esurience

Fatal | i used to make a comic until life happened, but now i miss it so i made a blog about it. mostly just re-establishing lore right now, so many things remain in flux. questions encouraged!

[3surience]

alright lets try to hammer out some of the revised lore and see if i can set the scene a little.

Esurience is the name of an era on the planet known mostly as Ler'mund, in a solar system with a single sun and many inhabited planets. it spins on its side like uranus and has an ice belt around its equator with tropical poles. orbits a gas giant, but stopping it from being tidally locked is its orbit with its sister world of similar size, which i havent named yet but which in recent history was struck by a large meteor, which it still bears the devastating crater from.

Ler'mund is littered with the gargantuan corpses, known currently as corpselords, of dead and dying lords, which are godlike dragon creatures that have a long history both on and off the planet. pollution known as magic leaks from their bodies, around which life on the planet has had to adapt to. the breath of the dying lords is known as ley, and their blood and other fluids is mana.

geographically speaking, Ler'mund has a supercontinent (unnamed) thats just beginning to break up. it stretches across the equator, where one big fuckoff ice sheet splits the continent. most people during the time of esurience interpret this as a giant mountain, with the warm lands at each pole being the base of the mountain.

(map is skewed in the middle, with the ice sheet actually being twice as long as it appears, and with a lot of ocean cut out around the edges lol)

most of the worldbuilding i have is about the south pole, known as the Southlands for now, where you have Solvan and Orden and Ava and all the guys i talk about.

in VERY recent history the glaciers have begun to retreat in earnest during a warming spike, which has brought a whole slew of changes to the Southlands. the Maidens' Tears Strait formed from the vast meltwaters flooding a growing rift valley plain, and the Encroaching Sea displaced large swathes of land.

(Also featuring big big freshwater glacial lakes)

with it, two of the major empires that have shaped the land, the Imperias Therium (led mostly by the machairo lineage) and the Quirlin Federation (mostly quirlin) have each experienced steep declines in power, leaving empty cities and niches waiting to be filled by younger lineages.

humans, newcomers from the Northlands partnered with the canini lineage, have proven willing to fill the power vaccum, as have the panthera and some felinae peoples as well.

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made a little guide to all the lineages/sublineages in the Greatmelt Lakes for my dnd players to reference uwu

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made a weird dog (pangolin+magnificent frigatebird+heron)

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the ord, now properly redesigned! there's still a lot up in the air about the lore for this lineage, i mostly pushed these out because they're a relevant lineage to the campaign im running, and there's probably a couple more types on the other side of the continent, but im satisfied with these to start

The ord started out looking like the person on the left, very big and very hairy. They're one of only two underground lineages in Southland, and this variety in particular live in the Hiddertalli Mountains to the east of the central Orden Empire which all members of this lineage belonged to, until the Sundering

the reasons behind the Sundering are poorly understood. what was once a thriving empire simply ground to halt when suddenly males and females could no longer produce children. within a couple decades, the empire all but shattered into a hundred different factions, each answering the question of "how do we continue our bloodline?" in their own way

many of the common tactics involve crossing their bloodlines with humans, which are a common lineage with which they can produce children with. two dominant types emerged: ordene, which stem from females and as a result remained quite large while moving to the surface, and the dwarvan, which stem from males and shrunk to adapt to their smaller mothers while staying underground.

both ordene and dwarvan spend many generations unable to produce male and female children respectively, and the reliance on outside lineages for mates had great impacts on the relations between ord and other lineages.

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cats time!!

Panthera are the second of the kiil lineages, which are more of less cats who all believe they were made by their creator, Kiil. theyre one of the biggest and most dangerous lineages in the southern hemisphere, but at the moment theyre a bit too busy fighting each other to bother anyone else

panthera are weird, even for the kiil lineages, because unlike the machairo and the felinae they have four sexes: rosed males and females, and unrosed males and females. and just like only males and females can reproduce, only a rosed and unrosed can have children together. it serves to make this lineage's already complicated social hierarchy even more complex.

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@no-endlings

they're based on white-throated sparrows so they ofc have male and female, but the rosed and unrosed is where it gets funky. rosed cats are typically smaller and lither, and true to the name have rosetted markings specifically with the shading in the middle. their markings also stand out starkly against their coats. for tigris, their stripes have the middle shading, though for leo and atrox these markings are way less visible overall.

(sometimes the spots are completely filled in)

rosed cats are also generally less aggressive. they usually end up in caretaking roles or hunting small game.

unrosed cats are bigger, more muscular, and more aggressive. their markings lack the rosette shading and tend to be fuzzier and blend into the rest of the coat a bit more. they usually end up in protective roles or as warriors and big game hunters

each variety have different ways to set up society around these sexes. uncia, for example, keep their rosed cats towards the center of their territores, while their unrosed hunt on and patrol the border regions. leo, on the other hand, keep unrosed females and rosed males in the center, while unrosed males and rosed females stick to border regions.

