Krevborna is centrally located on a continent called Urazya. If you need to understand where these nations sit in relation to each other, imagine a map of Eurasia; I’m confident you will be able to figure out where the following countries should be placed.
The detail below will be sparse by design; Krevborna is the main event, this is all just background flavor--with the added opportunity for Game Masters to expand with their own material, if they want.
Yre
Yre is a green isle of bogs, hills, and deep forests at the northwest extremity of Urazya. The island is a patchwork of warring clans, some of which remain pagan despite the best efforts of proselytizing monks and priests from the Western Church.
Language: Kurgic
Albitza
The White Isle of Albitza is a land of perpetual rain and drear south of Yre. The Middle Kingdom of Albitza seeks to conquer the Northlands and the Wolflands to unite the island into one nation.
Language: Albitzish
Narske
Narske’s cold northern climate and near-perpetual snow has made its populace resilient and bold. Unable to sustain themselves on agriculture alone, sailors from Narske are much-feared as raiders who pillage the coasts of other nations.
Language: Narskan
Rhus
Once the mightiest empire of Urazya, Rhus has been reduced to a magically tainted badlands. It is only home to roving monstrosities and once-human abominations. Krevborna’s royal family was originally an offshoot of Rhus’s rulers. Rhus is due north of Krevborna.
Language: Rhuski
The Khanlands
The Khanlands are a seemingly endless expanse of steppes flowing east from the borders of Rhus. It is the domain of horse-riding nomadic tribes whose leaders are all said to be descended from a single legendary warlord.
Language: Khandic
The Ustalecht Paladinate
The Ustalecht Paladinate is a confederacy of states west of the Vespermark that consider themselves the rightful heirs of the Eastern Church’s authority. Each state is ruled by a “Lord Paladin,” a knight elected by the resident noble families. Despite the name, not every paladin of Ustalecht is noble or pious. The Paladinate is collectively one of Krevborna’s ancestral foes.
Language: Ustalechtian
The Rhomish Principalities
East of Krevborna lies the Rhomish Principalities, a collection of petty kingdoms that frequently make war against each other. The holy seat of the Western Church of Holy Blood is the state of Rhom, the City-State of Cathedrals.
Language: Rhomian
Morgundy
Morgundy sits on the western coast of Urazya, due south of Albitza. Morgundy considers itself the pinnacle of culture on the continent. Recently, a number of peasant uprisings against the heavy taxes levied by the nation’s nobles point toward the possibility of bloody class warfare.
Language: Morgundaz
Castalonya
South of Morgundy is Castalonya, a warm, sun-kissed land locked in a bitter conflict between two heirs to the kingdom’s throne. Castalonya is a nation of sailors; Castalonyan explorers have even made excursions to the mysterious continent of Merhk in the far west. Pirates rule the westernmost tip of Castalonya, where they maintain an enclave called the Port o' Gulls.
Language: Castalonyan
The Ebrian Empire
The Ebrian Empire borders Krevborna to the south. The Ebrian Empire’s vast reach includes Tystolya, the former seat of the Eastern Church’s Patriarch and Novi Mudraal at the tip of a southern continent known as Akelb. The Ebrians worship a bellicose fire god–considered one of the worst heresies by the Church of Holy Blood.
Language: Ebric
Ontioch
Ontioch, also known as the Holy Land, is the supposed birthplace of the Khristosa. Currently a war-torn land caught between the Ebrian Empire and western crusaders who wish to reclaim it, Ontioch largely lies in ruins.
Language: Ontimaic
Gurkhesh
A land of spices and silks south of the Khanlands, Gurkhesh exists under the colonial rule of trading Albitzan companies. Known as the Land of a Thousand Gods, Gurkhesh’s religious practices are poorly understood by the rest of Urazya.
Language: Gurkheshi
Nikondo
Nikondo is an island of the far east. Though it has an emperor, said to be descended from a pagan moon goddess, Nikondo is actually ruled by military leaders who oversee a caste of hereditary swornswords. The people of Nikondo fear that bloody civil war is inevitable, as each military leader sees themselves as the one destined to unite the country.
