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FANTASY WORLD

The map looks superficially like our world in the 18th century, but as one looks closer, the details become increasingly strange, filled with peculiar marvels and strange peoples. Humanity shares the world with many other kinds of sapient life, and the dawning revolution in knowledge and understanding of the world is concerned as much with what our world would consider magic as proper science, alchemy as well as the laws of gravity and optics, with sorcery as well as the classification of plants and animals.

SCIENCE AND MAGIC

This world knows about the laws of gravity, optics, microscopes and telescopes and the properties of pendulums and the manner in which the planets travel around the sun. It also knows about the eight fundamental elements, the conflict between the principles of hot and cold, dry and moist, the special principles of mercury, sulfur, and gemstones, and the interactions of the microcosm and microcosm, for this is a world where alchemy is a functional, practical art.

There are three major schools of alchemical art - the European, Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese, although with the Islamic conquests of much of India much of the Hindu school’s lore has been incorporated into Islamic alchemy. The transmutation of lower, less precious metals has been widely achieved, but as yet only the alchemists of Prague have mastered the creation of gold, the highest of metals, and it is kept a state secret: the Imperial court’s scholars are wise enough to know that gold will rapidly become no more valuable than iron if the technique becomes widely known, and extra gold manufactured to aid the Empire’s finances is created in small enough amounts to keep gold expensive, and passed off as the product of New World mines. The secret will not stay secret much longer, and the effects on the global economy will be…impressive.

(The Empire of Further Hind has in fact also mastered the transmutation of lower metals into gold, but it’s religious-minded rulers do not use it to create wealth at all, considering this a worldly distraction from the true ultimate purpose of alchemy, the purification and refinement of human beings to bring them back to a pre-lapsarian state).

The peak of alchemical science, in the view of most, is the Panacea or Elixir of life, which will reportedly cure all diseases and grant immortal life. As yet, Christian European and Islamic alchemists are a ways from achieving this: there are alchemical potions that will substantially extend life, and others which heal a wide variety of diseases, but old age still comes: however, there have been enough successes to keep people hopeful, and aging royals, nobles, and rich folks of whatever origin spend huge sums on sponsoring continued alchemical research. Fraud and quackery is widespread, on the large scale in the mansions of the rich, on the small scale in the cottages of the poor (some 50% of the population of Europe, not counting slaves and serfs, can’t afford even the cheapest real alchemical nostrums, and make do with dubious cures and hedge-magic.)

The Ecclesia Universal, the Catholic Church, opposes research into alchemical potions of immortality, and most Dissenter Churches agree: pursuit of physical immortality on Earth is, according to standard doctrine, a snare and distraction from the proper pursuit of immortal life in heaven, and is likely to lead to Hell when you eventually die anyway (even if you do conquer old age, you’re eventually going to fall down some stairs and break your neck, or something comparable. (This does not, of course, prevent wealthy clerics from sponsoring alchemical researches on the sly.)

(The ironic fact is that the more scholarly alchemists consider the Panacea as imagined by the general population a false, incomplete Panacea. As the alchemists of Ind know, the true Panacea, produced by the true, perfected Philosopher’s Stone, transmutes human beings, not metals: immunity to old age and disease is just fringe benefits of a spiritual transformation, which when shared with the general population will bring about the Millenium (or its Islamic equivalent) and the renewed terrestrial paradise.)

Another alchemical invention, the alkahest, or the universal solvent, is used principally as a weapon of war. Impossible to keep in a physical container, it is usually prepared in an incomplete form and kept in special artillery shells with the final ingredient separated from the incomplete formula by a thin partition, combining upon impact to dissolve the target. Although very useful for penetrating walls and such, the use of the alkahest in combat has the unfortunate side effect of littering the battlefield with almost bottomless holes as the alkahest dissolves its way down towards the center of the earth [1]: in the case of soft ground such holes generally collapse in on themselves, but if bedrock is close to the surface a risk of one hell of an oopsie is created.

Cathayan alchemy is in some ways more advanced than European or Islamic, especially in medical fields (see nations below, on the Xia empire) and has developed potions which allow people to work long periods without eating or drinking, and some which even remove the need to breathe for extended periods. Long study of the flows of Earth-energym AKA Qi lines AKA dragon lines has also allowed for some interested developments, such as Cathayan man-carrying kites, which can travel long distances following atmospheric lines of Qi flow.

Advances in alchemy also have duplicated many of the effects of 19th century chemistry in our world, including a variety of dyes making things more colorful, poisons and corrosives, glues, toxic gasses, high explosives, and more. Middle Eastern palaces glitter with coatings of artificial gemstone, and imperishable Cathayan swords are eagerly sought for.

Alchemical processes also allow the creation of homunculi, artificial humans grown in soil from blood and semen (and not just humans: a wide variety of animals have been similarly recreated by experimenters). This has not, however, eliminated regular slavery or animal husbandy: creating animals the old-fashioned way is cheaper, and homonculi are always imperfect in some ways. Most notably they lack souls, and depending on the details of how they are created are either will-less automatons that will obey orders but have no initiative and must be instructed with tedious and painstaking thoroughness, or mute, violent, and bestial creatures. Still, royal and church bureaucracies have found some use for them, as have doctors [2] and rich perverts. (In labor-rich Cathay, there is even less practical use for homunculi, but a fad has developed among the rich of creative deliberately bizarre and weirdly malformed homunculi, bred like those weirdly elaborate goldfish for an aesthetic of the outre. )

Another subject of alchemical research is the Prima Materia, the chaotic, formless substance that is the ultimate basis of all matter, the stuff that existed before the creation when all things were “without form and void.” Incautious research into this has already led to the near destruction of the city of Bologna, and the kingdom of Padania forcing all alchemical research to relocate to houses in the countryside, a healthy distance from any densely populated area.

(This world will read a state of MAD - mutually assured destruction - a lot earlier than ours did).

Another important source of technology is clockworks, “clockpunk” technology having developed in Renaissance italy. Clockworks technology includes armored vehicles, helicopters and ornithopters, printing machines, mechanical chess players, and automated music makers. Attempts have been made to create clockwork troops, but while of some use against troops unfamiliar with the technology, their limited clockwork programming allows savvy opponents to avoid their attacks and disable them.Also important are clockwork tabulators and calculators, of increasing important to bureaucrats throughout Europe, and are important in ballistic calculations increasingly used by artillerymen on at land and at sea. (At sea there are also clockwork-powered submarines, their air kept breathable by alchemical formulations, and sticky waterproof goo - another alchemical formulation - kept handy to plug frequent leaks. The need to rewind confines them so far to daily patrols in coastal waters.)

The biggest limitation in clockpunk tech is the need to keep it wound up (flying machines in particular can’t travel very far without stopping to rewind) and much of Europe’s poorest classes are employed at the extremely tedious task of winding things (in the colonies this is often done by slaves, and in Eastern Europe by serfs.) Clockwork calculating machines require the crafting of a great many tine gears, which task is so exacting that in some European countries there have been efforts to recruit labor through capturing members of the Wee Folk, the smaller the better, and put them to work as gear-makers: this has led to retaliatory magical mischief on such a level that the harassed population is increasingly demanding the practice be put to an end.

Clockpunk tech remains mostly a European thing, although it has increasingly spread to India and the Islamic world in the last century. It may however soon become obsolete as a means of propulsion: the creation of alchemically powered “engines” has been slowed by the difficulties of going directly to a form of internal combustion technology without going through steam technology first, but recently models which don’t even explode much at all are now being developed to propel balloons through the sky and armored gun-carts across land. Possibly to drive larger vehicles along tracks. (The amount of work involved in keeping a clockworks train wound is simply obscene.)

Magic also exists, but it is more obscure and less normalized. It can be divided into theurgy and thaumaturgy. Theurgy is a spiritual practice, a form of white magic by which the practitioner attunes themselves to the energies of the cosmos and allows them to act through them. There are few masters: it is not an easy practice, and requires many years of training, meditation, and self-abnegation to get to the point where results start to become impressive. The most advanced practitioners are to be found in the east, among Hindu fakirs and holy men, Buddhist monks, and Taoist sages.

Thaumaturgy, or “practical magic”, is in turn divided into associative magic, the magic of contagion and similarity (think of voodoo dolls in our culture), the related field of symbolic magic (words and signs of power), and demonology, the summoning and control of supernatural beings to achieve one's ends. The “daemons” thus summoned are actually generally not the actual devils-out-of-hell that the Church worries about, but rather various natural spirits and elementals, including known abuman species such as djinn, naiads, dryads, ogres, etc.

Thaumaturgy is generally either tightly regulated or banned outright by most states, who consider magic in the hands of private individuals as a threat to social order and heirarchy. In *Catholic states where the Ecclesia Universal dominantes, only specially licensed agents of the church are allowed to practice magic, while in Dissenter (protestant) states it is either banned outright or controlled through a few state-run schools. In most Islamic countries all magicians are (at least in theory) employees of the Sultan, Caliph or Shah, although in Sahelian Africa the magical community is organized as a sort of guild and is (often brutally) self-regulating. In Aryavarta (India) and Cathay things are often more easy going and catch-as-catch-can, although Cathay has an extensive bureaucracy dedicated to hunting down and executing magicians who use magic to do evil (well, evil not sanctioned by the state. Honestly, it’s safer to get a government job).

Natives of the Novus Mundi have magicians of their own, priests, shamans, and elders, although gunpowder, germs, and steel have still done a number on them. [3] Due to the non-literate nature of most native societies outside of Azteca (OTL southern Mexico)use of symbolic and associative magic is less systematized than in the old world, and learning is heavily dependent on lengthy apprenticeships: nothing is written down, so any unexpected deaths can lead to a serious loss of knowledge. Spirit-summoning, at least, has at least a rich a supernatural ecosystem to draw on as the old world, and several cultures have their own theurgic practices, in which oneness with the cosmos is often pursued with the aid of rather more natural pharmaceuticals than their old world equivalents.

[1] It does not reach it, admittedly: eventually the alkahest eats its way down to a level where the heat of the Earth’s interior is so great that the alkahest breaks down into less toxic components.
[2] Spare body parts are useful, and unlike regular humans, the dissection of dead homunculi for anatomical studies is quite legal. Of course, one really should be careful about where one sources ones homunculi corpses: low-quality specimens often have malformed or misplaced internal organs, and may be missing multiple organs altogether.
[3] Magical healing is not the same as mass-produced medicine: it’s a very hands-on procedure, and can’t be done on large numbers of people at once, so in cases where half or more of the population is falling sick at once, the shamans and priests can only do so much, and if they weaken and fall ill themselves, they’re in trouble if there isn’t another magic-user handy to heal _them_.

THE OTHER RACES

Referred to “abhuman” species by European scholars, there exist a wide variety of nonhuman intelligences on all the continents and the seven seas. Some divide them between “spirits” and “elementals” on the one hand, and “sapient beasts” and “near-men” on the other, creatures basically mystical and supernatural, and those more clearly fleshy and terrestrial.

The Tuatha de Dannan, elves, alfar, huldrafolk, etc. are definitely on the “spiritual” side of the chart. They are said to dwell beneath the Earth, but perhaps not quite literally so, since, unlike the cavern homes of dwarves and gnomes, one cannot find them just by taking a spade and digging downwards. One certainly descends into their realm through tumuli and earthen mounds and hidden caves, but reports of their realm describe caves far too vast to be physically possible, many with no visible top, roofed with either a glowing misty “day sky” with no visible or stars, or at times with a darkness filled with cold, foreign stars and a too-large Moon. Of course, such reports are unreliable: illusion and glamour is fundamental to the realm of the elves, and nothing is quite what it seems.Some mystics say that multiple interpretations and seemings are all, in fact, equally “real”, and that reality and illusion in the case of elves are in fact basically indistinguishable.

Although shunning the full light of day and vulnerable to iron, the fey are powerful, and while humans may dominate the daylight and surface world, attempts to invade their own realm have rarely gone well, even when ways down can be found at all. Ancient myth holds that the elves and their allies long ago fought humans (the ancestors of the Celts) for control of much of Europe, and the humans finally drove them underground with iron and magic. (Or rather back underground. Elves themselves claim that they first arrived on Earth by digging up. Elves tend to lie a lot, but how far and deep extend the realms of the elves, nobody is certain, but there are tales of deeper and deeper Underworlds, such mysterious places as the Land of Forever Spring and Forever Winter, places where reality is a bit “thin” and beings exist closer to pure archetypes than physical entities. Passing through these realms supposedly leads to the true Otherworld where elves originally came from: some says this is actually the realm of the dead, and it is true that elves seem to have an odd relationship with ghosts, human ghosts apparently being unable to interact with them at all.

