Planète Rôliste: Le jeu de rôle par forum
Parties de MJ Eretas => [PFRPG] Le règne de l'Hiver => Discussion démarrée par: Eretas le septembre 03, 2021, 01:14:53
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Pour vous vous aider à comprendre la planète, voici un texte de référence en anglais. Si c'est un problème, faites le moi savoir.
Seasons
Traixus’s seasons are caused by its eccentric orbit, yet that orbit itself is mysterious and perhaps magical in nature, with the planet seeming to move in slow motion compared to its brethren. Both winter and summer on Triaxus seem reluctant to relinquish their reigns, occupying most of the planet’s long “year,” while spring and fall rush past in a generation.In summer, Triaxus is a sweltering paradise of fertile fields, dangerous jungles, misty mountains, and warm seas. Food is plentiful, and many cultures abandon traditional farms and cities for long walkabouts and nomadic periods, or else expand their cultivated territories in great leaps and bounds. At the first signs of autumn, however—often given names like the Portent, the Chilling, or the Falling—wise societies begin to make arrangements for the planet’s rapid cooling and ecological shifts. Glaciers spring up almost overnight as winter arrives in earnest. The seas, already gentle and languid because of the planet’s lack of a moon, freeze over at the edges, and many ports are forced to either close their harbors or uproot and move their structures miles out onto the treacherous ice. Some islands find themselves suddenly connected to the mainland or each other via ice bridges, allowing people and animals to trade or migrate between them. Farming anything but those plants and animals adapted to the cold becomes folly as the ground freezes or is buried in snow, and many societies shift to hunting and gathering models. Thus, it’s with great relief that most Winterborn residents welcome the eventual Thaw or Time of Floods, as spring is often known. Yet even this welcome warming of the planet is not without its dangers. As the seas warm up and the glaciers melt, the entire planet is plagued by floods and monsoons that are every bit asdestructive as the bitter—but stable—cold. New predators forgotten for generations awaken, and skills developed to survive in the winter become obsolete as the traditions of summer living are dusted off.
Triaxian settlements change with the seasons. During the winter, cities are often squat and fortified against the beasts that prowl the blizzards, filled with hard people who protect what little they have with deadly efficiency.
Some retreat into caves and caverns, and others craft the ice itself into great structures. Those without cities often travel in sleds pulled by domesticated beasts, dwelling in interconnected igloos or animal-skin huts. In summer, however, the stone cores of winter cities tend to be surrounded by sprawling masses of breezy, thin-walled wooden structures housing the booming population. While many winter cities have tunnels and hallways connecting important buildings, some of the greatest cities are built for both seasons, with the walls of these insulated hallways being taken down in the hot summers to reveal shaded lattice walkways.
At the time of this adventure, Triaxus is still in the grip of winter, though rumors whisper that the weathermages and meteorological prophets have seen signs of the coming Thaw, and that the first of the Transitional Triaxians have been born—though how soon the shift might begin in earnest is anybody’s guess.
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Ecology
Triaxus’s unique environment has given rise to two distinct ecosystems. While the physiology of a few creatures, including the Triaxians, shifts and adapts to the changing environment, most plants and animals are ascendant during only one season, going dormant or dying back to a tiny minimum population during the other. Such survival methods vary wildly. Some organisms bury eggs or seeds deep in the soil that are programmed not to hatch or sprout until the favorable season has returned, while sufficiently long-lived creatures might hide and hibernate. Some winter-adapted creatures like the fire-horned acelope retreat to snowy mountaintops and polar regions during the summer, while the last of the sun-loving karbalands mate and then worm their way into stony niches to die, leaving their gestating young to gnaw their way out of the corpses over the course of decades.
