Blog / Codex Inversus

The Codex Inversus is a worldbuilding project by Luca Vanzella. It can be found on Medium.com and on a dedicated subreddit.

Once, long ago, the Demiurge brough the world into being. It shaped the many planes of existence, filled them with life, and appointed a cosmic order over everything. However, it grew dissatisfied with its inability to create a truly perfect world, and eventually left creation behind to try anew somewhere else. Before leaving, it charged the various lesser divine beings that it had made, such as the Angels, the Devils, and the various lords of the elements and chaos and order, with looking after its creations in its absence.

Things worked well for a time, but eventually a rift formed between the Angels and the Devils over how to properly order creation and watch over mortals. The Angels favored strict order and forgiveness, while the Devils championed freedom and punishment. This disagreement eventually grew into resentment, which in turn became open conflict. Heaven and Hell marched to war against each other, forcing all the other inhabitants of creation to pick a side. The battles that raged then shook the foundation of the multiverse, toppling reality and causing all planes of existence to fracture, collapse, and fall inward, leaving a single hybrid world formed from the shattered remnants of its predecessors.

In the wake of the Collapse, the survivors of the War in Heaven found the world a greatly changed place. The formerly immortal divinities became subject to age and disease, and, with no afterlives to go to, souls now simply dissolved into magical energy after death. Nations have arisen from the former celestials, whose descendants have varyingly split apart and interbred with each other and humanity. The ruins of former planes dot the land, from the broken arches of the Circles of Hell that loom over the cities of the Devils to the great ash desert formed form the extinction of the Plane of Fire. Strange animals, descended from celestial beasts or from mundane creatures that adapted to a new, magical world, teem in the wilderness.

And, as the 1,000th year since the Collapse arrives, the papacy of the Angels and the catechism of the Devils claim that the Demiurge will soon return, and who knows what it will have to say about the state of the world it left in its servants' keeping? Or perhaps it will not return at all, and the people of the world will have to live in the ruins of their ancestors' mistakes as best they can.

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Examples

• All-Accessible Magic: Magic is derived from a universal Mana field that permeates the universe, which can be interacted with and altered by creating knots in specific patterns, whether by drawing, carving, or simply gesturing quickly enough. In theory, anybody can do this, although actually knowing how to do this in a way that will actually achieve anything of note requires a lot of dedicated study; "magicians" are those who have spent large parts of their lives studying in order to do this. Most are scholarly researchers similar to Renaissance-era natural philosophers, although other traditions exist — for instance, Orc fencers have worked out a way to quickly scribe spells in midair with their blades, although they consider this to be simply an advanced martial art and not magic. Even animals can manipulate the field through instinctive behavior or physical structures in their bodies.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: One of the techniques used by Hesizainak, orcish duelists who scribe spells mid-combat with their sword flourishes, is the "selective slash", which ignores armor to cut the flesh or beneath (or, alternatively, can also ignore the flesh to only cleave armor or cloth).
• Attack on the Heart: One of the most feared techniques of the Hesizainak is the "heart piercer", a special flourish that allows the swordsman's blade to burst directly out of his opponent's body — which, most often, is used to have it dramatically explode from the target's heart.
• Axis Mundi: In the World Before, Olympus Mons served as a very literal connection between the mortal world and the higher planes — it rose so high that its summit rose entirely outside of the world and ended in Heaven, allowing for a direct physical link between the habitations of mortals and those of blessed souls and angels. It was utterly destroyed in the last, cataclysmic battle of the War in Heaven, when the leader of the devils, Eosphorus, caused himself to detonate by transforming all of his mass into energy; doing so wiped out the opposing angelic army and blasted Olympus Mons into oblivion, which in turn began the great Collapse of the multiverse that saw the planes buckle, shatter, and fall inwards into a single patchwork world. Today, the former location of the great mountain the Olympus Crater, a vast basin still teeming with magical energy.
• Beelzebub: Beelzebub was one of the original Archdevils who founded the Holy Infernal Empire. In the modern day, Devils revere him as a saint and pray to him for protection against pest insects.
