
# A Cosmic Fantasy Frontier

And so that's the chief points in an overview of the monstrous world.

This is a place where the incredible is the basic trade, but not a place where
those incredible moments occur without a very dangerous context. It's a place
where the gods lie imprisoned and are well-known by the people, but they aren't
anything like mortals at all. Instead, they are fractal things, expanding
forever outward; incomprehensible and alien, creatures of unfathomable cosmic
horror.

Yet games in Oshanal are not about cosmic horror or existential dread, and
they're not about the apocalyptic wastes left behind after the devastating
magical war. In the world of the Hanging Towers, people have overcome the
potential madness of their surroundings. They've persisted, they've endured, and
now they're beginning to thrive anew.

Traditional cosmic horror depicts worlds where the supermassive is
insurmountable, and mortal life can never achieve notice of the ancient eyes
that dwell past creation. Hanging Towers games are very different because not
only did mortals achieve that notice, they also survived it and surpassed it.

Now these mortals, the characters of Hanging Towers stories, have become
something different, something strange and incredible. Many are ascending in one
way or another. There are dynasties of child gods, empires of monster hunters,
and it is increasingly normal to dreamwalk for hidden secrets and lore of the
Never Was. Mortals are on the cusp of something even greater, if they can do it
without losing control of the Spinning Cage and loosing the monstrous divine
again.

So, what does cosmic horror look like in a fantasy world where magic is powerful
and capable of defeating the eldritch beyond? When the people of your world are,
themselves, incredible and vast? What does a post-apocalyptic wasteland look
like after everyone's survived it, the post-post-apocalypse where life
flourishes again, changed but enduring?

Those are the central questions of games set in the world of the Hanging Towers,
a world of cosmic fantasy, full of frontiers of magical splendor and strange
alien radiance.


A cosmic fantasy frontier


# A World Claimed by Strange Behemoths

While it's definitely true to say that the people and spirits of Oshanal have
risen to the occasion of their strange, broken world, it is still a very
dangerous place, swathed in vivid radiance, teeming with monsters. Whether or
not the monstrous divine is imprisoned, their strange influence brings a sense
of constant apprehension, so pervasive and low-grade that most have long
internalized and become familiar with it. Life goes on, as they say.

Imagine for yourself beings so vast that they must contain universes far beyond
your own, and then imagine that some part of those beings protrudes into what
you know of as your universe. The distorting effect alone of this impact was
nothing less than enough to shatter the laws of life and death in your world,
and yes, now those beings may be held at bay and slumbering – but the strange
warping of their mere presence has caused mountains to awaken and roam, the
oceans to grow infinite and proliferate with aquatic titans, and your dreams
themselves to become second realities, from which some never return.

The world has stabilized and become a surreal, new kind of thing, yes. People
have re-established bulwarks of civilization and largely endured and even
thrived, yes. But they have done so in the company of monsters, many of which
are so massive as to not even realize the Hanging Towers are there at all.

And so it is that the life of an Oshanalian is very far from what we would think
of as peaceful, largely. There is, on some level, continual struggle, enough
that the people of the twilight world take it as given. There are titans, and it
is true that many must be fought from time to time, and it is best to be ready
to at least take a stand. For the most part, the people are capable of meeting
the challenge: whether it be through the significant artifice of the sky people,
or the more harmonious and naturalistic approach of the surface folk.

The titans which emanate from the monstrous gods are often indifferent to the
small creatures of the city, generally preying upon one another or vying for
some kind of behemothian dominance of a strange radiant ecosystem. That, in and
of itself, can be a life-threatening struggle, but it can be that such
indifference is the best you could hope for. It's certainly better than gaining
the wrathful attention of a waking mountain.

It helps that the actual size of Oshanal is vast, far eclipsing the size of
other worlds, and there is plenty of room for the great monsters to roam. Even
as thick and fortified as most of the bulwarks are, the simple matter of it is
that there's a considerable amount of distance between the known pathways of the
worst titans, and the most important established steadfasts of civilization.
This is absolutely by design, whenever possible: some may adore the monsters of
the twilight world, sure, but most are a little more honest with themselves
about their chances for survival where the behemoths tread.


