The World of Kerebra

Kerebra is a small world, being a sentient demi-plane of psionic energy.The geography of the world is dominated by a crystal mountain range that lies at it's centre, surrounded by plains of grass and soft, rolling hills. Surrounding the central plains is a vast forest, seemingly with no end. The crystal mountains are illuminated by the rising and setting sun, filling the Kerebran twilight with soft coronas of light that can be seen from everywhere in the realm. At night, the mountains become almost completely translucent, reflecting the light of the Kerebran night sky's twinkling stars.The central lands of Kerebra are verdant, fertile fields interspersed with small forests. Most of Kerebras population live in small villages dotted around the landscape, where subsistence farmers till their fields and harvest the rich bounties of Kerebras soil.

Kerebra is a land of eternal summer. The weather is remarkably stable, atleast in the central plains. The bright sun warms the land, and soft, cooling breezes keep the day temperature around a comfortable 20 degrees C, falling to a comfortable 15 C at night. Storms are rare and brief, mostly preceded and followed by soft rainfall that brings the temperature down slightly.Since there are no seasons, life on Kerebra for the most part revolves around farming and tending to livestock.

In between the small hamlets and villages lie larger towns, connected by paved roads. In these villages live blacksmiths, carpenters and other craftsmen, as well as traders, merchants and workers of various kinds. Trade is mostly conducted between villages, though many traders travel to isolated settlements to ply their trade, bringing crafted goods to villages in exchange for crops, meat, furs and other commodities the towns require.

These towns are also where the larger temples of Kerebras three main religions can be found. Even the smallest hamlet will have a pisteic shrine or perhaps an enkéfali monk or two, but the larger temples and monasteries tend to be located in or near a town of some size.

These towns are also where the Purple Knights and the Executores Justitia have built their strongholds, from which they do their best to protect the people from the horrors of the Rot.

The Order of the Purple Knights tend to build defensible keeps, with town walls and watch towers to protect the townsfolk. These small fortresses also serve as bases of operation for the itinerant Knights of the various Orders who are constantly on the move in the call of their duties. The Knights of the Crossroads maintain several fortresses that are at times largely abandoned, as the bulk of their members travel far and wide to ensure the safety of travellers on the many roads of Kerebra.The Purple Order has also constructed a number of fortified outposts at the borders of the great forest, which the people have taken to calling the Gravewood in recent years due to the substantial number of Purple Knights who have ventured within and never returned. The Knights of the Glade man these outposts and keep a constant watch on the Gravewood beyond them.

The Executores Justitia, by contrast, do not fortify their strongholds or focus on defending themselves or Kerebra from outside threats. Their mission is one of persecution, and the structures they maintain reflect that. Their stark, utilitarian halls are places of training and research, where the Executor Knights and praetors are instructed in the ways of detecting corruption and delivering swift and lethal justice. Equal parts training camps and legal institutions, these headquarters are designed to impress and awe the populace; tall columns, high, domed ceilings and stern statues featuring somatic imagery are common features. Many of them also contain somatic monasteries, and the Executores Justitia encourage somatic monks to use its court halls to spread their philosophy.

Game options for Kerebra (Pathfinder)

Kerebra is a psionically charged demi-plane, a physical space being manifested by an extremely powerful, slumbering psionic entity. Every thing, living or dead, in Kerebra are a form of autonomous psionic construct. Since the entire plane is suffused with an incredible amount of psionic power, it's inhabitants are receptacles of psionic potential capable of wielding this power for themselves.

Most of Kerebras inhabitants, be they sentient people or beasts of the wild, are able to amnipulate their psionic potential to some degree, though for most it takes the form of strange bursts of insight or knowledge and mental images from someplace (or someone) else. These phenomena are common among Kerebrans, who call them gleanings or glimpses, and most think nothing of it. A few gifted or determined individuals are able to draw on much more of this psionic potential, and develop real psionic power.

