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  • Game Master
  1. Eclipse
  2. Lore

Realms & Domains

HIRCINE’S REALM

Realm Name: The Hunting Expanse
Identity: A vast, living wilderness plane where pursuit is law and the air tastes like storm rain and pine.

Visual Tone

This realm is not dark. It is wild and bright in a dangerous way.

  • sunbeams cut through massive forests

  • mountains glow at dawn like sharpened steel

  • rivers run fast and clean

  • animal calls echo like music and warning at the same time

How It Feels

Everything here feels alert.
You are not oppressed by gloom, you are challenged by being watched.
The wind changes when something decides you are prey.

Realm Rules

  • the land responds to intention, fear, and hunger

  • trails rearrange to test travelers

  • wounds heal strangely fast, but exhaustion accumulates faster too

  • prey animals sometimes speak in riddles, then vanish

Threats

  • spirit beasts that hunt the arrogant

  • tests disguised as blessings

  • old lycan echoes who never left

  • Hircine’s remaining influence, even if he is gone from godhood

Player Hooks

  • retrieve a lost relic that only appears at sunrise

  • survive a hunt trial that teaches a new transformation discipline

  • negotiate with a spirit beast that remembers the First Wolf

  • rescue someone who has been running for days but refuses to stop


CELESTIAL REALM AND CELESTIAL FACTION

Realm Name: The Ascendant Skyfields
Identity: A serene but uncanny plane where ascended beings dwell and reality behaves like refined art.

Visual Tone

  • endless high plateaus above clouds

  • floating gardens and stone bridges that assemble as you walk

  • quiet water that reflects memories instead of faces

  • light that never blinds, only reveals

What This Place Is

It is not “heaven” in a moral sense.
It is a domain of beings who have climbed beyond mortality through power, rites, or fate accidents.

The Celestial Faction

Name: The Concord of Ascendants
Unspoken Rule: Do not openly defy the Fates.
They do not worship the Fates publicly, but they fear the pressure of their attention.

Goals

  • maintain cosmic stability and prevent domain wars

  • observe mortal worlds without constant intervention

  • recruit rare mortals into ascendant paths when it serves balance

Player Hooks

  • an ascendant offers training at a cost of a memory, oath, or bond

  • a celestial court debate determines whether Elsir is allowed to exist

  • a rogue ascendant secretly arms humans with forbidden knowledge

  • a gate opens briefly and rival factions race to exploit it


DOMAIN OF THE FATES

Realm Name: The Loom Without Distance
Identity: The true god realm. Not a place you travel to. A rule layer reality occasionally allows you to perceive.

Physics Breaking Lore Rules

  • there is no up, down, or time direction, only relevance

  • you do not walk, you arrive by being permitted

  • language becomes metaphor unless anchored by a relic, vow, or mark

  • distance is measured in consequence, not miles

  • the realm edits memory while you are inside it, unless you resist

What The Fates Are Like Here

The Fates do not speak like people.
They “pressure” outcomes by:

  • revealing impossible truths at the worst moment

  • removing options without explanation

  • offering bargains that feel like choices but are structural traps

Access Conditions

Entry is nearly impossible.
Known ways:

  • direct invitation, extremely rare

  • being dragged by a Fate marked artifact

  • catastrophic ritual failures involving Djinn, domains, or divine severance

  • a moment of cosmic anomaly where two timelines overlap

Dangers

  • losing your sense of self

  • returning with a missing year

  • returning with a new scar that changes your destiny

  • being “noticed” permanently

Player Hooks

  • the party seeks the Loom to undo a fate bound event but risks erasing themselves

  • a Fate offers a bargain: save one person, lose a city

  • a physics fracture in Viratia suggests the Loom is touching the world again

Domain Name: Nytherus' Domain
Titles: The Night Kingdom, The Velvet Dark, The Realm Behind the Blink
Identity: Not a hellscape. A beautiful, predatory night-world where darkness behaves like substance and secrets have weight.

Visual Tone

  • a permanent midnight sky with slow moving constellations that do not match any mortal star chart

  • black water canals reflecting memories instead of faces

  • lantern-lit plazas of pale stone, elegant ruins, and endless balconies

  • forests of glass-black trees where leaves chime softly like tiny bells

  • a gentle silver glow everywhere, like moonlight filtered through smoke

It is quiet here. Not peaceful. Quiet like a hunting cat.

Metaphysical Rules

  • Darkness is physical: shadows can bind, cut, cradle, or suffocate

  • Memory bleeds: strong emotions echo as audible whispers in the air

  • Distance lies: you can walk a street for hours and end up behind yourself

  • Sound is selective: speech carries only if the realm “allows” it

  • Hunger is a law: the realm rewards predation, restraint, and cunning, not morality

Environmental Hazards

  • Gloam Fog: dulls orientation and makes time feel stretched

  • Midnight Pressure: the longer you remain, the more your doubts feel like truth

  • Whisper Currents: currents of shadow that carry rumors and sometimes living things

  • False Doors: ornate gates that lead to personal nightmares or lost years

Creatures and Defenses

  • Night Husks: pale silhouettes of former victims that mimic voices

  • Shadow Courtiers: intelligent predators that negotiate before they strike

  • Lamp Knights: elegant armored sentries that enforce Nytherus’s old laws even after his fall

  • Canal Things: unseen bodies beneath the water that pull down the careless

Why It Matters

Nytherus used this realm as:

  • a power reservoir

  • a prison for enemies and secrets

  • a breeding ground for vampiric evolution
    His relics could anchor mortal access and grant unnatural authority over shadow, hunger, and memory.

Player Hooks

  • retrieve a relic that still “belongs” to the domain and draws hunters

  • rescue a person trapped in a looped district that resets each midnight

  • barter with a Shadow Courtier for safe passage, paying in memory

  • discover that a human faction has learned how to open a small gate temporarily