College of War

As told by Crazy Rat of Wmawa tribe.

This was told by the fish

and the ravens

to me when walking

along the shores.

Every animal knows how it will end

how man will forget and let things fall.

How man will forget to heed their advise.

It will start when the seas form a wall that can’t be crossed.

Separating us from the other people.

After that we will live in peace from the others

but only for a while.

As they come on ships no wall can hinder.

There will be death.

And these ships will bring people who have forgotten

to listen. To heed the warnings.

These ships will bring the end to our lands.

They will come to the most holy sites.

They will use them for their pleasures.

And when they’re done, they’ll bury them.

Like the squirrel buries the acorns.

And we will all be buried with them.

And forgotten. Like we were before.

And the walls of the waves will stay up.

And no-one will know our fate.

Oops, a bit late today.

In the College of War and surrounding areas, there are few “ethnic” groups that are quite easily recognizable:

Frontiersmen

While the actual person from the Frontier might vary a lot, life there changes you. Characteristics that describe a person who has lived most of his life face to face with the Wilderness have the tendency to be introverted and inventive. Politics matter very little to them and they keep their views on religion to themselves, and hope others do the same. They do not engage in small-talk, in fact, they seem to find talking distasteful if they can’t bring any new insight to the conversation. When a person returns from the Frontier, he is always greeted almost as a hero returning from war - his stories give everyone new insight and his work in fighting the wilderness is respected.

Colonists

The original Colonies of the area are Imperan, and thus quite many of the people belong to that ancestry. When speaking of Colonists, people refer to those that haven’t been born on the new continent, but have moved there from abroad. At the moment the colonists can be divided into two distinct factions - the Imperans and the Fieon. Fieon people have only really been around for some 10 years, oldest Imperans classified as colonists are over 60 years old. The colonists are a varied bunch, but the usual opinion is that they are loyal to the mainland and try to promote that agenda in the New World

Aboriginals

The original people of the New World were primitive savages with next to no idea what magic was before the first settlers arrived. They are a simple folk that live off the land, mainly hunter-gatherers. Some of their tribes have decided to embrace the civilization from the Old World and have made it their agenda to teach their children to speak Imperan or Fieon. Some of them are known to be able to write as well. These “noble savages” act as negotiators between the two people and are often respected by both sides. (note: the previous might contain a biased view)

Natives

People with ancestry in the Old World, but who have been born in the new one are quite different from the others. They, thanks to the laws of land-distribution, believe in virtues like equality. Everyone should be treated the same no matter what their family may have been before. Here everyone is born under the same status. For some reason, the natives seem to be much more social than the settlers, but yet retain the honesty that is associated with those who went to conquer the frontier.

In addition to these birthplace and genetics-related distinctions, religions play a huge role in the area. The three most common ones are:

The Orthodox Church

The old-fashioned church, much rampant in Fieon. Maybe rampant is a bit too mild a word - the Orthodox Church pretty much equals the Fieon state these days. The church doctrine is strict about what is allowed and what is sin. They have had little to no influence in the Imperan area of the New World before the seizure of power that happened, but after that it has been more than reasonably aggressive in rooting the “heretical” element from society.

The Reformist Imperian Doctrine

Or Reformists. The church of Impera separated from the mother church ages ago, and thanks to the highly scientific and elemental-centric view on life of the ruling class, formed into a more pragmatist version of what the Orthodox were even back then (the Orthodox have become even more bound in their black-and-white view of things in the past few hundred years). The Reformists, not surprisingly, form the bulk of the people of the Imperan settlements.

The Church of Purifying Light

When the news of a brand new continent broke, many of those who felt oppressed in their homelands left for the new shores. The Church of Purifying Light, or Puritans for short, were amongst the most numerable. Believing that there is no darkness at all, they embrace the magics most people consider Dark and revel in those. There are few villages of these Puritans scattered in the wilderness, and the Orthodox church is finding their presence in the lands they now claim to own unbearable.

For ages we thought that the world was the lands we knew, but the journeys of Anardian and Imperal explorers across the Great Chasm yielded results that literally changed the face of the world. On the edge of the world, there is a whole new world. Everyone with ships and magicians set sails West, for the New World, Tera Neuve.

The Eastern Continent, Old World

The Old World is divided between three distinctive areas - in the North, beyond a near-impenetrable mountain range lies the Imperan plains - the heart of the Impera empire. Isolated from the rest of the world, the Imperans have always been forced to rely on their navy and trade through sea routes for foreign relations.

The Middlelands is the large continental area south of the Northen Peaks - habitable land-mass big enough for three Impera-sized countries: Fieon, Gerenia and Anardi. Of the three, only Fieon has had an easy access to the Ocean - Gerenia’s harbors are near the Northern Peaks and hard to reach by land from the main part of the country and Anardi’s connection to the Ocean is through the Southern Sea, around the Hisperan Peninsula.

South of the Middlelands is an area called Hisperan Peninsula that consists of the long and narrow peninsula (containing the country Hispera) and the surrounding Andegal islands. The Hisperan peninsula is sealed from the Ocean by a high mountain range, but they have huge harbors to the Southern Sea area in the east and south.

From this viewpoint, it is quite obvious why Fieon and Impera are the two leading nations to the expansion to the west. Anardi on the other hand requires a much longer explanation that stems from the political alliances it has made with Hispera and Andegal over the years.

The Great Chasm

When you sail far enough west from the Eastern continent, you realize why people for the longest time thought that it was the edge of the world - the water’s surface starts to literally bend “downhill”, with strange phenomenon as waterspout-like waves appearing from nowhere. You are attacked by elemental forces that are beyond any ship’s capability to survive. At least without a proper magician specialized in sea travel aboard to keep them at bay.

