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 seemingly located on the literal edge of the world. 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 from the end of the First Age of Flight to the end of the Second Age of Flight. Then the series moves on five hundred years to the Nate and Cade sagas, which take place during the height of the Third Age of Flight.

A Magic-less fantastical setting

Although many things that could be considered supernatural IRL exist in the Edge, in the setting they are by and large usually not considered magic, but rather unexplained phenomena. Other than the various methods of flight, the world of the Edge Chronicles differs from IRL in several other key ways. There are stones that grow from the ground, start floating when cold, and sink when heated. 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. All of these things are not considered out of the ordinary in the setting, but simply how reality works. To put it simply, the Edge is not a world where magic has been added onto the rules of reality, but rather one where the rules of reality are different.

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.

The Mire

A bleached expanse of toxic mud, the Mire forms a natural barrier between the Stone Gardens, Undertown, and Sanctaphrax and the Twilight and Deepwoods. It is home to vicious flocks of carnivorous white ravens, ravenous ooze-fish, and the dreaded muglump. In the Second Age of Flight, it is traversable via the heavily-tolled Great Mire Road, an elevated pathway meandering through the wastes under the watchful eyes of shryke overseers.

Undertown

Founded as a place where slavery was illegal in the distant past, Undertown is the largest settlement (if not the only one) on the other side of the Stone Gardens from the Deepwood, and is the hub of all industry and trade in the Deepwood. During the First Age of Flight, it was often idealized as a place of racial equality and prosperity by the simple villagers and tribes of the Deepwood, but the reality was that it was a dirty, rough-and-tumble, brawling town of warring guilds and cut-throat politics. Undertown largely made its fortune as the practical counterpart to the academics of Sanctaphrax.

Like Sanctaphrax, Undertown's fortunes fell dramatically during the Second Age of Flight; the western portion of the city was crushed under the rotting stone fallen from New Sanctaphrax, becoming Screetown, whilst the rest was conquered by militant goblins who enslaved the locals to build the so-called "Sanctaphrax Forest" - the tangle of supports that kept New Sanctaphrax from completely falling to earth. Ultimately, Undertown and New Sanctaphrax would be destroyed by the Dark Maelstrom, an artificially engineered super-storm, causing the inhabitants to flee to the Deepwoods.

Undertown would live on as New Undertown, a democratic city-state build adjacent to and allied with the Free Glades. By the time of the Third Age of Flight, it had evolved into a section of the Great Glades.

Sanctaphrax

Situated on the far end of the Stone Garden, at the very pinnacle of the Edge, Sanctaphrax is the Edge's single greatest city-state during the First Age of Flight. Built atop the single largest flight rock ever seen, Sanctaphrax is a city of academics, scientists and sky-pilots, the hub of all knowledge on the Edge - especially all knowledge related to the weather and all things that fly. It forms a symbiotic link with Undertown, which lies literally below it.

Constructing atop a flight rock poses a natural problem: how do you keep your precious city from just drifting off into the air like a balloon when the levitation abilities of the stone outgrows the space you can actually build stuff on it? During the First Age of Flight, the answer is a vault filled with total darkness, in which precious stormphrax is contained.

Towards the waning years of the First Age, however, under the mismanagement of Vilnix Pompolnius, Most High Academe, the decision is made to use increasing amounts of massive and heavy chains to hold the city to the ground. The fact that this causes terrible pollution in the local water supply is combated with the use of water-purifying phraxdust... ironically, this leads to a Catch-22 situation; Vilnix stealthily depletes the city's stormphrax supplies to fuel his experiments in trying to figure out how to make more phraxdust, as it was a lucky accident in the first place, but this just makes the city lighter and lighter, causing the need for more chains and thus more phraxdust to battle the pollution.

Although Sanctaphrax was saved by an unlikely hero, ironically, it would all turn out to be for naught. You see, the Edge depends on a single mighty river, the Edgewater, to provide it with life, but the river is fed from a once-every-few-thousand-years storm, the Mother Storm. And towards the very end of the First Age, a Mother Storm blew in... but Sanctaphrax was right in its way. The same hero who had originally saved the city from flying off in the first place now had no choice but to sever the Great Chain tying it to the ground and let it loose into the sky, or the Mother Storm would have smashed through the city and vented all its water before reaching the Edgewater's source, causing the extinction of all life on the Edge in a millennia-long drought.

As the Mother Storm sailed through where Sanctaphrax had once been, it let loose a single massive bolt of lightning, which struck a lift rock in the Stone Gardens and caused it to begin growing to massive size. New Sanctaphrax was planned to be constructed atop it... and then stone sickness hit; more than half of the giant stone rotted away and it began to sink back to earth, resulting in the hasty construction of an every-growing forest of supports and buttresses to try and hold it aloft, a dark mirror to the old Sanctaphrax. Taken over by a cult led by a mad academic, New Sanctaphrax would ultimately be destroyed by an artificially engineered storm of devastating power, which tore the region apart and drove all life away to resettle elsewhere.

Ironically, during the Third Age of Flight, the original Sanctaphrax would drift back down to the Edge after nearly six hundred years in open sky.

Stone Gardens

A region towards the "point" of the Edge where lift rocks, the naturally buoyant stones of the Edge, grow, creating distinctive formations of spherical stones packed atop each other, with the higher rocks being bigger than the smaller ones. During the First Age of Flight, this is one of the most important areas in the Edge, with surveyors and rock harvesters carefully staking out the growing stone-piles and waiting to capture the best lift rocks to form the basis of new skyships. But when the mysterious stone sickness invades the Edge and destroys the lift rocks, this area becomes just a lifeless rocky wasteland, ultimately forgotten to time as people move on to new methods of flight.

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. Generally, the history of sky-travel in the setting is divided 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.

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.