Veminox

INTRODUCTION


A tropical and temperate planet home to a vast diversity of life, climates, and cultures. Veminox is the home of humans and all similar beings, such as elves, which are sometimes called Fey-born due to half-believed legends of curious beings that birthed all intelligent life on the world.

Amongst the scientifically underdeveloped people of Veminox, the concept of a planet is not common, and the name ‘Veminox’ more often refers to the planet’s single, jagged continent. This landmass is surrounded by vast, unique oceans teeming with dangers and beautiful life, largely unexplored. However, due to the unification of the continent and the safer travel possible by land, ship trade and travel is uncommon, and generally taken only through specific, brief routes.

The continent of Veminox is most often described as the shape of a hatchet blade, turned with its curved edge facing north. Within that broad blade of northern land is the Gorung Desert, home to the Obsidian Mountains at the edge, as well as the human cities of Mirek and Nimb Vard and the Corpse Fragments, a series of black sand and igneous rock islands. The center of Veminox contains the vast Rose Amon Lake, the largest freshwater body on the planet and home to the enormous city of the same name. To the west, taking up roughly a quarter of the landmass, is Ozaros, a wild, monster-infested, war-plagued region said to be the birthplace of humanity. Ozaros is gated off from the rest of Veminox by a towering mountain chain made of bright green gemstone, called the Jade Peaks. Finally, the southern end of the continent consists of Delvina, a grand but backward human city and the center of agriculture and the elf slave trade. To the east of Delvina is the Crown of Pines, the most exclusively elven territory on the main continent, and within its center is the underground city, Inria. To the south of the Crown of Pines is the Broken Isthmus, a dense collection of floodplains and shifting clay bogs said to be inhabited by elves exiled from Inria.

One of the most prevalent forms of life on Veminox is a class of being known as a ‘monster.’ Monsters, despite being similar to some animals, are unique in their diversity of intelligence and power. Monsters also have the ability to use magic, and humans were able to breed with certain monsters to claim this hereditary power for themselves, leading to the birth of mages and Ozarians. This has not succeeded for any other race, proving that humans possess a strange ability to interbreed, for unclear reasons. Monsters are the most potent threat to the Fey-born races, apart from each other.

Veminox is also home to magic, an ever-present, scientifically inexplicable force that allows certain humans with ‘aptitude’ to alter their environment through ‘spells’, at the cost of their physical vigor. Magic is divided into six ranks, one each named for the six moons that orbit around the planet: Leftivacus, Vextrus, Gurrendal, Torrach, Vemmite, and Istel. Because Istel is the most distant moon and the hardest to see, and also because only a small number of educated people know all of the ranks of magic to begin with, common folk tend to mistakenly think there are only five moons, or maintain the expression of "the five moons", even when knowing the truth. Despite the coincidental link between the six moons and the six ranks, the Thaumaturges suspect there may be other ranks of magic as well.


The vast majority of magically apt beings on Veminox are monsters, which all possess some degree of it. Only about one in every ten human Veminoxians possesses magical aptitude, whether through being a mage, Ozarian, or similar, rarer demi-human types.

Although ship travel is uncommon, the humans of Rose Amon developed Veminox’s most formidable naval force, a fleet of monster-slaying ships that have conquered the Trenches of Karihoul and the beasts within their own lake a number of times, earning them heaping bounties of food and materials in the form of bone, shell, coral, and nacre, from which the majority of their city is made.

Possessing a population of millions of intelligent and social beings, Veminox has a long history of war and cruelty. The landscape, entire cities, and even entire races have been annihilated through the course of the world’s development. However, recent religious figures that have risen to popularity, such as Latalla among the humans, seem to indicate a desire for long-standing peace. Secularism has grown more common as well, with groups seeking reform out of its own sake and love for one’s neighbors, near and far, without connecting these motivations to religion or spirituality.

About one twentieth of Veminox’s population is not free, bound in either slavery, servitude, or imprisonment. Slavery as a concept is socially accepted or endorsed by roughly a third of Veminox’s population, with the vast majority of such individuals being humans from the southern territory, particularly Delvina. Because humans can possess the capability to use magic at birth, and even then are still more physically domineering and industrious, humans have a long and grotesque pattern of enslaving elves, a race that prefers to act isolationist and defensive. Other races also are believed to have existed, before various human empires exterminated them. These include giants, dwarves, and imps. A number of monster species are also believed to be extinct due to human industries such as hunting and superstitious medicine practices.

Roughly half of Veminox’s population can read and write at least one language. Most of the world’s cultures are patriarchal, but there is less anger and pain between the sexes considering the various hatreds between races. Still, old attitudes triumph in the ugliest of ways, and elf and human men with nothing to lose will hurt each other through their females. It is for this reason that mixed-raced beings and couplings are a complicated and tragic affair. If humans and elves agree on anything, it is that a human and elf marriage is an abomination, and particularly the curious spawn to which it leads.

The current state of Veminox is one of uneasy peace, with only small conflicts rising up like bubbles from a simmering pot. Much of this peace, however, may only beget larger, even grander challenges that go beyond the simplistic violence of war.


SPOILER INFORMATION BELOW(COMING SOON)