At the moment, the grassy prairies and deep jungles of summer are only a distant memory on Triaxus, as are its summer residents—the great silver hunting cats, leech-bats, stilt-runners, porabees, echo moles, and so on. In their place are the hard-edged predators of winter—giant furred insects whose chittering mandibles can tear a person in half, terrifying frost worms, and the snowbirds whose beaks can punch through plate armor. Some land-based herbivores manage to subsist on the snowmoss, pale fungi, and hardy icefruit trees that grow along the glaciers and frost-choked fields and taiga, yet in the winter the great lakes and seas are a far better source of food, as aquatic life proceeds with only minimal changes beneath the bergs and ice sheets. Those Winterborn Triaxians who don’t rely on ice-fishing, whaling, sharking, and other coastal pursuits often raise herd animals like the stringy, goatlike shabals for their blood and milk, working hard to protect them from the moonflowers, stormghosts, ice-shelled gammenores, and psychically gabbling moyeyes who would happily take such easy prey. Icy forests make up a large part of the winter landscape, and Triaxus’s trees have various ways of coping with the extreme winters. Some, such as the great conifers, simply shrug it off and change hardly at all. Others lose their leaves and go dormant, sometimes actively expanding their capillaries and allowing their sap to freeze solid, turning themselves into frozen sculptures that thaw in the summer. Those that don’t run the risk of exploding as their sap freezes inside the wood—the smooth-boled burst tree actually does so intentionally, filling every branch with sap as the temperature cools and using the resulting explosions to spread its seeds, and turning its groves into shrapnel-filled deathtraps. Still other trees have even stranger variations, such as long-rooted dapoya, which lifts itself above snows and f loods like a mangrove, and the gora, whose thin
summer trunk is wrapped in great scales of flexible fibrous bark, used by locals for everything from making twine and baskets to shingling houses and crafting armor.
One of the most common domesticated animals in the Skyfire Mandate and other portions of the northern continents is the wolliped. This creature is shaped somewhat like an eight-legged alpaca with two large, downward-curving tusks. Its copious fur keeps it warm in the winter and sheds to a length of just a few inches in the summer, with the discarded wool either felted or spun and woven to make most of the cloth in the region. In addition to its utility in textile production, the docile wolliped is also used as both beast of burden and steed, with ground-based cavalry often riding armored wollipeds into battle. Though wolliped tusks are normally used to break through ice or churn tough ground, the creatures also employ them for self-defense and mating displays—a battle-trained wolliped can inflict horrific damage on the battlefield.
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The Drakelands
No one knows exactly how or when the first dragons appeared on Triaxus, but legends suggest that in the beginning, there were only the somewhat humanoid dragonkin and the bestial drakes. For untold millennia, they lived alongside the Triaxians and other races with no more or less aggression than might be expected.
Then came the true dragons. Whether these were visitors from another world or plane or a natural evolution of dragonkin into something more powerful, the newcomers immediately took up rule over their lesser cousins. From their appearance in the heart of the continent now known as the Drakelands, the true dragons warred with each other, established nations, mustered armies—and began to spread.
Thus began the War of Heroes. For generations, the humanoid races of Triaxus not already enslaved by the draconic conquerors banded together to halt the spreading destruction. Joining them in this fight were those dragonkin who resented enslavement and subjugation, as well as the good-natured metallic dragons who sought to oppose their conquest-minded brethren. It was this first great alliance that eventually halted the dragons’ advance, ceding them a single continent for their territorial disputes and establishing the Skyfire Mandate to guard against further growth.
Today, the Drakelands are a squabbling, chaotic mess of independent fiefdoms. These territories range from true nations complete with functional governments, metropolitan cities, and high quality of life for their subjects, to simple slave camps and villages paying terrified tribute to an overlord. Yet at the head of each state is a true dragon who sees the nation as his or her territory, and its governmental coffers as a shining hoard.
Life in the Drakelands flows according to a strict caste system. At the top are the “true” dragons, chromatic (and occasionally metallic) nobility with total authority over everything save each other. Below them come the less powerful but far more numerous dragonkin, who often work as generals, government officials, consorts, and other people of influence. Lesser still are the bestial drakes and dragon-blooded Triaxians—those humanoids who can trace their ancestry to a draconic dalliance. But even these are better than the mundane humanoids, who fall somewhere between peasants and livestock in the views of their superiors. The political geography of the Drakelands is always changing, with nations falling or expanding as the dragons vie for power. This is especially true as the seasons change—during the winter, the barbaric whites tend to be ascendant, only to be driven back into the northern reaches during the summer by the more powerful reds and politically cunning blues. Greens and blacks, for their parts, tend to form more isolationist settlements to pursue their own ends, yet aren’t above being drawn into conflicts or alliances when their territories are threatened.
