The Euriddian Empire

• Euriddian Empire Setting Pitch
• Citizens of the Empire

Euriddian Empire Setting Pitch

The Euriddian Empire is 25 years old. It is beautiful and at its peak.

We live in the golden age. Art nouveau ironwork, Aether-lit boulevards, skyships docking at wrought-iron spires. The floating continents united under the Golden Lion. Cafés full. Newspapers thriving. The future has never looked brighter.

The cracks are already starting to show.

The Golden Truths

These are the things that every character knows, no matter what background.

1. The world is broken. The world shattered a long time ago. Now it's floating continents above an ocean wound. Skyships are the only way between them.

2. Aether powers everything. Mined from the floating islands, refined Aether runs the skyships, the street lamps, the guns, the telegraph. It is finite. Whoever controls Aether controls the Empire.

3. The Empire is young. Twenty-five years ago, King Tarathion Eurid unified the warring nations through diplomacy and sheer presence. Most adults remember the wars before.

4. The Six watch over us. Solarion, Luna, Mallus, Titania, Lliira, and Morana — the six Prime Deities. The Church of Solarion runs the show, but its grip is slipping.

5. Magic and industry are the same thing. A street lamp is a crystal humming with bound light. A revolver is magic punching a bullet through a firing crystal. Your wizard and your engineer use the same tools now.

6. Not everyone is happy. The elves joined reluctantly and never embraced it. The dwarven forges chafe under Imperial taxes. The plains feed everyone and get no say. The frozen hinterlands barely get by.

A Day in the Empire

You wake to a tram bell. Morning paper on the doorstep — the Chronicle if you're respectable, the Dock Ward Whisper if you're not. Headlines: trade disputes, a refinery opening, last night's salon.

You take the tram to work, or walk if you can't afford the fare. Wide boulevards, ironwork curling like ivy, Aether-lamps still glowing from the night before. A skyship passes overhead. In the poorer districts, the lamps flicker.

Evenings: a salon if you have connections, a temple if you're faithful, a spiritualist parlor if you want to speak to the dead. The Church disapproves. The parlors are full. At night the wealthy districts stay bright. Where the Aether doesn't reach, it's very dark.

The wilderness is still out there. Monsters still hunt between the islands. Ruins still hum with old magic.

Citizens of the Empire

"The Empire is not one people, but many. That, dear reader, is precisely the miracle of it."
— The Imperial Chronicle

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Common Citizens

What people expect. Your character can break every expectation on this page if they want to. That's fine.

• Human (Lyridia, everywhere)
  • The majority, and the default assumption everywhere from the aristocracy down to the factory floor.
• Elf (Caelyth, the Aelwood)
  • Traditionalists who remember exactly what was lost when Caelyth joined the Empire, and still haven't agreed among themselves whether to forgive it.
• Dwarf (Baeldun, the Baelspine, Caldor)
  • Industrialists, gunsmiths, Aether refiners. If the Empire has an engine room, this is it.
• Halfling (Ceresia, the cities)
  • Grain merchants, mill owners, shopkeepers. Comfortable and prosperous, and politically invisible right up until they aren't.
• Half-Elf (Lyridia, everywhere)
  • The bridge between the two founding peoples. Worth remembering that the Eurid dynasty itself is half-elven. The whole Empire started as one half-elf's project.
• Gnome (Azurea, Eurydice)
  • Academics, inventors, journalists. The one hunched over a notebook full of equations at the café table next to you.
• Goblin (Factory districts, dock wards)
  • The underclass. Factory hands, newspaper urchins, the people the Aether-lamps somehow never quite reach.
• Orc (Foundries, dock wards, the military)
  • Soldiers, dockworkers, builders. They're the reason the Empire is still standing, and they don't get thanked for it.
• Kobold (Baelspine, the undercities)
  • Trapmakers and tunnel-dwellers who tend to know exactly what's buried under the city, and rarely say so for free.
• Leshy (Aelwood, rural fringes)
  • A nature-spirit given a walking, talking shape. The wilderness that decided to come into town.

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Uncommon & Fringes of the Empire

Same deal. These are the broad strokes. Your hobgoblin could be a pacifist poet. Your catfolk might have never set foot in Alfheim. That's fine.

• Azarketi (Port cities, floating trade posts)
  • Children of the Sundered Sea. Traders and divers who know what's down there better than anyone with lungs alone.
• Catfolk (Alfheim, rare travelers in Imperial cities)
  • Eastern traders, exotic to Imperial eyes, though from where they stand, the feeling is entirely mutual.
• Fetchling (Veil-touched districts, spiritualist quarters)
  • Human once, before generations spent in the dark between planes changed that. Whatever brought them back, they don't discuss it.
• Hobgoblin (Skovos, military outposts)
  • Warband culture. Tarathion won them over with diplomacy rather than a war, but they haven't forgotten they used to be the threat he was worried about.
• Kitsune (Alfheim, rare travelers in Imperial cities)
  • Shapeshifters out of the far, far east, carrying old magic into a very new empire. Most Imperials have never actually met one.
• Lizardfolk (Southern islands, warm-water ports)
  • From the sunward isles, far enough from the capital, and close enough to the water, that the Empire mostly leaves them be.
• Ratfolk (Sewers, dock wards, undercities)
  • Run the information underground. They hear everything the Chronicle refuses to print, and they forget none of it.
• Tengu (Alfheim, port districts)
  • Eastern swordfolk and traders. Rare enough in Imperial ports that people still turn to look.

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Ask First

Rare in the Empire. If one of these catches your eye, we'll make it work.

• Automaton — Built before the world broke, and woken up after. Their memories of the old world come in pieces, and no two automatons carry the same ones.
• Skeleton — Dead, and refused to stay that way. Something is holding them back from whatever comes next, often not even they know what.
• Dhampir — Born at the line between life and death, which the living tend to find unsettling in ways they can't quite explain.
• Changeling — Born from a bargain they never agreed to, carrying inherited power and inherited debt in equal measure. A few embrace it. Most would rather not have been asked.
• Duskwalker — Psychopomps wearing mortal shape, easing the dying through their last passage while carrying their own appointment with death somewhere down the line.
• Beastkin — Fur, feathers, fangs, worn openly by some and hidden by most. The Empire is still working out how it's supposed to react.
• Poppet — Brought to life by desperate love or an accident of magic, and now walking around asking the kind of questions nobody expects from a doll.
• Sprite — Fey from beyond the elven courts. They answer to no crown, and don't seem interested in starting.
• Drow — From somewhere beneath the forest the surface elves would rather not discuss, and chose to stay topside anyway.