A world claimed by strange behemoths


# Broken But Beautiful

Oshanal survived the monstrous gods, and they are now imprisoned. It's been left
much stranger in the wake of the final summoning of Marimneros, as you may
expect from the world that shattered firmament of eternity itself. It's been a
few thousand years since the end of the last age, or at least that's the popular
consensus: it's difficult to know for sure.

Even had the apocalypse somehow come and gone without destroying most of
Oshanal's written historic record, time would be hard to quantify simply because
_time isn't what it once was anymore._ When the monstrous gods awoke, they
brought with them new truths, and those new truths were pervasive and
foundational – not only did they suddenly become true, they suddenly _had always
been true._ And so, things which were once easy to take for granted as elemental
truths are no longer always true on the twilight world.

For example, if you were to look at Oshanal from obit, it would seem spherical.
However, at many parts on its surface, specifically those parts where the
monstrous gods hold the most influence, the horizon contorts and stretches in
unpredictable directions. The most striking of this is the ocean of Oshanal: in
many places, due to the presence of the monstrous goddess of the sea,
Ereshkanoi, there is no end to the oceanic depths. And if you were to sail into
the oceanic distance, you would never see the end. Ereshkanoi is known as the
Endless, and so is her aquatic periphery.

To add to this, ignoring the considerable warping influence of the monstrous
gods, the eternity they're now confined in has been permanently scarred by their
summoning itself. There were once many radiant realms neighboring the physical
plane: fairy realms, elemental realms, entire planes of thought and light and
shadow, evil and benevolent. No more. When the monstrous gods were first
summoned, the membranes around these realms popped like a bubble, and today they
have all integrated into a single melange of all realms.

This blending of realms means that for a long time, spirit and flesh have
tangibly coexisted. Angels and demons stride the surface, fairy courts hold
session neighboring island settlements of seafaring folk, and the restless dead
are a very real every day threat in places of great loss and tragedy. This means
that, to some extent, the spirit worlds and the mortal worlds have had to learn
to coexist, and this has produced interesting and cosmpolite results.

In truth, though, since the imprisonment of the monstrous gods, Oshanal has
mostly stabilized into a remarkable, incredible place. Dangerous, yes,
_extremely dangerous_, but gorgeous as well. A curtain of splendid stars glisten
in the twilight sky, spirits tangibly surf the waves of an endless lavender
ocean, cloud cities congregate around splendid glittering, ancient Tower States,
magical ecosystems proliferate and evolve new kinds of life, and the very idea
of life itself has become something stranger, more complex and wonderful,
spiritual and rich.

It has been an incredible, awful, terrifying journey, but the people and spirits
of the monstrous world have risen to the occasion. They've made a new, wonderful
home for themselves and it is truly breathtaking to behold.


Broken, but beautiful


# In the Cradle of the Cosmos

When the universe was still mostly material, before the Summoning of Ereshkanoi,
Oshanal was a small planet at the heart of a great, old galaxy. The skies of
Oshanal even today are thick with stars, and even the darkest of nights are
bright with their glittering twilight. The heavens and the patterns of their
drifting bodies have tremendous meaning to the typical Oshanalian. Every day,
you awake to a starlight canopy replete with a complex and fascinating luminous
design.

Many of the cosmic bodies of Oshanal have their own mythologies and roles in the
pantheons of the monstrous divine. In some periods of the twilight world’s odd
history, a few of those cosmic bodies gave proof to these myths by inexplicably
and disastrously coming to life.

## The Blackmoon

Easily the most identifiable of the cosmic bodies in the Oshanalian canopy, and
marking polar north, the Blackmoon is a vast black hole that swallows nearly a
tenth of the sky in its copious, brilliant white accretion disc.

Oshanal is tidally locked in a way that ensures that the inhabited parts of it
always faces this ominous spectacle. This means that the further north on
Oshanal, the more colossal the Blackmoon looms. Within its brilliant accretion
disc, the bleak pupil of void at its heart peers out across the twilight world.