The underground realms of the elves are inhabited not just by “true” alfar/elves, but also seemingly lesser and subordinate races such as boggarts and ogres, the tiny, winged pixies, goblins, and other peculiar creatures. Some theoreticians hold that all the abhuman races originally emerged from the caverns of the Fey Folk, while others consider this a bunch of dingoes' kidneys.

The western Elves of Europe (and, increasingly, the Americas) are divided between the courts of the Seelie and Unseelie, the Light and Dark Elves. Humans tend to think of these as “good” and “evil”, but this isn’t really accurate: they are more symbiotic than opposed, two sides of the same coin, existing in a state of balance which is often bloody but always intimate. Elves of the Seelie court may be less frankly terrifying to human sensibilities, but really should not be trusted in any case.

Cousin races exist in Asia, the Devas of Aryavata (India) and the “fairy folk” of Cathay, the Xian and Feitian. Both share the unclear, illusion-clouded nature of the elves and their subterranean-possibly-extradimensional habitats, and the Xian are said to have their own Yin and Yang themed courts but there are also substantial differences. The Devas are a more straightforward bunch, aggressive but not treacherous, and comfortable in full sunlight, warring against indian ogres (rakshasas) and sharing underground stomping grounds with the half-snake Nagas and the Yakshas, while the Cathayan earth-folk are generally benevolent in their treatment of humans, and have been known to enlighten human scholars and aid humans in times of disease and famine with infallible magical medicine. Their vast underground realms, sometimes referred to the Yellow Springs Beneath the Earth in confusion with the Cathayan traditional land of the dead, is said to be a place of wonders, where plants with stems of gold and leaves of jade grow with jewels as fruit, and the peaches of immortality can be found, but human commerce with these lands is even less than with the realms of the European fey. (The Cathayans tend to consider the Xian and Feitian as a form of minor gods rather than a specific race of beings).

One should beware the Mogwai, malevolent Chinese spirits somewhat akin to the Unseelie Court: they are known for their habit of cruel and occasionally fatal pranks inflicted on human beings. Fox spirits are also a major presence in the East, and are generally less dangerous, except for the Korean varieties, which should be avoided at all costs.

There are various marine elementals and non-human people in the sea (notably Asian dragons), but the most common are mer-people, which generally inhabit the shallower waters of the continental shelves in tropical to temperate seas, growing cities of coral, herding fish, and cultivating seaweeds. Sailors should beware: female merfolk may look hot from the waist up, and certainly do have lovely singing voices, but aside from the occasionally weirdo which would be on the mer-folk equivalent of Furaffinity it they had the internet, they aren’t really interested in human males, their tastes being towards Merrows, the males of their species, scaly, crested and spine-plumed, noseless and fanged. Merfolks aren’t necessarily evil, but they aren’t really much more moral than their fellow sea dwellers and occasional pets/hunting dogs, the dolphins - which is to say, some may save sailors from drowning, but they’re just as likely to yank you down into the drowning deep, to make scrimshaw out of your bones, ornaments from your teeth, and giant lobster feed out of your guts. The genitals aren’t compatible, anyway.

Mermaid’s flesh if eaten can confer greatly extended life, but the side effects make it seriously not worth it some 95% of the time. This has not stopped European scholars from capturing Mermaids to harvest their flesh for experimental purposes (surely there must be some way to prevent or at least moderate the monsterism?) and Merfolk have become increasingly elusive in areas where European shipping is common. It’s also gotten rather more dangerous for fishermen in teeny boats fishing in ones or twos out of sight of other humans, and as little as the European elites give a fig about people as lowly as fishermen, there’s an increasing sense that Something Must Be Done. (Oddly, “stop capturing Merfolk for experimentation” doesn’t seem to be on the list of possibilities.)

The abyssal merfolk of the Pacific have legs and the genitalia match up: unfortunately, the females are just as awful-looking as the males.

The most common magical humanoids are the Little People, comprising a great many species, varying in size from five feet tall down to smaller than thumb-sized, hairy, hairless, many with backwards pointed feet, some with big noses, some with no noses, good, bad, and indifferent. They are generally classed as either Kobolds or Gnomes, with Kobolds being those species which have a somewhat symbiotic or at least comensual relation with humans, living in and around human houses and farms and mines, such as brownies, duende, nissen, puca, dormovoi, etc. and often doing helpful things for humans in exchange for small gifts of food/and or drink, but can be a serious pain in the ass if offended.

The class of “wild” little people or Gnomes is much larger (see small inset map) and have a variety of lifestyles. Some live underground, although rarely burrowing as deeply and certainly not as elaborately as Dwarves: small species may construct burrow homes in soil comparable to those of rabbits or prairie dogs. Some live (at least part time) within the underground lands of the Elf folk and their east asian cousins. Some live in trees, under large bushes and hedges, in rivers, in termite nests. Some are nomads, some are fishermen, some grow mushrooms. Some seem to be able to live without food, others are almost perpetually hungry (some occasionally eat people). Most have some degree of magic that helps keep them hidden, and many can become invisible: some can make their entire settlements invisible.

(The distinction between Gnomes and Kobolds isn’t absolute, BTW. Some species may at times become associated with humans only to later return to the hills and forests, and a number are known by one name when they dwell among humans and another when they are found in the wild.)

Naiads and Dryads - spirits of trees and rivers - and such related beings as rusalkas are largely spiritual beings, although they can sometimes materialize to an extent sufficient to, say, drown people.

Even more elemental are Djinn, beings of fire and air and the desert sands, beings of no fixed abode and no fixed form (possibly of no “true” form at all). Popular culture is unhelpful: they aren’t muscular harem guards with legs made of smoke (although they could take that form if they wanted to), and most do not grant wishes. (Only a handful have been tied to rings, lamps, etc. in permanent servitude. More were trapped in bottles, but they are under no obligation to grant wishes. Depending on their personal feelings, you might get a servant for life if you let one out, or be divided into 42 artfully arranged pieces, depending on the mood of the Djinn when you let it out). They are also not omnipotent: they really can’t raise the dead, can’t give you all the money in the world, or give you the abilities of Silver Age superman. They can, however, summon up enough gold and silver to fill a swimming pool, summon a real mob of almost-real servants, build you a palace overnight, etc. If, of course, they feel like it.Various forms of magical protection do exist to keep them at a distance, and they generally don’t go out of their way to mess with humans: that’s how all those Djinn got locked up into bottles in the first place.

The many-formed and variegated Yokai of Wakuko (Japan) are a whole story in themselves, and space limits forbid going into detail, but let it be noted than the Shogunal government maintains a sizable bureaucracy detailed with human-Yokai relations, and employs a small army of shamans and theurgists to negotiate with them or bring them under control if diplomacy fails).

There are also a number of normally invisible, elemental spirits of air, water earth and fire, some evil, other friendly or indifferent, which are rarely perceived by most human beings, and are generally the concern of mystics and magicians. They usually only become a real problem under certain rare circumstances, such as running into an unfriendly air elemental while halfway up a mountain in a storm: or a spirit of the wild spaces may enter into a human lost in the woods, especially one who is suffering from some sort of dissociative episode, due to, say, eating your traveling companion after you ran out of trail mix. (This can lead to wendigoes or werewolfism. This sort of “natural” metamorphosis should be distinguished from deliberate lycanthropy, in which a magician invites animal spirits into their own body to effect a transformation.)

Among the more grounded and physical abhuman races, Dwarves are probably those Europeans are most likely to encounter, living underground in perfectly physical mines and caverns, and with magic largely confined to stone cutting, earth moving, cave reshaping, mining, forging, and craftmanship. They are generally found in rocky and mountainous areas where there is good solid rock to build tunnels in, and valuable minerals, and avoiding low-lying, wet, high-water-table areas. More than half of all minerals used by human beings in Eurasia come from the mining of dwarves, who also produce swords, armor, iron wheels, toys, musical instruments, and the occasional magical gadget. While dwarves can maintain a sort of underground ecosystem without the aid of the sun, using alchemy to support a base of fungi and giant roots and unnatural growths to feed their own versions of cattle and fishponds, it is easier to trade for much of their food and drink (fungus beer is an acquired taste), cloth, and medicinal plants. Due to their somewhat symbiotic nature with the human world, dwarvish settlements often have a vassal-ruler relationship with above ground human rulers, but their feudal obligations tend to be rather light, and it generally takes a lot for a dwarven hold to go so far as send soldiers to help fight in human wars.

Ghouls (or ghūls) are widely distributed in the old world, in middle latitudes from what in our world would be Iberia to Indonesia. While the Elven races are largely independent of humanity and dwarves have a somewhat symbiotic relationship (if capable of surviving on their own in a pinch), the relationship of Ghouls with humanity is largely parasitic. In desert areas often living on the margins of settled land, often in ruins or tombs, and burrowing under cities and their graveyards in areas where the soil is not too wet and prone to collapse, ghouls prey on the living and the dead. Extremely omnivorous, they eat the corpses of both humans and animals, stray cats and dogs, homeless beggars and solitary nocturnal travelers, stray dogs and cats, and all sorts of garbage. (Their one positive attribute is that they tend to keep the rat population down).

A clever race, ghouls are careful to not murder too many of the living as not to panic the humans and bring about intensive efforts to destroy them, and keep their population numbers under control by eating the weaker and stupider of their kind as needed. Although foul in odor and somewhat dog-like in appearance, many ghouls can at least partly adopt human form, although there are almost always certain flaws requiring covering clothing. Some have infiltrated human society: ghouls are a long lived people, and know where many a “lost” treasure was buried, giving them the financial pull to gain entree to human society. Such urban ghouls will use their influence to get other ghouls plum jobs in slaughter houses, hospitals, graveyards, and as dogcatchers. Human-ghoul crossbreeding and the swapping out of the more human-like half-breeds as changelings gives ghouls further access to human society, but in the end such influence is limited; ghouls, even rich ones with their own cannibal chefs, are creatures of base appetite, and have no real interest in altering human society.

Also having a rather predatorial relationship with humans are the various races lumped into the category of “Ogre”, beings bigger and stronger and more magical than humans, but more physical and less magical than the Alfar types, and less physically impressive than giants, shapeshifters but with little ability to put spells on other races. They are generally divided into western ogres, Indian Ogres or rakshas, and eastern ogres or Oni.(There are a variety of evil spirits which are also known as Oni, which can be confusing. If they come in bright primary colors, they’re probably the spirits). There are also ogre-like beings in subsaharan Africa and parts of the Americas, but they are less commonly known. Given their shape-shifting natures, their actual appearance is unclear, and there is some uncertainty if the tiger heads often sported by Indian ogres are inherent or just as sort of fashion statements, as with the elephant ears and tusks that Arabian and Persian ogres often have. Horns seem to be the norm, although only the eastern Oni have pointy ones, the western types generally having short, blunt horns. They often take refuge in the underworld of the Alfar or Feitian, but this seems to indicate indifference rather than fellow feeling, and it may be that they are no more native to the underworld than the squirrels and plover that often hang out in prairie dog burrows helped build them.

Rakshahs, which have a rather adversarial relationship with the Devas, have their own network of magically hidden houses and even palaces in the surface world, but Oni and western ogres tend to sleep rough when they can’t or won’t couch-surf in the underworld. Some do manage to hide out in plain sight in human communities, thanks to their shape-shifting abilities (do you have suspicions about your neighbor with the terrible bad breath? Try tossing some salt on them or poke them with cold iron. WARNING - make sure to do this only when in a public setting!)

Ogres aren’t actually obligate maneaters, and a fair number have obtained bodyguard or shock troop employment in human nations: a very few have even obtained patents of nobility.

