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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jasin" data-source="post: 2755838" data-attributes="member: 7531">A sort of a vignette meant to get across the general feel of a setting that's been sitting in the back of my brain lately:Those weak of faith name me blasphemer and warlock, but as the poet has written, "if the Maker hath not desired that we should drink wine, he would not have provided us with grapes". We praise the Four Pillars and their Maker by using the gifts bestowed upon us, and the binding patterns are my grapes, and the power of the elementals my wine! -- Jalal al-Alim, in a letter to his sister and assistant, 689th Y.R.835th Year of the Righteous: the Caliphate of Alam al-Rashidun is at the height of its power thanks to the advances in magic, natural sciences and philosophy rooted in harnessing the power of elementals, a technique pioneered by Jalal al-Alim, the greatest elementalist in the history of the Caliphate.Al-Alim's death for his percieved impiety towards the servants of the Four Pillars (and by extension, towards their Mreator) at the hands of the Fedayeen sparked the short and bloody civl war that finally broke the power of the Fedayeen warbands, a development many deemed inevitable ever since the warbands had fulfilled their raison d'etre with the final defeat of the Kurgan Empire in 524 Y.R.Today, 143 years after the scholar's death, the Caliphate is a land of trade and knowledge, and the elementalist clerics of the Four Pillars healers, diplomats and scholars, working side by side with the secular artificers, instead of the warrior-priests of old that rode against the Kurgan hosts.But the height of power is the beginning of decline: the Fedayeen brotherhoods of the deep desert could never be eradicated and they're dreaming of revenge, eyes beyond the borders fill with envy at the sight of al-Rashidun's prosperity, and the shadows are stirring again in the ruined Kurgan capital of Dar ul-Jihad...Think of the Baghdad Caliphate c. 900 A.D.... but with artificers instead of mathematicians and bound-elemental magic items, genies and genasi, a (suitably renamed) shugenja priesthood! The PCs take the roles of visionary scholars that try to rival the accomplishments of al-Alim, or pious elementalist priests that strive to embody the virtues of their Pillar, or grim desert warriors thirsty for revenge on the society that they built with blood and steel and which rejected them, or delvers in the forbidden shadow-lore of Kurgan...Well, that's it so far. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> How'd you like it? Does it make you want to play?</blockquote>

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