Nuraine
Nuraine is set in a high-fantasy, vaguely historical 1618, where seven Great Houses sit within an unsteady Holy Roman Empire, hurtling into the religious, economic, industrial and ecological crises of the early-modern era, and into which we light a spark: our starting heist.
Now there’s a few thousand years of history established, from the binding of the planes, the rise and fall of the Witch King, up to the First Great House War, tracking a dozen or so species as their cultures differentiate and mix. There’s a complex cosmology and theology based around the periodic table and atomic physics. And the 80 or so primary characters mostly have their own miniature by now.
Nuraine started as a game of Dungeons and Dragons I ran for my family and friends, an archetypal adventure to plan and execute a daring heist at a high-society ball. Each time I ran the game I made the puzzle more engaging and more intricate, and it grew to something bigger and more interesting.
Great Houses map of Nuraine
A good adventure needs struggle, obstacles for the heroes to overcome and adversaries who have competing designs. So we have the Seven Great Houses, the nation states of the Holy Roman-ish Empire of Nuraine. There need to be stakes and consequences, so the world has to be filled with people and things, ideals and powers to treasure or condemn. Each agent has a past, with debts to repay, grudges to settle and plans for the future. The world needs to be grounded in a realistic climatic, economic and political landscape of a world roughly similar to our own in the early 1600s, while also explaining the unexplainable power of magic and the gods.
Cosmology diagram — the heavens arranged by the periodic table
The heavens, arranged by orbital
This cosmos is organised around the principles of atomic physics. The planes of reality split into up and down, strange and charm, and around this globe of reality 118 elements race around the firmament instead of stars. The gods align to the periodic table, with each of the races of the world set as the elements. It maps over surprisingly neatly.
Hydrogen and Helium, El and Asherah, were the first gods, father and mother to the elves. Then the eight major deities for each of the groups of the periodic table. The Crystallogen god which made humans from Carbon as infinitely adaptable builders; the god of Noble Gases made the halflings, which sought for nothing more than themselves; while tieflings of the halogen god and goblins made of alkali metals are reactive and corrosive. This scientific reality sits in tension with the traditional fantasy conceptions of good and evil, and with this as an emerging heresy in the universe it lets me play with parallels to the protestant reformation.
The nations of this world all have suitably bizarre and extreme forms of government, because if you are going to design a science fiction in the truest sense of tweaking the parameters of human society and seeing how the experiment plays out, then you may as well have some interesting test subjects. So we have the three elven Great Houses who arrived in their ‘New World’, Nuraine, in the year zero and formed House Clovis, reminiscent of Charlemagne and the Habsburgs; our antagonists House Harkyl, the warlord elven-supremacists in the mould of the tsardom and the British Empire; and House Sildurel, which is in the unfortunate position of Belgium in 1914. Then the Varone Corporation, House Aremon’s gerontocracy posing as a meritocracy, the Crusader state of House Leoran and the clans of the dwarven diaspora, the Dwarovar.
Attach a handful of kings and queens, princes and princesses, civil servants, preachers and spies to each of those, plus a dozen or so further-flung realms, and it’s very easy to get up to over 100 named characters. Most of these I’ve by now 3D printed and given a lick of paint, while the main characters are waiting on getting some extra care and attention to paint.
Nuraine miniatures — the display shelves with the cast on them
So the original heist is now the first spark which lights this tinderbox world alight. It’s the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand — or one could say Ned Stark, or Leto Atreides — which breaks apart the social contract of this unstable world and unleashes forces which none of the participants can control. I’m not exactly sure how it all ends yet, but I’m very pleased with the start.
The Confluence
The Confluence is the first novel set in Nuraine. It opens with that same heist, at a Great House’s summer ball, and follows what happens when it goes wrong.