I've written before about Silent Titans, and chances are you've heard of it anyway. You might even have an opinion on whether it's workable, or any good, or anything else. If not....see here.
However, what I'm really here for is the section Beyond Wir-Heal, specifically the sub-set 'Your Own Wrecked Heptarchy'. I don't suppose I'm the first one to write something like this, even setting aside the pre-existing Land of Rushes (to be found In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard). All the same, this stuff's been brewing at the back of my mind for a while. It's probably not going to turn into anything substantial, but I might as well share it. So here we go...
It’s History.
Silent Titans is set in a world wracked by time spasms and dimensional collapse. In its geography, society, environments and characters are warped or alternate versions of the Wirral Peninsula in North West England. Driven through this like needles through skin, are terrifying shards of a distant, ruined, high-technology reality whose broken weapons and poisonous ontological waste has been dumped and hidden in its own past. It has both sword fights and robots
Of course, I don't know the Wirral. That's difference one. As an effete Southron, this is going to be about inner East Anglia (largely). Let's call the region Estengle (for now?).
The nature of the wreckage is different in this portion of the Heptarchy. No Titans, silent or otherwise. That's difference two. No terrifying shards, no peninsula girt by the tides of time. There's likely a drip-feed of displaced history, but it would be less flotsam and jetsam and more .... strangers riding into town? A ghostly train?
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Estengle. What's it like? A blend: market towns, dense bocage, the rolling fields of drained marsh, planned planed business parks, thorn-choked dykes, the lurking survivals of the old fens, chalk pits, golf courses, race tracks, abandoned airfields. The weather: aching, pitiless sun, sullen rain or oppressive grey cloud.
The people in Estengle:
Alchemy Puritans: clean shaven, simply dressed, well-read, soft-spoken. Keen enthusiasts for Better Living Through Chemistry. Probably taking some sort of mood-alterer, sense-enchancer, suppressant or relaxant. There is a sophisticated colour coding system to indicate this - different coloured badges, different coloured streaks in the hair, different jewelled studs along the cheek bone, different stripes of make-up spiralling away from the eyelids.
They would be insulted to be call lotus-eaters. They know exactly what they are taking, how much, and when they will stop. Everyone requires some measure of pharmaceutical support; they're just being systematic and rational about it.
Aiming to strike out into the Fens and bring them into order for the growth of cash crops.
Fen Tygers: Want the Fens back for their own. Grubby and rustic; much more given to occasional excesses than the Puritans. Have somehow acquired several noisy motorcars and a pack of heraldic tygers.
Ferrymen: merchants, dealbrokers, expansionist middlemen.
Fane-raisers: raisers of great monuments, architects, devotees of order, ritualists, hierarchs, dwindling fraternities.
Aviscaputs: Could there be some of these around?
Dungeons:
The most obvious thing to point to, the most Titan-like would be the restless bones of Gog and Magog: thorn-tunnels in the spinney lead to actual tunnels in the earth lead to rib-caverns and femur-passages.
There would be the vast heaven-seeking towers made by the predecessors of the Fane-raisers. Empty, chill - poisoned? Ruined?
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| Inspired by the likes of St Botolph's, Boston, St James's, Louth and other wool churches - to say nothing of Ely Cathedral, the 'Ship of the Fens'. |
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As above, I'm not sure that there are any plans to work this up any further. Certainly, I would need to do some further reading - the late Ronald Blythe, for instance. There is at least one piece in Anglo-Norman I'm currently working my way through. Anyway, I hope this has been of some interest.
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