Tabletop Game / City of 7 Seraphs

"When we first saw the Radia, we were certain we had slipped from Shadow into the Heavens.

But what we found was far more precious and strange, the energies of Light and Dark balanced on a pin…

The axis upon which every Great Wheel turns and the craftsman which carved many of those selfsame wheels.

This was Hyraeatan, the City of Seven Seraphs, the Meeting Place of Light and Dark, the First and Last City.

We would soon discover how little we understood when we walked its liminal streets past the denizens of a thousand worlds..."

City of 7 Seraphs is a third-party Tabletop RPG campaign setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, published by Lost Spheres Publishing, centred around its namesake: Hyraeatan, the City of 7 Seraphs.

The City of 7 Seraphs is located between the twin planar energy phenomenons of the Radia and Occlusion. The first, an ethereal storm and planar vortex on the Shadow Plane that radiates a nearly limitless but hard to control source of power. This also agitates the surrounding Shadow Plane into the Occlusion, which forms in a ring around the Radia's storm. The tides of the two forces create a safe 'eye' wherein the City lies, within the otherwise deadly maelstrom, accessible only via the Lattice, a major Shadow Plane travel network of unknown origins. Both the Radia and Occlusion are highly sensitive to the general, psychic and magical natures of the City; if there's extreme unrest or a lack of balance, the intensity level of both the Radia and Occlusion should increase, resulting in catastrophic disasters.

Hyraeatan is defined and divided by the seven Seraph statues and the seven lengths of the Lattice that pass between them and interweave in the centre of the City. The Grand Walls enclose each Latticeway and protect the only entryways through the Occlusion. Each section of City behind the Walls is nearly a settlement unto itself called a District. The Districts are: Archives, Colleges, Crowns, Docks, Irons, Pacts and Orchard. The eighth area of the City stands at the centre of the statues and is called the Seraph's Ring.

The fourteen Parities of Hyraeatan are organisations possessing deep theoretical understandings of the nature of reality, their own relationship to those forces, and what potential the City has to shape the greater tapestry of existence. Tight balances exist between the groups to ensure no one group can ever outweigh the powers of another while allowing each a measure of access to the special powers afforded by the Radia and Occlusion. While this balance is never quite perfect, it does generally hold well enough for the well-being of the City.

While the City can be run as a singular campaign setting for fully planar adventures, its true goal is to create a planar metropolis that serves to link various campaign settings, be they homebrew, Paizo's official one or converted worlds from other editions of Dungeons & Dragons. The City is a capstone piece that can be laid on top of any existing campaign with minimal GM effort: it is literally hiding behind the shadows of most worlds.

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This game provides examples of:

• Abstract Eater: Rhyzala subsist on the psychic imprints exuded by other humanoids.
• Academy of Evil:
  • Endukai Chapterhouse is secretly a safehouse and training centre for an interplanar league of assassins.
  • Nalsin's House of the Fist has started training street toughs in brutal combat techniques and press-ganging a lot of oread youths to serve as muscle for successful and unscrupulous leaders in the Tailings.
• Accidental Hero: After Hyandil and her Lightbringers left Hyraeatan, for the purpose of imbalancing the City enough to cause the Occlusion to destroy it so she could return and recreate it, her plan was thwarted by the completely fortuitous appearance of the Eternal Dawning, who arrived just in time to counter the imbalance of the Lightbringers' exodus, like an act of fate.
• Acid-Trip Dimension: In the Broken Realms, cosmic laws break down, and the singular commonality between them is the consistent differences of their realities from the cosmology of the multiverse.
• Affably Evil: Simon Tempest, the observant and merciless leader of the Weavers of Fate, appear kindly, unassuming and vaguely distracted.
• The Ageless: The hellcore of some xodai sustains their body against time and age, allowing them to live forever if not killed. It is rumoured some of the very first xodai created by Nexalla still live.
• The Alcatraz: As befits a prison capable of holding exceptionally dangerous criminals, Blackblades Prison is exceptionally well-guarded and contains many subtle magical defences.
• Alien Geometries: The Infinite Spire is located on an orbiting landmass within the Schism, stretched an infinite distance away from the Schism in a way that is physically impossible.
• Alien Sea: The water in the Bay of Shadows of the Docks District shifts ships in and out of reality depending on the will of the captain and crew.
• Alien Sky: Within the Seraph's Ring the sky is nearly always lost to the shifting lights of the Radia far above.
• Alternate Timeline: At some point in the City's ancient past, two factions vied for control of the Crowns District: the New Reign and the Lightbearers. At some time (which may or may not even be static), they entered all-out war and one side or the other utilised magic so destructive and so powerful that it tore through the fabric of the dimension of time itself. The Crowns District was split into two fractures in time: one where the New Reign defeated the Lightbearers and came to rule the Crowns District, and one where the Lightbearers destroyed the Crowns District and replaced it with a dominion of their own fey kind. Natives of one fracture cannot travel into the other.
• Always Night: Nyctus, the third layer of Prima, is a night teeming with endless hunts and whispered secrets.
• And Man Grew Proud: Early in Raxsynsis' history, the House of Heights experimented with the spiritual binding force in two massive cities: the City of Heaven and Ianran, the City of Rings. This ended with a magical civil war which ended with most Eternals killed, the City of Heaven collapsing and Ianran losing the overseers who could drive its powers to their fullness. The scarcity of new divine powers, the fall of the City of Heaven, and the silence of Ianran created a myth according to which the survivors of Raxsynsis had been judged unworthy. Only the rise of other magics kept society intact. In time the people would divide into three societies, two of which try to bind the vestiges of the Eternals or piece together the arcane sciences left behind after the 'War of Heaven'. Adventurers visiting Raxsynsis are likely to become assumed that they are representatives of the ancient Eternals. Accepting this false assumption might put them at odds with the Hima and Kalbra, while denying instead risks being seen as living heresy or worse.
• Antagonistic Offspring: Aphos intended for his daughter Rysia (whom he previously turned into a vampire) to succeed him after his ascension, but after that she began to sell the secrets of vampiric immortality to the highest bidder. To this day, the Sanguine Sovereignty hasn't forgotten about Rysia's treachery.
• The Anti-Nihilist: Most Blackblades are existential nihilists, arguing that individual existence, and perhaps existence as a whole, contains no intrinsic significance. The few good-aligned Blackblades admit the pendency of the Last Moment, but argue for elevating overall social betterment before this inevitable end of all things.
• Appropriated Appellation: The name Temple of Coin was originally an insult used by members of the Sanguine Sovereignty. This amused the Temple's founder Rysia, however, and it was soon adopted.
