A world forged across forty years of storytelling.
MAZARIIM
The Geometry of Scars
Coming of the Lines · Book One · Available Now
Read It Now on AmazonA world forged across forty years of storytelling.
The Geometry of Scars
Coming of the Lines · Book One · Available Now
Read It Now on AmazonMazariim is a world where gods formed from clouds of mana like stars from clouds of gas. Where ley-lines once carried healing energy across continents before being shattered in a war between dragons. Where the mortal races, having banded together to save their world from annihilation, now watch old alliances fray as new tensions rise. Built over a decade of tabletop role-playing campaigns and shaped by more than twenty players, Mazariim is the foundation for an expanding library of epic fantasy novels, beginning with the Coming of the Lines series.
Epic fantasy novels set in the world of Mazariim, beginning with the Coming of the Lines series.
Free lore documents, maps, and RPG materials for readers and game masters.
Four decades of gaming, a world built from scratch, and the long road from rolling dice to writing novels.
Each series follows different characters, different eras, and different corners of a world large enough to hold them all.
Coming of the Lines
The rediscovery of ley-lines, the ancient channels of magical energy that once connected civilizations across continents. Destroyed in a catastrophic war over seven thousand years ago, the network left only scars in the earth: invisible to all but a gifted few, forgotten by most, and coveted by those who would twist ancient power to dark ends.
Coming of the Lines · Book One
Three scholars. One ancient secret. A race against those who would twist it into a weapon.
For forty years, Sevan Miros has seen what no one else can: faint scars burned into the earth, remnants of a magical network destroyed seven thousand years ago. His maps fill the sealed archives of the Library of the Ages. No one has ever believed them.
Then an ancient tome arrives from a ruined continent, and its diagrams match his maps exactly.
Joined by Vaelith Syrren, an elven mage whose brilliant ley-line theories have never been tested, and Tobias Windrake, a gnomish spy tracking a death cult through the same ruins they must explore, Sevan embarks on an expedition into the buried vaults of a fallen mageocracy, through a tower haunted by a wraith who was once the world's greatest ley-line scholar, and beyond a portal to the shattered temples of the civilization that built the original network.
What they find could reshape the future of magic itself. But a Zebulban cult is hunting the same knowledge, and they intend to corrupt it into something far darker.
Available Now on AmazonRead the Opening Pages
The Library of the Ages breathed. Not as living things breathe, with the wet rhythm of lung and rib, but in the manner of mountains that have endured so long they have forgotten the distinction between stillness and motion, a respiration measured in the settling of foundation stones, in the slow exhalation of dust from high vaults where candlelight had never reached, in the faint and ceaseless murmur of air drawn through corridors carved when the world was younger and more certain of its purpose. The sound was almost nothing. It was the sound of knowledge kept safe against the turning of centuries, and it filled every chamber of that mountain fortress with a pressure that was not quite silence and not quite song.
Sevan Miros stood at the window of his translating cell, his pale grey eyes open and unblinking, and watched the scars burn across the valley below. No one else could see them. He had confirmed this over the course of thirty-six years, through careful questions posed to colleagues and pilgrims and the occasional merchant who wandered too far up the mountain passes in search of a road that did not exist. The scars were his alone, his gift, or his affliction, depending on the year and his patience with the distinction. They traced the valley floor in lines of faded luminescence, not light precisely, but the memory of light, the afterimage of something that had once blazed with such intensity that the land itself retained the wound. They ran northeast to southwest in three parallel channels, each perhaps thirty feet wide, their edges blurred and wavering like heat rising from summer stone. Where they crossed a stream, the water seemed to thicken. Where they passed beneath a stand of pine, the trees grew taller and more darkly green, their roots grasping at nourishment that no longer flowed. He could see them. He could map them. He could not, after thirty-six years of patient observation, explain them.
Orcs From Beyond
Coming Soon
Coming of the Lines · Book Two
Eight hundred years ago, the world was saved by a single sword stroke. In another reality, that stroke was blocked.
When a wandering elf, a gnomish wizard, and a Sabonaar swordsman clear an orc-infested keep on the desolate Steppes of Broken Stone, they expect nothing more than a mercenary payday. What they find beneath the ruins is a machine built by a dead wizard — a machine that shows them a world where the orcs won.
