Naturalist Games
preview
preview
The strange creatures that reside in the Mountain are a disparate lot.
Draw from all corners of the world by greed, ambition, hate, chance, and even hope. None are quite evil, and none are quite good, and all are have their own tale.
The cool bedrock of the mountain has been his home longer than any other of these petty lordlings. They have spent their lives beneath that insidious burning timekeeper, the hated sun. While he has dug deeper, climbed lower, and seen more in the shadows than any of his kind, and rightly been given their crown.
To these dukes and queens of the open sky, the mountain’s depths are a new terrain to be explored, but to the King the darkened corners, the lightless hallways, and the crumbling vaults are all long trodden paths. The treasures interred here are his to unearth, his to entomb, these interlopers have no right in his sovereign tunnels.
He will allow their presence, for he is as magnanimous as any ruler, but should they seek to lay claim to what is buried, what is his, than these tunnels will be their tombs.
Unlike lesser queens, the Crown of her clutch is not some hereditary right. It is one taken by tooth, claw, and fire. It grants her great authority over her brethren, at a whim she can blacken the sky with her wyrms, or devastate whole kingdoms with their terrible breathe.
Even after her coronation the demands of the Crown are unceasing. Like any other flame it needs fuel, a tax if you will. Over centuries she has sacrificed her own hoard to the crown. Long since consumed are her greatest prizes, objects of age, beauty, and power. If she could offer up the petty gold, she certainly would, but instead the Crown demands magic.
Luckily she knows the Mountain. Ages ago she had alighted on its peaks, squeezed her bulk through its caverns, and most importantly, learned many of its secrets. Now, she has returned, amidst the scurrying lesser beings that seek to snatch at the treasures within. An entertaining lot, and surely one or two of them may even prove useful to her in the coming days. Unless of course they chose to defy her, and for their sake she hopes it won’t come to that.
Once upon a time, in a distant republic, there was a clever young woman. She was by far the most well-spoken, well-read, and well-loved person in her village.
Quite naturally she became a leader, representing her home for many years in the senate. But she grew older and when it was time she announced she would step down. But, her constituents had long since grown dependent on her council, and were aghast at this idea. They could not bring themselves to face a future where they had to decide things for themselves. So, conspiring with foul mystics and black magicians, they hatched a scheme.
Quite unnaturally, they wrenched the senator’s soul from her body and cast her spirit into a more durable body of unmoving stone. Stone quarried from a legendary hidden Mountain.
Possessing only ability to speak and listen she might have responded with sullen silence, instead she hatched her own plan. She continued to lead her people. She urged them to leave their homes in search of the Mountain, and bear her unmoving form by cart or litter to the very place it was hewn. It took generations, and even her nearly timeless body is failing, crumbling. Her true name long since forgotten.
But she is here, and now she just needs power. One of the treasures buried in the Mountain must grant her some way to release herself, or at the very least wreak vengeance on the descendants of those whom have trapped her.
Long she has led the Spinning Folk—wanderers in a world of strandless people. The Folk are conscripted by their natures into thankless service, stemming the insect flood that would otherwise overwhelm the world. Yet the Folk are feared and reviled as thieves or monsters.
This is her purpose in the Mountain. These crude stone tunnels are not a home. They gather no food. They send no warnings. They hold no artistry. They are a means to an end: the vaults of the Mountain. The artifacts, relics and legacies within will lend her people the strength they need to survive in these ignorant lands.
She stalks the halls, her true home draped across her back. It drags on the floor, gathering the foolish bugs that have stood in her path. Her nightly meal wriggles and squirms at the hem. As surely as she will drain those tiny lives; so too shall she drain the Mountain of its riches.
For months the Dame had been in the field, marshalling her retainers one battle after another, locked in a desperate war along her borders. The barbarian forces of her rival, Chieftain Cain Cur, lay just over the next rise.
Night blind, and downwind the villainous cretins stood no chance against the pride of Catterbury. Stealthy she led her forces through the ruins of an ancient temple built into the hillside. Unaware that these ruins were one of the secret paths to the Mountain. So, it was with some shock that when they crept over the crest that the enemy camp lay nowhere in sight, nor did any landmark that they knew. Instead the horizon was dominated by the Mountain, a peak like none in their home.
Cats are no strangers to the scent of magic, and its dangers. The Dame called for camp and sent her out scouts. They returned shortly with tales of strange two legged folk, and other creatures out of myth. But more notably, of the Mountain and the mystic energies they could smell wafting through its corridors.
With no other real recourse, the Dame leads her troops towards the Mountain. Surely whatever lies in the peak can lead her army home, and perhaps it can also lend them strength. Strength to triumph over the wretched Cain Cur, and secure her borders once and for all.
Story Coming Soon
Dying is a novelty in Kingdom of Autumn. Their mages have honed their craft over centuries, and only the most adventurous or destitute of their citizens part the veil and venture into the afterlife. The majority of the population quite simply chooses not to die, trusting their souls and bodies to the necromantic arts.
This wealth of life and unlife gave birth to a crisis. In hindsight, an obvious one. Their cities crowded, the shoulders of the living pressed tight to the shoulders of the dead. Their appetites, though vastly different, consumed the resources of Autumn at an alarming rate.
Decisive action was needed, a ruler to fill the long empty throne. But, what type of ruler. The kingdom’s finest necromancers were convened, and the problem was debated. One camp called for a conqueror, another called for a scholar, still another called for a master of the dark arts.
In the end all sides were satisfied. A single bone was taken from two hundred and six of the kingdom’s fiercest, wisest, and yes, most dangerous inhabitants. One for each bone in the body of a man. Their spirits mingled and a new life was born amidst the stuff of death.
The Caesar of Autumn woke and immediately turned his eyeless gaze towards the Mountain. Its slopes, and caves would host a fine necropolis for his people, and its many treasures would fill their coffers to near-bursting.
The Prince hates the Mountain. He hates its sheer cliffs. He hates its sun shunned corridors. He hates its unyielding ground. It is a loathsome edifice. But he needs it.
It’s the soil, you see. Even the Mountain isn’t immune to time. Wind scours its surface, its river erode their beds, and the creatures that make their home there die and rot. All of this contributes to a small, but magically fertile soil being formed. The Prince at first a lowly seed cast off from the world tree, took root in the rare loam of the Mountain. That earth is the Prince’s home, his food, and his chains.
The Prince aches to crack this despised rock open. He longs to plunge his roots through the fissures that riddle its unseemly bulk, to bust forth from the summit and shoot up through the very planes themselves like his forbearer Yggdrasil.
But, he lacks the strength starved as he is by the meagerness of his fare. This is why he seeks the Vaults buried in the abhorrent crag. First he shall wrest away its treasures, only turn them back onto the Mountain and sunder its repugnant peak.