Order is Heaven's first law; and this confessed,
Some are, and must be, greater than the rest,
More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence
That such are happier, shocks all common sense.
Condition, circumstance, is not the thing;
Bliss is the same in subject or in king.

There are two kinds of blood, the blood that flows in the veins and the blood that flows out of them.

Phade is a world of my own design. I've been running campaigns and adventures in it since high school (and I graduated from there in 1992), and so there's a not insignificant amount of work that's gone into it.

Phade is a near-ideal "default" world for Crystal Obelisk content. It's fairly generic itself, and big enough that Crystal Obelisk content can be plopped down somewhere without too much worrying about consequences. That is, if you're interested in having a world mapped out for you, Phade can be it.

For people who haven't travelled Phade's expanses before, here's a little overview. For people who have, consider this just a little refresher. I'll try to make it entertaining. Enjoy!

Phade is really, really big. That's probably the most significant feature one can mention.

Phade is a cylindrical planet. Oceans cap the ends, and a mottling of ocean and land cover the side. The cylinder is 150,000 miles in diameter, and 100,000 miles in length. The people who live on its surface believe that their world is infinite. One result of this size is that nearly anything you can imagine is probably somewhere on Phade's surface.

Note that gravity on Phade's surface is about 1G, just like Earth. I hide behind fantasy physics here.

Phade is orbited by 11 moons, three of which are visible to the naked eye. The first, Senean, has an orbital period of 10 days, and is a large, pale blue moon. The second, Laron, is smaller and green, and orbits every 20 days. The third, Tersha, is large like Senean, white, and orbits every 30 days. Most nights, all three are visible.

Phade and a number of other planets orbit a tetrahedron-shaped sun, which is an intensely hot fire body encased in thick glass. From the planet's surface, if you're dumb and look at it, it seems to be a single roundish bright spot in the sky (kindof like all suns, eh?)

Phade's climates do not obey simple physical constraints. According to science, the entire planet's surface should be an awful baked lifeless desert.

According to ancient legends, that's exactly how it started out: Primus, the world-creator (who is now dead), was foolish and placed the planet too close to the sun. After his defeat, and many miserable generations later, a powerful Arch-Mage named Yendor created and cast a spell called Yendor's Sunny Sundeck, which was supposed to have changed the climate of the entire planet such that it resembled a warm summer's afternoon, with no bugs.

The effect lasted about six weeks, if I recall correctly, and then the spell broke down. You see, Yendor forgot to take into account (or perhaps, didn't know) the fact that the sun was encased in glass, and so his calculations were off. In any case, the energies from the collapsing spell coursed back into his body, and he was mostly vaporized, leaving behind bits of greasy hamburger.

Other than being a horror story to warn young apprentice mages about attention to detail, the history of Yendor and his spell explain the existence of the Climate Fields today. The residue of his spell created huge belts of magical energy which creep slowly across the planet's surface, and in their midst, control the weather. Thus, there are Arctic Climate Fields, Subarctic Fields, Temperate Fields, and so on. This leads to some odd weather phenomenon, especially where fields intersect and border one another.

Because of this immense amount of magical energy just kindof hanging around, there are complications for mages who come to Phade from other worlds. Spells misfire, detect magic can drive a man insane (depending on the variation), and other effects are not uncommon.

Hm. I wonder where Yendor got that much magic from? If somebody else could match that trick, they'd be pretty powerful, eh?

This image was rendered by Grayson Squier Lang, who's a CS guy at Washington University in St Louis: graphics. :) Anyway, I'd like to thank him for this image.

Because Phade is so big, nobody is really known over the entire world. Even the most powerful people are only known over a relatively small area.

Vishus Wee-Zul The one exception to the locality of fame in Phade is Vishus Wee-Zul, the Sage King of Khalar. He's also extremely old: in fact, nobody knows how old he is. He's written huge numbers of books on nearly every subject, and knows seemingly everything. You'll undoubtedly hear about him sometime, and if your character spends any significant amount of time adventuring in Phade, he'll probably come up. Perhaps you'll be lucky enough to meet him.

Cap'n Blackjammer A die-hard pirate with a heart of gold, this character appears often in my campaigns. Nobody knows his origins, how he seems to be everywhere all the time, or even if there is only one Blackjammer. An enigma, to be sure.