Orden and the Timescape

A new game demands new worlds! Welcome to the timescape—a collection of worlds spanning high fantasy, dark fantasy, even space fantasy!

Our tour begins on the world of Orden, the prime manifold, where humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs share a world with dragons, goblins, kobolds, and dozens of other speaking peoples. But human civilization and politics dominate here.

Orden contains eight major regions, the largest of which is Vasloria.

Vasloria

A forested, medieval, feudal land, Vasloria is peppered with few cities, mostly just towns and villages. While there will someday be nations here with proper borders, as of now in the Age of Chaos those nations are merely geographic areas with names people use to distinguish lands that share similar terrain and subcultures.

Aendrim, the land of hills and farms. Corwell with its knights and castles. The marshlands of Tull where witches and wise women battle hags and swamp monsters. The thick forests of Farrow with its bands of archers, and the horselands of Graid home to the best cavalry in Orden.

Mountainous northeastern Vasloria is home to the small earldoms of Sednia, Olvaria, and Sărda, and the earldom of Rhöl containing the land of Glauer once ruled by a deathless count.

Scattered across it all, Vasloria boasts the densest collection of elf-haunted wodes in Orden. All regions have wodes, but Vasloria's northern border is the Great Wode where the world still works as it did before humans arrived.

Within the wodes, time misbehaves. Cause and effect are only distant cousins, as all lands were before Ord placed the dwarves in the world,

imposing the Law of Time on Orden. Children's tales of villagers wandering into a wode and emerging unchanged 100 years later are based on real events. When pressed on how this "works," the elves look baffled. "How does what work?"

Omund's Land

Western Vasloria, including most of Aendrim and Corwell and parts of Graid, was until recently ruled by Good King Omund. His draconian knights, the Dragon Phalanx, protected the weak from the strong, dispensing justice. Omund's rule lasted 35 years and in his life this area was known as Omund's Land.

Under Omund's rule, order thrived. Roads were safe. People could even walk into the woods unafraid of meeting anything more threatening than a nymph or conversational manticore.

Omund died 15 years ago and so died the rule of law. Now the forest claims the towns and roads once held safe. The woods are dangerous. Their only law... tooth and claw.

Omund was betrayed and his castle fell to Ajax the Invincible, now called the Iron Saint. His wizard Mortum unlocked the secret of the ancient sky elf flying cities, and raised the Chrysopolis, Ajax's city-fortress in the sky.

It was Mortum who used the secrets of the synliroi body banks, granting immortality to those nobles who voluntarily submit to Ajax. Those same body banks produce Ajax's war dogs, his brutal, patchwork—soldiers who owe their new lives to the Iron Saint and fight for him fanatically.

Ajax abolished all faiths and temples. He executed the dukes who organized and united the barons, leaving the far-flung baronies to try and hold human civilization together. Once, these people were loose allies. There was trade between humans, elves, dwarves and orcs.

Now there is only suspicion.

The high elves of the fallen city pay tribute with ancient artifacts they plunder from the fallen celestial city of Irranys. The wode elves of the Orchid Court, lacking any centralized government or cities, refuse to bow to Ajax.

The dwarves of Kal Kalavar pay tribute in prisoners they abduct from those foolish enough to travel the roads unescorted. These prisoners serve Ajax as forced labor or are fed into the body banks. Brooding under the mountains in their fabled Hanging City, the stone dwarves do not like this deal with the Overlord but lack the power—or the will—to rebel.

The Hawklords of the High Aeries, once remote and proud, almost mythical to the people below, made their own pact with Ajax to avoid extermination. They now serve as his elite counterinsurgent force. Mounted on their giant hawks, they project Ajax's power, enforce his law and extend his influence into every corner of the wilderness. Their mastery of the air means any revolt or rebellion is quickly seen and crushed.

The Dragon Phalanx is broken. Ajax placed a high bounty on its warriors' heads. Some folk still see Omund's knights as symbols of justice, heroes of a lost age before might made right. But in every town, every village, there are always desperate people willing to collect the bounty, summoning the Hawklords to pluck any dragon knight foolish enough to travel without a disguise away to the Chrysopolis.

Isolated and outnumbered, the human baronies desperately fight a losing battle against the encroaching wilderness. Order dies. Chaos thrives.

