No single throne commands the Inner Kingdoms. Power is held by many hands, by councils and churches, by scholars and spies, by those who serve the light and those who hunger in the dark. These are the organizations that shape the world your character walks through.
This page covers the Inner Kingdoms, where current campaigns are set. Other regions hold their own powers, and these pages will grow as the world demands.
Governments, intelligence services, research cabals, and independent orders. The institutions that hold the Federation together and the forces that test its resolve.
Founded some three centuries past, the Astral Circle is the Inner Kingdoms’ foremost authority on the ancient ley-line network and the boundaries between planes. Its researchers operate from five towers and field stations scattered across the Federation, studying the vast magical infrastructure left behind by civilizations long fallen to silence and ruin. Since the reawakening of the ley-lines in 815 AW, the Circle’s mission has grown urgent. What was once theoretical scholarship became a matter of survival, for the restored lines carry power enough to reshape the land, and there are those who would seize that power for darker ends.
The Circle works closely with the Line-Walkers of Asti in the stewardship of the ley-line network, and its field operatives have clashed more than once with agents of the Dark Whispers, who covet the Circle’s research for the Grand Confederacy of Pragos. Castellan-Prime Voss leads with a scholar’s precision and a strategist’s caution, keenly aware that the knowledge her people guard is both the Federation’s greatest asset and its most coveted prize.
Pragos officially denies the existence of the Dark Whispers. Pragos is not believed. The Grand Confederacy’s secret police and intelligence service operates at the pleasure of Grand Artificer Zebulon Grath, answerable to his authority alone, and its operatives move through every nation of the Inner Kingdoms and beyond. They gather intelligence, suppress internal dissent within Pragos, and pursue the Confederacy’s strategic interests through means that polite diplomacy cannot acknowledge and treaties cannot prevent.
Since 815 AW, the Whispers have turned considerable attention toward acquiring ley-line research, particularly from the Astral Circle and the Library of the Ages. This pursuit has brought them into direct and sustained conflict with the Emerald Shields, whose counter-intelligence mission places them as the Whispers’ oldest and most capable adversary. The shadow war between these two organizations has endured for over four centuries, fought in back alleys and coded letters, in poisoned cups and vanished agents, and neither side has gained a decisive advantage.
Where the Federation’s armies guard against threats that march under banners, the Emerald Shields guard against those that move in shadow. Founded nearly seven centuries ago, the Shields are the Inner Kingdoms’ answer to cults, foreign espionage, criminal organizations, and rogue magical threats. They operate independently of any single government, answering to their own charter and their own leadership, and their methods are as varied as the dangers they confront. Infiltration, intelligence gathering, and when all quieter means have failed, the decisive removal of confirmed threats.
Shield-Commander Duvalier is the seventh of the founder’s line to hold the post, and she leads an organization seasoned by centuries of conflict against enemies who do not wear uniforms or hold territory. The Shields’ longest-running engagement is their shadow war with the Dark Whispers of Pragos, but they also maintain active operations against Taovanian cells, the remnants of the Umbral Hand, and the quiet expansion of the Sheevan Widows. In the Inner Kingdoms, when something moves in the dark, the Shields are often the first to know and the last to be thanked.
The Federation of Man is the governing body of the Inner Kingdoms, a coalition of sovereign nations bound together by shared defense, trade agreements, and the hard-won knowledge that survival in this world demands cooperation. The Praetorian Council sits at Fort Hope and includes representatives from Beneshire, Saerrus, Arogror, Xeque, and Pragos. Together they coordinate foreign policy, arbitrate disputes between member nations, and marshal the combined military strength of the Federation when the need arises.
The Federation’s authority is greatest in matters of war and diplomacy and weakest in the domestic affairs of its member nations, each of which guards its sovereignty with the jealous attention of a kingdom that remembers governing alone. This tension between collective strength and national independence defines the Federation’s character. It is an agreement, renewed in every council session and tested by every crisis, that the nations of the Inner Kingdoms are stronger together than they would be standing apart.