• Arboreal Abode: The Grand Chapel of Now is a megaflora tree that has long since been hollowed out and carved into a living gallery of Divinities and Eternals.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Amsano Lom has been known to trail off mid-sentence upon spotting a new or particularly well-crafted magic item.
• Badass Teacher: PonPon Académie recruits its mentors from some fantastic walk of life. Many are retired Wardens or adventurers but it's not uncommon for other retired people of great renown to take up the position.
• Bar Brawl: Bar fights happen so often at the Vulgar Skyshark, considered the roughest tavern in the Garter, that the Wardens generally don't bother until it spills out into the streets.
• Bazaar of the Bizarre: The Grand Bazaar teems with merchants, customers and all manner of beings who provide for or prey upon both groups. Truly anything can be found in the Grand Bazaar if searched for long enough.
• Benevolent Boss: Annys Meshra, headmistress of Harvest Hill, is an outwardly severe woman dedicated to shaping the heroes Hyraeatan will need tomorrow. She is frequently found leading young adults through the Academies or watching over a student that another school found before she did.
• Bigger on the Inside: Perhaps due to the influence of fey magic, distances within the Orchard District can be even less reliable than normal for the Shadow Plane, and the stabilisation of the Seraphs only prevents the district from becoming unbound. The district is thus much larger than its walls might seem to allow.
• Bizarrchitecture: The Sewers of Hyraeatan are a labyrinthine mess of cross-laid and contradictory architecture, cluttered with remains from broken partial shadow matter or flooded by water mirrored from larger bodies than a section otherwise would have been able to contain.
• Bizarre Alien Sexes: Young ceptu exhibit many features of males of other species. As they age, they metamorphose into an egg-laying state like a female, before finally becoming a carrier that gathers fertilised eggs and gestates them in an optimally maturation environment.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Female veryx (amoxa) are bigger and possess a single set claws and a series of faint markings on their bodies that absorb magical energy; male veryx (semxi) are smaller and use their ambient magic to enhance another's mystical abilities. Both females and and males can also be member of a rare third amxi caste, who use webbing to catch prey and build structures. Each sex also produces their own kind of venom that serve them uniquely.
• Black Market: The Water Market is ruled by the Y'Obith, an aboleth criminal syndicate, and is a curious mix of criminal elements and outerplanar merchants. Neither the Constables nor Bailiffs dare to enter the Water Market.
• Blood Magic: Sanguine sorcerers developed the ability to use blood to empower spellcasting as a resource.
• Blood Sport: In the Tailings, blood sports are a popular escape from the drudgery of daily life.
• Boarding School: PonPon Académie is the most elite boarding school for the most talented and deserving children.
• Brainwashed:
  • Recruits in the Kraken gang are taken to the cavern of their master, the aboleth Eondairil, who ensures their loyalty.
  • The Blackblades employ specially trained psychics to whisper to the inmates in their prison, breaking down their personalities and instilling them with their twisted creed of destruction. When the mindbreakers determine that a prisoner has passed the Rite of Migration, the prisoner is released, ready to reenter society as a loyal Blackblades adherent.
• Burial at Sea: The dead of Hyraeatan are frozen into massive chunks of ice which are then ferried to be fused into an island of tombs floating in the Docks District.
• Chaos Architecture: The Locus of Ages is a strange combination of shifting architectures and drifting constructs.
• Circle of Standing Stones: The Iron Henges in the Irons District consist of upright dolmens capped with lintel stones, each hundreds of feet long and weighing millions of tons.
• Citadel City: Dark stone walls, no less than three storeys in height at any point, surround each of the seven major Latticeways into Hyraeatan and contain dozens of barracks. Each wall terminates in a massive dual-channel gate, which only travellers with an official writ of trade are allowed to enter.
• The City Narrows: The Archives District is a dirty, desperate, lawless place rife with danger and secrets, home to Hyraeatan's most desperate citizens. Gang wars regularly spill out into the streets, and illusionist bands rob those unfortunate enough to fall for their tricks. The locals are overwhelmingly anti-establishment, and local gangs enforce whatever laws they see fit in their own territories.
• City of Adventure: Hyraeatan has been designed with enough internal dangers and challenges to keep player characters occupied when visiting. From a high-level endgame staging area to a first level introduction campaign, the city was designed to support many different types of play. Murderous redcaps, conjured Shadowtide spawned beasts, neglected Sewer reflections or the twisting biblio-dungeons of the Archives, the arenas of the Academies' Grand Games or cross-time courtly intrigue in the Crowns District, the City never stops giving options for adventure.
• City of Canals: In the Pacts District, a canal system acts as dividing lines between the various markets and provides for the easy transport of goods and materials. The water flows from four pools, fed by small rips into the Plane of Water. Closer to the Nearring, the canal is called the Altos, and its blue waters offer pleasant boating as well as an everflowing source of drinking water. In contrast, in the Farring, the canal is known as the Palus, and its murky depths are choked with rubbish, runoff from factories and alchemical pollution.
• City of Gold: The streets of Soveria, the Gilded Heaven, is bejewelled with platinum, gold and silver.
• Clone by Conversion: The Likeness, a contagious persona that was originally a means to immortality for an unconventional member of the House of Heights, turns infectees into more copies of the Likeness. Individuals have only slight variations in appearance and personality to hint at who that copy of the Likeness used to be.
• Consummate Liar: Greaseskin Imirk is a would-be Eternal of Deception and Lies, and actually strives to make transactions based on the most outlandish claims and wild assertions. If he can successfully fool someone into a transaction under false pretenses he doesn't even mind the occasional loss of a major profit, as long as the opposite party is convinced they didn't get a good deal.
• Cool Key: Each Great Spiral mage is said to own a magical key that appears to be their only magical item. Speculations as to the key acting in proxy of large collections of artifacts or a greater magical bond are unclear.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Temple of Coin exists to enrich its membership at all costs, to profit as deeply and frequently as possible, to gain controlling interest in Creation. In time, it has acquired and re-marketed forbidden secrets, indulged in usury and simony, and accrued a virtually limitless fortune.
• Crusading Widow: The balor Ketenisse was sundered by the Priesthood of Nexalla to make new types of fiends. His lover Phyrganna was so enraged that she sought out the Sapphire Lord of the Eternal Dawning who used his command of the Virtue of Honor to bind her into a pact of mutual vengeance.
• Crystal Landscape: The crystalline trees in the Forest of Glass are made from a smooth seaglass-like material that glows a soft golden hue.
