Rutang, a World of Wonders and Dangers

The Sixth World grew proud. Secure in their pride, as masters of artifice and machine, they thought themselves beyond the wrath of the Heavens. Then, they did the unforgivable. Two Empires were in a contest to see which could ascend to the Heavens first. One finally managed to breach the God-Realm, defiling the very moon. That was the final insult. The Gods would no longer suffer their hubris.

You must understand, in those days man had no qi. Even simple farmers in their fields that possess the barest dredges of qi would be as demigods to the men of the Sixth World. For all their pride, their works of artifice that let them breach the Heavens, they were helpless to the wrath of the Gods. Their greatest weapon, the Ai Tam Bau, was too rare for it to reliably be used, and to use it was to poison the land it was unleashed upon. Entire peoples were scoured from the face of the world, men bearing strange features that will never be seen again, before a solution was discovered.

Who first consumed a spirit core has been lost to the sands of time. Whomever they were, whatever drove them into a land poisoned by an Ai Tam Bau, they discovered the key to man’s survival. By harnessing the qi within the spirit core, they were protected from the poison and grew the first meridians. As they cultivated their qi, they came to the realization that they could fight back against the spirits that hunted their people. They could win.

That was countless generations ago, most of those first spirits are gone now. Hunted for their cores and their qi sent back into the land, where it gives rise to spirit beasts and powerful plants. Those first cultivators, though mighty at the time, would be barely considered Initiates at any of the Great Sects; yet we owe our lives, the lives of our ancestors, and the lives of our children to their struggles.

– Qaf-Mi Jan, Seventh Tier Master of the Winter Crescent Sect

So a friend of mine on Discord got me to read a xianxia story, and the basic concept hasn’t left me alone since then. So, here I am, planning/plotting out my own xianxia setting.

At some point, I expect I’ll run a tabletop rpg game in this setting, though the exact system I’ll end up using I don’t yet know. As of the time I’m writing this, I’m working on a map of the region I’ll be focusing on which is the blasted and flooded region of what is today the northern valley of California through to Oregon and Washington. Most of the California valley has flooded to form an inland sea, and the coasts have also shrunk inland.

I’ll be writing more about this setting in the future, as it is in the extremely early stages of development.