• Beneath the Earth: The Principality of Dis is built atop the ruins of Tartarus, one of the primary areas of Hell before the Collapse. In the World Before, it was a cosmic prison of labyrinthine, shifting tunnels that held dangerous rebels against the cosmic order; in the modern day, its ruin is a sprawling, mostly unmapped cave system prone to shifts as new passages open and older ones collapse. Its depths are home to varied and bizarre ecosystems supported by natural concentrations of mana, treasure troves of pre-Collapse wealth, and the remains of ancient giants, demigods and sinners, all of which draw explorers to plumb the abysses — but, just as often, terrible monsters emerge from the unknown depths of Tartarus to ravage the surface world.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Chimericats have long, agile tails tipped with sharp blades, which they use to skewer flying or leaping prey and to slash at larger opponents.
• Big Brother Is Watching: The Angelic Unison is run by a rigid bureaucracy who can be a bit… overbearing.
• Bigger on the Inside: The Infinite Woods are so named because of a bizarre spatial property that causes them to be functionally infinite in internal area, despite having a finite perimeter. The wood of oaks that grow within the forest can be used to fashion furniture that is also larger interiorly than it is exteriorly.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Hellfire peppers are a red pepper variety from the Infernal Empire known for their ludicrous spiciness, derived from growing close to pits of hellfire. They are so spicy that simply applying crushed pepper to the skin is intensely painful, eating a whole raw pepper has caused people to die from sheer distress, and a distilled and concentrated version of their juice is used as a particularly nasty poison. The Devil aristocracy loves it and includes it in every meal they can.
• Bloody Bowels of Hell: The Flesh Fields of Minauros, one of the most unique locations in the Holy Infernal Empire, are an immense field of living flesh believed to have formed during the collapse when the Blood Veil, an immaterial passage that granted new bodies to the spirits of the dead, was forced into material reality. The result is a disordered sprawl of random body parts, assembled without rhyme nor reason in forests of limp limbs, fields of hair, and ridges of bones over vast cavernous organ systems. Most of these parts are human; some instead resemble other humanoids, such as patches of green orcish skin or fields of pointed elven ears; rarer still are appearances of fur, claws, feathers, scales or other animal traits of the beast-kin. In the areas where the Fields slope into the sea, divers record vast slopes of scaly skin, immense fins, and deep gill-chasms. The area is considered extremely valuable as a source of organic products — after considerable theologic debate, the Infernal Church decided that the Flesh Fields have no mind and soul and as such are fair game for... processing purposes provided that no recognizably human structures are used — and home to a thriving ecosystem of parasites, scavengers, and "flesh grazers" ranging from flightless vultures and mosquitoes to tapeworms hundreds of feet in length.
• Boring, but Practical: The maritime culture of the Devils of Minauros is built off harvesting the seas for its riches. Many enterprising Devils gravitate towards whaling, which provides lucrative spoils but whose hunts can often end in nothing and whose profitability depends on the whims of the market, or seek glory in extremely dangerous and expensive sea monster hunts. Most fisherfolk, however, prefer to stick to what is consistently the safest and most efficient and reliable catch — cod.
• Born in the Saddle: The elves of the Ash Khanate lead a perpetually nomadic existence, crossing their ashen plains alongside herds of horses, sheep and yaks along preset routes that they have observed for a millennium. Their endless migrations are designed to act as an immense, perpetual ritual, drawing in and preserving ghosts that would otherwise fade into nothingness in a world without an afterlife.
• Celestial Body: Stargazing cows are livestock raised in the Angelic Unison that have blue-black fur studded with faintly glowing pinpricks.
• Circles of Hell:
  • Before the Collapse, Hell was divided into nine Circles where sinners were punished. After the Collapse forcibly merged all planes into the material world, the Rings collapsed and fell into ruin. In the modern day, little is left of them but vast derelict pillars in the lands of the Infernal Empire, although one, the Ninth, still endures as a huge unbroken arch of stone above the city of Goetia.
  • The modern Empire remains divided into nine provinces named after common names for Hell and its Circles — Cocytus, Erebus, Dis, Maladomini, Malebolge, Cania, Minauros, Nessus and Styigia.
