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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Art of a paint spill by Pavel @ Unsplash