Sunday, October 13, 2019

The Burning Throne

art by Gayle Mandle and Julia Mandle
The Dirge of Urazya 'zine (last print copy available herepdfs here) features twenty worldbuilding prompts to help you create your version of the setting before you begin play. 

I've been posting the answers to the prompts that we used in our games using Urazya as a setting. I'd love to see other people post their creations as well; this could be a rich vein to mine, with lots of sharing, borrowing, and remixing. If you do post some of your stuff, link me to it, please! Maybe we could even get a public wiki going. Let a thousand Urazyas bloom and all that.


Last time I did a religion in my Urazya campaign; this week I'm doing a warlock patron inspired by the picture above: Two fiends from the netherworld prepare to make bloody war against each other. Who are they? What is the cause of their enmity?

The Burning Throne
  • On a night five years ago, the sleep of many residents of Urazya was interrupted by a dream of the Burning Throne, an emblem of law and order that took the form of a baroque ceremonial chair wrapped in coils of raging flame.
  • The Burning Throne did not speak, but those who dreamed of it understood its message without the need for words. The Throne christened all who dreamed of it as light-bringers who will help usher in a new age of order, stability, and law in Urazya.
  • As word of the Dream of the Throne spread throughout the land, it became a symbol of hope for those who crave stability, unity, and progress.
  • The ideas that the Throne represents are seductive in a world so often shaped by the chaos and destruction left by the Global War. Many of the adherents of the Throne’s ideology are more than willing to trade a measure of liberty to achieve its ideals. 
  • The Burning Throne is not considered a god and is not worshiped in any conventional sense. It is regarded as an idea possessing cosmic power or as an underlying principle that gives shape to the universe. 
  • However, devotees who pledge themselves to the Burning Throne sometimes find themselves gifted with supernatural power to exercise on the Throne’s behalf. Those who have made a pact with the Burning Throne feel that they serve a force of law and order that exists outside of fickle divinity and human frailty.
  • In reality, the Burning Throne is a guise adopted by an archdevil to encourage the violence of fascism and imperialism in Urazya. Posing as a principle allows the devil to move Urazya toward political and military conflict.
  • Some of the original dreamers who first beheld the Burning Throne view themselves as righteous conquerors who are permitted to use warfare, brutality, and oppression as necessary tools to achieve law and order in the disconnected Borderlands, the savage Devastation Zones, and the oft-fractious Capital.
  • These would-be conquerors style themselves the Scions of the Throne. Each sees themselves as the chosen one who will unite sundered Urazya into a grand empire. Each believes it is their destiny to be crowned emperor or empress of a glorious, continent-spanning nation.
  • Of course, this means that the Scions of the Throne--and the fanatical warbands they are assembling--will inevitably clash in open war against each other as their competing visions for Urazya’s future come into conflict.