Noteworthy Game Stuff

Okay, the intro makes some assumptions, here is an infodump to make sense of them.

• The intro mentions the dead a few times, an important aspect of things here is that if someone dies unnaturally, and their soul is not ushered on (and/or their body destroyed) they often don’t leave, and become monsters preying on whoever or whatever they find. For this reason funeral rites are important around here!
• Most Paths lead to what amount to small city-states. Maintaining independence is not so difficult for a polity when travel is severely restricted and predictable. On the other hand, most of those city-states have natural population limits as expanding into the wilderness is incredibly difficult and dangerous. This isn’t a big deal for most, as the world is pretty dangerous, unfortunately, but it leads to a cycle where if a city is doing too well, collapse can come fast if violence does erupt–see the problem with funeral rites!
• The above dynamic leads to a steady trickle of migration – a city doing well tries to send out colonies, often down Paths which have grown old, but not yet gone wild, hoping the place the stories speak of but no one has come from in a generation is viable again. Finding a place which is reachable, safe enough to start building in, and from which people can travel back is incredibly valuable.

The danger of the world, and the pattern of expansion and contraction, has made the world old. Small, and large, civilizations have flourished and collapsed many times – leaving ruins on ruins. Legends often have at least a grain, if not a fruit, of truth to them, and chasing them down – to find ancient cities now livable again, barely passable but still stable Paths, and understanding of what happened to them (so as to avoid it now, or use it on your enemies), is a valuable