High in the Beneshire highlands, where the wind carries the cold of altitudes that discourage casual visitors, the Library of the Ages keeps its long vigil over the collected knowledge of the world. Founded in the earliest years after the War, the Library is a Mauian institution, maintained by the Watchers of Mau and a company of secular scholars who have dedicated their lives to the preservation of what has been written and the patient study of what it means. Its collection numbers over twelve thousand volumes, including texts spanning thousands of years and fragments of Akovarian origin whose strategic value is not lost on those who covet them.
Archivist-General Miros has held his post since 786 AW, and in those long decades he has overseen the Library’s transformation from a quiet repository into a resource of considerable importance. The reawakening of the ley-lines brought new relevance to old texts, and the Library’s Sealed Archives contain materials of such sensitivity that access is granted only under the most stringent conditions. The Dark Whispers have made several attempts to acquire what the Library guards. None have succeeded. Miros, it is said, has a long memory and little patience for uninvited readers.
The Chimera is a title, not a name, and it has passed from hand to hand since 690 AW, each bearer inheriting a fleet, a hidden anchorage, and a reputation that precedes every black sail on the Crescent Sea. The current Chimera assumed the title around 820 AW and has reshaped what was once a loose confederation of raiders into something that unsettles admirals and diplomats in equal measure. The fleet commands roughly thirty vessels and a shore network that reaches into every major port on the Crescent, handling intelligence, fencing, and logistics with a professionalism that would not be out of place in a merchant house.
The Pirates are criminals, and the Federation names them such, but the truth is more complicated than any warrant suggests. The current Chimera pursues strategic objectives beyond simple enrichment, and the fleet’s actions occasionally align with interests that no pirate should logically care about. Whether this makes them a necessary evil, an unacknowledged asset, or simply a problem that has learned to make itself useful is a question the Praetorian Council has not yet answered to anyone’s satisfaction.
The Protectors of the Shire have guarded Beneshire’s woodlands and rural communities since 78 AW, when humans and elves first set aside the distances between their peoples and swore a common oath over common ground. That founding partnership defines the order to this day. Roughly a quarter of its members are elven, and Ranger-Commander Starfall, a Ya’sehrim elf who has commanded for over four decades, embodies the union of the two peoples in a single steadfast authority. Rangers, paladins, and druids serve together, patrolling the Misty Forest and the countryside beyond.
Since the reawakening of the ley-lines, the Protectors’ mission has expanded. Their Green Watchers now monitor Yrugas-era ruins and ley-line phenomena throughout eastern Beneshire, standing vigil over sites where ancient power stirs in ways that are not always benign. The Umbral Hand’s attempts to corrupt ley-line nexus points have given the Protectors new enemies and new urgency, and Greenveil Lodge has become a place where rangers sharpen blades that were already sharp and study maps of a landscape that grows stranger with each passing season.
The churches, temples, and holy orders that tend the souls of the Inner Kingdoms. Each serves an entity whose power is vast but whose nature is neither omnipotent nor beyond the reach of mortal consequence.
In the forge-temples of Mordrion, the act of smithing is the act of prayer, and the ringing of hammer upon anvil is a hymn older than any written scripture. The Church of Mordrion is the dominant dwarven faith in the Inner Kingdoms, organized not around parish halls and weekly sermons but around the heat of the forge and the patient shaping of metal into something worthy of the god who taught the craft. Its Hammerpriests serve as spiritual leaders, master smiths, and counselors, their authority earned at the anvil as much as at the altar.
The faith extends well beyond dwarven communities. In Arogror, where centuries of proximity to the Dwarven Empire have woven Mordrion worship into the human cultural fabric, the forge-temples serve populations that have never held a dwarven hammer but who understand that creation and devotion are the same labor. High Hammerpriest Deepforge leads from Fort Hope, where Mordrion’s Anvil stands as the faith’s principal temple in the Inner Kingdoms, its fires burning in honor of a god who values what is made well above all else.
The Church of Pala’dinae is a military order, organized around chapter houses rather than cathedrals, and its clergy are knights before they are priests. The Knight-Paladins of Pala’dinae hunt undead, fiends, and supernatural evil wherever such things take root, carrying the Silver Dragon’s mandate into crypts and corrupted sanctuaries and the dark places where the dead do not rest. Six chapter houses serve the Federation, and from the Halls of the Silver Dragon in Fort Hope, Grand Commander Vane coordinates a faith whose answer to theological questions has always been a drawn sword and a steady hand.