• Demon/Devil Distinction: The Devils were one of the two original species of divine begins created by the Demiurge and tasked with overseeing creation, alongside the Angels. In the modern day, they rule the Holy Infernal Empire, a large and civilized nation. The Demons are a splinter group who opposed the truce between Hell and Heaven and tried to force the Empire back onto the warpath. They waged numerous civil wars to gain control of the Empire, but in the modern day are reduced to a few remote mountain holdouts. Physically, Devils resemble humans with horns and red skin, while Demons use magic to awaken monstrous latent traits such as wings, tails, tentacles or additional mouths, and are nowadays little more than monstrous savages thanks to centuries of inbreeding and self-induced mutations. Dæmons are a third splinter group that was forced to flee the Empire after a failed coup and rebuilt itself into a smaller kingdom farther out. The modern Dæmon Kingdom is part of a larger confederacy of tiny nations, and its people are known for their piratical traditions, overstated claims to being the true inheritors of the ancient infernal culture, and peculiar asymmetric horns, a recessive trait brought out by their small population size.
• Demon Lords and Archdevils: The Holy Infernal Empire is politically structured like the Holy Roman Empire, including a complex hierarchy of hereditary nobles.
• The Empath: The omen birds of the Infernal Empire can sense emotions using their horns. Each species of bird is attuned to a particular set of emotions, and uses this ability to aid in its survival strategy. Sorrow hawks, for instance, can perceive despair, sadness, disorientation and gloom, which they use to hunt lost, wounded or frightened animals; bloodshed vultures perceive rage, bloodlust and antagonism, allowing them to find areas where dead bodies will soon be available; and joy quails perceive happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment, which leads them to animals that have finished their meals and celebrations that are winding down so that they can eat the leftovers.
• Enchanted Forest:
  • The Elsewhere Woods are filled with portals and spatial anomalies that periodically connect them to other parts of the world, and as a result their fauna and flora are surreal amalgams of different biomes where patches of jungle and conifer forest alternate with desert brambles fading into wet fields of reeds, all dotted with incongruous objects and structures from other lands and worlds. They have gained a cultural reputation as the place where lost or forgotten things end up.
  • The Ghost Forest is overlaid by a shard of the Ethereal Plane in the form of dense fog that functions as a distinct spatial dimension. Its native plants and animals have developed the ability to phase between regular and ethereal space, giving the impression of a forest inhabited by phantoms.
  • The Infinite Forest was once a paradisical wilderness in Heaven, which became overlaid with the material world and spatially folded in on itself during the Collapse. It has a discrete perimeter, but is either spatially infinite or just absurdly huge on the inside. It is extremely easy to become lost in it, and the center has never and perhaps can never be reached. Its outer edges are mostly just a normal forest, but as one heads deeper in spatial anomalies become more severe — straight paths loop back on themselves, gaps between branches and arching trees give views into different parts of the forest than what is visible around them, and animals vanish behind trees and reappear from behind others meters away. Mutation is also common in local flora, usually in the form of body parts repeating in fractal patterns and in the birth of many-headed hydras. People who spend too long inside it become increasingly obsessed with it and eventually allow themselves to become permanently lost among the trees.
• Fantastic Livestock:
  • Susmaggots, raised in the Infernal Empire, are creatures resembling pigs with the rear ends of pale worms or maggots. They are delicious to a literally supernatural degree, as their flesh has the uncanny quality of tasting like the first thing you eat after a days-long fast, and smell equally enticing. However, they are slow breeders and need to be extensively pampered and killed extremely quickly and painlessly, as fear, stress and pain cause their flesh to become bitter and sour; the traditional way to do it is to take the selected pig-maggot out for a stroll, give it a beautiful and delightful day, and then kill instantly with a pike blow to the back of the head. As a result, they are more of a luxury meat than any kind of staple. They are believed to have originated in Hell as a way to torment the gluttonous, tempting them with their smell but turning foul when slain by ravenous souls, and to be one of the few kinds of animal left largely unchanged by the Collapse.