Strangely, most volumes recovered from before the breaking of the world do not
mention the Blackmoon at all; a stunning omission, given its omnipresence.

## The Knives

A criss-crossing of comets ever in orbit around Oshanal, with tails that wrap
the majority of the planet, the Knives appeared a few centuries after the
construction of the great Godspire. Glittering with the kaleidoscopic reflection
of millions of icy shards, the tails of the dozen or so Knives twist like rivers
of light across the soft indigo sky.

Oral lore of gentle but strange people known as the galactine suggests that the
Knives are all that is left of their true home, a moon of Oshanal said to have
been destroyed in a great celestial cataclysm.

## The Celestial City

The chief source of much of the twilight of Oshanal, the celestial city is a
nearby supercluster of stars. These stars spin, rise, and fall in daily cycles,
seeming to take over primarily during the dusk, as the suns of the world begin
to set.

The Celestial City is the foundation of many of the mythologies of Oshanal. It
was once said that when a dreamer slept, they would walk there with the gods: in
their distant but glimmering cosmic abode. This may be true today: certainly
many people of the twilight world dream now of terrible, impossible vistas and
amongst them, the incomprehensible terrors of the monstrous divine.

## The Heart of Heaven & Twelve Towers

Books preserved from the last age mention the Heart of Heaven and the Twelve
Towers. A great red giant and two smaller white stars rose every morning, and in
the evening, their absence revealed a cluster of moons called the Twelve Towers.
They were said to light the way home for weary travelers.

At some point, though, the books stop speaking of the Heart and the Towers. The
Oshanal of today has only five remaining moons and no sun at all. In the place
where the Heart of Heaven once gleamed, there remains only a great, furious
cloud of light known as the Heavensblaze.

## Heavensblaze

An undulating canopy of rich violets, roses, and indigos, the Heavensblaze roils
in chaotic waves above the twilight world. It seems to have appeared at some
point before the breaking of all eternities, it seems to sit where the Heart of
Heaven once sat, and it seems to rise and fall, and warm the world as the lost
suns otherwise would have.

Not much is known about the Heavensblaze, but all signs suggest that something
broke the Heart of Heaven, and left behind this maddening nebula. How exactly
that could happen is the topic of many myths, spoken in hushed mornings to
children curious about the wonders of their world.


In the cradle of the cosmos


# The Ancient Gods Awoke

Oshanal has always been a place of powerful spiritual and magical strength. Long
before the current age, it was known as the world of gates – this was due to the
fact that in so many places, the membrane had worn thin between the material
world and the spirit realms beyond. In ancient graves, ghosts dwelled; in the
thickest hedges of the great forests, beast spirits walked; in volcanoes,
elementals bathed.

So familiar were Oshanalians with the idea of other realms that they discovered
several borderline sciences related to the arts of interacting with the
metaphysical. One of these arts, the art of summoning, began with an earnest
effort to catalog the archetypical True Name of magical things. Access to a True
Name could only come with a certain level of understanding of a thing, and
having access to these names would allow a summoner to then call that spirit or
influence that archetype.

Summoners were, overall, very well esteemed for most of Oshanalian history. They
were scholars of the many spiritual laws, historians of the metaphysical roots
of eternity, and wayfinders of the gates and the many spiritual realms. Most
importantly, though, they were a proven path to power, as the True Names a
summoner would collect could give them limited powers of control over spirits of
considerable power. Obtaining a contract or pact with such a spirit, for a lease
on its True name, would give the summoner access to its incredible strength.

It was not long before most monarchs and conquerers were, in some capacity or
another, trained in the arts of summoning. Each would have an extensive lexica
of powerful True Names, sometimes cultivated across centuries or milennia until
it represented a formidable arsenal of magical power. This culminated at the end
of the last age with an imperial dynasty, led by a powerful summoner named
Marimneros, the Summoner King.

