Kalsema: The Lands of the Long Light (Isekai Homebrew Setting)

[Marcarius5555]

This is a thread for campaign background for a current recruitment. Interested parties from the thread can post their questions here.

Kalsema or Kaslema, the variation in spelling depending on whether one is a speaker of the Karun or Teuneun languages, is a strange land subject to the almost constant illumination of its three suns. Once, it is said, they waxed and waned in a cycle of twenty four or twenty seven hours, and that the light of each mirrored the other in a glorious, luminated trinity. However, at some distant age, perhaps in connection with the fall of the Empire of the Dreams of the Great Dragons, their lights were shaken, and now no clime of Kalsema received the blessed respite of night more than once in a given week. One sun diminishes a single day in a week, another once a month, and the third for but one night in a year. Their orbits bestow the variable grace of night irregularly upon the various territories of Kalsema.

The mysterious tomes known as the Pahlar Vaolin and Palash Namqua, a pair of magical books which seem to manifest of their own accord, provide perhaps the greatest insight into the history and populations of these territories.

The seemingly endless leaves of the Palash Namqua recounts, in an admittedly highly elusive, excessively prolix language, something like the following outline of history:

In the beginning was the 'Elder Age' or 'Elder Most Age'; strange creatures -- dinosaurs, polydactyls, turtiformes, spinostomes, titaniformes, monoanticherans, jetocetes, cardiocetes, cardiocetoids, magnopsids, lophophids, sprogophidians, heterostomes, allotauriformes, fututoriformes, kahydroniformes, pescidonts, blumbomeniformes, and other such flora and fauna thrived alongside a sapient species known as the birrin or birilin. These hexopods apparently created a highly advanced technological civilization. The end of their era was brought about by some great disaster which may or may not have been connected with the arrival of the Dragon Lords. The remnants of this civilization can be widely observed in the territories surrounding the Sea of Santisacles - including the continents of Chamadron (Chamandron), Bha'al-Zauggor, Izox, and the isolated territory of Sanaadnida.


A birilin mycovillam of the Most Ancient Age.

The emigration of awakening of the Dragon Lords ushered in the Age of the Dream of Dragons, also known as the Dragon Age or the Age of Dreams, among other appellations. The Dragon Lords are said to have 'recreated' the world in this time, and introduced most of the standard flora and fauna, as well as magical beasts, which did not exist in the Elder Age. The end of the Dragon Dreamer Empire is somewhat shrouded in mystery. The Palash Namqua suggests that two factions -- the Dragon Teachers and the Dragon Students or Learners -- somehow began a conflict which ended with the banishment, capture, death, or sleep of the Dragon Lords. In the many years since this event, common tradition, has held that the Dragon Teachers were the Ancient Elves, the greatest of their kind who the Dragon Lords taught the arts of draconic metamorphosis, so that their creations might one day assume their own divine form. The Dragon Students or Learners are held to have been kobolds who were likewise instructed in the arts of draconic ascension, if such rituals in fact exist. The Ancient Elves who ascended to dragonhood are held to have been driven mad by their transformation, and resolved to replace their previous reptilian overlords. These 'Wise Masters' were opposed by the ascended kobolds of the Dragon Learners. At least, that is what has often be asserted as the purport of the thousands of pages of enigmatic text. The portion of the Palash Namqua that details the end of the Age of Dragon Dreaming is written in an unknown pictographic language that differs from that which comprises the rest of its endless pages. It may hold the truth of the disaster that ended the time of the Dragon Lords. In any event, the wake of this age saw the light of the three suns which rise over the Sea of Santisacles wax greatly, such that no land of Kalsema now enjoys more than one night in a week.

For its part, the Pahlar Vaolin describes, and continuously updates, an account of the present climes and habitations of Kalsema. It states that all the Lands of the Long Light are surrounded by a mysterious storm, and that within this storm lie the continents of Chamadron, Bha'al-Zauggor, Izox, Sanaadnida, Vel-Samar, and Ikuin, along with countless isles.