Winter Realm

The Realm of Winter

What are the Themes of the Realm?

The Realm of Winter is sometimes called the Wasteland. It is a realm of death, hunger and fear. It is a Winter without the hope of Spring or the memory of Autumn. This is a realm where death is categorically the end, rather than a transformation or a pause between lives. It is a realm of paranoia, where dreadful survivalist horror is the order of the day, and soul-wrenching trauma is par for the course.

This is a realm that embodies all the worst imagery of old age – physical infirmity, fading mental faculties and the fear of the grave. It is a Realm where every second every creature knows they are one heartbeat closer to extinction. This is a realm about the drive to try and survive at any cost, turning on friends and family, performing unspeakable acts all in the name of getting one more breath.

A common theme in this Realm is that things which seem pleasant or friendly are often dangerous and want to hurt you. The image of the quiet neighbour who is really a serial killer is a strong one that presents itself in the form of Eternals that can appear beautiful while really being flesh-hungry ogres. There’s also a subtle subtext that things that do not directly contribute to your survival can actively hinder it.

It is a Realm of chaos, where some of the most primal forces are unleashed – the forces that prefigure the end of all things. There is a dreadful arbitrariness to a lot that happens here, a feeling of inevitability that breeds paranoia and madness, but it is coupled by a refusal to lie down and accept that inevitability.

There is a wisdom in old age, however. For all that the Realm may be a constant struggle to survive, the survivors are experienced and crafty. At its most positive, this is a Realm that recognises the arbitrary and uncaring nature of the universe but still refuses give up. The struggle to survive gives meaning to that survival.

What kind of Magic does it cover?

The most obvious magic of Winter is the magic of cursing. Laying harmful magical effects on others is what the magic of this Realm does best. It is especially adept at delivering curses that deal with concepts of extreme age (crippling, tiredness, infirmity, withering sickness, mental degradation and even death), hunger ( hunger and thirst for food and drink that cannot be allayed, robbing something of its joy or meaning, or more unpleaseant urges such as a drive to commit cannibalism) and fear (everything from full-blown feelings of crippling fear to nagging doubts and uncertainties, an infestation of nightmares, or the slow eroding of hope into despair).

These curses can also become blights that affect larger areas, or they can become contagious effects that spread through a bloodline or town.

Actual destruction is also an element of Winter, but it tends to operate on the smaller and more intimate scale. If you want an item utterly destroyed, feed it to Winter.

This Realm more than most others deals with the unleashing of horror on the world. There are spirits of Winter that constantly hunger for the sensations of the flesh. These spirits can be bound into mortals to create horrors such as walking corpses, vampires and ghouls. Such creatures are rarely if ever under the control of the ones who raise them.

The hunger of Winter can also be manifested by rituals that prey on other people. Stealing someone’s youth to prolong your own life, or consuming their power to gain a little of it yourself are both ideas of Winter rituals. These rituals are never an even trade – a large portion of whatever energy they deal with is bled off into winter – and they often come with other dreadful downsides (they might be addictive, for example, or need to repeated regularly to avoid a painful and messy death).

This Realm also covers concepts of entropy – removing or unbinding a magical effect is part of the Realm’s power, and is often presented as a good reason to study this magic that is otherwise seen as being quite malevolent.

Winter also encompasses ideas of sacrifice. This can be a negative theme – the use of murder to provide power to rituals, for example, or the creation of undying guardians. However mortals can make it into a more positive theme – the sacrifice of the individual for the betterment or survival of the group. In some ways this is like a bargain between the life-extinguishing forces of Winter and the spirit of the ritualist. The actions of Captain Oates on Scott’s Antarctic expedition are a strong image with this kind of magic, more than images of Aztec step-pyramids and Satanic baby-killing ceremonies.

There are of course mystics and scholars say that the magic of Winter is innately dangerous. They claim that each magical effect ended, each portion of energy consumed, and each incident of destruction somehow “feeds” the Wasteland. The energies it consumes are gone forever, and eventually all the magic in the world will be swallowed up by Winter, bringing an end to creation. Another group disagree – they claim that by using the magic of Winter the magician steals power from the Realm, postponing the eventual death of creation.

