I maintain the Uresia Mailing List as - primarily - an open forum for questions about Uresia. Most of what you'll find on this page I've culled, edited or just crudely cut-and-pasted from the mailing list.

Uresia is so contrary a fantasy that I can't claim to be an absolute authority on it. I know quite a lot about what's happening there nowadays, a fair bit about the recent past, and a respectable amount of its history. I don't know everything, though, and that goes double for the days before the sky fell.

That said, I really enjoy sharing what insights I can. My sources are mostly Sindran, though, so when you ask me a Uresia question, expect, as often as not, the Sindran angle on things, with a dose of Temphisian worldly humor. Sindran scholars know plenty, but they have biases and limitations. I once requested a list of these, to help clarify things, but that didn't go over very well.

If my responses ever seem deliberately vague, satirical or weird, you aren't imagining things. It's part of the nature of Uresia to be more evocative than informative, where setting details inspire characters and their adventures, and only in those adventures can you really find out what's true and what's legend and what's both.

Even the Uresians don't have anything like a reliable encyclopedic knowledge of their world, and they know it better than we do. It's a dangerous place, and answers don't come easily unless they're frustratingly flawed, dangerously misleading, or an old sailor pulling your leg. Picture me that way. I mean, all three of them.

If there's something you'd really like to know about Uresia, some juicy mystery you'd like to solve or some tantalizing region you'd like to explore . . . You need to let your Game Master know. Your Game Master alone knows the secrets.

How to Pronounce "Uresia"

I use both the Temphis pronunciation (yoo-REEE-sha) and the Dreed/Sindran/Rindenland pronunciation (yoo-REE-see-ah) when discussing the book, but when I'm GMing in character, I use whatever's appropriate for the NPC's dialect. In Koval, they're heavy into the letter Z, because maniacal villain types enjoy letters like Z, V and X ... So there it's yoo-RREE-zha, for example (they roll the r a bit). Since the word is Sindran, originally, I suppose yoo-REE-see-ah is "correct" by default. But try telling that story in the shadows at Vasalt and see how quickly you get a laugh.

When Emeralds Burn Out

If you were to raise the question of emerald "burnout" in a rowdy tavern full of Sindran blowhards, they'd probably opine that emeralds are a self-renewing resource but they can be stressed, and that very dramatic abuse of the emeralds (inevitable in an extended campaign of powering the Emerald Armors) can tax them beyond their ability to regenerate.

Maybe they're right, and maybe they're just spouting nonsense that happens to fit what's been observed so far. Only large-scale or "industrial" applications seem to burn the gems out (they crack visibly when it happens, and take on a deeper, smoky hue that gives them a second life as costume jewelry in Boru and Temphis). Tiny emeralds purchased as wizard's baubles, on the other hand (p.66 of Grave of Heaven) are durable enough to pass from generation to generation provided they aren't stolen or used to power some kind of villainous infernal plot device.

Marking Time

Calendars vary a lot by region, especially once you get away from the cities. Many of Uresia's older calendars, still popular in rural areas, are based on the movements of the Vernia (and they're still a useful guide to those well versed in their lore). When Uresian scholars refer to "the" calendar, though, they mean the Nonathorian Calendar, developed in Sindra nearly 900 years ago. All of the dates in my Uresia writing use this method of reckoning, and it's the standard for commerce among the islands. Everybody else just speaks in general terms of seasons, or in local terms to be confusing/colorful.

The term "month" is generic in Uresia; it simply means one of the three phases of each season. The local names reflect this (witness the "Youngsummer Festival" of Localona, for example). While the months have no proper name in Nonathor's calendar, every week has it's own correct name or phrase, each referring to a Sindran fable about a foolish sorcerer, and each also important in Sindra's most popular method of astrology ... which, as it happens, still involves the vernia …

More on these matters are likely to trickle into forthcoming works, but for practical purposes, they aren't of much interest except as trivia. A Uresian year is the same length as our year, a Uresian week is 7 days, and so on. There are some interesting stories about Nonathor himself, though, that might make the basis of a very fine (and very dangerous) Uresian horror adventure ... More later on that, certainly.

More on all of it, in fact; now I've added this article expanding a bit on all of the above.

Temphis Slavery Laws & Slave Children

I've had a missive directed to my correspondent Magrathey Duvarine, a legal mind of considerable brilliance in Gryphon Rock, requesting a draft of the current Temphis slavery laws (rumored to be 940 bellweights* of scrolls, not counting some addenda)

The postal lag time is murder, though, so in the meantime here's a whirlwind summary as I remember it on slaves in Uresia in general, and Temphis in particular.

