ZEITGEIST Age of Enlightenment: a Zeitgeist Encyclopaedia

[arkwright]

G'day, folks. I'm happy that I can share with you something quite neat I have been working on- Age of Enlightenment, a TiddlyWiki encyclopaedia of the world of Zeitgeist. Age of Enlightenment is best read in conjunction with my Zeitvice document of advice for GMs running the Zeitgeist AP. Thanks to Earth Seraph Edna for their editing help, and credit to Ryan Nock et al. for the Zeitgeist AP.

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Purpose
My intention is that a GM will present this encyclopaedia to their players before the game starts, containing everything they need to know about the world and any of that GM's lore changes or additional setting features.

Navigating this encyclopaedia

Each page on this document is a Tiddler. Clicking on a link will open a new tiddler above your current tiddler. You can click the pencil on the top-right to edit any tiddler; don't worry, you will not be able to make permanent changes to the wiki, just to any copy you download for yourself.

Most tiddlers have tags, visible underneath the title. You can click on a tag to see a list of associated tiddlers which you can click to navigate to.

Key tabs on the right sidebar include Contents (a quick list of Age of Enlightenment tiddlers) and Map (a zoomable map of Lanjyr, with tiddler links). Key buttons include the Home icon and the + Create Tiddler icon.

This encyclopaedia contains:

• Everything a well-informed Risuri-born RHC constable would know about Lanjyr, the great nations, the Planes and beyond, prior to Book 1.
• My lore expansions and simplifications for Millerism, to Clericism, to the Old Faith, for the culture and history of the Elfaivaran gender imbalance, placing more focus on the Vekeshi Assassins, among others.
• My lore fixes. Skyseers are no longer grossly wrong about the properties of the Planes, The Night of the Mirror Moon is now random, the fey tech sickness now has history and a reason for wheels to not be anti-fey weapons, among others.
• A small amount of additional lore for Nalaam, The Far East, Shaha and other places taken from work I and my fellow co-author Earth Seraph Edna did for the Zeitgeist sequel setting. This material is nothing like it will look in the sequel setting due to it being trimmed for brevity, due to the material being adjusted to fit 500 AOV, due to the material not being the final version edited by Ryan Nock, and due to some of the material being 'cut content' that is not in the final manuscript.
• Almost everything from the Player's Guide lore sections.
• Mild spoilers. Age of Enlightenment refers to some characters, locations and events that occur later in the Zeitgeist AP. However, these are always public characters, locations and events, or their public aspects, which a well-read Lanjyran could know about.

This encyclopaedia does NOT contain:

• Everything a player in a faithful Zeitgeist AP game should know. This encyclopaedia clashes significantly with the Player's Guide on several points, to make lore improvements and simplifications.
• Everything a well-informed constable from another nation would know. Information on other nations is deliberately brief, and obscured. An Elfaivaran constable should, for example, know much more about the enclaves and their matriarchs. Constables could receive spoiler-information from the AP based on their backstories.
• RHC procedures.
• Wholly system-neutral information. Elfaivarans are called eladrin, dragonborn are briefly touched upon.
• Wholly system-specific information. Age of Enlightenment contains no mechanics, and will need to be customized to the specific conversion (D&D 4e, PF 1e, PF2e, 5e) you are using.
• All the lore changes suggested by my Zeitvice document.

Using this encyclopaedia

Age of Enlightenment is built with TiddlyWiki, a unique non-linear notebook for capturing, organising and sharing complex information. The encyclopaedia uses barely 5% of TiddlyWiki's features; use Grok TiddlyWiki to find out how to expand upon the wiki. TiddlyHost is providing free hosting, though site capacity is small (don't upload images).

Simply by right-clicking on the page and hitting 'Save As', anyone can download this wiki and make it their own. Change the history, add more map locations, embed images, improve the formatting. Make your own Age of Enlightenment for your own game. Make sure to update the username in the control panel to sign your own name to changes.

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I don't intend to put too much additional effort into Age of Enlightenment. What information is there is there, what information is not there (more on the Family, on the Kell Guild, a page for Han Jierre, etc) is for prospective GMs to figure out. Still, I'm always happy to listen to suggestions, so please feel free to discuss the encyclopaedia in the comments below and any errors I've made or contradictions I've included.

I hope you get some value out of this work.

 

[Nnesk]

Thank you!

 

[Adigard]

That's pretty awesome, and likely took a ton of work. Thanks Arkwright! My Zeit campaign is temporarily paused, and we may end up just giving it a short hiatus and restarting with slightly different people in a few months (had a LOT of flakes prior). Curious how difficult it would be to download everything, shove it into a personally hosted TiddlyWiki server, and let my players make changes to their heart's content as the AP ran. Unfortunately with how little attention was paid to the newspapers, they'd likely just ignore it entirely after glancing through it once... but it's still pretty great for folks who are really into the campaign setting.

 

[Anselm]

This is so helpful and incredibly timely. Thank you for putting it together. My prep for session 1 this weekend will greatly benefit!

 

[Roko Joko]

This encyclopaedia contains:
... My lore fixes. Skyseers are no longer grossly wrong about the properties of the Planes ...

What is this referring to?

 

[arkwright]

What is this referring to?

Basically, the planes and their traits as stated in the Player's Guide ('Jiese influences war') do not map at all with their planar traits in Act 2 and 3 ('Jiese enables precision technologies.') Ryan says that both are correct, that Jiese influences war and precision tech. I prefer to have it be that the skyseers are wrong- and to change it for my table that the skyseers have the correct traits.

If you look in the wiki, you'll see that the plane traits do not match their player's guide description.