What is the Realm like physically?

The Wasteland is a realm of hunger and dread. It is a barren realm. Large sections of the realm are forested with dark trees, especially pine trees, but other areas are literal wastelands of bleak stone and abrasive sand, or eternal ice and razor snow. Ruins stand in many parts of the realm, suggesting that there were once cities and towns here. This is deceptive of course – it is likely that most if not all of the ruins came into being in a crumbling state and have stayed that way ever since. There are said to be at least two ruined cities in the Realm, one of them standing on the shores of a tideless black sea that is slowly consuming the ruins.

In some ways it is almost as if the realm itself is becoming senile. The length of day and night is not set – a day might last a few hours and a night last for what seems like a week. Sometimes the sun fails to rise for months on end, and when it does put on an appearance it is dim and ancient and hangs low in the sky. At night the moon is wan and sallow, and provides minimal illumination. It’s dangerous to carry lights in this hungry night, however, for light and warmth attract the denizens of the Realm.

What weather there is here is poor. Blizzards and bone-chilling cold are obvious, but it is also a realm of drought, where drinkable water is as scarce as wholesome food. While Eternals as a whole do not *need* to eat or drink, every inhabitant feels a drive to consume things as part of the theme of the Realm. The creatures here exist in conditions of almost constant hunger and thirst.

There are said to be oases in the wilderness of Winter but these are also said to be dangerous places. Some Eternals maintain homes that are well-lit and appear to have plenty of food and warmth. Unfortunately, those same Eternals demand a steep price from their guests, and maintain esoteric bans that can easily be broken by visitors who don’t know the rules.

What are the inhabitants of the Realm like?

The Eternals of Winter are monsters. They are hunger and fear given physical form. Many of them look like the monsters they are – withered flesh, terrible fangs and claws, and hungry empty eyes are common features. The lesser eternals act more like savage beasts than thinking creatures, but they are capable of cunning and cleverness when they can be bothered. Many of the more powerful Eternals are capable of appearing beautiful, but this is just a temporary glamour to conceal their true nature. Even when they hide their physical ugliness, their spiritual ugliness comes across in their casual cruelty. More than perhaps any other Eternals, the creatures of Winter are alien to mortal experience.

Winter Eternals are always hungry. They are dangerous to deal with because they generally want to consume or feed on the mortals they interact with in some way. Some feed literally on flesh and blood, whereas others have more rarefied palates and feed on fear itself, or on attributes such as youth, hope or passion.

Many Eternals of Winter are bound – or choose to bind themselves – by complex restraints on their behaviour. A flesh-eating witch-hag might be incapable of harming someone who is polite and deferential in their dealings. A crazed ogre might be the soul of courtesy until someone asks a question, or disagrees with him, or fails to abide by the rules of hospitality, or whatever. There is something arbitrary about these rules – they exist as much to create the fear of breaking them as they do to restrain the Eternal.

There are few if any associations of Winter Eternals. They do not naturally co-operate, they are in constant competition. When two Winter Eternals meet, one eats the other. Only when they are equally strong does any sort of political activity take place, and in general they would prefer just to avoid one another rather than socialize.

Winter Eternals can be wise. This wisdom often takes the form of magical knowledge, rather than the kind of secrets that lead to blackmail. They may be prepared to share these magical secrets for the right price. The price is always steep, however. This isn’t the Realm of Autumn which understands concepts of quid-pro-quo and equitable bargaining. This is a realm where one pays a tribute, and the price may be greater than the worth of what it buys.

There is a kind of twisted altruism in the Eternals of Winter. They know that creation is a terrible place where one must struggle to survive. They want to share that knowledge with other creatures to help them survive. They are like bleak parents in this regard, and the horrors they represent are the primal horrors of the fairy-tale or even the good-quality horror story. They are horrors designed to instruct, not to be horrific for their own sake.

The Eternals know that it is all going to end in tears, they just think that real strength lies in accepting that fact and all it implies about the universe.

There is no lineage definitively connected with this Realm at this time, although there are themes in the grotesques that could be developed to fill that niche.