Boru has a well-integrated slave class, and in the spirit of Boru's almost chaotic approach to upward mobility, slaves have several paths by which they can legitimately seek their freedom. Koval still has slaves as a matter of economic necessity (they're breaking the habits of centuries) but most slaves are now given a staff of well-paid servants to assist them. Orgalt has a miserable and genuinely oppressed slave class ... In every other nation with slaves, there are many laws governing their humane (or demi-humane) treatment; not so in Orgalt.

Temphisian slaves are, as Grave of Heaven describes, the province of the Galon priesthood. The Galonites generally deal in convicted criminals. Just about anyone arrested for anything can be sold to the Galonites ... While in theory it's a matter of moral lessons and whatnot, in practice it's more often about how much money any given Duke needs, and how vindictive he (or his enforcers) are feeling. For their own part, the Galonites are very kind to slaves, since they honor the memory of a god sympathetic to them. The worst that can happen under the Temple's care is that a slave can get very, very tired of spelt. Occasionally, the Galonites acquire slaves from non-criminal sources, usually on ships from Helt (some Heltish kingdoms allow slavery; some don't).

In Temphis, children born of two slave parents are slaves, the property of their parents owners until they reach the age of twelve, at which point they are returned to the Temple of Galon as the god's own property. These children become acolytes of Galon and are ultimately the highest ranks of Galon's priesthood.

So, yeah, there are child slaves in Temphis, but no, they're not generally bought and sold.

As for a slave "black market ..." there isn't much call for one in Temphis. The Galonites run as brisk a business as Temphis could need. Other nations who need slaves buy them in other markets, since Temphis slaves (like Temphis anything else) are rumored to be bad luck, tainted by the accursed island from which they hail.

That said, my memory is hazy on these matters, and I may have overlooked something. If your game reveals one of those somethings and it's of interest, be sure and let us know!

* Depends on the bell.

The History of the Temphis Runes as Divinatory Tools

As with Earthly divination methods, there is no honest answer because all of the practitioners prefer to believe it has more of a history than it really does. While the runes themselves (or at least some of them) predate the Skyfall, the earliest separate runestones (that anyone has found) don't, and the oldest known set (the property of Moltava of Ballicazar) was found intact with an attached bag of silver "strike tokens" of the kind still used as gambling chits in nearly every port city in Uresia. The conclusion (the conclusion, that is, that Moltava likes to gloss over) is that the runestones were used for gaming before they were used for divination.

But the runes have genuine power, both for divination and for stray sorcerous releases (sometimes hazardous ones). The runestones aren't used much for gambling now because people are often injured when they are. The conclusion (the conclusion, that is, that many Sindran sorcerers are very nervous about) is that the rampant waves of free energy in Uresia are growing either stronger, more unstable, more sensitive to symbol and human will, or all of the above.

One of my NPCs keeps a pouch of runestones carved from a bizarre green rock he dug up near the Mummy Towns. He plucks them out and throws them, creating a kind of "wand of wonder" effect that I determine with a toss from my own runestone props. For much more on the runes and their divinatory role see Temphis Runes documentation.

Necromancy Tidbits

All Yemites have the raw talent for necromancy, which is why even Yemite children can accidentally create Snowmen. The ruling Necromancers have access to greater knowledge than the commoners, however. They don't share it - with commoners or with one another - except as coins of political bargaining.

Just about any sorcerer can pursue necromancy to whatever extent his Character Points permit, and it's naturally very common in Yem. The Dread Prince, like the Dread King before him, actively encourages the responsible study of magic. Many of the Necromancers would prefer it be outlawed, but I think Orliss knows that that sort of behavior just leads to the kind of prophecy-fulfilling storylines that end a noble's career (plus, with Sindra a close trading partner, the Yemites would suffer from severe Mage Envy).

Only snowmen are prohibited by decree, and that's a remnant of the old Dread King's vanity that I wouldn't be too surprised to see Orliss lift at some point now that he's comfortable in his position. But of course, that's up to him …

The Madness and Demise of Madwoman Voriis

The why and how is something impossible to determine by examining her reign from a historical perspective. While there are certainly surviving documents from those years that paint her in an unflattering light ("madwoman" wasn't an epithet she chose for herself!) none of them were penned by anyone close to her. The court documents describing her madness all date from the time of her death, or later. She kept quite a corps of imperial censors. According to history, she was simply mad in exactly the way Grave of Heaven describes: she had an insatiable, unreasoning, villainous lust for power, glory, obedience, and the kinds of things such folk tend to go on about.