BEASTS, FREAKS AND GIANTS: WILD MEN AND OTHER “MUNDANE”   ABHUMANS

    A number of Abhuman species which are often grouped together are those types which lack either advanced societies or supernatural abilities (they may have superhuman abilities, but these are simply a matter of size, strength and other purely physical features). These include sciapods, a nomadic people who travel by jumping long distances on their single, giant, foot, the largely solitary giants [1] and the smaller, forest-dwelling giants known as wodewose (rarely more than nine feet tall), cyclopes, dog-headed men (cynocephalids), centaurs, the goatish fauns and satyrs, and certain types of western ogres. Such beings tend to be rare nowadays, lack of magic or political organization having driven them to the fringes of the human world, inhabiting jungles and desert wastes inimical to organized human states. Centaurs have been largely been hunted to extinction by steppe nomads after the development of the stirrup and the composite bow allowed them to meet centaurs on an equal combat footing. Giants used to be occasionally seen in Europe, chained and often hamstrung giants employed as gate guards, turners of great cranks to open huge gate of or river locks, cutters and toters of quarry stone, or just as court ornaments proclaiming the might of some king or other, but the unwillingness to let them _breed_ has driven European giants to extinction over the last couple centuries. Some have survived as subjects peoples, several Asian states fielding cynocephalid troops (they’re excellent trackers).

The Sasquachidea (Bigfoots, Yeti, and related species of giant hairy hominids) are doing OK: the fact they are all telepathic and can therefore reliably avoid running into human beings helps. They're quite intelligent, but uninterested in technology: they've seen our societies, telepathically tasted our unhappyness, and have decided that if that's civilization, we can keep it.

TROLLS
    Some class the trolls with the above, but this is inaccurate, trolls and related species such as the Hudlar being magical beings which turn into stone in the daylight, more closely related to elf-kind. Most trolls have some talent at the arts of illusion to conceal themselves from humans: more potent magics are largely confined to older female trolls or troll-wives. Trolls are quite variable in size, from no larger than dwarves to the size of small giants, twelve feet tall and more. Although most only have one head, some have two or three or even as many as five: extra heads is a bit of status symbol among trolls.

[1] Finds of ruins built on a colossal scale world-wide suggest that giants, millennia ago, were more social and had an actual civilization: what caused it to collapse and reduce giants to their current “cannibalistic mountain men” status is unclear, although it is often linked to the fall of Atlantis and Mu.

THE DEAD
Ghosts and spirits are known world wide, although there is much philosophical debate as to whether these are the actual souls of the dead, some sort of “spiritual residue” or psychic echo, or just some sort of mischievous spirit or demon pretending to be someone who died. (Indeed, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between a troublesome spirit and a pesky Kobold.) Most cultures just tend to exorcize them, and not think too much about the theological issues.

Vampires and Revenants are rather harder to dismiss.

A revenant is essentially a spirit so strong and stubborn that it refuses to leave the body even after it would normally cease to function. Some are trying to achieve some overriding goal, and pass on when it is achieved. Some just refuse to acknowledge they are dead - they usually give up when the signs of decomposition become obvious. And a few simply refuse to move on even thought they are dead, and stave off decomposition through cannibalism. This is how you get draugr and barrow-wrights.

Vampires are corpses which have become the habitation of dangerous chthonic elementals, and rise from their towns to prey on the living. They often spread disease, and are not charming, are not articulate, and do not dress like headwaiters.

Neither draugr nor most vampires are destroyed by sunlight [1], although vampires are immobilized by sunlight and wights are at least blinded by it. Vampires can be disposed of by staking, decapitation, fire, and combinations thereof, while wights need to be cut to pieces and then burned to ashes (the development of alchemical incendiaries has increasingly made it possible to skip other steps and go straight to the burning).

Zombies are soulless corpses animated by magic to do hard labor, and are just disgusting.(Certain west African magicians can enslave people by putting them in a trance in which they are quiescent and obedient as a Homunculus, but it’s not quite the same thing)

[1] Chinese vampires, who manifest a rather unique form of spiritual corpse-parasitism unique to the local supernatural ecosystem, are an exception.

UNUSUAL FAUNA

Aside from the various abhuman races, this world contains a variety of unusual birds and beasts. The unicorn, although rare, still roams the high mountains of Tibet, central Asia, and north India: almost as intelligent as the great apes and able to run at over 50 miles an hour, the beast is sly and elusive, and if cornered its almost indestructible horn can penetrate plate armor like paper. Hunters seeking to kill unicorns for the unique virtues of their horn or capture them for the menageries of kings and emperors are often disappointed when they try to take advantage of their supposed predilection for virgins: unicorns have no fear of virgins, but they are not particularly drawn to them, and many a virgin has suffered near terminal embarrassment as a nearby-but-not-close-enough unicorn entirely ignores them.

The Firebird of the north Eurasian forests is a mysterious entity, neither good nor evil, bringing good or bad luck and appearing and disappearing unpredictably: it can be captured, but never kept for long. It has developed a complex lore and symbolic significance amongst alchemists, and is widely considered to be a form of pure elemental rather than a biological entity, although nobody has ever dissected one (nobody should actually kill a firebird, unless they really want to be at the center of a really impressive firestorm). It’s glowing feathers have a variety of uses for alchemists or mages, but one should only use ones that having fallen on their own: plucking a firebird may not cause a forest fire, but it is extraordinarily bad luck.

The three-horned Fanged Tyrant of India is a now nearly extinct giant reptilian predator living in large, deep rivers, needing the room: the largest specimens were capable of seizing full grown elephants and dragging them into rivers to drown.

Griffins are considered to be the result of ancient alchemy or magic, like other chimeric species. Native to the Caucasus, they have become fairly widespread as a result of domestication (well, more or less domestication. Griffins are temperamental and never entirely safe, even after centuries of breeding for a better disposition, but the lure of a flying steed is such that macho warriors have taken the risk for nearly two millennia.) Most Asian nations west of Serica have at least some units of aerial Griffin cavalry, as do a number of European countries. Numbers are limited by the huge amounts of meat that is needed to feed them, and the lengthy process of training and establishing a rapport between rider and steed. Thule and northern Muscovia are too cold for Griffons in the winter, while tropical Africa and southern India are too hot. They are quite rare in the wild, and wild specimens are confined to a few distant mountain ranges in Asia.

Dragons are divided into western and eastern forms, and are quite different.

The most common western dragon, found in west Asia, Africa and Europe, is a snake-like subterranean or freshwater creature, commonly known in northern Europe as a wyrm (sometimes “loathly”), heavily armored with usually blade-proof scales above but soft-skinned and vulnerable underneath, and in many cases capable of spitting copious amounts of corrosive venom. The largest African varietes, which can exceed 120 feet in length, are known to prey upon elephants, which they kill through a mix of constriction and poison injected with fangs. European varities are generally smaller, rarely exceeding 70 feet in length and more slender in length, although often rather more copiously productive of venom. Extending further east in its distribution but not as far south is the fire-breathing or “true” dragon. It is the only hexipedal reptile, having four legs and two bat-like wings, and is widely believed to have originated in the Meddling With Things that Should Not Be by ancient wizards. The largest dragons can carry off a full grown horse or cow. Although myths hold them to be sapient, they aren’t any brighter than crows, with which they share a love of bright and shiny things, leading to dragon hoards (which more often have shiny stones and quartz crystals than gold and silver). Fire breathing involves intestinal gasses and a “flint” tooth to provide a spark, and is generally overstated as a weapon (otherwise none of those knights of old would have survived). A dragon can generally produce a few bursts of flame lasting for a few seconds and then will require several hours to “refill their tank.” (Note that this is still enough to badly, even fatally burn a man or horse without protective cover).

While flying dragons are not overly bright, very old and large wyrms can possess a degree of sapience, perhaps through mental absorption from human prey, wyrms possessing certain telepathic abilities allowing them to fascinate, snake-like, individual prey: even clearly non-intelligent young wyrms can give the impression of speaking to those they are attempting to immobilize mentally.

Both species have been greatly reduced in numbers throughout most of their former range, thanks to the rise of modern organized states and the spread of gunpowder weapons and alchemical mordants and incendiaries, outside the most unorganized regions of Interior Africa being confined to the deepest of forests, cave systems, and swamps. [1] The dragon hunter of song and story has been replaced by military professionals, and hardly anyone in the richer parts of Gallia or Albion is likely to encounter a dragon other than smallish ones with their venom sacks removed in a menagerie.

There is also the wyvern, a flier with two wings and legs like a bird. About the size of a condor, this very wide spread species is more a nuisance than a real threat, although it will attack sheep and occasionally children: some very patient trainers have broken them to the role of very metal hunting hawks, but this is exceptional.

Eastern dragons, in spite of some superficial similarities in appearance, are an entirely different type of being. They are elementals of air and water, taking tangible form only part of the time, capable of shape-shifting, and inhabiting clouds, rivers, seas, and mountain peaks. Like Wyrms, they develop sapience with age, and the oldest (which can be millennia old) are extremely intelligent and can take human form. They have a complex relationship with the royal Cathayan family and with the Devas and the Xian and Feitian: they have been known to aid and advice Cathayan rulers and administrators/scholars, but also punish severely those who seek their aid under false pretenses or even honest ones if they offend the dragon’s often somewhat unclear sense of ethics and propriety.

The Zmei of old Rus - shapeshifters, taking on forms human, dragonine (often with multiple heads), or mixed, are believed by some scholars to be a western branch of the oriental dragons; Little is known about them: since the conversion of Rus to Christianity, their manifestations have become very rare (there are some reports that they have begun to appear in Wakuku, where they don’t stand out that much among the weird and varied abhuman population of those Yokai-haunted islands).

A third sort of dragon are the many Great Serpents of the new world, from the hundred-foot long anacondas of the Amazonian jungle, to the giant subterranean rattlesnakes of the northern fringes of New Castile, the giant lake serpents (lakes may or may not be giant) of Vinland (America north of Mexico), and the perhaps mythical feathered serpent of Yukutan, reported by terrified survivors as colossal, fire and lighting spitting, and able to fly. Their classification as “dragons” is a source of scholarly debate in Europe, some scholars using the term as a catch-all for giant snake-y and lizard-y creatures in general, others claiming that the term should be restricted to the Wyrms and flying dragons of the west, the east Asian dragons preferably to be renamed (the Cathayan term “Lung” is available, but European scholars will insist on coming up with something of their own) and the species of the new world not to be allowed to clutter things up further.

The Great Sea Serpent is not, as some believe, a form of sea dragon, but an enormous carnivorous eel of global distribution, with the largest specimens approaching two hundred feet in length. They do occasionally snatch sailors off the decks of ships, but since they generally do not raise their heads very high above the water, this is only a danger for the smaller ships. In the case of military ships, the anti-boarded netting is usually sufficient to provide adequate protection.

The Kraken should be distinguished from the giant squid and colossal octopus, being a pseudocephalopod of thaumaturigal coelenterate nature, a radially symmetric creature with over one hundred tentacles spanning nearly half a mile, each with a glowing eye near its end to spot prey and constantly groping in all directions. A deep water dweller, it is rarely seen on the surface, and in cases where it is, survivors are few. Most human scholars consider it mythical, but the merfolk known better.

[1] This represents a second large-scale die back after something of a population recovery in the Middle Ages - dragon numbers in the Mediterranean were greatly reduced during the days of the Roman Empire, which while lacking cannon or the universal solvent had catapults, onagers and ballistae, and certainly had excellent military organization and ballsy military commanders.

NATIONS AND EMPIRES

In Europe, although it has some commonalities with our early 18th century, it’s still more a baroque world than an Age of Reason: indeed, much of this world makes such an Age implausible, and Europe remains sodden with early modern religious-magical thinking in spite of the advances in science - indeed, inseparably from said advances, since it is seen as simply another route to revelatory understanding and reshaping of the world.

Wigs are large, society is elitist, monarchy is increasingly enlightened but what is enlightened isn’t quite the same. There are extensive bureaucracies set aside to deal with elves and dwarves and gnomes. There is at the same time a great arrogance - a notion that the secrets of life, death, and immortality are just around the corner - and at the same time a more humble understanding of humanity’s role in the world, there are others which share this world, and while we may (hopefully) be God’s favorites, it’s hard to believe we and our spiritual struggles are the sole thing of importance in this world.