  • The Angelic Unison raises herds of livestock with wondrous appearances and properties. Stargazing cows are cattle with star-studded fur and milk that induces calm and relaxation when drunk and is downright narcotic when aged into cheese. Insomniac sheep are infested by glowing ticks that inject stimulants into their bloodstream over the summer, and produce milk with a caffeine-like effect; insomniac sheep butter is a popular breakfast food. Holy cows are descended from celestial kine that interbred with Earthly animals after the Collapse; they have halo-like horns, the ability to calm other beings with a glance, milk that always tastes sweet, and meat that heals those that eat it.
• Fantastic Vermin: Manticorats are bat-winged hopping rodents from the Valley of Delights, with a taste for magic. In nature, they feed primarily on magical insects, but, after the Valley became settled by wizards, the rats' numbers exploded thanks to a suddenly booming food supply. Provided with inquisitive intelligence, strong prehensile tails and the ability to literally eat protective enchantments and wards, they can be very difficult to keep out of where they aren't wanted. Finding a horde of these critters in your laboratory, eating ingredients and gnawing on wands, is bad enough, but the creatures are also prone to dramatic mutations from eating dangerous spells or blowing up towers and villages by chewing through the wrong enchanted scroll.
• Flash Step: One of the techniques used by Hesizainak, orcish duelists who scribe spells mid-combat with their sword flourishes, is the "blinking footwork", which allows the duelist to "skip" a step and move across spaces longer than their natural stride should allow.
• Giant's Knife; Human's Greatsword: Giants were so absurdly huge that their tools are artifacts are essentially landscape features for human-sized beings, but can be used for improvised purposes by larger beings. Trolls, for instance, are tall and strong enough to be able to use a giant's table knife as a two-handed sword.
• Have You Seen My God?: The Demiurge, the universe's creator god, vanished in the distant past when they left creation out of frustration at their inability to create a perfect world, and left the various orders of being to watch over and guard their creation in their stead. The apocalyptic war that destroyed the World before was caused by irreconcilable disagreement between the Angels and Devils over how to order the universe in the Demiurge's absence, and most modern religions center around waiting for the Demiurge's prophesied return and re-ordering of the world. The specifics vary beyond that — the Angels and Devils both believe that the Demiurge will prove their side right and restore the old order of things, while other groups believe that the Demiurge will lead everyone to a new, perfect creation or reshape the universe into a new and perfected form.
• Heaven's Devils: The Devils were loyal servants of the Demiurge, same as the Angels, and were simply charged with overseeing a distinct aspect of creation — the Angels watched over Heaven and guided mortals, while the Devils were given keeping of Hell and the punishment of transgressors of divine law, which they did with zeal and thoroughness. Their eventual war with the Angels, which destroyed the old world, was borne of what was essentially a profound doctrinal schism over how to best do the Demiurge's will; to the present day, the bad blood between the Holy Infernal Empire and the Angelic Unison is rooted in their very different readings of the Demiurge's instructions, but they're otherwise both run by churches run along Catholic lines and driven by a desire to restore their god's old order.
• Holy Halo: Holy cows, sacred cattle descended from the kine of Heaven, have horns that, during adolescence, grow together to form a smooth, halo-like shape.
• Introduced Species Calamity: The Valley of Delights was infested by a local pest species known as manticorats, known for their quick breeding and propensity for devouring magic ingredients and spells alike. To control them, the wizard Alamandry created an artificial species known as chimericats, provided with keen intelligence, blade-tipped tails and intense territoriality to control the pests. The chimericats did their job exceptionally well but, once the manticorats were reduced to small footholds, the voracious and aggressive felines began to prey on other wildlife just as efficiently, then pets, then livestock, and when a pack claims a house or a wizard tower as its territory it becomes an active danger instead of a simple pest. The Valley is now dealing with a chimericat infestation as ingrained and much more problematic than the manticorat one, and Alamandry is trying to create a new, larger predator species to control them. Second time's the charm, surely.
