Time and Memory
Time itself does not obey mortal laws. There are places where you can walk for a day and emerge a century older. There are valleys where dying warriors scream in infinite loop, caught forever in the moment of their death. Memories of the world's past hang in the air like fog, replaying themselves for those who dare to listen. This is not illusion — it is the land remembering, refusing to let history rest.
Civilization
In this chaos, civilization clings to survival like moss to stone. The floating bastion of New-Troynia drifts above the poisoned earth, tethered by chains of prayer and machinery. The Ascendant Astral Armada patrols the heavens with warships carved from star-metal, their cannons burning with divine fire. In the shadows of craters and ruins, tribes barter in bone, ichor, and memory.
Faith is everywhere, though no god answers prayers. Some worship the ruins themselves, convinced that broken machinery or sleeping corpses hold fragments of divine will. Others forge cults around carrion deities like the Crimson Owl Queen, whose prophets claim she is neither dead nor alive, but forever feasting on the in-between.
The Ruins
Scattered across the realm are monuments too vast and strange to be mortal work. The Celestial Nexus, a machine of suns that no longer align. The Sentinel Spire, where time folds in on itself until you meet your own shadow. The Abyssal Sentinel, a giant half-buried in ocean depths, its eyes flickering open once every thousand years to drown whole coastlines.
Adventurers and zealots alike plunge into these places, hunting shards of divine machinery, relics of lost tongues, or truths that could rewrite existence. Few return unchanged. Many do not return at all.
The Truth of Survival
To live in Neon Tartarus is to walk between hunger and ruin. The land does not nurture — it devours. Yet mortals endure, weaving their lives in the cracks between nightmares. They build cities from rusted bones, drink from poisoned wells, raise children beneath skies of broken moons. They endure because despair itself has become a kind of worship.
The realm breathes. The realm remembers. And it is waiting for something — or someone — to wake it.
LANDS
The Crimson Wildlands are not merely a region—they are a wound in the world's flesh, bleeding with ancient violence and uncanny life. Vast swathes of land gleam with iron-red dust that stains boot and bone. Rivers here flow not with water, but with something thicker, darker—ichor that pulses faintly under broken moons. The air is hot and dry, tasted like rust and regret.
Appearance & Atmosphere
A whisper travels across endless fields of jagged crimson spires—rock pillars that appear to have grown like the bones of titans, cleaved then discarded. Dust devils swirl fragments of their shattered surfaces, casting fractured shadows that seem to dance of their own volition. In the twilight, pale moonlight—or what passes for it here—makes everything bleed cobalt into the red,
painting the land as though the sky itself is wounded.
When wind sweeps the plains, it carries a thousand voices. Travelers say they hear the land speaking, sighing with the voices of those long swallowed by the wilds, murmuring songs of wrath and oblivion.
Flora & Fauna
Life here resembles a fever dream of evolution. Thorned plants with obsidian veins drain moisture from the air like sponges, their petals shimmering hot as embers. Flowers bloom only at night, dripping phosphorescent sap that glows like molten lanterns. Some predators are mutated into iron-blooded versions of their former selves—their pelts stained red, their eyes glowing faintly with opportunity.
Hazards & Strange Phenomena
Time itself warps in the Wildlands. One might stand in a canyon at dusk, only to emerge into a midday that has never existed before—or centuries ahead, where the sky has cracked in a different way. Mirages form not only to mislead but to remember: ghostly echoes of gods past, clad in shattered shapes that flicker and vanish.
Bridges of bone sometimes span chasms—seemingly stable, until they snap in imitation of a memory's broken promise. And worms of living scarlet ooze from the earth, searching for things buried under the dust, eyes peering blind into the red gloom.
Culture & Inhabitants
Few souls dare to settle here, and those who do cling to existence in enclaves carved from skeletal remains. They mine the land's bitter gifts: veins of divine rust, shards of shattered idols, veins of ichor solidified into a gem-like form. These relics fuel beliefs, commerce, and legends.
Those who wander the Wildlands are scavengers, cultists, prophets—or worse, recruiters for the Crimson Owl Queen. Her creed preaches that this land is alive with divine remnants, and her acolytes collect ichor-sap as holy oil. Even death here is a marketable myth: they believe in preserving the marrow of the ruined gods to resurrect new divine nightmares.
Legends & Lore
One fable tells of the Bleeding Spire, a rocky pillar that weeps cornflower-blue tears once a century. Drinking even a droplet is said to grant visions of the Wildlands' future—though none who have tried it live sane long enough to share.
Another legend speaks of the Blood-Song Canyon, where the wind hums with chorded sorrow. It is said that gods once warred within its cliffs, and their dying notes linger, waiting for someone brave—or desperate—enough to finish the song.
Magic is not a tame force here; it is alive, hungry, and whispering, seeping through the cracks of the world from dead gods' remains. Every ruin hums with latent energy, every river might carry ichor from a celestial corpse, and every stranger could be a vessel for something ancient and unknowable.
This is a place where heroes are fragile, choices are devastating, and consequences linger long after the last dice are rolled. From the crimson-scorched deserts of the Wildlands to the floating spires of New-Troynia, Neon Tartarus is a world that punishes the careless and rewards the cunning.
Pandora's Rift
Imagine stepping into a canyon where the sky folds in unnatural ways, the air vibrating with unearthly resonance. Pandora's Rift is a scar in the world itself, a chasm of jagged stone and shifting shadows, where the boundary between dimensions is thin and treacherous. The walls drip with crystallized ichor, reflecting eerie, spectral lights that seem to move with intent.
Travelers speak of whispers here—voices that are at once alien and familiar, promising power, warning of doom, and twisting the minds of the unwary. Gravity itself sometimes falters, making the cliffsides a treacherous dance of survival.
Monstrous, extradimensional predators slip between cracks in reality, and ancient, half-buried machinery hums with forgotten god-tech, pulsing in a rhythm that makes even the most stoic adventurer's blood run cold. To enter Pandora's Rift is to flirt with madness, but those who survive often emerge with knowledge, relics, and power far beyond mortal comprehension.