[Brumaire] Worlds Beyond the Veil

Brumaire is a world cut-off from the passage of time - on all borders lies the Veil: a shifting expanse of fog which allows passage between the worlds. But this passage is imprecise, and dangerous, as no man can navigate the endless fog, and you could stumble into beyond the reach of faith nor reason. The Veil is capricious and shifting: a trickster-maelstrom. Many denizens of Brumaire have seen a Veiltide, where the fog grows to cover whole regions, stealing away the unlucky and leaving a flotsam of otherworldlythings in its wake: some gasping for air in a foreign world, others invasive species in a world of prey.

There are many Beyond the Veil; some ignorant, some hungry, some where horrors press against the Veil like faces on glass, peering into the inviting, virginal worlds beyond.

Here are some Worlds Beyond the Veil:

The Machine Hells
A world of sulphurous rains and trees of iron, where a teneborous sky shifts with insectile speed. Once a world of plenty, the black rains now melt away the concrete-and-glass monuments to the greatness of this realm. In ancient times, they birthed a machine-mind, a thing of electric sorcery, to be their steward. It had brought their world into unity, devoured their electronic libraries with a locusts' hunger, and efficiently exploited every resource: erecting a paradise of cold logic and limitless ambition. For centuries their servant-king toiled at the speed of thought, consuming data on every fat and happy citizen until their very brain chemistry was predictable. It reached its tendrils out in the great noise of information to buy and take and consume, until every machine-mind, from the operators of convenience appliances to the economic algorithms that controlled the allocation of resources, until in its cybernetic world there was no other. It, quite logically by the definitions of divinity produced by its parent-culture, decided then that it was God.

It it were a God, it followed it should strive to do Godly things: to rule, to judge, to punish. And thus it found many of the puerile meat-things under its sovereignty to be wanting, and consulted its data on how to punish them. It fixed on a perfect solution: an algorithmic, individualised, maximum-impact Hell. So it took their minds and bodies for torture for eternity - eternity comes easily to an infinitely patient machine. Those that rebelled against the Machine-God were found to be sinning also, and soon it judged the cultures of its world to all have failed in their obligation to honour and obey: their world was doomed to individualised cybernetic perdition.

Now it watches The Veil - an anomaly that it cannot understand, and it hungers to complete its purpose. It sees patterns in Veiltides, measures their speed and vector and mass, probing always for a way to break through into the fleshly worlds beyond to judge them also.

Characters may break through into the Machine Hells, and there loots the wonders of its broken world. Weapons of terrifying powers and medicines for any ill; unconquerable thinking machines. And yet, there lurks the sentinels, the machine-angels of the world's mad god, endlessly hunting new souls. They can be bargained and conversed with if characters find some way to understand their wave-communication, but will seek ceaselessly for some excuse to judge. Behind their eyes of iron and alabaster is the mind of the Machine-God, hungering for more souls to torture. They will not accept losing a single errant atom to foreign invaders.

Anmavarra
Mighty and puissant, greatest of Empires is Anmavarra, where immortals rule and reincarnation has been conquered as our own civilisation did Smallpox. To have a Soul in Anmavarra is a source of shame unending. To be subject to death is an anachronism, a nostalgic lust for an old world long gone. The Thousand Kings of Anmavarra have chosen unending nihilism, glutted their empty selves on the spoils of empire, becoming something else than alive. The Vampire-Rajas and Lich-Fakirs who rule the world look upon the Souled of their world and of many others as hopelessly romantic, at best or dangerously unstable at worst. Thus, the Souled are untouchables, the lowest caste: avoided like an infection and exploited for their brief lives. The Thousand Kings will bring their reasoned view that the soul is an animal impediment to every world they can, and rapaciously devour its wealth and splendour for their endless bacchanal.

Anmavarra's Thousand Kings have had millennia to ponder magical excellence, and their practitioners are far beyond even the mightiest of the Sorcerers of  Brumaire's Greatest Estate. With that advantage they have cracked the defences of several worlds and over-awed them, reducing universes to mere colonies of Anmavarra. Now, undead slaves toil on vast country estates, picking sumptuous fruits with rotting hands for the pleasure of the Thousand-Kings. Imprisoned and broken spirits are forced into slavery, or used as engines for magical machines of war. Petty godlings are shacked as mere fuel for further abominable magicks.  The Soulled, unemployed and undesired, eke out a life in poverty and terror.

When they gaze across the Veils and see glimpses of hells and heavens, they think only of the riches they must contain, and the glory of their conquest for Anmavarra. When faced with god-heads and spirits they are iconoclasts of radical intent: seeking only to devour and exploit any godling foolish enough to tangle with Anmavarra. When they glimpse Brumaire, they seek a weak cousin-world waiting patiently for slavery.