As for her demise ... I wish I could say that she met her end at the hands of the Elves or a slave uprising or on the claws of a demon-beast, but according to the archives in Drova Nor, she went peacefully in her sleep sometime in 1320. Modern scholars interpret this as a courtly assassination, most likely by the agents or supporters of her brother-in-law, Brovor XXII, who would go on to salve the humiliations of the Wild Pact by lashing outward in the war of expansion that would spell the end of the "villainous" Koval. When Brovor's war, too, failed, his own wife took on the mantle of "ruling Madwoman"

Voriis isn't the only "mad empress" of Koval. Brovor XXII's wife, who both murdered and succeeded him in 1351 as the war of expansion failed to satisfy her, was even more outrageously loopy than Voriis had been ... But since she achieved so little before she was overthrown, she's most notable for being the last of the Imperial rulers.

Emerald Knights: Green-Tinted Armor?

That's usually only true of the new Koval orders. As you can imagine, the notion of a Kovali Emerald Order strikes a chord of deep irony anyway, so the green-tinted armor is just another example of the Koval tendency to try a little too hard to prove that they're the good guys, now …

Fantasy and Special Metals in Uresia

No Mithril that I've heard of, but my sources are notoriously inaccurate.

Orichalcum (Orichalc) - the real kind, which is a chintzy alloy similar to brass - is common in Boru; they make gongs and bells of it, and use it in their currency. You'll find a lot of it in Temphis, Sindra, and Koval as well. The Rindenlanders regard it as tacky, the elves just don't care for it, and the Dwarves insist that it actually smells bad, but nobody else knows what the heck they're talking about.

There are metals know one knows the origins of. Skyfall ruins often contain pretty blades (or more mysterious treasure) forged from a richly blue, iridescent metal half as dense as Orgaltish sprue-iron, but at least twice as strong. No one's ever found the stuff in the earth, though, and most assume it's an alloy known only to the gods, or known only to the cultures that thrived before the Skyfall. Horagast of Sindra, who studied a baroque dagger made of the stuff, believes it can't possibly be from Uresia at all, that it bears energies of enchantment that are just as mysterious as the metal. He calls it "Peerless Ut Metal," and his apprentices are too cowed by his enormous red eyebrows to demand an explanation.

The finest metal made in Uresia is arguably Laöchrian Burnsteel, particularly that from the easternmost foundries of the Ironhead Mountains, where the carbon in the metal is from the ash of the very dense Black Oaks that are (nearly) unique to that region, mixed with good Ironhead Iron. The Minotaur and Ursoids of Helt also make some well-regarded steel, but very little of it leaves Helt.

Troll Frequency
"You're Listening to the Troll Lands' BEST Classic Rock ..."

There are Trolls here and there. Shadow River, as we see in the book, has a kind of "Troll town" west of Pork Hill, and there are large Troll settlements in Boru. There are also a small number of Trolls (different types, more suited to cold climates) in northern Helt.

Trolls, as a rule, build no large permanent settlements (see the Troll Lands entry in Grave of Heaven), but that said, "Troll" is an arbitrary generalization, so there's probably some exceptions somewhere.

How A Few Gods Survived the Skyfall

As far as folks can tell from the Skyfall ruins, the Skyfall was a physical thing, and that's the story you'd get asking the Sindran scholars. A few survived the same way a few might survive any large physical disaster.

One common theory is that those gods simply had no stake in the final godly war, and thus weren't in Heaven when it fell to become Heaven's Grave. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't - maybe the Sea Dragon was busy in the sea, the Primal One was busy in the woods, the Wine God was sleeping off a bender and the Arbiters were stirring up a debate somewhere (nobody has any clue whether or not the Arbiters had an interest in godly conflicts ... If they did, maybe they started the war and stayed well clear to judge it ... If they didn't, they might have chosen not to take a side, whatever those sides may have been, given that they're neutral by nature).

But that's just one theory. The answers, if they remain at all, are deep in the dungeons somewhere.

Can Wizards Be Wizards at Sea?