Religion is similar to our world, with the Ecclesia Univesal, headed by the Pontifex Maximus, filling the role of or Catholic Church, and with several countries having Reformist/dissident (Protestant) churches. Jews exist and suffer under various levels of religious restriction, and a surprisingly large network of secret underground Druidic societies which have been under cover since Roman times, although their polytheism has changed greatly over a millennium and a half of Christian influence. They sometimes clash with the even older “Witch-cults”, followers of the pre-Celtic Earth mother, and there were attempts by both sides to rat the other out during the witch-hunting panic. (Largely unsuccessful, since as in our world most of those burned at the stake were elderly woman with poor social skills, although some actual unlicensed magicians were also swept up (and a very few of them had actually put a curse on someone, or tried to do so).

The Commonwealth of Albion retains its name from the period of Parliamentary rule, but is again a monarchy, ruled as in our world by a German import. The islands are divided into the four crowns of Caledonia, Hibernia, Logres (England), and Cambria (Wales). Hibernia is restricted to the east of what we would call Ireland, the west remaining independent thanks to the aid of the Tuatha de Dannan, the Irish finding the necessary tribute of meat, dairy products, and skilled artists and the annual occurrence of the Wild Hunt less burdensome that the rule of the stinking sassenach. It is a limited parliamentary democracy, with literacy and property requirements keeping voting rights to a small (male) minority, although that makes it almost radical by the standards of many Europan monarchies. It is a leading nation in the alchemical sciences, Sir Isaak Newtone having largely established the standard rules of alchemy for Europe. (The Serian system is rather different).

Italy remains a cutting edge sort of place in gears technology, producing the best clockwork combat automata, military vehicles, calculating machines, and ornithropters, a leadership established in the days of Leonardo the Marvellous. (Leonardo might have made Florence the rulers of Italy, but they grew too greedy, and tried to make him a prisoner in a gilded cage whose genius would be entirely at the service of the Florentine state: he escaped in a flying machine of his own design, created marvels for several Italian rulers, and in the end Milan triumphed and unified most of the Italian peninsula north of the Ecclesia in the kingdom of Padania. (Gallian efforts at military conquest, facing clockpunk military technology they were unable to duplicate at the time, came a cropper, and the Gallians went home short a monarch, and Italy avoided destruction as a battlefield for foreign great powers)

Gallia is an absolute monarchy with a notoriously corrupt nobility, but it also home to some of Europe’s most brilliant natural philosophers, and in a world where philosophy and magic aren’t that distant, some of the world’s most innovative thaumaturgical work. Lotharingia isn’t exactly a greater Netherlands, arising from something more like a surviving Valois Burgundy in the north rather than a long struggle against spanish rule, and is therefore a more conventional monarchy and somewhat less ferociously competitive, but it also has deeper pockets and more manpower than our world’s Holland, and has a larger colonial empire than said state.

While in our world this period in western European history was shaped to a considerable extent by the rivalry of Britain and France, in this world it’s more driven by the conflict between Gallia and its allies and the Holy Europan Empire, a more effectual HRE equivalent ruled by the Habsburgs (other branches of the family ruling Pannonia (Hungary) and Hispania (Spain). Gallia allies itself with the Ottomans (menaced by HEE-backed Pannionia) and Lotharingia (which the Emperor thinks is more in the way of a rebellious Holy Europan province than a legitimate country), while Albion plays spoiler as it sees fit: it generally has more conflicts with Gallia and Lotharingia than with the Europan Empire (the first two compete with it for colonies, the Empire doesn’t), but it doesn’t want to see the Habsburgs regain the truly dominant position in Europe they had back in the 16th century, either.

(As out HRE, the HEE has a complicated internal structure, with Electoral Principalities, Free Citiesm Dukes, Landgraves, Prince-Bishops, etc., but the central state functions are more powerful, and since crushing the rebellious Raetians (Bavarians) and absorbing much of their territory the Habsburgs have been largely unchallenged save for the minor surviving Protestant states of the north, ruling from Prague, the famed center of alchemical and theurgical science [1])
The *Polish nobility really leaned into that whole “we nobleman are the descendants of manly Sarmatian horse nomads, you peasants are descendants of backwards swamp-dwelling Slavs” mythos here. This will lead to problems later.

As in our world at the time, the Islamic nations are having a bit of a tough time, struggling to keep up with the Christian Joneses, although on the alchemy and theurgical side of things they aren’t as far behind as on the organizational and technological front (their lack of an Islamic Newton to systematize alchemy is becoming a problem, though). North Aethiopia (Africa) is actually doing better than in our world, the Marinid rulers of Barbary having actually managed to hammer the diverse groups of Al-Mahgreb into a more or less centralized state, and comport themselves as junior partners to the Osmanlis rather than vassals. (They actually did better than the Osmanlis in the last war of Islam and Christian Europa, overruning most of Sicily, although they’re now slowly being pushed back by Magna Graecia.) The Osmanlis are struggling to reform their military, trying to make deals with the thoroughly unreliable djinn, and growing some lovely tulips.

Osmanli Misr is notorious for its secret cults and societies, even a few cults still worshiping the old Gods and guarding their secrets with curses and attack mummies (corpses animated by an elemental spirit deliberately bound to it, not frustrated lovers nursing four thousand year old grudges.)

There’s always something new out of Aethiopia, whether it is Garamatian magicians, previously undiscovered kingdoms, strange beasts and monsters, gems, ivory, apes, peacocks, dragon-hide scales and rhinoceros-riding mercenaries. Chinese trading galleys visit the prosperous cities of Zanj, and the giant inhabitants of the kingdom of the cyclopes herd elephants and hunt dragons.The ancient kingdom of Aksum holds out against the tides of Islam, while the Lotharingians begin the long push that will take them to the heart of the continent in another century.

In India, the heirs of the great Christian king of Bragman (also known as Kerala), Prester John, still rule over a vast constellation of vassal kingdoms, republics, and tribal allies extending in a vast arc from western Bod (Tibet) and Kashmeer to Taprobane, including Christians Syriac and Nestorian, Hindus, Buddhists, worshippers of the Greek Gods of old, and even some Muslims, tolerated if not embraced, left behind by the withdrawal of Islamic rule from its previous high water mark, when some two thirds of the subcontinent was ruled by Muslims. The rulers boast of the variety of peoples they rule over, not just humans, but abhumans who live off smells, other who only eat snakes, dog-headed men, dwarves and Indian little people, Nagas who are snakes from the waist down, and centaurs. Allies include the Amazon tribes (Chadestians, Themiscyreans, and Lycastians), which migrated to northern India from the western steppe centuries ago to avoid falling under the rule of patriarchal groups, and to this day only allow men into their country once a year for the Festival of Love.

Under the rule of high kings less brilliant and charismatic than the Founder, the Hundred Kingdoms have become increasingly cat-like in their herding behaviors, but nobody is too worried: the current sultanate of Delhi is culturally quite brilliant, but also rather decentralized and corrupt. Of course, the applecart could be upset if the ambitious new Eranian King of Kings succeeds in his plans for eastern expansion…

The Greater Cathay area, the empires of the east, remain so far largely unmolested by Europeans. More of a concern is the hordes of Gog-Magog: their population having outgrown the remarkable system of boreal agriculture (based on engineered microclimates, the selective breeding of edible cold-climate plants, and a wee bit of shamanic magic), in the last two centuries they have expanded south, overrunning the Khanates north of the Xia Cathayan empire, pushing other nations west and south, and in the warmer climates are continuing to be fruitful and multiplying. A squat, pallid, hairy sort of people with funny-looking ears, the hordes of Gog-Magog are widely suspected of not being entirely human, of having cross-bred with goblins and forest demons and maybe even northern woods-trolls. They certainly seem inhumanly resistant to cold weather, as much as Patagonian giants, and worship a pantheon of deities of Lovecraftian creepyness (devil-worshippers, the Muscovite church says) with alarming rites and occasional human sacrifice.

The Xia are keeping an eye on these developments, but they also have some internal issues. Chinese alchemy has now reached the point where the monarchy (and a certain selection of loyal officials and nobles of the very highest ranks) can live for centuries, which tends to lead to a great many of assassination efforts on the part of frustrated heirs [2], and in cases where assassination doesn’t work, a deeply paranoid and profoundly isolated ruling class which tends to consider the short-lived lower classes as almost a separate species, not worthy to even have ghosts of their own. This has in turn led to quite successful recruitment drives by certain apocalyptic Buddhist sects.In spite of these troubling developments, Cathay is less isolationist than the late Ming and Qing dynasties of our world: there is a formidable navy, and much direct trade with other Asian countries and even Africa. This leads to occasional clashes with European powers, in which Chinese Qi-guided alchemical rockets and European cannon balls with clockwork targeting mechanisms have so far performed with roughly equal honors.

Joseon, the Xia Empire’s most honored (for what it’s worth) vassal, is right on the front line with GOGMAGOG and is really getting nervous: at a great cost (there has already been one peasant revolt over taxes) they’re building their own equivalent of the Great Wall along the border, only higher, thicker, and with stones alchemically fused together and smooth as glass on the side facing the river dividing Joseon and GOGMAGOG territory.

The conquest of the archipelago of Insulind (Indonesia) by Lotharingia is further along than the equivalent Dutch conquest OTL: local rulers are trying to petition the Osmanli Caliph and the Xia emperor for help, but both are too concerned with problems closer to home to pay much attention.

Wakuku (Japan) has closed off more, roughly to the extent of our world, but hasn’t given up the gun (Xia’s alchemical artillery and the Cathayan habit of sending diplomatic missions on heavily armed mega-junks have provided incentive) and its artisans have recently been doing something rather peculiar with very large structures of elaborately hinged bamboo and machinery powered not by clockworks or alchemical potions but, strangely, boiling water.

The Polynesians are the heirs of sunken Mu, and bits and pieces of vast and strange ruins are found from the isles of Melanesia east to *Easter Island. (You think the statues in our world are impressive? You ain’t seen nothing.)

So are, in their own way, the deepwater - and deeply creepy - Merfolk of the deep Pacific.

The Americas - in this world, the New World or Mundus Novus, divided into Vinland in the north and Columbia in the south - is in the process of being conquered by Europeans (both human and not), but resistance is building. Hispania, like its OTL equivalent, got there first with the most and took the best bits, but expansion has mostly stalled. Thanks to local magical know-how and alchemically derived medical practices on the part of Europeans the population drop in Hispanian-ruled America hasn’t been quite as bad, and the Hispanian empire in the Americas is both more populous and more Indian/mixed race than in our world at the time: a sort of assimilated indigenous nobility is a substantial part of the ruling class. (This is reflected in the audiencia of what would be southern Mexico in our world being known as “Azteca”)

Survival rates in north America were also higher: Albionese New Hanover is nearly 10% native American while a more numerous Iroqouis are still putting up a fight to hold onto at least some of their western conquests, and trying to play the Albionese, the Gallians, and Lotharingia against each other.

(There is a second colonial conquest of the Americas happening without humans really knowing much about it. Alfar following the Vikings found their way to the Novus Mundi, and powerful nobles of the Lands Below unhappy with their status in the complex and ever-shifting hierarchy of the Tuatha de Dannan crossed the sea in their boats of stone and established little courts of their own in Vinland. Relations with the local Little People were initially friendly, but turned cols as more of the Elfar and their associated races arrived. As Europeans arrived with their iron and church magic, they have moved further inland, in turn pushing the local Little People in a domino/Mcafene/volkswanderung effect: however, the local little people have been forming larger confederations, allying with the flying heads and other forest spirits, and shit is getting real.)

This world’s version of the Mound Builder culture was heavily influenced by Muvian models, although it still ended up ecologically overextended and collapsing. There does remain a denser and more settled native American population in the lower *Mississippi river valley, which has both pluses and minuses from the point of view of Gallian colonizers.

Aside from Andean and Mesoamerican empires similar the ones of OTL before the Hispanian conquests, the Americas have a couple pockets of high culture tracing their heritage to colonies of Ancient Mu, having migrated deep inland in the process of fleeing the poorly understood and largely forgotten (if clearly very catastrophic) events taking place around the end of Old Mu. The peoples of the Seven Cities of Cibola and the kingdom of El Dorado didn’t manage to hold onto much more than agriculture, stoneworking, and a badly mutated version of their polytheistic religion, but this was enough to make them distinctly appealing targets for Hispanian aggression a few millennia later.

[1] - Wien? You craaazy? It’s a hick sort of town.
[2] - a side effect of the many, many failed efforts to produce an elixir of immortality has been the development of a remarkable pharmaecopia of immensely powerful poisons.