• Ironic Hell: Hell itself is long gone, but the Devils proudly continue this tradition in the modern day. Criminal law in the Infernal Empire is based on the principle of "jurisprudence", where punishments must fit the crime in some way. For instance, blasphemers, forgers, liars under oath, and others who committed crimes of speech or writing have their lies written on their bodies in pigments that burn the skin.
• Luring in Prey: The female enchanting mantis hunts by using her forelegs to trace magical reactive glyphs in the air that cause other insects to be drawn towards them. Simple proximity to the incantation will only cause a target to subconsciously head in the mantis' direction, while seeing the incantation directly will compel prey to heads towards her and meekly await consumption. An abrupt stopping of the incantation will cause an opposite effect, which the mantises use to make larger creatures flinch away from them and give the insect an extra moment to escape.
• Kraken and Leviathan: Immense sea monsters are common in the oceans. As a general rule, vertebrate ones are called leviathans, while invertebrate ones are called krakens.
  • Krakens include the abyne, a giant squid with dozens of tentacles that often drags down ships to use as shelters, and the legion, a huge lobster-like thing wrapped on in a nautilus-like shape, which perpetually scours the seafloor for food.
  • Leviathans include sea serpents, immense whale-eel hybrids that mostly filter-feed, and ferocious armor whales that hunt both krakens and ships.
• Magic Eater:
  • Manticorats are rodents that have adapted to feed primarily on magic and magical creatures. Their normal food source are spellcasting insects, such as conjuring ants and illusionist butterflies, but they are a serious pest for wizards because they will happily gnaw on wands, eat reagents, drink potions, and chew through scrolls. Keeping them out is almost impossible, since they will simply nibble holes through shields and wards and lick off repulsive enchantments.
  • Capibangels are larger relatives of manticorats that live in the Olympus Crater, one of the most magically active areas in the world. The ambient magic is so high there that they barely need to move at all, and instead can just "chew" the air and consume the magical energy there.
• Magic Knight: Hesiak is an orcish martial art that focuses on using extremely precise sword flourishes to scribe spells in midair. Its practitioners, known as Hesizainak, can do things like sword thrusts whose cutting edge "skips" a foot or so past the blade, a "defensive flourish" that briefly makes the air in front of it into an unbreakable barrier, blows that strike from a different direction than the one they're coming from, and a special flourish that sends the blade bursting out of its target's heart. A typical duel between Hesizainak resembles a windmill of blades, after which one of the duelists drops down dead or horribly maimed, usually without their ever coming close to each other.
• Mega-Microbes: The wildlife of the Flesh Fields of Minauros, an enormous landscape made out of randomly-sized and -arranged body parts, includes white oozes, palm-sized blobbish thigns believed to be either giant amoebas, some kind of magically evolved white blood cells, or some mixture of the two. They crawl around mindlessly, consuming detritus and parasites that collect on the Flesh Fields, and reproduce by splitting in half when over a certain size.
• Monster Whale: Armor whales are ferocious beasts covered in lobster-like armor. They are aggressive predators that mainly hunt krakens, but will readily attack ships due to mistaking them for prey.
• The Necrocracy: The city of Beshart is inhabited solely by undead such as skeletons, zombies, vampires, ghouls, and revenants under the rule of the lich Libenyer I, the Anti-Pope. Libenyer leads a religion that praises undeath as the highest state of existence, and which seeks to liberate the living from the pain and burden of life and convert them into the faith (that is, kill and reanimate them).
• Our Angels Are Different: The Angels are the inhabitants of the Angelic Unison and one of the dominant species in the setting. In ancient times, they were appointed by the Demiurge to be arbiters of cosmic order; in the wake of the Collapse and the end of immortality, they formed into a theocratic nation and remained at odds with the Infernal Empire of the Devils.
• Our Demons Are Different: The Devils are the inhabitants of the Holy Infernal Empire and one of the dominant species in the setting; in appearance, they resemble horned, red-skinned humans. In ancient times, they oversaw the Hells and administered cosmic justice. In the wake of the Collapse and the end of immortality, they formed a theocratic nation founded on the principles of meritocracy and a form of social survival of the fittest, and are known for their byzantine bureaucracies and regulations and for their passion for opera, blood sports, and extremely spicy food.
