A field guide to the Land of Shadow
Tír na Scáth: The Land of Shadow
Tír na Scáth is a grim Gaelic frontier where scattered people hold narrow ground above the realm below.
A layered world
Daily life in An Saol presses against An Tairseach, the threshold where the world thins, and the older depths below it.
People who hold on
The Scáthians hold to their túatha by hearth and oath, under ceanns whose authority follows shadow-steel. The setting is bleak and quietly dreadful. Every supernatural bargain has a price. As a horror draws closer, the telling says less.
What holds true
- Truth 1
- Shadow-steel is drawn from deep seams. A mine tally sometimes returns a smaller number than the row of waiting bodies.
- Truth 2
- The settled live behind walls and granaries; the exposed hold open ground with a fence and a prayer.
- Truth 3
- The sea remains a founding wound, and the drowned Old World still shapes what people fear may be coming.
Continue
Begin with the settled heartland, or see the setting held to account in a captured turn.