Description

FANTASY WORLD

The map looks superficially like our world in the 18th century, but as one looks closer, the details become increasingly strange, filled with peculiar marvels and strange peoples. Humanity shares the world with many other kinds of sapient life, and the dawning revolution in knowledge and understanding of the world is concerned as much with what our world would consider magic as proper science, alchemy as well as the laws of gravity and optics, with sorcery as well as the classification of plants and animals.

SCIENCE AND MAGIC

This world knows about the laws of gravity, optics, microscopes and telescopes and the properties of pendulums and the manner in which the planets travel around the sun. It also knows about the eight fundamental elements, the conflict between the principles of hot and cold, dry and moist, the special principles of mercury, sulfur, and gemstones, and the interactions of the microcosm and microcosm, for this is a world where alchemy is a functional, practical art.

There are three major schools of alchemical art - the European, Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese, although with the Islamic conquests of much of India much of the Hindu school’s lore has been incorporated into Islamic alchemy. The transmutation of lower, less precious metals has been widely achieved, but as yet only the alchemists of Prague have mastered the creation of gold, the highest of metals, and it is kept a state secret: the Imperial court’s scholars are wise enough to know that gold will rapidly become no more valuable than iron if the technique becomes widely known, and extra gold manufactured to aid the Empire’s finances is created in small enough amounts to keep gold expensive, and passed off as the product of New World mines. The secret will not stay secret much longer, and the effects on the global economy will be…impressive.

(The Empire of Further Hind has in fact also mastered the transmutation of lower metals into gold, but it’s religious-minded rulers do not use it to create wealth at all, considering this a worldly distraction from the true ultimate purpose of alchemy, the purification and refinement of human beings to bring them back to a pre-lapsarian state).

The peak of alchemical science, in the view of most, is the Panacea or Elixir of life, which will reportedly cure all diseases and grant immortal life. As yet, Christian European and Islamic alchemists are a ways from achieving this: there are alchemical potions that will substantially extend life, and others which heal a wide variety of diseases, but old age still comes: however, there have been enough successes to keep people hopeful, and aging royals, nobles, and rich folks of whatever origin spend huge sums on sponsoring continued alchemical research. Fraud and quackery is widespread, on the large scale in the mansions of the rich, on the small scale in the cottages of the poor (some 50% of the population of Europe, not counting slaves and serfs, can’t afford even the cheapest real alchemical nostrums, and make do with dubious cures and hedge-magic.)

The Ecclesia Universal, the Catholic Church, opposes research into alchemical potions of immortality, and most Dissenter Churches agree: pursuit of physical immortality on Earth is, according to standard doctrine, a snare and distraction from the proper pursuit of immortal life in heaven, and is likely to lead to Hell when you eventually die anyway (even if you do conquer old age, you’re eventually going to fall down some stairs and break your neck, or something comparable. (This does not, of course, prevent wealthy clerics from sponsoring alchemical researches on the sly.)

(The ironic fact is that the more scholarly alchemists consider the Panacea as imagined by the general population a false, incomplete Panacea. As the alchemists of Ind know, the true Panacea, produced by the true, perfected Philosopher’s Stone, transmutes human beings, not metals: immunity to old age and disease is just fringe benefits of a spiritual transformation, which when shared with the general population will bring about the Millenium (or its Islamic equivalent) and the renewed terrestrial paradise.)

Another alchemical invention, the alkahest, or the universal solvent, is used principally as a weapon of war. Impossible to keep in a physical container, it is usually prepared in an incomplete form and kept in special artillery shells with the final ingredient separated from the incomplete formula by a thin partition, combining upon impact to dissolve the target. Although very useful for penetrating walls and such, the use of the alkahest in combat has the unfortunate side effect of littering the battlefield with almost bottomless holes as the alkahest dissolves its way down towards the center of the earth [1]: in the case of soft ground such holes generally collapse in on themselves, but if bedrock is close to the surface a risk of one hell of an oopsie is created.

Cathayan alchemy is in some ways more advanced than European or Islamic, especially in medical fields (see nations below, on the Xia empire) and has developed potions which allow people to work long periods without eating or drinking, and some which even remove the need to breathe for extended periods. Long study of the flows of Earth-energym AKA Qi lines AKA dragon lines has also allowed for some interested developments, such as Cathayan man-carrying kites, which can travel long distances following atmospheric lines of Qi flow.

Advances in alchemy also have duplicated many of the effects of 19th century chemistry in our world, including a variety of dyes making things more colorful, poisons and corrosives, glues, toxic gasses, high explosives, and more. Middle Eastern palaces glitter with coatings of artificial gemstone, and imperishable Cathayan swords are eagerly sought for.

Alchemical processes also allow the creation of homunculi, artificial humans grown in soil from blood and semen (and not just humans: a wide variety of animals have been similarly recreated by experimenters). This has not, however, eliminated regular slavery or animal husbandy: creating animals the old-fashioned way is cheaper, and homonculi are always imperfect in some ways. Most notably they lack souls, and depending on the details of how they are created are either will-less automatons that will obey orders but have no initiative and must be instructed with tedious and painstaking thoroughness, or mute, violent, and bestial creatures. Still, royal and church bureaucracies have found some use for them, as have doctors [2] and rich perverts. (In labor-rich Cathay, there is even less practical use for homunculi, but a fad has developed among the rich of creative deliberately bizarre and weirdly malformed homunculi, bred like those weirdly elaborate goldfish for an aesthetic of the outre. )

Another subject of alchemical research is the Prima Materia, the chaotic, formless substance that is the ultimate basis of all matter, the stuff that existed before the creation when all things were “without form and void.” Incautious research into this has already led to the near destruction of the city of Bologna, and the kingdom of Padania forcing all alchemical research to relocate to houses in the countryside, a healthy distance from any densely populated area.

(This world will read a state of MAD - mutually assured destruction - a lot earlier than ours did).

Another important source of technology is clockworks, “clockpunk” technology having developed in Renaissance italy. Clockworks technology includes armored vehicles, helicopters and ornithopters, printing machines, mechanical chess players, and automated music makers. Attempts have been made to create clockwork troops, but while of some use against troops unfamiliar with the technology, their limited clockwork programming allows savvy opponents to avoid their attacks and disable them.Also important are clockwork tabulators and calculators, of increasing important to bureaucrats throughout Europe, and are important in ballistic calculations increasingly used by artillerymen on at land and at sea. (At sea there are also clockwork-powered submarines, their air kept breathable by alchemical formulations, and sticky waterproof goo - another alchemical formulation - kept handy to plug frequent leaks. The need to rewind confines them so far to daily patrols in coastal waters.)

The biggest limitation in clockpunk tech is the need to keep it wound up (flying machines in particular can’t travel very far without stopping to rewind) and much of Europe’s poorest classes are employed at the extremely tedious task of winding things (in the colonies this is often done by slaves, and in Eastern Europe by serfs.) Clockwork calculating machines require the crafting of a great many tine gears, which task is so exacting that in some European countries there have been efforts to recruit labor through capturing members of the Wee Folk, the smaller the better, and put them to work as gear-makers: this has led to retaliatory magical mischief on such a level that the harassed population is increasingly demanding the practice be put to an end.

Clockpunk tech remains mostly a European thing, although it has increasingly spread to India and the Islamic world in the last century. It may however soon become obsolete as a means of propulsion: the creation of alchemically powered “engines” has been slowed by the difficulties of going directly to a form of internal combustion technology without going through steam technology first, but recently models which don’t even explode much at all are now being developed to propel balloons through the sky and armored gun-carts across land. Possibly to drive larger vehicles along tracks. (The amount of work involved in keeping a clockworks train wound is simply obscene.)

Magic also exists, but it is more obscure and less normalized. It can be divided into theurgy and thaumaturgy. Theurgy is a spiritual practice, a form of white magic by which the practitioner attunes themselves to the energies of the cosmos and allows them to act through them. There are few masters: it is not an easy practice, and requires many years of training, meditation, and self-abnegation to get to the point where results start to become impressive. The most advanced practitioners are to be found in the east, among Hindu fakirs and holy men, Buddhist monks, and Taoist sages.

Thaumaturgy, or “practical magic”, is in turn divided into associative magic, the magic of contagion and similarity (think of voodoo dolls in our culture), the related field of symbolic magic (words and signs of power), and demonology, the summoning and control of supernatural beings to achieve one's ends. The “daemons” thus summoned are actually generally not the actual devils-out-of-hell that the Church worries about, but rather various natural spirits and elementals, including known abuman species such as djinn, naiads, dryads, ogres, etc.

Thaumaturgy is generally either tightly regulated or banned outright by most states, who consider magic in the hands of private individuals as a threat to social order and heirarchy. In *Catholic states where the Ecclesia Universal dominantes, only specially licensed agents of the church are allowed to practice magic, while in Dissenter (protestant) states it is either banned outright or controlled through a few state-run schools. In most Islamic countries all magicians are (at least in theory) employees of the Sultan, Caliph or Shah, although in Sahelian Africa the magical community is organized as a sort of guild and is (often brutally) self-regulating. In Aryavarta (India) and Cathay things are often more easy going and catch-as-catch-can, although Cathay has an extensive bureaucracy dedicated to hunting down and executing magicians who use magic to do evil (well, evil not sanctioned by the state. Honestly, it’s safer to get a government job).

Natives of the Novus Mundi have magicians of their own, priests, shamans, and elders, although gunpowder, germs, and steel have still done a number on them. [3] Due to the non-literate nature of most native societies outside of Azteca (OTL southern Mexico)use of symbolic and associative magic is less systematized than in the old world, and learning is heavily dependent on lengthy apprenticeships: nothing is written down, so any unexpected deaths can lead to a serious loss of knowledge. Spirit-summoning, at least, has at least a rich a supernatural ecosystem to draw on as the old world, and several cultures have their own theurgic practices, in which oneness with the cosmos is often pursued with the aid of rather more natural pharmaceuticals than their old world equivalents.

[1] It does not reach it, admittedly: eventually the alkahest eats its way down to a level where the heat of the Earth’s interior is so great that the alkahest breaks down into less toxic components.
[2] Spare body parts are useful, and unlike regular humans, the dissection of dead homunculi for anatomical studies is quite legal. Of course, one really should be careful about where one sources ones homunculi corpses: low-quality specimens often have malformed or misplaced internal organs, and may be missing multiple organs altogether.
[3] Magical healing is not the same as mass-produced medicine: it’s a very hands-on procedure, and can’t be done on large numbers of people at once, so in cases where half or more of the population is falling sick at once, the shamans and priests can only do so much, and if they weaken and fall ill themselves, they’re in trouble if there isn’t another magic-user handy to heal _them_.

THE OTHER RACES

Referred to “abhuman” species by European scholars, there exist a wide variety of nonhuman intelligences on all the continents and the seven seas. Some divide them between “spirits” and “elementals” on the one hand, and “sapient beasts” and “near-men” on the other, creatures basically mystical and supernatural, and those more clearly fleshy and terrestrial.

The Tuatha de Dannan, elves, alfar, huldrafolk, etc. are definitely on the “spiritual” side of the chart. They are said to dwell beneath the Earth, but perhaps not quite literally so, since, unlike the cavern homes of dwarves and gnomes, one cannot find them just by taking a spade and digging downwards. One certainly descends into their realm through tumuli and earthen mounds and hidden caves, but reports of their realm describe caves far too vast to be physically possible, many with no visible top, roofed with either a glowing misty “day sky” with no visible or stars, or at times with a darkness filled with cold, foreign stars and a too-large Moon. Of course, such reports are unreliable: illusion and glamour is fundamental to the realm of the elves, and nothing is quite what it seems.Some mystics say that multiple interpretations and seemings are all, in fact, equally “real”, and that reality and illusion in the case of elves are in fact basically indistinguishable.

Although shunning the full light of day and vulnerable to iron, the fey are powerful, and while humans may dominate the daylight and surface world, attempts to invade their own realm have rarely gone well, even when ways down can be found at all. Ancient myth holds that the elves and their allies long ago fought humans (the ancestors of the Celts) for control of much of Europe, and the humans finally drove them underground with iron and magic. (Or rather back underground. Elves themselves claim that they first arrived on Earth by digging up. Elves tend to lie a lot, but how far and deep extend the realms of the elves, nobody is certain, but there are tales of deeper and deeper Underworlds, such mysterious places as the Land of Forever Spring and Forever Winter, places where reality is a bit “thin” and beings exist closer to pure archetypes than physical entities. Passing through these realms supposedly leads to the true Otherworld where elves originally came from: some says this is actually the realm of the dead, and it is true that elves seem to have an odd relationship with ghosts, human ghosts apparently being unable to interact with them at all.