When sailing among the islands of Uresia itself (the "Inner Sea"), sure. The magic begins to "thin out" as soon as you lose sight of land, but the effect is just color until you're well past Uresia into the divide. There's a wobbly band of sea where the magic is so thin that spellcasters can't do much more than light your cigarette, but there's no reason to sail there unless your destination is the Troll Lands. If your destination is the Troll Lands, the duration of the magic-dead zone can be anywhere from a long afternoon to a couple of days, depending on the speed of the hull, the prevailing winds, and the skill of the skipper and crew.

To get an idea of the dimensions of the magically "dead" zone, just look at the maps on page 26 and 27 of Grave of Heaven: the words "Eastern Divide" and "Western Divide" are in just about the same position as the dead-magic zone, and the zone is just about as thick as those letters are tall. You an also use the thinness of the "woodcut" pattern of the ocean as a guide. Once the little squiggly lines start breaking into fragments, the magic starts to die.

As the vessel approaches the Troll Lands, magic comes back, but it's weaker - whatever the GM decides "weaker" means for the sake of his game.

Units of Measurement

The unit of measurement most commonly mentioned in Grave of Heaven is the league; that's the standard when writing about long distances. In practical terms, however, Uresians speak in days of travel. As noted in an earlier post, the Uresian league is about 4.8 kilometers, but of course, it depends who you ask. The most widely-accepted "league," from Rinden, equals the exact distance between two ancient trees in the Sweetbriar Wood (a forest revered as embodying the spirit of the royal lineage), which falls around 40 meters short of the rule of thumb.*

I use meters occasionally in the Grave of Heaven text for BESM-specific clarity, but most actual Uresians use less convenient units for short distances, volumes, and so forth. As noted in an earlier post, weights are usually in bellweights.

For much more on this topic (indeed, for too much on this topic, see Troll Hands & Slime Buckets, an article peeking at the chaos of Uresian measurement standards).

* 4,761.8904 meters, but who's counting?

Capital Cities

I arranged the city lists in Grave of Heaven in order by size. In most cases, the largest city in each land is also the seat of rulership. However, not all of the lands have capitals, since some are collections of nations rather than nations themselves (Helt and the Volenwood) or have no nations to speak of (The Elu Isles).

The only full-on current exception to the big-city-rules rule is Temphis. Shadow River is the seat of the Duchy of Shadows, but the Duke of Shadows isn't the Grand Duke of Temphis (give him time, though; he's been plotting). The Grand Duke is Ropha of Keyroe, and the seat of the Duchy of Keyroe is Clawsport.

There are also two kinda-sorta exceptions. The princess "rules" Birah from Danion's Path (Birah's largest city), but, obviously, the real rulers are the hidden court deep within the forest.

Celar is another kinda-sorta. As per the list, Vurndenburg is the capital. The palace is there; it's the biggest port, etc. But the King spends as much time as he can in the family castle in Brach Vorn. Since his court goes with him, that may as well be the capital for several months each year.

When Uresians Die, Do They Become Ghosts and Wander to Yem? Is There an Afterlife?

Sometimes a bit of this, sometimes a bit of that (see page 25 of GoH). Another certainty is while Yem seems to hoard a lot of the ghosts in Uresia, it certainly doesn't have all of them. There are ghosts everywhere. In fact, some sorcerers have observed that magic is thinnest where ghosts are least common, suggesting that more than the ghosts of gods fuels magic (and not just Yemite necromancy, which is very often explicitly ghost-fueled). This is something that even the Ghost Reverence League only gingerly approaches as a topic, however, and it may also be a coincidence, since ghost are least common where life is least common. But sorcerers, especially Sindran ones, get grouchy when they aren't allowed to indulge in idle theory. One small Sindran movement, based on a few scrolls circulating in Ballicazar, have even suggested that magic Emeralds are what they are because they contain the distilled and compressed essences of those who lived in lost ages - and perhaps even their wisdom (shades of Hermes Trismegistus, I suppose, but the Sindrans didn't get that joke when I made it).

Many believe that there is some kind of afterlife. Some believe nothing of the kind. At any rate, no amount of probing by curious sorcerers and priests have discovered such a place, or such a plane, if there is one. That said, they haven't discovered Tupperware, either.

Some believe that the spirits of the dead simply disperse to nothingness, and it's conveniently impossible to disprove, which makes it comforting to some. Not the bereaved, presumably.

How Are Werewolves and Wolf-People Treated/Regarded In Uresia?

