The Peerless Country of Yland (GLOG Setting)

    Oh trouble, oh char the tree, my dear, my lover, oh kiss me on the lips my lover, Apollo, my lover, oh G_d, destroy me. Oh eternity, I have burned my fucking flesh for three years of happiness, burned eternity, and burned the tree, and weighed it in the scale, oh Apollo, kiss me. 

     The world is round like a clock. In the center is a waste, which is an ocean and a fastness. "Water to sail, saltpan on which to ride", sayeth the bard. In the center of the waste is a tower whose top reaches into heaven. The sun brushes the top as he passes it at noon. This tower is visible from all parts of the world, weather permitting.

    The roundness of the world is divided into four parts like a compass. Skyey north and cthonic south; to the west order, to the east madness. Each part of the four parts of the world is divided into four parts, like a compass. It's dangerous to travel far from home here, because to leave your home is to leave the paradigm which you were born into. In the world of Yland (named for the wasteland the noon tower sits in) all men are travelers, because no one remains in the paradigm they were born unto.

   This post is a collation of some thoughts and dreams I've had over the years. In that, it resembles my post on 41 Feasts — I'm writing this down now so I don't forget it later, if I ever have need of these things again. This post is also an anti-canonical setting, as I understand them and their purpose. Yland is a non-place in no-time, a world where anything can and does happen. A player can say "my character comes from the city of thus-and-such, in the land of over-there", and rather than disrupting the craftsmanship of world, these new details enrich it. There's no map of Yland; because maps are not territories, no map could adequately reflect the conditions of the territories. There is only the north, the south, the east, and the west. Even if you were to go somewhere else you would only find yourself in — the center, with something to the north, the south, the east, and the west. If you understand what this means, then you have no need for a map.

Yland and its States

    If you head north from the noon tower over the ocean you will find yourself at a crossroads in the heart of the Antikingdom, where the sky is gray and the highway is cold and lonely. The ruler of the Antikingdom sits on the Multifoliate Throne, at the northernmost end of the world, in the sky of skies, the heaven of heavens. Here in the Antikingdom the king is the personal enemy of every citizen. He holds power only as long as his knights support him. The cycle of a hero rising up to slay the wicked king, taking the multifoliate throne, reshaping the Antikingdom in his own image and being killed in turn has been going on since the beginning of time.

    But I don't want to talk about the Antikingdom right now, I want to talk about the lands east of the noon tower. East lies madness, and so these are a mad land and they have no unchanging name. Call them the Peerless Country, if mere implication isn't enough and you find you must refer to them directly.

The Peerless Kingdom, according to the great cartographer Locheil N.'s Eye

    The Peerless Kingdom is in a constant state of uproar, of upheaval, of the long nightmare after the revolution. This is the land of madness, after all. If you want to leave this place, really leave it for good, you have to take a ship from the western coast and return to the waste about the noon tower. Traveling north will do you no good. North was abolished recently; the Law has dealt with north. Attempts to flee in that direction will surely fail, for reasons of impassable terrain, unimpeachable mountains, inhospitable tundras or simply very large, very bottomless pits. Traveling south will do you no good, Heaven knows. You'll be lucky to keep your sanity, let alone your mortal life, trying to flee the Kingdoms by the southern roads, you poor simple fool. To the east is Hell, which borders Fairyland. You don't want to go east.

The Eastern World, as recorded by the legendary Mad Queen

   The Kingless Lands have a long and noble history. They must. How else can you explain their total decadence? Ruins don't spring up from the ground like wild lettuce. If you have a collapsing society, you must have had a stable society. Recently, even — at least as recent as the time it takes for a society to collapse. And every visitor who's ever creaked open the impressive tomes of lore in the Lordless Town (the capital of and greatest city in the Lordless Realm) can attest to the centuries of well-corroborated past.

    Still,

    Still.

    I can't tell a lie; I wrote the preceding paragraphs in the fall of '23 and I don't remember what was supposed to come after the "Still, ". I was trying to do a Hemingway, but I left it too long. I can't remember one more note about the sentence therewhich I left in the middle. 

    One thing the Zelda series does really well is continually reinterpret themes and elements, placing them in new contexts or restructuring them entirely. For those just tuning in, a "zelda-style game" would be one where the same group of players returns to a place again and again, and some details remain consistent, but others shift and smear. Like how from Hyrule Field you can get to Castle Town, Death Mountain, a shivering-deep lake, a trackless forest without farther bound... yet they aren't quite the same town, mountain, lake, forest every time. 

    This is the theme I'm messing around with in my head. Phlox didn't know this, but he wrote a list of good examples:

• Wart, the worthiest boy you know, is terrorized by bullies
• Pranceloths, pony centaurs who tilt at anyone they see
• Ankleguard Boots, making you swift-footed
• Spurned Sling. Throws your heart away, spending HP as missiles
• Unmixed Wine, puts anyone who drinks it to sleep
• Monkings, trying to steal my divine fruits. Drive em off, will ya?
• They say the calamity man is making a new body for himself out of seven old kings...
• Old needle and spidersilk thread. They say you can graft new limbs to yourself with these.
• Rasputin, a miniboss who appears anew every time you kill him, requiring a new method of dispatch each time
• The alleys are infested with Batmen, acrobatic brawlers who swing around with grapplying hooks.
• Napoleons, small, low-HD monsters with high damage.
• Crown of Caligula, a fake cursed item that you find when you're looking for the crown of Zeus
• Caesarians, energetic goblins that shoot out of a slit in the belly of other monsters.
• Cromwell's Lantern, piercing the illusion of the Grand Castle so you can crawl through its crevices and hop over its rubble.
• Lightning Rod, attracting electricity to help solve puzzles and create obstacles for enemies.
• Moses, a friendly wandering trader who sells you mana and dolphin skins