The underground realms of the elves are inhabited not just by “true” alfar/elves, but also seemingly lesser and subordinate races such as boggarts and ogres, the tiny, winged pixies, goblins, and other peculiar creatures. Some theoreticians hold that all the abhuman races originally emerged from the caverns of the Fey Folk, while others consider this a bunch of dingoes' kidneys.

The western Elves of Europe (and, increasingly, the Americas) are divided between the courts of the Seelie and Unseelie, the Light and Dark Elves. Humans tend to think of these as “good” and “evil”, but this isn’t really accurate: they are more symbiotic than opposed, two sides of the same coin, existing in a state of balance which is often bloody but always intimate. Elves of the Seelie court may be less frankly terrifying to human sensibilities, but really should not be trusted in any case.

Cousin races exist in Asia, the Devas of Aryavata (India) and the “fairy folk” of Cathay, the Xian and Feitian. Both share the unclear, illusion-clouded nature of the elves and their subterranean-possibly-extradimensional habitats, and the Xian are said to have their own Yin and Yang themed courts but there are also substantial differences. The Devas are a more straightforward bunch, aggressive but not treacherous, and comfortable in full sunlight, warring against indian ogres (rakshasas) and sharing underground stomping grounds with the half-snake Nagas and the Yakshas, while the Cathayan earth-folk are generally benevolent in their treatment of humans, and have been known to enlighten human scholars and aid humans in times of disease and famine with infallible magical medicine. Their vast underground realms, sometimes referred to the Yellow Springs Beneath the Earth in confusion with the Cathayan traditional land of the dead, is said to be a place of wonders, where plants with stems of gold and leaves of jade grow with jewels as fruit, and the peaches of immortality can be found, but human commerce with these lands is even less than with the realms of the European fey. (The Cathayans tend to consider the Xian and Feitian as a form of minor gods rather than a specific race of beings).

One should beware the Mogwai, malevolent Chinese spirits somewhat akin to the Unseelie Court: they are known for their habit of cruel and occasionally fatal pranks inflicted on human beings. Fox spirits are also a major presence in the East, and are generally less dangerous, except for the Korean varieties, which should be avoided at all costs.

There are various marine elementals and non-human people in the sea (notably Asian dragons), but the most common are mer-people, which generally inhabit the shallower waters of the continental shelves in tropical to temperate seas, growing cities of coral, herding fish, and cultivating seaweeds. Sailors should beware: female merfolk may look hot from the waist up, and certainly do have lovely singing voices, but aside from the occasionally weirdo which would be on the mer-folk equivalent of Furaffinity it they had the internet, they aren’t really interested in human males, their tastes being towards Merrows, the males of their species, scaly, crested and spine-plumed, noseless and fanged. Merfolks aren’t necessarily evil, but they aren’t really much more moral than their fellow sea dwellers and occasional pets/hunting dogs, the dolphins - which is to say, some may save sailors from drowning, but they’re just as likely to yank you down into the drowning deep, to make scrimshaw out of your bones, ornaments from your teeth, and giant lobster feed out of your guts. The genitals aren’t compatible, anyway.

Mermaid’s flesh if eaten can confer greatly extended life, but the side effects make it seriously not worth it some 95% of the time. This has not stopped European scholars from capturing Mermaids to harvest their flesh for experimental purposes (surely there must be some way to prevent or at least moderate the monsterism?) and Merfolk have become increasingly elusive in areas where European shipping is common. It’s also gotten rather more dangerous for fishermen in teeny boats fishing in ones or twos out of sight of other humans, and as little as the European elites give a fig about people as lowly as fishermen, there’s an increasing sense that Something Must Be Done. (Oddly, “stop capturing Merfolk for experimentation” doesn’t seem to be on the list of possibilities.)

The abyssal merfolk of the Pacific have legs and the genitalia match up: unfortunately, the females are just as awful-looking as the males.

The most common magical humanoids are the Little People, comprising a great many species, varying in size from five feet tall down to smaller than thumb-sized, hairy, hairless, many with backwards pointed feet, some with big noses, some with no noses, good, bad, and indifferent. They are generally classed as either Kobolds or Gnomes, with Kobolds being those species which have a somewhat symbiotic or at least comensual relation with humans, living in and around human houses and farms and mines, such as brownies, duende, nissen, puca, dormovoi, etc. and often doing helpful things for humans in exchange for small gifts of food/and or drink, but can be a serious pain in the ass if offended.

The class of “wild” little people or Gnomes is much larger (see small inset map) and have a variety of lifestyles. Some live underground, although rarely burrowing as deeply and certainly not as elaborately as Dwarves: small species may construct burrow homes in soil comparable to those of rabbits or prairie dogs. Some live (at least part time) within the underground lands of the Elf folk and their east asian cousins. Some live in trees, under large bushes and hedges, in rivers, in termite nests. Some are nomads, some are fishermen, some grow mushrooms. Some seem to be able to live without food, others are almost perpetually hungry (some occasionally eat people). Most have some degree of magic that helps keep them hidden, and many can become invisible: some can make their entire settlements invisible.

(The distinction between Gnomes and Kobolds isn’t absolute, BTW. Some species may at times become associated with humans only to later return to the hills and forests, and a number are known by one name when they dwell among humans and another when they are found in the wild.)

Naiads and Dryads - spirits of trees and rivers - and such related beings as rusalkas are largely spiritual beings, although they can sometimes materialize to an extent sufficient to, say, drown people.

Even more elemental are Djinn, beings of fire and air and the desert sands, beings of no fixed abode and no fixed form (possibly of no “true” form at all). Popular culture is unhelpful: they aren’t muscular harem guards with legs made of smoke (although they could take that form if they wanted to), and most do not grant wishes. (Only a handful have been tied to rings, lamps, etc. in permanent servitude. More were trapped in bottles, but they are under no obligation to grant wishes. Depending on their personal feelings, you might get a servant for life if you let one out, or be divided into 42 artfully arranged pieces, depending on the mood of the Djinn when you let it out). They are also not omnipotent: they really can’t raise the dead, can’t give you all the money in the world, or give you the abilities of Silver Age superman. They can, however, summon up enough gold and silver to fill a swimming pool, summon a real mob of almost-real servants, build you a palace overnight, etc. If, of course, they feel like it.Various forms of magical protection do exist to keep them at a distance, and they generally don’t go out of their way to mess with humans: that’s how all those Djinn got locked up into bottles in the first place.

The many-formed and variegated Yokai of Wakuko (Japan) are a whole story in themselves, and space limits forbid going into detail, but let it be noted than the Shogunal government maintains a sizable bureaucracy detailed with human-Yokai relations, and employs a small army of shamans and theurgists to negotiate with them or bring them under control if diplomacy fails).

There are also a number of normally invisible, elemental spirits of air, water earth and fire, some evil, other friendly or indifferent, which are rarely perceived by most human beings, and are generally the concern of mystics and magicians. They usually only become a real problem under certain rare circumstances, such as running into an unfriendly air elemental while halfway up a mountain in a storm: or a spirit of the wild spaces may enter into a human lost in the woods, especially one who is suffering from some sort of dissociative episode, due to, say, eating your traveling companion after you ran out of trail mix. (This can lead to wendigoes or werewolfism. This sort of “natural” metamorphosis should be distinguished from deliberate lycanthropy, in which a magician invites animal spirits into their own body to effect a transformation.)

Among the more grounded and physical abhuman races, Dwarves are probably those Europeans are most likely to encounter, living underground in perfectly physical mines and caverns, and with magic largely confined to stone cutting, earth moving, cave reshaping, mining, forging, and craftmanship. They are generally found in rocky and mountainous areas where there is good solid rock to build tunnels in, and valuable minerals, and avoiding low-lying, wet, high-water-table areas. More than half of all minerals used by human beings in Eurasia come from the mining of dwarves, who also produce swords, armor, iron wheels, toys, musical instruments, and the occasional magical gadget. While dwarves can maintain a sort of underground ecosystem without the aid of the sun, using alchemy to support a base of fungi and giant roots and unnatural growths to feed their own versions of cattle and fishponds, it is easier to trade for much of their food and drink (fungus beer is an acquired taste), cloth, and medicinal plants. Due to their somewhat symbiotic nature with the human world, dwarvish settlements often have a vassal-ruler relationship with above ground human rulers, but their feudal obligations tend to be rather light, and it generally takes a lot for a dwarven hold to go so far as send soldiers to help fight in human wars.

Ghouls (or ghūls) are widely distributed in the old world, in middle latitudes from what in our world would be Iberia to Indonesia. While the Elven races are largely independent of humanity and dwarves have a somewhat symbiotic relationship (if capable of surviving on their own in a pinch), the relationship of Ghouls with humanity is largely parasitic. In desert areas often living on the margins of settled land, often in ruins or tombs, and burrowing under cities and their graveyards in areas where the soil is not too wet and prone to collapse, ghouls prey on the living and the dead. Extremely omnivorous, they eat the corpses of both humans and animals, stray cats and dogs, homeless beggars and solitary nocturnal travelers, stray dogs and cats, and all sorts of garbage. (Their one positive attribute is that they tend to keep the rat population down).

A clever race, ghouls are careful to not murder too many of the living as not to panic the humans and bring about intensive efforts to destroy them, and keep their population numbers under control by eating the weaker and stupider of their kind as needed. Although foul in odor and somewhat dog-like in appearance, many ghouls can at least partly adopt human form, although there are almost always certain flaws requiring covering clothing. Some have infiltrated human society: ghouls are a long lived people, and know where many a “lost” treasure was buried, giving them the financial pull to gain entree to human society. Such urban ghouls will use their influence to get other ghouls plum jobs in slaughter houses, hospitals, graveyards, and as dogcatchers. Human-ghoul crossbreeding and the swapping out of the more human-like half-breeds as changelings gives ghouls further access to human society, but in the end such influence is limited; ghouls, even rich ones with their own cannibal chefs, are creatures of base appetite, and have no real interest in altering human society.

Also having a rather predatorial relationship with humans are the various races lumped into the category of “Ogre”, beings bigger and stronger and more magical than humans, but more physical and less magical than the Alfar types, and less physically impressive than giants, shapeshifters but with little ability to put spells on other races. They are generally divided into western ogres, Indian Ogres or rakshas, and eastern ogres or Oni.(There are a variety of evil spirits which are also known as Oni, which can be confusing. If they come in bright primary colors, they’re probably the spirits). There are also ogre-like beings in subsaharan Africa and parts of the Americas, but they are less commonly known. Given their shape-shifting natures, their actual appearance is unclear, and there is some uncertainty if the tiger heads often sported by Indian ogres are inherent or just as sort of fashion statements, as with the elephant ears and tusks that Arabian and Persian ogres often have. Horns seem to be the norm, although only the eastern Oni have pointy ones, the western types generally having short, blunt horns. They often take refuge in the underworld of the Alfar or Feitian, but this seems to indicate indifference rather than fellow feeling, and it may be that they are no more native to the underworld than the squirrels and plover that often hang out in prairie dog burrows helped build them.

Rakshahs, which have a rather adversarial relationship with the Devas, have their own network of magically hidden houses and even palaces in the surface world, but Oni and western ogres tend to sleep rough when they can’t or won’t couch-surf in the underworld. Some do manage to hide out in plain sight in human communities, thanks to their shape-shifting abilities (do you have suspicions about your neighbor with the terrible bad breath? Try tossing some salt on them or poke them with cold iron. WARNING - make sure to do this only when in a public setting!)

Ogres aren’t actually obligate maneaters, and a fair number have obtained bodyguard or shock troop employment in human nations: a very few have even obtained patents of nobility.