A rigid and charismatic demagogue, Marimneros presided for nearly five centuries
as the Emperor of the Eruvenian Empire. His reign was marked by endless war and
the near eradication of many of the "impure" peoples. In this case, purity was a
scale defined solely by Marimneros and his lieutenants; this definition varied
based on convenience and had no genuine internal consistency. The whims of this
maniac emperor terrorized the world, enforced both by the dynasties he presided
over, and the terrible magics he commanded.

Inevitably, revolutions took form and were stomped out time and time again.
Eventually, however, one took hold: over decades, it grew into an inescapable
opponent that even proud Marimneros had to acknowledge as a legitimate danger.
This conflict began an arms race, and at the forefront of this race was the
Summoner King's favorite tool: the summoning of greater and greater gods to do
devastating magical war by proxy.

So began a quest, fueled by Marimneros' endless hubris, for the final, most
devastating summons of all: the legendary forgotten names of the First Gods.

The legend went something like this: in the earliest days of the Cosm, the
universe was but one egg in a basket of endless eggs, each their own, distinct
universe with its own laws of physics and metaphysics. These were the First
Gods, creatures so vast that within them were contained entire truths of reality
undiscovered. To invoke the True Name of a First God was, according to
Marimneros, to gain control over not just _truth which was_, but the ability to
_create and reshape truth itself_.

Marimneros began his quest in the heart of peace-talks with his opposition,
where he learned about the existence of paladins of the First Gods', and their
ancient crypts. Harvesting this knowledge and formally resuming war on the
rebellion against his empire, Marimneros followed a thread of clues for a decade
or more.

The war did not go well, particularly with Marimneros distracted by his quest.
His pride would not waver, but his forces began to. Each loss amplified his
desperation, but he persisted.

At last, the day arrived: the Summoner King had assembled the litany of True
Names in a splendid new lexicon, which he named the Writ of the Great
Conjunction. He posited that invoking the names was not enough to call being so
vast, so old. You could only call them on significant moments, where the planes
had aligned and the membrane between eternities had thinned just so.

This exact day made for a wonderful target for the rebellion. A great battle
ensued as Marimneros began the ceremony; it was spectacular, a truly legendary
struggle. Unfortunately, Marimneros was strained, but not thwarted: after hours
of bitter conflict, Marimneros, glittering with the splendor of his summoned
celestial raiment, at last uttered the names of the First Gods.

They awoke.


The ancient gods awoke


# The Conjunction of All Planes

So, how exactly does one summon an ancient god from the primeval abyss?

Strictly speaking, it wasn't possible. It'd been Marimneros' earliest intuition
and it was absolutely correct; after all, he was _excellent_ at summoning and
absolutely earned his moniker as the Summoner King. He knew that summoning the
First Gods was both physically and metaphysically possible. He also, however,
knew certain tricks around the laws of the many realms, certain ways to
temporarily suspend or confuse them.

In many cases, Marimneros leveraged certain configurations of celestial bodies,
timing them with corresponding configurations of the many realms. By timing
magics at exact moments, he'd been able to amplify or alter the effect of
powerful magics, creating a brief burst of power that evaded the laws of the
mortal and radiant realms.

Again, he leveraged a conjunction to magically circumvent those laws: conducting
his ceremony at the conjunction of all planes, he briefly poked a metaphorical
hole through these laws and let the many realms briefly comingle. This weakened
the natural barrier around the Cosm such that speaking the True Names was both
possible and effective. Speaking the names, he summoned the ancient gods.

The moment he spoke the names, all of eternity seemed to silent and tangible
suspend in place. The intonation of the True Names of the Ancient Gods echoed in
strange, incomprehensible ways, and the sound of those echoes pierced through
the radiant realms and past the boundaries of eternity itself. Somewhere very
far away, something stirred in the inky blackness of the Never Was.

Unfortunately for Marimneros, as incredible as his knowledge, and as vast his
magical power, it would have been impossible for him to truly understand the
gravity of his actions. In his mind, he was going to call the greatest of the
gods and command them, obliterating his enemies and permanently cementing his
terrible imperial sovereignty. Perhaps he would even become divine, himself.