Capital

The Greatest City in This or Any Age! City of the Great Game! Located west across the Bale Sea from Vasloria, on the eastern coast of Rioja, Capital is not only the largest city in Orden—it's the largest city there has ever been. Larger than the fabled steel dwarf capital of Kalas Valiar, larger even than Alloy, the City at the Center of the Timescape. Capital is the exception to many rules.

It is a city of playwrights and opera, of spies and sorcery. Famed throughout the world as a city of high magic where flying tapestries act as taxis, the reality of living in Capital is somewhat more mundane. Only the very wealthy can afford such luxuries.

The great houses, ancient noble families, reluctantly share power with the upstart guilds who think vast wealth entitles them to rule. The great houses are very proud of their city. They believe anyone, from anywhere, should be able to come to Capital and earn a living, own property, expect justice. They just don't think anyone else should be able to rule.

The guilds, by contrast, are more egalitarian, more democratic, and largely obsessed with accruing wealth, city be damned. Three of them recently used their obscene wealth to buy great house status and now play the great game with the best of them.

The "great game" is espionage, and House Alvaro are the best players in the world. Led by Duke Prospero, House Alvaro sponsor the Imperial University, the greatest center of learning in the world. Nobles from across Orden, including Vanigar, send their children to learn diplomacy and statecraft at the university. While the greatest spies in the world are all graduates of the Actian School, one of the colleges in the university, which has historically doubled as the prince's intelligence agency.

House Vorona run the city's navy, the largest military organization of any kind in Orden. Their engineers perfected the secret of blackpowder and guard it jealously. The Imperial Navy's cannons protect trade across Orden, placing Capital at the center of international affairs. Vorona's Far Mariners, aka the marines, are the closest thing Capital has to a city-wide law enforcement organization. Each great house is expected to police its own district.

Duke Marco Vorona sponsors the Imperial War College, also known as the Academy. A prestigious institution rivaling any college of the Imperial University, the Academy boasts graduates among all the noble families in Orden. This widespread allegiance creates a vast informal network in the city referred to cynically as the Old Class Ring that gives Vorona access to intelligence other factions can only dream of.

House Navarr, oldest of the great houses, enforces the church's law, which they call justice. Led by His Grace Orsino, Duke Navarr, archbishop of the most powerful church in the city—the Church of Saint Ysabella the Pitiless—House Navarr consolidates a vast network of different churches and orders of knights across the region under one elaborate system of patronage.

Arguably the most powerful great house, House Valetta controls the Arbitros Fiat, the tax collectors. Valetta is led by the Duchess Lenore who, in mourning for her assassinated husband Maximo, opened the Codex Mortis and spoke the ritual which should have returned her love to life. Instead, she brought about the Lilac Night, which transformed every mortal in her district, including herself, into deathless revenants. Now, the Duchess Lenore is an immortal vampire queen. A dead lady, ruling over a dead city.

After the Lilac Night, when the prince was no longer able to rely on House Valetta to deliver the taxes they collected, Lady Shirome

coordinated with two other guilds to buy Great House status for themselves.

Lady Shirome runs the city's assayers guild, the Fulcrum. The guild controls the Trade Integrity Board, which sets lending rates and leads trade negotiations between Capital and other governments in Orden. It was the Fulcrum that convinced the prince to switch the city to paper money. As a result, Capital is the first and only city in Orden to have a robust monetary policy.

The Broadsheets, formally known as the Font, publish the thrice-daily news sheets everyone in the city reads. Guildmaster Inān al-Adwiyya uses a vast network of young people called the Paperfeathers to deliver and sell the broadsheets throughout the city. Lady al-Adwiyya knows almost everything happening anywhere in the city.

The Farrier's Guild, popularly known as the Rasp, control transport throughout the city. Led by Lord Kashimir, a heliox from Alloy who introduced the flying tapestries that metaphorically shrank Capital, allowing the rich and powerful to cross the 13-mile-wide city in just a few minutes. He created the Kites, couriers famous for getting a message anywhere in Capital in only a few hours. Kashimir's monopoly on importing flying tapestries from Alloy gives him enormous power, and he is not shy about seeking more.

Three years ago, the prince of Capital died leaving no heir or even a likely candidate. He was a young man, only forty-one, but the events surrounding his death are shrouded in mystery and inaccurate accounts. Was he murdered like a commoner, or assassinated by a political rival? Evidence is scant, rumor substitutes as fact.