What do the Eternals want from Mortals?

The Eternals of Winter are hungry and want to be fed. What form this sustenance takes varies from Eternal to Eternal. They may not enjoy the company of their own kind, but some of them like the experience of interacting with mortal creatures. They enjoy playing the role of a gracious host or guest, because it makes the prospect of consuming the mortals that much more exquisite.

They want to influence the Empire so that it accepts the inevitability of death, and the need to put aside morals and ethics in favour of the dreadful algebra of necessity in the face of an uncaring or actively malevolent creation. They want to see the Imperials destroy their enemies without mercy, but they don’t really care who those enemies are. They want to see the Imperials do whatever it takes to survive.

In a way, they want to be like the grandparents in Winter who sit around the fire telling stories of their lives and passing on their experience and wisdom to their grandchildren. The problem is that in this scenario is that while the grandchildren are “the inhabitants of the mortal world,” the grandparents are scary psychotic serial-killers.

They encourage conflict, because the strong survive. They encourage fear and terror because when creatures are afraid, they do not challenge the ones terrorizing them. They encourage selfishness because fundamentally you can only secure your own survival, and each other person you take responsibility for is just another weight dragging you down. They encourage paranoia because if everyone wants to survive then anyone is capable of doing to you the sort of horrible things you might do to them.

What are some things these Eternals can give to Mortals?

The Eternals offer gifts, both physical and magical. Many of them have magical powers that can be transferred, but they almost invariable come with a horrible price. For example, a wolf-skin cloak that lets a hunter hunt like a wolf but requires them to kill a family member before they can turn back, or a cauldron that produces enough food to feed a village through the winter provided that the stock is made from human bones.

They can provide articles that enhance or focus the magic of Winter, again often with an associated down-side or restriction.

They can send out nightmares to trouble the living, either literal nightmares in the form of bad dreams that make restful sleep impossible, or more metaphorical nightmares in the form of spirits of disease and misfortune to plague people.

They might lend a mortal artifacts that create useful effects to do with death, hunger, desperation and fear.

What themes aren’t appropriate to this Realm?

This isn’t a realm that is evil for its own sake. The inhabitants are not grinning demons who eat with their mouths open. This is a realm that is evil because humans are often horrified by the themes it exemplifies. It’s malevolent because it presents a scenario in which nature is malevolent, and the worst-case scenario is day-to-day reality, but that’s not the whole story.

A Winter Eternal doesn’t encourage cannibalism because it is eeeevil, it encourages cannibalism because surviving is preferable to dying, a square meal is a square meal, and you don’t owe a stranger anything. This is the realm where “one less mouth to feed is one less mouth to feed.” The mistake Hansel and Gretel’s parents make in this scenario is not in leaving their kids in the wild to die, it’s in being so soft-hearted they didn’t just bop them over the head and stick them in a stewpot.

This realm isn’t cruel because cruelty is an end in itself, it’s because it recognises that if you show mercy to your enemy today, they will try and kill you and your friends tomorrow. It’s pragmatic to an irrational degree. It’s evil because it cannot conceive of love being stronger than death, or of real co-operation that survives in the face of starvation.

The inhabitants have learnt a terrible lesson and they want to pass it on. If mortals are squeamish about it, that’s their problem. But by the same token, the kind of people who enjoy killing for its own sake … they’re not the kind of people Winter likes at all. A guy who engages in cannibalism despite the fact there is plenty of food around is a poseur. He’s useful for providing a warning – don’t trust people they might be cannibals – but he’s still an idiot. A fellow who tortures cats for fun is interesting, and a fine object lesson, but at the end of the day the Winter Eternals will find him almost as hard to understand as they will the flowers-and-chocolates brigade.

There’s themes of cosmic horror here, but it’s a wider theme of creating meaning in an uncaring universe rather than tentacles attacking the senate. The horrors of the Winter Realm are comprehensible in a way that Cthulhu and company are not. They’re not even enemies of the PCs, they’re too primal for that – they don’t actively want to destroy the world, they just remind people that such destruction is apparently inevitable.