Chronicles of Vaelmaris

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Description

Chronicles of Vaelmaris

Something is taking the world a block at a time, and it is in no hurry.

Three blades were left behind in Vaelmaris. Each one is waiting somewhere, and each one is particular about whose hand it answers to. Finding them is not the hard part.

The dark

It spreads. Not in a wave — a block at a time, patiently, through stone and soil and whatever was standing there. Trees it reaches are left as corrupted logs and leaves. It cannot be broken; nothing you can swing will mark it.

Stand in it long enough and it begins to take you.

Hearts. A mass grows from a core, and everything within reach of one moves faster. A heart beats — its light swells and falls — so a mass with a heart in it can be found from outside by watching for the pulse. Break the heart and the entire mass lets go at once. It does not let you do that unopposed.

Threads. Where a heart has nothing to stand on, it lowers a line of dark one block wide, wandering downwards, feeling for ground. It breaks glass to get through. It does not stop for a wall.

The Darkness. A person-shaped piece of the mass, walking. It does not burn. It is the only thing in the world that puts the dark inside you, and once it is in, it will not be put away on its own.

What holds it off

Crystal. Luminar grows in geodes underground — budding blocks, buds, clusters, shards — and it is the one counterweight to all of the above. What it holds off long enough, it gives back: corrupted ground reverts.

• Luminar Pendant — worn at the neck. The dark cannot take ground near you, and unravels where it already has.
• Luminar Lantern — a house's worth of ward, made from shards. Needs a redstone signal; dark when unpowered, so you can see at a glance whether you're protected.
• Ward Projector — holds an entire settlement clear.
• Potion of Cleansing — awkward potion and one luminar shard. Short, because all it has to do is be in your blood at the moment the dark is. Meant for drinking mid-fight, not for keeping.

A ward is the only thing that stops a thread. This is the only thing that has ever worked.

Three blades

One of each per world, in one place, waiting.

The Shadow Sword stands in a ruined shrine in the open, the ground around it long gone over to the dark — meant to be seen from a long way off, and taken in the dark. The Lythari Sword is in a vault cut into the rock beside a geode and opened through its wall: you find the geode first, then the door in it. The Drakari Blade is in a hall joined onto a stronghold — the one of the three you might walk straight past.

Lifting one is a different matter. Two of them only answer to the right blood. The third asks whether the dark has ever been in you, and turns away if it hasn't.

Take one and you become an avatar — the Resonant, the Dragon-Blooded, or Obryx — and a school of magic starts answering your bare hand. Every avatar has levels, and the blade holds some things back until you've earned them.

Each blade keeps a record. Who carried it, how many days, what it killed, how many bearers it saw fall, how many hearts it broke, how many hands it has passed through. The blade remembers, and you can read it.

Blood

Three bloodlines, chosen at world start, each with real costs rather than a list of bonuses.

• Human — one more heart than most, and luck runs a little your way.
• Lythari — quick to move and quick to strike, a long fall costs you less. There is not much of you to break, and armour sits badly on you.
• Drakari — three more hearts of dragonblood, a hide that is armour in its own right, hard to move, and fire has little to say to you. All that weight is slow to carry and slow to swing.

Casting

Three rungs, and you climb them.

A scroll is one reading and the words are spent. A spellbook holds what you write into it — right-click to cast, hold the wheel key to turn the page. Your bare hand casts nothing at all until a blade has chosen you, and then only in its own school.

Scrolls can also be committed to memory instead of spent, if your blood can carry the spell. Some spells it never will.

Three schools — Fire, Crystal, Darkness — and a mana pool that both the book and the hand draw from.

What the dark leaves on you

If the corruption takes hold, it shows. It starts on the sword arm, climbs into the chest, and finishes on the skull. Each piece is worth something while it's out — more behind the hand that took the blade, armour, strikes that leave things in the dark — and you can hide it or show it with a keypress.

The sun charges for all of it. Under an open sky you're slower, and there's less behind a swing.

The crystal line runs the other way: a growth that comes up through your back, worth armour and toughness, fed by daylight and starved by deep gloom. It uses the same slot as the corrupted chest, so nobody is ever both.

Drakari get wings — jump again in mid-air to open them, glide like an elytra or hold forward to fly under power, and never fall far enough to hurt — and horns, worth armour and a gore attack if you sprint or dive into something.

All of it stays with you when you die.

A field journal

It writes down what you've actually met, in the order you met it, and stays blank on everything you haven't. Four entries so far.

Requires

All three are hard dependencies — the mod will not load without them, and without NeoOrigins you get no bloodlines at all:

• Curios API 16+
• NeoOrigins 2.2+
• GeckoLib 5.5+

Where it's at

Early, and honest about it. Three spells are in, with more written and waiting. Two of the creatures ship as spawn eggs only — one because a fifty-foot vulture shouldn't turn up in your save uninvited, the other because its model is a placeholder and will be replaced. There is a full in-game settings screen and admin tooling for servers.

Part of Chronicles of Vaelmaris, a dark fantasy world that also runs through fiction.