As a bonus, here’s a sample of the Planarch booklet I’ve been working on most recently, which is currently called A Refining Fire. It’s like Dune + the Bible + the Royal Geographical Society combined. Various science-based cults known as “mystery halls” search for truth on a plane covered in red sands. Not sure if this one or one of the others will get finished first.
Sweet!
J. Walton sir, this is gold, like the rest of your work.
Want!
Sounds right up my alley.
Glad you like it! Here’s an example mystery:
THE AEOLEAN PATTERN
A greater mystery of lost knowledge
The plane of Ma’adim is vexed by a series of persistent cyclones and anticyclones, tempests of various sizes that harrow its deserts and mountains with sand-filled winds that can strip flesh from bone.
The Aeolean Order, an ancient mystery hall, is said to have fully mapped the traffic of the storms, creating an immaculate diagram of cycles and epicycles by which their motion could be predicted exactly. They carved their findings into the rocky face of Aeolus Mons, but as the true implications of the chart became clear, Ba’al Zephon, the greatest of storms, bore down on the mountain and blasted away all but a few remnants of the carvings, leaving only smooth, bare rock.
In recent years, several “stormchaser” mystery halls have formed in an attempt to reconstruct the pattern. They whisper that Aeolus, the founder of the Order, predicted the storm-king’s arrival and scattered the hall’s research among a series of roving archives that float in the eyes of several large storms. The greatest of these was placed within the heart of Ba’al Zephon itself, carried aloft as the storm razed Aeolus Mons. It is from there, the Silica Basilica—perhaps the most famous of all the lost halls—that the ghost of Aeolus oversees the maintenance of the pattern for all eternity.
Perhaps you have found a half-buried ruin in the desert that could be a crashed archive, left by a passing storm.
Ma’adim? I barely know him!
Yeah, it’s Hebrew for Mars. Mainly a placeholder for now.