Rail War
Stakes Who controls transport controls food, troops, and the last reliable routes between settlements.
World Atlas·Sphere·A world held together by rail, ash, and the uneasy labor of the dead.
frontier gate · dusty badlands
Hook
A rail camp survives on scrap, lies, and a station that never appears on official maps.
Cindermarch is a soot-choked sphere stitched together by iron rail, where industry keeps famine and monsters at bay, just barely. Cities, mines, burial fields, and border forts depend on coal, ash rites, and train schedules that matter as much as harvests. Every power wants the same thing: fuel, freight, and control of the dead. The rails connect a world that would otherwise fall apart.
Themes
Form · Sphere
A single inhabited planet wrapped in belts of rail, smoke, sea lanes, and dead industrial ground.
Traversal
Travel follows roads, rail lines, rivers, and sea routes across the globe, with trains and steamships moving people fastest between linked regions.

Sphere

Magic
Common

Technology
Industrial

Death & Souls
Ancient
Before the Rails
Founding
The Iron Stitch
Recent
The Black Tally
Rail War
Who controls transport controls food, troops, and the last reliable routes between settlements.
The Grave Debt
The right to bind, burn, or release the dead could reshape faith, law, and the safety of every graveyard.
Keep the rails running, even if whole districts have to be rationed or emptied.
Profit from debt, transport, and private militias while pretending to serve the common good.
Control burials, ghosts, and funerary law before panic breaks open every graveyard.
Use smuggling, sabotage, and blackmail to make the rail network answer to street-level power.
Push back raiders, monsters, and cursed ground at the edge of settled land.
Stakes Who controls transport controls food, troops, and the last reliable routes between settlements.
Stakes The right to bind, burn, or release the dead could reshape faith, law, and the safety of every graveyard.
Scattered city-states survived by river, caravan, and blade while old ruins bled strange magic from the deep earth.
The first rail lines tied the sphere together, and soot engines made trade, war, and pilgrim travel faster than any crown could control.
Coal runs low, the dead are harder to keep buried, and every power now counts lives, fuel, and ore as if the world itself were a ledger.
A missing rail convoy turns up in pieces, and the cargo includes someone who was officially buried last winter.
A new seam of black coal burns hot enough to power a city, but it whispers at night and wakes the graves nearby.
Two rival towns claim the same station, and both can prove they own the last working bridge and water tower.
A crown inspector offers pardons and pay to anyone willing to escort a sealed ash reliquary across the frontier.
Rail workers begin vanishing on the night shift, leaving only wet footprints and cold tools behind.
The first rail engines were powered by the dead, and the practice never truly ended.
Discovery · Engine crews keep finding ash in sealed conduits where no fire has burned.
Impact · The rail network is being fed by bound souls, and if the truth spreads, the whole economy could collapse.
The present rail map is built on top of an older transit system nobody admits exists.
Discovery · Old maps match the buried tracks beneath half the world more closely than current borders do.
Impact · A hidden older network could bypass the crown, the barons, and every checkpoint at once.
The dead are being counted for a coming draft into another war.
Discovery · Graveyards near the largest stations keep producing the same unfamiliar birthmark on the dead.
Impact · Someone is marking souls for later collection, and the pattern points to the highest offices.