• Our Dragons Are Different: In the World Before, the Demiurge is said to have tasked the dragons with being the world's historians, and they gathered specimens of everything in existence for their museums. During the War in Heaven, they were torn apart by civil war and their lands were ultimately destroyed by the angels to prevent the dragons' involvement in the War. Nothing is left of them now but sunken ruins among broken islands.
• Our Dwarves Are Different: The Dwarves inhabit a large territory in the southern continent of Uxali. Since most of this land consists of rough mountains and barren salt flats baked by a localized second sun in addition to the usual one, most of Dwarf society lives underground to escape the heat. They use golem-drawn carriages to cross the flats, and utilize a system of magical caves to preserve the souls of their ancestors.
• Our Elves Are Different: The Elves were once the people of elemental Fire, now become mortal like everyone else in the wake of the Collapse. They are split into two groups. The Elvish Caliphate was founded by the Efreets, the ancient Lords of Fire, after the Collapse. Its culture is sophisticated and decadent, certain of its superiority; the humans and half-elves living there make up a distinct underclass. It is mostly located in the cold northern tundra, where it sustains itself using magic and thermal springs created by the shards of the former Elemental Plane of Fire. The nomads of the Ash Khanate, which live in the great ashen steppes that formed from the extinction of the Plane of Fire, are a splinter group that emerged from its founders' determination to preserve the souls of the dead after the end of the afterlife. Their language, religion and migrations make up an immense, perpetual ritual intended to draw and sustain the spirits of the dead, and they ruthlessly destroy anything and anyone that could threaten this mission. Both cultures make ubiquitous use of body paint as decoration.
• Our Giants Are Different: Giants were immense beings who, before the Collapse, tried and failed to stage a coup against the other divinities; most were imprisoned in Hell, although a few were confined to distant corners of Heaven. They are entirely extinct in the present; most died fighting for the Angels during the Cosmic War, and the rest either perished in the Collapse or starved in the buried ruins of Hell. In the present day, all that's left of them are huge buried skeletons, scattered artifacts such as gloves the size of caverns, and potentially a few diminished and barbaric descendants such as Trolls.
• Our Gnomes Are Different: The Gnomes live in thirteen sheikdoms on the coast of the southern continent, on the edge of a desert of dust. Like the Dwarves, they are greatly skilled at creating artificial constructs; however, while the Dwarves favor large, powerful golems, the Gnomes prefer to create small, precise homunculi.
• Our Gryphons Are Different: In the World Before, griffins were noble creatures that soared through the skies of Heaven. When the Collapse forced all planes of existence into a single world, they found themselves having to compete for food and space in the mundane food chain and lost much of their heavenly status. Their modern descendants are for the most part just predatory animals.
  • Birch griffins, part tiger and part snow owl, are among the creatures that inhabit the Infinite Forest, a dimension-warping landscape formed from a shard of a heavenly wilderness.
  • Psittagryphs are macaw-like gryphons that live in areas where the natural jungles of Uxali border the mechanical jungles created by the Matras. They hunt the living constructs found there, cracking open their artificial casings to drink their animating fluids.
  • Wolfyrs lost their wings entirely, and have lupine traits instead of feline ones. They live throughout the Angelic Unison as vicious and intelligent pack predators with a taste for horse meat, especially that of magical equines such as pegasi and unicorns. Some believe that the wolfyrs are driven by a hunger for the paradise that they've lost.
• Our Hydras Are Different: Hydras are animals mutated by the influence of the Infinite Woods, which occasionally cause creatures to be born with many repeating heads, each smaller than the previous. These creatures usually perish quickly, but some, most often snakes, survive and can become monstrous predators.