Well, some are just full-time beastmen, living in Helt and getting along just like any other beastmen. If they're weres (were-wolves, -bears, -orangutans, -cribbage boards, -parakeets or -marmosets; doesn't matter) it depends entirely on if they're the "when the moon is right they go on a killing spree" weres or if they're the "I can change into a cool beast form when I want to" weres, or something in-between.

"Cool beast form" weres are treated the same as any other character capable of the supernatural (wizards, etc): With bland indifference in highly magical or libertine lands (like Sindra and Boru and Temphis), and with suspicion in quieter, more rigid or less cosmopolitan areas.

"Killing spree" weres are treated like anything else that goes on a killing spree. Hide out in Birah and hope the demons consider you akin to them, I'd say. Perhaps you are.

Are Sporting-Chef Competitions Like Iron Chef? Like Chili Cookoffs? Like a cross between Emeril and Thunder Dome?

Yes to all of the above. While I've always included food themes in my world designs, the Sporting Chefs in particular are most directly inspired by a Tsui Hark comedy from 1995 called The Chinese Feast. If you've got a reliable source of Hong Kong videos near you, I highly recommend it as a fun time (and I'll be crushing on Anita Yuen for all time). Chinese Feast, in turn, drew heavily on an excellent Japanese film from 10 years earlier: Juzo Itami's infamous "noodle western," Tampopo, which is kind of the wellspring of "battling chef" stuff as an entertainment concept in Asia (there are earlier examples, but Tampopo seems to have been the trend-setter for recent generations). Renting both would make a good double-feature movie night for any gaming group with a Sporting Chef, and then you'd know why I have a running joke about bear's paws whenever the subject comes up in my own games (especially when it comes up in Helt ...)

In a Suit of Emerald Armor, Where Does the Emerald Go? How Big Is It?

Often the chest, but sometimes the small of the back or even nested in one shoulder (the one on the knight's shield-side, where the shield can offer protection additional to the emerald's casing). Some of the early Rinden designs placed the emerald in the suit's helmet, but that didn't last long, as you can imagine. The suit-emeralds are (as GoH specifies, p.66) of the "rare, giant" type ... as large as a baby's fist, found only in Dreed.

Have Celari Alchemists Developed Gunpowder? Are there Flintlock guns in Uresia?

Celari magic and alchemy doesn't produce anything consistently useful; it's bound to a kind of "dangerous invention of the week" motif ... Celari experiments are a lot less like reasonable science or predictable industry and much more like an unending series of harebrained, dangerous projects that rarely stick around (because making something explode one way is fun, but finding a NEW way to do it is even moreso). Celari alchemists and elemental wizards have stumbled on dozens or hundreds of things that would have made useful technologies, and then stumbled right away from them again, often covered in soot and visibly smoldering. And sometimes they just get stinking drunk and forget how they did something!

Beyond the workshops of Celari madmen, though, Uresia has lots of stuff that goes BOOM (magical, alchemical, and otherwise). See "Dosrabid's Unconventional Alchemy" for the latest and least-stable, but simple "black powders" are available, too. Uresian "gun meal" is a far cry from real gunpowder- it's crude stuff that nobody yet agrees on the ideal recipe to, and it's not "corned" (that is, the mixture doesn't stay mixed) making it a bit unpredictable, but it's good enough for simple, weak cannon of the sort found on many caravels (and for keg-bombing a dungeon tunnel you aren't enjoying). No flintlocks yet (unless that's the dangerous invention of the week!) or even wheellocks; you ignite a cannon by shoving hot match into a hole and turning your face away. The new edition expands a bit on the state of the art in Uresian explosives.

Are Uresian Demons Vulnerable to Any Specific "Bane" Like Holy Symbols?

No, because they're from so many different places. The term "demon" is no more usefully precise in Uresia than the terms "men" and "trolls;" they're very broad, arbitrary boxes that Uresians (being folks, with the problems that folks often have) like to shove things into to avoid having to actually think about them.

So while there are certainly some demons that do have issues with holy water or symbols, or cold iron or hot lead or lukewarm tin, or Justin Timberlake or Star Trek: Voyager, there isn't any consistent pattern across Uresia. Even the demons of Winnow come from dozens of different sources (Lady Ephemeran Ocada was very careful in her selections, but many others since her, as the book notes, have been much less so).

Demons Again: What Plane or Dimension Do They Normally Come From?