In game terms, this means that every human on Kerebra is an Elan, with all game options associated with that race available to them. Kerebran Elans are born naturally instead of made, and other kinds of elan are completely unknown on Kerebra.
All adventurers in Kerebra must take either a psionic class (or a class archetype that confers psionic power of some kind) or a Path of War class. Archetypes and prestige classes from the Path of War supplements are expressly allowed, as is multiclassing into these classes. Akashic Mysteries classes are equally available.  Any supernatural or magical abilities granted by these classes are treated as psionic effects, and any spell-like abilities gained are treated as psi-like abilities.In Kerebra, Akashic magic represents tapping into the energies of the Worldmind itself, rather than using your own psionic power.

Faiths of Kerebra

There are three religious traditions in the land of Kerebra.

Pisteis is the primary belief system, a philosophy centred around contentment with ones life, detachment from physical and emotional connections, and pacifism.The Pisteic monks teach that all beings in Kerebra are connected through the Worldmind, and that the Worldmind is the shared psionic energy field subconsciously manifested by all living minds, intelligent and animal alike. Since all people are one with the world, hurting others is hurting oneself. Likewise, all desire towards the physical world and other individuals brings only sadness; the physical is transient, and the pain of losing a connection to death and destruction spreads to everyone through the Worldmind. To be happy, content and detached is to spread contentment and happiness to everyone, and healing the world.To the Pisteics, the Rot exists because people are too attached to the world. Their unhappiness and greed has infected the world and the people with Rot, and only through abandoning material things and embrace contentment and detachment can the Rot be overcome.Pisteis is the most common religion in Kerbra.

Enkéfalos is the competing religion to Pisteis. The monks of the Enkéfali believe that the Worldmind is not a product of all the minds of Kerebra, as' the Faithful believe, but rather a huge ocean within which all living minds are born. The Enkéfali revere the Worldmind not as a diety, but as a force of nature which births all minds, and from which psionic power flows. The Worldmind, according to the Enkéfali, is a tremendous source of power within the world of Kerebra, and every mind in Kerebra spontaneously forms from this power. To the Enkéfali monks, the Rot is a taint within the Worldmind from an unknown source, and many monks dedicate their loves to searching for this source. 

Enkéfalos is a popular faith among the Purple Knights

Soma is the third major religion in Kerebra, and the youngest by far.

Soma teaches that each individual is a holy being, born to psionic power. Power is our birthright, the Somatics say, and the Worldmind is our legacy. Within the vast oceans of the Worldmind lies the knowledge and experience of the ancestors, ripe for the picking, the rightful property of all Kerbrans with the power to seize it. Every individual has an inborn right to this divine legacy, but not everyone is born with the power to seize it.To the Somatics, the Worldmind is a power to be wielded, studied and understood.Somatic monks teach that the Rot is an infestation of tainted power from deep within the Worldmind, and many Somatic Dreamdivers plumb it's depths to look for an answer.Soma is a popular religion with the Executores Justitia.

Kerebra, The Sapient Land

The world is called Kerebra, and it is alive. Or atleast it's sentient, perhaps even sapient. The whole world is enveloped in a field of psionic energy, like an enormous, unfathomable consciousness that touches all thinking minds. The people of Kerebra call it the Worldmind, but they don't fully understand what it is or why it is there. 

All intelligent beings in Kerebra (and most animals) share a connection with the Worldmind. Some learn to harness their innate connection to the Worldmind and become psionicists, but all who live in Kerebra share a bond with it. People sometimes experience prophetic dreams, visions and sensations that clearly come from somewhere outside of their own consciousness. Such experiences are called gleanings or glimpses, and they are common enough that everyone knows about them.

What isn't common knowledge is that Kerebra itself is an immensely powerful psionic being. The entire plane is a slumbering entity that manifests everything within it from it's vast stores of psionic power. In essence, Kerebra is dreaming the world, and dreaming it brings it into physical existence through psionic power.

Life in Kerebra is peaceful. Or it was, once.

