Thursday, September 8, 2016

Zyrd: In the Crux

The Crux is the cross-shaped area of habitation in the center of the tesseract of Zyrd. At it's hub is the City of Zyrd, the last city of note after the end of the cosmos. Surrounding Zyrd and villages and farmland built amid the ruins of when the City of Zyrd was larger, grander. Everything's falling apart, now. Chaos is seeping in.

In the northern arm of the Crux are badlands. It's a broken place where stone is ground to dust--and built up from dust, too, somehow. Things don't grow well in their farthest reaches. There are brutish people and brutish monsters than look like they're are hewn from rock. It's colder here, colder than it should be, and the mountains that climb the farthest wall are coated with snow and ice.

In the east, farmland gives way to plains. Winds blow from the great face in the eastern wall. Giant birds ride the winds as do cliff-dwellers on gliders.

In the west, there is the only sea in Zyrd. It stretches to a great falls nearly fifty miles tall that plummets into the dungeon depths.


In the south, there are jungles, then desert and finally the uttermost southern wall were lava flows.

All around the Crux, settlements climb the walls as far as the air is breathable and at one time perhaps farther. Some of these vertical settlements haven't seen a flatlander from the Crux in a generation.

4 comments:

Unlikely Lass said...

This is weirdly reminding me of Glorantha.

Trey said...

I can see that, yeah, though that wasn't a strong part of the conception (at least consciously). I suppose with a completely artificial fantasy world, certainly constraints and conceits are common go-tos.

Unlikely Lass said...

Oh, sure! I didn't mean that as a criticism. I'd never really thought of Glorantha as an artificial cosmic lifeboat, but it totally works. :)

Trey said...

None criticism taken. :) It just made think. Exalted's Creation has some similarities, too.