All of them. Or, at least, all of them the demonologists have stumbled onto spells for yanking things from. And it's a little different for each type of demon or each type of dimension, in terms of how easy or complicated or silly the process and side-effects are. There are no real boundaries, or at least none that a determined wizard can't try to smack down. Even King Timberfell is a demon by many common Uresian definitions of the term, though he doesn't think of himself that way and doesn't bring it up at the dinner table anyway (at the dinner table, he's otherwise occupied).

Demons Part III: Once You Release One, Can You Bind It Again?

A demon, once free, is a person who just happens to be from way, way out of town. So: yes, theoretically. But it would be no simpler than binding a Temphisian human or a Heltish pantherman. There's nothing about them that makes them more prone to being bound, though there may be individual exceptions.

The Tanglewood: How Big Is It? How Far From Skull Basin? Is It Entirely Forest?

The total area of the Tanglewood region is something between 200 and 300 square leagues, depending on how you draw the borders (it fills nearly three of the small hexes on the NavMaps, but with irregular borders as it spiders into some foothills of mountains to the northeast). It takes a couple of days' steady travel on foot or horseback to pass through it, and that won't allow for much sightseeing ...

It takes only four or five hours by road to get past Skull Basin's farms and satellite villages into the edge of the Tanglewood, which hugs fairly close to the coast and extends to the north and west. Things are very tame at that edge, though; it would take a hard day's hike to get into the heart of the wood (but that's much faster than it used to be, before Lederel established a roadway between Skull Basin and the Duchy of Hote.

Straying off the road is treacherous. Lederel tamed the "banshee woods" in many ways, but a lot of that ceases to apply when you leave the roads and well-marked trails (on the other hand, if you're in trouble and cry for help, you may summon one of the elite woods-runners who patrol the woods in small numbers ... some of whom are also monsters, so mind your manners).

The Tanglewood proper is all forest, and very dense forest at that, but there's a lot of elevation variance, with some wild hills and some pretty twisty, tucked-away valleys (and of course, tucked-away villages, some entirely "peopled" by very monstrous people indeed).

Climate and Latitudes

See Grave of Heaven itself for thumbnail descriptions of the climate of each island. As a quick guide to general trends, Uresia's kingdoms are in climate zones comparable to the middle latitudes on Earth, with the 30º mark somewhere near the southern edge of Boru, and the 60º mark somewhere in the upper end of Yem. All the kingdoms have some version of all four seasons (climates are damp and modrate overall, since it's pretty much all maritime air-masses), but there are large portions of the Troll Lands that are fully tropical (including the bit with the Mummy Towns) or fully arctic (including the bit with Desarak). The flows of magic (and the whims of the Sea Dragon) influence some areas more than others.

During my early writings, I did comparisons between what's known of Uresia's climate (some of the reports contradict; I got used to it), and more formal earthly models like Thornthwaite's humidity-vegetation zones, and Köppen's traditional latitude-based bands. While doing some sketches outlining theoretical cyclonic activity, I discovered that there are several islands that make funny faces if you draw lines between them just the right way. This bears further scrutiny, as one of the faces looks a little like Ella Fitzgerald.

Celari "Elemental" Magic: Does It Use the Four Usual Elements (Air/Fire/Earth/Water)?

It does, to be sure, but few Celari mages bother with scholarly niceties like organizing the elements into neat boxes (and if they did, they wouldn't agree on what the boxes are). Celari sorcery is about manhandling natural forces, about grabbing nature - in any form - and punching it into submission until it does stuff. It's macho, brute-force, control-loving magic that an analyst could have a field day with ... a sorcerous expression of fearful arrogance, in some cases (a Boru researcher named Acanthus Krang wrote a paper about it a few years ago; he was invited to lecture on its contents in Elksdraven, where his hosts led him into a dark room and repeatedly kicked him in the jimmies).

So, a Celari mage might force a small volcano to erupt in his back yard and then summon a windstorm to funnel the heat somewhere just to see what would happen next ... But if some white-haired pencil-pushing busybody stood there describing the scene in terms of quaternary elemental divisions, the Celari might have no choice but to just kick him in the jimmies, too.

Similarly, when I use the term "elemental magic" when I'm discussing emeralds on page 66, it means elemental in the sense of something primal, something basic, something natural, raw, and untamed. Celari wizards get a rush from using primal energies to grab and channel badass natural stuff. You might say that they like their magic charred on the outside but otherwise bloody and raw ... Which, by an amusing coincidence, it just what a Celari wizard looks like when something goes wrong.