Pala’dinae’s paladins work in close alliance with the Church of Tiovin, sharing both a celestial home in the heavens and a practical understanding that the threats they face require cooperation rather than doctrinal competition. When the Church of Tiovin identifies a supernatural threat, it is often a Knight-Paladin of Pala’dinae who rides to meet it. The two faiths are separate in structure but united in purpose, and in the Inner Kingdoms, their combined strength is the sturdiest bulwark against the forces that hunger beyond the firelight.
The Church of Tiovin is the largest religious institution in the Inner Kingdoms, serving an estimated two-thirds of the human population through seven dioceses and hundreds of ordained clergy. It is the faith that blesses births, consecrates marriages, and commends the dead to whatever peace awaits beyond. Its reach is woven into the daily life of the Federation so thoroughly that many who are not devout still mark their years by Tiovin’s calendar and seek a priest when the world grows dark.
The Church maintains three special orders that extend its mission beyond the altar. The Order of the Golden Light serves as its paladin arm, shining and resolute. The Hospitallers tend the sick and feed the hungry, carrying Tiovin’s compassion into the places where it is needed most. And the Order of Vigilance hunts what hides. Its inquisitors specialize in the detection and suppression of cults, and Taovanian cells in particular have learned to fear the Vigilance’s patient, methodical attention. The Brennan Reforms, enacted after the War, turned the Inner Kingdoms churches away from militant crusading and toward charitable service, a distinction that separates them sharply from the aggressive Tentigo branch of the faith that still marches under Tiovin’s banner in other lands.
Where other faiths build their worship around prayer and devotion, the Faith of Alagalothor builds its worship around research. The temple-libraries of the Dragon of Magic serve as sanctuaries for arcane spellcasters of every discipline, places where the study of magic is itself the highest form of reverence. Its Arcanologists are scholar-priests, as comfortable among scrolls and formulae as any cleric is among candles and hymns, and their theological neutrality makes the faith a rare meeting ground in a world where moral commitments often divide as sharply as they unite.
That neutrality is both the faith’s greatest strength and its most persistent source of discomfort for other institutions. In Pragos, where competing mage-lords regard one another with suspicion approaching hostility, the Dragon’s Eye temple provides a space where rivals can speak without drawing wands. In Fort Hope, the Temple of the Magister serves the broader arcane community with the same impartial hand. Magister Draconis leads a faith that asks only one question of its worshipers, and that question concerns neither alignment nor allegiance. It is whether they seek to understand magic more deeply today than they did yesterday.
The Fortune Halls are not what most visitors expect of a temple. Step through the door and you will find gambling tables beside counseling rooms, small-business loans administered alongside emergency aid, and a general atmosphere that owes more to a busy community hall than to a hushed cathedral. This is by design. The Fortune Halls of Polyvin serve the working people of the Inner Kingdoms, and Polyvin has never been a god who demands silence or solemnity from those who seek his favor. He demands effort, fairness, and the willingness to roll the dice when the opportunity is honest.
Each Fortune Hall operates independently, managed by its own Fortune-Keeper, and the faith’s accessibility has made it a fixture of working-class life throughout the Federation. Fortune-Keeper Brightcoin leads from Fort Hope’s Grand Fortune Hall, the largest in the Inner Kingdoms, and under her stewardship the Halls have become the natural theological opponents of Xannith’s exploitative practices. Where the Chains of Gold prey upon desperation, the Fortune Halls answer it with practical help and the stubborn insistence that a fair chance is a sacred thing.
The youngest organized faith in the Inner Kingdoms is also one of the most vital. The Line-Walkers of Asti have grown rapidly since Asti’s liberation in 815 AW and the reawakening of the ley-line network that followed, drawing followers who feel the call of the restored lines and the goddess who walks them. They are itinerant by nature and by conviction, maintaining the ley-line network through pilgrimage, prayer, and healing magic, their feet tracing the paths of power that run beneath the surface of the world like veins through living stone.
First Walker Lightfoot leads a faith still finding its shape, earnest and devoted but young enough to lack the institutional weight of the older churches. The Line-Walkers work closely with the Astral Circle on the stewardship of the ley-lines, sharing knowledge and purpose if not always methodology. They face growing threats from the Umbral Hand, whose surviving remnants seek to corrupt the very nexus points that the Line-Walkers tend. It is a quiet war, fought at crossroads and convergence points far from the notice of most citizens, but its outcome will determine whether the restored ley-lines serve as a blessing or become a weapon turned against the land that birthed them.
