When you fall asleep in Valdara and pass through the Gates of Horn and Ivory, you do not enter a dream. You enter a place. It has geography that does not correspond to Valdara’s. It has peoples who have never heard of Valdara and do not care about its politics. It has weather, seasons, economies, territorial disputes, and a history that stretches back further than any Valdaran chronicle because Grimmloch was here first. The folklore your grandmother whispered, the spirits the cunning woman addressed by name, the practices the Polytechnic dismissed as superstition - these were never invented in Valdara. They were observed here, carried back through the Gates by dreamers who crossed before you, and remembered in the waking world as stories that grew less accurate with each generation of retelling. You are now standing in the place the stories came from.
Grimmloch is not a reflection of Valdara. It is the other way around. The beings your ancestors called faeries, djinn, draugar, and nymphs live here - not as legends but as peoples with cultures, laws, and firm opinions about the Valdaran dreamers who keep arriving with expectations shaped by fairy tales. The forces your grandmother said governed the behavior of plants and stones and animals operate here as consistent natural principles, because this is the world where those principles are native.
Grimmloch is inhabited. The beings who live here range from the household spirits who tend the hearth-stones to the old gods who govern the deep places, and everything between - the fair folk, the stone-dwellers, the shapeshifters, the talking beasts, the giants, the restless dead. Every creature your folklore named and every creature it forgot. They have been here since before dreamers began crossing from the waking world, and they have protocols for dealing with newcomers that vary from welcoming to hostile depending on who you are, what you do, and whether you have the sense to learn the local customs before assuming your own apply. They have met dreamers before. You are a stranger in someone else’s country, and how that goes depends entirely on you.
Eight factions contest the political landscape of Grimmloch. Each faction has a philosophy and a method and a vision for what Grimmloch should become, and none of them agree. Joining one is not a character creation checkbox - it is a political act with consequences that affect how every faction and every people in the world responds to you. The alliances and enmities between factions are real, longstanding, and not interested in your neutrality.
The esoteric sciences that Valdara divided into folklore and chemistry are whole here. Geomancy, Herbology, Physiologus, Dendrology, Thaumaturgy, Symbology, Anthroposophy, and Pneumancy operate as complete professional disciplines - taught in colleges and apprenticeships, practiced by people whose skill ranges from the mundane to the arcane, and governed by principles that the Polytechnic would recognize as rigorous if it could bring itself to accept the premises. Your character chooses which sciences to study, and that choice shapes who they become in this world. A geomancer and a pneumancer standing in the same valley see two entirely different places, because the science you practice determines what you are equipped to perceive.
Nothing here was arranged for your convenience. The land has guardians who must be negotiated with before resources can be gathered. The peoples have histories with each other that predate your arrival by millennia. The factions will recruit you, oppose you, or ignore you based on what you do, not what you intend. The sciences require study, practice, and the kind of patience that the Polytechnic’s examination system never demanded because the Polytechnic never asked its students to negotiate with the subject matter.
You are here because you fell asleep. You will return because what you find here is more real than what you left behind, and the longer you stay the harder it becomes to pretend otherwise.