BEASTS, FREAKS AND GIANTS: WILD MEN AND OTHER “MUNDANE”   ABHUMANS

    A number of Abhuman species which are often grouped together are those types which lack either advanced societies or supernatural abilities (they may have superhuman abilities, but these are simply a matter of size, strength and other purely physical features). These include sciapods, a nomadic people who travel by jumping long distances on their single, giant, foot, the largely solitary giants [1] and the smaller, forest-dwelling giants known as wodewose (rarely more than nine feet tall), cyclopes, dog-headed men (cynocephalids), centaurs, the goatish fauns and satyrs, and certain types of western ogres. Such beings tend to be rare nowadays, lack of magic or political organization having driven them to the fringes of the human world, inhabiting jungles and desert wastes inimical to organized human states. Centaurs have been largely been hunted to extinction by steppe nomads after the development of the stirrup and the composite bow allowed them to meet centaurs on an equal combat footing. Giants used to be occasionally seen in Europe, chained and often hamstrung giants employed as gate guards, turners of great cranks to open huge gate of or river locks, cutters and toters of quarry stone, or just as court ornaments proclaiming the might of some king or other, but the unwillingness to let them _breed_ has driven European giants to extinction over the last couple centuries. Some have survived as subjects peoples, several Asian states fielding cynocephalid troops (they’re excellent trackers).

The Sasquachidea (Bigfoots, Yeti, and related species of giant hairy hominids) are doing OK: the fact they are all telepathic and can therefore reliably avoid running into human beings helps. They're quite intelligent, but uninterested in technology: they've seen our societies, telepathically tasted our unhappyness, and have decided that if that's civilization, we can keep it.

TROLLS
    Some class the trolls with the above, but this is inaccurate, trolls and related species such as the Hudlar being magical beings which turn into stone in the daylight, more closely related to elf-kind. Most trolls have some talent at the arts of illusion to conceal themselves from humans: more potent magics are largely confined to older female trolls or troll-wives. Trolls are quite variable in size, from no larger than dwarves to the size of small giants, twelve feet tall and more. Although most only have one head, some have two or three or even as many as five: extra heads is a bit of status symbol among trolls.

[1] Finds of ruins built on a colossal scale world-wide suggest that giants, millennia ago, were more social and had an actual civilization: what caused it to collapse and reduce giants to their current “cannibalistic mountain men” status is unclear, although it is often linked to the fall of Atlantis and Mu.

THE DEAD
Ghosts and spirits are known world wide, although there is much philosophical debate as to whether these are the actual souls of the dead, some sort of “spiritual residue” or psychic echo, or just some sort of mischievous spirit or demon pretending to be someone who died. (Indeed, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between a troublesome spirit and a pesky Kobold.) Most cultures just tend to exorcize them, and not think too much about the theological issues.

Vampires and Revenants are rather harder to dismiss.

A revenant is essentially a spirit so strong and stubborn that it refuses to leave the body even after it would normally cease to function. Some are trying to achieve some overriding goal, and pass on when it is achieved. Some just refuse to acknowledge they are dead - they usually give up when the signs of decomposition become obvious. And a few simply refuse to move on even thought they are dead, and stave off decomposition through cannibalism. This is how you get draugr and barrow-wrights.

Vampires are corpses which have become the habitation of dangerous chthonic elementals, and rise from their towns to prey on the living. They often spread disease, and are not charming, are not articulate, and do not dress like headwaiters.

Neither draugr nor most vampires are destroyed by sunlight [1], although vampires are immobilized by sunlight and wights are at least blinded by it. Vampires can be disposed of by staking, decapitation, fire, and combinations thereof, while wights need to be cut to pieces and then burned to ashes (the development of alchemical incendiaries has increasingly made it possible to skip other steps and go straight to the burning).

Zombies are soulless corpses animated by magic to do hard labor, and are just disgusting.(Certain west African magicians can enslave people by putting them in a trance in which they are quiescent and obedient as a Homunculus, but it’s not quite the same thing)

[1] Chinese vampires, who manifest a rather unique form of spiritual corpse-parasitism unique to the local supernatural ecosystem, are an exception.

UNUSUAL FAUNA

Aside from the various abhuman races, this world contains a variety of unusual birds and beasts. The unicorn, although rare, still roams the high mountains of Tibet, central Asia, and north India: almost as intelligent as the great apes and able to run at over 50 miles an hour, the beast is sly and elusive, and if cornered its almost indestructible horn can penetrate plate armor like paper. Hunters seeking to kill unicorns for the unique virtues of their horn or capture them for the menageries of kings and emperors are often disappointed when they try to take advantage of their supposed predilection for virgins: unicorns have no fear of virgins, but they are not particularly drawn to them, and many a virgin has suffered near terminal embarrassment as a nearby-but-not-close-enough unicorn entirely ignores them.

The Firebird of the north Eurasian forests is a mysterious entity, neither good nor evil, bringing good or bad luck and appearing and disappearing unpredictably: it can be captured, but never kept for long. It has developed a complex lore and symbolic significance amongst alchemists, and is widely considered to be a form of pure elemental rather than a biological entity, although nobody has ever dissected one (nobody should actually kill a firebird, unless they really want to be at the center of a really impressive firestorm). It’s glowing feathers have a variety of uses for alchemists or mages, but one should only use ones that having fallen on their own: plucking a firebird may not cause a forest fire, but it is extraordinarily bad luck.

The three-horned Fanged Tyrant of India is a now nearly extinct giant reptilian predator living in large, deep rivers, needing the room: the largest specimens were capable of seizing full grown elephants and dragging them into rivers to drown.

Griffins are considered to be the result of ancient alchemy or magic, like other chimeric species. Native to the Caucasus, they have become fairly widespread as a result of domestication (well, more or less domestication. Griffins are temperamental and never entirely safe, even after centuries of breeding for a better disposition, but the lure of a flying steed is such that macho warriors have taken the risk for nearly two millennia.) Most Asian nations west of Serica have at least some units of aerial Griffin cavalry, as do a number of European countries. Numbers are limited by the huge amounts of meat that is needed to feed them, and the lengthy process of training and establishing a rapport between rider and steed. Thule and northern Muscovia are too cold for Griffons in the winter, while tropical Africa and southern India are too hot. They are quite rare in the wild, and wild specimens are confined to a few distant mountain ranges in Asia.

Dragons are divided into western and eastern forms, and are quite different.

The most common western dragon, found in west Asia, Africa and Europe, is a snake-like subterranean or freshwater creature, commonly known in northern Europe as a wyrm (sometimes “loathly”), heavily armored with usually blade-proof scales above but soft-skinned and vulnerable underneath, and in many cases capable of spitting copious amounts of corrosive venom. The largest African varietes, which can exceed 120 feet in length, are known to prey upon elephants, which they kill through a mix of constriction and poison injected with fangs. European varities are generally smaller, rarely exceeding 70 feet in length and more slender in length, although often rather more copiously productive of venom. Extending further east in its distribution but not as far south is the fire-breathing or “true” dragon. It is the only hexipedal reptile, having four legs and two bat-like wings, and is widely believed to have originated in the Meddling With Things that Should Not Be by ancient wizards. The largest dragons can carry off a full grown horse or cow. Although myths hold them to be sapient, they aren’t any brighter than crows, with which they share a love of bright and shiny things, leading to dragon hoards (which more often have shiny stones and quartz crystals than gold and silver). Fire breathing involves intestinal gasses and a “flint” tooth to provide a spark, and is generally overstated as a weapon (otherwise none of those knights of old would have survived). A dragon can generally produce a few bursts of flame lasting for a few seconds and then will require several hours to “refill their tank.” (Note that this is still enough to badly, even fatally burn a man or horse without protective cover).

While flying dragons are not overly bright, very old and large wyrms can possess a degree of sapience, perhaps through mental absorption from human prey, wyrms possessing certain telepathic abilities allowing them to fascinate, snake-like, individual prey: even clearly non-intelligent young wyrms can give the impression of speaking to those they are attempting to immobilize mentally.

Both species have been greatly reduced in numbers throughout most of their former range, thanks to the rise of modern organized states and the spread of gunpowder weapons and alchemical mordants and incendiaries, outside the most unorganized regions of Interior Africa being confined to the deepest of forests, cave systems, and swamps. [1] The dragon hunter of song and story has been replaced by military professionals, and hardly anyone in the richer parts of Gallia or Albion is likely to encounter a dragon other than smallish ones with their venom sacks removed in a menagerie.

There is also the wyvern, a flier with two wings and legs like a bird. About the size of a condor, this very wide spread species is more a nuisance than a real threat, although it will attack sheep and occasionally children: some very patient trainers have broken them to the role of very metal hunting hawks, but this is exceptional.

Eastern dragons, in spite of some superficial similarities in appearance, are an entirely different type of being. They are elementals of air and water, taking tangible form only part of the time, capable of shape-shifting, and inhabiting clouds, rivers, seas, and mountain peaks. Like Wyrms, they develop sapience with age, and the oldest (which can be millennia old) are extremely intelligent and can take human form. They have a complex relationship with the royal Cathayan family and with the Devas and the Xian and Feitian: they have been known to aid and advice Cathayan rulers and administrators/scholars, but also punish severely those who seek their aid under false pretenses or even honest ones if they offend the dragon’s often somewhat unclear sense of ethics and propriety.

The Zmei of old Rus - shapeshifters, taking on forms human, dragonine (often with multiple heads), or mixed, are believed by some scholars to be a western branch of the oriental dragons; Little is known about them: since the conversion of Rus to Christianity, their manifestations have become very rare (there are some reports that they have begun to appear in Wakuku, where they don’t stand out that much among the weird and varied abhuman population of those Yokai-haunted islands).

A third sort of dragon are the many Great Serpents of the new world, from the hundred-foot long anacondas of the Amazonian jungle, to the giant subterranean rattlesnakes of the northern fringes of New Castile, the giant lake serpents (lakes may or may not be giant) of Vinland (America north of Mexico), and the perhaps mythical feathered serpent of Yukutan, reported by terrified survivors as colossal, fire and lighting spitting, and able to fly. Their classification as “dragons” is a source of scholarly debate in Europe, some scholars using the term as a catch-all for giant snake-y and lizard-y creatures in general, others claiming that the term should be restricted to the Wyrms and flying dragons of the west, the east Asian dragons preferably to be renamed (the Cathayan term “Lung” is available, but European scholars will insist on coming up with something of their own) and the species of the new world not to be allowed to clutter things up further.

The Great Sea Serpent is not, as some believe, a form of sea dragon, but an enormous carnivorous eel of global distribution, with the largest specimens approaching two hundred feet in length. They do occasionally snatch sailors off the decks of ships, but since they generally do not raise their heads very high above the water, this is only a danger for the smaller ships. In the case of military ships, the anti-boarded netting is usually sufficient to provide adequate protection.

The Kraken should be distinguished from the giant squid and colossal octopus, being a pseudocephalopod of thaumaturigal coelenterate nature, a radially symmetric creature with over one hundred tentacles spanning nearly half a mile, each with a glowing eye near its end to spot prey and constantly groping in all directions. A deep water dweller, it is rarely seen on the surface, and in cases where it is, survivors are few. Most human scholars consider it mythical, but the merfolk known better.

[1] This represents a second large-scale die back after something of a population recovery in the Middle Ages - dragon numbers in the Mediterranean were greatly reduced during the days of the Roman Empire, which while lacking cannon or the universal solvent had catapults, onagers and ballistae, and certainly had excellent military organization and ballsy military commanders.

NATIONS AND EMPIRES

In Europe, although it has some commonalities with our early 18th century, it’s still more a baroque world than an Age of Reason: indeed, much of this world makes such an Age implausible, and Europe remains sodden with early modern religious-magical thinking in spite of the advances in science - indeed, inseparably from said advances, since it is seen as simply another route to revelatory understanding and reshaping of the world.

Wigs are large, society is elitist, monarchy is increasingly enlightened but what is enlightened isn’t quite the same. There are extensive bureaucracies set aside to deal with elves and dwarves and gnomes. There is at the same time a great arrogance - a notion that the secrets of life, death, and immortality are just around the corner - and at the same time a more humble understanding of humanity’s role in the world, there are others which share this world, and while we may (hopefully) be God’s favorites, it’s hard to believe we and our spiritual struggles are the sole thing of importance in this world.