Cults, conspiracies, and predatory networks that operate in shadow. The threats that the Federation’s defenders hunt and that wise travelers learn to recognize before it is too late.
The Chains of Gold are Xannith’s clergy, and they operate not from temples but from banks, auction houses, and exclusive private clubs where the price of membership is a willingness to look the other way. Officially prohibited throughout the Federation, the Chains nonetheless maintain a visible presence in Xeque, where the Golden Ledger operates openly in the commercial district under protections that no one in the Praetorian Council has mustered the political will to revoke. Elsewhere, they work behind legitimate facades, extending loans designed to bind rather than help, manipulating markets, and profiting from the misery of those who have nowhere else to turn.
The Fortune Halls of Polyvin stand as their most committed theological opponents, and the Emerald Shields have disrupted Chains operations on multiple occasions. Yet the Chains endure, because greed requires no recruitment speech and debt is a chain that locks from the inside. Where other cults must persuade, the Chains need only lend, and wait, and collect what is owed with the patient certainty of a creditor who has written the terms in his own favor.
The Sheevan Widows do not recruit the ambitious or the power-hungry. They recruit the broken. A spouse betrayed. A parent who buried a child through another’s cruelty. A merchant ruined by a rival who faced no consequence. The Widows find those for whom justice has failed and offer something older and more personal in its place. Sheeva’s blessing, they whisper, and the tools to use it. A vial. A powder. A name scratched from the book of the living with such patience that the victim does not know they are dying until it is far too late.
The cult operates through small, autonomous cells scattered throughout the Inner Kingdoms, each acting independently, each unknown to the others. This fragmented structure makes them extraordinarily difficult to uproot. The Emerald Shields and the Order of Vigilance both hunt the Widows, but for every cell exposed, the grief and betrayal that feeds Sheeva’s congregation produces another. In recent years, the Widows have expanded their reach into new territory, a slow growth that concerns those who track such movements, for it suggests that the world has produced no shortage of people with reason to seek what Sheeva offers.
Taovan does not send armies. He sends offers. The cults that serve the Entity of Evil operate underground throughout the Inner Kingdoms, and their method is not violence but temptation. A clerk offered advancement beyond his merit. A magistrate offered the solution to a problem that honest means cannot resolve. A soldier offered power that no training can provide. The devil-pact warlocks who serve Taovan infiltrate institutions by placing corrupted agents in positions of authority, and by the time the corruption is discovered, if it is discovered at all, the damage is already woven into the structure of the thing it has consumed.
No unified leadership governs these cells. They operate independently, and this independence is itself a defense, for no captured cultist can betray what they do not know. The Church of Tiovin’s Order of Vigilance hunts Taovanian cells as its primary mission, and its inquisitors have developed methods of detection refined across generations of this particular war. Yet the conditions that favor Taovanian recruitment, desperation, resentment, and the hunger for power that honest roads cannot satisfy, are never in short supply. Every era of upheaval feeds the cults, and the Inner Kingdoms have known no shortage of upheaval in recent years.
For over two decades, the Umbral Hand operated as a unified conspiracy under the dominion of the shadow dragon Noctuminalis, who gathered Zebulba’s scattered faithful into a single apocalyptic instrument of terrifying capability. At its zenith, the Hand commanded hundreds of operatives and posed a threat that required the combined attention of nearly every major institution in the Inner Kingdoms. Then, in 842 AW, Noctuminalis fell. The head was severed. The body did not die.
What remains of the Umbral Hand is fragmented, diminished, and hunted by every power that values the continuation of the living world. Yet diminished is not destroyed, and the survivors carry with them the knowledge and the conviction that animated the Hand at its height. Their most dangerous ongoing activity is the corruption of ley-line nexus points with negative energy, an effort to poison the very network that sustains the land’s magical vitality. The Line-Walkers of Asti, the Astral Circle, the Emerald Shields, and the Protectors of the Shire all devote resources to hunting what remains. The Hand is wounded. It has not yet released its grip.