A world where elves were exterminated. Where humans were bred into slavery across thirty generations. Where dwarves were twisted into biomantic war machines. Where the gods themselves were hunted across the planes and destroyed, one by one, by a general who earned the title Godslayer through personal combat with the divine.
Now joined by a half-mad planar traveler who speaks to things that aren't there and a green dragon masquerading as a small elven girl with a dangerous smile, they must carry what they've learned to a world that doesn't want to believe it — while the civilization on the other side of reality, disciplined, technologically superior, and undefeated across eleven conquered worlds, has already noticed them.
More series set in the world of Mazariim are in development.
Mazariim is a world of deep time and fragile peace. Its gods are not omnipotent beings handing down commandments. They are magical consciousnesses, formed from clouds of mana the way stars coalesce from clouds of gas, powerful and ancient but neither infallible nor invulnerable. Some awakened from the fabric of reality itself. Others arrived from distant universes, carried through dimensional rifts by catastrophe or ambition. The oldest has been watching since before anything else existed.
The universe they inhabit is vast and strange. Dozens of extradimensional planes drift through an Astral Sea, each with its own nature and laws: planes of elemental fire and crushing earth, realms of celestial order and abyssal chaos, domains built by gods to house the faithful or punish the damned, and stranger places still where geometry bends and time runs sideways. Beyond these, nested within the same cosmic architecture, lie alternate material planes, worlds that share the bones of Mazariim but where history took a different turn. Some diverged at a single decision, a war won instead of lost, a god who woke a century earlier. Others are barely recognizable, places where the fundamental forces settled into different patterns and even physics works by unfamiliar rules. The barriers between these worlds are real but not absolute. Things cross over. Things leak through. Rifts open, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design, and what comes through does not always go back.
On the material plane most of these stories call home, the continent of Nigal is home to the Inner Kingdoms, a confederation of human nations bound together by the Federation of Man. Elves, dwarves, gnomes, and halflings share this land, their cultures shaped by millennia of coexistence, conflict, and the memory of a war that nearly destroyed everything. Eight centuries ago, the mortal races banded together against annihilation. They won. But time has passed, old alliances have frayed, and the tensions that unity once held in check are rising again.
Beneath it all, invisible to almost everyone, the scars of an ancient magical network trace geometric patterns across the earth. Ley-lines once carried healing energy between the cities of a civilization that mastered magic before any nation on Nigal existed. That civilization fell. The lines died. But the scars remain, waiting for someone to understand what they were and what they might become again.
This is the world the novels explore. This is the world the RPG materials invite you to inhabit. It is large enough for many stories, and it is still growing.
Free lore documents for readers and game masters. New materials are added regularly.
The complete campaign setting guide. Nations, gods, history, magic, ley-lines, and everything a reader or game master needs to explore the world. System-neutral.
The Inner Kingdoms, their cities, governments, ruins, organizations, and the deeper mysteries of gods, magic, and ley-lines. Expands everything in the Gazetteer. Contains spoilers.
More materials are in development. Check back regularly for new additions.
Callum Ashvane has been telling stories with dice and imagination since the early 1980s. Across four decades of tabletop gaming, through systems where you might masquerade as vampires or find your path through wilderness campaigns or play what one publisher boldly called “the greatest role-playing game in the world,” he learned that the best stories are the ones you cannot fully control.
In 2014, he built a world called Mazariim. It drew from a game of lands forgotten, where ancient civilizations left scars on the earth that later peoples could barely comprehend, and from a modern science fiction game of interdimensional rifts, where reality itself was negotiable. He took the sense of deep time from one and the fragility of boundaries from the other, and started drawing maps.
Over the course of ten campaigns, collectively titled Coming of the Lines, more than twenty players sat across from him with their dice and their ridiculous plans, making choices he never saw coming. Characters lived. Characters died. One player voice-acted four characters at the same time, four distinct voices having conversations with each other at the table. The campaigns spanned eras of Mazariim’s history, and the players did not merely inhabit the world. They shaped it.
The Geometry of Scars is his first novel and the beginning of the Coming of the Lines series, translating those campaigns into fiction for readers who have never rolled a twenty-sided die but know what it feels like to chase a mystery into the unknown.
He writes epic fantasy grounded in deep worldbuilding, scholarly protagonists, and the conviction that the best adventures begin in libraries.
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