Now the great game takes on a new meaning as the four great houses and three newly ascendant guilds jockey for position, each wanting to step into the power vacuum left by the dead prince. Everyone knows a war is coming, a war of succession that means fighting on the street. But each player in the game would much prefer it if someone else made the first move.

The Myriad Worlds of the Timescape

Orden is only one world in the timescape! Each star in the night sky is another, though this fact is not known to most people living on Orden. Old fashioned people still use the archaic term "plane" to describe these worlds, while sages use geometric formulae, describing these worlds they call "manifolds," but they all mean the same thing.

Higher worlds are more energetic, affording access to alien technologies. Great starfreighters ply the space-lanes, and knights wield psionically powered hard-light blades dueling against star pirates with hard-light blasters.

The lower worlds lack the energy necessary for such extraordinary technology to function, and so rely on magic to break the rules.

On Axiom, the Plane of Uttermost Law, the memonek live on a world teeming with complex, inorganic life. UNISOL, the Universal Solar League, ensures and protects trade across the upper worlds, defending the starfreighters from the time raiders and the infamous pirate band the Starslayers on their legendary ship the K.R.A.D.1 Fearless.

Meanwhile, on Proteus, the Sea of Eternal Change, the formless proteans rebelled against the synliroi who once ruled the Plane of Uttermost Chaos, exiling the voiceless talkers to the World Below. Now masters of their world, the proteans take to the stars in their living changeships, hurling their small fleet against the tyrannical unquestioned might of UNISOL.

On Quintessence, the lowest of the upper worlds, proteans and memonek alike rub shoulders with devils, fire dwarves, even humans in Quintessence's capital city of Alloy, the City at the Center of the Timescape. The Free City of Alloy, also known as the City of Brass, is the gateway to the timescape. People travelling to or from the upper and lower worlds meet here to trade goods and information, free from the inflexible law of UNISOL.

Traveling downward from Quintessence one arrives on Orden, the Plane of Gods and Sorcery, highest of the lower worlds where magic rules. The gods, forbidden from interfering directly in a world with such a low energy state, rely on saints to enact their will. Technology from the upper worlds does not function down here, unless powered by a strong psionic mind or the miracle mineral iridoss, also known as prismacore.

Almost coterminal with Orden is its sister-manifold, the World Below, the Dark Under All, a plane of exiles ruled by A Lie Cloaked In Star's Silver, the Queen of Night, first of the Three Sisters Below. The World Below is a land of vast caves, and sunless seas. There are no stars here, no sky, only endless caverns and warrens, some vast enough to hold entire cities, like Or-Mazaar City of the Black Star from which the Queen of Night rules.

The power of the World Below wanes, while the power of Equinox waxes. A smaller, parasitic manifold home to the twilight celestials and their servants the shadow elves, Equinox is ruled by Every Strike of Lightning a Lover Betrayed, the Queen of Shadows, third of the Three Sisters Below who plots to bridge the sea between worlds and colonize Orden making a new home for her people before their old world dies. A fierce, fairy-tale, weird magic, jungle world of permanent twilight also known as Dusk.

The last plane of law, the Seven Cities of Hell is among the lowest of the lower planes. A land of devils proud of their civilization, each of the seven cities is ruled by an archduke who schemes to ascend to the Throne of Hell. A world of bureaucratic law, the devil denizens of Hell have little interest in the other planes. Life is so much more interesting down here.

The seven archdevils conspired together once; agreeing to create the Order of Desolation—also known as the Illriggers—to extend their power into the timescape, and defend Hell from the horde of demons below.

The demons of the Abyssal Waste, the lowest plane, claw and scramble over each other, competing for souls in this heat-blasted desert under a baleful, giant orange sun. Mindless collections of organs, claws, and teeth, demons collect souls until they reach sentience and gain identity and the blessing of memory. These demons will do anything to escape upwards, out of the wasteland, lest they lose their collected souls, lose their identity, and fall into that mindless state called lethe.

At the center of the Abyssal Waste lies the Necropolitan Ruin, the Last City, a city of the dead, ruled by Khorsekef, once the Infinite Pharaoh of Khemhara, now the Ultralich. Khorsekef intends to return to Orden and sit once again on his throne in the Heliopolis.

Setting Design

Orden and the timescape were both designed over the last 25 years to be an explicitly commercial setting. A product where you could find all the things everyone expects to find in a classic fantasy setting, with new takes on classic tropes and a little more "Why are things like this?" work done to ground everything and make things feel plausible. None of this makes Orden "better" than other settings, it just gives it character.

