In Evil Land, corruption is not a dramatic spectacle reserved for doomed sorcerers or power-mad kings. It is the slow bleed of the world itself into the bodies and minds of those who live there. Every spell cast, every ruin entered, every shuffle of the cards, and even the simple act of breathing in the wrong place may seed a small, insidious alteration. These minor corruptions rarely kill outright. Instead, they accumulate like rust or mold, wearing down mortals until they are no longer entirely human.
The people of Evil Land have learned to endure them. They make jokes, invent folk cures, and trade advice, but no one ever escapes their touch. Some corruptions are so common that they are considered almost part of ordinary life, while others strike adventurers like invisible thieves, stealing pieces of health, sanity, or fortune.
1. Ash-Lung
Caused by breathing the fine, grey powder that drifts across ruins and battlefields. Victims develop a dry, rattling cough. The Guild of Commoners says chewing bitter roots eases it, but in time lungs stiffen like parchment. Nearly every farmer has it by middle age.
2. Lantern-Eye
Eyes begin to glow faintly in the dark, a remnant of exposure to ruined lamps that still burn with Anunnaki fire. Useful for seeing at night, but it attracts insects and predators. Children often tease each other with “lantern games,” hiding in pitch black barns to see who glows first.
3. Salt-Skin
The air around dead seas and dried riverbeds carries invisible crystallization. Skin flakes into tiny white scales, sometimes cracking into painful fissures. People rub themselves with oil or fat to keep the salt from spreading. Some tribes treat the condition as a badge of endurance.
4. Whisper-Ear
Caused by sleeping too close to a corrupted ruin. Victims hear faint voices just at the edge of sleep, often indistinguishable from dreams. Some live with it their entire lives, but a few succumb, wandering off to follow phantom orders into the desert.
5. Rust-Tooth
Teeth slowly turn the color of iron, becoming brittle. Blacksmiths joke that it’s the land reclaiming what it forged. Chewing raw mint leaves is said to delay it.
6. Bleeding Nails
A minor but cruel corruption: fingernails and toenails occasionally weep thin rivulets of blood. Painful but not deadly. Most hide it with rags or dyes, but some cults claim it is a sign of “divine favor.”
7. Shadow Slough
A person’s shadow no longer matches their body precisely—it lags, twitches, or bends unnaturally. At first it’s little more than unsettling, but over time people start to distrust those so marked, believing their souls are loosening.
8. Vine-Veins
Greenish lines spread beneath the skin, resembling plant roots. Causes no pain, but eventually draws insects. Common near old battlefields where blood seeped into poisoned soil.
9. Red Drip
A constant nosebleed triggered by card magic residue. People stuff herbs or cloth up their noses to hide it. It stains shirts crimson, leading to a local insult: “Red-drip fool.”
10. Sleep Hunger
After too much magical exposure, sleep brings no rest. Victims wake more tired than before. Some live decades in a haze of exhaustion, muttering of dreams they cannot remember.
For those who deal directly with spells, relics, and the deeper ruins, corruption becomes sharper. These afflictions are known among scavengers as “deck scars”—marks of having gambled too often with the powers of Evil Land.
1. Draw of Misfortune
Whenever an adventurer draws a card for magic, they must draw two: one is the true effect, the other lingers as a curse, such as sudden nosebleeds, memory loss, or unlucky dice rolls for the next day.
2. Fractured Soul
The body remains intact, but the reflection cracks like a mirror. Looking into water or polished metal shows fractured images. The afflicted lose Charisma when dealing with superstitious folk.
3. Card-Burn
Hands develop blackened marks in the shapes of spades, clubs, hearts, or diamonds. These glow when magic is near but also attract predators that feed on corruption.
4. Echo Tongue
Words sometimes repeat themselves a few seconds after being spoken, whispered by no one. Terrifying in stealth situations. Priests call it a sign the Anunnaki are “practicing speech” through mortals.
5. Joker’s Curse
Those afflicted occasionally shuffle themselves: forgetting their own name for an hour, swapping their sense of taste for hearing, or mistaking allies for enemies until the curse passes.
6. Hollow Hunger
No food satisfies. Adventurers waste away, eating twice as much as others, but never feeling full. Some eventually turn cannibal.
7. Creeping Bloom
Strange flowers sprout from the skin at random—small blossoms at the wrist, a bud in the scalp, a vine curling around an ankle. Cutting them only delays the spread.
8. Dice-Flesh
Flesh begins to dimple like the sides of dice. Each scar is said to represent a roll of fate the person has lost. No two afflicted look alike, making them unmistakable in a crowd.
9. Ashen Tongue
Speech dries into rasping whispers, tasting of burnt wood. Charms and persuasion suffer, though curses and invective gain eerie potency.
10. Gilded Blood
Small streaks of gold appear in the blood. Harmless at first, but thieves covet it, and each wound shines like a beacon under moonlight.
The people of Evil Land know they cannot escape corruption, only endure it. Every guild, tribe, and kingdom has its coping methods:
Guild of Commoners: pass around home remedies like vinegar washes, bloodletting, and herb poultices. None cure corruption, but they offer comfort.
Guild of Mages: embrace corruption as the cost of knowledge, even cataloguing which corruptions pair best with particular spells.
Qin Dynasty: regulates corruption strictly, executing those too warped to remain human, while secretly experimenting on prisoners to weaponize mutations.
Tribes and Ashlanders: weave corruption into identity. A warrior with Lantern-Eyes or Vine-Veins is considered marked by the land itself.
Merchants: sell “purifying charms” carved from bone or silver. Most are scams, but a rare few actually delay corruption.
Corruption has become part of the psychology of Evil Land. People speak of it not as punishment, but as inevitability:
“The land always collects its toll.”
“Every hand of cards leaves a scar.”
“To live is to rot gracefully.”
Some see corruption as proof that mortals are slowly becoming one with the Anunnaki’s legacy. Others argue that resistance, however futile, defines what it means to be human.
The minor corruptions of Evil Land are like the background radiation of a broken cosmos. They are small, insidious reminders that the land itself is hostile, that magic extracts a toll, and that survival is a daily gamble. Whether a baker coughing in his sleep, a scavenger with roots in his veins, or an adventurer whose reflection no longer matches his body, every soul in Evil Land bears the marks of corruption.
To be uncorrupted is not normal. To be scarred is simply to belong.