The War of the Four Courts
Stakes The seasons may cease to follow their proper order, leaving Valleneer trapped in famine, flood, endless heat, or killing cold.
World Atlas·Sphere·Every border is a season waiting to break.
Industrial frontier and primary battlefield between the Thorne Conglomerate and the winter court. · High northern tundra, glacial valleys, and black-pine foothills
Hook
Thorne factories mine beneath the ice while winter spirits sabotage every rail line and foundry.
Valleneer is an Earthlike world where everyday magic lights streets, repairs tools, and eases hard labor, while great sorcery remains rare and feared. Its kingdoms were built on treaties with the seasonal fey courts, but industrial armies and rival monarchs now press against those old boundaries. Frosthearth freezes beneath the Thorne Conglomerate, Albion burns with summer glory, and every frontier asks who has the right to decide what season comes next.
Themes
Form · Sphere
Valleneer is a natural spherical planet with broad oceans, familiar continents, polar regions, and a climate increasingly distorted by fey influence and industrial magic.
Traversal
Travel follows roads, rivers, coastlines, rail lines, and sea lanes, while seasonal borders can close passes, transform routes, or open temporary paths through fey terrain.

Sphere

Magic
High

Technology
Renaissance

Death & Souls
Founding Era
The Treaty Years
Crown Era
The Fourfold Peace
Industrial Era
The Iron Thaw
Present Era
The Broken Year
The War of the Four Courts
The seasons may cease to follow their proper order, leaving Valleneer trapped in famine, flood, endless heat, or killing cold.
The Thorne Frontier War
Frosthearth's mines, schools, and passes could become the foundation of a mechanised empire or a frozen wasteland ruled by force.
Expand industrial control across the northern frontier, monopolise magitech production, and break the winter court's power through force.
Preserve summer's abundance and Albion's influence while presenting its wars as a defense of civilisation.
Restore winter's ancient borders and punish mortals for violating the old treaties.
Profit from instability, seize relics, and keep every kingdom dependent on their ships and weapons.
Prevent any single season from ruling the world, even if that requires covert alliances, assassinations, and selective disasters.
Stakes The seasons may cease to follow their proper order, leaving Valleneer trapped in famine, flood, endless heat, or killing cold.
Stakes Frosthearth's mines, schools, and passes could become the foundation of a mechanised empire or a frozen wasteland ruled by force.
The first nations of Valleneer grew around agreements with the seasonal fey courts, trading safe borders and fertile lands for ritual obligations that shaped law, harvest, war, and royal succession.
For centuries, spring, summer, autumn, and winter held a tense balance while human kingdoms, fey nobles, and growing cities learned to profit from predictable seasons.
Renaissance industry, battlefield magic, and militarised schools spread across the world, weakening old treaties as ambitious commanders sought to control weather, harvests, and fey territory.
The seasonal courts now contest their borders openly, bringing frost, raids, crop failures, and shifting alliances while mortal powers decide whether to restore the old balance or replace it.
The Commander sends the party to the Beltane fire as a scouting mission, but the celebration hides a gathering of enemy agents and a fey ritual capable of redrawing the local border.
A Thorne convoy carries a machine that can force winter back across Frosthearth, but its fuel is made from captured fey memories.
Arthur's knights request aid against the Belmote war host, only to reveal that the autumn sea raiders are attacking both sides to seize a treaty relic.
A school for battlefield magic has begun graduating students who remember battles that have not happened yet.
A village experiences spring, summer, autumn, and winter in a single day, and each season leaves behind different survivors.
The treaties do not control the seasons, they delay the collapse of the world's seasonal rhythm.
Discovery · Different calendars, temple records, and battlefield reports reveal that several seasons have overlapped for generations.
Impact · The seasonal courts are not merely invading one another; they are concealing that Valleneer's natural cycle is failing.
The first treaty was made with something older than the four seasonal courts.
Discovery · Thorne engineers and fey prisoners both describe the same voice beneath Frosthearth's oldest mines.
Impact · A buried power could end the war by enforcing one permanent season, but awakening it may erase mortal weather and agriculture entirely.
Many human crowns are still legally bound to the seasonal courts.
Discovery · The Keepers of the Turning possess records showing that several famous royal bloodlines descend from fey bargains rather than mortal dynasties.
Impact · Exposing those bargains could delegitimise kingdoms, trigger succession wars, and change how mortals understand their right to rule.