Orden is not explicitly a high fantasy world, even though there are some pretty high fantasy things going on in it, because the average person has very little access to magic. The typical village might have a priest who knows some real prayers that close wounds or cure minor ailments, or an alchemist or hedge wizard who can brew some potions or conjure minor spells, but that's the extent of it. The result is, though Orden is a pre-industrial world with technology and societies akin to 13th-century Europe, the quality of life of the people who live there is a lot closer to ours. They live about as long as we do, die from disease about as often as we do, and generally have diets similar to ours, though with vastly more basic and constricted options on their menus.

In Capital, for instance, people use flying tapestries to get around the city quickly, but these are a luxury available only to the rich. The vast majority of Capital's citizens live a life basically the same as your average Londoner in Shakespeare's time. Less plague and fire, though.

It's not clear to us, looking in, but it doesn't seem as though Orden operates according to the real-world laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. People in the middle ages here on Earth didn't know about quarks or DNA, but they still knew everything was made of "stuff" and everyone expected a child to more or less resemble their parents. Essentially, Orden works the way people living in any culture's medieval era believed the real world actually worked. Because of the presence of magic, prayer, and psionics in the world, it's unlikely anything like science or an industrial age will ever come to Orden.

Ultimately, while there are 10th-level characters out there, these are exceedingly rare. Most people in Orden do not have class levels. Only a few are 1st level anything! No one has ever tried to take a census of all the censors, conduits, furies, and so forth, but if they did, they'd probably end up with a chart that looks a lot like Zipf's Law.

Finally, most information about Orden and the timescape is presented from the point of view of someone living in Orden. They can tell you what they think they know, but even learned historians do not agree, and new information constantly comes to light challenging the accepted academic wisdom. Just like... you get it.

This lack of objective certainty not only makes it more fun for us to work on Orden, it makes it easier for you to make Orden yours. This comes at the price of certainty. (Are the Dragon Phalanx really "incorruptible?" Well, a lot of people still say that! In spite of concrete evidence to the contrary!) But we think it helps relieve some of the anxiety Directors have when they want to run a game in Orden but are afraid they don't know "enough" or "everything." Not to worry. No one knows everything!

P.S. We use the phrase "Orden and the timescape" because Orden is, as it were, the star of the show. But Orden is very clearly only one world in the timescape. It's like those astronomy maps hanging on the wall in your grade school science class that said, "Earth and the solar system." Like that map, any map of the timescape will be an artist's interpretation, not drawn to scale, and never wholly accurate depending on what information you're looking for.

The Timescape in Your Game

We use the timescape and its medieval fantasyland Orden as the default setting presented in these books. Doing so makes it easier for us as designers to marry our design with real examples from a real (imaginary) fantasy world. We also think it's easier for you to take the names for places, languages, and gods, and replace them with your own. We might reference some hero or villain, saint or god, whose name makes you think, "Well, I don't have that in my setting." If we do a good job, though, you might be inspired to say, "But that makes me think..." And being inspired is part of the fun!

If you're the Director, you can use as many or as few of the details of the timescape as you like. You might wish to create your own world within the timescape, or use a setting you've created that exists outside of the official MCDM manifolds. You can use details from settings published by other companies. There are no rules when it comes to worldbuilding. Feel free to take what you like from this book and change the rest. For example, you might not care for our dwarves having literal stone skin. That's fine. You can make them fleshy, stout, bearded folk, or mohawked, barrel-chested punk rockers, or anything else you wish. As long as you're running a heroic fantasy campaign about fighting monsters, then the game's rules are still likely to serve your narrative even if that narrative deviates from ours.

If you're a player, ask your Director about the setting where the game takes place and discuss with them the sort of hero you want to create. Maybe you want to play a more traditional gruff and bearded dwarf rather than go all short and stony. An open dialogue and honest discussion with your Director can lead to everyone getting what they want out of the game.

What's Next? Find Out on Patreon

While this book and Draw Steel: Monsters are both chock-full of character options and adventure ideas that could keep you playing Draw Steel for years, some folks want even more classes, ancestries, monsters, treasures, and encounters. You can find out what we're developing next, get a preview of that content, and read blog posts about the development of the game by joining the MCDM Patreon at mcdm.gg/Patreon.