Edge Chronicles

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The Edge Chronicles are a series of young adult fantasy novels written by Paul Stewart and and illustrated with ridiculously detailed art by Chris Riddell. The series is Set in the magical world known simply as "The Edge", which is named that way since it is located on a massive cliff seemingly the edge of the world. Literally. However, for most of the series, nothing is mapped or even known of the world beyond the edge and the empty sky around it so the Edge might as well be all that exists. The series consists of five sagas spanning a period of 600 years, covering the Three Ages of Flight and centering around five members from a single family tree of heroic flyers. The Quint, Twig and Rook sagas span a period of one hundred years, and take place during the First and Second Ages of Flight. Then, following the discovery of how to safely harness the power of stormphrax ie lightning in geological form that gets super-heavy in the dark, which allows the beginning of the Third Age of Flight, the series moves on five hundred years to the Nate and Cade sagas.

The timeline of the Edge Chronicles is governed into three Ages of Flight The First Age of Flight: Skyships are built around buoyant, living rocks. The Second Age of Flight: With the extinction of the flight rocks via a mysterious plague, flight can now only be accomplished via tiny craft made from lighter-than-air wood. The Third Age of Flight: Through the harnessing of Stormphrax, a kind of solidified lightning, large flying machines far in excess of the craft of the First Age of Flight can be built again.

Other than the various methods of flight, the world of the Edge Chronicles differs from IRL in several other key ways. Wood has different levels of buoyancy influencing their suitability for building skyships with. Lightning can solidify into a highly reactive substance named stormphrax which changes it's weight depending on the light level. Water can be purified through the application of Phraxdust, powderized Stormphrax. Although many things that could be considered supernatural to us exist in the Edge, they are by and large usually not considered magic, but rather unexplained phenomena.

The Edge

The titular setting takes place on the known expanse of what the official website describes as the edge of a colossal cliff). The sky off the edges of the cliff is known as Open Sky and is bad news to be in if you're a sky ship. The Edge itself is divided into several distinct areas, including forests, swamps, forests, fertile plains forests, barren plains of rock, forests, forests, and endless forests. What lies beyond the Known World is a mystery; dense clouds and the natural cover of the Deepwoods prevents exploration inland, more clouds inhibit efforts to fly straight down from the Edge, and all efforts to explore Open Sky have turned up nothing.

The Deepwoods

Make up most of the known world of the Edge. A fucking Death World tier forest full of animals and plants that will kill you horribly.

The Twilight Woods

An eldritch forest where it's always twilight. No one knows how it works. People who stay here too long transform into dementia-ridden undead zombies who roam the Woods in pursuit of dreams and goals they can never catch. The Forest seemingly tempts you with visions of lost loved ones and then bewitches you into not being able to navigate your way out. Unfortunately, despite being the single most dangerous place in the Edge to be, not only does it straddle the edge making it that anyone who wants to get from one side to the other has to pass through, it's also the only place where Stormphrax can be found. In the past, Knights Academic ventured into the woods on quests to retrieve Stormphrax but by the Third Age of Flight, underpaid miners were digging under the woods for Stormphrax to mitigate the eldritch dementia zombie magic. But even without Stormphrax, people would still need to cross them because it sits between Undertown and Sanctaphrax, the industrial and academic centers of the Edge, as well as the Stone Gardens where Flying Stones necessary for flight in the First Age of Flight were grown, and the Deepwoods which are 99.9% of the entire rest of the Edge.

Folk of the Edge

The Edge is inhabited by a ridiculously vast and sprawling array of humanoids, most of which are gathered into the loose family groupings of Goblins, Trolls, Trogs and Waifs. Even then, there's a stupidly huge internal variety and multiple races that don't fit into these groupings.

Fourthlings: The humans of the setting, mutts born from multi-generational crossbreeding between different groups of goblins, trolls and/or trogs.

Slaughterers: A red-haired, crimson-skinned tribe of humanoids who make their living as the Deepwoods' premier butchers and tanners. Despite the name, they're peaceful, friendly folk.

Banderbears: Giant, tusk-sporting bear-like creatures native to the Deepwoods. Fearsomely powerful, but incredibly loyal.

Shrikes: Amazon birdfolk, consisting of small, meek, docile males and their larger, stronger, fiercer, more warlike and cannibalistic females.o

The Ages of Flight

The Edge relies heavily on sky-travel due to the sheer lethality of the Deepwoods, but flight technology changes over the 600 year period.

In the First Age of Flight, which began long before the start of the series, flying ships are built around "flight rocks"; naturally buoyant stones that grow in a region of the Edge known as "The Stone Gardens", which ascend as they heat and descend as they cool. Further bolstered by the naturally buoyant nature of certain tree-woods from the Deepwood, large ships are constructed around flight rocks by using a combination of fire and water to manipulate the rise and fall of the stones, and sails to catch the wind.

The First Age ends when a strange phenomena called "stone sickness" mysteriously arrives in the Edge, causing flight rocks to universally lose their buoyancy and crash.

The Second Age of Flight begins when people learn to construct small 1-person and 2-person flying vessels using the old sumpwood and treated with a new varnish that enhances its natural buoyancy. However, these small vessels can only be used for personal craft, and the need to reconstruct the flight-base trade network ultimately leads to the Third Age of Flight, which centers around the harnessing of stormphrax. This proves so successful that whereas it took only a century for the First Age to end and the Third Age to begin, the Third Age is still uncontested five centuries after its beginning.

/tg/ Relevance

Whilst there isn't an official RPG for the setting, /tg/ has been getting shit done by attempting to build one itself.