In a way, Marimneros _did_ ascend that day, becoming an immortal and divine
thing. The True Names spoken, there was a pause and a brief silence. Then,
doubling over in pain, Marimneros fell to the ground. His form began to bulge,
swelling and contorting, pregnant with some unknowable thing too vast for him to
contain. And then the First Gods began to flood into eternity, rupturing his
body and reality itself.

The truth of beings as vast as the first gods, the universal divines, is that
each is, in and of itself, as vast as the next: each was a full universe, a full
eternity and cosmic ecosystem. One could not exist inside of the other, for each
was infinite. By placing the ceremony at the conjunction of all planes,
Marimneros had circumvented this natural volumetric law. However, any time you
violate the natural way of things, there are consequences.

The consequences of the summoning, this time, left few witnesses. Those who
lived to tell of what happened were already fleeing before the summoning itself,
and they could only watch in brief moments as they fled: a cataclysm, the roar
of a sudden void, an incomprehensible momentary nothingness, which began to
bloom into a terrible whirl of furious alien lights, through which unspeakable,
colossal things began to flood.

This was the final moments of the last age. The act of the summoning had broken
something permanently in eternity: the barriers between realms had shattered,
and suddenly the physical and radiant realms began to bleed into one another.
And most horrifying of all: the ancient gods themselves, awakened, and angry,
forced into fragments and torn from their homes into the cramped interior of a
neighboring reality.

Eternity and the Cosm are structured things, emergent accidents that
coincidentally scaffold outward into a complex physical and metaphysical engine.
The summoning broke this great engine, filling it suddenly with intrusions from
neighboring eternities: sentient and vast, unknowable and alien things, so
incredible they exuded new truths and rewrote the cosmos in their wake.
Imprisoned, angry, hungry monstrous gods, offended at the pain of the summoning
and wrathful: ready to devour this young eternity and return to their familiar,
cosmic slumber.


The conjunction of all planes


# The Evil Empire Won

As long as we've used stories as moral plays, most stories which feature
oppressive cultures or empires would somehow also feature the moment where that
empire fell. Some scrappy and outgunned revolutionaries rise up and, noble in
intent and resigned to self-sacrifice, defiantly stand against the imperial
oppression. Generally, they win out in the end.

For Oshanal, this was similar to how the last age played out, but here the evil
empire didn't fall. On a night of a planar conjunction, the maniacal
sorcerer-king began his great ceremony, and although the heroes _did arrive_,
they were too late. The ceremony could not be stopped, and the gates to other
worlds opened, giving birth to a cataclysm that ruined not just the old world,
but nearly the cosmos and eternity itself.

Oshanal mostly survived this terrible cataclysm of eternities, and they were
devastating – yet unfortunately, for many, the empire then went on to thrive in
the wake of the destruction they'd wrought. In fact, it consolidated their power
as they were instrumental in the creation of the Hanging Towers themselves. They
even went on to enjoy a tremendous amount of appreciation and good will from the
survivors as, for the refugees of the sky world, the imperial armies were the
last, most reliable allies in the war between mortal, and monstrous god.

In any event, they were, and are here, still, referred to as the "evil empire"
for a reason. Sure, you could say that they fought for mortal life, and that
would be true. Or, you could say that they fought for only those mortal lives
they thought were worth fighting for, and that would also be true. In practice,
there were entire cultures and peoples that the imperials regarded as "less
than". These people were refused passage onto the first of the towers, and were
left behind to watch it rise into the skies as the floods of Ereshkanoi swept
away the world around them.

Today, this empire is in decline, succumbing to the natural entropy and
self-loathing of fascist regimes. The Hanging Towers have largely fragmented
into independently powerful collectives of Tower States, each claiming domain in
their own network of interdependent towers. There is passage and trade, and no
one is at open war, but the central lines of the old sorcerer-king have ended,
and many new dynasties have emerged in the increasingly cosmopolite world of the
sky people.