• Dark Is Evil: The judow are tainted with the blood of shadows, and are drawn toward law and evil, although a growing amount of them have taken a decided turn from evil.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Each xodai holds the essence of an imprisoned fiend inside a hellcore which is usually visible to observers, but many xodai find even contemplating evil acts incredibly difficult due to the magical nature of the abjurations bound into their transfiguration.
• Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: Judow and shadow fey can see in the dark, but their eyes are vulnerable to sunlight.
• Death World: Cricozarn's active volcanoes spew constant ash, which are kept from settling by heavy winds, blanketing the planet in a thick layer of particles. Combined with a dying distant sun, the entire planet is shrouded in darkness, which empowered the rise to power of vampires. A small number of dark-loving creatures have moved here, but they face frequent attacks from the Anlaces.
• Deity of Human Origin: All Eternals were once mortals who ascended into divinity.
• Down in the Dumps: The Tailings is occupied by cast-off detritus both physical and social. The Irons District's poor eke out a living in this neighbourhood, scrounging through scrap piles for valuables and defending their paltry homes against equally desperate rivals.
• Dream Land: The Plane of Dream is said to be woven from the dreams of all sleeping creatures.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Undreamt are among the most ancient beings in creation. They make their home in the Broken Realms, bubbling oceans where cosmic laws break down, and they were the only beings powerful enough to remain as others are destroyed outright or driven insensate by madness made physical.
• Eldritch Starship: Etheric Dreadnaughts are massive ships armed with eldritch weapons and defences that serve the starfaring neothelids and aboleths of the Continuum Deliria.
• Elemental Plane: The Elemental Planes are nearly endless seas of uniform elemental energy and matter.
• Empathic Healing: Loadlighteners are clerics dedicated to ensuring that their companions are free from harmful conditions, taking on the maladies themselves if necessary.
• Empty Shell: After being betrayed by several fellow inevitables, Broadback was broken physically and mentally, and now lives a subservient and nearly emotionless life.
• Enchanted Forest:
  • The Orchard District, specifically the Verge and Glarewood, is politically and physically unstable, with supernatural dangers and twisting landscapes that prevent anyone from feeling entirely safe.
  • Eventide Mire is a tangle of dark plants that seem to absorb light. The level of illumination is never above normal light, and at night it is always dark. There are many paths through the Eventide Mire, but none are reliable, due to the fey lords and ladies who wish to claim interesting wayfarers as prizes.
• Endless Daytime: Hyraeatan is bathed in relatively static light source of the Radia. Only the Midstreets really experience fluctuation of light and even then it is mostly random fluxes.
• Eternal Engine: The plane of the Grand Machine is a perfect clockwork world.
• The Exile:
  • Xiomorns that shirk their duties or rebel against their kin are cast out and lose the close connection to the earth that they once held; the stone does not speak to them or heed their commands, but is merely an inert substance like any other base materials.
  • Maelwyn of the Mithral Throne was exiled from the fey realm for betraying the Flowered Queen, and has claimed the Glarewood and the Verge as his recompense.
  • Lingering Whisper of the Fall is a chorus-less imentesh protean who serve the Chrysalis Covenant after being exiled by the keketar priest-kings of the Roil.
  • Lord Xiaoran, ruler of the fey Court of Dancing Flames, came from another realm far to the west, parallel to a mortal nation ruled by a pantheon called the Celestial Bureaucracy, where he fled the court of Xi Wangmu for a reason he refuses to share.
• Extra Eyes: Jarcovo masks have six eyeholes, in two rows of three, in order to accommodate its six eyes.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Dozens of eyes stare forth from every part of the Master of the Docks, many able to project arcane effects.
• The Faceless: Most judow cover their faces with heavy masks created out of artai.
• Fantastic Caste System: Traditionally, the Hands of Onus believe in a hierarchy of burdens, which they call the Ladder of Weights. This hierarchy is remarkably classist, as it puts physical labourers (who bear burdens by muscle power alone) at the bottom, middle-class professions (who bear monetary debts) at the middle, and educated professionals (who bear personal obligations, or are obliged to support the whole society) at the top.
• Fantastic Ghetto: In the Irons District's many oread ghettos, several thousand oread labourers and their families live in unnervingly identical, claustrophobic slums. Although generally seen as havens of violent crime, gem smuggling and the gray queen drug, many oread families have lived there for generations and are fiercely devoted to them. Even those who earn enough money to move out wax nostalgic about their hard youth that made them wary and tough.
• Fantastic Light Source: Glowglass, created in secret conditions under the brightest Radia emissions from both alchemy and arcane science, emits soft light in response to surrounding darkness conditions. The light, while dim, is visible from farther than the darkness of the Shadow Plane usually allows.
• Fantastic Metals: Artai is a metal specifically invented by the kytons to protect their judow creations from harmful sunlight while still allowing them to see through it.
• Feel No Pain: Rhyzala can turn off their capacity to feel pain at a whim, allowing them to remain surprisingly collected despite injury.
• Fighting for a Homeland: Centuries ago, the Daestari were driven from their homeland by the ravages of a magic-corrupting plague and have since founded the Eternal Dawning and taken up the quest to seek a way to cleanse their homeworld. Failing this, they hope to forge a new homeland worthy of their Virtues.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: Phlegethon, a layer of Hell, is dominated by the River of Blood, which is so hot with the evil of sin that it burns. Many mistake it for magma and some say it can melt stone.
• Fire Purifies: The Ashborn philosophy states for the Seed to grow to the promised perfection, the multiverse must be cleared of the Flaw. Burning away the Flaw is then the path to their goals and the Parity's primary occupation. Any obstacle to perfection's Seed, be it an unjust law, a rusted breastplate, or a corrupt organisation, should be fed to the flame.
• Floral Theme Naming: Blighted rhyzala often name themselves after plants or herbs, favouring beautiful and dangerous plants.
• Flying Seafood Special: Ceptu are a species of jellyfish capable of telekinetically moving over water and breathing air.
• Food Chains:
  • Visitors are well advised not to eat anything at Morningtide's Requiem, since fey food offers no nourishment and can eventually transform visitors into fey themselves.
  • The food of the Bright Lands is exquisite, so much so that the first time a creature eats of it they risk becoming trapped by the beauty of the land.
  • Feastlayers' food is far more delicious than it is possible for mundane food to be; those who eat it have been known to starve to death, unable to stomach anything less perfect ever again.
• Fun with Palindromes: Mirrorkin names tend to be palindromes of 3 or 4 syllables.
• Gender-Blender Name: Judow names are all gender neutral, instead of being different for different genders.
• Genetic Memory: Veryx carry the memories of the previous members of the species.