Sindran and Boru types are a lot more likely to go for cosmological chunking (but again, few agree on how the chunks are divided - the new edition may have a silly sidebar giving some examples, or it might not). In Celar, they're more prone to spewing chunks than labeling them.

How Well Would Telepathy Work on a Jovanos Imp?

I'd pass this question along to the panel of Sindran sorcerers I correspond with for that purpose, but I still remember the nasty responses I got the last time I sought information on the Imps. Jovanos Imps are a subject none of them want to admit they know anything about, lest someone start pointing fingers (when wizards point fingers, there are often lightning bolts or rays of ice involved).

The Sindrans make a very big fuss over how magically cosmopolitan and open-minded they all are, but when it comes down to tacks, they have just as many little pockets of denial as the Yemites do (the Sindrans are still better dinner company, though). One of the reasons the Imps reappear every few years, I think, is that the Imps exist in those pockets of denial . . . .many people turn a blind eye to suspicious activity, lest they be questioned just for knowing enough about the process to recognize any part of it. Even using the Imps as a metaphor or a comparison is taboo (a kind of mage's equivalent of the Hitler Rule, with similar "benefits").

But in theory, anyway, telepathy would be just as effective a window into the mind of a Jovanos Imp as any other creature with a mind to speak of. The difficulty might come in understanding what you perceive, since the mind of a Jovanos imp is much simpler, much more feral, and much more focused than the mind of anything resembling humanity.

Jovanos Imps Have "Skin Like Hot Asphalt," So: Just How Hot Are They?

When they first emerge from the cauldron, they're very hot to the touch, like an asphalt macadam that's been directly in the summer sun. For the first hour or so, they even produce visible heatwave distortions in the air immediately around and above them. Over the course of their short life spans, however, they cool. It may be the case that re-warming them would extend their existences ... but again, this isn't a subject I can get anyone from Uresia to discuss without a lot of alcohol, a process that's ultimately self-defeating when seeking useful detail.

What Happens When a Magic Maid Breaks One of Her Vows?

The oaths aren't magical restrictions exactly, although many of the oaths address the way they use their powers in the line of duty. The maids are magically independent of both one another and of their training house. This is in contrast to, say, the Rego Corunda, who magically depend on the Fire Cluster and can have their powers yanked from them if they're naughty. A magic maid is a full-on sorceress with full control of her powers (or as much control as any similarly-powered sorceress, anyway).

While I leave the 300-or-so oaths vague as something to be filled in as a campaign goes along (a cousin to the "Ferengi Rules of Acquisition," I suppose) the ideals they represent are pretty straightforward ones of loyalty and service to house (order) and household. The details boil down to ethical considerations specific to those goals (like the one Caravel specifies forbidding romantic dalliances with those within the household), and - of course - to ethical considerations that can create humorous or dramatic tension in play (again, very much like the one Caravel specifies).

The penalties crossing any lines that the order discovers are severe, because the maid houses live and die on their reputation. There are not only disgraced maids but entire houses that have, through the missteps of a few, lost their reputation among the wealthy and noble who provide the resources they need to continue training maids to peak ability. So, if you're a maid who visibly fails to live up to the order's standards, the order will disown you, demand the return of any of their property (some orders, including Soubrette's, provide both the aprons and the apron-blades), and do their best to provide your household with a replacement that won't screw up the way you did.

What happens then can vary. If the order feels it must disgrace you publicly but recognizes that whatever-happened wasn't really your fault, they may help you find work, or even provide you with a private life working for the order behind the scenes. If the order really is thoroughly unhappy with you, they will - at best - ignore you and leave you to your fate and - at worst - send an enforcer maid or two to make a public example of you (not lethally, but otherwise pretty cruelly), as a way to launder the stain on their own reputations. Some of the orders are stricter than others, though they all have functionally identical sets of ethical standards so far as the actual oaths go. If a disgraced maid continues to try to pass herself off as a member of her old order, most orders wouldn't hesitate to dispatch one of the shadowy maid-assassins (many of whom are, ironically, once-disgraced maids now working only for the order because they're otherwise unhirable).

It's important to remember, though, that maids break their oaths all the time as the complex nature of their service occasionally demands. The question isn't whether they do so, but whether they do so in a manner that embarrasses their sponsoring house. Provided everything comes out spotless in the end, nobody gets their wrist slapped. Maids like things tidy.

