Sigil:Home
The Sigil Lands are a realm of old banners, bitter songs, haunted crowns, and memories that refuse to die; a place where kingdoms rise upon the bones of older kingdoms, where the dead are not wholly silent, and where even the sky may bear the mark of war.
From the Old Annals: Here are gathered the names of realms, the reckonings of kings, the memory of songs, and the long grief of lands that have outlived their conquerors.
The World of the Sigil Lands
[edit]The Sigil Lands are not one kingdom, nor one people, nor one age. They are a patchwork of realms, memories, ruins, vows, and ancient hatreds. Here stand proud courts and broken citadels, forest realms of song, mountain fastnesses, inland seas, long roads, cursed lands, and banners that still fly for causes half-forgotten by those who bear them.
Some lands are mighty in arms. Others are mighty in memory. Some keep faith with the living; others are ruled by the weight of the dead. Yet all belong, in one fashion or another, to the long history of the Sigil Lands.
Explore the Codex
[edit]| The Lands | A survey of the great realms, marches, wild places, seas, forests, and frontiers that make up the known world. |
|---|---|
| Kings and Realms | Kingdoms, city-states, lordships, tribal domains, and all the crowns that rise, fail, and contend beneath the same sky. |
| Peoples and Cultures | The Rhone, the Seylandri, the Uragh, the Gholibin, and the many peoples whose customs, grudges, songs, and loyalties shape the age. |
| Wars and Catastrophes | The Numberless Wars, the Great Wrath, the fall of kingdoms, the coming of the Shroud, crusades, invasions, sackings, and bitter reckonings. |
| Orders, Faiths, and Powers | Warrior brotherhoods, gods, spirits, ancient powers, and those who invoke, honor, fear, bargain with, or defy them. |
| Songs, Omens, and Wonders | The arts of Memory, Craft, and Unmaking; the Great Comet, the Comet Road, the Blue Flame, and stranger marvels besides. |
| Great Figures | Conquerors, kings, queens, poets, heroes, villains, and all who left their mark upon the world. |
| The Present Age | The current balance of power, unfinished wars, living rulers, threatened realms, and the tensions of the Age of the Comet. |
Realms of Note
[edit]The largest of the central kingdoms, famous for its armored lancers and its motto, Strength and Honor. Angharais is powerful, ambitious, and no stranger to civil war or disputed succession.
Once the greatest Rhone kingdom of its age and the land most closely associated with the legacy of Brannais. Tael Neydra fell to the Vorghol a century ago and has remained under their dominion ever since. Much of the present Crusade is fought for its liberation.
A small but influential kingdom that has stubbornly retained its independence while former neighboring kingdoms were absorbed into Angharais. Where Angharais is a broadsword, Calalais is a rapier: precise, cultivated, skillful, and fiercely protective of its own way.
The great free harbor of the Crimson Coast, independent, unruly, and currently the greatest haven for pirates in the known world. Its ships and sailors range astonishingly far from home.
Once a Sarriveline city, now an independent kingdom ruled through the office of its First Magistrate.
One of the great powers bordering the lands once conquered by the Vorghol. Sarrivel endured invasion after the fall of Tael Neydra and later suffered generations of border raids.
The Great Ages
[edit]The history of the Sigil Lands stretches far beyond the rise and fall of any single kingdom.
Some four thousand years ago, the Seylandri and the Gholibin struggled across the world in wars so vast that later chroniclers could scarcely number their armies or their dead. The Gholibin host of that age was remembered as the Numberless Horde. The old tales preserve heroes and tragedies on both sides.
An age of colossal deeds and terrible powers, remembered in the manner of heroic epic. The Dragha and other mighty beings moved openly in the world, and the wars of that age reshaped peoples and lands alike.
The troubled age that saw the rise of Brannais and the beginnings of the great Rhone traditions that still echo through the present world.
The present era. A dozen years ago the Great Comet crossed the heavens, leaving behind the luminous scar now called the Comet Road. Across the Sigil Lands it was taken as a sign that the old order was ending and great changes were at hand.
It was in the wake of the Comet that King Henrick of Angharais helped launch the Crusade against the Vorghol occupation of Tael Neydra.
The Crusade
[edit]The Crusade brought together powers that had spent generations regarding one another as rivals.
After the fall of Tael Neydra, the Vorghol attempted invasions of Sarrivel and Rhess. Those invasions were defeated, but Vorghol raiders continued to terrorize the borderlands of Sarrivel, Rhess, Angharais, and even Kuragh Torr.
Eventually the rulers of those lands began to ask a dangerous question:
Why merely endure the raids?
The appearance of the Great Comet turned that question into a cause.
One of the Crusade's greatest early victories came at Blackwater Ford, on the very edge of the Shroud, where an army of Angharais, Rhess, and Merant crushed the Vorghol defenders after Henrick personally rallied the faltering allied troops.
The war has since become harder. Tael Neydra is mountainous, defensible, and deeply scarred by a century of Vorghol rule. The Crusade has stalled for years.
Songs and Memory
[edit]Though kings are earth and halls are stone,
the song remembers all;
the road of fire remains in heaven,
though banners break and fall.
— The Lay of the Comet Road
Among the Seylandri especially, song is far more than entertainment.
Memory Songs preserve histories, places, events, and losses against the erosion of time.
Craft Songs shape living materials through the old arts of song.
Unmaking Songs are rare and feared melodies capable of undoing what song-magic has made.
Across the Sigil Lands more generally, songs preserve history almost as powerfully as chronicles. A city may be lost while its song survives. A king may be dead for centuries and remain more vivid in the lay than many living rulers.
Powers and Faiths
[edit]The Powers of the Sigil Lands are neither a single orderly pantheon nor a collection of interchangeable gods. Peoples understand them differently, worship differently, and sometimes disagree profoundly about what a particular Power even is.
Among those remembered in tale and worship are Inglorian, associated with strength and honor, and Lalochai, the Laughing Knife: jester, trickster, satirist, and no respecter of persons.
Lalochai is especially beloved among the Tobon. Smaller folk living among larger and stronger peoples have good reason to prize wit, nerve, luck, and the victory of brain over brawn.
The Gholibin have their own religious traditions and their own darkly comic understanding of fate, summed up in the word skûr — pronounced skoor. Things happen. Fortune turns. Death comes. And yet, here we are.
Peoples of the Sigil Lands
[edit]The Sigil Lands are home to many peoples with histories far older than the kingdoms they presently inhabit.
The Rhone are the dominant human peoples of many of the central kingdoms.
The Seylandri are extraordinarily long-lived and consequently understand history very differently from shorter-lived peoples. Their occasional term for such folk — mayflies — is not necessarily an insult. It is simply an observation.
The Gholibin once marched in hosts numbering perhaps in the millions. They are fearless, irreverent, stubbornly funny, and capable of mocking almost anything. A Gholibin might taunt a Dragha if the mood took them. Skûr will decide what happens afterward.
The Tobon survive in a world dominated by larger peoples through adaptability, wit, community, and the occasional well-timed dirty trick.
For the Reader
[edit]This Codex gathers the surviving histories, songs, legends, customs, rulers, wars, wonders, and contradictions of the Sigil Lands.
Not every account agrees.
Some things are history. Some are tradition. Some survive only because someone put them into a song that refused to die.
That distinction is not always as useful as a scholar might wish.
Choose a kingdom, follow a song, trace an old feud, or begin with a war. In the Sigil Lands, every road eventually leads backward into memory — and forward into trouble.