Religion is similar to our world, with the Ecclesia Univesal, headed by the Pontifex Maximus, filling the role of or Catholic Church, and with several countries having Reformist/dissident (Protestant) churches. Jews exist and suffer under various levels of religious restriction, and a surprisingly large network of secret underground Druidic societies which have been under cover since Roman times, although their polytheism has changed greatly over a millennium and a half of Christian influence. They sometimes clash with the even older “Witch-cults”, followers of the pre-Celtic Earth mother, and there were attempts by both sides to rat the other out during the witch-hunting panic. (Largely unsuccessful, since as in our world most of those burned at the stake were elderly woman with poor social skills, although some actual unlicensed magicians were also swept up (and a very few of them had actually put a curse on someone, or tried to do so).

The Commonwealth of Albion retains its name from the period of Parliamentary rule, but is again a monarchy, ruled as in our world by a German import. The islands are divided into the four crowns of Caledonia, Hibernia, Logres (England), and Cambria (Wales). Hibernia is restricted to the east of what we would call Ireland, the west remaining independent thanks to the aid of the Tuatha de Dannan, the Irish finding the necessary tribute of meat, dairy products, and skilled artists and the annual occurrence of the Wild Hunt less burdensome that the rule of the stinking sassenach. It is a limited parliamentary democracy, with literacy and property requirements keeping voting rights to a small (male) minority, although that makes it almost radical by the standards of many Europan monarchies. It is a leading nation in the alchemical sciences, Sir Isaak Newtone having largely established the standard rules of alchemy for Europe. (The Serian system is rather different).

Italy remains a cutting edge sort of place in gears technology, producing the best clockwork combat automata, military vehicles, calculating machines, and ornithropters, a leadership established in the days of Leonardo the Marvellous. (Leonardo might have made Florence the rulers of Italy, but they grew too greedy, and tried to make him a prisoner in a gilded cage whose genius would be entirely at the service of the Florentine state: he escaped in a flying machine of his own design, created marvels for several Italian rulers, and in the end Milan triumphed and unified most of the Italian peninsula north of the Ecclesia in the kingdom of Padania. (Gallian efforts at military conquest, facing clockpunk military technology they were unable to duplicate at the time, came a cropper, and the Gallians went home short a monarch, and Italy avoided destruction as a battlefield for foreign great powers)

Gallia is an absolute monarchy with a notoriously corrupt nobility, but it also home to some of Europe’s most brilliant natural philosophers, and in a world where philosophy and magic aren’t that distant, some of the world’s most innovative thaumaturgical work. Lotharingia isn’t exactly a greater Netherlands, arising from something more like a surviving Valois Burgundy in the north rather than a long struggle against spanish rule, and is therefore a more conventional monarchy and somewhat less ferociously competitive, but it also has deeper pockets and more manpower than our world’s Holland, and has a larger colonial empire than said state.

While in our world this period in western European history was shaped to a considerable extent by the rivalry of Britain and France, in this world it’s more driven by the conflict between Gallia and its allies and the Holy Europan Empire, a more effectual HRE equivalent ruled by the Habsburgs (other branches of the family ruling Pannonia (Hungary) and Hispania (Spain). Gallia allies itself with the Ottomans (menaced by HEE-backed Pannionia) and Lotharingia (which the Emperor thinks is more in the way of a rebellious Holy Europan province than a legitimate country), while Albion plays spoiler as it sees fit: it generally has more conflicts with Gallia and Lotharingia than with the Europan Empire (the first two compete with it for colonies, the Empire doesn’t), but it doesn’t want to see the Habsburgs regain the truly dominant position in Europe they had back in the 16th century, either.

(As out HRE, the HEE has a complicated internal structure, with Electoral Principalities, Free Citiesm Dukes, Landgraves, Prince-Bishops, etc., but the central state functions are more powerful, and since crushing the rebellious Raetians (Bavarians) and absorbing much of their territory the Habsburgs have been largely unchallenged save for the minor surviving Protestant states of the north, ruling from Prague, the famed center of alchemical and theurgical science [1])
The *Polish nobility really leaned into that whole “we nobleman are the descendants of manly Sarmatian horse nomads, you peasants are descendants of backwards swamp-dwelling Slavs” mythos here. This will lead to problems later.

As in our world at the time, the Islamic nations are having a bit of a tough time, struggling to keep up with the Christian Joneses, although on the alchemy and theurgical side of things they aren’t as far behind as on the organizational and technological front (their lack of an Islamic Newton to systematize alchemy is becoming a problem, though). North Aethiopia (Africa) is actually doing better than in our world, the Marinid rulers of Barbary having actually managed to hammer the diverse groups of Al-Mahgreb into a more or less centralized state, and comport themselves as junior partners to the Osmanlis rather than vassals. (They actually did better than the Osmanlis in the last war of Islam and Christian Europa, overruning most of Sicily, although they’re now slowly being pushed back by Magna Graecia.) The Osmanlis are struggling to reform their military, trying to make deals with the thoroughly unreliable djinn, and growing some lovely tulips.

Osmanli Misr is notorious for its secret cults and societies, even a few cults still worshiping the old Gods and guarding their secrets with curses and attack mummies (corpses animated by an elemental spirit deliberately bound to it, not frustrated lovers nursing four thousand year old grudges.)

There’s always something new out of Aethiopia, whether it is Garamatian magicians, previously undiscovered kingdoms, strange beasts and monsters, gems, ivory, apes, peacocks, dragon-hide scales and rhinoceros-riding mercenaries. Chinese trading galleys visit the prosperous cities of Zanj, and the giant inhabitants of the kingdom of the cyclopes herd elephants and hunt dragons.The ancient kingdom of Aksum holds out against the tides of Islam, while the Lotharingians begin the long push that will take them to the heart of the continent in another century.

In India, the heirs of the great Christian king of Bragman (also known as Kerala), Prester John, still rule over a vast constellation of vassal kingdoms, republics, and tribal allies extending in a vast arc from western Bod (Tibet) and Kashmeer to Taprobane, including Christians Syriac and Nestorian, Hindus, Buddhists, worshippers of the Greek Gods of old, and even some Muslims, tolerated if not embraced, left behind by the withdrawal of Islamic rule from its previous high water mark, when some two thirds of the subcontinent was ruled by Muslims. The rulers boast of the variety of peoples they rule over, not just humans, but abhumans who live off smells, other who only eat snakes, dog-headed men, dwarves and Indian little people, Nagas who are snakes from the waist down, and centaurs. Allies include the Amazon tribes (Chadestians, Themiscyreans, and Lycastians), which migrated to northern India from the western steppe centuries ago to avoid falling under the rule of patriarchal groups, and to this day only allow men into their country once a year for the Festival of Love.

Under the rule of high kings less brilliant and charismatic than the Founder, the Hundred Kingdoms have become increasingly cat-like in their herding behaviors, but nobody is too worried: the current sultanate of Delhi is culturally quite brilliant, but also rather decentralized and corrupt. Of course, the applecart could be upset if the ambitious new Eranian King of Kings succeeds in his plans for eastern expansion…

The Greater Cathay area, the empires of the east, remain so far largely unmolested by Europeans. More of a concern is the hordes of Gog-Magog: their population having outgrown the remarkable system of boreal agriculture (based on engineered microclimates, the selective breeding of edible cold-climate plants, and a wee bit of shamanic magic), in the last two centuries they have expanded south, overrunning the Khanates north of the Xia Cathayan empire, pushing other nations west and south, and in the warmer climates are continuing to be fruitful and multiplying. A squat, pallid, hairy sort of people with funny-looking ears, the hordes of Gog-Magog are widely suspected of not being entirely human, of having cross-bred with goblins and forest demons and maybe even northern woods-trolls. They certainly seem inhumanly resistant to cold weather, as much as Patagonian giants, and worship a pantheon of deities of Lovecraftian creepyness (devil-worshippers, the Muscovite church says) with alarming rites and occasional human sacrifice.

The Xia are keeping an eye on these developments, but they also have some internal issues. Chinese alchemy has now reached the point where the monarchy (and a certain selection of loyal officials and nobles of the very highest ranks) can live for centuries, which tends to lead to a great many of assassination efforts on the part of frustrated heirs [2], and in cases where assassination doesn’t work, a deeply paranoid and profoundly isolated ruling class which tends to consider the short-lived lower classes as almost a separate species, not worthy to even have ghosts of their own. This has in turn led to quite successful recruitment drives by certain apocalyptic Buddhist sects.In spite of these troubling developments, Cathay is less isolationist than the late Ming and Qing dynasties of our world: there is a formidable navy, and much direct trade with other Asian countries and even Africa. This leads to occasional clashes with European powers, in which Chinese Qi-guided alchemical rockets and European cannon balls with clockwork targeting mechanisms have so far performed with roughly equal honors.

Joseon, the Xia Empire’s most honored (for what it’s worth) vassal, is right on the front line with GOGMAGOG and is really getting nervous: at a great cost (there has already been one peasant revolt over taxes) they’re building their own equivalent of the Great Wall along the border, only higher, thicker, and with stones alchemically fused together and smooth as glass on the side facing the river dividing Joseon and GOGMAGOG territory.

The conquest of the archipelago of Insulind (Indonesia) by Lotharingia is further along than the equivalent Dutch conquest OTL: local rulers are trying to petition the Osmanli Caliph and the Xia emperor for help, but both are too concerned with problems closer to home to pay much attention.

Wakuku (Japan) has closed off more, roughly to the extent of our world, but hasn’t given up the gun (Xia’s alchemical artillery and the Cathayan habit of sending diplomatic missions on heavily armed mega-junks have provided incentive) and its artisans have recently been doing something rather peculiar with very large structures of elaborately hinged bamboo and machinery powered not by clockworks or alchemical potions but, strangely, boiling water.

The Polynesians are the heirs of sunken Mu, and bits and pieces of vast and strange ruins are found from the isles of Melanesia east to *Easter Island. (You think the statues in our world are impressive? You ain’t seen nothing.)

So are, in their own way, the deepwater - and deeply creepy - Merfolk of the deep Pacific.

The Americas - in this world, the New World or Mundus Novus, divided into Vinland in the north and Columbia in the south - is in the process of being conquered by Europeans (both human and not), but resistance is building. Hispania, like its OTL equivalent, got there first with the most and took the best bits, but expansion has mostly stalled. Thanks to local magical know-how and alchemically derived medical practices on the part of Europeans the population drop in Hispanian-ruled America hasn’t been quite as bad, and the Hispanian empire in the Americas is both more populous and more Indian/mixed race than in our world at the time: a sort of assimilated indigenous nobility is a substantial part of the ruling class. (This is reflected in the audiencia of what would be southern Mexico in our world being known as “Azteca”)

Survival rates in north America were also higher: Albionese New Hanover is nearly 10% native American while a more numerous Iroqouis are still putting up a fight to hold onto at least some of their western conquests, and trying to play the Albionese, the Gallians, and Lotharingia against each other.

(There is a second colonial conquest of the Americas happening without humans really knowing much about it. Alfar following the Vikings found their way to the Novus Mundi, and powerful nobles of the Lands Below unhappy with their status in the complex and ever-shifting hierarchy of the Tuatha de Dannan crossed the sea in their boats of stone and established little courts of their own in Vinland. Relations with the local Little People were initially friendly, but turned cols as more of the Elfar and their associated races arrived. As Europeans arrived with their iron and church magic, they have moved further inland, in turn pushing the local Little People in a domino/Mcafene/volkswanderung effect: however, the local little people have been forming larger confederations, allying with the flying heads and other forest spirits, and shit is getting real.)

This world’s version of the Mound Builder culture was heavily influenced by Muvian models, although it still ended up ecologically overextended and collapsing. There does remain a denser and more settled native American population in the lower *Mississippi river valley, which has both pluses and minuses from the point of view of Gallian colonizers.

Aside from Andean and Mesoamerican empires similar the ones of OTL before the Hispanian conquests, the Americas have a couple pockets of high culture tracing their heritage to colonies of Ancient Mu, having migrated deep inland in the process of fleeing the poorly understood and largely forgotten (if clearly very catastrophic) events taking place around the end of Old Mu. The peoples of the Seven Cities of Cibola and the kingdom of El Dorado didn’t manage to hold onto much more than agriculture, stoneworking, and a badly mutated version of their polytheistic religion, but this was enough to make them distinctly appealing targets for Hispanian aggression a few millennia later.

[1] - Wien? You craaazy? It’s a hick sort of town.
[2] - a side effect of the many, many failed efforts to produce an elixir of immortality has been the development of a remarkable pharmaecopia of immensely powerful poisons.