• Our Manticores Are Different: The true manticores were torturers in Hell, punishing sinners through mockery and humiliation. Their modern descendants, the imperial manticores, live among the ruins of the Circles of Hell and retain the ability to induce shame and embarrassment through their laughter. They use this to throw prey off balance and goad it into either attacking their tormentor, at which point the manticore subdues it with its venomous claws and sting, or fleeing, which will lead it into an ambush prepared by the manticore's mate. Their venom is incredibly painful, as it induces both physical and mental anguish described as feeling like being doused in acid while reliving your worst memory.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: Minotaurs are taurine Beast Folk famous for their impeccable sense of direction, and are often employed as navigators, guides and cartographers. This is in large part a self-enforcing cultural thing — the stereotype developed in the past for somewhat unclear reasons, and modern Minotaurs face a strong societal pressure to be good at finding their way.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Orcs are green-skinned, tusked humanoids who once served the Djinn in the World Before. They sided with Heaven during the ancient cosmic war and thus retain a strained relationship with the Infernal Empire. Their society is highly rigid and caste-based, with each family being expected to follow a specific profession or vocation. They are also highly militaristic, and are famous for practicing a martial art that uses complex sword flourishes to quickly inscribe spells in combat to produce devastating effects.
• Our Perytons Are Different: Perytons are monsters that roost among the floating islands of Emuna, in the Angelic Unison. Before the Collapse, they were beautiful winged stags that appeared to offer encouragement and help; during the great war that ended the previous world, some now-unknown entity twisted them into bizarre monsters, with pterosaur wings and tails, hand-like antlers, and a thirst for blood. They use their hand-antlers to cast spells, disguising themselves as clouds, flocks of birds, or chunks of rock when hunting; when making a kill, they are savage and messy eaters, dismembering their victims to create gory spreads of viscera and blood as displays for potential mates.
• Our Sphinxes Are Different:
  • The city-state of Mizani is ruled by Hekima, the Everlasting Wisdom and the Last Sphinx. She is the last surviving being, a millennium after the Collapse, to retain a spark of divinity and the immortality and magical power that go with it.
  • The explorer Tamil came back from one of her travels with a second sphinx, named M'zaha, which has a woman's head on a leopard body. Nobody knows where she came from, as neither Tamil or M'zaha will tell. Unlike Hekima, M'zaha is a wholly mortal being, and is infamous for her rotten attitude.
• Our Trolls Are Different: Trolls are barbaric humanoids found in the wild, snowy northlands of the Angelic Unison. They're about as tall as three humans standing on each other's shoulders, and their faces take up the entirety of their torsos, with a thatch of hair between their shoulders and thick beards covering their hips and groins. They are savage barbarians, speak an unintelligible grunting language, and are highly resistant to magic — mind control flatly doesn't work on them, and they can see through most illusions.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Zombies are basic undead, automaton-like beings created by using a spell to keep the soul from dissolving into the mana field. Devils turn executed criminals into zombies to ensure that they'll still receive an appropriate eternal punishment in the wake of the afterlife's collapse.
• Pegasus: Pegasi are winged horses that fly thanks to a natural anti-gravity property in their bones. They descend from celestial horses that soared through Heaven before the Collapse. In the modern day, the Angelic Unison has spent a great deal of effort in maintaining careful breeding programs to prevent the pegasi's surviving bloodlines from being corrupted by the realities of earthly ecology like other heavenly animals were.
• The Phoenix: True phoenixes once lived in the Plane of Fire, before the Collapse. Afterwards, Iblis, the last of the Lords of Fire, reshaped them into their modern descendants, the flamingo-like phoenixopteroi, to which he gave dexterous hands for feet and the ability to cast spells. Phoenixopteroi wade through lakes of molten rock like regular flamingos do in tepid lakes, using spells to call up small elementals to eat, and, when they die, they burst into flames. This often leaves behind an egg, but this isn't the bird being reborn, as true immortality has been impossible ever since the Collapse. Instead, they use the heat of their deaths to incubate their eggs.
• Proud Hunter Race: Supposedly, according to the tenets of the Infernal Empire, the purpose of the Felidar Cat Folk in the World Before was to act as cosmic hunters, tracking down escaped damned souls and rampaging beasts and dragging them back to Hell. After the Collapse, they continued to view themselves being fundamentally born to hunt and track, and were often employed as hunters of animals, people, and even objects and information. Modern Beast Folk culture fundamentally rejects both Diabolism and the general idea of anyone being born for any particular purpose, but enclaves endure along the edges of the Elf-Woods and the Infinite Forest who view themselves as hunters first and foremost, training from childhood to track down specific prey, ranging from deer to griffins, basing social status on hunting prowess and the capture of impressive prey, and embracing any new technology or magic that will let them keep their title of greatest hunters in the world. The mainstream of Beast Folk culture views these enclaves as embarrassing archaisms, and the two groups do not get along.