• Genius Loci: Mr Wallach, the absent owner of Wondrous Wonders is not absent, he is the shop. A rare variety of mimic, Mr Wallach changes into the shape of a store, or coats the inside of an empty establishment, forming everything inside.
• Ghost City: The Annex of Avarice leads to an abandoned shaitan city. For the past several generations, miners have been demolishing the abandoned structures and shipping the magical material back to Hyraeatan for use in other projects. Why the city was abandoned so long ago is unknown, leading some to whisper that cannibalising a cursed city will one day have dire consequences.
• Giant Corpse World: The Mounts of Muspell are thought to be the broken body of a giant so great not even the titans knew the whole of it.
• Giant Spider: The veryx are a species of human- or halfling-sized arachnids.
• Gladiator Games: The Bloody Chisel hosts gladiator fights every five days. These bouts allow aspiring champions to earn a small measure of fame and a tiny slice of the evening's betting proceeds.
• God-Emperor: The minor Eternal Arhendue is said to rule over Valbarise and the Hima nation of Raxsynsis, who worship her.
• God Needs Prayer Badly: Divinities need mortal belief to thrive and grow.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Axu-Refli is an Abyssal realm that worships an Eternal named Refli. It is said that she was so cruel and evil as to flood her world with magic to serve her will, regardless of the cost to her subjects. The Sphere became so saturated with her dark power that the Material World could no longer bear the weight of the spiritual investiture and the world slid wholecloth into the Abyss. Refli has continued playing the part of a queen and glutting her priests and sycophants with Abyssal power.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Baelsion is a yawning absence of darkness and chill, where prisoners most often become insensate or freeze from long periods of frigid isolation.
• Heel–Race Turn: The judow were originally created by the kytons and served as their champions in the Wonder Wars. However, they were far more human than the kytons expected, and a great deal of their soldiers began to wonder about what they were doing and why, before the majority of the judow claimed their freedom.
• Heinz Hybrid: Some posit the ancestors of the shadow fey seized upon Shadow's mutability to produce offspring with other species. The shifting nature of the plane makes offspring possible between creatures that should not have been possible in a more stringent reality.
• He Knows Too Much: Historians have learned that focusing on the Blackblades' origins invites frightening visits from grim, heavy-handed bruisers who suggest, none too gently, to cease asking the wrong sorts of questions, as well as accidents that coincidentally destroy their research.
• Hellhole Prison: The Blackblades Prison is operated with no pretensions of rehabilitation or eventual reintegration. It is a place for punishment and forgetting, where criminals serve their time and are released as empty, hollow-eyed shells.
• Hero Academy: Harvest Hill's purpose is to train the heroes of the City's future before they were needed, with the aid of the Foreseen who seek the seeds of future heroes.
• Humans Are Not the Dominant Species: Humans in Hyraeatan seemed to walk a little lighter than elsewhere. Of all the great planar metropolises the City of 7 Seraphs holds no singular species majority. Most human lineages in the city are descended from servitor stock, brought by the vampires of the Sanguine Sovereignty.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: The goods Marabets value the most is novel prey: creatures they can release and hunt down for sport, with the highest price paid for sentience.
• Hybrid Monster: The ai-go appear to have been mi-go that have been repeatedly crossed with other aberrant strains such as cerebral scourges and neh-thalggus.
• An Ice Person: Either by design or magical interference, a lich can become infused with freezing cold as well as unholy energy, turning into a frost lich.
• Identity Amnesia:
  • The xiomorn exile Greengem's past, name and crime were all wiped from his mind upon his exile.
  • When the man known as Peter of the Lantern wandered into Hyraeatan, he was devoid of any memories of his prior life except his faith, saying only that he thought he belonged here. Efforts to repair his mind all have failed.
  • The android known as 101 arrived in Hyraeatan on a voidship of unknown design. He does not remember who he was, only that he was here to destroy something.
• Immortality Inducer: The city of Archenstone is home to an artefact that prevents people from dying, turning it into the safest place in Hanar. Magical enhancement, abjurations, and transmutative effects prevent nearly any force outside of old age from killing anyone.
• Immortality Seeker:
  • The House of Heights's central effort is to achieve various forms of immortality. They often rapidly engineer environmental, arcane or social circumstances around a member's pending transformation, and abandon the effort, if it is a failure.
  • A small contingent of the Steamwalkers has never truly given up on the goal of energetic immortality and are currently conducting their cutting edge research in the facility of Neo-Locus One.
• Indentured Servitude: Steep fines are the universal punishment for transgressions in the Archives, and those unable to pay must work off their fines by serving as indentured servants of the district.
• Inhumanly Beautiful Race: According to the aesthetics of most sentient species, rhyzala are beautiful, almost unearthly so.
• Interservice Rivalry: The leaders of both the Sanguine Sovereignty and the Church of the Faith Devoured were all sired directly by (or at least claim to have been sired directly by) Aphos himself. Despite this blurry distinction between the two, there has been growing tension simmering out of the public eye and the emergence of subtle ideological fault-lines between them, primarily upon the issue of who most directly represents and speaks for Aphos. Aphos himself rarely intervenes, and likely sees the conflict as a natural and beneficial reflection of his philosophy.
• Keeper of Forbidden Knowledge: The Bookbinders go to incredible lengths to gather knowledge, including maintaining a massive espionage network stretching through the other Parities and far beyond Hyraeatan itself. They espouse a careful viewpoint of control, seeing knowledge as a dangerous weapon whose access has to be earned, but assert that all knowledge must be kept and preserved, instead of destroyed.
• Klingon Promotion: Risobeth has led the Marabets for the last hundred years, since assassinating the previous leader. Several attempted coups have sought to overthrow her, but she is both cunning and ruthless, and those who have risen against her were promptly executed.
• Knight Templar: Crusaders from the Heavens have shown up on more than one occasion seeking to punish Hyraeatan for its 'hubris' in emulating the angels of the Seven Mounts. The assumption that Shadow is an evil and not a balance has lead to endless acts of bias and intolerance by the Heavens.
• Knowledge Broker:
  • If enough coin, goods or knowledge is offered, Traduce can relate nearly any of the City's current rumours or secrets to be had.
  • An information broker known throughout the Blackwreath, Yix-Nix claims to be the most knowledgeable ears in the City. He is notoriously willing to sell the secrets he encounters, leading some Parities to use him to spread misinformation or casual secrets to implement plans.
