed that the forces of Good would fold, and all would be lost!

Yet, at the very last moment, Ur’Goth themself managed to strike a fatal blow against Achnikor, turning the tide of battle and sending the forces of darkness scattering. In fact, it’s this very moment that marks the close of the Wild Wars, and the beginning of the Era of Unbroken peace.

Yet, it would be some time before this era earned it’s name! For, while the bulk of the Ash’kin forces had been turned away for now, the Dragonblessed Ash’kin still roamed free - and they all knew that their time was drawing to a close. So, in many separate, final, desperate gambits, they began to each try and play their final cards, creating chaos and havoc that would take some time to recover from before they were each finally put down. This brief period in time left scars all across Unatowa, large and small - from the undead city of Necraless in the Boneswamps of Dirge, to the Godscar mountains tearing its way through Songwind.

But, indeed, the world would recover. For following this hectic beginning was an era of peace and prosperity - trade came easy, governments spent time rebuilding and recovering, and many of the Towan Dragonblessed took the time to dedicate themselves peacetime activities.

As time passed, though, the Dragonblessed retired themselves from the mortal plane one by one, content in the work they had done and the peace they had ensured. Now, they exist only in the divine plane - communicating to their followers each in their own way, but still mostly divorced from the physical affairs of Unatowa. Only Ur’Goth remains, the final relic of the Wild Wars, and the sole power sustaining the world.

And indeed, their age has begun to show - for the world has grown dim, the days short, and the winters long. Ash’kin have spotted this weakness, and begun to capitalize on it: Travel no longer feels safe for most commoners, farmers frequently fight off monsters from their farms, and disappearances and raids have become increasingly common. Now, everyone knows the Era of Unbroken Peace has drawn to a final close, with the Era of the Waning Sun taking it’s place.

None know for sure what will happen next. Many whisper about the return of Achnikor to reunite the Ash’kin armies of old. Many others whisper that even before that occurs, Ur’Goth’s flame will finally extinguish, leaving the world in perpetual dark. Others still prophecy a savior of some sort - coming from the beyond to take the mantle of the world from Ur’Goth and reignite the flame of life.

Whatever may happen, one thing’s for sure: These are desperate times, and nothing yet is certain.

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Tune in tomorrow for the start of a series introducing our characters