• Roc Birds: Oceanic rocs are immense seagulls, with wingspans as wide as palaces. They nest on inland mountains, and fly out to sea to hunt leviathans, krakens, and the occasional ship.
• Sea Serpents: Sea serpents are a kind of leviathan resembling a cross between a whale and a snake, and grow to be about three ships' worth in length. They're filter feeders like real whales, using tentacled lips to catch schools of fish and shrimp. They are hunted for their lips, eaten as a delicacy, and for their amberblanc, a variant of ambergris that can be used to make fix magical effects in potions like ambergris can fix scents.
• Shark Man: The Sharkmen are a tribe of Beast Folk that lives beneath the southern seas. They don't consider other species to be people; to them, anything that isn't a sharkman is just a smart animal, and can therefore be food.
• Shedu and Lammasu: Bull-like lamassu are creatures found in the Angelic Unison that once lived in Heaven before the Collapse. The ancient lamassu are believed to have been advisors and guides to blessed souls, and to have had human heads. The modern breed, left stranded in the material world, became essentially animalistic and lost its original human features, although their horns grow in the shape of masks to mimic their ancient faces. They can still fly for a time using their small wings, and, if approached, still bellow out litanies of cryptic advice or proverbs that catalyze change or self-reflection in those who hear them. They are often hunted, by people seeking either their strange advice or the profit that comes from their many magically-active body parts.
• Snake People: Nagas, humanoid serpents, are among the inhabitants of the Beasts' Nations. They are known to be excellent cooks, thanks to their keen sense of smell and ability to sense heat, but their lack of chewing teeth means that Naga cousine is perforce heavy on soups, eggs, and food chopped into small pieces.
• Speculative Biology: A great deal of the blog's material focuses on describing the animals, plants, and ecosystems of the setting, with a particular emphasis on the pervasiveness of magic and on how living creatures have adapted to use and exploit it. Magic is produced by specific patterns of knots, motions or numbers interacting in certain ways with the universal mana field, which don't strictly require the mind making them to understand how they work, allowing for such things as butterflies whose wing venations encode a spell that creates an illusory owl, termites with a specialized "wizard" caste that marches endlessly around a knot of tunnels that makes their nest unbreakable, or birds that use their ability to sense emotions to seek prey or avoid predators.
• Thieving Magpie: Hoarding magpies are birds with the ability to sense emotions such as material attachment, pride in owning things, excitement for a new acquisition, and fear of losing things, which they use to track down creatures that have recently obtained something, be it a squirrel's stash of nuts or a person with a new jewel, and nab it. During the mating season, males attempt to steal things that people find important so that the resulting feelings of grief will attract a female by telling her that a successful thief lives in the area.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Transmuter snails are capable of self-transmutation by waving their eyestalks in precise patterns, creating magical sigils and effectively casting spells. A snail may give itself climbing or jumping legs to deal with a tall obstacle, then a tadpole-like tail to cross a body of water, then turn that tail into a prehensile tentacle to reach a piece of food, then grow bristling spines over its shell to fend off a predator.
• Weird Moon: The World has two moons. The Jade Moon is the one easily visible in the sky, the Onyx Moon appears smaller and darker, so much so that it is easier to spot by stars that it eclipses in the night sky. Both have no permament features visible as dense clouds cover them and both are inhabited. Divinities exiled into the moons two factions that sabotaged both sides of the Collapse War- fairies were placed on the Jade Moon, nightmares on the Onyx Moon.
• Weird Sun: The Second Sun is a glowing celestial body that hovers, stock still, over a giant salt desert in the south. It is believed to be a fount of pure positive energy, and its light causes endless creations and mutations of the objects and creatures on which it falls.

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