Language: Nikond

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ReplyDeleteFor the record, I don’t!👹
DeleteI may have made the mistake of seeing those repetitions above as a bit of Horror-movie business suited to a blog dedicated to all things gribblesome and haunting: if this isn’t the case then fellow Anon, if you need help then please ask.
DeleteNeeding help doesn’t make you weak or pathetic or a failure, it makes you a human being in a Bad Place.
The easiest way to get out of a Bad Place is to ask for a way out: even if the person you ask doesn’t know the right way, they can still help you find one that works for you.
I hope things get better for you and I can guarantee that they’re more likely to do so with friends and family, loved ones or trained professionals.
Best Wishes, wherever you may be.
Dear Jacques, thank you for taking the time and trouble to bring us this view of the wider world around Krevborna in fulfilment of a fan’s fond dreams.
ReplyDeleteIt kills so much of my speculation stone dead and I HATE it.😁
Actually, I sympathise with the desire to mostly work from our own world as a way to save time embroidering a back-cloth to the Adventures, Misadventures and Evil Nights of Krevborna.
I’m also perfectly happy to note that, in some ways, it’s perfectly easy to slip elements from the older version of things into this Urazya (Rhomlund could well have been bigger at one point, for instance; there’s no reason to imagine the forges of Zilheim have silent in the realm called Narske; and Nikondo might only be the most prominent of the Okami archipelago).
Heck, one of my first reactions to this article was that I can imagine the First Edition vision of things as what happens when various of the realms above start accreting into Great Powers (Or, if you prefer, could have fractured apart into the various component elements mentioned above).
Also, it would be deeply disingenuous of me to pretend that reading about Albitza and it’s wars of disunity didn’t give me an absolutely delightful pair of mental images.
One was of taking the Brexit referendum results map and creating a version of Little England based on the bits that voted to seperate themselves from Europe - essentially depicting it as Anglo Saxons only, but deeply divided into a number of petty nations squabbling through the local War of the Roses/English Civil Wars, unravelling in it’s own splendid isolation.
My other mental image was of an island stitched together from Scotland, Wales and most of Ireland - with London being amalgamated with Dublin into a city I think of as ‘Blackwater’ and the local equivalent of the Jacobean monarchy filling in for the Ascendancy (The Plantation of Ulster being a Stuart/Scottish policy).
Probably for the very beginnings of the British Empire too, given this often took place under Stuart monarchs.
At this point I may have stood over the shambling Wel-Scots-Ireland of my conception, herky-jerky with the unholy energies of its vivification and screamed “I MAKE SATIRE!” to the black-brow’d Heavens at the culmination of my lunatic endeavours.
It goes with the territory.
Yeah, since my games all take place in Krevborna, all the real-world analogs are just as background stuff that can show up and players immediately get the context.
DeleteAlso worth saying: I change my mind all the time and invent new stuff, so everybody should just use whatever stuff from wherever that they want. There is no meaningful canon here!
Except, of course, when you need a priest at a cathedral who isn’t too grand to talk to a layman and is also decently regular.
Delete… well blow me down, clergy jokes are slightly harder and much less fun than pretending to misread ‘canon’ as ‘cannon’.
Anyway, a few random thoughts that occurred to me whilst reading the article:-
ReplyDelete- It amuses me to imagine that whilst ‘Albitza’ is the name of the Middle Kingdom, the Island as a whole is also known as ‘The Isle of Yng’.
- One quibble that did occurr to me was that having the names of local languages almost perfectly mirror that of the country (and having none of the nations share a language) struck me as more ‘Modern’ than ‘Early Modern’.
- That Yre mostly speaks ‘Kurgic’ made me wonder if the local highlanders have legendary traditions of having sailed all the way from the local equivalent of Scythia.
- Interesting to note that Krevborna was not itself the hub of THE local Tsardom (Which I rather assumed to be the case, equating Chancel with Ravenna as capital of a fading but still quite extensive empire).
- One tends to assume that the Tsars of Krevborna have been defunct for roughly 118 years (By analogy with the Romanov dynasty and to help keep it plausible that a certain she-ranger has a colourable claim to the old dominion).
- I wonder if the disaster which afflicted Rhus could have been a sort of magical Chernobyl that struck so hard it rippled backwards in time?
