Silt & Stone
Silt & Stone is a World Setting
originally intended for Brains&BrawnRPG ® by Ordo Octopia
it is system-agnostic.
The Living Land and Its Eternal Cycle
The world is shaped by an unrelenting geological and tidal rhythm. Every third generation, roughly sixty to ninety years, the sea surges inward across vast lowlands in what the people call the Great Inundation. Salt water pours over fields, villages and forests, depositing thick layers of silt, gravel, boulders, and marine debris before eventually receding. The flood is capricious: it may last mere days or linger for several years. No pattern has ever been reliably predicted.
When the waters withdraw, they leave behind a reshaped landscape. What were once fertile plains become shallow lagoons, reed-choked marshes, or gently sloping silt flats. Former river valleys are now either narrow canyons cut through fresh sediment or broad, deceptive shallows hiding deep, unstable muck beneath. Over centuries the lowlands have steadily risen as each inundation adds another stratum of material; the once-towering mountains that ring the region appear shorter not because they have eroded, but because the surrounding land has been built upward, layer by layer.
Structures built directly on the fresh silt gradually sink, sometimes evenly, sometimes catastrophically, until their foundations eventually reach the firmer strata below. Only buildings anchored in ancient, pre-inundation bedrock or raised upon deliberately engineered stone platforms endure across multiple cycles.
The Cycle of Strength and Ease
Human society is caught in a parallel rhythm, one that the people themselves recognize and name:
"Strong men create easy times.
Easy times create weak men.
Weak men create difficult times.
Difficult times create strong men."
This cycle has repeated for as long as memory and stone carvings record. Yet two powerful institutions have arisen that actively intervene in the pattern, each convinced that only their path can secure the long-term survival of the people.
The Guild of Might believes humanity requires hardship to remain vigorous and capable. They deliberately perpetuate difficult times—through rigorous training regimes, controlled scarcity, destruction of softening luxuries, and the glorification of physical endurance and martial prowess. Guild members are renowned as master builders, quarry-workers, stone-haulers, and warriors. Their bodies are sculpted by labor; their ethos exalts strength, discipline, and sacrifice.
The Guild of Ease holds that ingenuity, comfort, and intellectual flourishing produce the tools, knowledge, and resilience necessary to survive the next flood. They preserve and expand lore, refine engineering, cultivate rare plants, develop new materials, and create labor-saving devices. Guild members are scribes, inventors, archivists, hydraulic engineers, and keepers of the most ancient records. Their minds are their strength; their ethos prizes foresight, creativity, and adaptability.
Though their philosophies stand in opposition, both Guilds are regarded as essential. Open warfare between them is rare. Instead they engage in subtle, generational competition—undermining one another’s projects, swaying public opinion, sponsoring rival settlements, and claiming credit when times improve. Most ordinary people navigate between the two poles, recognizing that survival demands both raw strength and clever invention.
The Barrows — Cities Beneath the Silt
Because fresh silt is unstable and prone to subsidence, the people long ago turned to stone. They construct barrows. Multi-layered subterranean complexes built predominantly from the flood-deposited boulders and from quarried stone hauled down from the mountains.
A typical barrow consists of large, flat, oblong slabs used for floors, walls, and ceilings. Smaller fill-stones are packed into gaps. The exteriors and interiors are frequently adorned with carved relief. Spirals, wave patterns, human figures, creatures, maps of forgotten coastlines, and abstract glyphs whose meanings have been lost or are fiercely guarded.
Older barrow networks are palimpsests of generations: each inundation buries the previous surface level, prompting the builders to simply quarry a new entrance higher up and continue living downward. Some complexes descend many levels deep and stretch horizontally for kilometers, linked by long tunnels. Newer barrows may have only one or two subterranean layers and are still sinking slowly as unified masses rather than collapsing stone by stone.
Most barrows are empty, abandoned, or forgotten. Silent stone archives waiting beneath the silt. Yet many remain inhabited. Families, clans, and entire communities dwell in the cool, stable dark, emerging to the surface for trade, farming, exploration, salvage, and the never-ending work of excavation and new construction. Digging out lost barrows or carving fresh ones is as fundamental a profession as raising surface structures during the brief windows between floods.
A network of hollow resin-bark pipes, carefully farmed and maintained, provides fresh water, ventilation and waste removal to deep dwellings. These living conduits are among the most valuable resources in the Silted Realms.
Flora of the Silted Realms
The dominant trees of the region have evolved in perfect synchrony with the inundation cycle. They are called Sap-Tree. These giants grow extraordinarily rapidly in youth, sending thick taproots downward through dozens of meters of silt to anchor in older, stable layers. Once established, they soar to great heights; the oldest specimens are revered as living monuments, their massive trunks marked by centuries of flood scars and bark layers.