Do the Uresian Kingdoms Have Separate Languages, or Share a "Common Tongue?"

The flip answer is "they all speak different accents." But, yeah, there are distinct languages in Uresia, a point which the book and some of the support material makes occasional vague references to (the "Language" entry in the Uresia Master Index will point you to most of them).

The extent to which you make it important in play is down to taste. My usual unspoken assumption is that the languages are, for the most part, related enough to allow some equivalent of a Lingua Franca to thrive (possibly, like the real Lingua Franca, a trader's mish-mosh of related languages, or possibly just a pidgin derivation of the language of Rinden, a kingdom which sets many other "standards" in Uresia, including monetary matters, units of distance, and outrageous fashions for troubadours). To be sure, the languages of the human-dominated kingdoms are similar enough to be no more distant from one another than, say, Portuguese and Italian, or French and Spanish, while the Heltish language is related but a smidgen more distant ... English, say, to those others, with many regional dialects. All bets are off when we start considering what the Elves talk like when nobody's peeking.

I only bring linguistic barriers into play when dealing with isolated NPCs (Trolls holed up in mountains without contact with society, for example, or a hermit living alone on a frozen rock in the Elu Isles). I play up cultural barriers a lot more than linguistic ones, but I occasionally dabble in the language area as well.

But if you're doing a more detailed take on Uresia, or if you're using a full-on skills system for your game where language skills can be important, then yeah, all the nations have their own language, with varying degrees of (usually close) relation to one another.

[The new edition devotes a couple of sidebars to this sort of thing, and I had a particularly fun time nailing down the character and social role of the "Lingua Franca" equivalent ...]

Slimes: Are They Slimy To the Touch? Are They Soft Like Jelly?

I tend to describe them as "dense goo" (page 54 of GoH), and what I usually mean by that is a texture akin to a very, very fresh Gummi Bear. Only, a really large Gummi Bear that isn't bear-shaped, unless it's the shape of a bear that's been watching lots of TV and has really let himself go.

I like to imagine them as having some degree of control (conscious or otherwise) of their surface tension and "toughness" at any given moment ... a very agitated slime might more resemble a "Jujyfruit" texture, for example, while one in a lather of combat excitement would be more noticeably fluid (which helps the swords slice harmlessly through). When slimes are killed, I usually imagine them liquefying entirely ... letting go of the magic or life-force or stubbornness that normally holds them together (when they're killed by fire, I imagine them bubbling and stinking like burned tire-rubber).

Pirate Havens in Temphis and Elsewhere

The Elu Islands are well-known as the place where pirates rule some crucial roosts, but Temphis was the original "pirate island" before Dreed settled it. Today, a pirate's welcome in Temphis depends on the specific port. Some Temphisians don't care where cargo comes from; some do. Duke Judac, in particular, has a lot to gain by keeping a strong naval showing in the water, since he hosts such a vital emerald market. Quite a few "Elu Islands" pirates hail from Temphis, originally.

In most kingdoms, the larger ports make a great show of hostility toward questionable cargo, but with few exceptions, a great show is all you get, and there are small fishing-towns and other isolated spots where pirates can make land along virtually every shore, selling goods to itinerant merchants who can move them in more legitimate markets down the road.

In the days of the Koval war, pretty much everyone tolerated pirates since they were useful as privateers. That's the main catalyst that allowed the pirate community to balloon to its current level of prominence, with all the usual postwar "settling" that entails for the aftermath ... Nowadays, Celar in particular would like to pretend that its letters of marque never happened.

How Much Would an Artisan like Gram Obel or Dosrabid Charge For Their Services?

Hiring a "generic" master craftsman begins at around 20 guilders (4 links) per hour; the master will usually expect half the commission up front based on his estimate of the final price. "Celebrity" masters in high demand (like Gram) can command even higher prices (perhaps as much as a gold omen per hour depending on the customer, the job, and his mood) because they're picking and choosing commissions that most challenge or inspire them ... Gram, if he does have the political role Grave of Heaven suggests he might, will favor those commissions that serve his causes. He may even offer discounts (or better) - but it would be rude to presume free service from such a man. Dosrabid, on the other hand, will be most attracted to things that let him destroy matter in new and exciting ways. Other master craftsmen will have their own passions, and learning those passions are key to getting their attention, their best service, and their best price.