• Land of Faerie: The Bright Lands is a colourful and unpredictable fey realm, vast and beautiful island in a shining sea. Fairy ships fly across the sky andsail over the surrounding seas to trade, and magical portals in the highlands at its centre lead to mountains and plains in several fey realms. The food of the Bright Lands is exquisite, so much so that the first time a creature eats of it they risk becoming trapped by the beauty of the land. Some regions of the Bright Lands feature pockets of slow or fast time, where time might pass dozens of times as quickly or dozens of times slower.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: Hyraeatan is located between the planar twin energy phenomenons of the Radia (Light) and Occlusion (Dark). Both the Radia and Occlusion are highly sensitive to the general, psychic and magical natures of the City. If the City or a particular District or even neighbourhood is experiencing extreme unrest or a lack of balance (dominance by a single Parity, invasion, etc) the intensity level of both Radia and Occlusion should increase, resulting in devastating shadowtides or Radia storms.
• Literal Split Personality: Divided shades are vigilantes who cleave off an aspect of their identity as a separate, quasi-real creature by convincing enough others that these aspects are not the same person and drawing on the power of the Shadow Plane. This allows them to publicly serve the Descendants' interests while simultaneously seeing to their secret agendas.
• Living Ship: The Undreamt's bioships are living products of fleshgrafting gone mad.
• Luxury Prison Suite: When a powerful citizen is too esteemed to turn over to the Blackblades, but too dangerous to be left free or exiled, they are banished to the Trackless Estates. Here, a potent curse ensures that the damned never leave, although the lavishness of the estates inspires a few to stop trying.
• MacGuffin Super-Person: Niphuni is rumoured to be able to remove the fractured temporal condition once acquired. Both Queen Aphorasia and the High Adjutant are said to be recruiting genie binders and lamp mages in the hopes to eventually entrap Niphuni and shift the balance of power in the Breachway.
• Mad Scientist: Cruel or sadistic doctors in the Grand Sanitarium are assigned to the Deepthought Catacombs, where they pursue theories of mortal psychoses and brain function, reinforcing each other's cruelties with platitudes about how the suffering they inflict is a necessary evil, and that their unpleasant pursuits are burdens they alone are strong enough and noble enough to bear. Occasionally, they achieve truly significant advancements in psychiatric care, but most of their patients (usually incurable ones) die in confusion and pain.
• Mage Tower: The Locus of Pyres is the prime nexus of arcane magic and brings forth the raw power of the inner planes. Mythic characters empowered at the Loci of Pyres are most often archmagi, overmagi, scions of high sorcery, and a portion of the worldsingers.
• Magical Society: Dozens of magical guilds assign jobs to specialist mages across the world of Hanar and vie for the approval of the Magi Council. Their members are regularly evaluated for potential and relative rank to one another. Ranked mages are pushed into ever greater missions of complexity, difficulty, and reward.
• Magic Enhancement: It is believed that an ancient species known only as the Elders altered the peoples of Thaon to make them into living arcane weapons. After a hard-won rebellion, they gained freedom but retained a surprising amount of lore regarding the lineages and heritages that the Elders cultivated within them.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Hyraeatan is designed to be useful in connecting your existing campaigns to one another and to a larger world of planar adventure. Effectively, the City and its lore will simply lay on top of the games you already run. There isn't much content produced for Pathfinder, added by a third-party publisher, or presented in Dungeons & Dragons that doesn't make sense when presented in the context of the City of 7 Seraphs. The City is always just a Bright Portal away from your old home game, or a repaired length of Lattice from another new setting from your favourite company; the Lattice's mysterious origins allow its history to be fitted to an existing game and simply be an ancient forgotten or secret method of travel.
• The Maze:
  • The Labyrinth is a series of interconnected mazes and puzzle-rooms hidden beneath the streets of the Archives, believed to be the entrance to the greatest Bookbinder library, although some suspect the whole thing might be a decoy. The Labyrinth is so expansive and treacherous that none has reached its end, and its walls shift randomly, making it unmappable.
  • Isonus, a layer of the Vile Geometries, has been described by visitors as a massive metallic labyrinth in varying states of corrosion and disrepair with occasional spaces as fresh as new blooded surgical steel.
• Mega City: Issovhol is a mega-metropolis dominating its planet's largest continent. Due to this prominent presence, both the continent and world are known by the name as well.
• Military Academy: Those who study the art of war at PonPon Académie are immersed in punishing physical challenges and taught tactics. While expected to be competent fighters, they are being primed to become officers and military geniuses, not grunts.
• Military Maverick: Nomus Rhen's barracks are considered some of the more lively and raucous among the Army of the Wall. His men have a reputation as troublemakers for Irons District teahouses, bars and the pleasure dens of the Verge, and are often found at the heart of brawls or in a Warden's shackles. However, what he lacks in discipline, Nomus makes up for in tactical genius and has fended off more than one kyton assault and held true during the Incursion.
• Military School: Kiredge School of Martial Mastery is a martial training academy where troubled youth are reformed and eager soldiers trained. Kiredge and his staff have brought a greater level of skill to the guards that protect Hyraeatan and keep its worst criminals in check.
• Mobile Kiosk: Instead of shops, merchants in the Water Market sell goods right out of their open-topped watercraft. Each night these boats disperse, only to gather again at dawn the next day. No street or merchant location is ever the same.
• Mordor:
  • In the Schism, the unreality of the City's edge blurs into the temporal maelstrom that caused the fracture that divided the Crowns into two Alternate Timelines. The two fractures collide in ever-shifting temporal storms, where buildings exist in one moment and then vanish in a phosphorescent explosion of memories and would-have-been history. Even the rare magically reinforced buildings and unusual sites that do not disappear flicker and snap back and forth between alternate possible futures, leaving the Schism a dangerous place to visit.
  • Since the War of Arrival, the city of Mennathus on the planet Aldra and the surrounding lands have been cursed with a rotting miasma that weakens magic and renders life barren and sickly. The Daestari of the Arrival speculate they brought the ancient plague of their lost homeworld with them.
• Mouth of Sauron: Salvis Zorbenson is the Foreseen's public representative on the Parity Council, but the real one is Elshien, his intelligent golden topaz greatsword. Salvis makes quite a show of going through sheafs of paper while the sword instructs his actions.
• Mushroom Man: Rhyzala are independent humanoid extensions of a massive mycorrhizal network entwined with time itself. Their 'organs' are actually fungal cells grown into specialised forms at specific points of their body.
• Mutual Kill: When the kaiju Vriltosk the Suneater attacked the Docks District, the vanara hero Hoopaka G'crit delivered the final blow to the beast but lost his life in the process.
• My Greatest Failure: The Eternal Dawning views the exile of Nexalla, a foundling girl who strived to master all of their virtues (which was considered taboo), as their greatest mistake. Nexalla's vengeance was terrible and her magic poisoned even their homeworld and gods themselves. The shame they felt for their rejection was wide and altered their views: the Daestari swore that they would never again to cast out one willing to learn their ways.