Contrary to popular belief, not all of the dragons in the Drakelands are evil. While it’s true that many of the noble metallic dragons were slain during the War of Heroes, and that those who weren’t were hunted almost to extinction in the pogroms that followed because of their “racial treason,” a few metallics still hold their own, banding together to protect each other’s nations against the chromatics. These lands are something of a fairy tale among the lowborn subjects of the other nations, and many Triaxian slaves run away in hopes of making it to these fabled utopias. The few who actually succeed find themselves welcomed with open arms—though not necessarily with the lives of leisure and plenty they might have imagined. The metallic-ruled nations are often highly militant, constantly forced to make hard choices and fight for their right to exist. Small wonder, then, that many of the metallics who managed to escape the Purges but didn’t flee the planet altogether choose to forego nation-building and simply hide themselves away in remote locations, or within Triaxian societies.
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The Skyfire Mandate
In the rise of the true dragons, many Triaxians saw not only enslavement, but the potential extinction of their race. It was only through an alliance of Triaxian men and women, dragonkin, and metallic dragons—an army the likes of which has never been seen before or since—that the menace was halted. Huge sacrifices were made, including the lives of most of the humanoids’ true dragon allies, yet the spirit of their alliance continues to live on today in the form of the Skyfire Mandate.
The Skyfire Mandate occupies the long land bridge between Triaxus’s western, dragon-controlled continent and the eastern lands of the Allied Territories. Rather than being a single nation, it is instead a vast collection of semi-independent military units in charge of protecting individual regions, called holdings. Together, these soldiers make up the famed Dragon Legion, sworn not to a monarch or a government, but to the promise of keeping the Drakelands from expanding.
Though all races are welcome to take up the Dragon Legion’s cause, in practice the group consists almost entirely of Triaxians and dragonkin—hence the legion’s reliance on its iconic dragonriders. These legendary pairings are fearsome in combat, the dragonkin often fighting with huge lances and glaives while their riders support them with archery or magic, yet it’s a mistake to think of the dragonkin as steeds. Rather, these duos are true partnerships between equals, bonds of love, trust, and fellowship that extend beyond the battlefield, with the Triaxians acting as the dragonkin’s domestic partners and caretakers.
The governmental structure of the Skyfire Mandate is a loose one. Commanders of the various holdings must be chosen by the acclaim of their soldiers and sponsored by two existing commanders from other units. Once instated, only a vote of no confidence from the men and women under their direction can remove commanders from power.
Policy and overarching strategy for the legion as a whole is set in meetings of the Tribunal—13 of the most seasoned and respected commanders in the service—but beyond this, commanders have complete authority within their holdings. Though disputes between commanders are heavily discouraged, they can be settled through meetings arbitrated by other commanders (called “parleys”) or brought before the Tribunal, or in extreme cases can be decided through single combat. Outright military action against another commander is considered high treason, with all other commanders immediately seizing the offender’s holding and carrying out the sentence of death by high-altitude drop.
Of course, the majority of citizens within the Skyfire Mandate are not legionaries, but rather simple farmers, woodcutters, merchants, and other common people. They organize primarily into small townships and even city-states, though the formation of full-on nations is discouraged by the legion (a process many would-be rulers get around by establishing far-reaching guilds). These people are largely left to govern themselves, though the Dragon Legion both recruits from their ranks and retains the right to requisition what supplies they require—a little-loved process known as “tithing.” Though the commoners naturally grumble about the military “fatting itself while producing nothing,” those who’ve seen the legion or its enemies in combat rarely challenge the practice. Lately, however, many of the larger city-states to the east have begun protesting, demanding that the legion leave them alone, and sometimes even going so far as to claim that the dragons are no longer a threat.