- I remain amused by the notion that the local equivalent to the Baltic is the ‘Norse sea’ (and have a notion of it looking rather as though somebody had taken the map of Scandinavia, the. turned land into sea and fresh water lakes into islands).
- I wonder if the Ebrian Empire might simply be one of the Khanland dynasties gone more thoroughly native than most? (I believe the Turks also started as wolves from the steppe).
- Also, it seems plausible to suggest that the local ‘China’ would be under a sort of Yalu/Manchu Dynasty hybrid (A dynasty of Khandic successors to one fallen long before, a bit like a Chinese equivalent to the Mughal dynasty), as the easternmost link in the chain of Khanates.
- No lie, if there isn’t a realm in the Okami Islands under THE DEMON KING I shall be deeply disappointed: a diabolical mirror to the Heavenly Monarchy of Japan could be very appropriate to a Dark Fantasy setting.
Heck, Nikondo could be the Okinawa to their Japan.
- I would suggest that the front-runners in the establishment of ‘factories’ (For which read ‘compounds’) in Gurkhesh could well be Castalonya, as a nod to Portugal’s key role in opening up the Indian Ocean and East Indies to European maritime trade.
- It’s easy to imagine the Ustalecht Palatinates being mid-transition from Teutonic Order to Prussia.
- I’m a little ambivalent about the mention of an apparent Christ analogue in Ontioch: for my money it makes more sense to have the Church of Saintly Blood stem from painfully-human martyrs (More of a Saint Paul, really) and not a Messiah.
- I’m not saying the Church of Saintly Blood HAS to be based out of a good-sized city state that began it’s existence as a single, superbly-oversized palace but wouldn’t the ‘Domus Aurea as Vatican City’ vibes be delicious?
- Finally, ‘Morgundy’ is an absolutely delightful ‘Evil Bretonnia’ sort of name: it suggests a Fantasy France (Well, Burgundy) with LA REINE MARGOT or DANGEROUS LIAISONS and not LE MORTE D’ARTHUR as its foundation.
Fair warning, I may follow this up with other ideas.
This is only tangentially related to the topic of this article, but I wanted to compare my own mental image of the First Edition ‘Pterra’ (I like my little joke and will amuses myself with it, though hopefully not ad nauseum) with the version given above:-
ReplyDelete- Svatlund Caliphate = Kievan Rus + Ottoman Empire
- Okami Isles = Japanese Islands + Spice Islands/Malay Archipelago
- Rhomlund = Burgundy + Holy Roman Empire + Poland-Lithuania
- Zilheim = Kingdom of Sweden/Scandinavia + British Isles/Kingdom of England + Scotland post Union of the Crowns
- Principality of Kosk = Republic of Genoa + Portugal?
- Principality of Estborna = Aquitaine + Kingdom of Spain post Reconquista + Valois France (post Francis I)
- Principality of Ulvborna = Kingdom of Hungary + Austria-Hungary?
- Mudraal = Ethiopian Empire + Meroitic Egypt?
Krevborna = Wallchia + Transylvania + Serbia + Papal States + Thrace?
Jack Guignol, I’ve been seriously thinking of commissioning a map (At least a sketch map) of Urazya after the Seasonal Holidays, if time and funds allow.
ReplyDeleteI don’t want to discuss my ideas in too much detail (This is your comments section and not a private letter, after all), not least because one wants to leave some room for surprises, though also because I’m still working out some notions.
One did want to ask permission to use
your unpublished ideas for such a project: would this be acceptable to you? (Also, I wanted to suggest that if one were drawing a map of Krevborna’s continent, a useful way to keep the Big K prominent would be to make East and not North the top of that map: this would, I believe, be justified by the sanctity of Ontioch and Rhom*).
*It would also be in keeping with certain pre-modern European mapmaking conventions and allow you to give a new angle on a familiar sort of setting.
As long as it isn't a product for sale, go for it.
DeleteFrere Jacques, be assured that I am neither greedy, stupid not ingrate enough to risk a visit from copyright lawyers: I LIKE my liver and kidneys, not to mention my present bank balance)
DeleteI do have the megalomaniac ambition to see a world drawn up to suit my very own specifications which has created so much work for mapmakers (Amongst others) over the centuries, but then nobody’s perfect.