Their life cycle follows the seasons:
Spring — vivid green sap surges upward; new shoots explode skyward at astonishing speed. This green sap is harvested for food, medicinal salves, and soap.
Summer — heat bakes the outer bark into tough, woody armour. The yellow sap thickens into a powerful natural glue.
Autumn — the trees “weep” through fissures in the bark, exuding brown sap that hardens into a durable resin used as a fixative and hardener.
Winter — the exposed sap crystallises into hardy resin, insoluble in water or oil.
All forms of sap (except fully wintered resin) can be dissolved in water or oil, though brown sap requires longer processing.
Another ubiquitous plant form is spore-grass. Unlike conventional grasses, it propagates primarily through wind-borne spores rather than seeds. After the flood recedes, the air fills with drifting white clouds of spores—“milk rain”—that settle across the landscape. Where grazing animals keep the growth cropped short, a soft lawn-like turf develops. In undisturbed areas the grass rises into tall, wheat-like reeds that eventually produce edible spore-buds rich in starchy flour.
Fauna of the Silted Realms
Sheeg are a cross between Sheep and Pigs. There are two sub-species; Mountain Shig and Meadow Sheeg. Mountain Shig have incredibly strong muscular legs which can leap up almost vertical cliff faces. They grow to no more than eighteen inches tall, two feet long, six inches wide. Meadow Sheeg grow to four feet tall, four feet wide and four feet long. They are perhaps the most stubborn creatures imaginable. Both species grow thick wool which often trails behind them in dirty, matted dreadlocks unless they are regularly combed and sheared. They are herd animals and taste great. Their hides (with or without wool) can be tanned into a leather. They live for approximately thirteen years. They are wild but can be domesticated. The females are good producers of strong vitamineral-rich milk from which various recipes are made. Their dung is a source of compost.
Auroch are giant bovine (cattle); a fully grown adult is nine feet tall, six foot wide, pure muscle. They have horns which continue to grow throughout the creatures natural fifteen-twenty year lifespan, capable of reaching a size of ten feet per horn. They are usually incredibly docile, although capable of fearsome malice when riled. They are a migratory herd species, usually found roaming the plains. Their hides can be tanned into a leather. They are wild but can be domesticated. The females are good producers of creamy vitamineral-rich milk from which various recipes are made. An Auroch stampede can continue for hundreds of miles. Their dung is a source of compost.
Panther are fast running predators. A full grown adult panther is the size of a small adult human. They have been known to be domesticated while young, usually reverting to feral with call of nature. They have razor sharp claws and teeth. Although their pelts can be tanned it is not as strong as Auroch leather. Unless coupled for parenting, panther are usually solitary although it has been known for them to form packs under a particularly strong and intelligent leader.
Rabbits are typical wild rabbits. They dig warrens and breed like rabbits. They can be bred in captivity for meat and pelt.
Sneech are a cross between Snake and Leech. They move equally as well through water or across land, have rings of fangs in their mouths, containing a venom which causes numbness or burning pain depending on the sub-species. Sneech can grow from anything between a couple of milimeters to fifty feet in length, suck blood if they can't swallow their prey whole and are solitary except for mating or if found as hatchlings. They spawn from gelatinous eggs, a delicacy, as is the meat. Their bodies stretch and can be used as an elasticated cord which dries into leather. They will burrow under shallow silt by wriggling their bodies but prefer to find cracks and holes to coil up in or tree branches to dangle from. Although they will attack any other creature they never attack each other.
Raptors are all of the various sub-species of Eagles, Falcons, Hawks, Vultures and Owls combined into one generic bird of prey. There are two subspecies; small ones (six inches tall) and big ones (three feet tall).
Fish can be found in lakes, lagoons, rivers. They're all the same regardless whether freshwater or salt water. They grow to the size of the container.
Sqepa are originally giant squid washed up after the Great Inundation. Rather than dry out and die, they adapted to the terrain by tunnelling through soft silt before it dries and hardens into compact earth, forming subterranean tunnels. During this process their external skin hardens through abrasian into a chitinous exoskeleton. Their size is anything between an inch to a hundred feet from tentacle to tip. Sqepa are carnivores who will eat their own species. Although relatively rare, it is not unknown for breeding colonies to occupy a lagoon. Sqepa produce both ink and silk through different glands. They spin the silk into webs and cocoons and in the case of smaller specimens, into parachutes for wind-born travel. Sqepa are edible (except for their ink and chitin).
Tone of the World
Life here is defined by impermanence above ground and permanence below. Every generation knows that what they build, plant, and love will one day be swallowed by the sea and covered by meters of silt. Yet the people endure. Not through denial, but through adaptation, memory, and the stubborn conviction that strength and cleverness together can carry civilisation through the next drowning.
This is the world into which your characters are born: a place of sinking stone, weeping trees, spore-laden winds, rival Guilds, and cities carved into the bones of the earth. Waiting for the tide to rise again.