• Mysterious Past: The Blackblades have expended a suspicious amount of effort toward masking their beginnings. Libraries with information about their early history have burned down in suspicious fires, and civic records about their formation have mysteriously disappeared.
• Nay-Theist: The judow race hardly concern themselves with religion, as they can clearly remember their own genesis at the hands of the kytons.
• Neural Implanting: The Children of Perfection specialise in mental enhancements, carving away memories and skills to replace them with superior versions.
• Night of the Living Mooks: In times of peril, the Icegrave Enclave reanimates the dead in the Icetomb to help defend the city.
• No Biological Sex: Rhyzala have no sexual organs and do not reproduce sexually.
• No Name Given: The Seer of Worlds and the Debtholder are only known by their titles.
• Not Afraid to Die: The judow, rhyzala and veryx do not generally have a fear of death:
  • The judow's desire to be a part of something greater than themselves makes them completely willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater purpose, never letting consequences stop them. To a judow, death is simply the completion of a mission.
  • Rhyzala have a keen sense of self-preservation, but ultimately know that the 'first bloom' will happen and send them back in time.
  • Veryx see the approach of death as an inevitable step in their maturation.
• Not Always Evil: Unlike in the official Pathfinder campaign setting, it is entirely possible for non-evil vampires to exist in the City of 7 Seraphs.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: The Descendants of Dream have a reputation as scatterbrained and unreliable when assigned to Warden duty—an act some maintain intentionally to cover the fact that they sometimes assign saboteurs as Wardens.
• Older Than They Look: Some speculate that children in the Endukai Chapterhouse are given a form of immortality that ceases ageing and causes them to look far younger than their real age.
• Ominous Fog: The Night Souk is shrouded in an Occlusion manifestation of black fog and sees the full light of the Radia. Glowglass lanterns and street lights provide flickering light for those who enter its claustrophobic alleys and lanes.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Surtur waits with his burning blade to stride to the Liminus and cleave the Lattice from Yggdrasil and shatter all of creation.
• The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The Great Sanitarium is operated by the mysterious Administrators, who decide who will be admitted and who will be released. The Administration Suite is inaccessible to most people, as its doors usually lead back out in a manner that defies logic. Although some staff claim to have seen a white-coated Administrator in passing or at a distance down a long corridor, such sightings are generally deemed fabrications.
• Organic Bra: Rhyzala 'wear' trains of tendrils and organic loincloths, which are actually psychoactive components of their skin that assume roughly clothes-like shapes.
• Organ Theft: The Weavers of Fate is a sect of the Foreseen that trades in illegal fate eater organs.
• Our Angels Are Different: The Jeweled Angels are people dedicated to one of the Eight Daestari Virtues. Each individual's pursuit of their chosen virtue is unique. They are not angels in the traditional Pathfinder sense, but similar enough that many unfamiliar can't tell the difference.
• Our Gods Are Different: Divine beings in the City of 7 Seraphs are divided into one of two categories: Eternals or Divinities. The Eternals, aspects of the first Sources of creation, came first and cultivate a pure expression of their related forces. The Divinities arose later, congealing from the spiritual residues of creation. They are the beliefs and dreams of men given form and require such belief to thrive and grow. An elusive third group of beings is said to exist, the so-called Zenith Powers, who are said to balance the divide of Eternal and Divinity and have aspects of both.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The vampires of Hyraeatan have expanded the scope of traditional vampire powers and weaknesses, including alternate forms such as the dracostrigoi or blood-wyrms bred from an original stock of drakes.
• Perpetual Smiler: Mr Vacher's smile never wavers, even in the midst of haggling or fighting.
• Perpetual Storm: The Radia is a storm caused by the convergence of the Liminal Planes that endlessly bleeds multiversal energy.
• Phantom Thief: Inandi Crown-Taker's heists are rare and legendary, but despite her infamy, she has never been proven guilty or caught in the act. She continues to be invited to perform everywhere in the city because anywhere she appears generally makes more from the crowds she draws than they lose from the thefts that happen in her wake.
• Pirate Girl: Hildolei is the mostly-retired captain of the famous privateer orrery ship Forever Dusk, and her manor holds trophies from her many raids.
• Plasma Cannon: A plasma bombard uses an alchemical charge to fire a bolt of plasma.
• Pleasure Island: In Ssybellis, the Abyssal realm of Yssirys, soft golden light seems to pour from an unseen sun and a vibrant rainforest is nearly choked with beautiful flowering vines and creepers. However, if a creature tries to leave without Yssirys' permission, the creepers hold fast with an entangling grip that exudes a dimensional anchor effect and prevents most visitors from ever leaving.
• Polluted Wasteland: The Irons District's skies are perpetually sooty and many of its waterways are tainted with industrial waste.
• Portal Network:
  • The Lattice is a planar highway of indescribable size and complexity. Its creators or early discoverers made planar portals and arranged them in plazas of linked locations that dot the lengths of the Lattice. Numerous worlds have portals linking them to the Lattice in this manner.
  • At any given time at least a dozen or so portals (active or dormant) exist across the Pacts District. They offer magical access to Hyraeatan from all manner of other planes, realities and locations. These portals are by no means consistent, and though one may provide passage from a specific plane, the same portal will almost certainly not connect to that same plane when it reopens.
• Precursors: Another civilisation predated the vampires on Cricozarn, and their remnants can be found scattered throughout the plains. Their relics seem to predate both the darkness and the cloud of ash that now cover Cricozarn.
• Private Military Contractors: Walder Heimar runs a lucrative mercenary operation, offering soldiers to material and extraplanar battlefields in exchange for blood offerings and slaves.
• Propaganda Machine: The Temple of Coin heavily invests in its public relations office that generously stretches the truth to market them as 'the devils you know' and other Parities as not benevolent as they seem.
• Proud Merchant Race: The kasatha who moved to Hyraeatan have adopted trade and parity as their new spiritual calling. For them, every transaction is a prayer, every coin earned is a blessing, and a deal which benefits both sides uplifts the soul.
• Proud Scholar Race: Zeians are a curious people with a culture firmly rooted in seemingly endless exploration. Whether it's interacting with new cultures on recently found worlds or researching to find out about the people who used to thrive on dead ones, Zeians live to seek knowledge. It is specifically knowledge that has been lost, forgotten, or hidden that truly lights a spark in their eyes.
• Puppet King: The Delso of Thaon support a nominal monarchy, but are in effect ruled entirely by their bloodclans.
