Using Inspiration Cards to Create Realms

You can use Inspiration Cards to help create new Realms on the fly.

Here's the steps, followed by an example:

1. Draw three Fortune Cards for the Virtue, Fault, and Fate of the Realm.
2. Draw four Inspiration Cards to provide some images/flavor for the realm.
3. Consider what each of these draws could mean for the nature of the realm. Write a paragraph summarizing the nature of the Realm.
4. Place the four Inspiration Cards into a square. Use the terrain types on the four Inspiration Cards to determine the geography of the realm. Identify at least one key location for each card-quadrant of the realm.
5. Give the Realm a name. You may want to select that name from the words on the respective Inspiration Cards.

Example of Realm Creation:

1) The Realm's Fortune Cards are:

• Virtue: The Dragon - Cunning
• Fault:The Creator - Nurture
• Fate: Knowledge - Truth vs. Falsehood

2) The Titles and Archetypes for the four Inspiration Cards I drew were: 

• Mask - Mystery
• Tomb - Memory
• Virgin - Purity
• Temple - Virtue

3) The conjunction of Fortune Cards was peculiar. The Dragon, which symbolizes Cunning and looks like a half-skeletal dragon, as a Virtue. The Creator, which symbolizes Nurture and depicts a woman holding a baby, as a Fault. Quetzalcoatl - another draconic figure, albeit a positive figure - representing the Realm's Fate: the dialectic of Truth vs.Falsehood. So here's my narrative:

In the last days of their War against the Gods, a Dragon Army went to ground in an abundant land. This fertile land was tended by innumerable peasants and fed a complex set of temples and gods. The Dragons took on human form and hid here; over time temple warred with temple. Eventually, one set of priests prevailed: those who worshiped Dragons. They suppressed other religious knowledge, and took charge of almost every aspect of the people's lives, controlling marriage lines and producing generation after generation of clawed Dragon priests. Unless the secrets of the Dragon Temple are revealed, this Realm will give birth to a new Dragon army, unleashing the Dragon's bitter vengeance across the spheres.

4) Geography and Key Locations:

Northwest: Virgin card - Marsh

• The first new Dragon, The Dragon Mother, hides in the marsh and awaits her children

Southwest: Mask card - Forest

• Small tribes descended from the priests of the old gods, and former peasants who were loyal to the temples,  band together for self-defense in jungle that was once farmland

Northeast: Tomb card - Forest

• An ancient temple of Quetzalcoatl, covered in jungle vines, is guarded against all outsiders by Feathered Lizard Folk. This temple holds the only remaining knowledge of the time before the Dragons. Secrets and powers to defeat the Dragons and their Dragon priests might be hidden here.

Southeast: Temple card - Plains

• Opulent, hierarchical, and regimented, Dragon Temple City is surrounded by lush, vast agricultural areas 

5) The Realm's name is Temple Mask

The Tower Realm of Gilgamesh

Pieter Brughel the Elder, Tower of Babel (1563)

Gilgamesh, the Tower Realm which has not fallen. 

Virtue: The Smith - Productivity

Fault: Striking the Dragon's Tail - Underestimating the Challenge

Fate: Summer - Energy vs. Exhaustion

A city as populous as Everway stands at a point of brief convergence between two great rivers: the Swift River to the East, and the sluggish Silty River to the West.

Level-on-Level the Tower rises, almost to the heavens. The Tower is the work of generations. Who was the original Planner? Several competing cults point to different godlings of the city, or to one or more ancient priest kings. Go to the Great Library and do you own research. Just mind your words carefully. The Tower's Northward list is visible from a great distance. Just look away; pretend the Tower rises straight into the sky. After all,

"Better the low view of a bent neck than the bright vista 

enjoyed by heads mounted on King's Level." 

At the topmost levels of the Tower lives the Great King and his court. Immediately below him live the priests. Still lower are the nobles, and then the merchants. Finally the artisans, and layer-after-layer of workers, pilgrims and foreigners, and finally the wretched poor.

At ground level, the Tower is flooded so that food and other goods can be brought up into the Tower readily. The gondoliers of the Longshores, a guild-family believed to be a distant offshoot of Everway's own Whiteoars, control this trade. Once inside the Tower City, the goods are hoisted from the rafts and then moved up and onto the great ramps that lead up and up and up. The Sore Feet are the guild which controls this trade.

Beneath the Tower, the Foundation extends seemingly forever; some say to the center of the sphere itself.  Here are great storehouses, sufficient to withstand a hundred-year siege. There are numerous dungeons, safe houses, armories, forges, and blast furnaces. Whole warehouses with Demon Urns. Also below are the great beasts who consume the city's sewage and refuge. Beware of the Blind Shafts that connect Level to Level. Fall in one of these, and you will end up in something's stomach.

If Gilgamesh were not so distant from Everway, it would be a close and deadly rival. The city has a vast standing army, and is the hub of an inter-sphere trade empire. Gilgamesh has 36 gates, exactly half-plus-one the number of gates leading from Everway. The gates were constructed as part of the Plan. Each one binds a godling - each formerly a god - to the destiny of the city itself.

For the last 100 years, new construction has been suspended on the Tower. Some say there is a New Plan under constant revision - one which will correct the Tower's evident lean. But that is a story for another time. The various cults dedicated to the 36 Gate Godlings each assert that their godling is the unique protector and preserver of the city. For certain, something is helping Gilgamesh to avoid the isolation, confusion, and ultimate disaster experienced by so many other Tower Realms. Will this state of equilibrium hold?