The Islands of Grimmloch
Grimmloch's world does not arrive all at once. It grows the way its stories do: one saga at a time, one chapter at a time. This is a map of how the game will unfold, where it begins, and where the roads lead from there.
Sagas are islands
Grimmloch is a world of islands, and every saga of the game is set on one of them. A saga is the largest piece of the game: a whole island, with its towns, its wild places, its people, and the folklore it is drawn from. When a new saga opens, a new island rises out of the sea.
Chapters are places on that island
Within a saga, the game grows in chapters. A chapter is a scene, or a set of related scenes, and a scene is simply one continuous place you can explore from edge to edge. Each new chapter adds new ground to walk and new neighbors to meet, and every chapter connects to the places you already know by the roads that run between them.
The first saga: the Island of Buyan
Our first island comes straight out of Slavic folklore. In the old tales, Buyan is the island that appears and disappears: sailors find it where no island was, and the sea closes over the place where it stood. At its heart lies the Alatyr stone, the father of all stones, and somewhere on the island, under an ancient oak, the death of Koshchei the Deathless is hidden away: a needle inside an egg, inside a duck, inside a hare, inside a chest buried beneath the tree. Pushkin gave the island its most famous telling in the Tale of Tsar Saltan, where a wondrous city stands on Buyan and the ships of the world come to marvel at it. That is the island you will be living on.
Chapter One: Bukenstrand
The first chapter is set in Bukenstrand, a small harbor town on Buyan's coast, with its docks in one corner and exactly two roads leading out: one north along the coast, one west along the shore. Chapter One is the town itself, and the town is where every player's story begins.
From there, the chapters branch outward. The next chapters follow those two roads into the countryside around the town: the coastal woods to the north, and the farms, fields, and sheep pastures that feed Bukenstrand. Further ahead, the roads keep going, and so will the chapters: north and west to the two cities that anchor this stretch of Buyan's coast, each a much larger place than our little town.
The sagas to come
Buyan is not the only island in the old stories, and it will not be the only island in Grimmloch. Later sagas may raise the legendary islands out of the sea: Thule, the farthest north of the ancient world; Atlantis, that sank in a day and a night; and stranger shores that sailors swore to and never found again. Each new saga will do what Buyan does: take an island people once truly told stories about, and make it a place you can walk.
Where the fiction goes, the world follows.