As the Skyfire Mandate is hundreds of miles wide, the border holdings naturally see far more action than those in more eastern regions. While this gives those gung-ho commanders who claim the border fortresses that much more respect and prestige, the eastern holdings still pull their weight by regularly rotating units into certain fortifications along the border maintained specifically for that purpose, running minor invasions and annexation missions, dealing with local governments, and patrolling the vast stretches of sea to the north and south to make sure the dragons don’t simply try to fly around. Still, the fact that these soldiers get to retreat to relative safety rather than constantly living in the contested Parapets makes “eastlander” a popular insult among western legionaries.
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Other Major Regions
In addition to the Drakelands and the Skyfire Mandate, there are several major populated regions of Triaxus.
Allied Territories: Spanning the entire continent of Ora, this region—often simply called “the Territories”—is a riot of nations both small and large, including monarchies, theocracies, democracies, and more. Once these nations struggled against each other in a political free-for-all, yet the first great wars against the dragons of the Drakelands drove them to ally into a single federated unit in order to ensure that humanoids would survive as anything more than just a slave race. After the great victories of the War of Heroes and the establishment of the Skyfire Mandate, however, the dragons became a less immediate threat, and old rivalries began to splinter the bonds of blood and fellowship. Today, the Allied Territories are a union in name only, frequently engaging in border skirmishes and even absorbing each other completely, while still paying lip service to the humanoid alliance of old. Should the dragons ever make another significant push into their continent, however, it’s likely that such feuds would quickly be mended, and all spears turned outward.
The composition of the Allied Territories is always in flux, particularly as portions of their population are driven south from the poles in winter or drawn north in summer, but of the hundreds of nations and free cities that spring up periodically, a few are particularly well established, having survived many seasonal cycles. The riders of Aylok, for instance, hold fertile plains and are widely notorious for breeding the best cavalry. Zo, the Port of a Thousand Ships, boasts markets where anything can be found, and in winter maintains magically melted shipping lanes. Prieta, the Scholar’s Paradise, values learning above all, and even the basest of its mercenaries seek to improve their minds. And everyone in the Territories has heard of Kamora, the wealthy gateway to the Uchorae Jungle, whose residents pay for their nation’s bounty by constantly defending their high-walled cities from vampiric predators.
Ning: An island continent separated from its neighbors by the wide Sephorian Sea, the Immortal Suzerainty of Ning is an independent empire rarely challenged by the armies of other nations. Nevertheless, the empire maintains a vast standing army that it uses to protect the countless rural villages strewn across its landscape from the many predators—both bestial and dangerously intelligent—that dwell within the forests and valleys of the continent’s interior. Many of these communities are reachable only by treacherous roads through sharp-toothed mountains and deep jungles, and thus one of the first things constructed in any new settlement is its shelterstone, a ziggurat-shaped fortress designed to house citizens during invasions by monsters, and which usually contains some magical means of contacting the empire’s military for help.
Perhaps the most unique aspect of Ning’s culture is its focus on social station, honor, and custom. Ruled by the benevolent Immortal Suzerain (a title conferred on each monarch when the previous one dies or abdicates), everyone in the nation, from government officials and nobility down to common farmers, is obsessed with matters of etiquette, and those who flaunt the rules—either deliberately or through ignorance—can find themselves treated as invisible by the affronted populace.Another peculiarity of Ning society is a unique caste called ukara, or “battleflowers.” These individuals are elaborately decorated and androgynous warriors who renounce all ties to family, social status, and personal gender in order to compete in ritualized gladiatorial bouts. Those who do well are treated as high nobility, with great houses and powerful merchants competing for the honor of their favor, while those unable to prove their worth after their first year are banished from the major cities forever, forced to spend their lives defending
outlying communities.
Sephorian Archipelago: The seas between these several hundred islands are remarkably gentle, allowing travel by canoe in the summer and by walking across mazes of ice floes in the winter. Despite regular trade between them, most of the small island communities maintain their own customs and traditions, with even a few miles between islands creating vast differences in culture. To the more “civilized” nations of the continents, the most interesting aspects of the archipelago are the mysterious cylindrical towers on some of the islands that periodically exhale smoke and, aside from being used as navigational aids, are treated as taboo by the residents. Many of the more fertile islands are also left fallow, for reasons either unremembered or unexplained to outsiders.