Meanwhile, below, the surface folk have endured and eventually prosspered as
well. The old people of the last continent, and the seafaring folk of the
crystalline archipelagos, abandoned long ago, have grown and adapted in unison
with the behemoths of the monstrous world. To these people, monsters and titans
are commonplace, life goes on, and everyone has adapted and become strange
enough over time to perfectly fit their strange twilight world.

Yet, the animosity between the people because of the evil empire burns bright.
This empire, once called the Eruvenian Empire, now referred to as the Epicentral
Empire, is still a persistent threat, waiting for another "pure-blooded" (such a
thing no longer exists) demagogue to rise up and galvanize the dynasties into
lockstep again. No one has truly forgotten the cruelty of the old Eruvenians,
and many remember that it was an Eruvenian who shattered eternity. Bitter feuds
persist between the surface and sky folk, and probably always will.


The evil empire won


# The Seven Truths of Oshanal

Your people know your world by many names: the Monstrous World, the Heart of All
Realms, the God-cage, the Broken World, the Twilight World, and so on. It is an
incredible, surreal home: a tall tale made real, lit by uncontrolled magical
radiances seeping in from broken sibling planes, and lush with a terrifying and
majestic menagerie of cosmic hybrids.

Here, on Oshanal, the corpus of eternity was shattered, and the membrane between
the mortal and the metaphysical realms popped like a bubble. Monstrous gods
known as the Megaliths intruded on reality and began the work of devouring it.
Neighbor eternities broke open and spilled into this eternity in a great
conjunction. At long last, the damage was controlled and the wound was partly
sealed, yet the damage had been done: a once-tranquil world had been irrevocably
transformed into something paradoxical, eldritch and elemental.

Still, today, the teeming alien presences of the monstrous gods struggle to be
free from the boundaries of their profane periphery, in order to resume feasting
on the cosmos once again.

There are seven metaphysical and material truths which govern Oshanal, the
Monstrous World:

- **[In the cradle of the cosmos](/handbook/in-the-cradle-of-the-cosmos)**.
  Oshanal sits at the heart of a thick, old galaxy. So thick is its celestial
  landscape with stars, that it exists in a world of perpetual twilight.
- **[The evil empire won](/handbook/the-evil-empire-won)**. Long ago, there was
  an evil empire which had colonized much of the world. After the Summoning,
  they did well, and now they rule the sky people: the last known bastion of
  mortal civilization.
- **[The ancient gods awoke](/handbook/the-ancient-gods-awoke)**. In the final
  battle of the last age, the empire called forth the monstrous divine. It
  worked, but the gods were horrific, alien, and each was infinite and vast.
- **[The conjunction of all planes](/handbook/the-conjunction-of-all-planes)**.
  When the gods were summoned, it broke the barrier between planes and
  infinities. Now, spirit and mortal realms bleed into one another, creating
  strange peoples, a menagerie of unbound metaphysical evolution, and strange
  unearthly ecosystems of creatures part spirit and part material.
- **[Broken, but beautiful](/handbook/broken-but-beautiful)**. Oshanal was a
  placid, tranquil world at one point, but now it is a where at least nine
  universes bulge into one another in epicenters of surreal, incomprehensible
  physical and metaphysical geometry. The terrifying, the alien, and the grand
  are now commonplace, making the monstrous world odd, and wonderful.
- **[A world claimed by strange behemoths](/handbook/a-world-claimed-by-strange-behemoths)**.
  The nature of divinity is a fractal one. The very presence of these
  unknowable, alien gods emanates strange otherworldly ecologies in their
  periphery. The closer you get to the seats of power of the sleeping monstrous
  divine, the more terrible the world around them becomes.
- **[A cosmic fantasy frontier](/handbook/a-cosmic-fantasy-frontier)**. After a
  period of relative prosperity, the people of Oshanal are once again beginning
  to explore their world. Instead of caving to cosmic horror, these people have
  met with the otherworldly by becoming more odd, themselves. With strange but
  powerful magical disciplines on their side, mortals increasingly foray into
  the monstrous world with bolder and bolder confidence.


Tags: intro

intro