There are no kingdoms, empires or nations, only small cities and villages. People live in harmony with each other and nature, a gift of the Worldmind and the link it provides between all thinking beings. Everyone is connected, and they feel this connection in a vague way and instinctively know that negativity, harmful acts and any kind of evil would harm themselves as much as it would harm others. Villages and towns are guided by their elders, and the rare crimes are adjudicated by the elders and the community.

That was the way it used to be.

Now, a darkness has crept into Kerebra, spreading from the edges of the land towards the centre. The once lush and beautiful crystal forests are being consumed by a creeping rot, a wrongness that infects plants and wildlife and twists them into nightmarish creatures who thirst for blood. This Rot is starting to affect the Worldmind, and some people exibit dark, twisted urges and behaviours previously unknown in Kerebra.

As the rot spreads and grows, the people are looking for ways to defend themselves. Two organizations have emerged, and spread through most of the inhabited world.

The Purple Knights are a brotherhood of warriors and mystics who wield psionic power in order to defend their people. Purple Knights are found all over Kerebra, and they are building strongholds at the edges of the rot and trying to contain it's corruption. The Knights are divided into Orders with different responsibilities, like the Knights of the Crossroads who patrol the roads and pathways between communities, defending farmers and travellers from marauding beasts of the rot, and the Knights of the Glade who delve into the rot-infested forests to seek an answer to the mystery of what the rot is and how it might be stopped.

The other organization are the Executores Justitia. The Executores arose when crime and violence started becoming a problem as the Rot spread it's influence through the edges of the Worldmind, and some people started becoming affected. They fill the role of travelling police officers, solving crimes, making arrests and carrying out sentences. Unfortunately, those who become affected by the Rot cannot be cured, and it is the responsibility of the Executor Knights to carry out final sentencing on the perpetrators they catch.

The Executores Justitia are led by the Praetor General, the most powerful psion in the order, and every vigiles patrol has a praetor that accompanies the Executor Knights and carries out the sentencing. Each praetor is a powerful psionicist, and he or she is both judge and jury.

Nobody knows exactly what the rot is or why it has afflicted Kerebra and the Worldmind. The psions who have attempted to plumb the depths of the Worldmind for answers have reported being attacked by strange dreamlike creatures of darkness and fear, and the deepest reaches of the Worldmind are inaccessible to all but the most powerful and foolhardy of dreamdivers.

The Rot started about 100 years ago, but it spreads very slowly. The Purple Knights and the Executores Justitia began as groups of concerned villagers and townsfolk who saw a gradual frightening change in the world. The Purple Knights arose as farmers and villagers armed with tools and psionic talent banded together for protection, and evolved over a thirty year period into fully fledged knights. They had to learn how to forge tools into weapons, how to wield them and how to combat the rot based on experience, trial and error. Many of them had some measure of psionic power, but the combat applications of those powers had to be developed from nothing. They are still more armed idealists than true knights, but they have enough experience fighting the Rot that they have begun to train new recruits based on the knowledge and techniques they have gathered and developed. It was not easy for a peaceful people to develop the trade of war, but the Purple Knights have managed to do so.

The Executores Justitia are much younger, and grew out of the Purple Knights about ten years ago. The Praetor General was one of the founding members of the Knights, but he saw that the idealistic attitudes and methods of the Purple Knights were not enough to deal with the darkness and corruption of the Rot. He was ready to break with the Knights on his own when news began to spread of the Rot affecting people, and that was the push he needed to gather those loyal to him and leave the Order. He took with him the experience with violence he had gotten from his time in the Purple Knights and created a new doctrine of justice and it's execution on which he founded the Executores Justitia.

His methods are brutal but effective, and the men and women of the Executor Knights are taught to show no mercy and to deliver swift and final justice.

The two organizations are often at odds, as the Purple Knights react strongly to the often inhumane methods of the Executors, while the Praetor General and his followers feel the Knights are too idealistic and soft to be dependable for the safety of Kerebra. There have been no violent conflicts between the two organizations yet, but conflict is bubbling beneath the surface.