[fatal-blow]

part 1

felinae are the third and final of the kiil lineages, and by far the largest and most diverse, even if its peoples are also the smallest. hence why this is part one.

these are some of the cats in the first two kingdoms: catopuma and caracal.

the temminck were the first to establish themselves on the mainland, with the rest of their cousins living on the islands in the Maidens Tears Strait

and the cats of the Caracal kingdom were the second wave to hit the mainland on the shore of the Encroaching Sea. i Did draw all three of them because at the time i was developing the broader Encroaching Sea region but then i switched gears to work on the Greatmelt Lakes region for the dnd campaign

[fatal-blow]

felinae part 2

the lynx kingdom of the Greatmelt Lakes region argues about how many sublineages there actually are. the people of the city of pardinus (not shown here) (they sublineage itself is also called pardinus because the cats loooove naming stuff after themselves) also define themselves as their own sublineage, but the others tend to argue theyre too small a population to do so.

manul are another case entirely. theyre short, robust people who have ord ancestry. after the Sundering, ord tried crossbreeding with many other lineages. there were successful crosses with felinae, but the children were few and far between, and most lived with their felinae parents. they form a diverse subpopulation, lumped into a single box by other lynx.

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felinae part 3

the leopardus kingdom were the third wave of explorers to the mainland, settling in the dense forests of eastern Broadlan and pressing towards the desert and scrub at the core. there are many types, but most have fallen under control of the expanding Oncan Empire, ruled over by the much larger panthera who had found their way across the Maidens' Tears Strait. it was the refugees fleeing from this takeover who would go on to found the lynx kingdom.

[fatal-blow]

felinae part 4 (final)

the last wave of felinae are the cats in the puma kingdom. they are the largest of the felinae as well as the only felinae to have hit mainland on the eastern side of the Maidens Tears Strait. theyre often at odds with the panthera and the machairo, some of which keeping these felinae as servants or slaves.

[fatal-blow]

more fauna! ive decided that some smaller animals from earth can exist in esurience, because i think thats fun (and to set up for smth in the space age timeline)

kwinnis are just based on early horses. this ones got a big fur coat for the cooler climate

and sossa, which i think are prolly from the more temperate forests, but they get a nice snowy coat in the winter regardless.

[fatal-blow]

couple more megafauna i did. the javelinbird is so named because theyve got the heron neck thing that lets them launch their heads like a spear. they loooove camoflaging themselves in the bamboo forests and pecking things off the path

and then the ridacher, based on a real macrauchenia but with a big ol' skull dome that they ram each other with.

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realized i never shared this map of the region I'm using for the dnd campaign .o. I think I'll be calling it the Greatmelt Seas region, and i'm currently working on a fancy version

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turned all the layers in the canvas im doing the lineages on. for fun.

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how could this happen to me

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Gnoles! or gnolls, whichever spelling you prefer

esurience gnoles are generally regarded as uncivilized pests by other lineages. They're efficient hunters, using their powerful jaws and forearms to subdue large prey, but many make their livings by raiding the wealth and resources of nations and empires formed by other lineages without making nations of their own. Some lineages don't mind them, though, and willingly throw their unwanted food and garbage at them. It's not like they wanted it anyways.

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Mungolewe gnoles are the biggest and most dangerous, and typically the ones that give gnoles as a whole a bad name. They're found most often around human settlements in the coldest regions, even forming tight allegiance with the empire Laanda Ava.

Rassica gnoles live in smaller groups that eke out homes in drier, desert-y regions and wide open spaces. They're blamed for the fall of the Verdiquin Federation, though they merely took advantage of what was already a nation in decline.

Phiribar gnoles are the smallest, and aren't known for raiding at all. They mostly live among machairo and panthera, eating the scraps and bones of kills that they can't digest, earning them a somewhat dirty reputation as carrion eaters, though the nations they live among quite like having their own garbage disposals.

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im so crazy about this guy i designed for the campaign it needs its own post. look at this fucking thing.

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back to drawing 2974937 different cats

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Serentrae City (suh-REN-tray), better known as the Seren, was a city built at the base of the lord known as Asterwick by a people, the Siir, whom the modern day residents know little about. When Asterwick fell from the skies some three centuries prior, the city sprung up at the base of the mountains that cradle the lord's crown, in full view of its gaze, still struggling to stay alive despite its tremendous fall.

A little over a hundred years ago, the city, coveted for the wealth it surely must possess, was captured by the three nations surrounding. The Seren's original creators were insular, denying trade with their neighbours, and fell to the coalition built to oppose them.

Matusia, a land of rolling plains and temperate coasts owned by sapisene humans known as the Matusians; Padan, a frigid plateau whose people crossed the Pade Highlands to inhabit, owned by denisene humans known as Padans; and Lynxas, a coalition of felinae peoples which control the freshwater seas of Nattia and Kitchga; all three combined their skills to build an army that captured the Seren, a trophy which sits situated between the three.

A hundred years later the Seren has fallen under the control of the families who built this army together, fighting to consolidate their military history as they attempt to build and manage a city which hosts a diversity of peoples never before seen in the region. Some factions seek to let the city thrive as is while others want it for themselves, but the true threats the city faces run much deeper than surface level rivalries, as the great lord Asterwick slowly dies atop the mountain, leaving behind a corpse so massive it will change all the world around it.

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wanted to write a little practice hook for the city my lil dnd campaign is gonna take place in