The first ship known to survive the Great Chasm was actually a Gerenian military vessel, who wanted to test their mages’ new shielding spells in extreme conditions. Followed by the news that the Chasm (known as “The Edge” back then) could be crossed, all the sea-faring nations sent out expeditions, and it is quite impossible to say who actually “found” the New World first.

New World, The Western Continent

The new continent discovered hasn’t been explored fully yet, but it seems to be a land-mass at least the size of the Middlelands, perhaps even larger. There were people living there before the explorers arrived, but these are primitive folk, with no idea how to use magic and who live on the strange animals found there. From the explorers’ and later the colonists’ point of view, it’s quite easy to divide the New world to two parts - the forested north and the arid south. The coastal area is habitable, but the conditions get harsher as soon as you start moving inlands. In the north, the wilderness might bear more fruit, but the winters are so cold you can actually freeze to death if you travel too far in the cold. In the south, the summer’s heat will cook you alive if you don’t find a shade.

Between the extreme areas rises yet another mountain range, making things inhospitable. Some returning explorers from further west tell tales of lands that could be hospitable to human life again, but no-one has yet sent a larger expedition beyond the Deadlands (as the inhospitable cold and hot areas are commonly called).

The land-areas that will be given less focus

Beyond these two, there are two larger land-masses that need to be mentioned, but which won’t be playing such a vital role in the campaign starting just now.

To the south of Old World is another land-mass, fully occupied by the Elves. They try to avoid contact as much as possible, and thanks to their aptitude with magics, the southern continent has become known as “Nightmare Lands” to the Old Worlders.

East from Anardi, connected via an isthmus is a land filled with strange cultures and exotic people. These people try to avoid contact with the Old Worlders almost as much as the Elves do, and are usually referred to as “East”. It’s known that Anardi trade with them quite actively.

The explorers landed on the shores of Tera Neuve a lifetime ago. Cut through the impenetrable forests and survived the colder-than-ice winters to make room for their families. They carved a niche for themselves in a place where they weren’t wanted. In their footsteps came the traders and the learned, who wanted to rob the new world of its riches both physical and spiritual. They even formed an university as a place of learning about the new land.

Years passed and the good people of Impera prospered on their new shores, pretty much unaffected by the turmoil that had been rising in the Old World. But you can’t stay hidden forever from what’s happening around you, and when Impera waged war with its neighbors and lost, the price was the small colony in Tera Neuve.

Some people protested, some moved back to the mainland Impera, quite many stayed, realizing that it didn’t mean that much who was the legal emperor of a place he had never visited anyways and couldn’t probably even spell the name right. And then there were some who realized that the role of the colony would be something greater in the future, people who saw the need to turn the colony into a self-sufficient area.

These people began to act. A major change happened in the silence of the great forests. The university of the inland town of Cairnswind was renamed College of War and began training people in the art of combat - both magical and mundane. The colony was building an army.

It’s a time of free will and exercising that freedom.

The first Roleplaying game campaign called “College of War” was ran nearly a decade ago. It wasn’t really groundbreaking on a global scale, but the focus was from the beginning on the people which was pretty new a thing for our gaming group. The tone was humorous to the point of slapstick and it featured characters that were borderline silly. Drawing inspiration from Anime and GURPS Illuminati University, the campaign provided relief to the grey reality. The game, in all absurdity, was a delightful backdrop and opportunity to get together and mix real-life issues with a world of magic, pirates, dragons, princesses and other generic fantasy clichés.

The first College of War was really about relaxing and making fun of the university life that was, one way or the other, surrounding all of us at that point. The campaign was one of the longest ones we had played at that point. Because of its longlivety, some scenes from the campaign have become stamped in the core consciousness of the group.

The big finish of the first campaign included the destruction of five global parasites or dragons, or gods, that had been “corrupting the reality” and were responsible for how magic worked in the game. The campaign ended with the Player Characters traveling to the “other place” where these parasites had come from and destroying them at the source.

The second incarnation was a direct continuation of the first. The Player Characters from the first CoW managed to return to their own reality, where magic was broken. The game’s atmosphere was heavily influenced by fantasy/scifi crossovers and the feeling in the game was highly darker than before. Some of the characters were present from the first campaign, even if there had been a 12,000 year break between the first and second campaign. A fact that needs to be noted - Immortality isn’t only possible, it is almost common. It is a world of high magics that can prolong life to a point where the limits don’t excist.

The second campaign focused on returning the magic to the world - the few survivors from the first campaign were the only ones who could do it, and even they had problems. This, in a way, led the campaign to a darker tone. There weren’t any instant jury-rigs available for problems. The solutions were much grittier and the themes weren’t as clear-cut as before. But even with all this weight, the inertial silliness from the player characters themselves was something that kept popping up here and now.

Enter the third campaign - La Vache. Originally the players knew the game was College of War by name only - it lacked the characters, the silliness and pretty much anything from the first two. It was more or less a “realistic” fantasy world (oxymorons rock) with huge emphasis on family and religion and personal matters. The original feel was gone, as was much of the world - this was something that turned the game into a journey of discovery. The game, no longer so burdened by the history, became outsider-friendlier and two new players joined the main cast, and two others played on the fringes.

Again, the campaign focused on changing the world, and during the third campaign, the idea rose to publish things about the setting on the web. And so, here we are. The road to to the fourth campaign begins where the third ended - a corrupted world has finally perhaps turned back into the original state. There are two moons and two suns. No extra-planar parasites to worry about.

Where to next?