• Ragnarök Proofing: The city of Ianran on Raxsynsis stands empty in near immaculate preservation as it stood at the end of the War of Heaven.
• Red Light District: Bars, brothels, powder dens, and more all cluster in the Garter, because inside its borders all are legal. The Master of the Docks prefers to keep the vice confined in one place rather than fight it everywhere.
• Reincarnation: During the history of Hyraeatan, when the tenders of the Elder Grove found themselves lacking for warriors, they visited old battlefields and magically implored the souls of the fallen to reincarnate to defend the City.
• La Résistance: In Issovhol, human advocates that wish to see an end to draconic rule have begun a separatist movement. The human separatist force has successfully cordoned off the southeastern segment of the mega-city with the aid of power ancient magic meant to control evil dragons.
• Ret-Gone: In their attempt to defeat the Lightbearers, the leader of the New Reign enacted a powerful ritual intended to obliterate its leader Aphorasia in body and soul. In one fracture of history, Aphorasia does not exist, and yet in the other fracture she is still teetering on the verge of becoming a Parity as she was untold ages ago. For this reason, no historical record names Aphorasia either within her fracture or beyond, as if her identity had been erased from history.
• The Runaway: Many of the Anarchs' members are scions of the Pacts District merchants and Temple of Coins officers looking to evade being corralled into the family businesses or shipped off to a College's District Academy.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Mirrorkeep's aristocrat-mages are all but above the law, their wealth affording them the freedom to use any magic they see fit, simply settling the fines for any property damage or injuries they've caused.
• Sealed in a Person-Shaped Can: Each xodai birth group is created by sundering an imprisoned fiend's essence into six pieces, which are then contained within the spiritual essence and form of six people, who are reborn as xodai. Abjuration woven into their being protected their essence from the influence of this internalised evil. In time the xodai must come to terms with their duality and the contradiction of sustaining evil to contain it completely.
• Seers: The Foreseen use their precognitive skills to foresee dangers to Hyraeatan and advise the Parity Council about the future.
• Separated at Birth: Galyn the Lame and Oswin the Mad are completely unaware that they are half-siblings separated at birth.
• Serial Killer: The two beings currently called Vacher and Wallach are a pair of serial killers who have preyed upon the Pacts District for decades.
• Servant Race: The judow race was originally engineered by the kytons as scouts and spies for them in the Wonder Wars.
• Shining City: Allialla, the City at the End of Dream, is said to be among the most beautiful things in creation. The poets of Lumina and Phyllia strive to remember its shimmering towers and eternal sunsets to the point of Falling in frustration.
• Shrouded in Myth: Kapillarix the Scriptkeeper is dedicated to defending the Bookbinders' hidden libraries in the Archives from looters. He resets traps, bolsters wards, spreads false rumours, and creates decoy cache sites laden with considerably more deadly traps. Few in the Archives have survived a meeting with him, and many believe the Scriptkeeper is nothing more than an urban legend invented to scare the weak away from the vaults.
• Sinister Geometry: The layers of the Vile Geometries, home of the kytons, are dominated by geometrical shapes: spheres (Globus), cubes (Quantus) and triangles (Trinus).
• The Slacker: Byvaxa is officially chief of Hyraeatan's interplanar messengers and decides how they will be trained, but she ignores this duty and spends her time seeking further forms of transcendence.
• Soul Jar: Anshuri is an amulet bearing the soul of an ancient priestess of a Prime World.
• The Speechless: A veryx's mouth cannot speak most languages normally, and they rely on a low-level telepathic projection to relay complex thoughts.
• Spiritual Successor: The design team of City of 7 Seraphs has cited Planescape as a major influence. Hyraeatan, a planar hub metropolis at the literal centre of all realities, is Sigil with the serial numbers filed off. Colin McComb, co-creator of Planescape and writer of Planescape: Torment, is one of the designers working on City of 7 Seraphs.
• The Spook:
  • No is a sly creature of infinite secrets. While undoubtedly not their real name, No is the only answer they're known to give when asked to introduce themselves. A master of disguise, it's said their true face has never been seen.
  • Oriaseph, the King in Sackcloth, who has been leading the Sanguine Sovereignty since its beginning, has intentionally muddied his past with legend and conflated younger members' identities with deceased elder members as it suits him and his god.
  • Aphora, twin of Aphos and founder of the Steamwalkers, is an enigma, as she vanished mere months after founding it. Whatever her fate, her motives are as unknown now as they were when she still walked the streets of the City.
• Stable Time Loop: In some impossibly far away future, on one of the countless planes and worlds, a form of fungus will have reached a form of transcendence, stretching beyond the boundaries of both space and time. Its rhizomes stretch back throughout infinite alternate futures, presents and pasts, seeking to ensure its eventual coming into being as the entity it desires to be. Only in the incredibly diverse blending of psychic imprints of cosmopolitan places like Hyraeatan can parts of its rhizomes separate from the inconceivably complex entity and shape themselves into rhyzala, capable of meaningful interaction with three-dimensionally thinking beings.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Invarra Ciel, member of the Steamwalkers, has been involved with Alissa Starbow, member of the Bookbinders, in a secret affair for over a year. Each gifts the other with small 'pillow victories' to alleviate suspicion of their trysts. In addition to the dim view their Parities would take of the relationship, things are made worse by the fact that neither of their wives know about the liaisons.
• Straw Nihilist: The Blackblades promise no hope or salvation. Things exist to cease existing, so says the only scripture the Blackblades recognise. They stand and wait, their hands on their well-used weapons, for their critics to meet their own ends. Their philosophy is grim, all-encompassing, and dreadfully final.
• Superhero School: Lineage Academy is where children born into families with generational powers enroll in order to curate and carefully cultivate their unique lineages.
• The Symbiote:
  • Some ceptu enter symbiotic relationships with marine creatures like coral and crustaceans, turning them into armour.
  • Veryx can enter a symbiotic state with humanoids known as semoxa, and are magically shaped to defend the host and augment their health.
• Tailor-Made Prison: Some of the clusters in Blackblades Prison are specially designed for certain types of prisoners. The walls, floors and ceilings of Cluster F are impermeable to incorporeal or extraplanar travel, and Cluster G contains a permanent mind fog effect to make prisoners there perpetually pliable.
• Teleport Interdiction: Due to Aldra's constantly shifting nature, the effort of teleportation is incredibly difficult to execute successfully in this world. Casters and psychics often find themselves torn at by the energies of the Riftwall and emerge wounded physically or mentally.
• Teleport Spam: The world of Aldra periodically shifts through time and space, manifesting seemingly at random throughout the multiverse.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: The Ruby Order (corresponding to the virtue of passion) has often strained against the more rigid traditions of the Eternal Dawning precepts but despite these tensions is considered a necessary place to include those who otherwise might struggle with more demanding virtues.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Efforts to study the Riftwall magically often end up with negative effects on the viewer or the minds of those trying to interact in other ways.
• Thicker Than Water: For the most part, shadow fey society revolves around position and family. Each family's reputation is held as a whole and while outliers and standouts are acknowledged they often times elevate or decrease the standing of their kin regardless of actual intentions. This leads to even the most selfish members of their society taking vested interests in the actions of other family members and makes distancing oneself from the desires of parents, grandparents and even older generations somewhat challenging.
• Thin Dimensional Barrier: So great is the Radia's power that it strains the boundaries between planes and bleeds the energies it interacts with from across the entire multiverse into weather-like effects throughout the City of 7 Seraphs.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: The Crowns District, except for Time's Gate, suffers from dramatic temporal disruption and is divided into two distinct divergences in history, trapped in a war for dominance over the City's future. When a creature enters the Breachway or Schism of Crowns District, they are randomly deposited in one of the two possible time periods the district is divided into.
• Torture Technician:
  • Mindbreakers are Blackblades dedicated to mental devastation. Consummate interrogators and torturers, mindbreakers most often apply their talents in the Blackblades' Prison, extracting confessions from prisoners and leading them to the truths offered by the Blackblades.
  • Etalix believes that all life ends in twitching agony whether one is free to die as they choose or subjugated and imprisoned. His routine as a jailer was designed to drive this point home to his captives through any means at his disposal, and he relished in breaking a prisoner such that they would embrace and relish the despair and agony of their own isolation and hopelessness as he does.
• Transhuman: The Chrysalis Covenant seeks to harness the power of the Radia to change Hyraeatan and its people into new and advantageous forms.
• Trans Nature: The female half-orc Zinasha Alkaria didn't begin her life as one, but rumored as a male human. Most assume that at some point she'll end up an orc or another variety of half-blooded race entirely.
• Tree Top Town: The Silver Heights is a series of sprawling estates, vineyard and villas in the treetops of the Verge. Of elven and fey design, they do no harm to the trees from which they grow.
• Truce Zone:
  • The war between the New Reign and Lightbearers is physically incapable of spilling out of the Crowns District. Time's Gate is seen as a neutral ground, governed by the independent Exile Council, who has gone to great lengths to negotiate peace between the factions.
  • If Marabets and Anlaces need to deal with each other, they generally do so in Port Cricozarn, as it is considered neutral territory.
• Underwater City: The Undertow is a ceptu settlement, submerged off the coast of Hyraeatan's Docks District.
• Unreliable Narrator: A lot of the lore of the City of 7 Seraphs is couched with terms like perhaps, speculated or assumed. This is a deliberate choice of design to reflect both the quasi-real influences of the Plane of Shadow and the unstable magics of the Radia.
• Vampires Are Rich: Early in Hyraeatan's history, Aphos ensconced its vampires into high society.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: Candidates for xodai transfiguration are usually those who have been impacted personally by a fiend and they see the Rite of Sundering as a form of vengeance. Like many who seek vengeance, few xodai truly know what to do after achieving their goals. As a result of this strange and abrupt fulfillment, many suffer a period of doubt or confusion after the change.
• Void Between the Worlds: The Void is the space between Spheres and the Planes, where no emergent will has attempted to assert itself. Without the divine influence the Void has no manifest Union and cannot present consistent reality. This expanse is ancient and nebulous, often inimical to unprotected life. Ships with magical augmentation can sail this space between worlds and stars but rarely present consistent accounts of their experiences.
• Walking Wasteland: Cally is a rare creature whose very presence causes structures to fail catastrophically. When she walks down a street, cobblestones pop out of the ground, foundation-stones crumble, and water pipes burst. None of these events ever harm Cally directly, as her curse also affords her supernatural protection. Cally takes no action to cause these disasters, but she's dimly aware that she's the cause.
• Warrior Heaven: The Endless Fields of Valhalla are the shining reward of the Eihnar—the glorious dead who fought for passion and freedom, falling as they defended their homes and loved ones on their own terms.
• Weakened by the Light: The judrai are able to withstand only minutes of exposure to light before burning away into nothingness.
• Wetware CPU: Cognos is an arcane computer made from an astonishing variety of brain matter harvested from millions of specimens and powered by transposed and surgically-altered flesh. It bristles with the wretched remains of mortals who either crossed the kytons and were integrated into it, or gave themselves willingly as components to be welded into a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Rhyzala do not die of old age. However, at one point, they feel the urge to be extracted. The rhyzala returns to a crowd and vanishes as inexplicably as they entered the world. Rhyzala that do not heed the call find that their minds deteriorate, as the strain of having to live in a three-dimensional reality erodes their mind, not unlike dementia.
• Wizarding School: The Academies neighbourhood of the Colleges District is home to magical schools that train promising freeschoolers into scholars, mages and other professions.
• World of Chaos: The Roil is a mad sphere of forming and collapsing reality representing perfect chaos.
• Wretched Hive: Port Cricozarn is the only place on Cricozarn accustomed to visitors, and is still quite dangerous due to the lack of real governance, though no one travels to Cricozarn unprepared for danger. Many come to Cricozarn to make illicit or unpalatable deals away from Hyraeatan. The other cities are extremely hostile to visitors, particularly the City of Crossed Blades.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Zynehallia hails from a region of the Shadow Plane parallel to the planet Akasaat in the Aethera star system. She found a lost fragment of the Lattice that pointed her toward Hyraeatan, but when she tried returning home to rescue her family, she found that the twisting ways of Shadow seem to fight against her.
• You Killed My Father: Ish Greybane, scarred by lingering ancestral memory of her grandmother's tortures at the hands of Gorrobreth the Dirge Eternal, is an expert kyton hunter.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The Radia's energies increase the instability of the Shadow Plane's native quasi-reality outside the influence of the Seraph's Ring. Creatures entering the Farring, at the extreme of the Seraphs' stabilisation, in small numbers are torn apart by their own unconscious thoughts made real or their own existence becomes dissolved into meaningless abstractions. Large groups in telepathic links can sometimes stabilise the Farring enough to travel it, as long as they can remain in common purpose.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: The Temple of Coin considers letting a debtor die and journey into the afterlife to be forfeiting their payment. Instead, their souls are trapped and crafted into specifically-designed haunts, and are only allowed to pass on once they have worked enough to fully pay back the debt.

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